Gadgetopia

Print Story: Andrew Kantor: Could spam die out all by itself? Maybe.: Andrew Kantor has a theory that anti-spam tools will actually win the spam wars. He postulates that after they cross a certain threshold of effectiveness, the spam business model will fall apart. But spam has a weak spot ...

How to make spam unstoppable: A researcher has found the magic words that will allow spam to slip through Bayesian filters. "The actual words it found were a total surprise," said Mr Graham-Cumming. The list included words such as "Berkshire", "Marriott", "wireless", "touch" and "comment". Including just one of these ...

Web addresses get nip and tuck and spam: A good article on URL shortening services which we've talked about quite a bit before. Includes an interesting angle on the spam implications. In the hands of spammers, TinyURL has the potential to sag under enormous demand and attract the vociferous complaints that ...

Spam Wait for Movable Type Comment Spam: Another graceful solution. [Spam Wait makes] it necessary for a person or robot to wait fifteen seconds after accessing a comment form to post a comment. As humans generally take time to read an entry and write a comment, this should be unnoticeable. ...

The 10 Biggest Spam Myths: A very interesting article from a lady who would know. Everything that's "gospel" about spam that I've ever heard and repeated, I'm now ashamed to admit is in there. 5. Legitimate marketers don't spam. Oh, yes they do. This is true only for ...

AOL reveals top 10 spam subject lines of 2003: Here's a shocker. Viagra. Lowest mortgage rates. Hot XXX action. As seen on Oprah. [...] Those four phrases and six more topped the list of the most commonly-used subject lines for junk, or "spam" e-mail in 2003, Internet service provider AOL ...

Anti-spam start-ups cash in as junk e-mail grows: Anti-spam software is the new darling of venture capital. "Venture capitalists are pumping big bucks into start-ups that make anti-spam software. ... VCs poured at least $54.4 million into e-mail management software — including anti-spam software — last year. That was up ...

Simon Willison: Blacklisting Comment Spam: I got a comment spam the other day. Annoying. "I'm fed up with comment spam. From now on, any comment I judge to be spam will be deleted, and the domains linked to from that comment will be blacklisted. Any future comments that contain links ...

After the spam problem of a few weeks ago, I took a single step that Adam Kalsey talked about a long time ago that has fairly well fixed my spam problem: I renamed the Movable Type comments script. I have had exactly one spam in the last three weeks. Spam ...

SpamBayes Outlook Addin: Here's a spam filter for Outlook that runs on Bayesian theory. You give it a folder of good emails (your inbox) and a folder of spam that you've collected, then let it analyze both. From then on, it will use this information to assign a score to ...

German Spam Floods Inboxes: Some racist spam came out of Germany last week. The messages which appeared to blame immigrants, prisoners and welfare recipients for Germany's problems hit recipients in California, Finland, Germany and the Netherlands, according to initial reports on antispam mailing lists. Some recipients reported receiving ...

Spam Comp: This is a contest to find the piece of spam that scores highest on a SpamAssassin analysis. They post the SpamAssassin logs, which are unintentionally funny to read. The current champ scored a whopping 60 points (usually 5 is enough to get flagged as spam). Found via this ...

Zombie PCs spew out 80% of spam: Turns out spam is coming from places other than you might think. It's tempting to envision spam coming from some centralized location so we can all sit around and complain that they don't shut the loser off, but the reality appears to be ...

Comment Spam: Six Apart is looking at the problem of comment spam on Movable Type blogs, and they offer some solutions. In particular, I'm encouraged by the new MT-BlackList plugin.

Spam Cube: A spam filtering appliance for the home. It's $150, and sits between your modem and your router. Presumably it intercepts POP and IMAP requests and cleans them before returning the results. Is there a point to this? Why a hardware solution? Just to protect more than one computer? ...

Subliminal advertising in spam?: I followed this link, and I think I bought 100 shares. The spam contains an animated GIF with four frames. One of the frames (which contains the actual spam message) remains visible for 17 seconds. The other three frames are displayed for 10ms or 40ms, and ...

ActiveState - ActiveState Field Guide to Spam: All manner of dirty tricks used by spammers. Many hadn't even crossed my mind.

U.S. anti-spam Web pages shut down by attacks: It appears that spammers have gone on the offensive against the blacklists. "Monkeys.com shut down on Monday following a three-day denial of service attack over the weekend and an attack last month that lasted 10 days, list operator Ronald Guilmette said in ...

Reader feedback on bizarre no-link spam: A while back, Mark over at Boing Boing posted about some odd spam comments he'd seen that had no URL. If there's no URL, why post the spam? In the last week, several readers have approached him with theories. Some of them are interesting. ...

Texas law to block misleading spam takes effect Sept. 1 "Unsolicited advertising must carry the note 'ADV:' in its subject line, and messages with sexual material must say 'ADV: Adult Advertisement.' Backers of the law hope those notes will help Internet service providers and spam-filtering software remove spam before it ...

Spam (Monty Python) - Wikipedia: You ever wonder how the term "spam" came about? Well, apparently there was a Monty Python sketch that ended with a bunch of people yelling the word "Spam" so you couldn't hear someone else talking, and... "The phenomenon, some years later, of marketers drowning out ...

EU Rejects Spam Maker's Trademark Bid: This phenomenon is interesting. The company that makes Spam has essentially lost their name -- it was stolen by the rest of the world and there's nothing they can do about it. Even if they claim a legal victory, it's not going to help ...

UK Bans Spam Messages Effective December 11th, spammers could be fined £5,000 ($8,200) for spending spam messages but there are a few caveats to the new law. "Under the new law, companies will have to get permission from an individual before they can send them an e-mail or text ...

Here's something that may be a new trend in spam: including semi-newsworthy information in an attempt to add some value to the spam. I got an email the other day entitled "Medal Count." It appeared, for all intents and purposes, to be an accurate medal count for each country from ...

Brightmail Reports on Spam Trends of 2003: NewsFlash: spam is still a big problem. More interestingly (but still obvious), penis enlargement was the most popular category this last year. In 2003, Brightmail saw spam surpass legitimate email growing to more than 56% of all Internet email, up from just ...

About three weeks ago, an upgrade to the latest version of Movable Type killed our comment spam filtering. I finally had an hour to track the problem down, and it turns out the upgrade cleared the WordPress API key that MT-Akismet needs to function. We ve restored the key, and comment ...

Spam was killing me, but I've been having great luck with SpamNet from CloudMark. It's a free add-in to Outlook that uses a remote list to identify spam. What it does is compare each email to a list of known spam. That's nothing new. However, if a spam does get ...

Can You Say [Phrase] in E-Mail?: Interesting article that boils down to "how do I beat spam filters when I send..." spam? The article makes all the right noises about using opt-in lists and everything, but in the end, the entire thing is a discussion about getting around filtering. "Every ...

Six Apart Guide to Combatting Comment Spam: Could this be the be-all and end-all guide to comment spam? A lot of good research, opinions, and information here. This document describes how malicious or unwanted comments ('comment spam') affect weblogs, the techniques spammers use to abuse weblogs, and the tactics that ...

Have any other blog owners noticed a marked shift in spamming? Comment spam used to be the big threat, but spammers have suddenly (in the last two weeks, perhaps) shifted to trackback spamming. For every one comment spam I get these days, I'm getting five bad trackbacks. Anyone else?

Cloaking Device Made for Spammers: Spam has essentially created several new businesses. There are the spammers themselves, who are making money. Then there are the anti-spam companies, which are the new darlings of Silcon Valley and getting all kinds of cash thrown at them. Now we have the anti-anti-spam companies ...

Bayesian filter for MT: This looks promising. Hope it works as good as Bayesian spam filter for Outlook. "...I spent the last 2 days working on a bayesian plugin. To cut the story short, the plugin will allow you to train your movabletype blog to automatically identify spam comments and ...

AOL to charge fee as way to cut spam: Marketers can now pay America Online to ensure their messages are delivered and not flagged as spam. How is this not bribery? The certified e-mail system would require advertisers to pay $2 to $3 per 1,000 messages. The plan is optional, ...

Spam-Free at Last: This guy declared war on spam, and he managed to wriggle out from under it. He presents his techniques here, and there are a lot of them. He was slightly neurotic about it, but he managed to win...for now. For approximately a month now I have been ...

Gates reveals his 'magic solution' to spam: Just imagine if he actually did it and become "The Man Who Solved the Spam Problem." The world would herald the savior. That's enough to give Apple die-hards a shiver. The battle to rid the world's in-boxes of spam has got itself a ...

Australia's Internet Industry Association is launching a new campaign to educate consumers on the best way to eliminate spam: "Don't try - Don't buy - Don't reply". "'Spam is the unwelcome by-product of a largely free and open email system', says IIA chief executive, Peter Coroneos. 'Spammers are freeriding on ...

Exiled Spam King's Go-Go Life: Sanford Wallace was the king of spam. He built an empire called Cyber Promotions that was sued by about every company on Earth. I wanted to provide some links to demonstrate his notoriety, but I was overwhelmed Wired has had 34 stories about him ...

I got a spam today advertising some Web site of ill repute. Here's what it said in huge letters: NO BULLS**T.. ONLY $1 PER MONTH...AROUND .07 CENTS A DAY!!! Do the math.

Responding to Spammers The Internet Strikes Back: This. Is. Brilliant. How could you organize this and make it happen? We can all have a "Respond to Spam Day." Today, I got so fed up with the spam I've been receiving (I'm up to about 300 spams a day now), ...

Referer Spam Redux: A nice little wrap-up of ways to combat referrer spam, which is wicked annoying. I think it's so annoying because they count on the nacissism of someone checking or displaying their referrer logs, and we usually live up to their expectations. Personally, I'm fed up with them. ...

If it's not obvious by now, I've tightened up the spam filtering. We're getting hammered by comment spam this last week or so -- some big new round of scripts is going off. I'm sorry if your comment is delayed, but it's either that or TypeKey, which I don't really ...

Osirusoft Blacklists The World: Serious ugliness in the world of spam blacklists. This list is used by SpamAssassin, which is one of the most widely used spam filters around. "As of today, Osirusoft, distributer of the SPEWS and open relay blocklists, among others, is no longer operational. Servers using these ...

Elliot Back has come up with the best anti-comment-spam measure I've heard in quite a while. Taking Matt's stopgap spam solution, which sends precomputed hashes to be echoed back by the user-agent's form, I've added dynamic generation of the md5 hash. Rather than write it to a hidden field, we ...

Hijacked PCs spread 30% of spam: A standard refrain from home users about security is "I don't have anything on my computer that anyone would want." Well, yes you do you have a computer which can be hijacked for God knows what. One third of all spam circulating the ...

Unwanted Comments: Comment spam is becoming a bigger and bigger problem. Shirley has a good roundup of resources to help you fight it. "Some site owners stave off comment spam by closing off older comments, using blacklists, using filters, just deleting them when they occur, or a combination of these. ...

Spam Suit Highlights Need to Police Affiliates: So, if I'm reading this right, Amazon or Google could be in trouble if I spammed a bunch of people to get them to this site so I could make money of the affiliate marketing? Or is my agency relationship with them not ...

I don't mean to go on another rant about comment spam, but I'm suffering under another deluge on my personal site. While the Texas Holdem spammer was a blitzkreig, another spammer has deanebarker.net under slow siege. Someone out there is posting a spam comment to my site twice per hour, ...

My business mail server got blacklisted the other day. We started getting consistent bounces from a couple of clients that referenced some odd site. A little poking around revealed that our mail server had been inexplicably identified as an open relay and was on a spam blacklist that the clients ...

Congress Passes Bill That Will Limit Spam: Yesterday, I would have been thrilled. But after reading this article, I don't know if it matters anymore. The bills would prohibit senders of unsolicited commercial e-mail from disguising their identity by using a false return address or misleading subject line. They also ...

The Seattle Times: Business & Technology: Hormel can't stomach Seattle tech company that blocks out spam: I always wondered when the makers of Spam (big "S") were going to revolt over the co-opting of their name. "Unable to stuff this problem back into the can, Hormel is instead doing what ...

I've begun using Mozilla Mail for personal email, and I've been quite impressed with its "junk mail filters." It appears to be a rule-based filtering system which seems awfully accurate at flagging messages as spam. Over the weekend, I got 182 emails, and Mozilla slashed this total to five by ...

Paying Spammers Not to Spam: A novel theory, but I'm against anything that aids spammers. They deserve nothing more than a nice, solid kick in the face. The service, offered by San Antonio, Texas-based Global Removal, charges subscribers a $5 lifetime fee to have their e-mail addresses put on a ...

Hackers hijack federal computers: Not even the federal government is immune. This must be the zombie controllers' Holy Grail, because I imagine the feds have some decidedly fast machines lying around hooked up to some decidedly fast connections. Hundreds of powerful computers at the Defense Department and U.S. Senate were ...

I'm reading Packt's new book on SpamAssassin, and it's shaping up to be a good one. More on the entire book later, but I found some interesting tidbits on the history of spam in the first few pages. The first spam ever sent was on May 3, 1978 from a ...

Interesting article about the proliferation of advertising on the net, and the apparent move by software developers to place ads in standard applications.

Google Spam Filtering Gone Bad: Funny things going on with Google. Seth Finkelstein has identified what he calls a "GoogleNack" when a Google results page trips over a spam site and removes a big chunk of the results. "The suppressed sites should be quietly removed from the items returned. ...

Spammers turn to classic prose: The BBC has an article on the spam/literature phenomenon I mentioned the other day. [...] as Clive Thompson points out, automatically generating text that reads like it was written by a human hand is difficult. This is perhaps why some spammers are turning to out-of-copyright ...

Comment spam on this site is getting relentless. It's like a driving rain that just won't stop. Every day, over and over they never let up. I'm running MT Blacklist, and I have to add about 10 domains a day. You should see some of the domains they're coming ...

Caught in the Crossfire: Email is a mess these days. People who used to send email to their legitimate customers are having to rethink that strategy. "Less than 24 hours later, Gastel received a stern message from her Internet hosting service. A user had reported her e-mail as spam, the ...

The Value of a Good Name: This is sort of a global whitelist, really. "Your reputation precedes you. This is the idea behind a new weapon in the war on spam and e-mail overload from IronPort Systems: reputation filtering. The IronPort C60 Messaging Gateway appliance controls the flow of e-mail ...

Larry Taylor Spam Ministries: Word to the wise: don't spam Mean Dean, even if it's for ministry-related stuff. This is a great read. Considering the fact that I'm still receiving unsolicited commercial email after having already complained directly and upstream, I have come to the conclusion that perhaps the best ...

Swollen Orders Show Spam s Allure: Apparently, it works. An order log left exposed at one of Amazing Internet Products websites revealed that, over a four-week period, some 6,000 people responded to e-mail ads and placed orders for the company s Pinacle herbal supplement. Most customers ordered two bottles of the pills ...

Looks like spammers are trying to fool Bayesian filters by diluting their text. I got a spam today with two lines at the top advertising "cash freedom" or something, and I noticed that the message scrolled quite a bit. After about a hundred line breaks, I found this: I can ...

Spammers now clogging blogs, cell phones: Kalsey got quoted in this AP story about blog spam. Three years ago, Adam Kalsey set up a Web log to share his thoughts about online business and the digital revolution. Like countless other "bloggers," he lets his readers post comments on his ...

I found this comment on one of my client s blogs today. hello , my name is Richard and I know you get a lot of spammy comments , I can help you with this problem . I know a lot of spammers and I will ask them not to post ...

What's the deal with the blatantly illegal spams, these days? I've been getting spam that doesn't even try to disguise its intentions. "Are u carder? This site is a must-have for your bookmarks! * credit cards with cvv codes * trading * driver licenses" That was nothing compared to this ...

Spam's irritating cousin, spim, on the loose: I haven't seen any of this, but I'm sure it's just a matter of time. Consumers ditching e-mail for instant messages to avoid spam are in for an unpleasant surprise. Spim, or instant-messenger spam, is peppering computer screens with increasing frequency. And the ...

AOL says worker sold screen names: It'll be fascinating to see how this plays out. An America Online (TWX) software engineer was charged Wednesday with stealing 92 million AOL screen names and selling them to a spammer, federal prosecutors in New York said. [...] Both [the AOL worker and the ...

Spammers have gotten inventive. We've starting getting spam that appears to come from someone else in the office. For instance, Rachel the administrative assistant has started getting spam from "dbarker." She thinks it's from me, so she opens it. What these spammers have done is match up harvested email addresses ...

Ounce of prevention: Adam Kalsey is in a war against comment spam, and he shares some great ideas here: "What will probably be the biggest help is the thing that was easiest to do: changing the comment script name. What else would be effective is changing the names of all ...

Spam Talk: Adam Kalsey has a nice exchange with a comment spammer. "After receiving a bit of comment spam I hunted down the hosting company of the offending party and asked that their account be suspended, since that's the penalty set forth for spam by the host’s acceptable use policy. ...

I got an ad in an eWeek RSS feed this morning. It was prefaced with the "ADV:" notice and everything. It was offering a whitepaper about thin clients. "Sponsored by Wyse Technology." Interesting.

In War Over Spam, One Company Is Happily Arming Both Sides: Interesting aticle about IronPort, a company that sells numerous anti-spam devices...right alongisde its industrial strength mass emailers. "Their primary market is exactly the same set of companies that are most adversely affected by the blocking lists like SpamCop," said ...

Gates 'world's most-spammed man': This is insane. INTERNET junkies, take heart: Microsoft chairman Bill Gates receives four million emails a day, and is probably the most "spammed" person in the world. Via Slashdot.

Yahoo proposes new Internet anti-spam structure: Good thing this is Yahoo!, because it's going to take a big company to pull this off. They're apparently going to open-source it. Under Yahoo's new architecture, a system sending an e-mail message would embed a secure, private key in a message header. The ...

ISC to Cut Off Site Finder: Verisign's stunning abuse of its monopoly is about to come to an abrupt end. A patch is coming out for the BIND DNS server that will negate Verisign's SiteFinder service. Here's why: "...VeriSign's Site Finder broke their spam filters. ...a lot of spam spoofs ...

Craigslist phone verification system: Craigslist has implemented perhaps the absolute killer app in terms of anti-spam solutions: [ ] Craigs*list has implemented a phone verification system in certain categories to reduce SPAM content. When you attempt to make a post, it asks for you to verify yourself by typing in a ...

California wins its first anti-spam judgment: Very good news. "California won its first anti-spam judgment Friday when a court fined a marketing firm $2 million for sending out millions of unsolicited e-mails telling people how to spam, the state's attorney general said. Attorney General Bill Lockyer brought the case against ...

Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow: I posted on this entry over at Joseph's Scott's blog, and he has an interesting comment spam prevention tool going on. The comment form asks you a question in my case, "What color is an orange?" I tried to be cute and ...

Well, comment spam has finally done me in. A big new wave launched about a week ago, and we're getting spammed about once every 2 minutes, 24 hours a day. I have to manually delete over 100 comment spams a day in three or four "shifts" at the MT interface. ...

What's to stop people from spamming Feedster and other blog search engines? At what point does a blog entry cease to become "real" and crosses the line into shilling for a product or company? I found this today. While searching for a particular term over at Feedster, I found several ...

MT-Keystrokes: This isn't a bad idea. This plugin counts the keystrokes entered in the TEXTAREA for the Movable Type comments form, and sends that number with the comment. the plugin does some arithmetic on it to make sure it roughly matches the number of characters in the comment. Based on ...

McAfee Security - SpamKiller Anti-Spam Software: I don't mean to shill for anyone here, but SpamKiller has all but negated spam for me. Sometimes I get lulled into thinking that spam doesn't exist anymore, but then I go look at the SpamKiller trap and see hundreds of spams per day ...

Nigerian Spammers Seek Credibility, Enlist BBC: "Now it seems media outlets like the BBC are unwittingly being used as references of a sort, as real news stories get included in emails to confirm details of the scam's premise." There's an example of what he talks about on this site. These ...

Solution for comments spams: Excellent solution. To cut the story short, I wrote a plugin to [Movable Type] that will verify if it is a human before it allows comments to be posted. The idea is pretty simple: Display an image with a Security Code and demand the user to ...

Do Penis Enlargement Pills Work?: This guy has a blog to document his attempt at increasing his penis size using those pills hawked via spam. "I got my pills from Pro Solution yesterday. Came in a plain white box as promised. I had ordered the 4-month supply and it came ...

Accused AOL phisher spammed the FBI requires little comment... "An Ohio woman accused in federal court of using mass forged e-mails from "AOL security" to swindle America Online subscribers out of their credit card numbers was allegedly tracked down after spamming exactly the wrong person: an FBI agent specializing in ...

Friday, October 31, 2003: This is a great idea, but it's punishment, not deterrence because blog comment spammers will never hesitate long enough to figure out if posting is worthwhile or not. "We've reengineered it so that URLs become links to a redirect server hosted by Fog Creek which, we ...

Business > Media & Advertising > DRILLING DOWN/E-MAIL DELIVERY: Making It to the In-Box" href="http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/09/business/media/09MOSTWANTED.html">Making It to the In-Box: Some research in the ongoing fight between legitimate email and over-zealous spam filters. Return Path, an e-mail forwarding service, has analyzed the results of more than 16,000 of its clients' ...

Last week, I posted about installing SpamAssassin for Exchange. It was a simple install, and it worked pretty well. I was getting a 50% filter rate right out of the box, and I was confident I could get it up to 70% or so by cranking down the threshold. In ...

So, a few of us here at work got a spam today with this as part of the body: Your credit doesn't matter to us We believe this should have been caught by our spam filter. However, if you copy the text and paste it into notepad, it come out ...

I found this subject line in my spam trap this morning: Get your site seen by 100K+ now-%RND_SUBJ Apparently he screwed up the "random subject" parameter in his spam generator.

Gates gets serious about spam, security: This is new. Sounds Bayesian. Google News had no mention of it prior to seven hours ago. Gates also said both technology and legal efforts may help curb spam, the unsolicited e-mails that clog inboxes and create headaches for Information Technology departments. He said ...

Make Money Fast!!!! - If you owned your inbox, spammers would pay to get inside: Reiterating the need for the Penny Black theory if I don't know you and you want to send me an email, how much is it worth to you? "Technologically, no quick fix is in ...

Junkeater - We fight guestbook spam: Wonder if this would work for blog comments? I mean, who has a guestbook anymore? "If you are a webmaster and use a guestbook or automatic link page on your website you are most likely very familiar with guestbook spam: People who 'sign' your ...

MT-Blacklist - A Movable Type Anti-spam Plugin: Well, a new salvo in the war against comment spam has been launched. The idiot hawking tramadol has forced me to install MT-Blacklist. He was coming in about 10 times a day from different IP addresses, so I couldn't ban him. He seems ...

Seven Habits of Highly Effective Spambot Hunters: Josh Clark is doing some crazy fun stuff to counter comment spammers on Big Medium. I love it. Big Medium counters this by covering its tracks, never using the same field names twice. Every time you visit the page, all of the field ...

Survey: Spam Fears Affect Loyalty Marketing: I can't say I'm terrifically shocked by this. I usually give them a fake address something at Mailinator. Fear of spam is stopping consumers from providing e-mail addresses for loyalty programs in which they wish to participate, making it difficult for marketers to ...

Here's an interesting situation with a host I use. AOL is getting confused as to the actual source of email marked as spam, and mail forwarding servers are getting dinged as a result. [...] some customers have content filter rules to send all mail for their domain or for their ...

Is there a point to "catchall" email addresses anymore? You know, those addresses where misaddessed email to your domain gets routed? Let me explain I was having some email trouble this morning. POP3 response from the server was sporadic, and when I got a command line on the box, ...

Hardware maker Belkin has sunk to new lows in marketing strategies; a firmware upgrade on its wireless routers adds the ability for the router to grab a random HTTP connection every eight hours and redirect it an ad for Belkin's parental control option. The Register has an article on it, ...

Ever find referrers in your logs that make no sense? Sites that couldn't possibly have a link to your site? I found this product online, which is the first tool I've found to accomplish referrer spamming. No link or name because I don't want to promote it. [This app] is ...

As it turns out, ridding millions of PCs worldwide of their zombie-infestations is actually going to be quite simple -- press the power button and wait for your ISP to call: The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) today proposed that computer users who are unknowingly sending out millions of spam e-mail ...

No Truce in the Spam Wars: This is wonderful. A spammer filed a lawsuit against two spam blacklists. It was widely believed that the lawsuit was frivolous, and that he filed it just as a warning to others that might try to interrupt his spamming ways. Well, last week, the ...

A Plan for Spam: In the last few months, we've talked about Bayesian-this and Bayesian-that quite a bit, but what does "Bayesian" mean? Here's a great article that explains the concepts behind Bayesian filtering for spam. It's long, but a worthwhile read. The Achilles heel of the spammers is their ...

Gadgetopia got targeted by a comment spam bot over the weekend. Two entries were targeted, and each got 80 comments apiece one for a site with rape fiction, the other for a porn site apparently specializing in incest. This happen three times over the weekend, for a total of ...

I love reading Joel Spolsky. The guy is so smart it makes your eyes water sometimes. I just read his five-part series on The Road to FogBugz 4.0. It was actually just so-so for Spolsky, but that's still really good for anyone else. What's great about this stuff is the ...

Re: The false spam you requested: Man, my secret contact in Nigeria is going to be upset when he hears this. Hopefully the $30 million we're transferring out of the country will make him feel better. "The Federal Trade Commission recently issued a finding that probably won't come as a ...

Interesting story from the BBC about giant service provider Savvis internal debate over whether to expunge spammers from their network. The article details their angst over hosting spammers vs their love of that sweet green cash. Alif Terranson, a former Savvis employee who was responsible for keeping the network clean, ...

Microsoft Efforts Don't Slice Spam: News from PC Magazine: Microsoft is embarking on an ambitious anti-spam campaign, but many are accusing Redmond itself of making the problem worse: "...Microsoft itself is taking heat for assisting the targets of its actions. Apparently much unsolicited e-mail comes from the company's own services ...

Movable Type's Spam Hole: Six Apart is getting a little heat for not being more aggressive in notifying people about the recent MT spam vulnerability. The question does arise though, with literally tens of thousands of MT users affected by this vulnerability, why didn't anyone at Six Apart think that ...

Interview with a link spammer: The economics will always drive spam. Until people stop buying and clicking, spam will keep coming. For that's what Sam does, pretty much all day long. [...] he says he can earn seven-figure sums doing this. Sam is a link spammer. He's unapologetic about it. ...

An illustration of spam...: Can't...breathe....laughing...too...hard.

Going price for network of zombie PCs: $2,000-$3,000: Here's a look into the economics of spam hackers. One indication of the going rate for zombie PCs comes from a June 11 posting on SpecialHam.com, an electronic forum for spammers. The asking price for use of a network of 20,000 zombie ...

What's the deal with comment spam like this: http://www.pornsite.xyz/viagra.html badonkadonkbarker There's always a link to some porno/gambling site and a made-up contraction that makes no sense. The only think I can figure out is that if you Google one of the nonsense words from the posts, you get a bunch ...

I was looking for a spam filter for my Exchange server. I had great luck with SpamAssassin on another box (just regular SMTP), and luckily I found two great resources today: How To Use SpamAssassin on Win32: This is a fantastic example of someone documenting something they know how to ...

The spammers win again. A hosting company we work with sent me this in reponse to a support email I sent. I used to email their support desk all the time with great results. It was really handy. Now: Due to high volumes of Unsolicited Commercial Email (SPAM), this incident ...

Anti-Spam - Fight Back Against Spammers...: I don't know how technically feasible this method actually is, but it's an awfully funny concept. All you have to do is link to this page so that whenever a spammer's robot scans your page, they will be sucked into this one. To link ...

InfoWorld Trials RSS-Based Advertising: I was contemplating this the other day. What happens when people start spamming RSS feeds? "InfoWorld's simple solution is to make one of the headlines in its RSS feed an advertisement, noted as such via parentheses at the beginning of the link. Readers can click on ...

Another Whack at Spam: Tim Bray lays out an interesting and viable solution for dealing with spam. This (imaginary) company has a simple business model. It operates a really big password-protected SMTP relay. It sends email from anybody to anybody for 1 cent ($0.01) each. You open an account with ...

Once again, Matt Smith has come and rescued me from spammers. A couple of weeks ago, I was at my wit's end. Some commentors recommended Akismet, but I thought it was WordPress-only. Then Matt emailed me to tell me there was a Movable Type port. Given Matt's track record of ...

This comment appeared on a couple entries today. It's technically spam, but it's interesting spam. Do you live for technology? Is your house surrounded with technology gadgets Then we are looking for you! ABC Television's hit show Wife Swap is looking for families who live in a high-tech home and ...

As near as I can tell, this comment pointing out my crappy spelling was comment #10,000. And I'm anal-retentive about deleting spam, so that number is awfully pure.

OK, so I'm stretching for a clever title there. But the good news is that Microsoft has now joined AOL, Earthlink, and other large email providers by publishing Sender Policy Framework records for all their e-mail addresses, and are using SPF validation to scrutinize inbound mail. The company is strongly ...

I got a spam this morning with the subject: "Hey DBarker, start smoking today!" It was advertising cheap cigarette prices on some Web site. "Start smoking today!" This just strikes me as the height of absurdity.

Here's something I'd love the ability to synchronize two installations of the same software on two different computers. I'm thinking right now of Thunderbird. I have so many settings customized email accounts, RSS feeds, custom search rules, address book entries, adaptive spam filters, etc. Settings I tweak on ...

Send an email to [mobile phone number]@teleflip.com, and the entire email will get sent as a text message to that phone. Replies from the phone will get emailed back to you. (Warning: is there a spam angle here? I don't know...)

I'm watching "Law and Order SVU" right now, and the case of the murder and rape of a 9-year-old girl is resting on whether or not a company complied with an spam unsubscribe request. The spammer is a child pornographer. Go figure.

Will the preponderance of blogs these days wreak havoc with Google's PageRank model? It used to be that you couldn't get a link from a big name site without having something they they wanted to link to. And if they linked to it, then they liked it, so others might ...

This seems a bit harsh: Vardan Kushnir, notorious for sending spam to each and every citizen of Russia who appeared to have an e-mail, was found dead in his Moscow apartment on Sunday, Interfax reported Monday. He died after suffering repeated blows to the head. Via Drudge.

I got this spam today. This guy really wants a date. To: Juror #3, Van Nuys Superior Court, Dept E, Los Angeles, CA, excused on November 13. This is Juror #4 and I would really like to say Hi and continue our conversation. You can reply to this email or ...

In case you're sick of my inane blathering about every topic under the sun in your RSS reader, I've created individual feeds for each category, so you can just subscribe to what you want, like spam, content management, etc. The feed icon is the top of each category page.

Joe and I have been working with eZ publish for the last few months. It is, without a doubt, the best content management system I've ever used. I got more done in one week with eZ publish than I did in nine months with Documentum. I like it so much, ...

If you need to come up with a URL for some reason, but don't care what it does (as in testing form input, making an example in a paper, etc), what's likely to be one of your first choices? "test.com" The whiz kids at the IANA thought of this up ...

Spread Firefox Downtimex: Talk about a high-profile hack among geeks It appears that a part of Spread Firefox was hacked in an attempt to use it to send out spam. It doesn't look like the attacker accessed any personal data on the site, but to be safe, we're encouraging all ...

Microsoft s new Hotmail goes live: I tried it. Ehhh. Nothing to write home about. Windows Live Hotmail, which officially became available Monday, sports a new look and features similar to Microsoft s desktop-based Outlook e-mail program, including the ability to drag and drop messages into folders. Microsoft also said it improved ...

I was able to spam the Wankometer all the way to an 11 ("This level is classified as OFF THE SCALE!") using a page with these two sentences: "We need to create synergy among our business units using integrated, seamless, and robust features of our B2B platform. This will enable ...

Lycos screen saver attacks spammers: Lycos Europe is offering a screen saver that participates in DDOS attacks against known spam relays when your computer is not being used. Seriously. The program activates whenever a computer equipped with it goes into standby mode, and sends so-called HTTP get-requests to what Lycos ...

It is to laugh! A Register article reports that AOL is raffling off a $47,000 Porsche Boxster S that was seized last year as part of a settlement against a busted spammer. The company says the car's original owner made over $1m by unleashing a 1bn email spam tsunami on ...

Google Search: yplus 3.01: People, don't expose stupid pages and let search engines index them. The results just confuse everyone. I found a certain User-Agent in my log files about which I wanted to find out more information, so I Googled for a term in the string. All I got ...

USATODAY.com - Google eyes a gaggle of sites: They recently doubled their claim of pages crawled, from 3.3 billion to over 6 billion. The Mountain View, Calif., firm's "tens of thousands" of computers crawl the Web often to find pages to add. To grow the index, Google couldn't add more ...

The Blogging Scholarship: This is admirable. Is Your Blog Worthy of a $10,000 Scholarship? [ ] Do you maintain a weblog and attend college? Would you like $10,000 to help pay for books, tuition, or other living costs? If so, read on. We re giving away $10,000 this year to a college ...

Dutch mass spammer loses grip: Here's what happens when you try to hide the fact that you're a spammer, then get caught. "Dutch ISPs don't need more evidence. Last week Megaprovider lost several peering contracts (meaning it won't be able to share network capacity with other ISPs), and some companies ...

Get this for a new spam angle -- I had shared my Yahoo Calendar with my wife, so she could add events. Somehow I must have hosed it up, because some idiot has managed to add events to my calendar so that I'm amply remind that I need to join ...

Penis Enlargement Web Ads Prompt Calif. Spam Rage: Show me a jury in that would convict this guy. Heck, I'd give him a medal. A Silicon Valley computer programmer has been arrested for threatening to torture and kill employees of the company he blames for bombarding his computer with Web ...

Wikiseek - Search Wikipedia and its external links: An external search engine for Wikipedia. Not sure how this is any better than a site-specific search in Google, but I like the concept The contents of Wikiseek are restricted to Wikipedia pages and only those sites which are referenced within Wikipedia, ...

Yahoo Submits DomainKeys to IETF: Six months after first announcing their plans, Yahoo! has submitted a spec for "DomainKeys" to the Internet Engineering Task Force for approval as a standard. Good for them. DomainKeys is a way of authenticating email senders, using public and private key pairs and the domain ...

Here is proof that Bayesian and spam filters are working. Spammers are getting more and more desperate to disguise their messages from them. Take this email I got today. Here's the list of drugs the guy was selling: \ V|@grA ? Som.a. ^ :P:ntermin $ Val.i.um $ :XANAX: # At:|v@n ...

Building a Time Machine by Spam: Finally the answer to all the time-travel spams. "An investigation has revealed that the time-travel spammer is dead serious about his quest for technology that can rewind time. A trail of Internet clues has fingered Robert 'Robby' Todino as the source of the time-travel ...

Spammers are firing off HTTP requests at places they think common email cgi scripts might be ("http://www.domainname/cgi-bin/formmail.pl" for instance). They send this request with parameters designed to send them an email if it finds a unprotected, generic script. If they get an email, then they know the script is there ...

Cracking Down on Cyberspace Land Grabs: Great article on the New Thing stealing IP blocks. "Network operators were galvanized by a particularly brazen case in April, when a trail of spam led to the discovery that no-less than six /16s nearly 400,000 addresses had been misappropriated from ...

All-Girl Gaming Team Takes Aim at Boys: No, the title of this post isn't the same as the last spam you got. They apparently play a wicked game of CounterStrike. At first glance, Les Seules might look like an all-girl rock band mdash; complete with sassy attitudes and fawning male ...

7 Hot Projects: How do "spinal-cord trauma treatment" and "blocking spam" end up in the same list? Technology Review went hunting for projects at a crucial point on that continuum: well-funded work with specific commercial goals that will, if successful, provide a dramatic improvement over the products and services now ...

How to redirect a web page, the smart way: This page shows you about a dozen different ways to redirect a page using a 301 status. I concur. I changed the URL scheme on this site last year, and redirected 4,000 pages using 301 and watched Google update its index ...

USATODAY.com - Gates, Microsoft look for ways to zap spam: Microsoft has been floating this "Penny Black" idea of charging spammers for a long time, but it looks like they're serious about it now "Software filters would force e-mail from unfamiliar sources to offer money — perhaps 20 cents a ...

Computerless E-Mail Printer: Your parents want email but they don't want to deal with a computer? Here's just the thing. This is the color inkjet printer that only requires standard AC power and a telephone line to automatically print spam-free e-mail and pictures from friends and family you designate, eliminating ...

FTC files case against spyware companies: The proprietor of this operation is none other than Sanford Wallace, the original "King of Spam' (and, before that, the "King of Junk Faxes"). The Federal Trade Commission on Thursday filed the first case in the country against software companies accused of infecting computers ...

Microsoft Acquires Giant, Plans Antispyware Release: Giant's site has essentially been replaced by a big press release. I didn't use any of their products, but they included Spam Inspector, which I hear was quite good. I wonder how many of Bill's four million emails a day it could head off? ...

Steganography is very cool. No, it's not a dinosaur &mdash it's a method of sending hidden messages so that no one knows a message has been sent. Well, that's just boring ol' cryptography, you say. No when you encrypt a message and send it, anyone who intercepts the communication ...

Shelfari: Invitations and updates: From the official Shelfari blog, posted yesterday. We ve seen the recent emergence of complaints about Shelfari s invitations feature, and it s quite distressing. [ ] It s been about five months since we last touched our invitation design. In June we looked at a number of different designs with ...

The Raw Feed is one of my favorite blogs. Mark Elgan has a great rant on email hoaxes over there that's pure genius. He doesn't just whine about the problem, though. He provides a great solution to your relatives that forward you hoax emails: The Anti-Email-Hoax Email Hoax Please be ...

Unhappy Customers Slam FreeiPods.com; Owners Blame Apple: Perhaps we spoke too soon? A Web site that gives away free iPod Mini's to customers who participate in promotional offers is being criticized by its customers for failing to get them their promised portable music player and inundating them with additional spam ...