Posts filed under “spam”
PicPedant
@PicPedant Exposed DC Interview Slate story on viral pic accounts mentions PicPedant on page 2 Buzzfeed: 14 Incredible But Fake Viral Images – And The Twitter Account Debunking The Picspammers (by Tom Phillips) There’s a certain class of Twitter users who post nothing but pictures, calling themselves names like “HistoryPics”, “EarthPix”, “SpacePorn”, and such. They’ve […]
Quoted in Guardian on Twitter Spam
I got a passing quote and link in this Guardian technology article: “Why are there no spam or trolls on Twitter?” by Kate Bevan, jumping off from Russell Beattie’s musings on the topic. I would dispute the titles of both articles; there absolutely are spammers (and trolls) on Twitter. The articles do append their praise […]
New .info Spam Run
The site’s been getting lightly hit at intervals by a series of spam comments and referrers using multiple drug-based subdomains prefixed to a fix set of rotating .info domains. Pretty common and predictable spam strategy, and still just a few hits so far, but it may start ramping up, so those of you who want […]
Twitter Spam
Okay, Twitter, this is just getting ridiculous: Not content with single friend/follow notifications, Twitter spammers are removing and re-adding and following and un-following people so as to be able to send more notifications. Yes, yes, I know about the block feature, but that’s like the whack-a-mole routine of maintaining an IP deny blacklist on one’s […]
MSRBOT at 209.249.11.4
Would someone at Microsoft please explain why something from IP 209.249.11.4 is crawling this site extensively and using up huge quantities of bandwidth while passing a clearly faked “blogger.com” referrer field in the headers? This is behavior I usually associate with malicious spam and scraper bots, and indeed in the past I have had to […]
Phish Snooping for Beginners
So I get a phishing message telling me “Your Bank of America account has been closed, click here to reactivate it.” Nothing new. I don’t even have a BoA account, and even if I did, I know enough to avoid phishes. But before clicking on the “Report phishing” link, I try a click on the […]
Update on Pingdom Referrer Spam
Update, 11/16/2006: See this comment from Pingdom on the issue. They claim they are tweaking the GIGRIB bot for better behavior and will soon have a working monitoring page on the other end of the referrer. (Preview of that here.) Update, 2007: Well, the public monitoring page never happened, and Pingdom’s spoofed referrers still forward […]
An Open Letter to Pingdom.com on the Topic of Referrer Spam
Update, 11/16/2006: Pingdom responds. Please note also that JDCDesigns is innocent: jdcdesigns.com. Hello! Lately I’ve been noticing hits in my referrer logs from pages on pingdom.com which seem to be linking to my site, but when clicked through, do not actually exist. The false hits are coming from 66.98.148.24, which is a server on EV1 […]
Comments, Archives, and Speed
I discovered a few months ago that Movable Type commenting on HNBP was slowed down by republishing of static monthly and category archives. (See Scot Hacker’s Foobar Blog and UnderscoreBleach.net for details.) Basically anything that had a pertinent tag in it was being rebuilt everytime a comment was submitted, and the default template was set […]
Outage
Sorry about the overnight outage. The site was hit by a “XANAX” comment spam attack, prompting a well-justified overnight lockdown from Site5. The spams came in at a rate of about 2-5 comments per second, from a botnet — a network of infected PCs — with machines mostly in the 212.138.64 range. This meant multiple […]