From the digital media front

Starting the year on a positive note:

• On the last day of 2007, New York Times published an article about the University of Oregon resisting RIAA’s subpoena requests. In the Fight Over Piracy, a Rare Stand for Privacy points to the opposition from Oregon state Attorney General’s to RIAA request for student information. RIAA has been aggressively going after P2P file-sharing in higher-education. Quoting the article:

The recording industry may not be selling as much music these days, but it has built a pretty impressive and innovative litigation subsidiary.

Oregon AG is not taking a stand on the principle that file sharing should be legalized in all forms– that more extreme position, while espoused by EFF is unlikely to hold sway with the courts. Instead this is a more focused, tactical battle against the questionable approach used by RIAA in going after suspected file-sharers by pressuring colleges to work around due-process and presumption of innocence.

• More labels announced support for publishing their catalog without DRM. Sony/BMG is the last label to get on the bandwagon; still a long way for a company that once root-kitted user machines in the name of content protection.

• Better technology can succeed in the market: Warner may just have delivered the fatal hit to HD-DVD by throwing its weight behind Blu-Ray format pioneered by Sony. This new alignment brings everyone one step closer to the anticipated end of the high-definition DVD format wars. The 3% decline in DVD sales for the past year was in part being attributed to consumer reluctance to buy into a new format until the dust settled. Some companies such as Samsung tried capitalizing on the confusion by building dual-mode HD/Blu-Ray players but consumers balked at the price. Sony may have its revenge for losing the VCR format with BetaMax, which provided a textbook example of how a better technology (similar to BluRay having more storage capacity than HD-DVD) does not necessarily succeed in the marketplace against savvy deal-making. It sounds like Sony learned the lesson and aggressively pursued studios with heavy incentives for exclusive commitment to its favored format this time around.

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Is Comcast throttling all upstream bandwidth?

Comcast Inc. may have cast a much wider net in their effort to bring customers inline increase subscriber value. The Slingbox is set to become the latest example of collateral damage in the war against user content.

Quick recap: Slingbox is the generic name for a family of special-purpose devices that can stream TV content for remote viewing. In the same way that VCRs and DVRs allow time-shiftin watching a live broadcast at a different time, the Slingbox allows for “space-shifting” by watching content at the same time from a different place than the physical location of the cable connection or satellite dish. SlingPlayer application available on Windows, Mac and smart-phones allows connecting to the device from any Internet connection and streaming almost the same video/sound that one would see see watching television in comfort of the living room. “Almost” being the operative keyword, because video quality or how closely the streamed content approximate the original, is crucially dependent on available bandwidth. That includes both the upstream bandwidth available on the connection where the SlingBox is located and the downstream bandwidth at the remote location where the traveling customer is trying to tune in to his local TV station. As noted earlier here, downstream bandwidth is usually abundant while upstream bandwidth is the scarce commodity and the expected bottleneck for scenarios involving streaming from home. SlingBox FAQ notes that about 250-300kbps is the minimum recommended bandwidth. That turns out to be an understatement similar to Vista minimum hardware requirements. In this bloggers’s experience ~500kbps is required to avoid compression artifacts and closer to 800 kbps is called for when the signal is intended for display on a TV at standard watching distances instead of a tiny window on a laptop screen.

This is where the Comcast story comes in, only weeks after the company finally admitted to interfering with the operation of BitTorrent protocol. Recent experiments on trying to stream content from a Slingbox attached to a residential Comcast broadband line suggests that the traffic-shaping may be more widespread than peer-to-peer alone. SlingPlayer uses a sophisticated, adoptive algorithm to optimize image quality for the maximum available bandwidth on any given connection. It starts out by streaming a few frames at low quality, successively increasing the transmission rate until the channel is close to saturation or the client can not keep up with the decompression.
When streaming from a wireless home network where the Slingbox is located, bandwidth peaks out 2-3 Mbps and the image quality is very good. In a more representative scenario, during 2006 a SlingBox A/V routinely delivered cable content from Florida, behind a Cox 9.0/1.5Mbps broadband connection hitting anywhere between 700-800 kbps sustained, good enough to watch on a 32″ TV. (Ironically the downstream side of that connection in Chicago was Comcast.)

It turns out Comcast is happier to go along with receiving content than serving it. Below are pictures of bandwidth usage when streaming from a SlingBox Solo on a Comcast 9.0/1.5Mbps connection in Philadelphia.

• Image from task manager’s network view
• Image from perfmon, TCP/IP bytes received per second and packets per second

[Update: added second trace using perfmon-- Jan 9, 2008]
As expected, the connection rate shows the initial gradual climb to roughly ~700 kbps. But after two minutes something very strange happens: it drops precipitously, shedding 50% of the bandwidth in a matter of seconds and flat-lines at around 350.

• These results can be reproduced consistently, at different times of day, from a wide array of streaming locations: broadband at home in NYC, a corporate LAN in Silicon Valley, free hotel networks in San Francisco, even a 3G wireless modem. Without exception all of them exhibit the same jagged, initial climb followed by a sharp drop and flat-line.
• The flat-line is very suspicious: “organic” network traffic is subject to random perturbations due to effects of congestion along the way.
• We can rule out the client side as being source of the problem because it repros independently of how the streaming side is connected to the Internet. It’s unlikely to be a bug in SlingPlayer or bad interaction with a particular operating system’s networking implementation because it repros on Windows, OS-X and Mobile versions. Even allowing for the possibility that all of the cross-platform variants share the same code base, and susceptible to sharing the same bug, there is the mysterious fact that this “bug” never occurs when SlingPlayer connects over a home network– not crossing any Comcast controlled space– where it easily hits multiple Mbps.
• Disconnecting from the Slingbox and immediately reconnecting restores the initial spike of high bandwidth– so there is no transient congestion issue either. That spike then follows the same pattern, eventually dropping off to a flat-line.
• At this point the most plausible explanation is: Comcast has engaged in wide-spread traffic-shaping which downgrades available upstream bandwidth to a fraction of the stated value and in particular interferes with the operation of the Slingbox.

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Real-estate agents: deceptive practices even in strong markets

Combine two ingredients:

1. Real estate business is not exactly known for transparency and integrity. In spite of strict regulations– such as legal obligations to disclose known defects and record all transactions in public records– deceptive advertising, distorted perception and Ponzi-scheme mentality remain the hallmarks of the industry. (Some of the subtle ways where an agent works against the interests of the client, pressuring sellers to bid higher and buyers to accept lower bids, was chronicled in Freakonomics.)

2. New York metropolitan area real-estate remains one of the few islands of stability and uninterrupted irrational exuberance in the midst of a sobering, country-wide correction after the unsustainable bubble in housing prices for a whole decade. Manhattan remains strictly a
seller’s market including in rentals.

It’s no surprise that brokers resort to questionable practices trying to move units. This also explains why Craigslist, that venerable free resource, has been rendered completely useless for Manhattan, flooded by hundreds of bogus listings for non-existent apartments meant for bait-and-switch scams and otherwise useless, content-free classifieds describing IN ALL CAPS why this apartment will not be on the market very long. Goes to prove that sometimes “free” is not a good thing: charging people to place ads would go a long way to assure quality control and improve signal/noise ratio.)

Consider the following blurb from a contract that must be signed before brokers are willing to show apartments:

“You understand that the commission charged by [brokerage firm] for the aforesaid services is 15% percent of the first year’s rent … payable to [firm] only if you rent in a building or complex shown to you by [firm] within 120 days of such showing.”

This contains an ambiguous case: broker Bob shows unit #123 in the building which does not work. Later broker Alice from a different firm shows apartment #456 which the customer decides to take. Is Bob owed any commission? From reading the above blurb, the answer seems to be in the affirmative. In this case “Bob” continued to insist that was not the case. In fact it is  very much in the interest of the brokerage firm to have this over-reaching clause. It’s perfectly fair game to insist that a customer utilizing the services of an agent should properly compensate the firm. On the other hand by extending the claim to include all units and effectively “tainting” the building for for months, the company achieves lock-in effect. But Bob would also insist this is not an exclusivity agreement which is strictly speaking correct. It does not rule out working with another broker only creates strong economic incentives against doing that for the same building.

The pragmatic solution which worked in this case: different brokers for each neighborhood. This makes sense anyway because real-estate remains a very old-fashioned business personal connections matter and it’s unlikely that the same person has developed strong networks in all areas.

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Throwing fuel on the fuel-economy debate

How often do GM and Toyota get into a public argument with a Pulitzer-prize winning author, using the blogosphere as their battle-ground? It all started when Thomas Friedman, author of the globalization classics Lexus and The Olive Tree and The World Is Flat, wrote an op-ed piece for the New York Times titled Et tu Toyota?, taking the company to task for its duplicity in joining the Detroit big-three for lobbying against higher fuel-economy standards in the US, while publicly cloaking itself in the language of eco-friendliness when it comes time to hawk hybrids on TV.

Toyota PR machinery kicked into high-hear and soon Irv Miller, group VP of communications had a response posted on the company’s external facing blog. General Motors also took offense at the allegations, and joined in the fray with a post of their own on the GM blog, appropriately borrowing Shakespearean title from Julius Ceasar: Beware the Ideas of Friedman. (Perhaps they could have waited until March in deference to the theme?) And there are just the “official” participants– bloggers have been actively writing about the problem.

Here is the quick run-down of the argument:

• Friedman questions why Toyota is fighting against fuel-economy standards in the US, since their fleet already complies with the higher ones in Europe and Japan. Detroit is in a different boat, as their primary market is US and their production is  heavily weighted towards light trucks. Precisely for that reason, higher CAFE standards place GM/Ford/Chrysler at a disadvantage while favoring the imports which do need to costly adjustments to the new regime. The puzzle is why sheer self-interest did not lead Toyota to lobby in favor of higher standards.
• The answer implied in the article: because that would leave significant revenue on the table since large-trucks and SUVs constitute a big slice of the US market. It’s not uncommon for a large company with diversified product lines to demonstrate schizophrenic behavior– one side going after the “green” niche while another seeks to capitalize on gas-guzzlers. No surprises there.
• Irv Miller counters that Toyota is pushing for higher standards but not the most aggressive version described in the senate bill because it is unrealistic:

“It’s because there’s a point at which the bar is set too high for all competitors.”

• Both the Toyota and GM responses counter that the reason large trucks are built is because the large trucks are bought by consumers- effectively a syllogism that amounts to “we sold them because they bought them.”

• Similarly this line makes no sense:

It’s why our full-size pickups are the fuel economy leaders. It’s why our new Chevy Tahoe and GMC Yukon Hybrids match the city fuel economy of a Toyota Camry.

The fact that one model can beat a competitor doesn’t give GM a “green heritage” anymore than the fact that the Viper can hang with a Ferrari give Chrysler a “Formula 1 heritage” across the line up. Existential proofs are useless because environmental impact is about total emissions across the board. The “A” in CAFE stands for average, not some best-case scenario achieved by prototypes in a controlled lab experiment or niche model driven by a few hundred people.

• There is a deeper concern raised by Friedman which is not answered in the GM retort. NYT article refers to Michigan reps’ attempt to lobby against CAFE standards on behalf of auto-manufacturers a case of “empty-barrel politics” and corporate euthanasia– effectively hastening the decline of the US industry. This is a far more damning and bold accusation. Putting on the McKinsey consultant hat, Friedman is dropping a hint that management has been clueless and their long-established strategy of abandoning the small car segment to imports has driven the industry into the ground. (The reasons for the decline may be debatable but its existence is certain. Last year Toyota quietly surpassed GM to become the world’s #1 manufacturer.)
• Finally the engineering creed of “doing more with less” is missing from the whole debate. There is undeniably a trade-off between vehicle size and fuel efficiency, but there is nothing that precludes improvements across the board. Even today wide difference exist in the fuel efficiency for vehicles in same size, weight and performance categories. In fact one could argue there is a greater burden to improve fuel economy in that segment. There is no reason that tricks applied to  optimize small cars today (multi-valve engines, variable timing, use of lighter metals in construction, aerodynamics, hybrid drive-trains etc.) could not be employed elsewhere.

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Website traffic as proxy for real-estate correction

Amidst the sub-prime lending mess, it is difficult to gauge the true state of the real-estate market. Several blogs track the inevitable correction, and academic Casandras such as Robert Shiller– who correctly called the end of the 2000 technology-fueled stock bubble– have been predicting doom and gloom for some time. Meanwhile the National Association of Realtors would like to assure you that all is well, pay no attention to the man behind the curtain please. (In fact, one full-page ad published in the New York Times in late 2006 hoping to stem the rising tide of panic stated: “It’s a great time to buy or sell a house.” Simple economics would dictate that it can’t be a both buyer’s market and a seller’s market but hey, irrational exuberance is all about freedom from the dictates of logic. BigPicture blog compared the advice to an investment banker suggesting that it’s a great time to buy or sell the same stock.)

It does not help that the market indicators themselves have been completely skewed, in spite of the full disclosure tradition. Keeping with Justice Brandeis’s principle that sunlight is the best disinfectant, few other markets have so much regulation intended to keep the level of transparency. From the seller’s obligation to disclose known defects to the public database of all transactions, residential real estate makes the post Sarbannes-Oxley corporation look like the Iran Curtain. But compelling disclosure does nothing to ensure the accuracy or relevance of the data published. Since perception is everything in market-setting, it is very much in the interest of sellers to project the existence of high demand and a robust market firing on all cylinders. Nothing ruins that picture as evidence of price declines.

Because the entire history of the transaction including original asking price is conveniently available on MLS, it would obvious when the seller did not succeed. That sets a bad precedent, especially when identical units have to be moved. If the average cookie-cutter suburban development has 100 units and the first few go below market, the next customers in line will demand deeper discounts. Soon the builder is in trouble. Much better to inflate the selling price by throwing all types of incentives. Paying the buyer under the table by the way, is illegal, so builders need more subtlety, in the same way car dealerships charge exorbitant premiums under the “fresh-air-and-sunshine” package. Paying closing costs, throwing in extras and upgrades, in one case offering a car along with the house, are all examples of incentives that are not reflected in the recorded sale price in MLS and not visible to prospective buyers looking for comparison basis. (Here is another article from the San Diego Union Tribune on incentives skewing the data and how that impacts lenders.)

So one must turn to more indirect signs to measure the correction. Fore-closures are one gauge that can’t be faked or sugar-coated, but they reflect the worst-case scenario. Money/CNN now reports on another: the traffic on a website that helps home owners quickly sell their property. According to Florida foreclosure future shock, the House Buyer Network website guarantees a sale by pricing it below market (one would hope, based on an honest appraisal this time, instead of the equally inflated appraisals used to secure financing) and having a real-estate agent commit to purchasing at even lower price if no buyers are found after a specified time. Company president claims to have correctly called the correction in Phoenix, Palm Beach FL and two California counties ahead of time. Their next reading: Central Florida is in trouble, even though Gainesville, FL home of the University of Florida Gators still posted the fourth highest year-over-year gain of all US cities.

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Fighting 419 scams, the vigilante way

It turns out that an interviewed with Chris Hansen of DateLine is not the worst thing that can happen to a Nigerian fraudster preying on victims on the other side of the world, with promises of getting a cut from non-existent fortunes hidden away in Swiss bank accounts. An article in the June issue of Atlantic Monthly looks at a group of volunteers who have taken art of fighting Internet scams to a new level.

Best exemplified by the site 419 Eater, these vigilantes turn the tables on scammers by playing the part of a gullible/greedy target, with the objective of causing maximum effort, wasted time or humiliation on the con artists. Some of the stories are familiar extensions of the To catch and ID thief TV series: the scammer travels a long distance to close the deal but the victim never shows up, or a payment promised never arrives after multiple creative excuses. Others border on the absurd: a photograph accompanying the article shows a Commodore 64 carved out of wood, by the enterprising scammer, tricked into believing that the victim is collecting items for his art gallery. In fact the self-styled “scambaiters” try to one-up each other with more outrageous exploits by getting scammers to send pictures holding up embarrassing signs, displayed in the Trophy Room. (Most comply, supporting the theory that when it comes to crime we catch the dumb ones. A few respond with amazingly awful and obviously fake digitally retouched pictures, which find a home in the Hall Of Shame on the same website.)

Revenge is good but in the collective frenzy over humiliating pwned spammers, the cyber-vigilante seem to have lost sight of the over-arching goal: reduce total damage from fraud. To the extent that the miscreants waste time and effort chasing scambaiters, there is some benefit because those resources are being tied up in unproductive ways instead of going after truly vulnerable victims.  That distraction is expensive because it also requires that the good guys waste their time keeping up their side of the story– although turning it into a competitive public sport with a web site seems to have turned up no shortage of volunteers. The basic problem is that once a scammer operation is revealed, including an authentic picture of the perpetrators, he/she remains in business. Future victims remain just as vulnerable to wiring money  overseas based on vague hints of a deposed African dictator’s hidden cash.

Parallel situation from phishing: flooding a phishing site with bogus submissions may temporarily reduce its effectiveness or pollute the database sufficiently to reduce the value of the ill-gotten gains. On the other hand, submitting legitimate credentials to a valid “honeypot” account and then carefully monitoring any activity on that account can protect other users. By design, any activity on the account is fraudulent and any IP address used for logging in is suspicious: all activity from that source can be screened to protect users whose data had been obtained in other unrelated scams.

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Identity thiefs tag team with data-sellers to target elderly

In what may be the newest low-point in data-mining and marketing, first-page story from the New York Times last Sunday details how identity thieves are turning their attention to scamming elderly persons living alone, a particularly vulnerable group. This by itself would not be unexpected from the low-lifes hiding out in the comfort of their dysfunctional countries in Africa and Eastern Europe to target US consumers. But the disturbing part is how data-mining and aggregation companies are knowing aiding and abetting the criminal enterprise:

“These people are gullible. They want to believe that their luck can change and it’s just a matter of catching a bit of star dust.”

Comment over-heard on an IRC channel populated by carders?
No, that would be a quote from the official marketing literature for InfoUSA, which sells lists of consumers often collected by dubious schemes such as sweepstakes, where the true purpose of data collection, if disclosed at all, appears in fine-print.

The article titled “Bilking the elderly, with a corporate assist” details the story of one 92 year-old World War II veteran and Purple Heart winner who frequently received calls from telemarketers– and did not mind it, as they provided some solace for a person living alone at home. InfoUSA sold his name/contact information to scamers, who contacted him to extract more information using standard pressure tactics (“your benefits will be canceled unless you provide us your SSN/bank account # etc.”) and proceeded to wipe out his life savings.

This not an isolated incident, and the companies selling the author contends that the companies selling data are fully aware that they are being used by criminals. Quoting a Canadian police officers:

Only one kind of customer wants to buy lists of seniors interested in lotteries and sweepstakes: criminals. If someone advertises a list by saying it contains gullible or elderly people, it’s like putting out a sign saying ‘Thieves welcome here’

In fact internal company documents obtained by NYT show that InfoUSA executives were aware of suspicious activity but knowing continued to profit from the sale of information to criminals. The company has since then posted a response– which is nothing more than a transparent spin attempt, except for the allegation that NYT story is based on events 3 years old– but they could not be bothered to respond to the author who claims they were contacted by phone and email at least thirty times.

InfoUSA is not the only player in this disgraceful episode, published one week before Memorial Day. Wachovia Bank also profited from the criminal activity, hosting the accounts used by the scam artists, where they collected money withdrawn from victims’ accounts. (To the tune of accepting $142 million in deposits with unsigned checks.) Particularly appalling is the fact that often the victim’s bank would detect suspicious activity, protect its own customer and then contact Wachovia to urge them to shut down the accounts. In one case 59% of all checks from a company were returned, in each case Wachovia being informed of the rejection. No action was taken.

Not surprisingly Wachovia declined to comment on the story and issues a content-free statement to the effect that they are continuing to cooperate with authorities. Lesson learned: spin doctoring after a screw up is always easier than protecting customers in the first place.

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HD-DVD processing key and Internet censorship

More observations:

• Attempting to suppress information after it has been leaked on the Internet is highly counter-productive. The heavy-handed tactics required to force the hand of web-site owners and publishes across the world only serve to draw more attention to the problem. This is a lesson that DVD Copy Control Association learned the had way with DeCSS.  But it should have been an obvious point to extrapolate from individual experiences. For example Outlook/Exchange have a feature to recall messages– but the “recall” works by sending another message which the recipient must first open, before Outlook will process it to remove the original one. Emails are often sent by mistake; to err is human. But sending a recall only draws attention to the original blunder and virtually guarantees more people will read it. This is because most errors involve sending a message to the wrong audience: not recognizing the subject line or sender, most  busy people may be tempted to ignore the message or file it away for later review. Send a recall message though, and suddenly everyone dropals their work and dig up the original. (Bonus points for sending an additional message on top of the recall: in 2004 an HR person sent email containing salary information to an entire building at MSFT campus. She followed up with a high-priority message admonishing people not to open the original, even kindly explaining the contents of the confidential attachment. )
• User generated content cuts both ways. It can fuel a website, but it can also bring untold dangers in the way of legal risk. Digg is far from alone here– witness the Viacom litigation over copyrighted content posted to YouTube. This is the trade off associated with riding an economic externality in the form of getting your audience to build your business: the result is a t the whim of users. Trying to shape the externality by weeding out the negatives can back fire. It is difficult to build a sense of ownership unless users feel they can post their choice of content, as opposed to content approved by the omniscient moderators.
• Commercial ventures have a lot more to lose than individual bloggers. Deeper pockets equals greater incentives to be litigated for perceived wrongs. Digg has decided to take a stand and ignore the C&D letters. Depending on your perspective, this is either a principled stand to be applauded, or unabashed grab for cheap publicity via corporate martyrdom. Developments over the next few days will be interesting. Already there is speculation on whether Digg has any legal ground to stand on. But either way, the decision to stop censoring the content would have been difficult to justify for any reason to an established company.

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Distributed breaking-and-entering: novel uses of Craigslist

It’s a common observation that crime online mirrors crime in real life. Fraudsters and hucksters of all stripes have been working at parting people from their money long before the Internet was designed/invented. Organized crime set up shop online, exploiting the new medium for new ways to accomplish same objectives with greater efficiency and lower risk. Identity theft, extortion, pump-and-dump stock trading, pyramid schemes etc. were not new but the web expanded their reach and impact dramatically. (It turns out that all the talk about “economies of scale” and synergies and enabled by a connected world is not limited to legitimate business only.)

But from Tacoma comes this story of influence going in the other direction: bricks-and-mortar crime inspired by its high-tech counterparts. Somebody posted a bogus ad on Craiglist to the effect that a house was abandoned and everything inside was free for the taking. Only it was not abandoned and the owner quite understandably upset at discovering the residence taken to the studs upon her arrival. Quote:

“The ad was pulled quickly, she said, but was up long enough that scavengers stripped the house of its light fixtures, front door, vinyl windows, water heater and even the kitchen sink.”

This is reminiscent of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks in the online world, but with a more damaging “exploit payload.” Instead of experiencing a temporary outage, the homeowner has unrecoverable property damage. In the standard DDoS, a large collection of machines (referred to as botnet) under the control of a single person (“bot-herder”) are all instructed to focus their resources on attacking a single target. Even with no vulnerabilities on the victim system, the volume of traffic from the thousands of machines is enough to temporarily wipe a website off the map. DDoS remains a popular extortion mechanism: “pay $$$ or else your website goes dark.” Bonus points when the website being targeted is already on shaky legal ground– think online gambling or betting services– and unlikely to seek help from law enforcement.

In this bizarre story from the Pacific Northwest, an attacker with a grudge against the owner (the story cites recent eviction of her two sisters living there) used Craigslist as the command-and-control channel for manipulating people (“bot” equivalents) into doing his/her bidding. But the parallel ends there because in principle every person who participated in the looting had free-will and made a voluntary decision, even if influenced by willfully misleading information. A bot-herder is fully aware of the consequences of issuing an attack order to his/her collection of machines– the PCs have no choice but to carry out the attack once the trigger is pulled. But the anonymous Craigslist poster can argue that it was a prank, that every person made a conscious, independent decision to break-and-enter or remove property from the premises.

Craigslist provided IP address and email for the person who posted the ad, but the question of which charges to file remains. Quote:

Detective Gretchen Ellis, a spokeswoman for Tacoma police, said that, because the case is so unusual, she isn’t sure how it will be investigated or prosecuted.

It is going to be an interesting court case– assuming the suspect is ever apprehended.

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Truth in spamming

“Fraudulent spam” cries the title of a recent unsolicited email message, pushing the limits of CAN-SPAM act. At least the FTC could not accuse this sender of false representation. The finally-out-of-beta Gmail had no problems delegating it to the junk mail folder correctly, but this one deserves points for creativity. With the exception of the unique title, there is nothing unusual about the rest of the message: same generic announcement about a mortgage preapproval, fantastically low rates, not contingent on credit history etc. (Quote: “[...] your credit is in no way a factor”– apparently these folks have not heard about the crisis in subprime lending sector.)

This is not the first time that subject has appeared in spam either. You have to wonder if it is a bug in the software, stamped on by an over-zealous intermediate gateway (in which case why is it not dropping the message completely?) or intentional attempt to exploit the relative simplicity of filters, a demonstration of how unintelligent AI can get. A person looking at a message with subject line “Fraudulent spam” is not going to get fooled. But for all their sophistication at detecting variations and creative spellings of m0r1gag3, the average antispam solution could easily get tricked by a novel approach.

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