2pnet.net News:- By way of an update on the comment spam situation, hopefully, you’ve noticed a marked diminution in the number of scummy junk posts such as this, url=http://h1.ripway.com/zhenqoo/1.htm, or this [url=http://fada18.greatestjournal.com], or this [url=http://site.voila.fr/seelou/3546.htm]Å®ÐÔÊÖÒùͼƬ[/url].

That’s because a m8 over in the UK has been working on the problem from the server end, up to and including adding and tweaking the verification system, Scott at Ripside Interactive, host to some of the worst crap, has been doing what he could to eliminate it, and I’ve been spending half-an-hour and more first thing every morning killing off the ‘new’ parasite spam comments which accumulated overnight, also pecking away at the literally thousands of ‘old’ posts which linger on.

Does spam really work? Do people really fall for the kind of dross it typically advertises? They must do, otherwise it wouldn’t be the multi-billion-dollar industry that it is.

For the first time in history ….

Advertising is part of the world in which we live. ‘Things’ are purpose-designed to fail about 10 minutes after you bought them. So clearly, manufacturers need a way to make us consumers consume. We have to somehow be enveigled into buying all the new stuff to replace all the old stuff we bought yesterday and which today became obsolete.

Yes, the Net is helping to deal with that because for the first time in history, people can blog; they can communicate instantly and directly, sharing with other people, completely by-passing the mainstream print and electronic media who, until this digital 21st century, have been the principal sources of information.

The entertainment cartels in particular don’t like this radical switch in emphasis. They want the status quo to stay the way it is. Consumers are fine. They consume. But customers? Not so fine. They’re people who can, and do, exercise free choice, raising the dread spectre of C-C-C-Competition?

Oh! the Horror!

But with the digital 21st century came spam which, until then, was merely a word forged from ’spiced’ and ‘ham’ to become Hormel Food’s SPAM, “pink, chopped ham and pork rammed into square tins,” as the UK’s The Guardian once described it.

Monty Python Vikings picked it up and lampooned it and it ultimately became a Broadway show called Spamalot.

Like just about every other site at the time – blogs hadn’t become the power they are today – we used various pix of spam cans as illustrations – until we heard from Hormel Food’s lawyers. They wanted us to cease and desist from using them to illustrate spam posts. We said we would if they’d sent us a golden Spamalot can, which they did. And keeping our part of the bargain, until now, we’ve haven’t used a SPAM can in a spam story and hopefully, this time around it’s cool.

Parasite spam

Spam is a food product you either love or hate, but the electronic version is, without exception, thoroughly repellent.

Spam filters are now essential and although we’re extremely careful, we know we occasionally bin legitimate emails along with the trash. And we know people we’ve emailed have inadvertently done the same.

Comment spam is different, but just as invidious. Really, it’s a kind of parasite that leeches onto a host which wouldn’t knowingly touch it with a barge pole. And it’s hard to get rid of, especially on a site such as p2pnet where freedom of expression and freedom to say what you think anonymously or otherwise are essential features.

It sucks up server space on the host site, and broadband capacity in general terms. But far worse, it’s also a really nasty form of indirect censorship because it stops people from freely sending and receiving emails.

p2pnet doesn’t demand that readers to register to be able to post comments. We neither see posts before they go up, nor monitor them, meaning we often don’t see them at all and although it’s embarrassing to admit, we didn’t really appreciate the full extent of the parasite spam problem until relatively recently.

But hopefully, we’re getting a handle on it, even if for the time being it does call for quite a bit of manual deletion.

“Wow, that’s some spamvertising there,” remarked Scott when we sent him some of the junk we’d been receiving and which his company, Ripside Interactive, had inadvertently been hosting. He went on:

We run a free/paid hosting service, including anything from free file hosting to paid professional Linux hosting for corporate websites and email. We handle around a half million users, so in reality the percentage of abusive accounts is very small, but it only takes a handful of them to really cause problems for content-driven sites like yours.

We have created our own anti-spam scanners that look for these kinds of accounts and terminated them automatically, which usually redirects to another website like a search engine or adult site.

The redirection code, usually Javascript, is typically hidden behind at least one layer of base64 or similar encryption, which then another Javascript function decodes, assembles, and executes. That makes a simple scans of the text useless, therefore we have to look for various techniques used to decode the strings, but these guys are constantly updating these methods to avoid detection.

It’s an on-going battle, but we’re doing the best we can.

Why do the spammers bother?

A parasite spam url in a p2pnet comment post leading, say, to a Chinese sex site, will be picked up by various search engines with obvious results. Spammers also hope to get readers to visit sites they wouldn’t otherwise go anywhere near.

For the first time in many moons, this morning, there were no riptide comment spams.

But there were still plenty from accounts on France’s voila.fr. We’ve sent them emails but have yet to receive a reply and meanwhile, voila.fr parasite spam keeps showing up on p2pnet comment posts.

Meanwhile, we have a list of the principal spammers and we’re working on a plan to make life difficult – very difficult – for them.

So stay tuned.

Cheers!
Jon

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 27th, 2006 at 12:55 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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