no! It hasn’t.
But now there is the first
trojan it seems.
You need to download and click on it. It’s finder icon appears to be forged to look like a jpeg file.
Now would be the time to see if the “Broken Windows” theorem holds true.
Category: malware
You an apply the Broken Windows Theory at spam blogs as well. There was always ample opportunity for spammers in blogs. Now they are in, and they make revenue. So they enhance their spam blogs to stay in the game. Here two splogs out of a current campaign:
They certainly get better.
http://thisasseenontvpetsteps.blogspot.com/
or
http://thisdoggieramp.blogspot.com/
not your usual link collection.
ok, provokative title. Let’s rephrase: google tolerates spam.
Blogger is owned by google. It runs the biggest blog service on it’s blogspot domain.
It appears to be very simple to create hundrets of thousands of ‘weblogs’ like this:
http://p85.blogspot.com/
Created solely for spam purposes. So called ‘splogs’. You set up a robot and there is nothing in the blogger software that stops you from adding all the blogs you like.
This is not new. Google / Blogger / Blogspot knows about it. They did nothing against it in the last years.
It should be relatively easy to make sure that there is a human in front of the computer if a new weblog is created at blogspot.com. Simplecaptchas are very common today.
There are two possible explainations why this did not happen yet:
– blogspot engineering is amazing incapable
or
– there is no real rush to get rid of splogs on googles side.
It might make sense:
You have to forget the “don’t be evil” and “organize the worlds information and make it easily accessible” google dogma’s for a second though. Google knows one thing very very well: how to run a scalable service. They have the lowest cost per stored bit due to their own file system technology. It uses commodity hardware and adds failover management brilliantly. It does cost google not much to host millions of splogs.
But wouldn’t million of false blogs pose a danger to the result-quality of a search engine?
Exactly.
Google knows from which ip address a blog get’s maintained. Nobody else does. They have the actual blog data readily available for further parsing. I doubt that the googlebot comes through the front door to blogspot. The bandwidth alone that you could be saved by crawling blogsport internally should make up for the ‘exception’ that this would mean to the googlebot operations. I don’t know these things. It’s a guess.
Every search engine has to have spam combat tools these days. Google is one of the most useful search engines and in the US they have an ok handle on search engine spam. Isn’t it funny that they don’t use their insider knowledge and acess together with their anti-spam tools to simple turn off splogs on blogspot?
Last October there was somebody that scraped famous blogers sites and reposted that content splogs. That got some attention, and stopped. But splogs did not.
Blogspot hosts lots of splogs. But also lots of legit and very powerful weblogs. Nobody can really afford to ignore the biggest weblog service. Yahoo, Msn and even my little BlogsNow have to crawl blogspot in order to find out what is going on. Google can skip the skip, all others have to deal with it.
There is also a third theory that is the most plausible:
splogs don’t matter to search engines. They have to crawl billions of pages anyway. Who cares about a couple of million spam blogs here and there. That’s probably what it is: The aircraft carrier keeps on going regardless if there are 50% more roaches in the kitchen or not.
elvis elvis
elvis elvis321
elvis elvis123
elvis 1
elvis 12
elvis 123
elvis 1234
elvis 12345
elvis 123456
elvis password
elvis passwd
elvis test
elvis test123
elvis sivle
unix is secure. But only as secure as your passwords: Just came across this lame rootkit on some computer.
Above the passwords that it seems to try for all users it seems to be frequent enough. Pretty lame, but it seems to work.
If you think you are smart and have a password like ‘usermane’ then think again.
File servers. No big deal. I am dealing with kind of thing since more than ten years. And it works.
We tried OS X Server 10.2.8 a while back, and it was bad. Now I have to deal with it again: OS X 10.4.3
and it still is junk. It is broken. Things don’t work as they should. Apples way of doing things is
incompatible with everything. It is such a waste of time. If they add a guy then they should leave
the way things are done underneath as everybody would expect them. XServers get bought by people
for their shiny facade. Which is all ok for me. Just that the inner workings of it are simply rotten.
The non server version of OS X is much more consistent with having all features in the system preferences
sharing.
it’s all gory details. I don’t even want to go into it. It was broken with 10.2.8. With 10.4.3 it is still broken.
Fileservers are not THAT important that you want to waste your entire worklife administrating them.
And with Linux (or even SGI for that matter) you don’t have to. You learn the meaning of a few commands and
are done with it.
It really is bulshit. If you consider to get a server, don’t get an Apple one. They are too expensive and work not in a way that would make any sense …
Once in a while I watch how the BlogsNow bot crawls. Url’s running by. Today a yahoo Groups URL caught my eye. I didn’t know that yahoo uses ping services for these pages. I don’t think they do.
I asked BlogsNow for all yahoo Groups and got a list of 42,278 different ones. I clicked randomly on 5, and looked over the names of hundreds. I could not find a single legit one. The spam content that gets pushed via yahoo groups is the same than on spam blogs.
No need for examples.
Blogdex is still down. So I thought I might run some google adwords pointing people to BlogsNow.
Turned out somebody was faster: Right now I see an add for blogturbo dot com. Interesting what google advertises for:
It costs only 149 US$ and you can generate thousands of weblogs pointing to your site. This looks like a keyword spam tool to me.
Interesting that google runs ads for it.
Then I wonderred what is going on at daypop.com
Turns out they are down as well …
update November 1st
Blogdex: “up” again, yet results are old/pointless right now.
Daypop: back up again, results make sense. the usual 24 hour delay
blogturbo: still showing ads on google adwords for blogdex.
BlogsNow gets seven pings a second. I just had a cursory look over those. Yes, they are all spam.
If you should still ping BlogsNow in good intention please stop doing so. If you ping BlogsNow in the future then your weblog will go on the black list. Sorry.