Thursday, October 28, 2004

Halloween is Near

I am watching Haunted Travels on the Travel Channel. Its an episode on Southern ghosts. That got me thinking about whats online. Long ago I had seen a site where a woman setup webcams around her house trying to catch the ghost in her house. So I Googled "ghost cam webcam" and found this really creepy site. They have photos of lots of things that look like ghosts caught on film.

GhostStudy.com

Sunday, October 10, 2004

Slashdot: Spammer Forced To Pay

This Slashdot story sounds good to me:

Saturday, October 09, 2004

Hack A Day

Just saw this on Slashdot. Slashdotters are mixed on its usefulness and uniquness of its content so far. The hacks and text describing them (all or mostly) come from other sites which could be a bit clearer, they are only linked with a small "read" link. It is nice to have someone find all these interesting hacks and put them in one place, but it could use some improvement. But its still an interesting collection of hacks.

Wednesday, October 06, 2004

Seraphim Puddledork

Well, I found some more more garbage from the Seraphim Proudleduck SEO contest. It was already cleaned by the time I got there. And the top of the edit page said something like "all links posted here are redirected through our site so they won't help your Google ranking." But the Proudleduck, Poodleduck, Puddleduck, or Puddledork still spammed their blacklist a lot, totally replacing all existing content.

This Puddledork was spamming for forums.merkey.net, princess-mononoke.com, and geneostar.com. It was signed "by Hybrid Alien for merkey" and "by uphu for merkey". Maybe Merkey has no idea what is going on, maybe he doesn't care, but either way he has been chongqed. This particular Puddledork was an AOLer (AC9918B9.ipt.aol.com) so its easy to understand his stupidity.

Our first report of Puddledork spam was for seraphim-proudleduck.i8.com. Manni also discovered some from seraphimproudleduck.freewebsrus.com.

This stupid contest goes on till January, so I am sure lots more wikis are going to get trashed before its over. Then we will get to go through it all over again next time.

Tuesday, October 05, 2004

Seraphim Proudleduck Contest Spam

The revenge of "Nigritude Ultramarine" is called "Seraphim Proudleduck" (or Puddleduck). Seraphim Proudleduck is another nigritude like SEO contest going now. Hopefully the contestants will not resort to spamming again. But I doubt it. We already have seen one example of a Seraphim Proudleduck spammer. Many of them never considered what they were doing to be wrong. Thats exactly what the spammers think.

If you are in this game stay away from wikis, blog comments, and guestbooks that are not involved in the game. Its just a game, why turn yourselves into spammers.

hukuki.net: Turkish Legal Resources Spammer

Last night we really upset a spammer from Hukuki.net by telling him he was a spammer and wasn't going to be removed from our list. We don't have a problem removing someone from our list if we made a mistake, so far that has not happened. We are very careful what gets into our list, if its not obvious spam we don't include them. This guy's problem was he didn't understand or couldn't admit what he was doing was spamming.

A large number of guestbooks have his link spammed on them. He even admitted to making some of those comments. He sees them as reciprocal links or link exchanges and its up to the page owner to go sign and link on his guestbook. Signing hundreds of guestbooks with stuff like "cool page" and including your link is obviously only meant to spread your link and improve your ranking in search engines. It must also be a coincidence that a very large number of those guestbooks pages were named fsguestbook.html. Could that be because he has an automated "cool page" bot?

Manni also found several discussions at Wikipedia that confirms they do consider Hukuki Net to be a spammer. He has created law pages for a number of wikis that give a little content, but are not really relevant to the specific wiki at all. Creating a law page is not necessary on all wikis. Wikis are an open form of webpage, but the idea is to provide others useful on topic information. Not to spread your link around just to improve your Google PageRank.

Then we got a report that the someone spammed a chongqed.org link into the middle of the Czech Wikipedia main help page along with several others including the German, Arab, and English versions. Along with our link he spammed them with links to c2.com, usemod.com, and emacswiki.org, who also listed him as a spammer.

Here are hukuki.net's entries in the chongqed database:

Saturday, October 02, 2004

Halloween Decorations

I have been busy decorating for Halloween in real life and online. At home the majority of my decorations go up Halloween day, but online I don't have to worry about the weather or things walking away. Feel free to use my Halloween images, I created bunches of them over the years and they don't get much use. I may put up some more if anyone is interested. Just leave a comment telling me where your using them.



Spammers Have No Conscience

A whole bunch of spammers are spamming a guestbook page of condolences for Princess Diana. How much more slimy can they get?
We have a new trouble maker, JD. He logs in to wikis and does minor edits thinking he won't be noticed. He was first reported by our new friend Halz on the chongqed wiki earlier this week. He had hit the KayakWiki and today I found he had also visited Dach's wiki and spammed the Spam page. He apparently read Dach's page because he tried to disguise the spam first as: but I guess he didn't want to admit it so changed it to:
Oh, and the famous Mr. Chongqing is still around. I found a couple of his links on the Sandbox page of Dach's wiki. I normally chop off the subdomain, but he seems to enjoy them so I figured I would leave them in this time, otherwise its really only four sites that all take you to emmss.com:

airticket.emmss.net
blog.emmss.net
chinajoy.emmss.org
commerce.emmss.net
companyweb.emmss.net
dahaoji.emmss.net
dianzibaiban.emmss.net
ebusiness.emmss.net
egovernment.emmss.net
emmss.emmss.net
enterpriseweb.emmss.net
fangdichan.emmss.net
fengshui.emmss.net
fireworks.emmss.net
googlepromotion.emmss.net
googleranking.emmss.net
hangye.emmss.net
hotel.emmss.net
jiuzhaigou.emmss.net
kingdee.emmss.net
leech.emmss.net
logs.emmss.net
metalproducts.emmss.net
netcompany.emmss.net
netmarketing.emmss.net
netone.emmss.net
netp.emmss.net
nettwo.emmss.net
notebook.emmss.org
peixun.emmss.net
pmsjpx.emmss.net
qiming.emmss.net
quming.emmss.net
refractorymaterials.emmss.net
sdi.emmss.net
se.emmss.net
seranking.emmss.net
snsjpx.emmss.net
software.emmss.net
suanming.emmss.net
webdesign.emmss.net
webdesignn.emmss.net
webp.emmss.net
webpages.emmss.net
webs.emmss.net
websbjn.emmss.net
webscompany.emmss.net
websgooglerankingn.emmss.net
websitedesign.emmss.net
websn.emmss.net
websshn.emmss.net
websszn.emmss.net
webwyzz.emmss.net
webwyzzn.emmss.net
webzz.emmss.net
webzzn.emmss.net
www.chongqing987.com
www.emmss.com
xianhua.emmss.net
xingzuo.emmss.net
ycmb.emmss.net
yijing.emmss.net
yuce.emmss.net
zhanbu.emmss.net
zhouyi.emmss.net
zuche.emmss.net
zufang.emmss.net

Friday, October 01, 2004

30 days till Halloween

Not chongqing related, but I am already in a Halloween mood:

ghostdroppings.com - A forum for discussing all things spooky.
halloween-online.com - A large Halloween resource.
hauntedcreations.com Lots of good stuff that I would love to have if it didn't cost so much.
anatomical.com - Almost medical school quality plastic skeleton, supposedly good for decoration though I am too cheep to buy one myself.
phantasmechanics.com - The Flying Crank Ghost. I have built one of these minus the motor and crank, its still looks good.
hauntedhistorytours.com - Tours of haunted New Orleans. Haven't been but would love to go.
batcon.org - Bats of Austin. I would love to see this too. I do have a few bats living in my backyard though, really good for mosquitoes.

Now if you are wondering, I am not some goth nut. Just a Halloween nut.