Category Archives: Spam

The Anger of the Blogger Spammed

There’s something just so lame about comment spam dressed up as a legitimate comment that it gets me angrier than I do with ordinary spam, blog or otherwise, for some reason. (Comment spam/blogspam/linkspam is when individuals automate posting of comments on blogs to build traffic and Google rankings by having links to their sites on… Read More »

Asia, the World’s Spam Factory

A new list from Sophos shows that spam is far from dying, thanks largely to Asia: While the U.S. still tops the chart, for the first time it accounts for less than a quarter of all spam relayed. (Compare this to more than 50% two years ago.) But that’s not the problem anymore. The problem… Read More »

Skype Buddy List Spam

It seems people are catching onto Stuart Henshall’s trick of playing with your Skype name to get it at the top of people’s buddy lists. Two people on my list have put period marks at the beginning of their profile name, messing with the alphabetical order to get their names above all my legitimate friends. This… Read More »

The Penguin Embraces the Frog

Blue Frog, the anti-spam ‘vigilante’ software that has courted some controversy, has introduced a Linux Version : This new offering will enable the 29 million Linux platform users to participate in the Blue Community and register in the company’s Do Not Intrude Registry to actively fight spam and safeguard personal and business e-mail accounts though… Read More »

A Directory of Spam-like Intrusions

A week or so back I wrote in my WSJ.com column about language and the Internet, Evoiding Pedestrian Ways (subscription only, I’m afraid) in which I explored some new words and how they catch on: People have been coming up with new words for a long time. But the Internet may be shifting the balance, not… Read More »