This is an interview between Randy Morin of igotspam.com and Randy Charles Morin of Destroy All Malware.

Q: Randy, you started the splogger challenge over on the Destroy All Malware blog. Tell us again about it.

A: The splogger challenge is something I issue once in awhile when I find someone who is easily targeting is splogging.

Q: Most splogs, don't have a public face, so you can't do anything but report them to Google or Yahoo for de-indexing. So what are you talking about?

A: Every once in awhile, I come upon splogs run by someone in the Internet community with a public face. I issue the splogger challenge to get the splogger to stop his activities.

Q: And has the splogger challenge ever resulted in the splogger discontinuing his splogging?

A: Never. The splogger will typicaly laugh at the challenge, thinking there's nothing I can do about his activities.

Q: Sounds like the splogger challenge is failing. Any successes?

A: Well, our first splogger challenge was against 301powered. Since the challenage, they've had 99% of their splog pages de-indexed for Google. That's a great success. The second splogger challenge was against Robert Stein. He use to have AdSense on his splogs. They've since disappeared. I imagine Google canceled his account. Another success. It's all successes.

Nate Anderson: Winternals entered into negotiations and offered the retailer 12,000 licenses of its software for several million dollars, and all seem to be going along smoothly. Before any final decision was made, Best Buy requested that Winternals provide evaluation copies of the software and some training to employees in its use, which the company did in January. It was at these training sessions that Winternals learned that many Best Buy employees were already using unlicensed versions of the software in their daily work. [cut] In early February, however, they stopped negotiations suddenly and said that "they were no longer interested in pursuing a commercial license at that time."

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060413-6596.html

Randy: Wow, that was awefully stupid of Best Buy. By allowing Winternals to find out and pissing them off, they've giving Winternals reason to go public with the information. Now, other software vendors might be interested in some additional licensing fees.

Did you know, there's an official SPAM fan club? I think I'm gonna start the official spam hate club.

http://fanclub.spam.com/

Oh, did someone wake up on the wrong side of the bed this morning? Might be a better use of your time removing all the ads from your pages, it makes the look crappy. Report whatever you wish and PLEASE keep making threats on the internet!

Bob Stein's has many splogs, which I'll enumerate here (without Google Juice).

• http://notontelevision.com/wordpress20/
• http://tickgo.com/
• http://worldchampionredsox.com/wordpress/
• http://www.usjesus.com/wordpress/
• http://beatlegs.com/

cross-posted from igotspam.com.

Last week, I got an email from Yahoo via my Yahoo! 360 inbox. Somebody sent me a piece of spam to my Yahoo! 360 account via some Yahoo! 360 form, I suspect. I reportedly won $723k in a lottery. Hmm! That's really not much. I usually win several million several times per day. At the bottom of the page, there was a link "Report for Abuse." I clicked it and then began the long series of wizards to fill out information and squeal on the spammer. After telling Yahoo! about everything including my deep dark secrets, the process was seemingly over. Another spammer exposed.

A couple days later, I receive an email from Yahoo! Customer Care asking for the Yahoo ID of the sender and/or the URL of the Webpage on Yahoo! 360. There was no Yahoo ID, so I responded with the URL on Yahoo! 360, but before I sent the email, I noticed that the email I was responding to already had the URL in question. Oh well! it's hard to find good help.

Another day goes by and I receive an email from Yahoo! Customer Care asking for the Yahoo ID of the send and/or the URL of the Webpage on Yahoo! 360. This email is a response to my response of their original email. It already contains the URL twice. This time I respond that I've already sent them the URL two times, that I'm sending them the URL for the 3rd time.

A few hours later, there's the same email again. The response to my response to their response to my response to their original email and it now contains the URL three times and their asking for the URL for the 3rd time. I'm not gonna respond, but if anybody from Yahoo! sees this, then please remove the original "Report for Abuse" link. It's pointless.

Last October and January, I wrote pieces on the state of the splogosphere, that is the ability of our blog infrastructure to handle SPAM, SPAM blogs, blog comment SPAM and spings. In these pieces, I talked mostly about the splog problem that was rooted in Google's Blogspot hosting service and the inability of blog search engines to filter the splogging noise.

Here we are six months later and nothing much has changed. Splogs are still everywhere and the search engines are struggling with result pages that are littered with splogs. Let's examine a few blogosphere search engines and score the amount of splog found compared to useful results. Let's compare search results for my primary domain; kbcafe.com.

• Bloglines uses subscription information to easily weed out the splogs. Unfortunately, it suffers from a second problem. The results do contain a lot of other search feeds, but at least they don't have a problem with splogs.
• Bloglines Citations is simply broken, although I don't get any splog, the results are usually non-existent or 100% false positives.
• PubSub is also broken. It currently reports only two referrers and going back thru time, whenever it reports more than a handful of referrers, it's mostly splogs. PubSub is completely dominated by splogs.
• Technorati has a lot of problems. They seem to have rid themselves of Blogspot splog, but they now contain a lot of Wordpress splog.
• IceRocket has struggled of late. A few months ago, splog was almost non-existent on IceRocket, but that was likely due to the fact that IceRocket banned new Blogspot blogs from their index. Now, like the other blog search engines, they are struggling with the occasional Wordpress splog.
• BlogPulse is likely the best search engine at filtering splog for the moment. Unlike Blogslines which isn't really that useful, BlogPulse is reporting a lot of referrers, yet I struggled to find any splog. I finally found a splog on the 5th page of the BlogPulse search result pages.
• Google Blog Search like BlogPulse does a very good job of filtering out splogs.
• Feedster was mostly rewritten lately and it would seem they took a rather large step backwards. At this point, it's reporting more splogs than non-splogs.
• Blogdigger doesn't report many results at all and none of it is splogs. Also broken.

Currently, I'm using a combination of BlogPulse, IceRocket and Google blog search. All three do a good job of filtering splogs and still report a lot of new referrers.

One things that has changed is the preferred splogging framework. Six months ago, almost every splog was found on Blogspot, but thanks to a lot of effort on Google's part, this is no longer true. Sploggers prefer the self hosted Wordpress platform. Don't get me wrong, there's still lots of splogs on Blogspot, but the search engines and Google have teamed to reduce the number of those splogs that are appearing in the blog search result pages.

There's a new evil in the blogosphere and that's blog comment SPAM. The amount of blog comment SPAM is not only increasing, but the spammers are writing relevant comments that are less likely to get removed by the blog's author. Some blogging platforms are simply inadequate at stopping blog comment spam. I have a Blogspirit test blog and if you check the right sidebar, the comments are dominated by blog comment spam and I really have no idea how to stop this. I've even tried to disable comments, but the software seems to be broken in this regard.

Another new evil in the blogosphere is spings. Spings are blogosphere pings on behalf of splogs (or fake blogs). The end user doesn't really see this problem, but search engines like Technorati do. David Sifry is reporting that the majority of blogosphere pings are actually spings.

Conclusion? We're not getting anywhere. Splogs are devaluing the blogosphere, as much as email SPAM is devaluing email. The problem is that governments move at a slower speed than the Internet. A spammer or splogger is a millionaire before the authorities know how to deal with them. The solution must come from the private sector.