Tag: Spam
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Debate: Will Spam Get Worse?
This week I participated in Business Week Online’s Debate Room feature, where two people write short essays on opposite sides of a proposition. The proposition: “Regardless of how hard IT experts work to intercept the trillions of junk e-mails that bombard hapless in-boxes, the spammers will find ways to defeat them.” I argued against, concluding…
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Wikipedia Leads; Will Search Engines NoFollow?
Wikipedia has announced that all of its outgoing hyperlinks will now include the rel=”nofollow” attribute, which instructs search engines to disregard the links. Search engines infer a page’s importance by seeing who links to it – pages that get many links, especially from important sites, are deemed important and are ranked highly in search results.…
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Spam is Back
A quiet trend broke into the open today, when the New York Times ran a story by Brad Stone on the recent increase in email spam. The story claims that the volume of spam has doubled in recent months, which seems about right. Many spam filters have been overloaded, sending system administrators scrambling to buy…
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Why So Little Attention to Botnets?
Our collective battle against botnets is going badly, according to Ryan Naraine’s recent article in eWeek. What’s that? You didn’t know we were battling botnets? You’re not alone. Though botnets are a major cause of Internet insecurity problems, few netizens know what they are or how they work. In this context, a “bot” is a…
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Spamhaus Tests U.S. Control Over Internet
In a move sure to rekindle debate over national control of the Internet, a US court may soon issue an order stripping London-based spamhaus.org of its Internet name. Here’s the backstory. Spamhaus, an anti-spam organization headquartered in London, publishes ROKSO, the “Register of Known Spam Operations”. Many sites block email from ROKSO-listed sites, as an…
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AOL, Yahoo Challenge Email Neutrality
AOL and Yahoo will soon start using Goodmail, a system that lets bulk email senders bypass the companies’ spam filters by paying the companies one-fourth of a cent per message, and promising not to send unsolicited messages, according to a New York Times story by Saul Hansell. Pay-to-send systems are one standard response to spam.…
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Who'll Stop the Spam-Bots?
The FTC has initiated Operation Spam Zombies, a program that asks ISPs to work harder to detect and isolate spam-bots on their customers’ computers. Randy Picker has a good discussion of this. A bot is a malicious, long-lived software agent that sits on a computer and carries out commands at the behest of a remote…
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Michigan Email Registry as a Tax on Bulk Emailers
I wrote on Friday about the new registry of kids’ email addresses being set up by the state of Michigan. I wasn’t impressed. A commenter pointed out an important fact I missed: emailers have to pay a fee of $0.007 to screen each address against the list. (One of the occupational hazards of blogging is…
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Michigan Debuts Counterproductive Do-Not-Spam List for Kids
The state of Michigan has a new registry of kids’ email addresses in the state. Parents can put their kids’ addresses on the list. It’s illegal to send to addresses on the list any email solicitations for products that kids aren’t allowed to buy (alcohol, guns, gambling, vehicles, etc.). The site has been accepting registrations…
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Spam Kings: Mini-Review
I just finished reading Brian McWilliams’ new book Spam Kings. It’s an entertaining read that offers an interesting, nontechnical peek at some of the personalities behind the spam wars. The book’s central figure is Davis Hawke, an amoral character responsible for most of the spam promoting male anatomical enhancement products. (The only thing that these…