p2pnet - rss feed: Putting spam back in the can
p2pnet.net OT news:- When I started p2pnet, to me spam, was a kind of unpalatable canned meat. Junk email wasn’t on the radar. But it didn’t take long for advertisers to realise the Net was a great new promo vehicle. No worries. Advertising is now part of the environment, and that’s fine within reason.
The problem was, like Warner Music, EMI, Vivendi Universal and Sony BMG, scammers and spammers see us as milk cows, ripe for exploitation in any way they can dream up.
Even their approaches are similar. The labels fire out thousands of subpoenas, hoping to scam the millions upon millions of people who share music with each other into believing they stand a better than even chance of becoming targets. In fact, the odds of any one person being singled out are close to zero.
The scammers, in their turn, fire out millions of scam-mails, and a few produce results. But that’s enough enough to make the exercise more than worth while.
And so it goes.
It didn’t take spammers long to realise sites such as p2pnet, which have anonymous posting, are also targets. Upload tons of links and inevitably, some people will respond. For a while, p2pnet comment spam was a very serious problem.
p2pnet still gets more than its fair share of comment spam and the verification process now stops a huge amount. But some still gets through. Amazingly, some spammers think it worth while to post by hand, so the first thing I do in the morning is manually delete the latest batch, and I periodically check for, and kill, new arrivals throughout the day. It’s a bit of a pain, but I’d rather do that than have links to Chinese porn, or Viagra, or whatever.
Nor are Big Time spammers the only guilty parties. A couple of days ago, I told a small family insurance business in Ontario to cease and desist.
Meanwhile, William Keeley in the US has been single-handedly trying to deal with the problem and has written several applications meant to give spammers a taste of their own medicine. A link his anti-spam programs is in the bottom left column.
Now, “I wanted to let you know about a service called Project Honey Pot,” he emailed me. “It allows you to track and help catch spammers who harvest email addresses from your web pages. I signed up myself, added honey pots to my site, donated an MX entry to help the cause and think it might be a service you’d find useful.
“This might be helpful in reducing the amount of comment spam you’ve been receiving. You can add a few lines of code to your forum scripts to prevent known comment spammers from posting.”
To use Project Honey Pot, “webmasters need only install the Project Honey Pot software somewhere on their website,” says Unspam Technologies, company behind it. “We handle the rest - automatically distributing addresses and receiving the mail they generate. As a result, we anticipate installing Project Honey Pot should not increase the traffic or load to your website.
“We collate, process, and share the data generated by your site with you. We also work with law enforcement authorities to track down and prosecute spammers. Harvesting email addresses from websites is illegal under several anti-spam laws, and the data resulting from Project Honey Pot is critical for finding those breaking the law.”
Cheers, William, and thanks.
Jon
If your Net access is blocked by government restrictions, try Psiphon from the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto’s Munk Centre for International Studies. Go here for the official download, and here for details. And if you’re Chinese and you’re looking for a way to access independent Internet news sources, try Freegate, the DIT program written to help Chinese citizens circumvent web site blocking outside of China. Download it here.
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Tired of being treated like a criminal? They depend on you, not the other way around. Don’t buy their ‘product’. Do bug your local politicians. Use emails, snail-mail, phone calls, faxes, IM, stop them in the street, blog. And if you’re into organizing, organize petitions, organize demonstrations and then turn up on your local political rep’s doorstep, making sure you’ve contacted your local tv/radio station/newspaper in advance. Don’t just complain. Do something!
June 6th, 2007 at 9:14 pm
Nice to know you got that going on. If I notice it, I always try and leave a note under each spam reply just to foil the spammers and so that our readers here don’t have to open the spam and waste time with that sort of junk.
Since they are the cause of the catchpa having to be used and the making of our on line lives a bit more miserable here as a result, I have no compunction in warning others the post is spam and not to waste their time as they have wasted ours.
Nice job in setting up to hunt them down Jon. I hope the trail leads right back to the spammers and they do have to face the consequences for their actions in being a pest to everyone else uninvited.
*Fifth attempt at validation