Idea: hosted classification service • 26 May 2010
Yesterday evening I was watching “How to replace yourself with very small shell script” by Hilary Mason.
Twitter spammers: Clickbank/Keynetics affiliates • 14 Jul 2008
I’ve been experimenting with Twitter a couple of times, and one of the results, the FM Brussel Live playlist twitter bot, seems to be rather popular. I get a couple of subscriptions per day. But recently they’re almost all of the form [name of girl][number of 2 – 4 digits]. This is what they look like:
My first Facebook spam • 02 Jul 2007
The Belgian Facebook community is growing and I was expecting to have a first ‘spam’ invitation eventually. It came a couple of days ago, from a group that goes by the name “In Loving Memory of Juliane Angel”. It seems to be created by a guy in rememberance of a girl that died some time ago (Juliane Angel). Even if this sad story is not a marketing ploy (which I don’t think it is), the invitations are still ‘unsollicited’. Whether they are ‘commercial’ is hard to say now, that might only become apparent when there are enough members (only two...
Viral in the bad sense: MessengerChecker • 04 Feb 2007
I just received an email on my Hotmail account from someone that normally never contacts me. The email itself is clearly generated by an automatic process:
Colorbar: belgian spam • 25 Aug 2006
In the last three days I have received 3 mails from Colorbar, a “lively private club for colorful people”. The first one didn’t trigger my suspicion, since I am subscribed to some music-related mailing lists. The two next mails came for 2 @forret.com aliases of which I am certain they never subscribed to any list. So I took a closer look at the email. No contact details are given, no indication of where the email addresses came from, no possibility to unsubscribe, i.e. it’s a spam mail. To be even more specific: a belgian spam message.
Size doesn’t matter • 29 Mar 2006
Sometimes a spam mail escapes my filters and shows up in my inbox. Last week I got a “Enlarge your …” mail with some girl’s name in the From field. I deleted it right away but subconsciously I had already read some of the content. So I went back and retrieved it from my Deleted Items just to be sure: they really talk about “enlarge a penis up to 10 cm“? (UPDATE: I read this as 10cm TOTAL length, not 10 cm EXTRA length) Indeed: First off: as a straight guy I have no practical knowledge of what average size...
Why spam opt-out lists won’t work • 24 Jan 2006
I was reading about a technique to discourage spammers: let an organised mob fill in thousands of fake submissions so that there is no way telling how to distinguish them from real responses. They targeted a known spammer, Alex Polyakov, currently #8 in Spamhaus top 10 and he did feel the pain.
Avoiding wiki spam in Mediawiki • 01 Nov 2005
The great thing about Wiki’s is that everyone can edit them. The problem is that this attracts a new strain of spam morons: the wiki spammers. My Tango Wiki has gotten spammed several times per day since I launched it. A page gets changed to a list of URLs for various drugs, mostly ‘male performance related’, let’s say.
What the government can do about spam • 30 Oct 2005
The Belgian Minister of Economy, Marc Verwilghen, recently announced the efforts the Belgian government would take to restore trust in the Internet as a way of doing business. This includes a directory of trustworthy online shops (e.g. in the travel business), but also some efforts to reduce spam. On the site spamsquad.be the following 4 basic rules are described to avoid spam: 1) don’t leave your email address, 2) don’t answer dubious emails, 3) camouflage your email address and 4) protect your computer.
Old-style Nigerian scam: via fax • 30 Apr 2005
Amazing: I just got my first Nigerian (419) scam via FAX! In these days of practically free email sending, you have to admire someone who goes the extra mile and pays for sending faxes. A handwritten letter would have made me feel even more special, but it’s a start.
Googlistics: messing with the big “G” • 05 Apr 2005
He probably also first thought it was an April’s Fool joke:
Matt Mullenweg from WordPress was discovered to have used his PageRank 8 site (WordPress is a popular open-source blogging software) for hosting lots of irrelevant content, with the purpose to get high scores in Google rankings and (let a customer of his) make money on Google Adsense.
Dave Winer’s problem and solution • 18 Jan 2005
Dave Winer seems to be very excited about something but he can’t say yet what it is:
Peter Forret
MySpace spam
