News and views
News
Tuesday, January 10th, 2006
Server move finally finished
After a couple of technical problems, chongqed.org now resides on a new server.
The new server should be a lot faster; we can now install all the Perl modules we ever wanted and thus I hope that chongqed.org's quality of service will be improved by the move.
Wednesday, March 9th, 2005
marketingfuture.com - a spammer?
In the last two days, I have my cleaning bot clean the Spanish GNU wiki. It seems to be abandoned; nobody was removing all the spam and thus I found it with more than 1,000 spammy edits the other day.
Today, it was relatively quiet there. The page that my bot had to revert most often is a page created by one of the spammers: Qiyang.
So I entered the term Qiyang into Google and the first result is for a SEO company that boasts "7 year experience of search engine optimization". And further: "You can be highly successful in China - you just have to know how to do it correctly".
So I guess the obvious question is: Is marketingfuture.com a major spamming organization?
Monday, February 7th, 2005
Default blacklist for DokuWiki: http://blacklist.chongqed.org
I just found out that the DokuWiki engine uses chongqed.org's blacklist as the default blacklist for spam prevention!
Thursday, January 20th, 2005
The chongqed.org newsfeed
Everybody just has to have one these days, and that's why chongqed.org now has one too: a RSS feed.
If you want to stay informed about the world of wiki spam and about chongqed.org, simply direct your feed reader to this address: http://chongqed.org/cgi-bin/feed.pl.
Wednesday, January 19th, 2005
rel="nofollow" update
As a follow-up on the Google story, I can now report that the good folks maintaining the MediaWiki software have already implemented this for WikiPedia!
Thanks!
Wednesday, January 19th, 2005
Google to eliminate comment and wiki spam?
Google announced yesterday that they will give us a weapon against comment spam: the rel="nofollow" attribute for links. This gives you a per-link choice about search engine indexing as opposed to the per-page choice, authors have had until now.
The idea is that blog software is supposed to give any link in a comment that attribute while the links in the blog post itself can still be followed and bloggers can thus still influence the page rank of pages or google bomb each other.
This seems like a excellent idea and I wonder why they didn't come up with it (much) earlier. Of course, this can easily be brought to the wiki world. I hope that the maintainers of wiki engines take notice and implement this (at least as an option) ASAP.
Tuesday, December 14th, 2004
A broken spam bot?
In the recent days, I noticed vandalism on several wikis. The vandal always comes with the hostname 64.125.108.5.available.above.net. Searching Google for this hostname reveals that he is busy on most every wiki out there.
Usually, all he does is remove everything following the first few lines of a page. Since he is returning quite frequently and since I cannot imagine somebody so bored that he will spent his days deleting stuff from wikis, my guess is that he is using a bot. Probably a script kiddy that harbors some grudge against wikis. You can find on example of his weird hobby on the Know-how wiki.
Monday, December 13th, 2004
chongqed DOSed
Yesterday, we had the first denial-of-service attack on chongqed.org.
The attacker had the hostname dpc6682009069.direcpc.com,
his browser (or whatever it was he used to do this), didn't send any
referrer strings. It did send the user agent string
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; .NET CLR 1.0.3705; .NET CLR 1.1.4322).
The attack started at 20:48 (GMT +1) and ended at 21:40. During those 52 minutes, he sent 2825 page requests to the keywords and spammers pages (all of them served by a script).
Hoping that he did not use a proxy, I have informed his ISP.
I also implemented a surge protection scheme for the script that serves all those pages.
It seems that chongqed.org is working: we are able to annoy the hell out of some spammers out there.
Wednesday, December 1st, 2004
Finally: A European spammer
Seems like the Chinese wiki spamming frenzy encouraged some American and European spammers to vandalize a wiki or two. Those guys are really doing their spamming at a Chinese scale. They don't just add a few links, they add dozens.
Our first spammer in this sorry category seems to be a Mr. A. Keegan from Norfolk, UK. He owns the domains adultfriendfindernow.com, adultfriendsite.com, dating999.com, diet-pills-now.net, fabuloussextoys.com, findbestpills.com, and kucko.com. Well, at least he's been spamming for those recently. Who knows what other domains are his. It's interesting to look at the whois records. At some point he must have thought that having his name in those records isn't too smart when you are trying to pay the rent by spamming. So he tried the services of "Domains by Proxy, Inc.", left away his phone number, and his name. Seems he hasn't yet settled on one method to obscure his identity.
Here's some chongqing for Mr. Keegan:
adipex, adipex online, adult dating, adult dating online, adult finder, adult friend, adult friend find, adult friend finder, adult friend finder coupon, adult personals, adult personals online, adult sex, adult sex toys, adult toy store, adult toys, adultfriendfinder, adultfriendfinder com, adutltfriendfinder, anal toy, big dildo, brutal dildo, buy adipex, buy cialis, buy didrex, buy levitra, buy phentermine, buy propecia, buy soma, buy tramadol, buy ultram, buy viagra, buy viagra online, carisoprodol, cheap cialis, cheap didrex, cheap levitra, cheap phentermine, cheap propecia, cheap soma, cheap tramadol, cheap viagra, christian dating online, christian dating service online, cialis, cialis online, cialis viagra, dating, dating online, dating personals online, dating service online, dating site online, dating web site online, didrex, didrex online, dildo, dildo vibrator, free adult personals, free dating online, free personals online, friend finder, generic cialis, generic viagra, huge dildo, internet dating online, internet dating service online, jack rabbit vibrator, levitra, levitra online, on line dating online, online dating online, online dating service online, order phentermine, order viagra, personals online, phentermine, phentermine online, phentermine prescription, photo personals, photo personals online, propecia, purchase phentermine, rabbit vibrator, sex movie, sex personals, sex shop, sex store, sex toy, sex toy shop, sex toy store, sex toys, sex videos, singles dating online, soma, soma online, tramadol, tramadol online, ultram, ultram online, viagra, viagra levitra, viagra online, viagra prescription, vibrator, vibrators.
Tuesday, November 2nd, 2004
haibo.com: spammers!
I guess I finally found one of the companies that do the spamming for a lot of Chinese websites: haibo.com.
I just found spam for super glue which (from an advertizing kind of view) was pretty well done. The super glue manufacturer that was spamvertized is pasco-stationery.com. And at the bottom of www.pasco-stationery.com, you can find this little ad: "Designed & Supported By Haibo Network Inc.".
A look at haibo.com through the Babelfish, pretty much settled it.
Thursday, October 28th, 2004
More from the wire mesh spammer
The wire mesh spammer from China is now resorting to using a proxy on the comcast.net network.
He is currently spamming wikis at an amazing speed using that proxy with his usual crappy keywords: wire mesh, musical instrument, battery, garden tool, etc. His favorite, of course, is wire mesh. And he seems to be determined to push no less than 53 domains that are somehow connected to the wire mesh network.
I wrote an email to abuse at comcast.net and I really hope that they will close this proxy.
Tuesday, October 19th, 2004
Nutty spammer
The chongqed.org wiki has been spammed again. This time, the spammer had the IP address 61.179.12.211, which (again!) points to China.
The really interesting part of this story comes from my server logs: He came from the WikiSpam page on the KaminskiWiki. That WikiSpam page contains the usual blacklist along with a link to chongqed.org that you can find on many wikis these days. He looked at spammers.chongqed.org for half a minute and then took a look at our antispam links. From there he went straight to our wiki, looked at its HomePage for another 30 seconds and then spammed it. Just like that.
Here are his keywords:
Wednesday, October 13th, 2004
Phone Mr. Zhang
I just found the telephone number of a spammer from China!
This guy has been spamming for guanghui12.51.net. If you run this page through the BabelFish, you get a lot of incomprehensible gibberish, but we all understand this paragraph:
"This domain name passes through the massive advertisements propaganda by the intercom as the key word, the search place prominent, the current capacity is huge, wants to transfer: Disposable transfer price 8,000 Yuan Consults the telephone: 022-27378036, Mr. Zhang"
In fact, the keyword used was "intercom" and the advertisement propaganda was massive. Good ol' Mr. Zhang seems to be amongst the spammers in the latest spam run from China.
Oh, by the way: the area code for China seems to be 0086 and 8,000 Yuan are roughly $970 or 785 Euro.
Tuesday, October 12th, 2004
Chinese spam frenzy
The wiki community is currently hit by a huge wave of spam from China.
There are several spammers now that will vandalized pages by dumping incredible amounts of spam on any wiki page they can find.
Fortunately, this is happening just after we updated our database and scripts to be able to deal with Chinese keywords. Combine this with the current frenzy and you'll figure out why our database has grown substantially in the last couple of days.
Our indeces of spammers and keywords are now divided into Chinese and non-Chinese keywords. This doesn't mean that the latter does not contain Chinese spammers, though. Thus we are currently offering four lists of spammers and their keywords:
- spammers using Chinese keywords
- spammers using non-Chinese keywords
- Chinese keywords
- non-Chinese keywords
The worst offenders ("the nefarious ramifications of Pure Evil" as our new friend Emile would put it) are 1so.com.cn, best88.com, chunmeng.com, cz-huifa.com, ponytest.com, shop263.com, sinoart.com.cn, suolide.googlebaidu.com, and most certainly one of the most evil spammers of all times: ec51.com.
Wednesday, October 6th, 2004
Another pissed-off spammer
We have another case of a pissed-off spammer. This one has been spamming for hukuki.net and is from Turkey. He has been spamming mostly guest books, but here and there he also liked to plant links to hukuki.net on wikis, especially on the wikipedia where Angela noted in April:
"hukuki.net are spamming hundreds of wikis, and many of the small Wikipedias have been attacked. It was added to the law article here. Most of the others had it put on their Main Page and disclaimers page. Often they hide the link by typing something [http://hukuk*.net _], so it just appears as an underscore of the page, which can easily be missed. Please watch out for this and revert it immediately.".
A couple of days ago, he asked on Joe's user page on the wiki to be taken off our "blacklist". Apparently he had found out that he was in the chongqed.org database and on the wiki blacklist that you can find on many wikis out there. Seems he didn't like that. It also seems like he doesn't think he is a spammer. He claims that all he did was write his opinion on guest books (where is opinion was always something like "cool page" or "good job", always shorter than http://www.hukuki.net). He also claims that his edits on wikipedia were for the better of..., I don't know, mankind perhaps. OK, so neither of us knows Turkish, so we cannot judge his own website. But whether it is useful or not, we don't think you should be spamming for anything.
Joe answered him something to that effect and he didn't like it. Instead sending a sensible reply back to Joe, he sent a quite emabarassing email that ended with "Please do not reply. I accepted I am a spammer. Good chance and clear idea...". And he decided to go on a rampage and spam the hell out of wikipedia. His briliant trick was not to spam for his site this time, but for Wikipedia, Yahoo, Google, Altavista, c2.com, usemod.com, emacswiki.org, and chongqed.org. Nice job! And the final answer to the question whether we should let him off the hook or not. NOT!
The details about the hukuki.net story can be found on the chongqed.org wiki on Joe's user page and on the DiscussChongqed page. And you can find Joe's views on this on his blog
Saturday, September 25th, 2004
First spam on the chongqed.org wiki
It happened! The chongqed.org wiki has finally been spammed. The spammer had the IP address 211.147.229.121 which points to China (of course). The funny part is that he came from Google where he was searching for " www.emmss. com". That's how he found our SpamReport page on the wiki. He didn't look at any other pages, just went ahead and spammed that page. Not in a particularly smart way, I might add. He used a strange syntax that is probably legal on certain bulleting boards, but it didn't win him much on our wiki. He also spammed many other pages that Google returned for his search on emmss.com. Seems somebody was smart enough to use the domain name emmss.com as a searcht term that guaranteed to return spammable guestbooks.
Of course, we should chongq him right away. But there is one problem: All his keywords where in Chinese. I can't read Chinese and I don't even know how our database system would react to characters with that encoding. So I can't really chongq him. Looking at the domain names he spammed for, it seems that it was the usual lot: SEO outfits and the odd kitchen supply store.
That's why we need your help: If you speak (or at least read) Chinese, could you please contact us to help fight the Chinese wiki spam that is so prevalent? Just write an email to manni@chongqed.org or show up on the chongqed.org wiki.
And here is the list of spamvertized domains: 2881.com, 58882.com, 592mir.com, 99lhc.org, 99lhc.org, agreatserver.com, chinazrzz.com, dakuohai.net, google1000.com, hk9697.com, jmd.com.cn, ke-fei.com, rainbowvc.com, sakurakitchen.com.cn, su968.com, sz-daking.com, sz-google.com, szhx.net, sztongyi.com, tekall.com, vivaful.com, and yibt.com.
Tuesday, September 14th, 2004
Cigarettes, degrees, green cards, and mortgages
It seems that the wiki community is being plagued by another spam wave. Again.
This time, the spammer has a netvision.net.il IP address and the whole operation is caried out in a very stupid manner:
- The spammer doesn't seem to care whether his links work or don't work.
- The spammer doesn't seem to care whether he has already spammed a page or not.
- The spamvertized websites all redirect to different sites on the adprofile.net network. But many of these redirects aren't set up directly. The spam links for online diplomas and cigarettes, e.g., both get you to the online-diploma spam page.
- The spammer is using (what he thinks is) html. But the <a href= tags have alt attributes. They also have title attributes which is ok (html-wise), but he didn't quote his keywords. Google would have a hard time with that spam.
I have added all the domain keyword combos to the database, chongqing not only the spamvertized domains but also adprofile.net: mortgage, mortgages, refinance mortgage, refinance mortgages, online university, online degree, online universities, online degrees, online education, aiuonline, devry college, university of phoenix, foreign exchange, forex, forex trading, green card, cigarettes, cigarette, cheap cigarettes, spyware, spyware removal, web hosting, hosting, domain hosting, site hosting, online dating, dating, dating service, poker, online poker, and poker room.
Sunday, August 15th, 2004
New features on chongqed.org
Today, chongqed.org sees one change and one addition.
Let's start with the change: the index of spammers and the keyword index now each have links to little pages that have two textareas. These textareas contain the html and wiki code you need to link to chongq.org, chongqing a special keyword in the process.
The addition is far more exciting: chongqed.org now has its own wiki! A few comments on our blogs (Joe's blog, Manni's blog), made us aware of the fact that chongqed.org doesn't have something like a forum where you can give us feedback.
Because chongqed.org primarily serves the wiki community, we settled for a wiki instead of some web forum. You can find the chongqed.org wiki at http://wiki.chongqed.org/. Have fun, share your opinions, and please don't spam us.
Wednesday, August 11th, 2004
chongqed.com
chongqed.org now has a rival site: chongqed.com. Here's the story:
I was on a short vacation last week and when I got back I found a little email conversation in my inbox that Joe had forwarded me. A spammer named Lior Yashinski had issued an ultimatum. He told us to remove the site usagc.us from our database or he would "mess up with your site and get it removed from the search engines".
Since Lior didn't want to hear that I was away and that Joe couldn't remove anything from the database, he got ahead and registered chongqed.com.
I don't know what his plans exactly are, but he seems to be determined to spend time and money to lower chongqed.org's page rank by getting some page rank for chongqed.com.
Well, fine. We don't really care about our page rank. We never planned to sell the domain or run ads, so we aren't followers of some page rank cult.
Why he does all this is a little more clear. As he says himself, he is a spammer (or was) and he doesn't approve of chongqed.org and how we are trying to ruin his reputation and that of his clients.
Well, what can we say to this? If you don't want to ruin your reputation, you can simply behave and refrain from spamming in any way. If you piss in my garden and I tell the neighbors about it, who is ruining your reputation? Me? Sorry, but I don't think so.
Tuesday, July 13th, 2004
Pissed-off spammer's comments
A little update: Seems like that pissed-off spammer didn't trust our spammer submission form, he also posted comments to my blog and Joe's blog.
The comment on my blog seems to be in German, but sounds a lot like the Babel Fish to me.
Tuesday, July 13th, 2004
casino-online-on-line.com
It seems that we have a new friend: the casino-online-on-line.com spammer. We already knew that he is able to spam wikis (but unable to check whether his spamming really had any effect), we already knew that he likes to spam for his online casino, but will sometimes also spam for viagra (not much of a surprise).
Today, he impressed us with his other talents: He can use Google and he can deal with some kind of image processing software. Wow. How cool is that?
How do I know that our friend is that much of a genius? He used our spammer submission form to send us a URL. I don't know why he didn't simply email us, but we got your URL allright, don't worry, spammer. The URL is: www.exit.co.il/images/logo57.jpg.
Yes, that's really me on that picture! It was taken when I was on holiday at the Baltic Sea. And I used it for the little info page they keep about me at the university.
I don't know why Mr. Spammer thinks that I'm a loser, but, of course, that's just a matter of opinion and even spammer's are entitled to have their own views on the world. What puzzles me is that he signed it with "HAKDATA". I always thought that the Hakdata spammer was German and whenever we tracked him down, he used a German IP address. But that submission came from the IP address 80.230.158.139, which points to Israel, just like exit.co.il.
Well, whether this was the hakdata spammer or the casino-online-on-line spammer or whether they are both the same guy, I must say that I had a really good laugh. And it's a rare occasion when a spammer gives me a good laugh. So: Thank you very much, Mr. Spammer, wherever you are, whoever you are. Keep up the good work and we'll keep up ours.
Thursday, July 8th, 2004
casino-online-on-line.com
One of our most recent (and most aggressive) spammers, casino-online-on-line.com has spawned some very interesting research. Joe kicked it off on his blog and followed up on the topic several times: [2], [3]. Then I had to join in with some more findings and a follow-up. It was Joe's turn again and he fired a quick salvo: [1], [2], [3].
If you don't want to read all of that, I sympathize. Here's a quick summary:
Some bot is spamming wikis in a very aggressive manner. He leaves a lot of junk, erasing the original content of the wiki pages. He is trying to get links to the incredibly stupid domain name online-casino-on-line.com, but he isn't very clever. When you access the site, you find references to btdcasino.com. The former hides his whois information behind an outfit that will do just that for you: hide your personal info from the whois records, the latter's whois info points to Cyprus (where casinos are strictly illegal). Both of them are affilitates of bethedealer.com, which is registered in Tel Aviv, Israel.
So we have links to Cyprus and Israel. In Cyprus, we have armata.net, who are doing just about anything: SEO, webdesign, avertizing, car and boat rentals, you name it. And in Israel, we have bethedealer.com and we have the host name of our spammer, who always came from netvision.net.il.
A couple of minutes ago, we got a new spam submission. The submitted spammer spammed for usagc.org. If you look at the sites they spammed, they always seem to have their spam close to spam for online-casino-on-line.com, but it always seems to be guestbook spam.
Now, if you google for the person that usagc.us is registered to you end up on yet another online-casino site: casino-adv.com. And they have a flash add for btdcasino.com. Is that a weird coincidence? Am I beginning to become paranoid? But as Mr. Cobain once sang: "Just because you're paranoid, don't mean they're not after you.".
Tuesday, June 29th, 2004
POPFile wiki spammed once more
A little update. I have just removed the links to the nominees page. Then I wanted to see what was happening over at the POPFile wiki and had to find out that it had been spammed. Well at least somebody tried to spam it, but he didn't score. His keywords "online casino" and "casino online", however, are now where they belong: In chongqed.org's database of spammers.
Tuesday, June 29th, 2004
chongqed.org improvements
I have just finished revamping the spammers page.
I wrote a few Perl scripts to make linking to us easier and more efficient. Well, linking
was always easy, but it is now easier to steal the spammers' keywords. Just link to
http://spammers.chongqed.org/keyword. Here's an example:
http://spammers.chongqed.org/emmss
A little script will turn this address into a web page dedicated to the emmss.com spammer.
The spammers page now contains a list of keywords along with the spammer that used it. You can take a look at it and use the link addresses behind the keywords to get a good link to chongqed.org and to hurt a spammer.
Still to do: adapt all of our chongqing links to this new scheme. Eliminate the nominees page. Wait for Google.
Monday, June 21st, 2004
Spammer creating spammy pages
Fighting wiki spam is an amazing job (I wish it were a job). You learn something new about human nature every day. While I said on Saturday that we get very little "adult" spam, we've got a submission today that proves that those adult spammers are just as busy spamming wikis as all those other spammers.
But that's not the only new thing about this submission. The submitter sent us a nice Google search to find this spammer's spam. Check it out and you will see that he didn't just add links to pages like your run-of-the-mill spammer, this guy created pages named like his favorite key word: adultcheck.
I still don't get why he did this. If he was (probably is!) spamming for adultcheck.com, he would have left links to that site. If he was trying to drive traffic to his porn sites (for which he left lots of links), he did exactly the wrong thing, pushing the page rank of all sorts of wikis for adultcheck. It just doesn't make any sense!
Sunday, June 20th, 2004
Credit cards and contact lenses from Germany
More news relating to the Wakka Wiki. It's not only plagued by the referrer spammers, it's also ridden with comment spam as you can see on its Wakka Sites page.
Many of the spamvertized sites point to Germany. And as you can see, credit cards and contact lenses seem to be all the hype for German spammers. In German: "Kreditkarten" and "Kontaktlinsen". Among those guest book spammers you can find our old friend Hakdata. May all those other spammers take the same road as he did.
Here's an appeal to all our German readers: Setzt Links auf chongqed.org und verwendet die Suchbegriffe der Spammer! Sie wollen gute Suchergebnisse für Kreditkarten, Kontaktlinsen, Handy, Oberschalen und Lotto. Aber was die Spacken können, das können wir schon lange.
Saturday, June 19th, 2004
Three new submissions
Last week we got three more submissions. I have been a little busy and I have to apologize to the submitters for not updating our pages right away.
The first submission is very interesting because it touches on something we haven't had on chongqed.org yet: referrer spam. Apparently the Wakka Wiki engine has a built-in function to list the referrers to its pages. This is abused by spammers who manipulate the referrer strings of their browsers (or they use wget). They seem to keep reloading those pages; in exchange they get nice links to their spamvertized sites. It seems that the WakkaWiki page itself is suffering from this, but the submission we got was from suchmaschinenwiki.de.
The list of offenders is pretty long, here is a selection:
- asstraffic.com (nice domain name, folks),
- chat2007.de,
- 123gotcash.com,
- gottapays.com,
- referrer-script.de (nice to see someone with technical know-how, duh),
- chanel-perfume.biz (the Chanel people will be delighted),
- discount-skin-care.biz (has anybody seen a .biz domain that wasn't involved in spamming?),
- homecashmachine.biz (I haven't),
- telephony-voip.biz (What attracts spammers to .biz domains? Well, it sure helps our filters.)
- bond-ratings.biz
- satellite-receivers.biz
- free-card-games.biz
- free-webhosting.biz
- nutrition-guide.biz
The second submission was all about "adult" links. I guess those adult webmasters are better than their reputation. At least we don't get to see that many spammers from this camp. However, the Python Wiki got a bunch of adult spam dumped on their front page. And here are the offenders: twinks.monolove.org/latino-twink-james.html, voyeur.sweetadultpics.com/web-voyeur.html, www.lingeriesex.org/french-lingerie.html, pissing.sweetadultpics.com/pissing-men.htm. It seems like they are trying to use the names of their pages to boost their page rank. Usually I'd say "All your page ranks are belong to us!", but do I really want to be listed on google if someone is searching for pissing men?
Submission number 3 takes us back to our homeland: huge and beautiful China. The LarpWiki (which gives us a couple of referrers every day), was hit by Chinese spammers. This one is interesting: he's not from Chongqing, he's from New England. That's about the only thing I can read on fda.com.cn. It seems that a guy selling scooters is quite busy spamming wikis: Links to timescooter.com can be found throughout wiki land. The same company is responsible for the domain sbt-scooter.com. Check out the homepage of timescooter.com: "Our company ... covers an area of 20,000 square meters". Not bad, timescooter! I didn't get this one, though: "all the employees ... have the capability of independent fiting". Hmm.
Friday, June 18th, 2004
Hakdata is dead
Hakdata is dead! I don't know whether our little effort had anything to do with this. But the fact that Google didn't return links to hakdata.de might have been a factor. Checkout www.hakdata.de. For those who don't speak German, it says "Welcome to www.hakdata.de. This page is no longer maintained or updated".
Friday, June 11th, 2004
Where is Hakdata?
For the last couple of days, Google searches for the term "hakdata" did not return a result for hakdata dot de. I don't know why Google suddenly refuses to give you a link to them, but I think that that's really, really funny.
Monday, June 7th, 2004
Email from Hakdata
We got feedback from a spammer early Sunday morning. Apparently this guy was working late to rake in even more with this SEO business; it was 2am in Germany when he sent an email to Joe. You can read the mail from Hakdata at Joe's blog.
This email clearly shows what is going on in the twisted mind of a spammer. He thinks that the world would be a better place if all wiki owners had a dedicated page where spammers can leave their crap. He also thinks that spamming would stop if wiki maintainers stopped removing spam!
Now here's a deal for all the wikizens out there: Stop removing the spam, tolerate one link from each spammer out there, and the spam will miraculously come to a halt. I still can't believe that. Look, Mr. Spammer: If each spammer in the world left just one single link on any given wiki, how many spam links do you think would end up in that wiki?
Thursday, June 3rd, 2004
Manni's got a blog!
I joined the bloggers! There are three reasons for this: (1) I wanted to have yet another site linking to this one. (2) I noticed a tendency for these news items here to get longer and longer and I think that my personal opinions should not go here. And (3) I sometimes need to rant a little bit and I never new where to put my rants.
You can find the chongqed blog at chongqed.blogspot.com.
Friday, May 28th, 2004
hakdata.de
I just stumbled accross removed spam on some wiki that I found very interesting: This was a link termed "Internetoptimierung" that pointed to hakdata dot de. Internetoptimierung is German and means "internet optimization". I don't know how they are supposed to optimized the internet, but spamming wikis is not what I'd call optimal.
The site hakdata de is very interesting. You can pay them to have your page rank optimized (your page rank, not the internet). Their basic offer costs you 299 Euros and seems harmless. For 650 Euros, you get the "Power" optimization, which includes "Hakdata Advanced Tricks ;-)" (I didn't include that emoticon, that's just copy and paste). If you pay them 399 Euros per month for at least 6 month, what you get is called "Daily optimization". This also includes their "Advanced Tricks", but you also get "Hakdata Dirty Tricks ;-()". Do I want to know what that is?
Yes, I think I do. Unfortunately, their site doesn't offer any hints as to what those dirty tricks are. Googling for "Internetoptimierung" and "wiki" turns up only the wiki that I mentioned in the first paragraph. But googling for "hakdata" and "wiki" gives me 612 pages found. Lots of details here. It seems that this spammer is still in business. Most of his acts of spamming are only one or two weeks old. Fortunately, most of the crap was already cleaned up again. Other keywords he likes are: SEO Optimal and Suchmaschinen Optimierung.
Thursday, May 27th, 2004
From Chongqing with love
Tonight, I had a visitor with an IP address from an ISP in Chongqing. Half an hour later I got lots of spam to one of my email addresses. I had never received spam on this address before. Thanks Mr. Chongqing! But you can send me all the spam in the world, it will never give you back your page ranks. They are belong to us!
Wednesday, May 26th, 2004
Ms. Maria Mwanke lamenting her purpose
Speaking of marriage proposals and wetting myself: I just received a spam email from a Ms. Maria Mwanke; subject: "MARITAL PROPOSAL!". It starts like this: I sincere desire permission to lament my purpose of subscribing this Preposition wrestle to you. Sir, i must spray-out my agenda. I am Miss Maria Mwanke 19years old, the first daughter of Mr. Frank Mwanke the Managing director, FACO. Cocoa industries in Cote DŽIvoire.
Right. I guess I should also spray-out my agenda. You should do that at least once a week. So it's high time for my old agenda.
Wednesday, May 26th, 2004
Noble chongqed
I nearly wet myself today when I found out that the proposing marriage spammer, also spamvertized the domain chongnoble dot com with the keyword engagement proposals. I realize that Chong is a common name, but the connection to wiki spam kills me.
Tuesday, May 25th, 2004
David's submission
Submission #4 just came in. The submitter, David Schmitt, found spam on the AlphaEins wiki. And since it isn't our aim to bore you, we have a spammer from the US of A this time. If you look at the spamvertized sites and the keywords that were used, you might even think that it's a spammerette. And what a list that is:
- Sites
- romanshades dot better-life dot us
- handbags dot whatdoyouknow dot us
- sew-roman-shades dot com
- organize-your-life dot net
- anhandrichard dot com
- my-marriage-resources dot com
- Keywords
- "sewing roman shades"
- "designer handbags"
- "how to make roman shades"
- "roman shades"
- "home organization"
- "how to propose"
- "ways to propose"
- "proposing"
And here's a impressive google search for roman shades wiki.
What I liked most about David's submission was this comment: "I think I'll code up a little perl fragment, which changes all links from a given list to to http://chongqed.org/". Now that's what I call quite good!
Monday, May 24th, 2004
Mr. Chongqing doing the email thing
This just in: Mr. Chongqin is not only a talented wiki spammer. He's also a pretty good email spammer (or his box was invaded by a Trojan horse). This was blogged by our friend Alex. Thanks for that.
Monday, May 24th, 2004
Two more submissions
This weekend we got two more submissions!
The first submission concerns a spammer that is typical for all the google spamming we are seeing over here in Germany. This particular one seems to spam guestbooks and wikis, fortunately only on a moderate level. He seems to be bit a little lazy when it comes to spamming. E.g., he has a text block that he just copies into forms: "I really enjoyed spending some time surfin on your web page and didn't wanted to leave without some greetings to you! Jana". Maybe he (or she) should have had a look at a dictionary before composing this beautiful sentence. The spamvertized site is autoversicherung dot to.
Report number two is about another (?) spammer from China. He appeared on openwiki.com and spamvertized the site shmole dot com dot cn.
I'll add the two spammers two our nominees page as soon as I find some time.
While I'm at it, I might as well steal some keywords: 兼职网 兼职
Monday, May 17th, 2004
Our first submission
We have our first spam submission! Somebody spammed somebody else's wiki and somebody else sumitted a report. The submitted spammer is once again from China and he plants links to italent dot com dot cn. You talent, me talent, we all talent. Sorry about that very bad pun. Read more about that spammer on the Nominees page.
Friday, May 14th, 2004
Incoming links
We found our first supporters! I guess I will soon add a dedicated page for our supporters and the people that are kind enough to link to us. Until I find some time to do that, I'd like to introduce to you:
- IrishEyes mentionend us on his blog. Seems his is another victim of the Chongqing spammer who plants link after link to emmss dot com all over the web.
- Then there is Alex from the Netherlands, who also linked to this page and Joe's blog on his blog. Yes, he too is yet another victim of emmss dot com spam. And he blogged about it repeatedly: 1, 2, 3, 4 times. But maybe I missed a post or two. Dank u wel!
Tuesday, May 4th, 2004
chongqed.org now online
chongqed.org is online. I know that there are still lots of things to do around here, but since the first links to this site are already out there, it was about time I went public.
Today was also the first day that we noticed the Chongqing Man in our logs. He visited both, my old page and Joe's Spam chongqing blog. Hi there!