Charles on… anything that comes along

Got another 419 scam spam (surprisingly, to my Gmail address; usually it’s .Mac which lets through the junk). It contained the marvellous paragraph

After legal consultation, I have concretized modalities for a secured way that would guarantee a perfect transaction. But be most assured that for your help and partnership you will get a good percentage of the total sum. It is important to let you know that fifty percent of the rest will be invested over there under your anagement. For a negotiable period of time and we will open a fruitful dialog to that effect.

But of course! Concretized modalities are just what we need today, and in five-inch sizes too - though only the biodegradable ones will do..

At which it occurred to me that what we need is something that will generate some sort of gibberish - close to English, but still rubbish - to keep the 419ers going. You could even start up a Gmail account of your own to bounce the rubbish back and forth, keeping it separate from the Gmail accounts you actually value. The longer these folk waste on scams that aren’t going anywhere, the less time they’ll have for real scams, and the better for the ISPs in Nigeria et al. (They pay for the ISP service, right?)

There used, in the Mac OS 9 days, to be a program called “Kant“, which would generate phrases according to a set of rules you generated. During Andrew Marr’s reign at The Independent, Andrew Brown and I (we sat alongside) toyed with the idea of creating a Eurosceptic version, which would spout unreasonable rubbish about Britain’s inheritance being sold for a mess of pottage if you gave it any random input - say, “forks”. Though it would be tuned to the subject of forks, of course, not just repeating its own things.

Ah, it turns out that Kant was the work of Mark Pilgrim, and work continues to move it to OSX. But gradually. And Pilgrim has released the Python code.

Which takes us some distance from the 419ers, but we’ll get back there eventually. IF Kant can’t bamboozle them, he ain’t trying hard enough. Perhaps some pure Kant output would do it..

As is shown in the writings of Hume, our a priori concepts, in reference to ends, abstract from all content of knowledge; in the study of space, the discipline of human reason, in accordance with the principles of philosophy, is the clue to the discovery of the Transcendental Deduction. The transcendental aesthetic, in all theoretical sciences, occupies part of the sphere of human reason…

These posts might be related (the database thinks..):
• Sometimes you forget that there are clueless spammers too (18 January 2005; score: 40.31%)
• How are would-be spammers registering on my Wordpress blog if I've disabled registering? (15 February 2007; score: 39.77%)
• Club Mobile, you are spamming liars.. Not! (3 August 2004; score: 37.36%)