Antarctica Starts Here.

Due to the fact that Rending the Veil hasn't finished restoring older articles from backup since the last server migration, I'm reposting my last article they published on harvesting the energy spent by spammers in trying to get us to buy their crap.

Spam. Junk e-mail. Things you can't say in mixed company.

No matter what you may call it, we're talking about the same thing: E-mail that you didn't ask for and don't want filling up your inbox, sometimes making it impossible to find real e-mail. It's a nuisance that netizens have been fighting for years. In terms of its capacity to annoy, it's right up there with ingrown hairs in tender places and bassmobiles making things fall off of your altar in the middle of a ritual.

But what if you could turn the steady flow of spam to your own ends? How could you possibly transmute all those exhortations to enhance your genetalia (regardless of your physical sex) into something useful?

First, let's take a look at spam from a metaphysical perspective.

There are a few ways by which spam is transmitted. One of the oldest is software that, when given a canned message and a list of addresses to target, sends hundreds of thousands of messages, one to every e-mail address in the list. This is probably the slowest method of spamming because it's limited by the speed of the spammer's connection to the Internet. More often than not when the complaints start flooding the spammer's ISP, their accounts are summarily terminated, assuming that the entire netblock doesn't get dropped into RBLs (realtime blacklists) across the Net first. There are only so many ISPs in a given area, so it's too easy for a spammer to exhaust all of their possibilities in a short period of time. This method is all but obsolete, not only because connectivity is at a premium but because spam filtering technologies can easily pick up and drop spam that doesn't change its content very much. Then there are spammers who spend hours cracking e-mail accounts at other ISPs. Almost all SMTP servers require a user to authenticate with a username and password before they can relay e-mail through the server. Because many people don't choose very strong passwords, it is possible for a spammer out of the reach of law enforcement in an ISP's geographic area to target a few accounts for a brute-force password guessing attack with a specialized utility that throws hundreds of passwords an hour at the account until either the password is guessed or the dictionary runs out. A US statute called the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1986 (18 USC 1030) makes it illegal to crack accounts on systems that aren't yours so most of the time these attacks come from other countries, which makes it neigh impossible to prosecute. Still, it's too slow a technique to be profitable and really isn't used much anymore, to say nothing of ISPs issuing usernames different from the e-mail addresses of their customers.

The most common method of transmitting spam these days is to assemble a collection of PC's scattered around the Net running control software into a botnet. Usually, an enterprising systems cracker keeps an eye on various security-related mailing lists for vulnerabilities that look promising and writes an application that exploits them to turn the host machine into a zombie - a computer that, as far as the user is concerned is perfectly fine (perhaps running a little slowly). The malware agent then connects to a command channel of some kind. At one time, it was common for zombied computers to connect to an IRC server and accept commands like hammering out spam using forged originating e-mail addresses using someone else's bandwidth and time. Usually the bandwidth and time of many thousands of someones. Botnets these days are measured in the tens of thousands of infected machines. To put the future in perspective, the Storm Worm botnet was estimated at a population of between one and ten million infected machines during its heyday.

The one thing that all of these methods have in common is that they are the result of an act of W/will: Someone Out There Somewhere spent a considerable amount of time, energy, and effort bringing these things to fruition. That energy is carried by each and every piece of spam transmitted, and it can be harvested and turned toward the accomplishment of one's personal W/will as a shortcut to raising energy. The best way to harvest all of that energy, of course, is through the time-honored ritual of sacrifice. Unfortunately, it is still politically incorrect to sacrifice spammers for the purpose of magick (regardless of what sysadmins may say while standing around the coffee pot), so the next best thing would be the fruits of the spammers' labor: The unsolicited commercial e-mail that piles up in your inbox every day.

The best way to get at the energy invested in every message is to render it down somehow so that the essential content is still there but the enclosing matrix isn't. While it is possible to use an entire piece of spam in a ritual (for example, by printing it out and shredding or burning it) it can be cumbersome. Carrying around a stack of printouts all exhorting the reader to order a counterfit designer wristwatch lacks elegance, in my humble opinion, to say nothing of a gust of wind taking hold of five or six printed pages and scattering them. The challenge then becomes finding a way of reducing pages of text into smaller passages that are easier to work with and are more portable.

Enter message digest algorithms.

A message digest algorithm (sometimes referred to as a cryptographic hash function) takes an arbitrary stream of input, performs a transformation of some sort on the input, and outputs a fixed size string. The output string is of interest because it acts as a unique signature for the volume of input data, and in fact such outputs are referred to as fingerprints, the idea being that every block of data has a unique fingerprint, just as people do. The message digest produced carries all of the unique qualities of the data set, including the intent that produced the input in the first place. Think of it like using a lock of hair to create a connection to a specific person. Most of the time they are encoded as printable characters, and look something like this: