Wow, quite a  big day. First a reply from splogger extraordinaire, Elliott Back. Now, I get a call from Brian Retkin. He, just like Elliott, swear up and down they are not fraudsters. What joke these individuals are.

The #1 splogger in the blogosphere responded to one of my comments today. He responds "I'm really not spamming anyone.  The only site that's mine is at elliottback.com/wp/".

1. A quick look at his About page reveals he has many sites. What else would you expect from a splogger? A lie to cover up his crime.

Today, I found out that Dell actually pre-installed viruses on my computer when they shipped my new notebook. When I found this out 10 minutes ago, I couldn't believe it. You see, since I got the laptop, I've found that my network card was constantly dropping it's connection. Re-enabling my network card was solving the problem about half the time, but the other half the time, I had to reboot the notebook. Today, I uninstalled McAfee Security (the virus) and the problem immediately disappeared. Now my computer is faster and better than ever. I can't believe Dell would intentionally install a virus like McAfee on their notebooks. In case anybody else buys a Dell, be sure to uninstall the MacAfee virus immediately.

It's entirely amazing to me how many scams actually work in today's world that are absolutely clearly fraudulent. Today, Nathan Weinberg of Inside Google recounts just such a scam. The scam is from a British Internet user, Brian Retkin. Brian has been selling domain names that don't actually exist and many website across the Internet have tried to expose him by writing up his scam. In turn, Brian has been asking Google to remove the webpages that expose him from Google's index and he is now suing Google.

The root cause here is government, which seems incapable of keeping up with the Internet. The problem doesn't only exist in Britain. One of the biggest Internet email spammers lived in the U.S. and within the laws of the U.S. for years and was only arrested because his spamming activities resulted in him impersonating other people. In Canada, the 407 etr has been billing customers fraudulently and issuing license plate denials when they fail to pay.

Today, a user of one of my websites reported that someone had posted a link to a porn site. It turns out the site was Photobucket and it truly was porn video. I found two links on Photobucket that were porn. There was no link on the Photobucket webpage to report the video. I had to search the website FAQ to find out how to report porn. Most users are not going to go thru that much trouble to report abuse. On almost every single one of my page, I either put an email address where users can report inappropriate content. I'm amazed that Photobucket doesn't do the same.

Andrew Grumet says "If you want to run a service on Web 2.0, your destiny will be to fight spam." So true. He's frustrated with fighting spam instead of writing features. So am I.

http://blog.grumet.net/2007/06/16/biggest-threat-to-the-open-internetspammers

Let's browse the Web today. Goto Google and type Sharon Housley. The first result is www.softwaremarketingresource.com. Whois says their admin is Irina Kouzina of QZ Technologies and the site confirms this. QZ's admin is Alexander Kouzin of McKesson.com. McKesson.com's admin is Kapeel Sharma. McKesson is a public company listed on NYSE as MCK. NotePage claims to operate softwaremarketingresource.com, notepage.net, rss-specifications.com, make-rss-feeds.com, podcasting-tools.com, messaging-software.net. But if you spend a little time on Whois, then you'll also find small-business-software.net, recordforall.com, photo-wizard.net, blog-connection.com, create-rss.com, rss2html.com and the list goes on and on. I also noticed today that Nic, who replied to my previous posts about Sharon uses IP address 203.113.13.3, which has been blacklisted for spamming Wikipedia. Notepage is also associated with Cody Red of logo-search.com, call-center-depot.com, security-port.com, rss-tools.com, medical-feeds.com, rss-network.com, realty-feeds.net, finance-investing.com, monitoring-tools.net, call-center-depot.com, download-software-search.com, investing-partners.com. There's also a link to anonymously registered domains like free-software-programs.com, software-matrix.com (DR Management). I wish I had tools to mine the whois database. Does anybody? Anyhow, I thought it was interesting that I tied Sharon's empire back to a public company.

The biggest piece of malware on my new Dell notebook is the virus protection. The constant nagging to try to get you to register and buy. Today it tells me with a big popup to interupt my work that my computer isn't protected. It doesn't tell you why, but it gives you a Fix button to click. Click and another window appears asking if you want to register now. Conclusion. I'm not protected because I haven't registered McAfee yet. Wow! I think on Monday, I'll disable it. What a total piece of crap. It's suppose to be protecting me from malware, but it's the only malware on my machine.