Many spammers are from China, and will use Chinese characters for their spam keywords. Spam fighters attempting to chongq them (or just understand them better), will need to enable chinese character support as follows.
Displaying Chinese Characters in your browser
If you are seeing nothing but question marks (like this '?????? ??? ???') in Firefox, or little squares (like this '□□□□□□ □□□ □□□') in Internet Explorer, then you need to install Chinese character support.
Windows 'languages settings'
Close all your programs (because this crashed my PC)
Go to 'control panels' → 'Regional Options'. Then find languages settings, and tick to install 'Simplified Chinese' and 'Traditional Chinese' (windows 2000) or just 'Install files for east asian languages' (windows XP)
This will windows install files (probably requiring your windows CD), and will force you to reboot
See also: http://seba.ulyssis.org/thesis/howto-win.php
If you dont have your windows CD, or if you're strangely missing some files such as WINPY.MB, or if you really
cant reboot for some reason… there is another way:
Windows 'CJK fonts'
If the above didn't work, what you actually need, is support for 'CJK fonts'. There is shareware CJK enabler called '
MView Pro'. Download and install this. Select 'custom install' and only install CJK, not the input features. Hopefully you'll be seeing chinese characters, without having to reboot!
From the help file:
"MView Pro is a Microsoft Windows™ integrated software that allows viewing of Chinese, Japanese and Korean encoding under Windows™. The supported encoding types include GB, HZ, BIG5, JIS, EUC, SJIS, KSC, UTF7 and UTF8."
Remaining weird characters in spam links
It will now depend on how careful the spammer was with his spam. If he encoded his Chinese characters with html numeric entities, you should be able to see the Chinese in its full glory. If the spammer just dumped raw text into a wiki assuming that it would come out right, but completely forgetting about the encoding, then you will see spam which has lots of Umlauts and Cyrillic characters (like this: [Æû³µ×âÁÞ][ÉϺ£×â³µ] [×â³µ][Æû³µ×âÁÞ]). You will have to force your browser's encoding in this case. Most browsers have this feature somewhere in their 'View' menu. Choosing 'Chinese GB2312' should do the trick.
See Also