The Register have posted a story saying Lycos have launched a screensaver which is designed to utilise the bandwidth of spammers and therefore slow down (but critically not stop as this would be a ddos and therefore illegal) the spammers networks.
It is targeted at spam sites (identified by Spamcop) Lycos claims, where the site isn’t hosting banner ads and therefore won’t benefit from hits - rather the increased network traffic will, in theory, cost them.
There are Windows and Mac OS 9 and OS X versions available.
It all sounds lovely (in a 2 wrongs DO make a right kinda way) until you look a little further and discover that the makelovenotspam.com domain is registered to Starring Ltd AB - a Swedish Marketing company. Apparently Starring were contacted by Spray (a Lycos company in Sweden) to get more people to start using Spray’s e-mail service.
The makelovenotspam.com domain opens in a new window, even in tabbed browsers, and then loads in a page hidden behind the new window “Our offers” from Lycos. Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t pushing adverts to people without their consent in an underhand fashion like this considered Spam?
So Lycos spams us to get us to run a program which would almost certainly contravene the AUP’s of our ISPs in order to rob bandwidth from spammers? I’ve lost count of how many wrongs we’re talking about here!
I use Mac OS X as my main OS (Operating System) on my Powerbook 15″. I also have Windows XP SP2 installed and running simultaneously on the PowerBook (thanks to the magic of Virtual PC) but I only switch to XP when I absolutely have to (to run SQL Server Enterprise Manager, for instance).
I use RSS feeds all the time on the Mac and have for some time been looking for a good (and free) RSS reader for the Mac. I used NetNewsWire Lite for a long time and found it quite good but I was annoyed that it deleted RSS entries after a short time and there was no search functionality in NetNewsWire.
I also tried AmphetaDesk and Shrook but found various limitations in them which had me looking for alternatives to them all the time.
Recently I came accross Newsfire and decided to give it a whirl. I’m hooked! You can choose how long to keep posts for before they are deleted automatically by NewsFire (anything from 1 day to 6 months to never delete), search functionality is built-in, the interface is beautiful and it is free!
NewsFire can import (and export) OPML files so you can quickly set up all your favourite feeds. NewsFire has very quickly displaced all my other RSS readers and become my RSS reader of choice. Now, if only there was a feed grouping option in NewsFire it would be absolutely perfect! Well, I’m sure it will be along shortly and I have NewsFire set to automatically check for new versions of itself (I’m currently using v0.28) so soon I will have the ultimate RSS reader, for Mac OS X, free!
Falk eSolutions is an Ad Serving company who according to their website “is now the third-largest ad management solution worldwide, serving over 12 billion ad impressions per month”.
On 20/11/04 some clever cracker broke into one of their load balancing servers that handles ad deliveries and successfully loaded exploit code on servers serving ads on hundreds of clients’ Web sites. Users visiting Web sites that carried banner advertising delivered by Falk’s affected servers were periodically delivered a file which tried to execute an IE-Exploit function on the users’ computer.
Falk AdSolution clients include AtomShockwave, IDG, A&E Television Networks, MediaCom and Universal McCann.
European tech publisher The Register was the first to notice that banner ads served by Falk were launching exploit code to non-SP2 IE users. The Register advised readers ” If you may have visited The Register between 6am and 12.30pm GMT on Saturday, Nov 20 using any Windows platform bar XP SP2 we strongly advise you to check your machine with up to date anti-virus software, to install SP2 if you are running Windows XP, and to strongly consider running an alternative browser, at least until Microsoft deals with the issue.”
The Irish Revenue Commissioners have an online service called Revenue Online Service (or ROS for short).
I tried to sign up for Revenue Online’s service over the last week. However, I failed to get it working because of a problem installing KCrypto (a custom Java application) onto my Mac. The Kcrypto appears to be required for download of a digital cert.
Ringing the Helpdesk I was told that ROS only supports OS 9 on Mac! (and even then, the woman told me - the trainer they had training them on OS 9 last week couldn’t install it on an OS 9 machine!). Seriously though, only supports OS 9? Isn’t that a bit like telling Windows users that it will only work on Windows 95, not Windows 2000 or Windows XP?
And also, wasn’t this whole Internet and Java thing supposed to be about platform independance? Sun seem to think so, according to the Java section of their website “Running across all platforms … Java technology unifies business infrastructure to create a seamless, secure, networked platform for your business.”
I took another tack. I have Virtual PC 6 installed on the Mac and Windows XP SP2 installed on that. I tried to get ROS working on that OS - However, I still get the “Problem installing KCrypto” page appearing in both IE 6 and Firefox 1.0.
It is probably that the Revenue Commissioners don’t want people enlightened enough to own a Mac to be bothering themselves with such lowly tasks as paying tax. Us Mac owners are off to eat cake!
One of the reasons I like Firefox so much is its extensibility - something annoying you about your browsing experience? Well, if your browser is Firefox, the chances are that someone else has been frustrated by the same issue and written an extension to overcome that it.
My current favourite extension is called Adblock. Adblock is sweet. It does what it says on the tin. It blocks ads.
Now, I don’t have anything against ads, per se - I have ads on this site myself. What annoys me is when an ad on a site takes so long to download that it slows down the page load significantly. This is often because the ad is hosted on a busy, under-specced adserver somewhere.
What Adblock allows you to do is to block an individual ad - or all ads from a particular adserver. This is brilliant. Suddenly, pages that took ages to load, come up almost instantly.
Adserver administrators beware - invest in your infrastructure or you will be by-passed.
Log file and Blog comment spam
I use AwStats to monitor traffic on the tomandpilar.net site. I monitor the traffic regularly and recently started to notice that my site was apparently being linked to by some very strange sounding sites - Online Poker sites and Online Pharmacies!
A quick bit of investigation (and a quick word of explanation from FrankP) told me that I was the victim of Log File Spam. The idea behind Log File Spam is that Log File analysers, like AwStats, often create html based reports including hyperlinks to referrers. Therefore, if someone appears to come to my site from genericlogfilespammer.com, there is a link to that domain automatically created in my AwStats file report.
If the report is not password protected, then this is found by search-engines and it increases the page-ranking of the spammers’ site.
How do we combat this?
Luckily there are a few simple steps we can take to combat this. The first and most basic, is to password protect the Log File analyser folder.
As added protection, a line can be added to the robots.txt file instructing search engines not to look in the log file analyser folder. Add the following line:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /Insert Logfile Analyser folder path here/
After a little further digging I found an article on how to modify my .htaccess file to exclude the majority of offenders. I modified my .htaccess file follwing the tips on this site and using some of Joe Maller’s sample .htaccess file data .
This was my first time modifying an .htaccess file by hand so I am interested to see how it will work out for me. If you would like to check out a copy of the .htaccess file I created - click here
I am also plagued by Blog comment spam. I have always moderated comments on my blogs but it is still a pain to be receiving emails about spam comments daily - which then have to be deleted. Hopefully the .htacess modifications will eliminate a lot of this too.
UPDATE - The link to Joe Maller’s .htaccess file above appears to be re-directing to microsoft.com. I have emailed Joe to ask if this is expected behavour. In the meantime, if you find yourself unable to access it, feel free to browse my own effort - a lightly edited version of Joe’s file.