Slashdot Mirror
Free Web Hosting a Fount of Malware
daria42 writes "It looks as if free Web space services are increasingly being used to host spyware, with Internet security firm Websense claiming more of such dodgy material was found on free hosting services during the first two weeks of July than in May and June combined. "These fraudulent, free personal Web sites have an average lifespan of two to four days, making them difficult to trace," said an executive from the company."
I'd say that the gov't should make these companies provide more authentication, but all it would do is prove a barrier against legitimate users while the criminals would just find a way around.
Outlawing free/homesteading sites would be likely be found unconstitutional in the U.S. and it would be a big fight to remove the safe harbor provisions for such sites to make them responsible for their users' malicious activities. I really don't know what we could do at a legislative level. At a personal level, I just refuse to visit any sites at angelfire, geocities, et al.
- Greg
Start a happiness pandemic
Next thing you know, the malware authors will just host stuff from infected PCs. I'm sure you can run a basic web server pretty easily.
I've been paying GoDaddy to host my Malware all this time?!
Free web hosting doesn't provide anything useful to the web community. In fact, according to all 800 blogs that TrackBacked this story this morning, the whole notion of "free web hosting" is ridiculous. Everything can be instead posted on a variety of topical and coagular fora. If you have something meaningful to say, you buy cheap web hosting.
Spammers and crackers abusing free internet facilities?! Perish the though.
It's not just fake hosting services with malware and other phishing scams. It's getting so that one gets suspicious of any kind of new service that crops up on the web. The other day, I got excited seeing this service that promised to turn my blog contents into a printed book. I tried it, but then got worried that it was a phishing scam. And cancelled my attempts to use the service. What does mean for the promise of "web services" in general? More on the "blog into book" experience here: ahref=http://mp.blogs.com/mp/2005/07/s_11.htmlrel= url2html-21790http://mp.blogs.com/mp/2005/07/s_11. html>
Who would have guessed that the shady people who build sites to send their crap around wouldn't want to pay for a legit hosting setup? Profound!
"He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lampposts...for support rather than illumination." - Andrew Lang
Does anyone know how effective these schemes really are? Is there a study that measures how effective this is?
There are 11 types of people. Those who understand binary, those who don't and those who are sick of this lame joke.
I was wondering, how do these people typically register accounts with free web services? Our site was having a problem with comment spam, so a CAPTCHA test tends to do the trick basically all the time. On the other hand, I've also heard about defeating the test by starting a porn site and then taking the image and showing it to visitors and basically just having them type the right answer and they get to see 10 pictures or something. What we ended up doing was a word riddle, like "The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy ___s" or "3 + 5 = _" So if automated registering of these accounts is a problem, that's what I would suggest. Or you could surely just prohibit any files with a .bat or .exe or .whatever extension, and only allow .html, .gif, .jpg, .png, .wav, .txt, and a few more. I mean, if it's a free service, you get what you pay for. If you really need to host programs it shouldn't be too much trouble for you to buy something for $5/month. All in all this doesn't really seem like that outrageous of a problem.
Take off every sig. For great justice.
Why not put spy/malware everyware...your not paying a cent to get rid of it or for the company to care about their server.
Go to the w3.org and put Slashdot.org through the validator.
HTF can you expect anything different?
Mod article +5 Duh.
do() || do_not();
All future flights of the shuttle are grounded until the foam problem can actually be solved.
It makes sense. The cameras on Discovery saw all kinds of junk flying off. Any of that junk, if it hit the orbiter in the wrong spot, could lead to failure of the mission on reentry.
But it is pretty disappointing...
Maybe this would also get rid of the million's of those MySpace or Piczo type websites that plague the internet with the writings of illiterate 13 year old girls.
I have to agree, free webhosting causes a lot of the problems on the internet. People that don't know even the basics of HTML, or how to create a website shouldn't be allowed, because, afterall on an on-topic note, it is also easy hosting for malware/other dodgy 'things'.
-- Design. Create. Assemble. --
They're also often used to host infringing files.
:) But don't blame me if they do, it was the Google representative who all but suggested that to me :P
I've seen some schemes where they encode the files several different ways, give it an incomprehensible name, and host each one on various free web hosts, then make you go through their voting and advertising scripts to get to the download file prompt.
Rather clever, actually. Illegal in any signitory to the Berne copyright convention, surely, but rather clever.
Another matter is that some of these hosts seem remiss to enforce their ToS. I've informed Google of many violations of their ToS on Blogger, and they've (in effect) told me to sod off because they don't actually intend to enforce it unless they feel like it. Apparently it takes a full DMCA notice or some other legal documents/subpoenas/etc. to actually get them to do a damn thing, and I just can't be arsed to register the copyrights and go through all the rigamarole to file one of those.
Then again, want to store something illegal? Blogger apparently doesn't give a damn about copyright infringement until you file a DMCA notice, so feel free to UUEncode whatever you damn well please and put it on your blog
>>Outlawing free/homesteading sites would be likely be found unconstitutional in the U.S.
Not with the current Criminals-in-command.
Thanks and have a Bush_Cheney_Rove_Rice_free-day,
Kilgore Trout, CEO
Does anyone know how effective these schemes really are? Is there a study that measures how effective this is?
The type-in is called a CAPTCHA (an acronym for "completely automated public Turing test to tell computers and humans apart"). They can be fairly effective, but all they do is block robots from setting up an account. If I need 10 accounts, I don't necessarily need to automate it. CAPTCHAs are more often used effectively to block bulk botting stuff like blog spam, signups for free mail accounts, or other services (like whois at Netsol.com or Godaddy.com) prone to abuse and they can work well if well designed. But, again, they're to prevent robots from doing something, not humans.
Now, as CAPTCHA's get more obscured to try to defeat more sophisticated OCR elements, they become more difficult for humans to read. I recently developed one that I may use on some of my sites that uses identifying the contents of pictures. Demo here. Some of the people I've had test it said it was fun and they actually played it like a game.
- Greg
Start a happiness pandemic
I read that and at first glance thought it was a typo. But it's true that you don't see that word much. "It is a fount and or plethora of ..."
My humor is probably your flamebait
... but amazing numbers of doorways, low quality and tasteless personal pages, that owners like to spam everywhere, like there is no tomorrow.
(As a reference - doorways are pages optimized for specific keywords, solely for search engine, redirecting user to another site - thus name "doorway")
It is all fine and dandy, but... It doesnt necessarily means that free hosts are only evil. Free hosts serve also as great starting point for future webmasters.
Dephine URL
BBC NEWS
Japanese develop 'female' android
By David Whitehouse
Science editor, BBC News website
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4714135.stm
Pretty cool, eh? Sorry, it's off topic but I came across a movie and it's movement is fairly good. Maybe do one called lin-yette and let us poor chaps play around with it for a while (heh).
Calling them a "Security" firm is whitewashing who they really are.
read the article on Censorware.
I thought these free hosting sites only existed to annoy me with endless pop-up ads.
insert inflammatory anti-microsoft comment here
Actually, fount is the British and the old poetic spelling of font. When this spelling is used, it generally means a fountain, spring, or source. Using the modern spelling, a font refers to a basin for baptizing people or holding holy water, (sometimes also called a laver), although it can refer to the old useage as well. However, I don't think the word can be used to mean "plethora".
...En að Besta Sem Guð Hefur Skapað Er Nýr Dagur
this is why its so important to recognize the unique sociological challenge of the URL.
it is a namespace. thus, portions of it will be a BRAND space.
either people recognize when they are culting, or they don't. times that they do, are often predicated on the formulation of identity.
the URL is a human blank page. if you don't know the URL, don't go there...
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
However, I don't think the word can be used to mean "plethora".
I've actually heard it a whole lot, but my parents were always big on vocabulary. At least in US English there's no "u" in font though:
http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=font
Specifically:
An abundant source; a fount: She was a font of wisdom and good sense.
(you have to look at fount to see that the "u" is deprecated)
The "security" frim websense is actually a censorship firm. For examples of their work, you can read maddox's little article on them.
Duh, if nobody wants your product, you probably can't afford to host it anywhere reputable.
If you could, people would just not go there anyway.
Nobody says, "Hey, lets all go to BonziBuddy.com!"
The concept you're looking for is "cause and effect". It applies to human behaviour every bit as it does physics.
Until humanity acknowledges this fact, and stops trying to circumvent it. We'll keep revisiting this topic with ever more tears.
Why is this news? That's been going on for like 6 years now.
Websense was used in censorship/blocking at my high school. It was ridiculous trying to find articles on my future career (Game Programming) because most of the places I found were blocked by Websense.
Wheel in the sky keeps on turnin'.
I thought that was what drudgereport was for...
I would think it possible for a free hosting site to run some sort of scan over pages as they are uploaded just to see that they are plain old HTML. Maybe even disallow links to financial institutions (to prevent some obvious phishing). Disallow CGI and form elements until the pages have been reviewed by a human.
Spammers simply proxy the CAPTCHA images, and re-present them on their own sites. Users of their sites then process the CAPTCHA for them, and they turn around and use the user's input to register on the original site.
For example, say compuporn.com wants free geocities accounts. compuporn.com offers free memberships on their site; when Joe Sixpack loads the signup page, compuporn.com runs a script that starts a new registration at geocities.com, and copies the geocities CAPTCA image, presenting it to Joe Sixpack at compuporn.com. Joe Sixpack puts the correct string in for the CAPTCHA, compuporn.com takes Joe's string, and uses it at geocities.com.
Viola. Compuporn.com has a new geocities account, without any OCR, and without any employees of Compuporn.com interpereting the CAPTCHA by hand.
Your CAPTCHA is not immune to this attack either.
Not very often these days. Not only do free pages put serious restrictions on who the site owner can use for advert service (no link exchanges except "approved" ones, and so on), but often (geocities, yahoo, etc...) the free host spams your visitors with their own pop-ups/unders/banners/all three. And when you can get your own space for well under $10 a month ($4 to 7 seems to be the lowest I've seen), who really needs "free" hosts anymore? It's a dead dead dead business model.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
Researchers have discovered that the Microsoft Windows operating system (all flavors) has been hosting spyware, virus and other malicious crap that comes off the Internet and spreads it to other computers attached to the same LAN at a faster rate than any other time in the last 10 years. Microsoft released a statement saying that Windows does it better than Linux and encouraged all users to immediately upgrade to Windows Vista. :P
John Leyden at The Register has a slightly different take on this story. Essentially Websense is a company trying desperately to sell its "security products" through a campaign of FUD and blatantly obvious "alerts". I think most people here see this as the latter, while most of Websense's target audience probably fall into the former target audience.
... come free of worry?
Dang! Several of my paradigms just imploded!
sig? Oh, that sig...
I've never understood how people can actually ESTIMATE AVERAGES. When they say "average of 2 to 4 days" i mean... well, what is it? 2, 3, 4 days? 3.2. what? ya know? Just my two cents on the whole deal. Websense is very sketchy to say the least anyway 8)
"These fraudulent, free personal Web sites have an average lifespan of two to four days, making them difficult to trace," said an executive from the company."
Well, of course all the fraudulent ones are going to have a quick turnover! It's not like Websense doesn't have anything to sell here. Nooooooo.
What I say does not represent the views of my employers, my friends, my cats, or myself.
That sounds like Slashdot and their anonymous posting code. The problem originates with Freedom. Everyone wants it, but want to force upon you what is "good" or "bad," and that is completely irrelevent to whatever action is derived from the scope of participation. Notice that all the Legislature-created "courts" are ignoring acts of tresspassing and choosing all the non-sense to rule over any particular actions? It's no longer about property theft, but thought crimes being forced upon everyone by precision of surveilance and legislated morality. I have two "Neighborhood Watch" neighbors that have forced Police Officers on me and my fellow neighbors, without regard to absolute property ownership, on what plants may be planted and wear cars may be situated when not in use. All of them are not educated on common law and when they face similar violations it is written-off and forgiven because they are such active "community members" of whatever nameless communities they claim I and others are a part of. I just want to live, inexpensively, with property I own and not lease. The moment anyone pulls a gun in support of their freedom from someone else pointing a gun at them, I'll join them whole-heartily. But whenever I immediatly think of such things, or offer my counter-militaristic support, I'm always thought slandered by words that have no context to the situation: nut, redneck, hillbilly, etc. There all a bunch of Herodian and armchair "Christians" that make me sick when Jesus himself said that prissies don't inherit whatever is the kingdom of Heaven.
Maybe if we put some illegal music or video on a free service, then maybe someone will take notice.
I figure even though they're evil, even ambulance-chasing luddites have a use.
Malware and spyware are only the small fish in the pond.
Why not go after Google, Yahoo and Microsoft? What do you think happens when your have their toolbars installed?
Do you think they keep log files on their servers of what sites you visit or what you search for?
There's free as in speech, free as in beer, and now free as in sex.
you can have my violent video games when you pry them from my cold, dead hands.
Prime UID Club
I thought that ISP's that didn't provide web space with a connection account were more common than ones that did. I'm using Verizon, and as far as I know they aren't giving me any web space.
... of course that Windows isn't free.
"Obviously, I'm not an IBM computer any more than I'm an ashtray" (Bob Dylan)
Your analogy is awful. You don't learn to drive on the freeway. Math students don't earn as they learn at places like NASA. You go on the freeway after you get your license. You go to work as a mathematician after you get your degree.
HTML students do not have to post their crap while they're learning for the world to see. They can learn all they want, just don't pollute the web with misinformation and valueless, emotional ramblings.
"These fraudulent, free personal Web sites have an average lifespan of two to four days, ..."
...
It's almost enough to make people go back to USENET for all their porn.
click on post anonymously and
> There all a bunch of Herodian and armchair "Christians" that make me sick when Jesus himself said that prissies don't inherit whatever is the kingdom of Heaven.
...
I confess, I've never heard the Beatitude where Jesus says that the meek shall inherit the Earth described in *quite* that way
Taking the mean and adding/subtracting the standard deviation. Seems like one good way to do it.
When we started our Dreamweaver unit in high school, and a student asked if he could just use Tripod instead of learning how to use Dreamweaver.
"I recently developed one that I may use on some of my sites that uses identifying the contents of pictures. Demo here [cardsender.net]. Some of the people I've had test it said it was fun and they actually played it like a game."
So basically you came up with "Were's Waldo"?
---
The "are you a script" word for today is imagery.
Step 1: Start a free webhosting company, that requires credit card info to verify identify
Step 2: In the terms of service, say that if you are caught spamming you agree to be charged $500
Step 3: Profit!
http://illhostit.com/ - Webhosting
In other news, the "internet" has been found to be a fount of malware...
eTrade SUCKS
Most captchas out there can be easily defeated with a variety of methods. The implementation you describe would be horridly complex. Rather pointless when you can write a robot capable of solving them as much as you want versus hooking up a system dependent on humans.
You've obviously got a lack of knowledge on how spammers operate, nowhere would you ever see a setup like this in the wild.
I cant believe that banks in US are stupid enough to let anything done without authentication. Here is Russia banks either ask you for a special password that you provide for phone communications or ask you to dial TPIN (telephone pin, which is different from PIN) before you get connected to human operator.
1) If any "free" host requires 1 cent or 1 dollar to make sure I'm for real I'm not going to use them for the following reasons.
a) no longer free, im im going to pay might as well go for a real host
b) no immediate return, could take 24, 48, 72 hrs. I want to start work NOW.
c) I got no credit card - this means I have to do all sorts of other shit to get these people that 1 penny.
2) if you remove 'free host' my money says prices for 'paid hosting' will go up at the same time quality of service goes down
Just a thought
"Freedom and Justice for All" is a registered trademark of The United States Govt Inc. Not available in all areas.
No Text
I have no sig yet I must scream.
Free hosting, in promoting both free's, does a great job. Unfortunately, it just takes a couple bastards to ruin it for everyone else.
Free as in speech hosting is different. The key here is to not charge too much, and to put in place your hosting policies to afford as much privacy as you possibly can. Here is an example of what I have learned, YIAAH (yes, I am a hoster):
Basically, be honest and up front, know your limits, ensure your operation is financially viable, and know your shit. Getting into the hosting business sounds a LOT easier than it really is. If you get into it for moral purposes like me (as part of a not-for-profit incorporation), it is even harder. Free as in speech hosting is NOT a cash cow. There are also few rewards and thanks. Your days will be spent not only providing services equal to other top hosters, but without the benefit of a fat paycheck (or any paycheck at all).
The rest of your time will be spent always looking over your shoulder for complaint e-mail. If you host bands, maybe one of them slips in a copyrighted song on their hosting, and one wrong move with the RIAA can shut you down. Maybe someone makes a threat via e-mail, and then you have someone demanding user identity, or trying to enforce the Patriot Act on you. Maybe a site ju
I8-D
Paul is recorded to say,
1 Corinthians;
Jesus taught none in the alleged "Net Testament" and is shortly recorded by his compounding the existing script with precision to give glory to God. Consider His thoughts on the relevance of what people claim to be the mis-placed or antiquated "Old Testament",
Matthew