Today, I received spam email from Tumri, a pathetic Web 2.0 startup. I had to unsubscribe because I was now on their spam list. I also added a nice little quip, so that they knew they were pathetic spammers. You may remember Mike Asshole Arrington taking shots at me for linking to a spam blog. Hey Mike, you are linking to spammers. Can you say, Mike is a supremo hypocrit?

Robert Alan Soloway was arrested yesterday. He is one of the top email spammers. He operated out of his Seattle. He's long been known as a top spammer. It's being reported that spam levels have decreased noticeably since his arrest. He was supposedly sending billions of spams daily from his apartment. He wasn't arrested for spamming, but rather for impersonating others.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18955115/

I don't know what TaggedMail is, but I was just tagged 5 times in less than 10 minutes, all from Luciano Evaristo Guerche. Honestly Luciano, I don't remember how you got my contact info, but stop importing all your contact information into every new social website. The vast majority of these sites simply collect email addresses and I get no end of spam. I have previously asked Luciano to stop sharing my email address with everybody. He apologized and said it wouldn't happen again. For four months, I never heard from him again, but now I`m back on this guys spam list.

WARNING: If you ever bump into this guy, don`t give him your email address or he`ll give it to every spammer in town. You have to wonder if he`s selling the email addresses.

Robert Scoble says that blog comment spam is out-of-control. I completely agree. Robert uses Akismet, which automatically spam filters his blog comments, but of late, he's getting a lot of false positives and a lot of misses (1000 per day). I suspect that the spammers are now aware of Akismet and developing algorithms to trick it.

I've always written my own comment spam filter. I've had to modify it from time-to-time, but my latest rendition is solid, although not perfect. It uses javascript validation for some comments. Since bots are not great at responding to javascript, I avoid 99% of the problem. Still, it's a problem that must be solved. I've solved the problem temporarily, but I'm sure it'll return once the spammers figure out my new algo.

Now, the first person that suggests some sort of universal validation or registration, should be shot. This has been tried and it only discourages comments, which leads to unsubscribes and next thing you know your blog is a desert. What's the solution?

This is an opportunity for a startup. Create a system that works permanently. That's a tough task considering that even Google and Yahoo! haven't solved email spam.  

http://scobleizer.com/2007/05/21/ive-lost-control-of-my-comments/

Update: Scoble says since midnight last night my blog has received 2073 spams.

After the recent RSS hi-jacking incident with SplashCast, I've been thinking a lot about other instance of RSS hi-jacking and the biggest concern that comes to my is Google Reader link blogs. This issue was first raised by Andy Beard. In particular, he pointed to Robert Scoble's linkblog, which of course, got a reply out of Scoble.

If you don't know how Google Reader link blogs work, then the simple explanation is that it copies RSS items in full to your link blog and feed. No excerpt, all full-content and with a referrer link.

Scoble's response can be paraphrased as if you don't like it, then tell me and I'll delete your links. That's fair. Of course, Scoble's link blog has tremendous readership, so you'd be pretty stupid to take him up on this offer.

Nevertheless, what Google Reader does is clearly a copyright violation. Consider this. Many RSS feeds have copyright statements, but when the RSS item is moved to Scoble's (or other Google Reader user) link blog, the copyright violation does not travel with it. Scoble IS republishing other people's content with their copyright statements removed.

What could Google do to fix this situation? It's simple, if Google excerpted the blog entries in the link feeds, the same way they excerpted results in their blog search feeds, then the copyright problem goes away, because an excerpt with a link is fair use of such content.

Should we all tell Scoble to stop link blogging us? That would be stupid. The best approach is to go after Google and make them change their product. Any ideas on approaches?

I just did a check of a dozen channels at SplashCast and they appear to have desisted in their RSS hi-jacking. Instead of the SplashCast hi-jacked feed, they are now offering the source feed on most channels I checked. I can only assume that the few remaining hi-jacked RSS feeds will also get removed in time. Congrats and big thanks to Marshall Kirkpatrick and the SplashCast team for listening to the community.

For the last week, a few bloggers have been complaining that Splashcast is hi-jacking their RSS podcast feeds. A list follows...

• http://www.geeknewscentral.com/archives/007000.html
• http://www.geeknewscentral.com/archives/007009.html
• http://curry.podshow.com/?p=622

If you read these blog entries, then you'll see Marshall Kirkpatrick responding that Splashcast is trying to find a solution and making this a priority. In a recent private email exchange with Marshall, he has indicated that Splashcast doesn't believe they are hi-jacking feeds. You have to ask yourself a question. Why is Marshall telling people publicly they are looking into when they complain, but telling me privately they believe they are doing nothing wrong. Is Marshall afraid of the backlash if he says this public. You bet your ass.

Further to that, Splashcast has made numerous changes to Todd Cochrane's channel page. First, they added Todd's RSS feed as a second option for syndication. Then, when Todd continued to complain, they removed his channel completely (or at least it appeared so).

In the meanwhile, his friends at TechCrunch who have bashed companies before for hi-jacking an RSS feed before are big friends with these new content thefts. I think it's time that people stand up and step on these hypocrites. Researching this subject, I stumbled onto this quote from the Splashcast blog.

RSS is public, thank you. It was designed to be public. It’s the responsibility of the RSS publisher to understand the full ramifications of publishing a feed.

...and this quote in the comments of the same blog entry...

we also believe that if an RSS feed is made publicly available for free by the publisher, he/she is implying that the feed can be freely syndicated.

This is quite an misunderstand of RSS. RSS has a copyright element for a reason.

Does is end here? No! Splashcast has been pinging Weblogs.com with their hi-jacked feeds. In other words, they are taking your content, republishing it on their website and injecting it into blogosphere and web search engines.

Todd Cochrane has vowed to stick up for the starving podcaster. I volunteer him our champion of podcast splagiarism.

Update: Since I wrote this Marshall has responded further. He suggested that they were linking to the original podcaster's webpage and no the Splashcast version of the page. I checked dozens of feeds and couldn't find one link to the original podcaster's webpage. Everything link to Splashcast. Marshall seems intent on lying his way out of this. I doubt that'll work.