I am kicking Tagged

Sunday, July 19, 2009 at 2:01 | Posted in internet, spam | Leave a comment
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A couple of years ago I received an invitation from a friend to join Tagged. I was not very much for increasing my social network activities at the time but I thought I could give it a chance and joined. Found a couple of other friends ahead but my Tagged contacts today are but a fraction of those in Facebook and Twitter. Besides, I have contact, and I mean real contact, with everybody listed as my friend in Tagged through several other channels but all I ever get through Tagged is a load of spam.

Not a day goes by without at least one e-mail notification of a spammy message through Tagged. On worse days, like today, there could be about 10-15 of them. Most of the time it appears to be sent by somebody who says they have “seen my profile and fallen in love”. The alleged senders would be young enough to be my daughters unless they in reality were robots.

The rest of the spam mail is what is generally called Nigerian scam letters. One such today was the last drop into my bowl of patience. On top of 10-15 “Afro-Asian love letters” I received “a solid business propotition” from somebody whose picture displayed an elderly American or European gentleman. They chose to address me as “My Dear”!

This was where I decided that enough is enough and I am quitting. I found the “cancel account” button in my account settings and pushed it with joy. Just to get this:

Well, I am happy to lose a profile that spam robots keep falling in love with. I have plenty of copies of the couple of photos I have ever uploaded and as I said, I have good and clean channels to keep in touch with the handful of Tagged friends I have. I even see some of them in person from time to time so they are not likely to be “permanently lost” if I hit the “Submit” button.

Which is what I did. Only to be encountered by a password prompt! Never ever have I been prompted to enter my password when I have reported those messages as spam (for little good, though) because I have never logged out and never bothered to delete their cookies. So now they insist that I enter my password when I want to have nothing more to do with them!

Of course I did not remember the password so I needed to take the trouble to search it. Not a big deal but still a last annoyance to get rid of Tagged. Having bravely entered my password they have the nerve to throw a survey at me:

I did not bother to tell what they could do to improve themselves. I spared that detail for this post: EAT DIRT! YOU ARE FIRED!

A bold spammer

Monday, December 1, 2008 at 8:26 | Posted in Akismet, internet, spam | 1 Comment

This is the boldest fucking spammer I have ever seen. Browsing spam comments caught by Akismet, this message added to a regular spam comment caught my eye:

to: Admin – If You want to delete your site from our spam list, please visit this site for instructions: removeurl.********.com

The comment itself included a bible quote paired with some pretty obscene statements. A nice try, Mr./Ms. Spammer but I do not think visiting your site would make much sense.

info@bulk-mail.org

Tuesday, September 23, 2008 at 19:36 | Posted in e-mail, internet, spam | 6 Comments
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The owner of info@bulk-mail.org provides spam mail services but does not want to receive spam himself. Which is why I ask everybody not to publish the address info@bulk-mail.org in their blogs. Publishing the address info@bulk-mail.org would be an unfriendly act against a major spammer so please do not publish it.

via Cyberantweb.com

Cease and desist

Friday, September 28, 2007 at 15:51 | Posted in internet, spam | 2 Comments

Mr. Campbell,

Just by saying that your spam is not spam you do not relief yourself from a legal responsibility for having spammed a number of blogs that we represent. The below message makes you sueable in a number of countries and if our clients continue to receive these messages, Mr Campbell, I am going to make an appointment with you in front of a court of law.

Respectfully

Abmahnanwalt von Scheissenstiefel

Another spam scam

Thursday, September 27, 2007 at 8:26 | Posted in Akismet, internet, spam | 1 Comment
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I have noticed a spam scam these last couple of days which is disguised as job announcements. The most annoying part is that Akismet seems to let those comments through. The reason for them being able to fool Akismet may be that the comments are targeting fairly recent posts and their bot seems to be clever enough to include key words that loosely match with words in my posts.

Most of the spam comments are in English but I have also seen a couple in German. The URL of the alleged commenter is yahoo.com which is a certain sign that somebody is building search engine visibility to a site to be launched soon. In other words, a traditional spam scam is being prepared.

A WHOIS query placed one of the comments in Malaysia but that does not need to mean anything because the botnet probably consists of infected computers of innocent people. When do people learn to protect their computers?

Reading other mail accounts through GMail

Wednesday, July 11, 2007 at 8:17 | Posted in e-mail, internet, spam | 1 Comment
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I have had a domain, larko.org, for several years to keep my stuff accessible from blogs and other sites. I never meant to use the e-mail accounts attached to that domain as my primary mail address but I used larko[at]larko.org quite a lot before I was one of the first users invited to GMail by Google. Now the inbox mainly collects spam but I occasionally receive valid mail there from people who may have the old address left from the old times.

In order to get hold of the proper mail, I have hitherto had to access the account by webmail to keep it getting jammed altogether by spam. The spam filters provided by the ISP are not very efficient and they would require quite a lot of manual configurations. Thus, I have not wanted to let my mail client check out that mail account as I would end up getting the load of spam in my hard drive.

This morning I read this nice hint by Oliver about letting GMail collect the mail from services outside Google. I logged in to my GMail account and went to Settings/Accounts. I then added the account larko[at]larko.org to be read by GMail in POP. I entered the details of the mail server, user ID and password and instructed Gmail not to leave the letters at the mail server.

The cool part of this is that GMail’s spam filters comb through all the letters they fetch from larko.org so only valid mail ends up to my inbox. It could also be archived direct but I opted to let GMail automatically label the messages as “larko.org”. I could also have chosen to send mail under larko[at]larko.org but I did not think that was necessary. When I choose to reply a message, the person may just as well get to know my GMail address.

Now my Thunderbird brings all the good mail to my computer leaving the spam in GMail’s spam folder. The Gmail pop client also empties the inbox of larko[at]larko.org without me having to lift a finger. Ergo, that inbox is never again going to get jammed and I get my mail instantly and properly filtered.

Thanks, Oliver, for the good hint! I may even try this on my hot.ee account, the first e-mail address that I ever had. I let the modest limit of 10 MB be exhausted some time ago but I still sometimes get good mail to that inbox as well.

Deniz Yakut is a thief

Thursday, April 19, 2007 at 1:42 | Posted in Blogosphere, internet, spam, WordPress | 2 Comments
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A while ago I wrote about a jerk who has set up a robot to monitor and steal contents from blogs around WordPress.com. It looks like just about every post in blogs hosted by WordPress.com eventually end up being displayed together with Google ads at http://ultravb.com/arsiv/.

When somebody steals food from your table, you would want to know who the filthy bastard is, at least. Which is exactly why I WHOISed the domain ultravb.com:

So, Mr. Deniz Yakut in Izmir, Turkey, I wonder how you are going to feel if you detect that your bot stole this post as well. Mr Deniz Yakut, you are a filthy thief! Shame on you!

Edit: Yes indeed! He stole this one as well. :-) http://ultravb.com/arsiv/deniz-yakut-is-a-thief/

Another blog contents thief

Wednesday, April 18, 2007 at 18:06 | Posted in Blogosphere, internet, spam, WordPress | 9 Comments
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There is another thief around whose robot monitors and steals posts from allover WordPress.com. I am not linking to this bastard but the URL is http://ultravb.com/arsiv/. The dude calls himself Webmaster Arşivi.

He did, however, make the mistake of pinging to one of my posts so I got his IP 88.255.127.232. Apparently, this clown sits in Turkey. My suggestion to WordPress team is to block all traffic from him.

Edit: Just as I expected, the jerk has even stolen this post: http://ultravb.com/arsiv/another-blog-contents-thief/

A load of spam

Saturday, March 31, 2007 at 6:32 | Posted in Akismet, Blogosphere, spam, WordPress | 2 Comments
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A massive spam attack has been in progress for the last 24 hours or so. As usual, Akismet has caught the most entries but has also unfortunately let through quite a lot of them. Comments passing the filter arrive in series of three or four. The contents in each of them are similar: the usual “compliments” for a good site and an invitation to visit theirs. Oddly enough, no links are included.

This suggestion to the WordPress.com team is to be considered as freedback, i.e. free and constructive feedback. I can also be used for the benefit of anybody hosting their WordPress blog in own server. The suggestion is to ban the following IP’s:

207.111.173.119, 66.255.131.10, 82.154.176.105,203.131.132.78, 83.211.70.187, 209.208.69.150, 219.76.145.244, 59.93.195.227, 213.190.195.105, 82.195.156.186, 82.127.82.85, 122.21.0.49, 74.138.28.190 and 202.248.88.165.

Please hurry because they keep coming in as I type.

Edit: Also IP 66.212.222.74 belongs to these spammers.

A rude spam attack

Thursday, March 15, 2007 at 4:02 | Posted in Blogosphere, spam | Leave a comment

My friend Peter writes that his other blog Fabriknahrung was last night exposed to an extremely heavy spam attack. The attack was carried out by thousands of IP addresses in Asia who attempted to pollute the blog with more than 26.000 spam comments during the night.

Interestingly, some of those comments were in German which causes some speculation. Could it be that this cowardly action was initiated by food industry or somebody running a cook book or kitchen site? Did they consider Peter’s blog as competition to their own business?

The attacked blog has an interesting collection of posts about all aspects of food, nourishment and related topics. I did know about its existence but had forgotten to subscribe to the feed. That error has now been corrected. Needless to say that the blog is as from now in my dynamic blogroll.

I am not spamming my own blog

Sunday, February 25, 2007 at 22:15 | Posted in Akismet, Blogosphere, spam, Web tools, WordPress | Leave a comment

I just discovered a funny bug with WordPress and Akismet. As I was trying to post a comment in response to a reader’s comment, it did not appear in the post. The comment had a hyperlink in it. I checked out and detected that Akismet had caught my own comment as spam.  I posted it while logged in.

It is naturally fine that Akismet is in the alert to keep spam out of my blogs. However, it is not likely that I would be spamming my own blog. Of course a blog is by definition spam in the good sense of the word so the owner of a blog should by all means be allowed to spam their own blog as much as they want to.

Spam trouble

Saturday, February 3, 2007 at 17:38 | Posted in Akismet, spam, Web tools, WordPress | Leave a comment

Akismet is letting quite a lot of obvious spam comments through to moderating queue today which brings a little unnecessary additional work. Unfortunately the WordPress.com support is closed for the weekend. I would not want to question that the great team has deserved their days off work but it would make my weekend better if somebody could black list a number of IPs.

Spamming New Year

Monday, January 1, 2007 at 6:54 | Posted in Blogosphere, spam | 6 Comments
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Andre has an effective spam filter. Occasionally you get this response for trying to post a comment:

Spamschutz: Ungültiger Kommentar!

Kommentar wurde nicht hinzugefügt, da Kommentare für diesen Eintrag entweder deaktiviert sind, Sie ungültige Eingaben gemacht haben oder Anti-Spam-Maßnahmen angewendet wurden.

Yes, it happened to me just a moment ago, once again. I was trying to leave a comment to his New Year’s greeting. Which, I guess, is just fair. Christmas and New Year generate a whole lot of spam.

However, as I checked it over, the comment was there. So I guess I will be allowed to spam ahead. :-)

Nicht mein Bier

Sunday, October 29, 2006 at 13:46 | Posted in e-mail, Germany, internet, spam | 7 Comments
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Lycos Germany are spamming sending me an offer for a 30 day free trial of their Lycos Extra e-mail account. Should I want to keep all the goodies after the trial period, it would cost me less than a glass of beer a month:

Wenn Ihnen LycosExtra gefällt, können Sie natürlich auch LycosExtra-Mitglied werden: Das kostet Sie am Ende der 30-tägigen Probezeit gerade mal weniger als ein Glas Bier im Monat. Was haben Sie da schon zu verlieren?

I dunno about that. I already have an e-mail account with lots of more goodies, bells and whistles attatched and they are not asking me to pay the price of a beer still after good two years. So I guess, this spam offer is not my pint of bitter or nicht mein Bier, as it were.

Spam or not?

Wednesday, October 25, 2006 at 5:31 | Posted in Akismet, Blogosphere, internet, spam | Leave a comment

Browsing the harvest of Akismet is sometimes interesting. The amount of comments caught is too large to allow each of them to be judged individually. While I would not want to purge a comment that has been caught accidentally, I must admit that I frequently press the “delete all” button without browsing through all the comments.

Sometimes it is not easy to judge whether a comment or a trackback is legitimate or just sophisticated spam. I had one such trackback today. The blog post linking to me actually exists. It looks like a legitimate quote. The source is properly mentioned and there is a proper link to my post.

Not all of my post has been reproduced. Together with the link and source reference I would not have a problem if I were convinced that the post was written by another blogger of flesh and blood. On the contrary, I would be happy to have been linked to.

But a closer look at the “blog” concerned made me think otherwise. It turns out that every single post in that “blog” consists of one identical sentence:

I found this article very interesting and would like to include it in my blog.

The standard sentence is then followed by a per se legitimate quote, source reference and link to the quoted post. This “blogging concept” makes one wonder if there is any human input at all involved in the process of producing those posts. Or is it rather a spider harvesting tags and producing those quotes and links?

Needless to say, of course, that all of those posts are topped by ads. So somebody is definitely cashing on contents written by real bloggers. Who might that be? And would they care to share some of the revenue with the original authors?

I am sorry if I have mistaken. But at least for the time being, I am not going to release the comment.

Edit: An IP WHOIS query would point at Germany while a WHOIS query of the blog’s domain returns a registrant, administrative, technical and billing contact in Russia: Elitum ltd., Alexander Petrov, Leninsky avenue, 32, ap. 34, Saint-Petersburg.

This srtongly suggests that it is another sophisticated method to disguise spam as legitimate links and a shameless way of exploiting blog contents. I do not suppose sending my bank contact information to Mr. Petrov for a payment would give a desired result.

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