Stock touting and a cute little HTML trick

Stock Touting

While reading an artcile about how stock-spammers make money (you know, the emails saying a particular stock is going to be hot), I followed the research link to a Harvard web page titled Spam Works: Evidence from Stock Touts and Corresponding Market Activity. I enjoyed playing with the stock simulator at the harvard site also which simulates the scenario from both spammer and spam recipient point-of-view. It is hard to believe that this kind of social engineering works, but the facts don't lie. :) The only thing I could even *remotely* consider doing on these would be to buy short!!!!!!

A cute little HTML trick

While reading the Harvard page, I noticed this text: "If the email addresses are unreadable, click here. They cannot be copied/pasted directly from this page." which naturally made me try to highlight the authors' email address and copy them. As advertised, it appeared to mangle the email address. After looking into it a bit more, I figured out the little trick: the web page author used a combination of the PRE tag along with a STYLE attribute. I'll show this below: first with no 'style' attribute so you can see the 'real' text and then with the style attribute of "line-height: 0px" to see the obfuscated text. (I will change the email addresses of the real authors to protect their addresses...). They used the 2 line technique, multiple lines also works (as shown below).

Un-Obfuscated

r b t p o m i . o 
 o o @ o k a l c m

Obfuscated (2 lines)

r b t p o m i . o 
 o o @ o k a l c m

Obfuscated (3 lines)

r  o  p  k  i  c 
 o  t  o  m  l  o 
  b  @  o  a  .  m

Wrapup

1. If spammers can't make money (by stock touting and every other nefarious ploy, they'll stop spamming.
2. Try out this fun little HTML trick! It should help slow down unsophisticated email collectors, and if nothing else, it is like a little parlour trick to impress your geeky friends :)

jk