Tag: Spam

Categories
Blog Google Internet

No more Spam!

Google, MSN, and Yahoo… plus a ton of blog developers sat down and came up with a fix. And there talking about rapid rollout on this one. Google Blog has the details.

Basically you need to have your blogging product of choice ad

<a href="URL" rel="nofollow">LINK</a>

to any link a visitor can add themselves (trackback, comments, etc). That will tell the search engines not to boost their rank based upon the linking. As a result spamming weblogs will serve no purpose. There will no longer be a page rank increase.

I’ve already hacked WordPress to cover part of this. It won’t do within comment fields, but will do so when you enter a website into the URL field when filing a comment.

Sorry spammers, the world decided: GO AWAY. We don’t like you, never have, never will. Your a bunch of “businesses” with unethical business plans (I have business in quotes since most aren’t even businesses, they are just people trying to scam someone out of some cash).

Thanks to:

Google, Yahoo, MSN, LiveJournal, Scripting News, Six Apart (MovableType), Blogger, WordPress, Flickr, Buzznet, blojsom, Blosxom .

It’s good to see widespread coordination.

Now what about email spam? When will they come up with a DomainKeys, SPF, solution.

Categories
In The News Internet Spam

Your not allowed to be guilty

Considering our overburdened legal system, and understaffed courthouses, this is really pretty wrong:

A federal judge refused to accept a guilty plea Tuesday from a former America Online software engineer accused of stealing 92 million e-mail addresses and selling them to spammers.

So he can’t plead guilty to a crime he admits to committing because the Judge isn’t convinced. Just makes you think. I’m curious what the judge gets out of it.

“I’m not prepared to go ahead, Mr. Siegal. I need to be independently satisfied that a crime has been created.”

[Source: Forbes.com @ 3:28 PME ST 12/21/2004]

As if the guy pleading guilty isn’t enough. If there was any doubt about a crime being committed, the guy would fight it. I’m sure some spammers will be emailing Judge Hellerstein to say “Thanks buddy”. I question the basis of his claim that he isn’t satisfied a crime has been created.

Categories
Blog

Jay Allen takes a break and the Internet Chokes

Jay Allen takes a break, and myself, and many others are being pounded by spammers. His last update seems to have been 2004-10-30 16:18:38+01:00. Since then, it’s been a nightmare. At least 50 since I went to bed last night (at 2:00 AM). Now at 10:00 (no morning classes, so I slept in until 9:00), I’m cleaning up from a few hours sleep.

There’s got to be a real solution to comment spam.

I’m still considering switching to WordPress since I know PHP rather well, and use a nice CAPTCHA system to protect the blog.

Categories
Spam

Terrorists Spamming

This spam just came in. Quite amazing. I’m not sure if it’s a legitimate idiot, or just someone who thinks the are funny. This future start could potentially run away with a Darwin Award in the near future. So keep an eye out for this moron.

Welcome to our web site [Removed]

Please use [Removed] in case of our domain outage.

You’re invited to shop for large selection of bombs and different
kinds of rockets such as surface-to-air,
surface-to-surface and weaponry available at reduced price. With the
following types of rockets you will be
able to commit terrorist attacks, destroy buildings, electric power
stations, bridges, factories and anything
else that comes your mind. Most items are in stock and available for
next day freight delivery in the USA.
Worldwide delivery is available at additional cost. Prices are
negotiable.

Please feel free to inquire by ICQ # [Removed] or contacting us
directly:

[Removed]
[Removed]
[Removed]

Today special:

******* AIR BOMBS *******
OFAB-500U HE fragmentation air bomb
Fuel-air explosive air bombs -Not in stock
BETAB-500U concrete-piercing air bomb
ZB-500RT incendiary tank
500-KG SIZE RBK-500U unified cluster bomb
RBK-500U OAB-2.5PT loaded with fragmentation submunitions
RBK-500U BETAB-M loaded with concrete-piercing submunitions-Not in
stock
RBK-500U OFAB-50UD loaded with HE fragmentation submunitions

******* UNGUIDED AIRCRAFT ROCKETS *******
Main-purpose unguided aircraft rockets
S-8 unguided aircraft rockets
S-8KOM
S-8BM-Not in stock
S-13 unguided aircraft rockets
S-13, S-13T, S-13-OF, S-13D, S-13DF
S-25-0
S-25-OFM
S-24B -Not in stock
RS-82
RS-132-Not in stock

******* ROCKET PODS *******
B-8M pod for S-8 rockets
B-8V20-A pod for S-8 rockets
B-13L pod for S-13 rockets

Recently received *NEW*

Hydra 70 2.75 inch Rockets
Air-Launched 2.75-Inch Rockets
FIM-92A Stinger Weapons System
Stinger 101: Anti-Air

Our clients are well known Al-Qaida, Hizballah, Al-Jihad, HAMAS, Abu
Sayyaf Group and many other terrorist groups. We are well known
supplier in the market and looking forward to expand our clientage
with assistance of Internet.

Do not hesitate to contact us via ICQ # [Removed]

Impatiently awaiting for your orders,
ShadowCrew

[Source: Spam Inbox from my email]

Aren’t these guys great

Categories
Blog

Comment Spam is driving me nuts

Come on Jay. We need 2.0. We know it’s good.

Seriously. I’m sick of deleting all these spams. And I don’t want to give up on it.

Problem with TypeKey is that people hate signing up for things. So it limits people from commenting. I hate that. I love when people post comments here. I really do. It’s my favorite thing about this site.

Ugh. No more Spam.

And my email inbox is 100X worse.

We need real laws against spam now!

Categories
Spam

And I Realized I Became A Man

Porn Spam They say there are milestones in every male’s life as they travel on that common journey from being a boy to a man. Well in the digital age, it’s still holds true, but it takes a unique twist.

Spam occasionally does (shocker) get through spam filters, and one got me today. It seems like all of a sudden the legal age for a porn star became younger than me (rather than older, as it has been most of my life). Somehow I never thought about it.

Talk about weird.

Anyway, that’s my random thought of the day. Growing older than porn stars.

Yea, this is pretty silly, but you have to admit, it’s a strange realization.

Categories
Blog

MT 3.0 upgrade

Upgraded to MovableType 3.0 tonight. So far, smooth.

I’ve got one question though:

Anyone know of a hack to get MT to correctly encode HTML entities? Hence making & &amp;? I’d appreciate any help. It’s an essential little hack if you expect any page generated by MT to validate.

Other than that, seems good to go. Post any issues you might have.

BTW: It’s not required yet, but signup for TypeKey. If Spam continues, I might eventually require it. But for now, I’ll leave it off, and see how we do.

For the curious, the upgrade took about 1hr in total for all the installing, playing, config etc.

Much faster performance. Especially posting/rebuilding.

That’s all, good night.

Categories
Spam

What would you complain about if there was no spam?

Seriously. It’s a good question. What would be the #1 complaint if there was no spam? Popups (despite Firefox blocking them)? Speed? Cost? Bad HTML? Accessibility? Pornography? Pornography that isn’t free? Pornography with Animals?

What would be your #1 complaint?

I’m honestly not sure of mine. Most likely proprietary components entering the internet (ActiveX, MSHTML, etc.) rather than standards.

But what’s yours?

Categories
Internet

Well, domains are popular again

Domain-name registration surges according to a CNET news article.

How much is legitimate, and how many are just blog/email spammers treating domains as disposable?

Categories
Spam

Comcast and Spam

I’ve got to admit I like this idea. Comcast has what might be a very good solution.

A great little bit here in CNET’s wonderful article.

Based on my conversations last week, Comcast’s network engineers would like to be more aggressive. But the marketing department shot down a ban on port 25 because of its circa $58 million price tag–so high partially because some subscribers would have to be told how to reconfigure their mail programs to point at Comcast’s servers, and each phone call to the help desk costs $9.

Instead, Comcast’s engineers plan to try the innovative approach of identifying the zombie PCs and surreptitiously sending the subscriber’s cable modem a new configuration routine that prevents outbound connections on port 25. Zombie-infected users won’t even notice, the thinking goes, because most people use Comcast’s mail servers for outgoing e-mail. Anyone wrongfully blocked can call and complain.

A few things I found interesting were the $9 help desk calls. As well as the great solution.

Personally, I think the best solution would be to simply shut those users down until they solve the problem. By encouraging people to keep patches on their computer up to date, it will prevent things like viruses and other garbage from wasting bandwidth. That would benefit everyone even more. Simply terminate all outbound access to all but local comcast servers (mail, www). The user gets an email, and forwarded to a page explaining why they lost outbound connectivity. When the issue is rectified, they can re-enable their account by contacting tech support.

The simple prevention of course is if you run windows, to use windows update once a month, and a virus scanner. For those who don’t, they will get a crash course if they want to connect to the network.

I don’t know about anyone else, but I’m sick of viruses clogging my inbox. And we all know they clog bandwidth on the network as well. That’s capacity that should be used for downloading legitimate data.