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Hard to believe, our darling little spam
turns 25 years old this week. From a humble beginning, this beast now tops the
"Most Wanted" list of cyberspace. Bloggers have the misfortune of an additional spammer avenue,
our comments section.
Also near and dear to our hearts is spam's evil twin, the robot. One of its most
aggravating transgressions is the harvesting of email ids. This week we explore how spam
and robots have impacted bloggers.
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Week of May 4, 2003
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Where is Raed? is back! He was the subject of countless speculation
during the war (see our "Iraqi War Blogs" edition). Now with the fighting over, one of his most notable quotes, "War sucks big time."
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05/07/03:
But I am sounding now like the Taxi drivers I have fights with whenever I get into one.
Besides asking for outrageous fares (you can’t blame them gas prices have gone up 10 times, if you can get it) but they start grumbling and mumbling and at a point they would say something like “well it wasn’t like the mess it is now when we had saddam”. This is usually my cue for going into rage-mode. We Iraqis seem to have very short memories, or we simply block the bad times out. I ask them how long it took for us to get the electricity back again after he last war? 2 years until things got to what they are now, after 2 months of war. I ask them how was the water? Bad. Gas for car? None existent. Work? Lots of sitting in street tea shops. And how did everything get back? Hussain Kamel used to literally beat and whip people to do the impossible task of rebuilding. Then the question that would shut them up, so, dear Mr. Taxi driver would you like to have your saddam back? Aren’t we just really glad that we can now at least have hope for a new Iraq? Or are we Iraqis just a bunch of impatient fools who do nothing better than grumble and whine? Patience, you have waited for 35 years for days like these so get to working instead of whining. End of conversation.
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Bloggers beware. If your comment box allows html code, spammers and hackers can write an html application. This code will have the same
security access as the html code that you write. Read the following from TooMuchSexy.blog.
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04/21/2003: Spam comment attacks
So here I am, sitting down to eat some dinner, and I decide to quickly check my site. Boy am I glad. I quickly stopped a comment attack. I caught them before they could hit me with more than 22 comments, but if I had not, all 800+ entries on my site would have been spammed.
For what? Stupid pornography.
If anyone is interested, the IP address which I was attacked with is
195.251.255.217. I saved one piece of the spam, for future reference.
Please do not do the spammer justice by clicking on the links he posted.
Evidently the way this spammer worked was to make three “test comments” with a seemingly legitimate email address. The content of the posts was what you see above, and I think the test posts were made to see if HTML was allowed in my comments. The same email address and name was used each time, anmichelle - anliaskos@yahoo.com. After those three posts, they began to run a script which outputted random email addresses and names, slowly going through all my posts. Luckily I caught them, this time.
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03/16/03: We have a spammer,
ladies and gentlemen, and they're going after bloggers. Virtuelvis, Masukomi, Beerblog, Bingwalker, Falcon's Eye, Mentalspace, Uppity Negro, Library Planet, Bill Kearney and Dale Keiger have all encountered the same company spamming their blog comments in the past day: Zipcodeworld.com.
The comment invariably reads "nice article, keep up the good work. lookup zip code" and Bill says the IP is 203.106.151.137 - keep an eye out, folks, and ban that IP.
UPDATE: More sightings at Winds of Change, Elderberries, Like Butter, and X-Pollen
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01/15/03: Why the 87 Pieces of Spam I Recieved This Morning Suck
All the following spam was received between the time that I checked my email at 12am Monday night/Tuesday morning to when I woke up around 11am, Tuesday. All of the email was read using the text-only email reader Pine, which, because it's text only, is immune to viruses, pop-ups or other annoyances that people embed into email. Of course, it also can't display HTML or images, but, as this article illustrates, I think that's actually a benefit.
...
From: "[GB2312] ÓƳ¤°åµÊ"
Subject: [GB2312] ´´ÒµÕßÂÛ̳(www.egoo.net/bbs)ÈËÆøÍúÁË£¬ÄãÔõô²
See that garbage up there? Know what that is? If my mail client had the fonts installed, that would be Chinese. Of course, it doesn't have the fonts installed, and do you know why? Because I don't know Chinese! These Chinese spam started flowing in after I made the mistake of posting a YankTheChain ad to a Hong Kong newsgroup (maybe it's karma). Of course, I can't actually read any of the emails to "unsubscribe" to their mailing lists (if they even had unsubscribe options to begin with), so I'm screwed.
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10/1/02
Hello, skjhjfd44lkgjhlkf8fjkfgkjgfdfi8@hotmail.com?
Yeah, you sent me some email a few minutes ago. About your webcam? And trout?
Remember? But when I replied my message bounced -- you must have mistyped your address (which is understandable -- it's pretty long). Anyhow, if you
read this please drop me a line and let me know your correct address so I can send you my credit card number, thanks.
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Hiveware's Enkoder is a nice solution to email harvesting bots. It employs a javascript which encodes and decodes email addresses.
There is no charge for the tool - "If this tool is useful to you, please consider making a donation to the Hiveware team."
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Enkoder Form 5.0
Protect your Email address from Spam (unsolicited Email
advertisements).
The Enkoder Form will encrypt your Email address and convert the result to a self evaluating JavaScript, hiding it from Email-harvesting robots which crawl the web looking for exposed addresses. Your address will be displayed correctly by web-browsers, but will be virtually indecipherable to Email harvesting robots.
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This entry provides eye-opener insight into robots. It includes solutions which minimize the bandwith theft you may be currently experiencing.
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02/26/03 Once seated, I noticed the
I recently woke up to the staggering level of abuse occurring on this web site. This is old news to some, but we all wake up at different times. I’m talking, of course, about automated robots and spiders. They come at all hours, they take as much as they can, and they leave me with the (bandwidth) bill. They do so without respecting the Robot Exclusion Standard, now almost 10 years old. Some come to gather email addresses, which are then sold to spammers; some come to steal images or other content, and republish it without my consent; some come to spy on me and sell information to their clients about perceived violations of copyright, trademark, or some nebulous concept of brand identity.
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BlogSig provides a low-tech solution which keeps your site's personal contact information immune from email harvester bots. Even if you you don't use their
utility, it's a great idea which is easy to implement.
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When you have a blog and you disclose
contact info like your email address, IM signature and so on, it's a huge benefit -- it brings you contacts and business -- but SpamBots can capture it. And the new IM SpamBots are even more annoying. A BlogSig is a graphical signature for your blog. Since it's an image, it is spam free. Yes, you can't cut and paste the contact info into fields in Outlook but that's not such a big deal.
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04/26/03 Executives at AOL,
MSN and Yahoo! were obviously reading my blog several months ago about the easiest way to put an end to spam. They announced today a plan to work together to create a whitelist of permission marketers (and, one assumes, that leads to a blacklist of everyone else).
Missing from this equation is the key part, imho—friction. I think we need to charge something (just a penny is enough) to make it expensive to send huge amounts of email where the expected return is quite low.
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