This last day, I intiated a first step in a anti-splogging program that seeks out splogs. You can find them by searching for the keywords "Have you been splogging?" at pretty much any blog search engine. Basically, I search for splogs that are compromised (most splogs are) and post on their blog using the hole. The splogs are then linked to the previous blog entry; Splogger Note. The next step would be to unsubscribe them from the service they are using to splog.

If you found a blog entry that linked here, then it's very likely that we discovered you were using a common splogging technique. This technique has a major flaw in that we can now post whatever we want on your blog. If you weren't intending to splog, then please accept our apologies, but note that your blog is compromised since the email address used to post directly to your blog was made public.

Don't know what Splogging is? Read the following.

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spam_blog
• http://www.plagiarismtoday.com/2005/11/08/behind-splogging-why-sploggers-splog/

I just purchased DestroyAllMalware.com. I'll be transferring this blog there in the near future.

One major problem that I had to deal with when I created Rmail, was email-to-blog gateways like Blogger's that allowed users to publish on their blogs via email. Rmail converted RSS feeds to emails. This made it trivial for sploggers to steal content by combining Rmail with the email-to-blog gateway. Rmail converts content to emails and the gateway republishes them (stolen) onto another blog. What I did was create a very simply mechanism that would automatically unsubscribe the user when the content was republished.  The technique wasn't prefect, as it did allow the splogger to steal content for weeks and sometimes months before the splogger was discovered and unsubscribed. Unfortunately, most all other RSS-to-email gateway didn't have such a feature, so the blogosphere is currently littered with splogs, mostly on blogspot.com. I've decided to expand my technique to work with other RSS-to-email gateways. It shouldn't take long to write. I'll report back later.