Splogs Clog Blog Services 241
SuperWebTech writes "A new generation of spam has emerged lately in the form of automatically-created spam blogs, or "splogs." One wily programmer manipulated Blogger's API to create a "spamalanche" of thousands of blogs whose sole purpose was to increase their real sites' pagerank. This clogged search engine results while filling RSS feed services with useless listings. Though Google, Blogger's owner, is doing its best to fix the problem, in the meantime several services have stopped listing any site they host. So far nobody has found a solution."
Username trend? (Score:5, Interesting)
Maybe start by disabling new blogs.
Flag all usernames that meet that basic regex criteria.
Hand filter that bunch.
Add the same captcha you have on your comment system to the posting system.
Re-enable registration.
Seems kind of elementary, doesn't it? Why not try it?
Managed RSS feeds are more interesting (Score:3, Interesting)
Of course, those become less valuable when folks add RSS feeds that aren't specific to the topic, so that Java posts show up in the Ruby feeds and all that. That can be tricky too, though; does this post [blogs.com] go under Jabber or PostgreSQL? Dunno.
Capcha? (Score:3, Interesting)
Charitable donation (Score:5, Interesting)
Couple of solutions? (Score:5, Interesting)
On top of this, once again the hosting services need to be held responsible: if a site is hosting an obviously spamvertised site then give them 24 hours to remove the site or be blocked from future indexing activities - and have current rankings deleted.
IP address/domain-name checking? (Score:4, Interesting)
a new low-point, but who cares? (Score:2, Interesting)
I seriously wonder if the DMCA's or other *AA laws couldn't be used to subpoena the ISP of these guys to get their real addresses. For some reason I doubt they are that many people in the spam and "search engine optimization" business.
Re:Word verification? (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes and no. CAPTCHAs solve the problem for things like Slashdot, where you just have to worry about trolls with too much time on their hands. But when it comes to spam, there's a value to beating them, so what some enterprising spammers do is set up porn sites that tell people "enter the word you see here and get free porn!". Lots of horny geeks do the spammers' work for them. The difference between the two scenarios is that the spammers are willing to pay minute amounts to beat the CAPTCHAs, but the trolls aren't.
Re:Well let's get old fashioned (Score:5, Interesting)
Do you have any alternate search engines (preferably with examples to prove that they're actually better) to use instead of google? I've tested out all the big names, and the results I get are almost always near-identical, with the small differences in the results returned not being that important.
It is extremely frustrating when Google returns nothing useful, but I've yet to find a search engine that works better. Google's level of results seems to be the best anyone can achieve at the moment (and it's not really google that's setting the level of excellence).
I wondered when this would happen (Score:4, Interesting)
its kind of ironic that google, which has had fewer [not "no", just fewer] security gaffs than Microsoft is, in a sense, suffering security embarrassment for a rather similar reason to the origins of Microsofts security mis-steps: trying to appeal to users by providing very streamlined and simple user interfaces to functions that require privelege [account creation, publication] on most systems [think unix or Apache]...yes the additional "hassles" of authenticating and establishing the remote request is from a human and not a bot are an impediment to users. But catering to utter lazy dummies is a worse hassle as ought to be clear to everyone by now. Funny this is now news. If you went to blogger 6 months ago and sellected a random blog and then just surfed randomly by hitting "NextBlog" button, you would have seen dozens of sights that were just huge steaming piles of links for such vital topics as online shoe purchases
Re:Capcha? (Score:2, Interesting)
Not one little bit.
Consider the following very general situation:
Spammer uses home ISP connection with connection time allocated dynamic IP.
Spammer sends out thousands until blocked.
Spammer reconnects and gets a new IP whilst the original one is reusable by someone else.
You or I then connect and unfortunately get the old IP and cant access the service any more.
BTW, Its already in practice here on slashdot.
Post too many fucked up comments and your IP banned from posting.
Re:PageRank's fatal assumption (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:PageRank's fatal assumption (Score:5, Interesting)
(Disclosure: I work in "white hat" SEO, where we try to actually make sites more friendly, fast and useful for end users; this black hat SEO stuff doesn't do us any favours at all, so I'm keen to see these spammers wiped out by any means).
Rich.
Re:Advertising: Out of control (Score:3, Interesting)
Who among us could not grok the same frustration? Funny anecdote: My kid went on a school field trip which included a stop at McDonald's. She returned with her happy-meal toy: a tiny little stuffed puppy-doll with a hu-u-ge tag sewn to it, just screaming with advertising and copyright information. The tag was about three times as big as the dog. I sent her for the scissors and snipped the tag off (in blatant disregard for the fine print saying I was committing a crime). Then the light bulb went off, and I asked her for all the *rest* of her stuffed animals. We had great fun performing tag-ectomies, as I explained to her that we had bought and paid for everything in the house, so it was ours to do with as we pleased, including stripping the commercial propaganda out of it. I think dolls are more fun to play with when they're allowed to just be dolls. She agreed. I'm just doing my best to raise a lawless little punk, here! (:
It's stuff like that that frustration with corporate capitalism can drive you to.
Re:Word verification is obsolete (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Advertising: Out of control (Score:2, Interesting)
Maybe I'll just go live under a rock... as long as I can get wireless high speed internet
Reverse-weight the spamvertised sites' Page Rank (Score:2, Interesting)
People in this thread have mentioned a number of things which would make such spam more technically difficult to pull off, none of which would be foolproof.
However, some combination of these techniques could be used by the search engine (handy, that Google the Blogspot-owner-victim is also the search engine being manipulated) to simply flag spammy links internally. And then use them as negative modifiers in its pagerank algorithm. So, questionable attempts to google bomb your site makes it drop off the face of google. Silently.
Sure, this could be abused to try and stifle competitor's pageranking. But that's a second order effect, within the realm of possibility to manually correct, as a whitelist of commercial targets bad guys have tried to frame has got to be more easy to maintain than a blacklist of fly-by-night spam sellers.
Re:Well let's get old fashioned (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:They even quote you sometimes (Score:2, Interesting)
Use Invites (Score:2, Interesting)
Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)