28 posts tagged “spam”
2024
Watching in real time as "slop" becomes a term of art. the way that "spam" became the term for unwanted emails, "slop" is going in the dictionary as the term for unwanted AI generated content
Spam, and its cousins like content marketing, could kill HN if it became orders of magnitude greater—but from my perspective, it isn't the hardest problem on HN. [...]
By far the harder problem, from my perspective, is low-quality comments, and I don't mean by bad actors—the community is pretty good about flagging and reporting those; I mean lame and/or mean comments by otherwise good users who don't intend to and don't realize they're doing that.
— dang
2023
I remember that they [Ev and Biz at Twitter in 2008] very firmly believed spam was a concern, but, “we don’t think it's ever going to be a real problem because you can choose who you follow.” And this was one of my first moments thinking, “Oh, you sweet summer child.” Because once you have a big enough user base, once you have enough people on a platform, once the likelihood of profit becomes high enough, you’re going to have spammers.
2008
Tell-a-Friend: Leverage Word of Mouth Marketing. I’d love to know how they intend to stop this free widget from becoming the world’s most popular spam proxy. And of course, they abuse the password anti-pattern despite the existence of safe API alternatives to address book scraping.
Using Akismet with Django’s new comments framework. A nice example that demonstrates two features that were recently rolled in to the Django 1.0 betas: the new signals library and the new comments framework.
The law behind “tell a friend” services. Useful guide based on UK law, updated in July 2008.
This is the new blog-spam. [...] 'web design company' takes the highest ranking comment from reddit, and posts it on the site that the original comment is based on. [...] Neat eh? They get to have links on a site that won't get blog-spam filtered, because the comment is 'relevant', since the comment originates from a comment thread about the site.
Craigslist is fighting back. Its latest gimmick is phone verification. Posting in some categories now requires a callback phone call, with a password sent to the user either by voice or as an SMS message. [...] Spammers tried using their own free ringtone sites to get many users to accept the Craigslist verification call, then type in the password from the voice message. Craigslist hasn't countered that trick yet.
OpenID and Spam. Matt Mullenweg: “OpenID has a ton of promise for the web—let’s not hurt it by setting people up for disappointment by telling them it’s a spam blocker when it’s not.” True for the case of general registration, but I still believe whitelisting known OpenIDs could be a powerful tool for fighting spam on personal sites.
2007
Sorry PR people: you’re blocked. I was added to some PR mailing lists a few months ago and they appear to be spreading my address around like a nasty disease. I’m tempted to contribute some addresses to Chris Anderson’s block list.
Quechup: Another Social Network Enemy! This is why we need to stop teaching users that it’s OK to give their e-mail username and password to any site that asks for it.
3rd Annual Nigerian EMail Conference. “Registration is via a confidential money transfer.”
Unsettling. Sounds like there might be a massive scripted hack going on against out of date WordPress installs on Dreamhost. Check your site. See also discussion in the comments attached to this post.
Introducing http:BL (via) Project Honey Pot announce a new blacklist service for blocking comment spammers and e-mail spiders using information from their network of honey pots.
Fading Out Nofollows? Philipp Lenssen suggests automatically removing the nofollow from links in comments a few days after they have been posted, to allow administrators time to delete spam without penalising legitimate authors.
Thankfully, because of the accountability that is built into the web itself (the URL structure is fundamentally accountable), I believe that while the vulnerability of the live web to spam is real, it is managable.
i’m Home. “Every time you start a conversation using i’m, Microsoft shares a portion of the program’s advertising revenue with some of the world’s most effective organisations dedicated to social causes.” Microsoft are now getting their marketing ideas from spam e-mail forwards.
The bright side: web spam is an evolutionary force that pushes relevance innovations such as trustrank forward. Spam created the market opportunity for Google, when Altavista succumbed in 97-98. Search startups should be praying to the spam gods for a second opportunity.
Fake bloggers soon to be “named and shamed” (via) Apparently due to a new EU directive banning companies from “falsely representing oneself as a consumer”.
Why people hate SEO... (and why SMO is bulls$%t). Jason Calacanis explains SMO, or “Social Media Optimisation”—digg spamming now has its own TLA.
Social whitelisting with OpenID... (plasticbag.org). Tom’s write-up of the social whitelisting idea. Lots of sceptics in the comments.
Stopping spambots with hashes and honeypots. Ned’s analysis of how spambots work, along with some relatively simple tricks that should fool most of them.
2006
The Spam Farms of the Social Web. Really interesting exposé by Niall Kennedy.
2003
New anti-comment-spam measure
I’ve added a new anti-comment-spam measure to this site. The majority of comment spam exists for one reason and one reason only to increase the Google PageRank of the site linked from the spam and specifically to increase its ranking for the term used in the link. This is why so many comment spams include links like this: Cheap Viagra.
[... 268 words]Battling comment spam
It’s a sad state of affairs when you come back to your blog after a week elsewhere and have to add another 56 domains to your blacklist. I’m actually getting more comment spam than legitimate comments now—this is becoming more than just a minor nuisance. I’m considering a number of improvements, including adding a moderation queue to comments on entries posted more than a month ago, disabling the comment form if the referral is a search engine (as per Russell Beattie’s suggestion) and adding some kind of wildcard support to the blacklist file.
[... 114 words]Fighting Filters and DDoS
Paul Graham’s essays on fighting spam are generally excellent; it was Paul who sparked the recent flurry of activity surrounding Bayesian statistical filters and inspired the creation of some of the best tools for fighting spam yet. Paul’s latest suggestion, Filters that fight back, seems to me to miss the mark in a big way. Paul suggests email servers should “follow” links in any email received. This would turn the tables on spam, as suddenly sending out a million spams would result in a million useless hits to the site being promoted, quickly brining it to its knees. It’s a great concept, until some malicious script kiddie realises that they’ve been handed a tool to run massive distributed denial-of-service attacks on any domain they care to target. Not to mention that such a feature would make many legitimate mass email tools prohibitively expensive to run.
[... 190 words]2002
Spam proof email
Today saw a useful thread on Webdesign-L about hiding email addresses from spambots. Some of the points raised:
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