Archive of TheNextWeb.org
Written on November 13, 2008 – 3:47 pm
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, Serial Internet Entrepreneur
On the right here is a SpamCop Graph showing worldwide spam over the last 7 days. As you can see the was a drastic decrease of spam on Wednesday. The reason for this decline in spam is that last Tuesday two Internet providers cut off McColo’s (Site is down) connectivity to the Internet.
The firm was suspected of offering hosting service to, as the Washington Post describes it: “international firms and syndicates that are involved in everything from the remote management of millions of compromised computers to the sale of counterfeit pharmaceuticals and designer goods, fake security products and child pornography via email”.
Several spam watching companies noticed a huge drop in spam worldwide. Email security firm IronPort estimated that spam levels fell by 66% after Tuesday.
It is not just good news that this one particular host has been taken offline and we see a sudden decrease in spam. More important maybe is that spam might be a smaller problem to fix than we originally thought.
Maybe the 80/20 rule is applicable to spam too. Maybe if we can catch 20% of the companies making spam possible we will actually stop 80% of all spam sent worldwide. That would mean that a solution for the spam problem is within reach.
We might not be able to stop millions of spammers worldwide, but we sure as hell should be able to stop a few big ones.
I hope you like that post!
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Written on November 10, 2008 – 5:05 pm
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, Serial Internet Entrepreneur
Computer scientists from University of California, Berkeley and UC, San Diego (UCSD) have been spamming us. They admit it too. In an effort to get a better understanding of the deeper workings of SPAM they infiltrated a network of SPAMMERS and sent out almost 350 million e-mail messages within 26 days. To find out how effective SPAM actually is they set up a fake pharmacy campaign but showed an error message when people actually submitted their credit card details. They found out that only 28 people actually bought something which means they got a 0.00001% response rate.
“Taken together, these conversions would have resulted in revenues of $2,731.88—a bit over $100 a day for the measurement period,” said the researchers. The network of hacked computers they used to send spam controlled millions of PCs and sent out a lot more messages which the researchers estimate to generate about $7,000 a day or $3.5m a year. Not bad but not huge either. As the researchers concluded: “The profit margin for spam may be meager enough that spammers must be sensitive to the details of how their campaigns are run and are economically susceptible to new defenses.”
As it becomes harder to hack PCs and people are less eager to click on spam maybe one day sending SPAM will just become uneconomic. I sure hope so…
Written on September 4, 2008 – 11:35 am
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, Serial Internet Entrepreneur
On August 21 Twitter announced it would turn up the heat on spam. They introduced some measures to keep spammers from abusing the system including a new rule that forbid people from following more than 2000 people. Unsurprisingly spammer did not give up on twitter and are now finding new ways to game the system.
On the right here is a screenshot of my Inbox with Twitter notifications. As you can see these are clearly computer generated usernames.
Twitters new anti spam measures seem effective up to a certain point. Yes, the accounts are now suspended and show a message explaining that this might be a fake account: “This account is currently suspended and is being investigated due to strange activity”. Unfortunately the current fix only becomes effective after the damage is done:
It seems the sign-up process is currently too easy to automate and will keep attracting spammers looking for an easy way to reach an audience. The fight against spam will be an ongoing battle for Twitter. But you can help too! If you see a clear Twitter spammer just Tweet the following:
@spam @spammername
That will alert Twitter and will give them a chance to suspend the account before too much damage is done.
Written on August 21, 2008 – 8:31 pm
Robin Wauters, Next web enthusiast & Plugg organizer
My buddies over at Belgian web agency Netlash have updated one of the coolest looking tools they’ve ever built imho, so I couldn’t resist letting you in on it. I’m referring to Spamgarden, a Wordpress plugin that will wipe out every problem you’ve ever experienced with life online.
Actually, it won’t, it doesn’t even serve any other purpose than making spam look pretty (example).
The way they figured, spam isn’t good for anything (which would be true enough if it weren’t for the fact that so many people actually respond to it), so they decided that they could take something bad and make it into something good. That constructive way of thinking led to Spamgarden, which takes all the spam coming into your Wordpress installation and uses it as fertilizer for a virtual tree made out of random keywords from the junk.
Enjoy!
Written on August 20, 2008 – 11:11 am
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
29 percent of Internet users have purchased something they were pointed to via spam, according to a study by Marshal. Not surprisingly, the most commonly purchased items include Viagra and porn, but also software, and luxury items such as watches, jewelery and clothing - the counterfeit type.
622 visitors of the Marshal site took a poll, which asked ‘What purchases have you made from spam?’. Quite a tendentious question if you’d ask me. ‘Have you made purchases from spam?’, would have been a more balanced question.
Anyway, a similar poll from Forrester Research from 2004 showed that out of 6,000 respondents, 20 percent had made purchases from spam. So the problem is getting worse. A reason for this could be that Internet users have gotten more used to making online purchases. Or that spam has become more sophisticated (in a negative way), like blog spam.
If taken seriously, this study shows that spam is a matter of supply and demand. “The poll highlights an inconvenient truth,” said Marshal’s Vice-President of Products, Bradley Anstis. “Many of us often question ourselves, why is there so much spam? The answer is, enough people are purchasing products from spam to make it a worthwhile and profitable endeavor for spammers.”
Marshal’s Website poll indicates that the number of respondents who admitted to making a purchase through spam have made multiple purchases; on average, more than two different types of purchase per person. This supports the conclusion that those who buy from spam make a habit of it. My guess is that people buy stuff via spam which they wouldn’t dare to buy in public.
So spam turns out to be a rather booming business. No wonder the number of spam emails already make up for 85 percent of all email traffic. Anstis: “There are approximately 250 million people out there who are interested in these kinds of products and have made purchases from spam in the past. That’s equivalent to double the population of Japan mixed in with every other Internet user. As a spammer - how do you reach that market without knowing specifically who these people are and with the bare minimum of expense? Easy, send lots of emails to everyone.”
Written on August 12, 2008 – 10:47 am
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, Serial Internet Entrepreneur
In an effort to prevent spam Twitter has rolled out some new features yesterday. The most important one being a secret formula that makes it impossible to follow more than 2000 people.
Unless your behavior doesn’t fit the profile of a spammer. Then you will be able to follow more than 2000 people.
Confused? Well, that’s the point:
“We don’t reveal exact limits, because it’s somewhat complicated and, more importantly, if you were to tell spammers exactly what the filtering rules are on your email or, say, Google’s PageRank, they’d just engineer their way around them much more easily. “
Twitter reiterates that if you happen to be affected by the Max follower rule that doesn’t necessarily mean you ar a spammer. Just that your behavior triggered the anti spam formula. Accounts that currently have more than 2000 followers won’t be actively downgraded but it might be impossible to follow more people.
If you are following close to 2000 people, or more, let us know how the new rules affect you.
Written on June 25, 2008 – 8:55 am
Robin Wauters, Next web enthusiast & Plugg organizer
TechCrunch, the Web 2.0 blog we all read, has recently expanded into a network of no less than fifteen sites with the inception of TechCrunchIT, which aims to focus a bit more on the enterprise side of the next web. Impressive, and somehow I’m getting the feeling it’s not going to end with those 15. However, CrunchNetwork , as it’s often referred to by the cool kids, also boasts a giant black hole which has gone mostly unnoticed for the past couple of months: TechCrunch Forums.
Update (11:30 AM CET): Looks like it went really unnoticed up until now. Someone took the TC Forums down, it now redirects to the main blog.
Launched in January 2007, the idea behind the so-called CrunchForums was to provide (and I’m quoting from the introduction post):
“a good place to pitch your new startup or product if it hasn’t been featured yet on TechCrunch (or even if it has), share tips with the community, spread rumors, or endlessly debate the definition (or existence) of Web 2.0.”
I’m not going to start a debate about whether or not ‘old-school’ message boards and forums belong alongside a new media property like TechCrunch, but has anyone taken a look at those forums lately?
First of all, the main category currently contains 832 messages in 449 threads. The lion share of these messages come from two fake users who are manually or automatically adding spam links to some website offering exam preparation packages (see screenshot below). The rest of the forums are hardly in better shape; you’ll find most users to be pushing crap software applications and devices, plugging completely unrelated websites, and other good old spam. And don’t even get me started on the way some users are self-promoting their startup or service on there.
Second, TechCrunch Forums is a ghost town. I checked every moderator account I came across, only to find most of them have not logged in for several months, and I’d bet good money on the assumption that none of TC’s editorial staff have done so either. If a legitimate question is asked (e.g. this one), there’s a good chance it won’t be read, let alone answered, which of course totally discourages anyone with good intentions to come back.
I reckon the CrunchForums still generate a good deal of pageviews, but in the spirit of Ernst-Jan’s latest post on ‘killing your darlings‘, allow me to suggest either ruthlessly cleaning up the site to get it back on track, or stop giving spammers such an easy-to-use platform by deadpooling it. I know it must have cost some money to implement (the forum software is a paying service by Jive Software), but why let people with bad intentions take advantage of a high-PageRank message board which is ultimately linked to at the bottom of every TechCrunch blog post?
Written on May 22, 2008 – 1:15 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Because of its malicious effect on our beloved web industry, we’ve discussed the practice of domain front running a lot on The Next Web. We have to get rid of it, that’s why we try to raise awareness. For those of you who don’t exactly know what is, Eric Litman from WashingtonVC once gave a good definition in the comments section of this blog:
Front Running: when a registrar purchases a name for themselves that someone either attempted to purchase or researched through that registrars web site.
So when you check the availability of thisdomainserviceisonebigscam.com at a domain company that just loves front running, chances are high they’ll register it for you. Even Network Solutions is has been accused of this practice once.
Yesterday I wrote about the popularity of the new .me domain. And when you think about it, it’s not that weird that these front running types also try to make some dirty money in this new area. Well, my co-editor Patrick has just discovered on of the first signs.
If you do a Google-search for “Register Me Domain“, one of the top results is Domain-me.com, a site that tries to appear as a trustworthy domain name registration service. They even have the dull stock photos thing going on. Yet when you check a domain, any domain, they say that your desired domain has already been taken. Even the thisdomainserviceisonebigscam.me one:
Let’s hope Google’s head of the Webspam team Matt Cutts will find this out soon and ban this “Market-Tek Enterprises” company from the search results.
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