Spam chongqing

Plagiarism Today has another great splog article, Losing the War on Splogging?. In it he discusses many things I have mentioned here and some new stuff that I completely agree with.

I especially liked the part comparing splogs to email spam. I have been wanting to post on that subject for a couple days so I am glad Plagiarism Today brought it up. With email spam you can setup your own filters, there are commercial filtering services, and ISPs usually at least try to filter email spam. Splogs are different, if they aren't filtered by their hosts, all that is left is to filter them out at the search engines. Client filters just won't work against splogs.

Since we know not all hosts are going to deal with splogs properly, that only leaves search engines to solve the problem. If they don't, search results are just going to get less and less useful. Plagiarism Today says if this problem continues to grow it will be the end of the blogosphere. It could be far worse than that, at some point people will just stop using search engines because they can't ever find what they want.

That would be the end of the internet as a useful resource of information. Portal sites with their own content would become necessities. AOL, Yahoo, and MSN would really benefit out of that situation. Google does have a lot of services, but no real portal like the others. They would be playing catch up.

We would also likely see growth of the human edited directories like Yahoo started off as. Dmoz currently is the only large human edited directory I know of. It is a good supplement to search results, but it is not a replacement for traditional search engines. Inclusion requests often are handled very slow if at all. There is too much potential for abuse with volunteer editors. I have already read about corruption including spammers sneaking their way into being categories editors.

Not indexing any blogs in regular search results might seem like a solution, but is it really? Sploggers have gotten attached to this "business model." They will just expand to other webspam methods which will continue to fill search engines with garbage.

I don't think we are loosing the war on splogs yet, but with Google apparently dropping out of the battle we are headed that way fast. I hope they wake up. When you are the biggest search engine, it is your duty to help clean up the internet. No one else can.

We already know they stopped deleting splogs on Blogspot. Now it looks like the little monitoring they did on AdSense may have stopped too. I first read about the AdSense change at SearchEngineWatch. And from their article read SearchViews.

I have no direct experience with AdSense, but this looks like a big problem for advertisers. Is this designed to raise the price of ads so Google can make more money? I doubt to, but that may be the end result. Which will also result in AdSense becomming no more popular than any other ad service.

I wonder how this affects SplogFighter's remaining method of fighting sploggers by going after AdSense violations.

Update: Google replied to SEW that humans are still part of the review process. Seems like it is a smaller part than it used to be.

Matt Cutts went on a posting spree lately. If you don't know why that is important enough to deserve a blog post then you clearly are not into SEO. He is a top antispam guy at Google. If you are running a website you should know about him.

His recent posts have mostly been on search engine optimization mistakes people make while setting up or marketing their sites:

Nearly Hidden Text
Spam Email Guarantees
Believing All Emails
Software Mistakes

And still on the posting spree and certainly related,
Sketchy Testimonials.

Update: A related post at SearchEngineWatch, On SEO Myths & Getting The Balance Right.

We know how spammy Google can be for some searches, but according to a blind study they do provide the best results. Not very surprising; the others are full of spam. What is surprising is that their lead isn't very big.

The study is being limiting to only the top three results from the main three engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN), but you can't really list them all and expect people to carefully evaluate the results of each engine. I presume that for most general (non-sex/drug) keywords you aren't going to run into much spam in the top three results so I guess they are mostly measuring relevancy rather than least spamminess, but they do go together.

There certainly are some flaws in the study. There is no way to vote a tie. And as some people suggest in the comments, by limiting to only the big three engines they are missing out on possibly better results (yeah right, there is a reason they are the big three). But when you run your own version you can set it up better. ;-)

You can participate in the ongoing study by choosing the best results for a search term you provide. You only get one official vote (monthly?) but can try it as many times as you want.

In my first run at the blind test I chose the Google results, but all three were pretty good and two only differed by one link. This was for a normal keyword that is not highly competitive.

My second try was for tramdol. Guess what I got. That is right, they all sucked. It was hard to decide, but after looking at each page I decided on the slightly less spammy of the three. In case you are wondering how non spammy the results were, here are the winners:

New to tramdol
Buy Tramdol 20% OFF - Drugs.MD - FREE Consulta ...
Tramadol

And finally I gave lolita a try. I really got far better results than I expected. No porn or spamdexing pages in the top three results from any engine. I chose this one on informational quality of results assuming I wanted information on the book or movie.

Two were pretty good, giving both movie and book information, but one of those listed three IMDB and Amazon pages. How they got three results for two different pages doesn't look good to me. The third included a young girl picture site; they were clothed and from what I saw not in revealing clothes, but still. It also returned a site for a bar named Lolita, which was not what I was looking for.

This time the winner was Yahoo, only because of the duplicate IMDB page and commercial bias of Google's top results. By process of elimination I am sure you have already guessed who returned the more questionable results, MSN.

I kind of figured when I saw it, but a manual Google search for lolita confirmed it. Due to Google's stacking of related pages from the same site (which in this case were identical with slightly different URLs) we got the odd looking results. I really don't know how you are supposed to handle that case in a study any better though. In a study I worked on a couple years ago we did the same thing, we determined that you just have to include everything otherwise it is not comparable to the other engines. They included it as one of the ten results on the page so we looked at it as a separate result.

Wow. This one is pretty good. The spam is customized by including the title of the post being spammed. Seems pretty well targeted too, too bad they didn't realize why I was talking about online casinos.

Hi There Blogger
I was looking for information related to online casinos and found you blog.
Your Casino Online On-Line Spam (part 2) has excellent online casinos information however not exactly what i was looking for.
Fantastic blog, keep up the great work.
Regards

online casinos , video poker

Posted by casinos at 11/28/2005 12:50:59 PM

Emphasis added to show post title.

I found a very interesting site in the fight against splogs. The main focus is on plagiarism and copyright infringement, but since that makes up most splog content there are some good feed scraper specific articles there like, Splogs: Plagiarism En Masse.

And they explain how to add a copyright notice footer to the bottom of posts on your blog's feed. Recently I added a tracking image to my feed. It wasn't setup for copyright purposes, but for identification and will be useful for tracking down spammers who illegally "syndicate" my posts. Ann quickly discovered the tracker and posted her support. You can read how to do it for Blogger in my first comment on that post.

Why waste time thinking of text to try to make your spam look real. This isn't like email spam, you aren't trying to trick readers into thinking it is real mail. Either it works instantly or it is held for moderation in which it has little chance of surviving. On most blogs there is no automated spam filtering and when there is it is usually only based on URLs. There really is no need to fill up the comment with stupid text. One spammer seems to have figured that out. I just got a spam comment where the entire comment was five short linked key phrases each on one line.

I also wonder why spammers keep hitting the same sites over and over within a short period. That makes their spam more obvious and annoying. People might hate spammers less if they weren't so destructive. I certainly wouldn't, but regular people don't care about spam when it is not a major problem for them.

You would also think they would do some checking to see if their spam sticks. If not what is the point in continuing to spam a site. By taking a little bit of program time to check you can rule out sites that are a waste to spam. Then you can concentrate on spamming sites that will display your spam.

I hate giving spammers useful advice, but this would help everyone including the spammers. If spammers weren't so annoying people would be less likely to delete link spam.

Even if you follow these ideas, I and other spam fighters are still going to go after you if you are a spammer. Don't think this is a way to get off the hook. You know what you are doing is wrong and destructive. The only way spam fighters are going to leave you alone is if you stop spamming.

Update: Rathamahata has some comments on this post from an SEO point of view. He explains why spammers use junk text, it is supposed to trick search engines. I really have doubts that it really helps much since if search engines are looking at adjacent words for link quality they should easily be able to detect that a comment has a subject totally out of place with the rest of the page. Such as Tramdol, penis enlargement, or horney lolitas on a blog about some teenager's school and boyfriend problems.

He also doesn't get the second part of my post. By reducing the insane amount of spam overall there is less need to use throw away campaigns. If spam is not so annoying fewer people would do anything about it. That would make spamming more successful for the long term. Since about the beginning of the month I have had over 300 comment spams on this blog. Blogspot uses nofollow on comments and my blog uses comment moderation. Why continue spamming entire domains where there is no PageRank benefit?

He says that as long as the spammer earns more than it costs they don't care. How much does spam really cost? Near nothing. You can get cheap domains or free subdomains. Spamming software is cheap even if you can't write it yourself. If it wasn't so cheap why would there be so many spammers trying to get rich quick doing it?

Update 2: Read about a group of "Ethical Spammers." Fits in quite nicely with this post though the term is certainly an oxymoron.

SpamFighter has a disappointing post on his work at reporting splogs to Blogger for deletion. He was doing really well for a good while with several thousand per week being deleted. Now he is getting NO results.

He also discusses the changes in splog form since Blogger got serious about spam. He says many sploggers are creating throw away splogs that are never updated again. Maybe Google is happy enough with the slow down that they aren't worried about deleting them anymore.

Spam is not something that can be ignored so I hope Blogger doesn't think they are doing a good enough job with their prevention methods. If you are getting a free list of splogs from a reliable source why not use it? I understand that they can't just trust all splog submissions they get without checking, but after the first ten thousand or so verified splogs you would think they would learn to trust a reporter and put higher weight on his reports.

What I really wonder is how come SplogFighter can do such a good job identifying spam blogs. With all the resources of Google behind them, shouldn't Blogger already be finding and removing these splogs? There shouldn't be any easy splogs left for an outsider to find with automated tools. They should be down to the tough ones that require manual inspection.

Luckily deleting splogs on blogspot is not the only method SpamFighter uses, he also goes after AdSense so still has ways of getting at the spammers. Spammers are often clearly violating AdSense rules so attacking them this way should work on many spammers as long as they keep using AdSense.

Slashdot has an article on the developers of the major web browsers getting together to work out ways to make users more secure no matter what browser they use. Sounds good to me. I am glad they are all cooperating.

I found some interesting posts over at DeleteMySpam.com on splogs and current spammer themes.

Also interesting was the top ten spam words for July he linked to, seems like spammers don't know how to read.

He also has a post on the effects of buying spamvertised products, and not just the ones you usually hear about. Would someone who spams be ethical enough not to scam buyers?

Since turning on comment moderation (November 4) I have now reached 303 comment spams, not counting the few that slipped though the moderation hole. Lately it seems to have been slowing down a bit. It certainly isn't anywhere near stopped yet, but it isn't quite so bad.

Could just be because it is nearing end of semester. Could be due to Thanksgiving this Thursday in the US. Maybe spammers are learning spamming blogspot isn't so easy anymore and they are moving on; probably not since most are dumber than rocks and will never figure that out. Hopefully the lull is due to something new Blogger setup silently, but I doubt it.

They seem to come in waves, but at least for now it is better than the 30+ I was getting on the 14th and 15th and the 20+ on the 9th and 11th. Weekends are normally slow and Tuesday is far from over so maybe I am jumping to conclusions. But I thought I would share the current scores for those posts with 5 or more spams. As you can see there is no apparent pattern to which posts get hit most:

19	Lots of Comments	11/05/2005
16	Google's Spamdexing Service	10/08/2005
15	Casino Online On-Line Spam (part 2)	7/07/2004
10	How Not To Fix The Blogspot Issue	10/26/2005
9	New Spam Fighters	8/30/2005
8	More about BeTheDealer	7/08/2004
8	BeTheDealer and DirectedMarket	7/08/2004
8	Casino Online On-Line (part 3)	7/08/2004
7	Leaving Blogger	10/20/2005
7	Redirect Splogs	9/01/2005
7	Back to the Future II	4/09/2005
7	BTD, Cyprus, and DirectedMarket	7/13/2005
7	Casino-Online-On-Line Spam	7/06/2004
6	Surfing with the Enemy	12/06/2004
6	Nigritude Ultramarine Nuts	6/03/2004
5	Chongqed at O'Reilly	12/03/2004

There is an email virus going around in emails claiming to be from the FBI. It warns that they have monitored you accessing illegal websites and requires you to answer questions in the attached document. That certainly isn't the way the FBI would go after people, but I am sure it will scare a lot of people into opening the attachment. I hope they have good antivirus software.

See the FBI's press release.

Update: I have also heard that this comes in a CIA version. And here is something pretty similar pretending to be from the BKA (German equivalent of the FBI) with some analysis of the social engineering tactics being used.

Not directly for spamming, but related to his spamming/scamming business. He was found guilty of fraudulent trading, concealing criminal property, death threats, threats to destroy or damage property, and blackmail.

BBC
ZDNet UK

Michael Pollitt has been busy with some new splog articles:

Splog wars
Cashing in on Fake Blogs

And because of his articles on PRStorm, a spammer is now planning to use it to spam for Michael's site to prove that it works. Pretty stupid. The spammer just doesn't get it. Of course PRStorm works. We know it works but it is evil and hurts its victims. And once Google finds out, the spammer's sites are going to be removed from Google's index and have their AdSense accounts revoked.

Spammers have done the same or similar to chongqed, SpamHuntress, and other spam fighters.

I got two interesting comments by a spammer recently. In with all the comment spams they were hard to find since they were made anonymously as is much of the spam. They were made on November 10 and I didn't notice them until the 15th. Here are the posts they appear on:

Lots of Comments
Advanced Wiki Spam

Another interesting set was spam telling the truth about what it is:

Nice blog, oop's did I lie? really I didn't even read your blog, To be perfectly honest I have no intention of reading your blog I am only interested in promoting my website, Is this bad? I don't think so , If anything just bad manners. Did you know that without **advertising** you have little chance of selling anything. **advertising**

Posted by Dan at 11/15/2005 05:47:24 PM

I got 12 of that one in 5 minutes on new and old posts. Just bad manners? Well, at least he admits that much. Most spammers try to explain how it doesn't hurt anything or that it actually helps the sites they spam.

Not supprisingly, Google has yet another flawed antispam system. Remember that moderation solution to comment spam they implemented a short while back. Since my last post, I have received about 200 more comments, few if any are legitimate (I haven't checked them all yet).

The problem is about five of them somehow skipped the comment approval system. Out of 200 that is a tiny number, but if this is an exploitable hole rather than just an intermittent bug, the number could greatly increase as spammers catch on.

When first discovered only days after being was implemented, I hoped this was just a momentary bug with Blogger while they were updating. They had just created this feature so I was willing to give them the benefit of the doubt, but it appears this was not a short term problem whatever it is.

I got no moderation email for these few spam comments, so I could not have accidentally approved them. I was also no where near a computer at the times they were posted.

The most recent spammer that appears to have bypassed the system is Doer. Tonight I had four comments by him. Only the fourth was held by the moderation system. Gordon left the same spam comment twice a couple hours before Doer. Those two were properly held for approval.

Their spam:

Hello, just visited your blog, it's informative. I also have a website related togoogle adsense software. So make sure you visit and hope it's useful.

So, is this a hole or an intermittent bug? I have no idea, only Google and Blogger would know and I doubt they would even admit a problem exists. Either way I hope they fix it fast.

It has been less than 20 hours since I turned off Word Verification and turned on Comment Modification. In that time I have had 21 really meaningful comments. Isn't it nice that so many blogger users would visit my blog and comment. The comments are so good I thought I should share them here on the main page:

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11/04/2005 05:32:33 PM

Looks like Blogger's new anti-splog measures aren't keeping up. Just now in Blogger's Recently Updated list of ten blogs, five were obvious splogs.

Single post simple splog with original graphic:
1040EZ -- Online Taxes

Single post adult affiliate splog with almost no blog formatting:
Measuring bra size

A hard one to detect at first glance, no ads, but stolen content with few links compared to most splogs of this style:
Helpful u2 info

A pretty traditional splog with no ads:
Home Based Business Opportunity

One of those new poverty banner protected splogs with no ads:
Giving Commodities

Manni tried to use Google's Blog Search for finding something other than splogs and discovered it's not easy. Mainly what I use it for is finding splogs or new posts about splogs so I had never tried a product related search.

I recently ran across a post about "over advertising" that most sploggers probably missed. It is actually a good read for real bloggers too, especially those who have more ads than content on their blog. And related to that, common mistakes with AdSense.

Tips on writing content might help improve your blog posts. If sploggers were actually writing their own content rather than stealing it, this might help them too.

IslandDave and Keith recently discovered that sploggers are now using that makepovertyhistory.org banner to make their blogs look more legit and block Blogspot's Flag as Objectionable button. Luckily since flagging is basically useless, it isn't hurting anything.

I found this one pretty funny. Not only is it a legitimate poker blog (I didn't think such a thing could exist), he posted about a content thief that is mad that his content is stolen.

Not really what I usually post, but this link appeared in my referrers just now thanks to the Next Blog ring and I had to share it; Hummer Overfloweth.

And finally some interesting search referrers to my blog lately:

how to find editable wiki pages seo spam
automatic wiki spam
addentry spam
free prstorm
prstorm review
spam free sucking girls
pokerbots how they work
spam university
javascript, spam

Finally!!!

Blogger Buzz says:

"We've just introduced a frequently-asked for feature, comment moderation. By using this feature, you can approve or reject what would-be commenters are looking to post before it goes live on your blog."

I turned on Comment Moderation and turned off Word Verification for comments on my blog and will see how things go. As we have seen, Word Verification seems buggy, not to mention annoying and inaccessible to visually impaired users. Depending on how bad comment spams get, I may leave it this way. I can more easily catch spammers without polluting my blog comments.

I wonder how many bugs this improvement will introduce.

Update: In the two hours since posting this, I already have five spam comments on posts going back all the way to mid 2004. I assumed spammers were mostly hitting recent posts these days, but I guess not. The online interface for moderating is ok, but not great, you can't tell what post the comment was made on. But you can easily deal with multiple comments at once which is nice. And the email version looks pretty good.

Mark of Sysinternals posted one of the scariest Halloween true stories I have ever read. Sony is now installing rootkits on Windows to prevent copying of their CDs.

For those that don't know, a rootkit is software installed at a very low level that allows it to be hidden from the operating system so it can't be removed normally. This is just insane. This is the kind of stuff malware, trojans, and viruses do, not gigantic multinational corporations.

Lucky the little music I get now comes mostly from iTunes. Seems to me that this move will only push the end of CDs. We know the music industry doesn't like that idea, what are they thinking?

Update: Sony has released a "Service Pack" to remove it. They say it is "not malicious and does not compromise security," but how can they be sure it doesn't open up some security hole. Even though it can now be removed this is still wrong.

Update 2: Turns out it was a security problem, it could be used by viruses and other malicious software to hide from scans. Sony halted production of these CDs and a few days later said they would recall them.

Update 3: Sony is now being hit with a bunch of class action suits. Someone setup a blog at sonysuit.com so people can keep up to date on them. And it turns out that a small bit of tape in the right place will prevent the DRM program from being installed.