Specially Prepared Assorted Meat. Mmm mmm. On May 10, 2011, at 8:12 AM, Jason Service <[email protected]> wrote:
> Um, Shag...Pork is form heven. Sadly, SPAM is made from pig, presumably, some > portion pork...however, SPAM is NOT from heaven. ;) > > On Tue, May 10, 2011 at 1:32 AM, Ronald Methvin <[email protected]> wrote: > Maybe they think people who read a Firestorm blog are bigger suckers ;) > > ~Ron > > From: "[email protected]" <[email protected]> > To: [email protected] > Sent: Tue, May 10, 2011 12:12:33 AM > Subject: RE: [The Unique Geek] Thought this was interesting given our > occasional spammer to the list serve > > Apparently my spammers haven't gotten that smart yet. All the URLs I get are > totally obvious. > > Spam is a weird thing. My Firestorm blog averages about 75 Spam comments a > day (thank goodness for Akismet!), whereas my Once Upon a Geek blog is > averaging only about 10 Spam comments a day. It's weird because my Firestorm > blog gets way fewer hits than my other blog. Regardless, Akismet is from > heaven! > > > The Irredeemable Shag > http://firestormfan.com > http://onceuponageek.com > http://twitter.com/onceuponageek > > > -------- Original Message -------- > Subject: Re: [The Unique Geek] Thought this was interesting given our > occasional spammer to the list serve > From: Jennifer Walker <[email protected]> > Date: Mon, May 09, 2011 10:00 am > To: [email protected] > > I've been getting those bing.com and yahoo.com "comments" this last week on > old webcomic posts. I give them credit for craftiness as Akismet has yet to > catch up to this tactic but, really, the commenter always seems to misspell > one of the last words. Every. single. comment. > > On Mon, May 9, 2011 at 9:24 AM, Cary Preston <[email protected]> wrote: > For most of you, Tetherd Cow is an unfolding story of antics in Cow World > that plays out on a fairly linear daily or weekly basis. You know how it goes > – I post a story, you comment, we have a some fun repartee and then we move > on. Very civilized. But because I have an expansive overview of The Cow (a > Cowish ‘omnipotence’ as it were) the Cowiverse looks somewhat different to > me. I see a whole lot of stuff to which you are not privvy. There is, for > example, activity that occurs way back in time, in posts that have had their > moment in the sun and are never visited again except by the occasional lost > web traveller. Or by spammers. Spammers discovered long ago that the vast > hinterland of forgotten blog comments provides another fertile venue for > their pathetic attempts to hawk various car insurance/viagra/cheap > mortgage/locksmith(i) schemes. Because visiting millions of blogs and posting > comments is (quite obviously) a tedious and time consuming task, the spammers > have mostly relegated this drudgework to bots. Sometimes very clever bots, > but bots all the same. Bots are mostly pretty easy to defeat, and these days > most bot comments get swept up by blog spam utilities and never see the light > of day.(ii) > Recently, though, a new spamming ruse appears to be on the rise. This > technique requires real people to spend time browsing around blogs and > posting comments and linking their names to some crap or other.(iii) Here’s > one that I got yesterday: > > This was a comment left on my post Ooze which you may remember concerned the > curious fungus that once appeared in my backyard. On the face of it, ‘Jeff’ > appears to be taking an interest in the post and leaving a pertinent comment > – he is obviously not a bot. > What the spammers don’t appear to understand, though, is that when a > commenter leaves his or her mark on TCA comments, I can tell all kinds of > things about them other than just their email address and their name. I know, > for instance, that while Jeff Morgan is (most likely) a real person, with a > real Bigpond email address, it is not the real Jeff Morgan who has visited my > blog. Someone has stolen his name and email address for the purposes of > making their spam look legitimate. The clue to Fake Jeff’s real agenda is > written clear in two places – one is in his IP address which comes out of > Pakistan, and the other is in ‘his’ website which is easily recognizable(iv) > as a ‘front-door’ for a spam operation linking off to various kinds of crummy > products.(v) > As is usual in these cases, I leave the comment intact and ‘repair’ the > weblink to take it somewhere a little more useful.(vi) This morning though, I > got a rather intriguing one of these ‘comments’ from ‘Mircea’: > > This one appeared in my post We’re All DOOMED! as a reply to Cissy Strutt. > Unlike Jeff’s comment, it only half makes sense, but I have had far more > incomprehensible legitimate comments in my time. ‘Mircea’ evidently thinks > that by embedding it in the flow of commenting (he/she would have to have > physically clicked the ‘Reply’ button) that it would go unnoticed.(vii) But I > don’t see comments the same way as commenters do, and for me it’s a trivial > exercise to spot it as spam. Here’s part of what I see: > > Did you see the very interesting thing here, Cowpokes? ‘Mircea’ appears to be > spamming for Microsoft. Oh, I’m sure that Microsoft would deny having > anything to do with such a practice. They would, most likely, claim that > anyone can type any URL in the web field and that they can’t be held > responsible for random punters being fans of their search engine. But It is > easy for me to see that ‘Mircea’ is not a legitimate entity: she/he has an IP > in Quebec and an ISP in Germany – a very curious and probably impossible > combination. Additionally, this is not the only one of these I’ve had in > recent times. > There is a bit of discussion going on about this elsewhere, and one > suggestion has been that the Bing URL is being truncated in some way and that > Bing (and Yahoo as it turns out)(viii) are just victims of a software snafu. > But I want to point out that the way these blog commenting systems work does > not support that conclusion – if people are physically reading the posts and > entering comments, they are also physically entering the URLs they have been > given to promote. To put it in clear terms, ‘Mircea’ is a fraudulent identity > who has visited an historically distant Tetherd Cow Ahead post with the sole > intention of leaving a link to Bing. > _________________________________________________________________________ > Footnotes: > Yes. A New York locksmith and his pals were, apparently, touring the > blogosphere and leaving comments in an attempt to boost their linkability. > Rather sad, really. > My spam tools automatically shift such comments into the spam graveyard > without me even being aware of them. On average, TCA gets about forty of > these a day. > The technical reason they do this is to increase the number of legitimate > websites ‘linking’ to their garbage product. This, in turn, increases their > search ranking in various engines. Search engines find it easy to defeat > standard spambot link farming, but this kind of ‘human’ bot requires (so far) > human brains to intercept. And not only that, human brains that understand > the context of their own blogs. > By a person, at least. > Typically, these ‘front’-door’ sites are set up as link farms into products > that the spammer has been paid to ‘advertise’. They are disposable sites that > will be abandoned as soon as they are busted, only to spring up somewhere > else in a matter of minutes. The spammers probably have thousands of them on > the shelf, ready to go. > I usually redirect it to the JREF, because I think if there’s one thing we > could do with a whole heap more of in this world, it’s some rational > thinking. Can’t ever have too many links to the JREF. Did I mention the JREF? > And I guess on a lot of blogs maybe it would have. > I’ve also had several linked off to Yahoo. > _________________________________________________________________________ > > > http://www.tetherdcow.com/?p=11837 > > > > Sent with MobileRSS HD > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "The Unique Geek" group. > To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. > To unsubscribe from this group, send email to > [email protected]. > For more options, visit this group at > http://groups.google.com/group/theuniquegeek?hl=en. > > > > -- > Jennifer "Scraps" Walker > Queen of the Helper Monkeys > > Better living through creativity... and cocktails! > http://www.scrapsoflife.com/blog > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "The Unique Geek" group. > To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. > To unsubscribe from this group, send email to > [email protected]. > For more options, visit this group at > http://groups.google.com/group/theuniquegeek?hl=en. > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "The Unique Geek" group. > To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. > To unsubscribe from this group, send email to > [email protected]. > For more options, visit this group at > http://groups.google.com/group/theuniquegeek?hl=en. > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "The Unique Geek" group. > To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. > To unsubscribe from this group, send email to > [email protected]. > For more options, visit this group at > http://groups.google.com/group/theuniquegeek?hl=en. > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "The Unique Geek" group. > To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. > To unsubscribe from this group, send email to > [email protected]. > For more options, visit this group at > http://groups.google.com/group/theuniquegeek?hl=en. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "The Unique Geek" group. 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