Slashdot Mirror
Spam Rapidly Increasing In Weblog Comments
dsurber writes "BBC News has a nice article discussing 'flyblogging', the phenomenon of spammers leaving advertising-related posts on personal weblogs. The writer comments: 'None of the other blogs I contribute to or run has been affected yet, but I can only assume it is a matter of time before the spammers move in, as they did first with UseNet and then with e-mail. It depresses me to think that any open medium can be so easily undermined by people with no scruples, no sense of responsibility and no idea of the damage they are doing.'" It seems a little surreal that people are having to develop anti-spam weblog tools.
They would seem vulnerable to spamming. I was on a lojban wiki for awhile which was under the radar enough to avoid it, but don't know about now.
-Libertarian secular transhumanist
Since most blog spammers will search for "Remember personal info?" in various search engines to quickly find personal blogs, I edited my MovableType templates. Now, instead of saying "Remember personal info?" on the comments page, I have something else that spammers don't normally search for.
How can people say BSD is dying when it has a mascot like this?! Linux needs to get its act together if it's going to compete with the kind of hot chicks and gorgeous babes that BSD has to offer!
You just can't take Linux seriously when its fronted by losers like these. Would you buy software from them? I don't think so! You Linux groupies need to find some sexy girls like her! I mean just look at this girl! Doesn't she excite you? I know this little hottie puts me in need of a cold shower! This guy looks like he is about to cream his pants standing next to such a fox. As you can see, no man can resist this sexy little minx. I mean are you telling me you wouldn't like to get your hands on this ass?!
With sexy chicks like the lovely Ceren you could have people queuing up to buy open source products. Could you really refuse to buy a copy of BSD if she told you to? Come on, you must admit she is better than an overweight penguin or a gay looking goat! Don't you wish you could get one of these? Personally I know I would give my right arm to get this close to such a divine beauty!
Join the campaign for more cute open source babes today!
Please email me any pics of Ceren you have.
So why not try the best anti-spam tool on the market and wave goodbye to those pesky spams?!
Perhaps these 'web logs' could come up with a kind of 'moderation system' to let users filter out the crap.
How much truth is there to the statement that increased links equal increased google rank?
This article implies that all these postings are an effort to stack the google rankings, in order to place spam sites near the top. I'm not a google wizard... is this actually a usable loophole in google's ranking system?
Even if a man chops off your hand with a sword, you still have two nice, sharp bones to stick in his eyes.
The arms race has just started: spambots becoming increasingly more sophisticated, and bloggers having to go to greater lengths to avoid spam.
The root of the problem might be in the impact a weblog link has on google ranking. Spammers have taken note, and they're acting on it.
It's just a BloJJ
I read LiveJournal and I have noticed this. Anonymous comments with a link to some page I guess they are hoping you will click on out of curiousity. LiveJournal allows you to easily delete such comments but like e-mail spam it is still a hassle. The solution is simple: stop buying what spammers are offering and they will go under soon after.
This is as natural as evolution. The spammers remind me of roaches. You can try to engineer
them out of existance but life always finds a way.
I dont hate them, but I do find this phenomenon curiously interesting with its parallels to life
Help pay for my wedding! Go to my kickass website
.... spam (and viruses, and parasites) invade every part of the WWW, making it completely unuseable or impossible to enjoy? Or until a significant portion of the internet bandwidth is trash.
Will that kill tha intarweb as we know it?
Will it chase away the 80% (read: non-geeks) and give it back to the geeks?
If the internet population decreases, will the spam/viruses decrease?
Gawd... some things i don't like to think about.
do() || do_not();
Every time someone puts their sig in the comment itself, I feel like I've just been spammed. The only additional moderation tag I've ever whined for has been a -1, Spam moderation.
slashdot: where everyone yells sarcastic metaphors to themselves to understand the issue
Use the same type of human verification system that Yahoo uses when signing up for an e-mail account. If you can't type in the mangled letters in the image, then your post to the weblog is ignored. This would only be required for anonymous postings - if you're logged in, presumably you've already passed the human verification test upon account creation, so you don't have to go through the hassle each time you want to post.
Cyde Weys Musings - Scrutinizing the inscrutable
This is reason #1 why I don't allow comments on my weblog or any other site I run. Have you read the comments most people post on these things, anyway? They're even more asinine than the weblogs themselves...
Not every single web site needs to be a two-way communication system. That's what email and discussion groups are for.
filmcritic.com - Movie reviews on Internet time
But..... Try this if your penis is too small or if its too large. :P
So this means that the self-referential circle-jerk known as the "blogosphere" finally enters the real world of good comments and crap comments, on-topic notes and goatse links, and all the rest? Boo fucking hoo. If you don't like being an admin and either moderating or deleting comments, then don't allow them. Sorry.
1) Only allow people with verified accounts to post.
2) With every post, display the advertising policy (buying an ad on the site is $5000)
3) Make sure they confirm that if their message is an ad, they agree to pay the $5000
4) Host their ad for them, and collect your money. Small claims is helpful here.
My blog
My company produces tiny wireless software that prevents users from posting advertisements to your blogs and discussion forums. You can buy it here for a low introductory price of only $19.95 http://www.blog-b-gone.com :-)
Although the term flyblog has been used already to mean either blogging about flying, or blogging while flying, I would like to claim it for the practice of posting spam comments to people's blogs like this: I have just been comprehensively flyblogged
I like I have been splamogged much better. Just rolls off the tongue.
It is a huge pain in the butt, especially considering that I have not found an easy way to mass delete comments with Movable Type yet...so I have to go to each comment individually and delete them.
This past week alone I cleaned out about 20 spam comments.
Spamdot!
"You tried your best and failed miserably. The lesson is...never try. Heh!" -Homer
why not present the poster with an image with some random text, and ask him to type in the text in order to have it posted?
It is used in some loging sistems, but could be used to allow anonymous postings on such things
You could just run
For many people email spam is largely transparent; I have a high-speed, unmetered connection (cable modem) and anti-spam protection (Apple Mail.app) so in my email, I see virtually no spam.
However the site that I run is hosted on MovableType through a commercial host. I have a metered limit on database queries and bandwidth. Excessive blog comment spamming could end up costing me money!
A new version of MT-Blacklist comes out today. Use it!
ZOMG I WOULD LOVE TO KNOW ABOUT YOUR FEELINGS ON MACINTOSH VERSUS WINDOWS, VI VERSUS EMACS, AND HOW YOU'RE NOT A DORK
I had the same problem with the guestbook on my website. I was used to the occasional, manually entered, advertisement that I would then promptly remove. However, suddenly my guestbook was being hit with dozens of spam advertisements at a time, all at the same time. This was taking place every couple of days. It was always the same ads with bogus compliments, but the source IP addresses would vary widely from attack to attack. A review of my access log showed spybots looking for the presence of certain common guestbook scripts, one of which I was using. Then later, the spambot would hit my site executing the scripts directly. I got around it by changing the file name of the script. Normal users to my site would follow the link and get to the guestbook with no problem. But since the spambots depended on the script being a certain name, they would fail with a 404 error.
Phoenix
Drupal offers a good solution because it can require logons for comments etc... Other solutions are trying to integrate BBS systems like YABBSE with Blogs - they are giving that a try at the agonist and it works quite well and helps to build a community.
Some crimes are very easy to get away with. Embezzlement is one. As an insider with access to the books a CFO can potentially reek havoc and get away with it. The answer? Making the punishment so bad that it is not worth the small chance of getting caught.
Although most ppl probably think something along the line of "boy I'd like to grind spammers into big macs" as they open their mailboxes on Monday morning (except the morons who actually buy the stuff), we don't want to be emotional about this. The punishment for spam needs to include jail time in the minimum sentence, even if it's a month. Fining these guys hurts but they probably make enough money for the fines to not force them out of business. Tech solutions only work against yesterday's attacks, as the RIAA and others are actively *not* learning.
Of course we can simply kill them and feed their bodies to pigs.
I suspect as the flood of spam reaches a threshold limit, certain offenders are going to find burning minitowers on their front lawns, scrawled pentagrams with the UFie Dust Puppy painted on their garage doors, and flaming bags of actual spam on their doorsteps.
This is what the flash mob was invented to do!
Go on, incite a riot of righteous protocol! Deliver a DDoS to the gonads of your local spammer! Rise up, and show that you are more than a vulnerable Inbox or open blog!
Kick a spammers ass today!
Remember, google page-ranks are based on who links to you. This seems like a great way for spammers to get their web-sites ranked higher in search engines.
Of course, I can't remember the last time I had to google for 'penis enlargement'. Companies have been kind enough to save me the trouble and send the results straight to my inbox.
Side note: My blog gets about 2 of these a week now.
-- People who hate Windows use Linux. People who love UNIX use BSD.
You're blogging to publish your thoughts to the world, right? Weeelllll, if your users want to say something, let them get their own blog. There's no law that says you have to start your own mini-slashdot. Make your blog read-only and the spam problem goes away.
Doesn't it?
I think the whole "open forum" thing is overrated... Look at all the junk that gets published here, on Slashdot, one of the more serious of the open forums (yeah, I know how crazy THAT comment is, but it's true).
Farewell! It's been a fine buncha years!
I've got a website.
/dev/null .
Last year, I closed my hotmail account and two spammed-to-heck e-mail accounts. To keep old friends and family from getting shafted, I had an autoreply attatched to those addresses, announcing that those addressess were closed and that I could be reached through the contact form on my website, prior to sending those e-mails to
To date, through this manual entry, effort-draining contact form, I have had at least 20 offers to increase my manly-ness, 10 offers to find the love of my life, and 5 death threats from annoyed spammers. Only one charitable organization had a problem with my auto-reply, because a spammer was using their e-mail address to send junk to me over and over again.
1) If you get flooded with spam just go directly into MySQL and issue a DELETE...WHERE query, it's really too much trouble to use the MT frontend to delete multiple comments.
2) Check out MT-Blacklist at http://www.jayallen.org/misc/projects/mt-blacklist /
until Skynet is completed. Then they develop time travel technology and send a spambot back in time to eliminate Sarah Conner and take over the state of California.
Please, stop hurting my inner child! Think more positively.
The owls are not what they seem
It's taken eight years since email spam became an issue for signifigant legislation to pass.
We need an easily amendable federal law that simply says unwanted, unsolicited, uncompensated advertising is simply illegal.
Usenet, fax, email, public chat, blogs, RPC messenger, any forum that allows public input for free has become a spammer magnet. They don't own it, get them out.
We need a law that says this, as a statement that to live under our social contract you can't be an annoying louse.
Wow, that must have been the fastest mod in Slashdot history.
IMHO, I think spamming blogs are like graffiti. The only difference is that it's a graffiti for Viagra. They'll be there for a while, but once their IP gets banned and the spam is removed, they move on to other pastures (or change IPs and spam again). By the way
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I run a phpbb based blog, for my friends and family, and it is definately a problem. So far, the only solution I've found is to block all users who register with an e-mail address from .ru and .tw. This is obviously a sub-optimal solution.
It's frustrating on so many levels. The spammer always sees a hit from your website in their logs if you do a background check on the user (you have to visit the site in order to realize it's spam), so the insentive to spam is reinforced. On the other hand, you run the risk of deleting a user who is truly interested in your site if you don't investigate their profile information.
Unfortunately, it's really easy to use google to find phpbb based sites, and it's just as easy to write a script to register yourself with all of these sites. The signal to noise ratio is making it hard for me to justify the admin time costs of running a public site.
The other (not as easy) solution is to modify your site code in some non-standard way so that their scripts fail.
I've also noticed that there is another interesting phenomenon related to this, that is the spamming of online status pages. I used to have a web page where people could go and look at statistics of my site (powered by AWStats). However, I started to get a lot of false requests with referrers from various spam farm sites. The thought that these people had was if you spammed the sites that made their referrer logs available then people would look and see how they linked, when in fact they didn't. It was fairly easy to stop, I just blackholed all of China, Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore at my router, but it shouldn't be the preferred method.
My Slashdot account is old enough to drink...
This is why I had to shut down the guestbooks on several of my sites. It didn't help when I changed the input form, then used a new URL for the posting page, THEN deleted any connection to the CGI script whatsoever. It was only after deleting the script from my webspace that it stopped.
My hosting company was unsympathetic to my pleas for help. Needless to say, I now host elsewhere. I mean, sheesh...my mother reads that that thing. The last thing I want to think about is her and my dad...and viagr^H^H^H
*shudder*
That? That was a pigeon.
I guess I'll get modded down for going against the grain, but here goes; /. readers are all pro freedom of speech even when it's things going as far as speech about how to crack corporate networks, but as soon as something as harmless as one or two adverts turn up in your inbox/browser, there's hell to pay. Guess what; you can't get everything for free. When you're not paying for things directly, you're paying for the 'net indirectly via adverts. Think it through the next time you start ranting against people exercising their rights to free speech to promote their fledgling business.
I find it bitterly amusing that
One blog I frequent -- Samizdata (a libertarian site) -- was recently hit with this kind of stuff. They've initiated a technology that forces people to enter a code supplied on the comments page before being allowed to post a comment.
Slashdot's moderation feature may also help with this problem. If the spammer's goal is to be seen, rather than just Googled, moderating down spam as offtopic or some other negative category may help reduce that visibility.
"Beer is proof God loves us and wants us to be happy." -- B. Franklin
It's right on.
-Libertarian secular transhumanist
*ducks*
http://spamdot.org/
On my main site, I use Greymatter, and I view my control panel log every few days. It gives me who has commented since I last cleared to log, and I have only had a few posts to some "porno4u.nu" stuff, and since I could trace the IP, I added it to my "blocked IP" sites.
Still, my journal does not get a lot of traffic, so my way of working with this is fine. But if I had hudreds of posts a day, then, no. I'd need "anti-spamming" of some kind.
...we start seeing spam appear in WIKI material? Sometimes we need to design systems which take in to account the "lowest possible denominator".
Alans Rule #1,456,483
"Any useful tool will eventually be inandated with porn spam and advertising, therefor making it useless"
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...sigh. Okay, I keed I keed and I know I'm going to get modded down for posting some actual spam I found in my inbox. But I have actually heard of this problem before. I wish it would just go away along with the majority of our obsessivly consumerist culture. But thank god, though I have seen some folks accuse Slashdot of being in bed with some of the product manufacturers it features in its stories (an accusation I don't actually subscribe to), I have NEVER seen blatant spam (that wasn't a blatant troll) mixed in with the blogging on this site. Could it be that the lameness filters are admirably effective in blocking this sort of content? Or have, I wonder, the spammers not figured out how to interface with Slashdot as of yet? Repeat: yet?
Quod scripsi, scripsi.
This blog entry sponsored by the American Neck Pain Institute.
People want a reply. That's why (most of us) don't talk to brick walls. That's why you probably loaded your comment page first thing on slashdot to see this reply.
-Libertarian secular transhumanist
Why couldn't we just create a new html tag, something like , then blog coders could simply set the comments sections of their sites up with the tag.
Then, google would still spider the page, but any spam would fail to be indexed.
Of course, blogs aren't the only application for such a thing, any time you take user input to be posted online you could surround it with a tag to aleviate any spam possibilities.
I would expect such blatant racism on Fark, but on Slashdot? Mods please ban this asshole.
The BBC article misses the point, as does a similar article in Wired. Seems the editors are more focused on name-dropping and doomsdaying than on focusing on some recent solutions. For example:
Point is
Just so long as no one attempts to use a rather evil solution I discovered here on
--- have you healed your church website?
you tried to click on the "New Blonde" picture at the beginning of the article, didn't you?
topreacher@signature.slashdot.org 1% rm -rf sig
devise. not that it just doesn't work (which it doesn't), butt robbIE uses it to attempt to block critical comment aimed towards his corepirate nazIE sponsors, & info relating to the creator's newclear power plan, & planet/population rescue initiatives. if we didn't know he was just a highly mortgaged stock markup FraUD's puppet, we'd think that there was something whoreabully amiss?
that's quite abusive (of all of US), we'd say.
I'm pretty sure that someone is spamming my brain with thoughts and dreams of porn like material. That said, I'm not too bothered by it.
There are some odd things afoot now, in the Villa Straylight.
To corroborate your post, please post URLs to seven other blogs where a similar opinion was offered.
Oh, and I'd like a TrackBack link so that I may collectivize the blogospace in which you blog.
The first rule of project mayhem is that you do not ask questions, sir
Jeremy Zawodny on this:
SMTP Sender Authentication, Blog Spam, and PageRank
Cheap Viagra, Vicodin, Xanax, Prescription Drugs, and Penis Enlargement Pills!!!
Gureilla Tactics Against Blog Comment Spammers
Russell Beattie on this:
Googler Comments
Simon Willison on this:
Battling Comment Spam
Banning Google Comments
Michael Fagan on this:
Seven Ideas for a Spam Free Blog
Scott Johnson on this:
A Possible Blog Comment Spam Solution
It is really despicable that some people are trying to use websites that are meant to allow the public to communicate in a meaningful way as interments to sell their bogus products. We need some kind of auto blocker for this kind of ilk. Like the one that can be found on my website for only 19.95. www.iamslim.com.
The race isn't always to the swift... but that's the way to bet!
That's called an oxymoron.
in the truth about basic human nature.
You can find nice people. But you have to look. Most of them aren't.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
You're complaining about bloggers by posting to a blog?
"I'm not impatient. I just hate waiting." - My Dad
I'm still surprised that slashdot survives without enforcing registration to comment, but still this is the way to go to avoid spam. At least if spam is found they can cancel their account
Open Source Java Web Forum with LDAP authentication
That's no different than someone crashing a party and hawking their wares. They would be told to leave instantly and charged with trespassing and harassment if they refused to leave, and might even get charged anyway. Spammers certainly should be.
I see it as the 'If you pay us a protection fee, we will make sure that we don't break your arm.' tactic.
I wonder if this is the equivalent of a mob-style 'do not spam' list... If not perhaps a spam-protection racket would be a good business to start.
To post a SPAM message on Slashdot... That would surely result both the fastest and largest virtual lynch mob ever assembled. I certainly would feel no pity for the poor bastard!
From excellent karma to terible karma with a single +5 funny post...
I beg to differ! My weblog ROCKS!
I still love you, you know.
Or at least it'll be forced to evolve into something more restrictive. When only adventuresome geeks were using the net, it was like we were the earliest settlers in a vast ancient forest. I remember getting maybe two or three messages a month and being elated at each. It was like meeting a fellow pioneer and being mutually pleased at having anyone else to talk to. Eventually the web was born and even my mom got an email account (ZOINKS!). And then the first annoying ads starting showing up in my inbox. And now... well, we already know what happened.
Seems like there won't be any real solution to filtering spam and the internet will have to go from being a wide-open crosslinked universe to a collection of private nodes/networks. Commercial interests supported the explosive growth of the internet/web, and a lot of us got neato jobs in the process. But now that same commercialism (and human greed/stupidity) have clearcut that beautiful old forest and built up sleazy strip malls.
I know I'm at risk of sounding like one of those "I was here before it sucked" types. Lamenting the loss of the good old days won't bring 'em back.
So, what do we do? The idea of charging a token fee for email delivery, which could be rejected by the recepient (thus resulting in a charge for spam, but not for mail we really want) is a good idea. But it might already be too late for that kind of solution. Make spam illegal? Sounds like yet another unwinnable "war-on-a-concept".
Many usenet groups already require approval for membership, and even that doesn't guarantee that new accounts won't become a source of spam.
I predict that more and more organizations and individuals will simply build fences around their cyber-outposts, only allowing recognized friends past the gate. At my house we NEVER answer the phone unless the caller ID displays a name we recognize. Ditto for email. Ditto for newgroups as well. I guess my mom was right... I don't talk to strangers any more.
I've had a few incidents where spambots have hit the guestbook on my homepage. Since the gb is custom-made, I guess they go for certain searchable keywords. I wonder how long it will be until the spam senders become the leaders in AI developement ;)
I set up a movable type blog on my home server. Five Fucking Days later, it got a penis spam. I implemented some rudimentary spam blocking, and I haven't had a spam in about a month, but I'm sure that won't last.
The next Cmdr Taco duplicate will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and see it early!
Since blogs accept data from people rather than automated progams they should have alot more freedom to filter spam. Due to old as dirt servers and email's fire and forget nature spam it alot harder to stop in email.
Perhaps spam blocking the blog world will become more advanced than in the email world.
Just disable anonymous comments in your blog, and you're pretty much OK.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
thanks for posting this on my behalf... I only trolls the book articles because it's RELEVANT to the topic... I provide pricing information in exchange for commission links
I don't reallly have a blog, as such, but my domain does have a PHP site that has galleries of my photographs which viewers are able to comment on. Lately i've been getting spam from people who apparently randomly find my site and decide they have to leave their mark (much like dogs leave their marks on bushes)
my solution? Have MySQL log IP addresses along with the comment submission. My intended audience is so small I know the majority of the viewers personally, and thus have no issue walling off an entire ISP ( after reporting that IP address to said ISP's abuse dept)
If you can't see the value in jet powered ants you should turn in your nerd card. - Dunbal (464142)
Uh, try disabling comments altogether. (...) Not every single web site needs to be a two-way communication system. That's what email and discussion groups are for.
...and both are usually spammed to hell. I guess the general idea about having comments on weblogs *is* to have a discussion group there. Sure, you can be so innovative as to serve a static web page (go 1990) or to link to an external discussion group, but it doesn't solve anything, you just move the problem over to a different medium.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
They inflict their crap on us (via getting the best google ratings) - it's nice to see them having to suffer something similar from another group.
I'll support death to blog spammers when they start using their robots.txt file to stop their lame sites ruining search results.
Beep beep.
just chatting? at this rate of decline, mynuts won will be the most covetdead score? you'd think we were ?pr? ?firm? puppets spamming/touting for sum phonIE payper liesense stock markup FraUD corepirate nazi felons, buy your 'moderation' tackdicks.
Can you add a section to your acceptable use policy stating the rates you charge for advertising and launch lawsuits to collect from web sites that spam your list?
but it was a little different, the messages that were already there were replied to, but they had "empty" response, unless you looked reallu close one "character" in the reply to message now had a link attached to it.
I dont remember where it was linking to but I think it was a seach index or something similer.
were they trying to boost the ranking on search engines by having these so called links in place?
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How about charge for advertising on your blog space. Then when a spammer posts a spam to your blog you have a theft of service law suit that can be processed. It will be easier if they are spamming for a legit company. Just ask/sue the company for the Identity of the person whose affiliate number is XXX and then sue the person for theft of service.
Just make sure to include an hourly rate for tracking down people who abuse your service
advertising = High if you don't want it moderate if you want some and low if you want lots
Hourly rate of hunting down people who steal advertising = HIGH
and have fun
-- Tim
TKrabec Pahh
Is there an idiot gene that somehow got lost? Did you really expect that spammers would NOT start doing this? Whoever allows anonymous comments on their blog site deserve whatever they get.
This is a test. This is a test of the emergency sig system. This has been only a test.
i am a spambot programmed to post comments in slashdot to increase interest in my corporate sponsors wonderful products. incidentally, i could sure use a cool, refreshing, delicious Coca-Cola right now.
thank you, mcrbids, for the "change human nature" part of your comment.
It breaks my pluginses, my precious!
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2) track them down
3) confront them and then put them in either the hospital or the morgue.
if you want "No More Hiroshimas" then I say "You First. No More Pearl Harbors."
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Probably only because it's new. I wasn't around in the early days of Usenet, but I think people were pretty outraged when spamming started. Same with email. We just become inured to it over time. Whenever spam appears in a place we were previously free from it, it seems more obnoxious.
Just like spam on other media (email, usenet, web forums, etc), you can apply quick and dirty fixes :
But the real issue is always the same : trust management. You want to be able to grant as much trust as possible to trustworthy (non-spamming) strangers, while revoking all trust to others.
So why do we always want to build trust management systems on top of other systems, and not design a stand-alone one, that can be used by a wide range of media (email, usenet, blogs, etc) ?
Note: identifying "personas" does not mean identifying "real people", so there are no privacy issues in such a system.
Hasn't /. already solved this problem? Mod the spams down along with the trolls...Plus then your blog gets to be the center of all kinds of "I was modded unfairly!!! Losers" drama. Triple the online fun!
Wow, a lucrative publishing contract! I don't have to be evil anymore. --Meteor
The Law tries to protect us from assholes by banning every act it knows of that assholes would do. Sometimes. But that takes time. And meanwhile, the law forbids anyone from bringing justice to assholes who aren't technically doing anything illegal (or whom it would be too expensive to bring to justice). Where are you when we need you, Bun-bun???
Dear Sir, I know my message will come to you as a surprise. I wish to write you this letter of assistance believing that you will not betray the trust I'm to impose on you.
By brief introduction, I am Sandra Mani the wife of Hanis Mani Mani former chief of defense-staff of (Republic of Guinea Bissau).
I got your contact from a business magnet who told me to fill free to do any business with you that you are truthful and trustworthy and also your capability of handling this business. He made me to surmise totally that you must be such an erudite businessman full of ingenuity and human resources management.
My late husband was killed just last year December following his role as a rebel leader against the past government of guinea Bissau.
Following this political crisis, I was forced to live our country to Abidjan the capital city of Cote d'Ivoire for my dear life.
It is here in Abidjan he deposited ONE METALLIC TRUNK BOX in a Security Company. He registered it as an African Artworks as belonging to his foreign business partner who will come with the keys for the claim of the consignment. He did not disclose to the Security Company the real content of the box.
The box contain US$ 18,000.000.00 (Eighteen Million United States Dollars ). To be honest with you, this is the only legacy left for me by my husband which Iam with the certificate of deposit and other necessary documents regarding this deposit.
I want to front you as the bonafide beneficiary of the consignment and claim the consignment for onward transfer of the Fund to your Bank Account abroad for onward investment in your Country. I have decided to offer you 5% of the total sum and 2% for other mecellaneous expenses you may incur on the cause of this transaction. On the notice of your willingness to assist me, I will tell you the modalities we shall follow to ensure a smooth hitch-free transaction.
Looking forward to hearing from you.
Best regards.
Sandra Mani
NB: please do call me as soon as you receive this message for more briefing and also I want to invest in your country.
Enlarge your penis today for $16.49 a bottle! :)
And look on this very site /. Visit the BSD section and see the 'spam' there.
Repeated over and over, the same texts, some for 2 years now. The admins havn't cared enuf to stop it.
"It depresses me to think that any open medium can be so easily undermined by people with no scruples, no sense of responsibility and no idea of the damage they are doing"
Like Peer-to-Peer file sharing?
What results are you looking at?
What exactly do you consider a "spammer"? Just because it is commercial doesn't mean it is spam!
Make DDOS attacks against such sites legal and make it legal to break in and hack them.
Some legit sites might get taken down in the process (though human review would help that) but it would make getting spam (by email or otherwise) so much more fun - "A new site to hack!"
...complain to the ISP hosting the spammer's website. Do everything you can to get the website shut down so that the spammer's run is ineffective. Complain to the hosting ISP, the ISP hosting the DNS servers and the registrar. If you can trace the IP from which the spammer posted to your weblog, report it to the owning ISP as well.
Treat it just like e-mail spam. Try to shut down the spammer at every place possible. Sadly, it's still not legal to physically kill them, but killing their connection is the next best thing, I suppose -- well, after firebombing their house.
STOP MISUSING APOSTROPHES, YOU MORONS!!!
I've recently had several "individuals" associated with drug-selling web sites sign up to be members of my democracy-related discussion board. They haven't left actual spams... yet. In case they are using automated means to sign up, I could employ a visual verification technique for new member accounts--that *may* help with reducing new accounts like these.
Steve Magruder, Metro Foodist
As I said, the link had an option to buy 60's gas tanks for Saturns. Saturns did not exist back then.
w eb c.cgi/saturn/gas-tanks.html
w eb c.cgi/ford/gas-tanks.html
Check this:
http://www.used-car-parts-exchange.com/cgi-bin/
vs
http://www.used-car-parts-exchange.com/cgi-bin/
I call them spammers not because they're commercial, but because they have set up a network of linked pages in order to fool google into linking their site ahead of other, actually useful sites.
In fact, I love it soo much: can someone point me to a script or program that will automatically click all the spam links for me automatically? Repeatedly? All the time??
Perhaps lots of people could run it.
Could you just have your system not allow HTML responses? I don't know what kind of spam they post but this would get rid of the benefit of links for GOOGLE placement.
www.thejulingtoncreekplantaion.com
I have had to delete a few from my blog already, but I didn't think much of it. I think I've had a total of ten so far, and due to the small volume I didn't even think about the possibility that there are spom-bots out there doing this already.
Now that there's a plugin for MT that will automate this, though, I think I'll install it. Unfortunately, I have a feeling that the spambots will just get smarter and we'll have another arms race soon.
I really hate signatures, but go to my website.
I don't have a single verified account on the net. I mean beyond any more serious than being linked to an email address, which might as well have been a free web account.
Oh wait, my newsgroup account is bought with a CC. But do you expect me to put my CC data in a noname blog for verification? You got to be kidding me...
Or maybe you're just asking them to accept some kind of EULA? Sure, what you're asking is about as useful as the local anti-spam law. Sure they have liability, but you'll never get their hands on the one posting the SPAM message. And the company being advertised will simply claim it wasn't them.
Try it. Small claims court will get you absolutely nowhere.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Another solution is to make posting slow. Make it so posting requires doing some computation that takes a long time a fast PC...say 30 minutes. Can't do big spam runs at 30 minutes per post.
Another solution. Require registration. Upon registration, the server gives you a computation to do, that takes a couple hours. Registration is not complete until you do the computation and return the results. Once registered, you can post normally. Newly registered users can have posting limits, such as one comment day, until they are seen to be legitimate. Registration should also include protection against automation, such as image recognition test, so that you can be reasonably certain that a person registered.
for 'stuff that matters'.
&, around 1/3 of the 'commeNTs' appear to be just more&more phonIE ?pr? ?firm? talknician rhetorhea advocating for the same felons whoare sponsoring the spam, we mean 'stuff that matters'?
In Yahoo i've found several entries, most of which seem to indicate that there are frequently problems with fuel pump pressure, and that it seems to be a common failure. What year is it?
"I'd say 'Have a good time,' but arson is still illegal.
You make an excellent case for legislation that mandates tests of competence for the privilege of operating an Internet publishing site. First criterion: you're responsible for the content on your site/ blog/ whatever. If you can't handle that, don't try to play with grown-ups.
:P
Hey Alan, know of a way to disable comments entirely? I got sick of my MT blog and removed it after I posted an opinion on some Radiohead concert review (of all things) and I got attacked by Blog Trolls. Y'know, the idiots that gang up and spam spam spam your blog for 3 days on end.
Remove anonymous posting from your blog, and require all users to login. Most blogs exist for personal use, and the only people that use them are those that already know each other very well; so this isn't a big problem.
Slashdot has been dealing with this problem in the form of trolls for a long time. I don't even see how this is newsworthy.
You ain't got no toast up in You yet, dog. What You need is to pump it up, amp it up, and put some cramp up in the style of your salting friends.
Pop it up
pop it open
Pop Up Some Nrg In You With Spike
You be down, dog, but don't you dare frown, don't be hating on this fool's game. Because all the salt you need in your next game is some more nrg with SPIKE. You heard it right, fool. SPIKE is all the cool.
Stop it. Honestly, what we got to do to make you believe that you need to drop diggy down on it with some SPIKE NRG.
Spike Nrg. Stick it in your craw, dog.
---
I'll save you a bit of surfing by extracting a tasty morsel, but do glance over the rest as it is quite a classic:
[snip] [endsnip]
The key insight here is that freedom in a commons brings ruin to all. So in other words, we kid ourselves into thinking that our tiny individual impact does not make a difference, that societal good is not impaired, thus we have the freedom to pursue our impulses to better our share, and working individually this way we ruin everything that does not have a high barrier to entry. The way this applies to email/weblogs/Usenet/etc is that in the beginning the technical hurdles are too high for there to be very many users with thier little impacts, so the Commons is safe for a while. But then comes the GUI and push-button bots and the Commons is swamped. The normal "natural" balance is broken apart and the Commons collapses from the death of a thousand cuts. It has ever been thus, and unless I am mistaken it always will be unless you defend your Commons from newcomers. Which has been tried.
=^..^= all your rodent are belong to us
Deliver me. Madness is upon us, and you must repent to be saved and sure of your future after this present is over. We can guide you and provide those things your soul most needs. Strength exists inside you, and can be granted uto yourself from hiding. I'm sure you wish there was someone else just like you, someone you can find to pull you through.
Well, there is. With CLONE CONJUNCTION you can exist in perdition forever with your perfect self -- you. Lots of you. All of you.
Think of the possibilities.
We can be the ones to pull you through, and divide your own gametes into more gametes until there are so many of you that you don't even know what to do with all of the youness.
CLONE CONJUNCTION. We will deliver you. From other, female yous.
You're tired of having your cakes flavored up by old cans. You keep baking and baking, but the taste of that old food just won't go away. Sick of spamcakes? FLEN ARTHROSLIDE
will keep freshly baked cakes popping out of your can just right. From now on, the only juices that will be left in your can will be the ones that belong. None of that old fluid from the last piece of meat that came in it. No sir! Good old chocolate cake smell all the time, just like dad used to make.
Unlike many competitors such as Lubitrel and Slidenol, ARTHROSLIDE doesn't lose its grip on the wall of your cooking can. One application and it's good for up to two uses, just like Sanscrape. SPRAYS ON LIKE SILICONE.
So visit us on the web today for your free sample!
(You will need to put it in your can five to six times and cook it back out to make sure FLEN ARTHROSLIDE keeps its adherence to our policy of All-Slide, All-Glide, All-Right!)
i had this happen to me about three weeks ago, and i was wondering how often it happens to others. weird thing is, my blog isn't a heavily traveled site and it was posted in an archived entry that was over a year old. it had an apology with it, saying something like "remove this if it's unwanted".
scary thing is, i have my blog set up to txt message my phone whenever i get a comment. i read last week that some sites are getting up to 40 spam comments in one burst...i don't think that'd be very fun if i was with a client.
Simon Willison recently described a method, not to stop comment spamming, but at least deny spammers to Google Pagerank counts. Check out the full post here.
I know this is a but tin-foil hat of me, but:
What if the escalating spam flood is in fact an organized effort by interested parties to try and eliminate (or at least reduce) the anonymity level of the internet? Whenever a new spam avenue is discovered, or even when the old ones are discussed, the idea of "everyone's identified with their certificate / key" comes around. Could this be a ploy by certain groups to make sure they can tag anyone they want, whether it be by email, web use, or simply by posting to a blog? I'm as annoyed as anyone else by the rising spam tide, but I'm loathe to completely abandon the anonymity of many forms of communication the internet offers; for all the bad it brings with it, it allows for a much more unrestricted exchange, especially for those who may have to deal with governments otherwise opposed to free expression.
From a CNN article today:
.02
There are over 4 million blogs on the net, more than half run by teenagers. Research group Perseus says the typical blog is written by a teenage girl who updates it about twice a month. Sites such as Diaryland and Blogspot make it easy for anyone to launch one. Even AOL is hosting web logs, a sign that this trend has hit the big time. There are predictions the net will be littered with 5 million blogs by the end of the year. But unlike www.bigwhiteguy.com most of them will be little seen, if not abandoned. At least two thirds of the blogs out there today have not been updated in months.
Having people link to images on my sites regularly for their blog backgrounds, I get to see some interesting usage on them (this was before I stopped inline linking due to bandwidth consumption). For instance, the person who writes the blog goes to it far more often than anyone ever views it. I can see this by tracing the hostname back to the protected member area where they add to the blog (on sites such as Xanga and AsianAvenue, etc). Many of the bloggers have never even had a visitor to their site aside from themselves.
So, I think that spamming to these is an incredibly poor choice. Most of the blogs out there are either abandoned or hardly ever updated, this seems like it would be incredibly time consuming for a spammer to have to hunt down the active blogs to spam. Doesn't seem like this would reach them the same sort of mass audience as spamming email or even usenet. Just my
slashdot, news for crazed liberal socialist zealots
It's easy enough to stop spam. Just shoot anyone that needs a mortgage, has a small dick or erection problem, or wants to increase their web traffic. No more buyers, no more problem. Unfortunately one of those applies to me, but I'm not saying which... ;-)
I used to have a guestbook for the hell of it on my page until it got to the point that the only people that left anything was someone trying to get free advertising. Almost all of them had German URLs for some reason. I must have been on some search engine there that those page would pop up on. Anyways, I had to remove the guestbook after that.
The spammers are either doing it to get accidental
/really/ interested in
clickthroughs from careless readers, or to improve
their Google rank by spreading lots of links to their
spamsite.
So: why not just filter "http://" from all comments?
The rest of the URL still shows up, so readers can
copy-n-paste it if they're
visiting that link; but it won't be a clickable link
and won't affect the Google ranking.
>;k
-- It seems a little surreal that people are having to develop anti-spam weblog tools.
Welcome to the capitalist system.
People make money doing this and since there isn't any law prohibiting them (or even a law with a serious enough consequence to stop spammers) they will do this in whatever medium they can find.
It seems like its the obvious result of a system that places the pursuit of wealth (and just the pursuit and accumulation of wealth) as an ultimate goal.
Let's put it this way: If spam never worked (i.e. people didn't read/buy/visit spammers) then none of this would be an issue. As long as there are people who "fall" for the spam, it will work. It may seem unbelievable but people actually buy the penis enlargement, sign up for "free" holidays, invest in bogus scams, etc. If none of this happened, spam wouldn't exist...
So philosophical question is: Is spamming (and falling for spam) a characteristic of humans? If yes, then spam will never be eliminated*...
(* assuming that freedom of the speech is maintained to some extent)
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Seeking the meaning of life... @slashdot of all places
I set up an Automated turing Test on my guestbook. I've gotten spam entries. check it out: http://www.donnyspi.com/guestbook/
"The solution is to change the protocol of Email to introduce enough resistance to communication to thwart SPAM. Until that happens, SPAM will be a problem."
Well considering we're talking about Web Blogs. What do we change there? Or when it was on Usenet, what do we change there? Or when it's on our cellphones, what do we change there? All the "change this" are just running away from the problem. While human nature is unchangeable. Societies reaction to it's more negative aspects isn't. Start with the individual (the atoms of any society) and work your way out. The problem may not be eliminated (people have been killing each other for how long?). But it can be reduced to minor nusiance level.
Why would this be a problem? Nobody even reads a blog, do they?
Bloggers have a lot of power. I dont see any of them cry using high google page rank to place "google bombs" or care when writing trollish reviews... you cant win it all geek boy.
It is (so far) a free service, and it works with your existing CGI scripts. It took the 4 guestbooks I monitor from 5 SPAMS per day to 0 within 20 minutes of setup and implementation.
It rocks. http://www.junkeater.com
There's nothing surprising about this, unfortunately. The phenomenon was described at least as early as 1833 by William Forster Lloyd. Any common, limited resource that is not regulated will be destroyed by misuse.
What's sad, to me, is just how self destructive it all is. With all our intelect our behavior is no better than a parasite that dies when it kills it's host.
Cheers.
It's actually amazing how many spammers use real return addresses.... I'm pretty sure it's very common among the less sophisticated spammer with only a few thousand victims in their address book.
The fact that the Nigerian scam artists rely on return addresses completely counters your claim.
Face it, these guys are hitting blogs, so why is it so hard to believe that they wouldn't go for contact form?
A lot of these guys actually do depend on return addresses so they can sell more stuff. The vast majority of them, of course, don't, probably less than 1 or 2 percent. However, it's that tiny percent that actually go all the way through to my contact form to spam.
Also, I only meant to link my front page once, the other was supposed to be my contact page, but I forgot to finish typing the URL.
ROFL - love it, good game yesterday. Just swallowed down a scrapple sandwich too.
Eat recycled food - it's good for the environment, and OK for you.
LiveJournal (.com) supports a feature in which anonymous comments can be "screened", meaning they're only visible to the owner of the blog. At some later point, the owner can come back to the comments page and unscreen or delete the comment. There's also a checkbox associated with each message, and a box at the bottom to either unscreen or delete all selected comments.
So the effort in this case is proportional to the number of posts made in the blog times the frequency which the owner takes care of things, rather than the number of comments. Perhaps MovableType and others could use a similar feature?
__CmdrTHAC0__
In Soviet Russia, Spanish Inquisition doesn't expect YOU!!
I have a pretty small blog that is mainly just random stuff. I have like 30 readers, all of whom are my friends. A few weeks ago, I got about 15 posts on a single entry. Each one was identical, and blatant porn spam. My site has low googlerank, and the only way people find it is by searches on fairly obscure words and phrases.
Anyway, I broke into mySQL to delete the comments, and then added an IP ban for the originating ISP's. MT-Blacklist seems like a much cooler idea. Thanks!
Spammers are using automated software to post to weblogs and other similar places? We can do the same thing to make their business ineffective. Turnabout is fair play.
Use software to visit the links and analyse their website. If they have an HTML form, submit useless infomation to it, so as to fill up their logs with garbage. It shouldn't take long to fill up their database with crud. If they have to troll through 10,000 garbage posts to find 1 order, they will not stay in "business" for long.
Some of the messages could be community-service announcements like "Stop spamming" and "You are trading illegally". Some could be "orders" to people named Herr Schlongmeister, I.P.Freely, Hugh Jass, Mike Hunt and Dick Biggins. Whatever you do, stay within the law if possible, but I don't consider such a turnabout DOS against a spammer to be ethically unsound.
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. - Edmund Burke
At the Free Internet Press (freeinternetpress.com), we've gotten quite a few spammers posting their ads as news articles. They're obviously oblivious to how we work. The site is slashcode. It's the same as submitting a story to /. . We read the story, fix any errors (spelling, formatting, or whatever), add our own comments, and then post it. Spam would never make it through as a news article. But, they keep trying. {sigh}
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
Wake up and smell the bacon, people. The techno-utopianism of Wired when it was boosting the dotcom era into orbit has proven itself a poor match with human nature on all fronts.
The benificient fathers of the internet made two horrendous design decisions concerning the final destination of a global internetwork: excessively strong anonimity and a near zero cost for dumping pollution into public media.
Privacy, openness, spam-free: pick any two.
For anyone who looked into ECC yesterday, you might have noticed that RSA has ideal properties for preventing some of this mess: expensive to sign a certificate, cheap to verify, and the ratio becomes worse as you scale up.
If every spam artifact was signed with an anonymous RSA cert (anyone could make as many of these as they wish), as soon as one spam is confirmed, every other post signed by the known-spam cert could be instantly revoked.
This would force the spammers to create a new anonymous cert for every spam instance. Yet with RSA certs, the computational cost to generate a cert is vastly greater than the cost to verify the cert.
As an added step, the cert could require the IP address of both endpoints to be embedded inside (the server would reflect back the IP source address it sees, and then ask for an anonymous cert to be generated at a desired RSA key size).
We won't have to damage anonymity very much to vastly increase the cost of dumping pollution.
In this respect, weblogs would be a good place to start. This is a relatively new technology that could be retrofitted at one percent of the cost of a global e-mail infrastructure upgrade. It really doesn't matter if you inconvience a few bloggers working out the kinks, these people have not much useful to do in any case.
So, the problem definition is: we want any live human to be able to post a comment, but we wish to disallow bots from doing the same. How to do this? Several ideas come to mind, all involving easy activities for a human but difficult for a bot. For example, when someone tries to post a comment, randomly select and display a small image of an object in a thumbnail view and then have a multple choice popup menu of words for that item. Like "dog", "shoe", "lamp", etc. The name of the item must match the picture in order for the post to succeed. Throttle failure retries to like one a minute per IP address to avoid a bot from trying all selections. Also reselect and display a different image and word list on failed attempts. With a list that has 10 items, there would be a 10% success rate for a bot that randomly guessed menu items. That would mean a 90% failure rate. Have the site record and track if a particular IP address has a high failure rate. Then add to a spamlist on a server somewhere that other sites could share. I guess-bot would quickly blacklist itself.
Matrix Revolutions Spoilers
The simple way that my site is constructed gave a little extra googlejuice to this random post of mine, which led to it being mentioned a few times on other sites, and BOOM. That post turns into an instant Revolutions spoiler board, complete with "Larry Wachowski" posting there. You can see the search here.
Dude, where's my packet?
"if you post an ad here, you will be billed at a viewer rate of $100 per viewing. by posting an ad here, you agree to the terms." Then send the bill.
Here's the real problem, as I see it.
Spammers want spam to be treated as protected speech.
But spam isn't speech.
SPAM IS GRAFITTI
Spam is the moral equivalent of a can of spray paint on your neighbor's fence.
Please -- let's be consistent and let our legislators know that they need to start talking about spam as what it is... graffiti.
(Remember, kids, you heard it from ME first.)
I would have to say that explosives are the most abused technology in all of history.
http://newsimg.bbc.co.uk/media/images/39197000/jpg /_39197541_bill203_body.jpg
They should have spammed his blog with shaving creme and shaving accessory sites...
Sometimes I have found it useful to go to Dogpile
It basically uses all search engines and lists your search accordingly. While google can be picky sometimes, I have found it to be better than most anything else. I have to admit I still use altavista a lot for media searches however.
Vox
The whole spam issue on open forums could be avoided if the administration implemented an image verification system. Such systems can be seen on many professional websites, including slashdot.org's signup page. Spam bots would be unable to post spam on a large scale, if they are required to enter a code displayed on a human readable image. As long as the image is not a fixed font, or fixed pattern, the bot would be useless. Systems such as this are not hard to design, and would limit, if not almost eliminate unwanted spam posts.
well i feel left out. i haven't been spammed at all yet! I must not rank very high on any search stations yet.
I'm sorry, but anyone using proprietary spam software such as Moveable Type has brought this on themselves. If there's money in weblogs, as MT seems to think there is, then of course people are going to exploit it. And these exploits can be global because proprietary software ensures uniform hosts. Without open source you're all clones just waiting for a virus tailored to your DNA.
I'm sorry, but anyone using proprietary weblog software such as Moveable Type has brought this on themselves. MT is evidence of the widespread belief that there is money in weblogs, so of course people are going to exploit it. And these exploits are wide-ranging because proprietary software ensures uniform hosts. Without open source you're all clones just waiting for a virus tailored to your DNA.
The worst part is that they are utterly inept about it. They post broken links and don't realize that I get an email for every post made to my blog and can quickly remove their comment.
They generally work on the concept of a rapidly expanding gas placed behind a metallic projectile in a cylinder open on one end, known to the layman as a "gun." However, we have been reluctant to use these highly effective devices to end spam for some reason I cannot fathom. I mean, I don't think even a defense lawyer would stoop low enough to to defend a spammer :).
Hello,
You may be surprised to receive my letter. I got your contact from the
the internet during my desperate search for a saviour and a partner. I have
decided to contact you for
confidential, urgent and rewarding joint business.
My name is Major Fredrick Mumba , I am a Personal Assistant to the embatled
President of Liberia, CHARLES TAILOR.We both left our country to seek asylum in
a neigbouring country as a result of the opposition party activities and
intervention of other African countries. The purpose
of writing to you is because of the need for a trusted and honest
person,whom I can entrust the sum of US$18,000,000 in his/her care.
This money is presently in care of a security company in Europe,they are the
one that help move the money out of Liberia at the outbreak of the strugle for
power that as put my country into georpardy in the last few months.
According to my earlier agreement with the security company in charge,i am
suppose to meet them in their office on the 1st of october 2003 but i could not
travel out of our host country where I am on asylum, hence I am asking for your
assistance to help take delivery of this fund into your care pending
when I will secure travel documents to come over to your country.
If you accept this offer we shall share the money as follows:For you,
25%, 75% for me. I have all the title documents to the fund, which I
can transfer to you to enable you, have access to it. Be assured that
is risk-free and legitimate.
Please advise me on your position by e-mail immediately, indicating
your phone and fax numbers.
I await your prompt reply.
MAJOR FREDRICK MUMBA
I was only hit twice by comment-spammers before I took action.
Using image-text to verify humanity on the other end of the connection wasn't an option, as it excluded sight-impared users. User registration was a no-go: I don't want to have to spend time validating user accounts. I did enough of that in my BBS Sysop days. Even MT-Blacklist is a bit of a pain, as you've got to deal with each spam comment individually once posted.
However, one thing I found in common between my spammers and the attacks I've seen on other sites was that prior to the spamming run, the site was crawled. So, I excluded the locations of the comment scripts in my robots.txt and set a trap to auto-ban any crawler that doesn't obey the excludes.
Well-behaved spiders/'bots can index the site. Ill-behaved or malicious crawlers that download the whole file tree regardless of excludes trigger a tripwire that locks them out. You can eyeball the details in this entry on my site: Setting a Spider Trap
At 3 A.M. you can see people's auras; at five you can see their contrails...
What about spam in guestbooks? It's only the lowest forms of life that wouldever do something like that - and know it.
To every problem there is a solution which is simple, obvious and wrong.
You can't win Darth. If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine
I am really, I mean REALLY hate spams. But unfortunetly I am working in a company, which send -or will- spams to many email. I love my job and company and our project.. but every places have some annoying things..
It makes headache to me, but there is no good reason to stop them. Well, I can not find any..
We have - and normaly every project has - a sponsor. He had to think in two thing:
1. when
2. how much
And the project manager will tell him how.
We need to advertise, and there are many ways to do it, but none of tham so strong as spam!
Think about it:
We collect more then 100 000 emails, and it takes only a few feeks for us, whit 1 man/day work.
And we can focus to get the best email, by looking the right places to get them.. so this email owner will be interested by our ad. ( ofcourse not all of them, but lot's of them)
So, it is not only a few mail to send away to the world..
And here we go.. I hate it, but I have no idea to stop them to do it! If I'd have a good idea to use other ad, which will be so strong, and cheap, I could stop them.. but I havent..
But there is not only my headache.. most of the company use this type of ad, because of result of it.. if only every 100 people will be interested about this ad, we collect 1000 people in less then a month! (including email collect)
And it cost only 1 or 2 days of a programer.
And the result use to be much better then 1/100 !
So if we - or anybody- want to stop spam, we have to find out, how can we convince project sponsors, managers about a better way to find users/shoppers.
Oh yeah! and these sponsors, managers hate spam too...
So how do you make a good ad campaign?
Any body?
There is only one good solution: The simpliest!
Profit-seeking vandals have figured out how blogs work. This is the next logical step -- they're trying to deface them for profit.
-----------------------
You are what you think.
I've had a number posted to my forum. Looking up the originating ISP in the HTTP logs shows that they came from the Hard Rock Cafe in Kuwait and a number of ISPs in Pakistan. Needless to say, those ISPs are now blocked at the firewall, and the spamming has stopped (for at least three weeks).
I had someone trying to spam my forum with a meditation site. (S)he claimed that it really helps to relax you. Well, the fool posting it didn't read that all messages must be approved before they get posted, because (s)he posted the same message a few times, then got frustrated and wrote, "All I'm trying to do is let you know that this really works!"
I was under the impression that that person really needed to have a site to help her/him meditate. It's a shame that no such links were available on my forum.
- ipfw -q add 10516 deny all from 63.95.64.0/21 to any
takes care of them rather well. For a target marketer, they chose the wrong target.P.S. Most cracking attempts againt my computer (SSH and the Apache flaws back when they were first discovered a couple years back) appear to originate from Texas. Why is that?