stochastic language processing summons evil

[trochee]

All sorts of religious and mystical traditions suggest that writing or uttering someone's (or something's) name has power -- either power over, or power of invocation. YHWH, "By Jove", "speak not that name", prayer wheels, runic magic, Nine Billion Names of God, much of various Lovecraft.

several_bees has an amusing poem that suggests just what might go wrong for people who too-freely assemble random "words" for spam-filter evasion, and a comment links to this transcript of a talented reverse-scammer throwing the fear of, er, Cthulhu into 419 scammer.

Makes me glad for my immortal soul that my research is focused on natural language processing, not natural language generation.

[update: http://www.boingboing.net/ has a link to a truly evil script for viewing web site A with web site B as coloring. For example: my LJ as told by CNN]