Yesterday I fell prey to the dreaded Twitter phishing scam. All my contacts receiving a direct message: "haha. This is you??? [clickableURL]" Now my inbox overfloweth with "Let's catch up!" emails. Who knew spambots could make a girl so popular?
America has a terrible health insurance system and crippling shame about sex. On the bright side, our problems are helping some Eastern Europeans make thousands of dollars per week, one fraudulent internet transaction at a time.
The White House is changing its procedures for sending out mass e-mails after hundreds of outraged conservatives received David Axelrod's healthcare reform pitch last week, Politico reports.
Yesterday, David Axelrod sent out a long and boring "viral" email about health care to the White House's email list. Or did he? We're getting a lot of tipsters saying they got it but never signed up for Obama emails.
The worse things get in America, the lower the quality of the meat we're willing to consume. Hormel's favorite whatzit Spam is preparing to survive the recession quite well, says the NYT, even allowing some of its employees to purchase televisions! As real Spam flies off the shelves, profits from virtual spam are on…
John Battelle has his own plan for riding out the holiday ad-buying slump. The founder of online-advertising network Federated Media, which brokers ads for sites like Boing Boing, GigaOm, and Dooce, can't fire writers, but he can cut the price of their ads. John, be careful. Your inbred network is made up of bloggers…
After McColo Corporation, a San Jose Internet service provider suspected of providing services for major spam operations, got its uplink service disconnected, the global volume of spam saw a detectable drop overnight. Some researchers say McColo accounted for a third of spam worldwide. Now, all we need is for people…
A group of computer scientists from UC Berkeley and UC San Diego spent a month earlier this year infiltrating a spammer network and studying its operations. The scientists mimicked the methodologies of the spammers by hijacking computers and using them to send out emails soliciting orders for pharmaceutical products.…
Looking for a little diversion from the disturbing news about the bailout, economic meltdown, and upcoming elections? You can now watch Apple pitchman John Hodgman read his spam email aloud, if you're so inclined. [BBtv]
With already pissed off VCs demanding their money back, Uber.com — a social network for hipsters — is doing anything but. Uber.com first called it quits last Friday but the LA-based website is now begging its users to spam its link on Facebook and MySpace in an effort to save it. A cunning strategy to let as many…
In character, the used-car dealer is a close cousin to the Web spammer, so he appreciates the advantages of misleadingly labeling a car ad as porn in order to drive up views, which is what Massachusetts-based Clay Corp. did with a YouTube video titled "Let's Get Naked." Expect much, much more of this to come: There…
Sign of the times: spammers are now enticing clicks on virus-laden emails with promises of Barack Obama sex videos. Barack Obama sex videos with Ukrainian white slaves! "Download and view not. Please sent this news to your friends. Obama it.s not right choice..." the spammers warn. A lot of fucked-up readings of the…
Elizabeth Coe sent 100 friends a link to her company's website. This feat got her booted from Facebook — and got her featured in the opening of a Washington Post story about Facebook's spam-fighting effort. Facebook is now banning users who ask too many people to be friends all at once, send too many messages, join…
Security software maker Marshal claims that of 622 respondents to a survey, 181 said they have purchased something that was marketed to them via spam. There are two ways to look at that number.Marshal's analysis: The response rates to spam — especially if you only count the messages that don't get filtered — are…
Beginning in 2009, telemarketers will be banned from making "robo calls," those pre-recorded sales calls that seem to serve no other purpose than to drive people crazy. The bad news? Charities can still harass you as much as they like. [WSJ]
BusinessWeek has tried it all — comments, blogs, podcasts. But with its latest online strategy, it's really giving up on the idea of serving up quality content. Instead, its new site, Business Exchange, will specialize in gaming Google. Sort through the gobbledygook about "aggregation" and "verticals" and…
Drew Kerr, the carrot-spewing former Radar flack, has seen his firm Four Corners Communications shrink to essentially a one-man shop in the past year. But the savvy Kerr, who specializes "in online and offline media" (that covers it all!), knows how to get good PR for himself in these lean times: by crushing PR…
MSNBC.com did not report this morning that in a long-anticipated move, Microsoft has acquired AOL. But after finding the above "MSNBC Breaking News" alert in my inbox this morning, I thought they did for a minute there. I even started drafting a post on the news ("Last we heard about the deal in mid-July, AOL…
I feel sorry for Twitter founder Ev Williams. The self-appointed A-listers who've flocked to his service are building an echo chamber worse than the blogosphere circa 1999. Today's pretend crisis: Williams has set an arbitrary limit that allows most Twitter users to follow no more than 2,000 other users' updates.…
Search-engine-optimization specialist Brent Csutoras reports that over the weekend, Twitter forbade him from following any more users after he hit 2,000. Twitter made the rule to fight spam. Here's how spam works on Twitter: A SEO specialist — sorry, "social media marketer" — creates a Twitter account and then…
