“Groovy Motherfucker”

Lovely post from Kellan explaining why Twitter (and other sites) can’t “just block all the spammers”.

When your best users and your worst users share common outlying behaviour, things get tough.

Form the possessive of nouns by adding ‘s, just an apostrophe, just an s, a semicolon, a w, an ampersand, a 9, or anything. “My wifesd*porcupine hot pix for u.”

Interesting insight into the control interface for a spam-blasting botnet.

Good notes on the current state-of-the-art in the arms race between spammers and anti-spam software, trying to skip around OCRing images.

Justin’s guide to what’s new and cool in the latest version of SpamAssassin. Installing on my mail server now.

I’ve been experiencing this — Emails I send to HoTMaiL users are getting silently swallowed, neither bouncing nor ending up in their Spam folders.

Project Honey Pot announce a blacklist for IP addresses known to comment spam. This could be easy to integrate with a Django middleware…

Project Honey Pot’s traps are now presenting spiders with forms that resemble comments/guestbooks/forums to try to gather some data on comment spamming. If you have a web site, it’s well worth installing the honeypot (or linking to a QuickLink) to help the cause.

Art. “When a new spam email is detected by the installation, it automatically prints it out. The printed email slides down a track into the shredder that analyzes it.”

Interesting article on the architecture and design decisions behind mailinator.com, your local friendly low-hassle disposable email address site.

Anatomy of a pump’n’dump scam. Or: Why you’re getting so much more spam this month.

New open database of user-submitted Phishing URLs. Somewhat reminiscent of Mark Fletcher’s old “Trustic” startup. Not sure how well the submission/validation system will scale, or deal with gaming, but it could be interesting to watch.

SpamAssassin plugin which OCRs the images attached to image-only mails to work out if they contain text like V14GRA. I imagine this is massively CPU-intense, but it might be worth looking at.

MT plugin that adds “Deny” entries to your .htaccess file when someone’s clobbering you with comment spam, saving you the CPU cycles. I’ve installed it — if it works, I’ll be giddy as a schoolgirl.

“Derek Trotter” gets a Nigerian scammer to ship a wooden carving of a Commodore 64. Just fantastic!

When Enrorn was investigated, the contents of their Exchange server was made public. Here’s some of the more amusing things found inside.

Visualizations on how Yahoo, Google and MSN (and comment spam bots) spider through content.

The hugely-successful Akismet anti-comment-spam plugin for Wordpress has been ported to MT.

SiteAdvisor’s excellent analysis of webcrap continues. Signing-up for “free” computer games gets you bombarded with 15 spam emails a day.