Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2021 April 11

= April 11 =

How to notify a developer about a virus?
I just went to https://www.foxynotail.com/ and downloaded several tools for minecraft. Most of them passed https://www.virustotal.com/ with flying colors, but the PendingTicks program is reported as being infected.

I wanted to report this to the author, but the contact led me to something called "discord". Discord asked for me for my email address, then for my cell phone number, so I bailed. Is there any way to contact the author without opening myself up to text message spam and robocalls? 06:00, 11 April 2021 (UTC)2600:1700:D0A0:21B0:ECE8:62B5:30DA:EA68 (talk)
 * You can try Twitter or Facebook, the links are on that web page. RudolfRed (talk) 19:03, 11 April 2021 (UTC)
 * I joined Discord without having to provide a cell phone number, only an email. I think that the cell phone number thing might have to do with your browser setup (see https://sneak.berlin/20200220/discord-is-not-an-acceptable-choice-for-free-software-projects/ *, https://stallman.org/discord.html, https://dev.to/daksh777/why-i-quit-using-discord-34b). Drop VPNs/Tor/etc and you might be able to make it work. Also https://www.foxynotail.com/ lists a Twitch contact, so you might want to try that too.

Duckmather (talk) 19:55, 18 April 2021 (UTC)
 * Potential COI disclosure: I've commented on bbs.sneak.berlin, a private forum run by this article's author.

Anybody recognize this encoding?
I received an email (it was obviously spam) containing this text:

H-VAAUpFtF -i Scs, I-ixEdmtCD -a-VpzOGM0y -mt-3jUO39Sl -h-DsNYpcOV -em-PdyIiT1N -a-a7FHmjC9 -r-z1R6LEB8 -k-EizUGEdI -e-BDYtehg9 -t-h7EWtbZk -i-PEonkIaa -n-Bp3Zk77w -gm-UW6Il9Uh -a-LIOD0FEt -n-je42fPoT -a-tNROdhP9 -g-071x5gZF -e-J6CCTwaW -rf-KAF534g5 -r-ydfxi64u -o-TEDSD7o2 -maR-foi9cLZW -F-DU4DBJ6V -I-RWYS1rnD -Dp-28JfShjC ...

(It went along in the same vein for quite a bit longer. The Content-Type tag just says "text/plain; charset=utf-8", which is obviously no help.  If anyone can recognize it and the text is disgusting, I apologize.)

Does anyone recognize this encoding? I'm wondering if it's some kind of plain-text transcription of Han radicals and strokes, or something like that. —Steve Summit (talk) 14:28, 11 April 2021 (UTC)


 * It's just normal English with a lot of added junk. Remove spaces, "-", everything after a second "-", and insert spaces when multiple letters are given:

Hi Scs, Iam the marketing manager from a RFID p...
 * I don't know why the junk is added. PrimeHunter (talk) 15:12, 11 April 2021 (UTC)


 * Good grief. You're right.  That both makes perfect sense, but at the same time, makes no sense at all.  But thanks for your rad codebreaking skillz! —Steve Summit (talk) 17:02, 11 April 2021 (UTC)


 * Aha. For anyone who was wondering, the missing piece -- which ends up being pretty banal, old-hat, and uninteresting -- is that I was looking at the text/plain half of a multipart/alternative message.  Over in the text/html half was the same text, but with all the extraneous gibberish rendered in 1-point white-on-white text.  Ho hum. —Steve Summit (talk) 18:44, 11 April 2021 (UTC)
 * Ah, so different recipients probably get different junk to circumvent spam filters looking for repetitions, while looking normal to people viewing the rendered html version. People with screen readers hear the junk, or whatever their software does with it. "Scs" is personal so it doesn't need junk to hide it. PrimeHunter (talk) 19:26, 11 April 2021 (UTC)


 * Not directly related, but I have always wondered about this sort of spam. Do the senders seriously assume anyone would want to deal with them when they so obviously employ dishonest, if not outright illegal, means to contact them? J I P  &#124; Talk 11:35, 12 April 2021 (UTC)
 * Theoretically, if nobody bought spammed products, spammers would go bankrupt and therefore cease operations. But then, spam is often a complex multi-level operation (where FooCorp will hire PromoCorp to make ads for product Foo, and PromoCorp would hire SpamCorp for the email marketing operation), and advertising is already a field where it is quite hard to know which money is well-spent, so... To twist a famous quote, spam servers can remain irrational longer than your inbox can remain clean. Tigraan Click here to contact me 13:14, 12 April 2021 (UTC)
 * That link doesn't work. There is no section "Attributed" in the article John Maynard Keynes. J I P  &#124; Talk 13:20, 12 April 2021 (UTC)
 * Looks like Tigraan meant to link to wikiquote: "Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent." —Steve Summit (talk) 13:48, 12 April 2021 (UTC)


 * Not only do they assume that, but they are also correct. Clearly. Spam relies on finding the stupidest people it can (I guess the nicer way of saying it is people who are unable to read or think critically very well) and part of that system involves making people think it's illicit and therefore tempting. Matt Deres (talk) 12:55, 12 April 2021 (UTC)


 * Consider the economics. One rather dated estimate has a cost of $0.0001 to send a single spam email (it has become much cheaper since then, as has making a robocall or spamming a text message). So it makes economic sense to pretty much spam everyone. Only a tiny percentage of people reply but it costs far more to deal with each one of them, so they want to avoid interaction with anyone smart enough to not fall for the scam. That's why a spam email so often looks like an obvious spam email. Making it look legit would bring in smarter prospects and cost the spammer time and money that could be used to reel in the really stupid ones. See The economics of spam] for more on this. --Guy Macon (talk) 14:57, 12 April 2021 (UTC)


 * Yeah, that's what I was getting at, though you used a bit more politesse (and a reference!) - thank you. Matt Deres (talk) 17:47, 12 April 2021 (UTC)
 * This describes scams, which is a subset of spam (or a separate thing in some definitions). I am not sure the same economics apply to commercial spams, of which the OP is (probably) a subset. In a scam ("I am the heir prince of Nigeria"), after marks have answered the initial email, you have to manually craft answers until they send money, so false positives are expensive. In a commercial spam ("buy those magic pills to get larger/slimmer"), false positives cause some traffic to your website without buying anything, but that is much less of a cost than in the scam case. Tigraan Click here to contact me 12:22, 16 April 2021 (UTC)