{"id":102,"date":"2008-02-20T15:57:29","date_gmt":"2008-02-20T21:57:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.planetmanuel.com\/dirk\/?p=102"},"modified":"2010-09-19T10:02:49","modified_gmt":"2010-09-19T16:02:49","slug":"pygmy-spammers-get-my-goat","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.planetmanuel.com\/dirk\/pygmy-spammers-get-my-goat\/","title":{"rendered":"Pygmy-minded spammers really get my goat"},"content":{"rendered":"

I read an article<\/a> about Facebook yesterday, where the author was concerned about its use for ‘targeted advertising’. It seems that FaceBook users are blithely\u00c2\u00a0listing their favorite films, books, bands, and foods, and stating their age, location, and a bunch of other ‘personal’ information, unaware of the fact that this information is being used to serve up ‘relevant’ adverts.\u00c2\u00a0 List your favorite film as “Pulp Fiction”?\u00c2\u00a0 Don’t be surprised to see an advert for Tarantino’s latest (and no doubt inferior) movie pop up when it makes its rapid trajectory to DVD release.\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0 Post an entry saying only Ritz Crackers can satiate the munchies, and you could well see adverts for other Nabisco ‘salty snacks’ (sorry, industry term – force of habit after 3 years in Retail…) appearing alongside your “current mood” indicator.\u00c2\u00a0 Naturally, the ‘invasion of privacy’ people (who see themselves as the necessary – albeit unrequested – defenders of our rights) are up in arms over it all!<\/p>\n

Not me.\u00c2\u00a0 I’m all for targeted advertising.\u00c2\u00a0 If I only saw adverts that were relevant to me, I’d be a happy man.\u00c2\u00a0 What annoys me more is the opposite – blanket advertising with no regard for whether or not I want or need what they are peddling.\u00c2\u00a0 And the place where this is happening the most is with spam, bane of the internet generation(s).\u00c2\u00a0 I am currently receiving around 250 spam e-mails every single day, and expect this figure to increase steadily over time.\u00c2\u00a0 Thankfully, Norton AntiSpam does a pretty good job of catching most of them, and Microsoft Outlook’s junk e-mail filter catches the rest, so I don’t actually have to do anything with them (other than to remember to empty the spam folder before it takes up my entire hard drive) but it’s still irritating that they turn up in the first place.<\/p>\n

Every so often I’ll run through my spam folder to see if the filters have caught any legitimate e-mail by mistake (it happens – if I never replied to your note, this could be why…), and the list of things I’m being offered is ridiculous:\u00c2\u00a0 viagra, penis enlargements, diet supplements – none of which I need.\u00c2\u00a0 I can get myself a “prety girl” from Ukraine who is looking for “love, and more”, I can help out a Nigerian dictator with his money-laundering woes, and even refinance the mortgage I don’t have, at “c0mpet1t1\\\/e ratess”, all of which I have absolutely no interest in, and I’m pretty sure most people don’t, either.\u00c2\u00a0 It’s absurd!\u00c2\u00a0 I don’t know why the spammers bother.\u00c2\u00a0 That is, apart from the fact that it costs them nothing – that’s\u00c2\u00a0nothing<\/span> – to send out 100 million e-mails.\u00c2\u00a0 So even if only one sad-sack of a shut-in responds (only to find that the “\\\/iaggra” they ordered are really just pink M&Ms with “Viagra” written on them in felt tip) then the spammer is making money.<\/p>\n

Clearly, the solution is to reduce their margins to negative, by increasing the cost to serve (same apology applies).\u00c2\u00a0 The easiest way to do this is to charge them for sending e-mails.\u00c2\u00a0 Unfortunately this would mean charging\u00c2\u00a0everyone<\/span> for sending e-mails, but as you have to pay to make phone calls (either per call or by way of subscription), why not e-mails?\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0 It could work.\u00c2\u00a0 Set a price of maybe 0.1 cent per e-mail.\u00c2\u00a0 Legitimate users will barely notice the cost (1,000 e-mails a month would still only be $1.00 – possibly paid for by a corresponding reduction in ISP costs, although I doubt they’d do that…), but the spammers would soon be out of business.\u00c2\u00a0 Sending 100 million e-mails would cost them $100,000, which isn’t exactly a cost-effective business model.\u00c2\u00a0 Unless, of course, they can hook 100,000 spendthrift onanists slathering at the thought of a four-hour hard-on…<\/p>\n

But it’s not just e-mail spam.\u00c2\u00a0 I also get spam posted to this blog – people posting ‘comments’ on my articles, that are really just spam with links to (more often that not) sex sites.\u00c2\u00a0 Some of them make a pretense of being responses to the articles (with such ridiculous statements as “Respect you author! You have imformative site.\u00c2\u00a0 Well said, you! Here is link to my sitte” [sic]), but many ‘comments’ just contain a long list of links to porno sites.\u00c2\u00a0 Again, I have a spam filter (which has caught and auto-deleted over 10,000 spam comments since I started), but it’s still annoying.\u00c2\u00a0 But again, it is so ‘untargeted’ that I really don’t see the point.\u00c2\u00a0 My blog is just a bunch of stuff about what I’ve been up to, which is read by about four people.\u00c2\u00a0 What makes the spammers think that this meager audience of friends and relations is a good target for their ‘message’?\u00c2\u00a0 “Well, this article by Dirk is very entertaining and all, but what I’d really<\/em> like to see is a video of a dwarf blowing a goat”, or “You know, I’d enjoy this blog all the more if only my penis was bigger”.\u00c2\u00a0 Come on!\u00c2\u00a0 It’s ridiculous!<\/p>\n

The spammers have a habit of leaving comments on one or two specific articles, regardless of the actual content of the article (not that I have other articles that are more relevant to goat-blowing, you understand…).\u00c2\u00a0 Periodically I disable commenting on these articles, but then the spammers just switch to another.\u00c2\u00a0 I don’t want to disable commenting altogether, but I’m almost getting to that point (it’s not like many of you bother to comment on anything, anyway…).<\/p>\n

I’ve also been seeing some odd ‘reverse-linking’.\u00c2\u00a0 I installed some statistics software (actually nothing more than a log analyzer) to help me identify the spammers, and one of the things it does is identifies the ‘referrers’ to my site – that is, other sites containing a link to my site.\u00c2\u00a0 I checked out a couple of these (in the name of research<\/em>…), and they’re all<\/span> sex sites (that<\/em> had me scrabbling for the volume control, at home with the kids in the next room – “Daddy, what was that moaning sound?”).\u00c2\u00a0 Why would they be linking to my site??\u00c2\u00a0 Man, are their<\/em> visitors going to be disappointed:\u00c2\u00a0 “Unhhh, this free porno site is great!\u00c2\u00a0 Let’s see what else it links to.\u00c2\u00a0 Hmmmfh… [click] Interrobang\u00e2\u20ac\u00bd<\/span><\/em> What is this crap\u00e2\u20ac\u00bd<\/span> Where’s my goat-blowing video??”.\u00c2\u00a0 I’m guessing it’s some kind of tactic to bump their site up in the search engines by raising their ‘authority’ rating, but I always thought that the more sites link to you<\/em>, the higher your rating, not the other way round.\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0 Either way, as it’s not something my visitors or I see, I don’t really care about this type of spamming.<\/p>\n

What I do care about is the spam posted to my ‘message drop’.\u00c2\u00a0 Someone was trying to sell second-hand office furniture this week, and obviously thought that my blog was the perfect market.\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0 They were so convinced of this that they were posting the same crap a dozen times a day, regardless of the fact that as soon as they posted it I deleted it.\u00c2\u00a0 In the end I gave up and just closed the message drop completely.\u00c2\u00a0 So now no-one can drop me a message, which really pisses me off\u00c2\u00a0 – I have to take away legitimate functionality just because some asshole keeps on abusing it.\u00c2\u00a0 “They’re just ruining it for everyone!”\u00c2\u00a0 This particular case annoyed me so much that I followed the link to the website (actually a blog with ‘articles’ on second-hand office furniture), dug around until I found out the owner of it, and e-mailed them a couple of dozen times, in my most purple prose, insisting they cease and desist.\u00c2\u00a0 Unfortunately, it appears that the spammer had basically hi-jacked this poor guy’s account, and he<\/em> reported me <\/em>to the service provider for spamming him<\/em>! There’s no justice.<\/p>\n

I know spam is probably here to stay, and there’s not much I can do about it.\u00c2\u00a0 I’m adding a third level of spam filter via a captcha (the other two being Akismet, and myself), but the spammers will just find a way around that as well.\u00c2\u00a0 It’s like C.P.Snow’s second law of thermodynamics: “You cannot win.\u00c2\u00a0 You cannot break even. You cannot leave the game.” Actually, I could do the latter (as I did with BeerScene) but why the hell should I?\u00c2\u00a0 I enjoy<\/em> writing this blog.\u00c2\u00a0 I just wish there was an effective way to stop\u00c2\u00a0 the spammers altogether.\u00c2\u00a0 Some bloggers\/sites retaliate by spamming the spammers (as I tried unsuccessfully to do), but I’d like to go one step further: turn the spammers into<\/em> spam.\u00c2\u00a0 Give me the address of a spammer and a length of two-by-four and I’ll give you an\u00c2\u00a0unidentifiable slab of pink mulch…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I read an article about Facebook yesterday, where the author was concerned about its use for ‘targeted advertising’. It seems that FaceBook users […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[52],"class_list":["post-102","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life","tag-internet"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.planetmanuel.com\/dirk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.planetmanuel.com\/dirk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.planetmanuel.com\/dirk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.planetmanuel.com\/dirk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.planetmanuel.com\/dirk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=102"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.planetmanuel.com\/dirk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":213,"href":"http:\/\/www.planetmanuel.com\/dirk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102\/revisions\/213"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.planetmanuel.com\/dirk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=102"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.planetmanuel.com\/dirk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=102"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.planetmanuel.com\/dirk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=102"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}