Scientology Spam? On My Craigslist? [app]

It's More Likely Than You Think

Scientology. They've gone and done it again. Kicked the internet's hornets nest.

Seems local Scientology 'churches' have been spamming Craigslist with everything from vaguely worded ads promoting mental health fixes with free seminars to marriage counseling for depressed internetites.

Enter ClearCraig. A chanology project that was started on WWP back in '09 has received some reviving interest from some ex-scientologists at exscn.net, who along with running the anon's ClearCraig spam-flagging utility, produce daily lists to flag as spam manually.

These lists are a little tougher to follow, as they create a new thread in the general discussion area exscn.net's forum (search for Target [insert number] example) as updated lists are produced.

Also note that ClearCraig is in beta, and recently the expansion of searches have been put on hold for some needed re-tooling of the program.

And inB4 anybody makes the spam is free speech argument.

Courtesy Reminder Video
As a public service, the original Message to Scientology video from 2008 is embedded for those Scientologists who have forgotten exactly who's playground they're playing on.

Nutter Sues XenuTV. Apparently Skipped Email 101

Crazy is as Crazy does
From Mark Bunker's blog @ XENUtv:

"John Bowen Brown II. He is the bright fellow who contacted me with allegations of being the leader on an international terrorist organization and hurling accusations against me that were baseless, ill formed and just plain wrong. He gave me permission to post our lengthy initial e-mail exchange on my website."

"Since that time he has periodically e-mailed some other baseless charges against me that usually result in him ending with “AND DON’T EVER CONTACT ME AGAIN!”.

"He never seems to realize that I don’t contact him. He contacts me and I respond. I never think of this guy until he sends me something in my email."

"I asked him why he was contacting me and he told me it was an automated invitation that sent an email to everyone in his mailbox. I asked him the simple question, “Why don’t you remove me from your mailbox?” That type of logic sends him to a tizzy of foot stomping and ended with him saying I should never contact him again."

"I get another email from him saying “Check out my photos on Facebook.” Another automated message showing that he didn’t take the simple step of removing my name from his frigging address book. Seems pretty simple. I never think of this nutcase until he contacts me and then he yells at me for contacting me. I wrote back to him a simple, “Really? You threaten me if I contact you and then you once again contact me to be your Facebook friend? You really are nutty.”

"Today, after a couple months of blissful Brown-free living, I got a letter from his attorney threatening me if I ever contact him again."

Scans of legal threat included on his blog.
Tip of the 'ol send button to WWP.

Jim Carrey: Crazy Man Ready For The Rubber Room

Scientologist Sees Psychotics On Planes [email]

WWP ~ A leaked Scientology email posted on WhyWeProtest.net contains language as if it were straight off the movie script 'Invasion of the Body Snatchers'.

Some examples: "...there is a simple, non-invasive way of being able to figure out who is a psychotic..." and "...until airport security people are trained in Human Evaluation and could recognize a person who was at antagonism or lower on the tone scale just by looking at them...". Read it in it's full Hubbardism glory, below:

From:********@****.***
Subject: body scanners
To: ***************
Received: Tuesday, 12 January, 2010, 11:35 AM
Re: the body scanners that may be used at airports. I know that in the USA you have the right to request a "pat-down" instead of the radiation from body scanners. That's what I did, and while even that can be considered degrading, my viewpoint on it was that I could confront it and handle it. (And even play the game of being mildly amused by it).

Until airport security people are trained in Human Evaluation and could recognize a person who was at antagonism or lower on the tone scale just by looking at them, I would prefer a pat-down to security people doing nothing, as there are some quite low-toned and psychotic folks who travel.

I recommend promoting to others that there is a simple, non-invasive way of being able to figure out who is a psychotic, or bad guy or gal. Promote the book, "The Science of Survival", and use it yourself when you travel or in life in general - that way you are at cause, which is a lighthearted, fun place to be. By the way, it is fun to spot the tone levels of people. I have discovered that when I do that and get it right, that person always looks at me. Even if they are driving by in a car. Interesting huh?!
Best regards, Barbara Dowling.

[update: 01.13 ~ brookfieldnow.com]
Seems someone in the states got the email. From reporter's notes @ townhall meeting in Pewaukee, WI.
"Scientology Q: Woman rambles reading a list of meeting dates and something about the Church of Scientology and a man with x-ray vision. Maybe she hoped he could get a job as part of the airport security team? ;-)".

Invasion of the Body Snatchers [1978]

Blogder.com: Scrapes 'Fresh Meat' but 'Serves Spam'

Yesterday I was checking to make sure Google's Blog Search picked up my article, and lo-and-behold, my headline is being used in a blog-spam link farm. Not just one day, but two in a row. What really tics me off is that it got a better listing than my article, and it was a bunch of nonsensical sentences strung together.

Well, this is a first for me, so I commenced on learning some more about it. Thanks to seo-theory.com's article Web Spam 101: Blog Farms and Copy Swapping, it turns out blogder.com isn't a link farm after all.
It falls into the category mush blog farm or frog blog farm (I understand why they have those names, but couldn't find any annotations elsewhere on the net). Here's where we get to what happened to me [see image]:

"Spammers fell in love with the mush blog, where they set up robots to scrape text from other blogs, from forums, from news alerts (that auto-posting through email came in handy, didn’t it?), etc. and create small posts. Some of the mush blogs are pretty sophisticated and a few of them have lasted for several years."

So I went over to Google's spam-report and filled it out. Whether blogder.com will eventually disappear from google's blog search, it's anybody's guess. Let's see... what's on the menu for lunch today? Spam, ...again.
[/rant]

Billy Troll? We Didn't Start The Flame War

We've all seen them. Flame wars, internet trolls wreaking havoc, thread derailers. Comment sections a mile long that add up to a bunch of time you wish you could recover, but never will. Well, I guess it was enevidible. Someone was going to put it to music. And I must say, what a great job they did. First, starting off with the soundtrack from Billy Joel's We Didn't Start the Fire, and added pretty much every single reply you've ever seen on a thread, and make it rhyme, lol. Apparently, somebody recouped their lost time from a battle of insults, and produced some entertainment from it. Chalk that one up as a win, because they got their 'last 20 minutes of their life back'. Whatever.

We Didn't Start The Flame War

Internet, Now 97% Email Free

Yes, it seems Bill Gates' prediction for the internet came true. He just picked the wrong horse. He boasted in 2004 that :

Spam will be a thing of the past in two years' time, Microsoft boss Bill Gates has promised. However, a three-pronged strategy would soon stamp out the problem, he said in remarks at the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos. Mr Gates, by now a fixture at the annual WEF's meeting of business leaders and top politicians, said a lot of progress had been made during the past year to stop spam e-mail. Filters could do a lot to sort spam from real mail, Mr Gates said: "Does the e-mail say it's about 'enlargement' - that might be spam."[duh]

But ultimately, Mr Gates predicted, spam would be killed through the electronic equivalent of a stamp, also known as "payment at risk". This would force the sender of an e-mail to pay up when an e-mail was rejected as spam, but would not deter senders of real e-mail because they could be confident that their mail would be accepted. "Microsoft is pursuing all three approaches, and spam will soon be a thing of the past," Mr Gates asserted.

Fast forward to today, A new security report from Microsoft claims that 97% of all e-mails sent are spam, and often have malicious attachments.

Thanks Bill. Seems your I'm going to rule the world with one OS venture really paid off. Now the eighth wonder of the world has been reduced to an automated 3rd class junk mail delivery system.