For the past 18 months, engineers at PayPal, Google, Facebook, Yahoo, AOL, Microsoft and
nine other technology companies have spent their off-hours (and some on-hours) working hand in hand to tackle the problem that plagues them all: e-mail
phishing. The result is
DMARC, or, "Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance". It's not new, but puts
SPF and
DKIM to work in a new
way.
posted by Blake
on Jan 31, 2012 -
45 comments
Mr. Destructo (
previously) discusses the
inscrutable twitter bot named
horse_ebooks, a Russian spam account that communicates entirely through snippets of ebooks and is more hilarious (
1,
2,
3,
4), confusing (
1,
2,
3,
4) and philosophically poetic (
1,
2,
3,
4) than any non-spambot on the internet.
posted by cobra_high_tigers
on Sep 23, 2011 -
34 comments
Do you want some Spam with your Kindle? Spam has hit the Kindle, clogging the online bookstore of the top-selling eReader with material that is far from being book worthy and threatening to undermine Amazon.com Inc's publishing foray.
posted by Fizz
on Jun 17, 2011 -
95 comments
Through purchasing Viagra, herbal remedies, and replica watches, computer scientists explain how modern spam works. The spam business model consists of three components: advertising, click support (i.e., delivering the customer to an actual website), and realization (i.e., receiving payment and delivering the product to the customer). Different firms located across the globe carry out the various tasks. For example, the website domains are registered in Russia, the credit card payments are handled by banks in Azerbaijan, and the pills are sent from manufacturers in India. The spam business infrastructure appears to be organized around a small number of affiliate programs that coordinate the activities among the different firms.
Click Trajectories: End-to-End Analysis of the Spam Value Chain (A 16 page PDF). [
via]
posted by Jasper Friendly Bear
on May 21, 2011 -
31 comments
Age of the Algorithm. In the age of the algorithm, you can get just about anything you think you want, learn everything you think you need to know, by clicking on a link or typing a few words into a search bar. On SEO, content farms, old media, and 'online sweatshops.' (
From Maisonneuve.)
posted by shakespeherian
on May 11, 2011 -
20 comments
The New Yorker dives deep into the world of Spiced Ham: "'You buy your spamming program and your spamming network. You obtain a list of mailing addresses. Anyone can do this in an hour. Then you put them all together and set up a Web site or go to a service provider. You can buy a server for a few hundred dollars and spam from that. Usually, the provider will shut you down quickly and you will be blacklisted. But then you move on to the next.' Among the systems that have been infected by networks of remote computers in the past two years were computers at the weapons division of the United States Naval Air Warfare Center and many machines operated by the Department of Defense."
posted by JPowers
on Aug 3, 2007 -
14 comments
Just when you thought virtual reality couldn't get any worse, it's
3D Email! "Immerse yourself in 3-D as you read and write your mail. Hang with your mail poolside, or feed your spam to the sharks! Deleting spam is so much fun, you may wish you had more! ...It's an email metaverse!"
posted by verb
on Jul 18, 2007 -
46 comments
What News Corp doesn't want you to know about myspace is that the much of the success of myspace was due to a large successful advertising campaign and it wasn't grass roots at all. They also don't want you to know that Tom Anderson didn't really create the site and that it is more spam 2.0 than anything else. The article is written by a 19 year old web journalist called Trent Lapinski. Has everyone just been had? Does it matter?
(via Digg and Valleywag)
posted by sien
on Sep 11, 2006 -
92 comments
