On May 2, 2006, at 11:43 AM, Igor Chudov wrote:
On Tue, May 02, 2006 at 02:29:09PM -0400, Matt Kettler wrote:
Igor Chudov wrote:
On Tue, May 02, 2006 at 02:08:23PM -0400, Matt Kettler wrote:
It looks like tinyurl is now being abused by spammers the same way
geocities
was. I just got a porn spam using it.
Hm, is geocities no longer abused by spammers?
I haven't seen as many, but it is still ongoing.
Have they done anything about it?
Geocities has done a LOT about this, however it is largely a game of
whack-a-mole for them. They've taken many proactive measures to try
to block
these before they get posted, but each time they implement one, Leo
mutates and
comes right back. There's only so much they can do short of manually
moderating
every upload to their site.
Thanks. (I wonder who is Leo). In any case, I think that they could do
something very simple, which is to set up several secret spam traps,
and watch for geocities addresses appearing in them, and they could
then quickly remove those pages that are mentioned in the spams, if
they meet some other criteria (such as having javascript or external
links).
I am glad that they are working on it, I have procmail rules that send
all emails containing suspicious geocities URLs to a junk folder
(which I review from time to time).
Another thing geocities could/should (as well as any other similar
public webpage hosting service) is running tools like spam assassin on
the submitted pages before they're approved, and only flagging
submissions for review if their score is over a certain level. Let the
other pages go up without human review/moderation.
