Ethereal Trades

Spammers Beware!

Spam has become a plague on our online lives, an unnecessary evil that has come to the computer age and clogs our inboxes instead of the mailboxes that the paper "junk-mail" used to fill up in the years before the internet. Now spammers are spoofing our email addresses as their own to send out their advertisements for everything from viagra to aides that will increase the size of unmentionable body parts.

Not only has email been affected, but now robot spiders are finding susceptable blogs and leaving url's unrelated to the actual comments that are posted on any particular entry. There are many who are working on different solutions to the new attacks and here is an excellent link to several solutions to the blog spamming problem as penned by Yoz Grahame, several which I have had to implement on the Ethereal Trades© blog.

From the Kalsey Consulting Group and his companys' Spam Manifesto:

"Spammers are hereby put on notice. Your comments are not welcome. If the purpose behind your comment is to advertise yourself, your Web site, or a product that you are affiliated with, that comment is spam and will not be tolerated.

"Bloggers will track you down and notify your hosting providers about your activities. We will tell your ISPs what you are using their connections for. We will let the makers of the products you are advertising know of your despicable sales methods. We will hit you where it hurts by attacking your source of income.

"You can move to a new host, find a new ISP, or sign up for a different affiliate plan. The end result will be the same. Each time you rise out of the muck we will strike you down and send you back to the hole you crawled out of.

"Our sites belong to us and we intend to keep it that way. It will no longer be profitable to advertise through comment spam."

You can believe that steps are being taken here at ShreveNet (SpamTrapper is FREE to our subscribers) to curb the tide of spam and thwart new techniques being developed to get past our security. We offer FREE X-Stop (to keep our children from accidentally hitting a porn or other X-rated sites) to our Unlimited Dial-Up, DSL, and Wireless accounts, and soon we will have server level Anti-Virus protection as a first tier of protection for all our subscribers.

We are taking the fight seriously, (and I take it personally), as is the rest of the on-line-world, and those who would be spreading viruses or spamming would be wise to abandon their practices, otherwise they will be facing prosecution, digital castration, and even jail.

Digitally,

Bobasaur

Posted by Bobco at November 21, 2003 11:54 AM | TrackBack