Category Archives: Spammers

Spammers of the Internet clogging available resources.

  1. The Spam Farms of the Social Web

    Blogs and other social media tools have changed the publishing landscape over the past few years, making it easier than ever to share information with the world. The ease of use and focused attention of the medium has also helped create new opportunities for spammers to automatically generate content, buy links, and get noticed by search engines and other points of aggregation. In this post I will break down the operations of one spam network utilizing social media technologies such as WordPress, Digg, del.icio.us, and more to climb the search results and generate revenue through ads and affiliate programs. Last...

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  2. AdSense API enters beta

    AdSense has a new API, allowing users to create and manage AdSense accounts programmatically using SOAP. Sounds ideal for all the spam bots creating new scraper pages for asbestos and cancer news. If your bot creates a new bot account and earns over $100, you get $100 too! Yes, there are more serious uses such as a reputable blog provider creating an AdSense ID for its members, put I just see the piles of web spam getting worse....

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  3. Google spam suite primer

    Google provides a full suite of services for the entry-level blog spammer. There are plenty of legitimate uses for all of these Google services, but Google's market-leading position in search creates a spam ecosystem that inflates corporate revenues, index size, and user data. Google's blog hosting service, Blog*Spot, received a lot of attention this week as blogosphere neighbors threw up their arms in protest of the host, which is like the seedy motel at the edge of town that rents by the-hour. It's cheap and inviting to those who know no better, but those in the know don't want anything...

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  4. Microsoft bidding on Claria?

    The New York Times reports Microsoft is currently in talks to acquire Claria for $500 million. Claria, formerly known as Gator, is known for its software installed on Windows computers to track browsing behavior and serve personalized advertisements based on this acquired user behavior. The article reports MSN is very interested in personalization technologies and the increased advertising revenues they provide and is pursuing companies in the space in an attempt to close the gap on Google. I am not a big fan of the methods used by Claria to deliver personalized listings. I think MSN could accomplish similar tracking...

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  5. Shirky spam?

    Over the last few days I received multiple e-mails about a message submitted using an e-mail address I use only on my weblog and it's feeds. The interesting thing is it appears this e-mail address was used to send a message to Clay Skirky's NEC list. It looks like a spammer might be crawling weblogs specifically to spam weblog mailing lists and it's the first time I have observed such a thing. Watch your inbox for a message from "nec-bounces@shirky.com" for approval of a message subject of "Re:" and you might observe part of a trend....

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  6. MailFrontier tests phishing

    MailFrontier showed 1,000 consumers examples of phishing e-mails as well as legitimate e-mails. The respondents fell for the phishing message 28 percent of the time. Take the sample quiz and see how you score. (via Slashdot) "About 20 percent of the Web sites devoted to stealing information are hosted in South Korea; another 16 percent are in China, and 7 percent are in Taiwan."...

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  7. NY Times: When Software Fails to Stop Spam, It’s Time to Bring In the Detectives

    Monday's New York Times article about Microsoft's fight against junk e-mail senders. I receive over 500 spam messages a day and would love to do something to stop the senders. "Microsoft's two-year-old digital integrity unit - which also fights online fraud, identity theft and spyware - employs more than 100 people around the world and has an annual budget of more than $10 million." "In the last 15 months, Microsoft has filed 53 civil cases against spammers."...

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