Monday, May 30, 2005
Lawyer upset by spammers
I bet spammers are too dumb to learn from this:
"In one of the few instances of an individual taking a spam fight to the courts, a New York lawyer has filed a lawsuit alleging that his e-mail address was hijacked and used to send messages promoting a company's stock."
Read the rest at news.com.
"In one of the few instances of an individual taking a spam fight to the courts, a New York lawyer has filed a lawsuit alleging that his e-mail address was hijacked and used to send messages promoting a company's stock."
Read the rest at news.com.
Sunday, May 22, 2005
The Darth Side
Darth Vader recently posted what was likely his last blog post, he hasn't posted in a few days and he kept talking about destiny and choice. He was just about to turn his son over to the Emperor, I guess it didn't turn out good for him.
Thursday, May 19, 2005
Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith
Revenge of the Sith was awesome. Makes up for the previous two by far. Great opening battle, lots of great light saber duels, Wookies, and R2 gets nasty. We get explanations of things from the prequels and things from the original trilogy that we always wanted to know. Lost of visual reminders of the original series. And 99.9% Jar Jar free. He only plays a background part, no speaking, squeeking, squeeling, or otherwise Jar Jarish antics.
After seeing this, it looks like the other two prequels were mostly setup for it. This is the movie fans have been waiting for over 20 years to see. If you are not seeing it because of being disappointed by the last two you are an idiot.
After seeing this, it looks like the other two prequels were mostly setup for it. This is the movie fans have been waiting for over 20 years to see. If you are not seeing it because of being disappointed by the last two you are an idiot.
Tuesday, May 10, 2005
Big Changes at Google
I found this from Slashdot, currently the wwwcoder.com story is down because of it. I had to read a copy of the article. It sounds really good. I had heard some changes were in the works, but had no clue what a big shakeup this could be. The story is based on a patent that Google recently filed detailing a bunch of techniques they will be or are using to combat spamdexing. The article says they "launched a full out assault against artificial link inflation & declared war against search engine spam..."
There are lots of things in there I like. Detecting changes between page updates rather than just looking at the page's creation date for freshness. Looking at site's name servers to penalize sites that use slimy name servers. Looking for real addresses in whois info. Length of domain registration. Click through data (likely from Google Toolbar). And lots of other good stuff.
If spammers read the article (assuming they know how to read) they would realize that link spam to a new site won't do any good because new sites are not expected to have a sudden huge increase in incomming links. And if you have been spamming for long enough you will be caught. So spam won't do them any good anymore.
The author of this article believes this system is "far beyond the reliance of criteria that can be readily or easily manipulated." I have no doubt SEOers will try really hard though. If they are smart that won't include large webspam campaigns, but since when have spammers been smart.
I really hope this turns out more effective than Google's last fix for comment spam. I think it will though since this is a global move rather than something that people must implement. Google is doing it for us. That is what has been needed all along, Google's PageRank success agrivated the spamming problem and now it looks like they might have it solved. As I have said before, I hope this makes chongqing unnecessary.
I know there are other search engines, but once Google gets it right the others will have to follow or die. Google already almost has a monopoly on searching. If the others become the main target of spam and can't handle it, no one but the spammers will use them. A true search monopoly isn't a good thing in the long run, but Yahoo and MSN would never let that happen to them.
It looks like nothing has happened yet, but they only filed the patent at the end of March so I suspect its not all in place yet. I am sure it has to go through lots of testing first, which means when its ready its going to be a huge sudden noticable change. They have to make sure this has as small an effect on legitimate sites as possible. I wonder what it is going to do to our PageRank since chongqed.org is such an unusual site.
There are lots of things in there I like. Detecting changes between page updates rather than just looking at the page's creation date for freshness. Looking at site's name servers to penalize sites that use slimy name servers. Looking for real addresses in whois info. Length of domain registration. Click through data (likely from Google Toolbar). And lots of other good stuff.
If spammers read the article (assuming they know how to read) they would realize that link spam to a new site won't do any good because new sites are not expected to have a sudden huge increase in incomming links. And if you have been spamming for long enough you will be caught. So spam won't do them any good anymore.
The author of this article believes this system is "far beyond the reliance of criteria that can be readily or easily manipulated." I have no doubt SEOers will try really hard though. If they are smart that won't include large webspam campaigns, but since when have spammers been smart.
I really hope this turns out more effective than Google's last fix for comment spam. I think it will though since this is a global move rather than something that people must implement. Google is doing it for us. That is what has been needed all along, Google's PageRank success agrivated the spamming problem and now it looks like they might have it solved. As I have said before, I hope this makes chongqing unnecessary.
I know there are other search engines, but once Google gets it right the others will have to follow or die. Google already almost has a monopoly on searching. If the others become the main target of spam and can't handle it, no one but the spammers will use them. A true search monopoly isn't a good thing in the long run, but Yahoo and MSN would never let that happen to them.
It looks like nothing has happened yet, but they only filed the patent at the end of March so I suspect its not all in place yet. I am sure it has to go through lots of testing first, which means when its ready its going to be a huge sudden noticable change. They have to make sure this has as small an effect on legitimate sites as possible. I wonder what it is going to do to our PageRank since chongqed.org is such an unusual site.
Saturday, May 07, 2005
Spam Huntress Wiki
Ann has caught on to the usefulnes of a wiki. She is using WikiMedia which is not one of my favorites, but it is a good wiki engine. It might seem this is competition with our wiki, but there is always room for another good spam fighting resource. Anyway, she focuses more on various methods of blog spam and even though we hunt and list any webspammer we can find, our site is very wiki focused. But that is because its what we each know best.
