facebook group

Funnily enough, someone has gone and created a new facebook group. It is called 'I bet I can find 1 million people who hate Etisalat spam text messages' and is open for membership now.

Spammer!

The Fat Expat got hit by a comment spammer today - www.dubaipropertiesportal.com is the outfit, offering stunning services just to readers of a food blog that are interested in fillet steak: "Dubai Properties Portal its one of the best property portal in Dubai. With us you can list your property for FREE in a few minutes."

Interestingly, I'm in a bad mood and the jerk behind the site has left his contact details all over WHOIS. So for anyone else (I've already had a go) who feels strongly about spam and particularly comment spam on their blogs (it REALLY ticks me off), you can take it all out on Florin by mobile, mail or email. I recommend mobile - it really is MOST satisfying.

Enjoy!!!


Registration Service Provided By: Supreme Center
Contact:
Visit: http://www.propersupport.com/

Domain name: dubaipropertiesportal.com

Registrant Contact:

Florin Campulungeanu ()

Fax:
Al Barsha
Dubai, 29948
AE

Administrative Contact:

Florin Campulungeanu ()
971504785426
Fax:
Al Barsha
Dubai, 29948
AE

Technical Contact:

Florin Campulungeanu ()
971504785426
Fax:
Al Barsha
Dubai, 29948
AE

Status: Locked

Name Servers:
ns1.exclusivehosting.net
ns2.exclusivehosting.net

Creation date: 09 Sep 2008 05:30:10
Expiration date: 09 Sep 2009 05:30:10

Comment Spam

Is anyone else having a problem with spam comments from Property in Dubai? Maybe it's just me, but I think it is incredibly rude of them to add comments that always include a link to their website. If they want prominent links that will enhance their search engine rankings, the least they can do is pay for them!

Out out dam spam

From The New Yorker Annals of Technology

Graham compared every character—dashes, apostrophes, numbers, symbols—in thousands of genuine e-mails with those in thousands of pieces of spam. He was able to train his software to use the context of a message to guess how likely it was that an e-mail containing certain words in relation to each other was spam. The words “republic” and “madam” seem innocent enough, but when they appear together in an e-mail they are often from a Nigerian huckster who has addressed his e-mail “Dear Sir or Madam.” Mail like that is invariably spam.

As filters become more sophisticated, spam becomes more elusive. There are millions of ways to write a word using punctuation, numbers, and other symbols. One mathematically minded blogger who looked into it found that there are 600,426,974,379,824,381,952 ways to spell Viagra. “If I thought that I could keep up current rates of spam filtering, I would consider this problem solved,” Graham wrote. “But it doesn’t mean much to be able to filter out most present-day spam, because spam evolves.” Indeed, most anti-spam techniques so far have been like pesticides that do nothing other than create a more resistant strain of bugs.

Read it all.

Thanks to Craig Newmark for the link. Craig notes,

Bill Gates infamously predicted in 2004 that the problem of spam would be solved "in about two years".

The image of where Bill pulled that one from is rather vivid.