Spammers got my attention
I got an email this morning whose subject begins with “We can define a private “stack pointer”…”. It got my attention because of the phrase “stack pointer”. The full subject was even more intriguing:
“We can define a private “stack pointer” that keeps track of which stack level we’re at, and addresses the corresponding register.”
When I opened that email I was utterly disappointed: the same spam advertisement that we get with less clever subjects. However I was curious to understand whether the spammer knew about low-level stuff or built the subject sentence automatically from keywords found on my blog. The latter assumption looked less plausible because it seemed to me that the first part of the sentence was written by a human or AI caught the wave again while I was immersed in crash dump analysis. On the other hand, the sentence as the whole was confusing to me because pointers do not address registers on Intel architecture, it is the way around. Finally I found that the sentence was written in 1988 by a human indeed. I googled it and it was the exact sentence from “LET’S BUILD A COMPILER!” article series:
http://compilers.iecc.com/crenshaw/tutor2.txt
I don’t know whether there was an engine behind the spam that picks subject text from sentences found on web sites based on keywords found on a target audience site or that was just a coincidence and everyone got the same e-mail. 
- Dmitry Vostokov -