Gadgetopia

Why would they sell this? You can write your own in a couple hours! It's not at all a hard concept.

Gotta appreciate the chutzpah of somebody who would actually use the word 'buttload' when describing their product. Like you said Deane, they really aren't trying to hide anything.

"You can write your own in a couple hours!"

Agreed. This is a 20-line Perl script, if that. Just proves how smart they are to build this and charge $75 for it. I bet someone threw it together in VB.Net in about an hour.

I was just inspired by your blog to write a small article on referral spam at http://www.trafficstatistic.com/articles/referrerspamprotection.html . Here at TrafficStatistic we see tries of referral spam increasing a lot recently, though it's rather easy to protect your site against being fooled by referral misuse.

More threatening is this: ... operates on textfiles with URL-lists, and a textfile of 3047 active blog websites ... Who ever is listed in this textfile should prepare already to protect himself from referrer spam. Hopefully the tool is too expensive for anyone buying it, else it could have an effect like a DDOS attack for these sites.

By the way: I disagree with the previous comments, that writing a referral spam tool is simple, it's just webmasters making it simple. With a 20 liner perl you won't reach 60-100 connections per second easily, even DNS lookup will already take longer. To reach such speed, multithreading is needed, probably it uses php curl.

Hopefully the Windows program is made bad enough not to reach the promised speed.

Interesting product. They say it is written in C++ and is possibly a lot faster than any java app you could make. Who knows though.

I've also seen this tool, and it's webpage. They are using Paypal to accept credit card payment. I suggest that anyone else who's been hit by this tool, complain to Paypal.

I wrote a similar thing in C#, and it seems perfectly fast... of course I've gotten no testing or feedback: http://www.elliottback.com/blog/?postid=52