Wednesday, August 25, 2004

Some good antispam links

SpamLaws.com - Explains the various antispam laws and proposed bills.

Out, Out Damned Spam! - a spam story about CANSPAM and other stuff.

NYTimes: Dozens Charged in Push Against Spam and Scams

The New York Times has a story on Operation Slam Spam. Finally some action in enforcement of the new antispam laws. It doesn't say exactly what laws, but if its CANSPAM its good that we are getting some use out of it. I hope soon this applies to webspamming.

Tuesday, August 24, 2004

Casino-Online-On-Line is still at it

I guess their promise to "stop spamming blogs from now on..." on Manni's blog was a lie. I am shocked! How could someone with the morals of a spammer lie? Oh yeah, they don't have any. I guess they were counting on us not noticing. We didn't, though a simple google search would have shown it. They can thank one of their many victims for letting us know.

They are also pretty dumb, they haven't realized recent antispam improvements in most Blog software have made spamming blogs useless. More proof of their stupidity is for a while they were spamming wikis with:Which with most wiki software is not valid and will not create a link. That is exactly the type of tricks email spammers use (though more succesfully). After realizing how stupid that was, now they have advanced to putting multiple styles of links so at least one of them will work on most wikis.

A quick look through Google seems to show they now concentrate on Guestbooks and Forums. I am not so sure though, I suspect those just make it higher up the search results because the spam often stays there longer. They probably spam anything with a form and submit button. They are still repeatedly hitting wikis and blogs even if the links are useless.

Here is the current text (minus the links) they are using for blogs:Luckily the site I found that spam at has a couple ways of making those spams useless for improving the spammers' PageRanks.

Saturday, August 21, 2004

Slashdot: A Day In The Life Of A Spammer

Slashdot just posted a link to an article on an email spammer. They also had a few good links that apply to wiki spam indirectly:From the comments I discovered a few more interesting links:
And of course if you are interested in that story you should check out a few of our own spammer stories: chongqed.com and Email from Hakdata.

Thursday, August 19, 2004

Drunk Bear

I know, more non spam news, but its so funny I had to post it:
CNN: Bear guzzles 36 beers, passes out at campground

Naked Movie Casts

I have recently recieved three emails that comply with the new Sexually Explicit tag. That brings my total up to four now with the one about the "Naked Cast Of Van Helsing." You would think there is a law against false advertising, but I guess requiring stupid tags is better somehow.

SEXUALLY-EXPLICIT: 12 Reality Sites - F.R.EE Access
SEXUALLY-EXPLICIT: Survivor winner exposed on video
SEXUALLY-EXPLICIT: LOTR cast naked? Both female and male!

All of these messages advertised different sites, but the layout of the messages were very similar and two of the four had "This message was sent as part of a membership of sex4nothing.net" at the bottom.

Slashdot: UK ISPs to Shut Down Spamvertised Websites

Slashdot says that: "The Register is currently reporting that UK ISPs are targeting ecommerce websites run by spammers in a new 'get tough' policy on junk mail...."

I hope they are careful.

Wednesday, August 18, 2004

the wiki, etc

In just a couple days the wiki has been discovered by a few people. I hope more people will contribute their antispam thoughts. I sure will be.

A mini-blacklist will soon be available of all the spammers listed on spammers.chongqed.org. We aren't going to make this into a big blacklist of every spammer that exists, but if we add them to our database they will be on our mini-blacklist. In the past I have not been a big supporter of blacklists, but a visitor and Manni recently convinced me this mini URL blacklist would be ok. We won't be providing an IP blacklists since those are far too dangerous.

A nice email spam story "US blamed for 85 per cent of spam: Can-Spam law having little effect on US junk mailers" is here.

Not at all chongqing related, but its a blog so its not too far off our usual topic. If you haven't seen JibJab's "This Land" US election parody you are really missing out even if you aren't American. Here is their blog www.jibjab.com/blog.

Monday, August 16, 2004

chongqed.org wiki

We now have a wiki at chongqed.org. We realized that we needed a better way to discuss things with the wiki comunity than just comments on our blogs and email. What better way to communicate with wiki users than a wiki?

Any spam we recieve there will be chongqed especially hard so don't spam it.

Wednesday, August 11, 2004

chongqed.com

Looks like we have a fan. He was so excited about our websites he created his own. He seems to be a little confused though, he thinks spamming is good and we are bad. Manni will fill you in on the rest here, here, and here.