E-mail spam (including Trojan and virus messages), instant-message spam (“spim”), blog-comment spam, postal “bulk business mail,” and any other kind of unwanted, underhanded, and/or intrusive advertising. Also covers viruses, worms, and other malware.
This post is old, but touches on a topic that’s near and dear to my heart — methods of stopping spammers from overwhelming a publicly-available e-mail address. It argues that posting an address in a somewhat-obfuscated form (like “myname AT spamtrap DOT com”) actually helps spammers, because it’s much easier to search for using Google …
I got tired of the nearly one thousand spambot “users” on this blog and mass-deleted any account that had never posted a non-spam comment and had no optional user information. I also added a confirmation-link requirement, and auto-removal of any account that doesn’t complete the confirmation within seven days. Apologies to any human users who …
After three months of near-silence, I’m back. Project M is nearly ready for beta (six months of work so far, and it’s still not quite usable… sheesh!), so I think I can spare the time to blog again. I may not write daily for a bit, but I’ll try. The first thing I’d like to …
Continue reading ‘One Hundred Fifty Thousand Spam Attempts in 90 Days’ »
I’m busy, so I shouldn’t be writing this, but it’s so funny I can’t avoid it. I got a call about an hour ago. The caller ID said “Unknown Name, Unknown Number.” Background noise of a busy call center, so I’m thinking a survey or a telemarketer. A survey I’ll just politely decline to take. …
The amount of blog-spam that Geek Drivel has gotten recently is ludicrous. Since late June (when the statistics were last reset), my anti-spam software has blocked nearly 42,000 spam messages (of which I saw and had to personally deal with maybe fifteen — that software is good). Roughly 15,000 of them came in between then …
The thought that girls like a big penis is not properly conveyed by the English phrase “big penis like a girl.” 😉 (Yes, I actually got several messages yesterday whose text was exactly that, claiming to be from “EnlargePenis.VeryGood4@yahoo.com”, to my great amusement. Somebody really needs an English lesson. Or a biology lesson, maybe. 😉 …
I’ve mentioned that the blog has been hammered with spam attempts recently, but I thought nothing of it — it happens every now and again. And I thought that my own e-mail inbox was getting an abnormally large amount of spam as well, but GoddessJ’s young cousin recently had her Yahoo e-mail account hacked, so …
Our young cousin has apparently had her Yahoo e-mail account hacked. We’ve been getting several spam messages a day purporting to be from her through it. The funniest part is the text auto-appended to the bottom of each spam message: Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com …
Some spammer’s automated spam-bots have targeted Geek Drivel over the past few weeks, for reasons unknown. Well, okay, the surface reasons are obvious — but since they haven’t managed to get a single spam published, despite weeks of effort and hundreds of attempts per day, you’d think the spammer would notice and turn them to …
It should have become obvious to people when the north-eastern US power outage happened a few years ago: malware is dangerous. The computer world is riddled with flaws that make it possible for a kid playing around on the computer in his bedroom (or more recently, a programmer writing a Trojan intended to steal money …
Continue reading ‘“Trojan-ridden warning system implicated in Spanair crash”’ »