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Spammers Attack Apple's Ping Social Network
An anonymous reader writes "Scammers and spammers have deluged the new Ping musical social network, created by Apple and built into the new version of iTunes. Sophos researchers have found that Ping is being overrun by scams and spam messages. 'Apple seems to have anticipated a certain degree of malfeasance, as profile pictures that you upload will not appear until approved by Apple. They are likely filtering for other offensive content as well, so they probably have means in place they could use to stop the spam.' It's ironic that the most common scams on Ping right now revolve around Apple's own iPhone."
The Sophos blog post adds that Apple is doing their best to clamp down on the spam, manually deleting many of the offending messages for now. Reader Tootech adds that Facebook integration was quickly disabled, possibly because of blocked API access.
...disease that has not yet been recognized much less treated.
Do you know it, mofo? No. You do not. It is not ironic that apple hardware (iphones) is being used to entice people into a scam on apple software. Especially when the software is what you use to keep your iphone up to date.
Perhaps if they were scamming you into buying music for a zune, we could talk irony.
I don't expect morality, equality, consistency, or justice from the law. I expect only legality.
Is that one of those sites that try to profit from the misspellings?
The cost of sending mass emails is still so low that even if they get one sucker a week out of millions of messages sent, it is still profitable, and honestly, they probably get more than that.
Its easy for us to sit back and laugh at these situations, but there are still plenty of people out that who are unaware of what happens out on the wider Internet.
Its not going to last forever, but it will probably last longer than we would expect.
http://www.f-secure.com/weblog/archives/00002021.html
Do you just have a feeling that people stopped being stupid or can you cite a specific date and time you saw the majority of humanity show some shred of intellect over greed?
Why do you say these offers are unreal? I got a this pill by mail and now my erection is never ending (both time-wise and length-wise), which goes well with all the boatloads of money I got from this nice guy in distress who mailed me the other day. If you want more details, contact me at ******** (In order to view the contact information, you are requested to send 100$ to the following bank acco#%$# - *** Transmission Blocked ***.
Whenever in an argument, remember this.
"Steve Jobs complained to me about what he called "onerous terms" that Facebook had demanded for the friends connection "
I mean, here Apple is, just minding it's own business trying to build an application to replace facebook, and facebook won't give them all their user data for nothing? What jerks. How dare they put restrictions on it like that? Who do they think they are, trying to stay in business after Apple told them it's not their turn anymore?
I don't see any compelling reason that facebook would ever give their friends lists to Apple. Is there even a theoretical benefit for facebook in doing so?
This sentence no verb.
Please remove the current iTunes codebase from the life-support you insist on keeping it on. Let the craplication die already, its brain is already dead.
Rewrite it, buy another developer, or open the damn platform so someone else can do it.
If they didn't turn a profit, they wouldn't be out there.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
What makes you think they aren't? You realize that a lot of these online pharma stores do in fact sell pharmaceuticals, right? Of course if you buy them you might get dosages too strong, too weak, or sold alongside other things that can kill you, but they do sell Viagra! One reason the "Canadian Pharmacy" is everywhere is because they have built up brand recognition amongst casual/recreational users of ED drugs, so they get repeat custom.
I see Apple has the machine that goes "spam egg, spam, spam, bacon and spam"!
You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
It's ironic that the most common scams on Ping right now revolve around Apple's own iPhone.
The author might want to look up the definition of irony, because I'm pretty sure this is the opposite.
... and then they built the supercollider.
What is it with Apple and the network stack? First IOS, now Ping. What's next, GPS for the iPhone called Traceroute?
Nah, it's gonna be their "Geo-Locate Caller" service: TRON.
Now that I think about it, I'm pretty sure everything I just said is completely wrong.
Unfortunately yes. There are still morons waiting to be fleeced
If they didn't turn a profit, they wouldn't be out there.
True, but I would argue that it's worse than that; it's a matter of PERCEPTION:
If they didn't THINK they COULD turn a profit, they wouldn't be out there. Right or wrong, the perceived reward to the perceived risk is such that many continue to attempt it. As you say, some likely do turn a profit. Of those that do not, and close up shop, there are still others who think THEY CAN, and set up shop to start spamming. And so the spamming continues.
Until such time as those who might spam conclude the potential risk exceeds the potential reward, we will continue to have spammers among us. Technological means can go a long way, yes, but given past experience, there always seems to be yet another new way to bypass these controls. Heck, I was on the internet when the first spam message was posted on usenet and saw the huge reaction. Nothing has yet been able to stop it.
Yikes! It's worse than I thought! I just looked up spam on wikipedia and discovered this:
In the late 19th Century Western Union allowed telegraphic messages on its network to be sent to multiple destinations. The first recorded instance of a mass unsolicited commercial telegram is from May 1864. Up until the Great Depression wealthy North American residents would be deluged with nebulous investment offers.
Alas, human nature being what it is even though the technology may change, I fear that spam will be with us for a long time to come.
True. The problem with digital commerce is that advertising cost is *extremely* low, even more so if they use spambots.
When your cost is zero, any sale turns a profit.
In this way, I think that spam filtering has hurt the Internet. People will rely on it over-much -- meaning that something gets past the spam filters, there is possibly a significant subset of the Internet-using population who will assume it's legit. (In this case, significant only needs to be a fraction of a percent for this to be very profitable.)
That being said, one possibility I've wondered about is that while people are paying spammers to do their thing (thus ensuring the spammers a profit), it may not really have a noticeable effect on the product sales. I could see a rather limitless market of people who tried such services once, realized it was a waste and never tried again.
I'd love to hear from someone who actual employed such "services" to find out what (if any) difference they made; if they recouped their costs; and if they tracked how many sales came from spam vs other channels.
Apple is having a problem with a new online service? This is inconceivable! Considering the outstanding quality and value that is MobileMe and the unprecedented popularity of iWork.com, I am shocked, shocked, that Apple would have difficulty managing a new online service.
As Ben Folds recently discovered, some artists have seen Ping accounts set up -- in their name -- without their knowledge or consent.
http://twitter.com/BenFolds/status/22830984597
http://twitter.com/BenFolds/status/22840802922
Spam filters may have hurt the Internet for the reason you state... But the alternative is wading through an inbox (or webforum, blog, etc) that is 99.999% spam.
Of the servers I've dealt with, something. Like 98% of the raw smtp traffic was spam. Without spam filters, the Internet would be unusable.
If they didn't turn a profit, they wouldn't be out there.
Correction: They want to turn a profit and SPAM is a cheap way to attempt that.
The difference is that it doesn't matter if anybody buys it or not, the SPAM's already gone out.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
What else are you going to do with the massive botnet between big decrypt or password cracking jobs?
It could well be just what they do on idle. If it gets 1 hit in a million, it would still be more profitable than letting your 100 thousand hacked machines sit there doing nothing for hours at a time.