Looks like Digg is finally getting serious about Digg spam. This is great news, as I've been seeing too many mundane articles on the front page. I never really understood Digg spam until a couple months ago when a friend told me that he and his friends had dozens of accounts each and were conspiring to get each others posts on the front page. Makes you wonder if John Chow is one of them.

http://digg.com/tech_news/Banned_From_Digg

Unintentionally, the heuristics of the software [Microsoft's AntiSpyware Tool] detected Internet Explorer as spyware, and removed the program from their systems.

http://www.bbspot.com/News/2005/01/microsoft_antispyware.html

read more | digg story

More than one person has pointed me towards Elliott Back as a big splogger. At the time, I reviewed his blogs and found that many of them were legit and that the automated blogs were mostly reposting legitimate excerpted content with links back to the source. Well, Elliott has grown his network and now he's even re-splogging (<< NOFOLLOWed) my comment spam. Normally, I wouldn't point out a blogger that is both excerting and linking as a splogger, but in this case, it's pretty evident with the volume of automated splogging and clear lack of quality in those splogs, that Elliott Back, you are a splogger.

So, what can we do? Let's begin by reporting him to AdSense. Click on the Ads by Google text in his ads. Then click Send Google your thoughts and tell Google that Elliott Back is splogger.

According to Plagiarism Today, someone related to blogiarizer extra-ordinaire Bitacle posted the following comment, translated from Spanish.

What a whore you are, and your son is a bastard son of a bitch of a rotten mother

This seems to be in response to the community effort to shut Bitacle down because of their blatant copyright violations.

http://www.plagiarismtoday.com/?p=369

Those spammers are getting creative again. Today, I found the following User-Agent is pinging my RSS feed.

<a href='http://www.netforex.org'> Forex Trading Network Organization </a> info@netforex.org

FeedBurner was smart enough to escape the HTML, but I can see this working for people that are automatically publishing the User-Agents that are polling their RSS feeds.

Nelson Minar says that spam has won. His spam filter can't keep up.

http://www.somebits.com/weblog/tech/bad/spamOverload.html

SA: Microsoft is investigating public reports of a vulnerability in the XMLHTTP 4.0 ActiveX Control, part of Microsoft XML Core Services 4.0 on Windows. We are aware of limited attacks that are attempting to use the reported vulnerability. Customers who are running Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 1 in their default configurations, with the Enhanced Security Configuration turned on, are not affected.

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/advisory/927892.mspx