Plagiarism Today: The term splog, or spam blog, is defined as a blog that’s designed solely to either promote another site, gain ad impressions or used to increase page rank. Generally speaking, these sites contain a great deal of content that is either pure nonsense or stolen from other sites.

http://www.plagiarismtoday.com/?p=117

Randy: JB goes on to discuss about Adsense and BlogSpot and their role in the splogosphere mess. Great thoughts!

Matt Cutts has been documenting some pretty hilariously lazy Web campaigns.

• http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/seo-mistakes-software-mistakes/
• http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/sketchy-testimonials/

Amit Agarwal: In an effort to reduce comment spam, Randy of the RSS Blog has decided to delete any new comment that links to blogspot.com blogs. [cut] Randy: I know blog comment spam is the most irritating thing but how about adding word verification kind of a thing.

http://labnol.blogspot.com/2005/11/randy-morin-does-mark-cuban.html

Randy: If word verification actually worked, then blogspot.com wouldn't be infested in the first place. Word verification is bad for accessibility. I said it once, no twice, no too many times and I'll say it again, CAPTCHAS don't work. But now, I have evidence (Blogspot) to prove it.

Niall Kennedy: The e-mail in question states that Technorati has suspended your e-mail account, lists some reasons why this may have happened, and invites you to open an attached file for more details on how to reactivate your Technorati account. The attached file, "important-details.zip," contains the W32.Mytob.LD@mm virus, opening a back door on your computer, lowering security settings, and allowing your computer to be used by the attackers for local access or distributing other content online.

http://www.technorati.com/weblog/2005/11/62.html

Randy: +1 Karma to Technorati for moving on this one.

Coolz0r: When I was checking Technorati these last few weeks, it became clear they still have a serious splog and spam issue to deal with.

http://blog.coolz0r.com/posted/technorati-spamsplogs-inc.html

Note: The coolz0r.com domain is currently experiencing DNS issues.

Feedster released their November/December rankings and placed the Destroy all Malware blog at #20.

http://top500.feedster.com/

No Need to Click Here - I'm just claiming my feed at Feedster

Danny Ayers reports getting so much referrer SPAM that it's affecting the performance of his Website.

Philipp Lenssen interviewed Matt Cutts, the blogger and Google employee who seems most concerned with SPAM. Topics covered include nofollow and webspam.

http://blog.outer-court.com/archive/2005-11-17-n52.html

USA Today: Sony BMG Music Entertainment said Monday it will pull some of its most popular CDs from stores in response to backlash over copy-protection software on the discs.

Randy: The blogosphere strikes again!

Newsweek: That's right—in addition to e-mail spam and instant messenger spam (spim), there's a new form of exploiting the Net's openness—splogs.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10017786/site/newsweek/

Randy: Great news! Newsweek is running an article on splogs in the Nov. 21 2005 issue.

I'm not gonna claim to know anything about Sony's rootkit, but it's definately been the talk of the blogosphere this last week. Let's just enumerate the news.

• Microsoft's new Anti-Malware Engineering Team blog says "will add a detection and removal signature for the rootkit component of the XCP software". That's a pretty clear sign that Microsoft doesn't like it.
• Cory Doctorow is linking to a new Sony malware discussion. Rootkit is not the only malware they are installing on your machines?
• The EFF is also up-in-arms about the rootkit. Posting six times this month on the subject.

I've read the arguments and to-date I'm not really convinced either way that it's malware or not. It's definately a PR nightmare for Sony and a dumb mistake made.

This morning was another bad day for Blogger.com and Google. I found 57 splog referrers from BlogSpot and forwarded them to Matt at Google. Basically, Google doesn't seem to be capable of stopping the splogs. IMHO, the recent splogs on Blogspot have easily identified patterns that make them easy to pick off. How Google is not able to identify and remove them is beyond me? IceRocket already has kicked them out of their index. I now have to agree with Mark Cuban and Blake Rhodes. This is now the only way that a Blogosphere search engine can move forward with reasonably clean results. I also note that Google doesn't show these blogs in Google's blog search, but haven't disabled the accounts. That seems like dirty pool to me. If you host on Blogspot, then don't expect me to point to you or find you anymore. BlogSpot is Dead!

FTC: An operation that uses the lure of free lyric files, browser upgrades, and ring tones to download spyware and adware on consumers’ computers has been ordered to halt its illegal downloads by a U.S. District Court at the request of the Federal Trade Commission. The court also halted the deceptive downloads of an affiliate who helped spread the malicious software by offering blogs free background music.

http://ftc.gov/opa/2005/11/enternet.htm

Randy: Great to see the U.S. government coming to the plate.

Just a small list of people I've noticed are helping the fight against splogs. Please comment with other nominations.

1. Matt Cutts
2. Kailash Nadh
3. Mark Cuban
4. Jason Goldman

I just noticed that one of the SplogSense accounts that I reported was disabled. Thanks Google!

Define SplogSense: A splog (spam blog) that has AdSense ads.

Marcel Marchon got a very interesting looking email SPAM today.

http://blog.lazytom.com/2005/11/hmm-what-website-does-this-remind-you.html

techdirt: The Nigerian government's latest "effort" is to just to help warn people about the scams, putting out statements for the folks out there who still don't seem to recognize this is a scam.

http://techdirt.com/articles/20051104/0934226_F.shtml

Mark Pincus: When are we going to collectively wake up and start holding these companies and their ceo's accountable?

http://markpincus.typepad.com/markpincus/2005/11/ticketmaster_is.html

Randy: There's multiple levels of SPAM. Irrelevant SPAM is definitely unwanted. Viagra, MBAs, etc. I get between 10-15 thousand of these per month. Now, those SPAM are generally irrelevant, but some people actually use Viagra and to them, Viagra SPAM is relevant SPAM. That said, the vast majority of recipients of Viagra SPAM don't consider it relevant. This is the type of SPAM that is reducing the utility of email. What Ticketmaster is doing is producing relevant SPAM. Since you've already bought product, it's very likely that you are interested in buying more product from them. Now, I'm not defending them, but I think this is a secondary level of SPAM that isn't as problematic as the first. MHO.

About: Windows Live Safety Center is a new, free service designed to help ensure the health of your PC.

http://safety.live.com/

Randy: This is an absolutely amazing site for home users who want to protect their computers from all sorts of malware and general health problems.