On Sale: Likes & Followers

The spam companies that sell fake Twitter followers and other false social media boosts have been dropping their prices. Usually their emails demand much more money than the one I just received. Last week I got an offer to create my Wikipedia entry for a "mere but non-negotiable $500 fee." I guess that's a lot more work.

NY Times Busted In Spam Claim

The New York Post is slamming the Times this morning after the Grey Lady accidentally sent a discount offer to over eight million subscribers then later claimed that the message was actually sent by spammers.

“The e-mail is SPAM and was not sent from The New York Times. We are alerting subscribers immediately,” the paper told reporters by e-mail at 2:08 p.m. “That’s our immediate concern. When we learn more, we will let you know. ” About the same time, the Times’ Twitter feed said, “If you received an e-mail today about canceling your NYT subscription, ignore it. It’s not from us.” But it was from the paper. The Times’ story changed drastically by 3:29 when the paper’s media reporter Amy Chozik tweeted, “The e-mail was sent by the NYT, a spokeswoman said. Should’ve gone to approx 300 & went to over 8 mil.” That message was passed on to reporters at 3:47 in an e-mail that retracted the earlier spam claim and admitted the Times was the source of the e-mail flood.

The Times says it will not honor the 50% discount offer that was intended for only 300 customers. And of course, there's already a parody Twitter account.

Less Spam? Thank Russia

Russian authorities have shut down a single scamster who was estimated to be responsible for 20% of all the spam on the internet.

You may not have noticed, but since late last month, the world supply of Viagra ads and other e-mail spam has dropped by an estimated one-fifth. With 200 billion spam messages in circulation each day, there is still plenty to go around. But police officials in Russia, a major spam exporter, say they are trying to do their part to stem the flow. On Tuesday, police officials here announced a criminal investigation of a suspected spam kingpin, Igor A. Gusev. They said he had probably fled the country. Moscow police authorities said Mr. Gusev, 31, was a central figure in the operations of SpamIt.com, which paid spammers to promote online pharmacies, sometimes quite lewdly. SpamIt.com suddenly stopped operating on Sept. 27. With less financial incentive to send their junk mail, spammers curtailed their activity by an estimated 50 billion messages a day.

The above-linked article notes that the spammer was shut down shortly before a Governator-led trade delegation from Silicon Valley arrived in Moscow to discuss moving Russia more fully into legitimate internet businesses.

Daily Grumble

Is it just me or has Gmail just given up on spam blocking? A year ago I'd get one or two a week, max. Lately, it's 20 or 30 a day. Annoyed!

Friendster Relaunches

Third runner-up social network Friendster relaunched this weekend. Via Techcrunch:

Friendster outlines some of the changes in a video (embedded below), in which it calls out other social networks (*cough* Facebook and *cough* MySpace) for being plain and boring. My absolute favorite part of the video: “I mean, if everyone’s there, woop de doo”. Friendster in the clip says the redesign aims to place more emphasis on 3 pillars: Simple, Fun and Personal. The company also features glimpses of the new website lay-out, which looks a whole lot like Facebook in my opinion, but seemingly mixed with the customization capabilities of MySpace (e.g. it looks like you can change the background color of pages with a single click).

And here I just finally figured out how to delete my account last week. I'm already missing those sexxay emails from Tiffany, Amber, and Summer.

30th Spamiversary

Via BBC:

The first recognizable e-mail marketing message was sent on 3 May, 1978 to 400 people on behalf of DEC - a now-defunct computer-maker. The message was sent via Arpanet - the internet's forerunner - and won its sender much criticism from recipients.

Thirty years on, spam has grown into an underground industry that sends out billions of messages every day. Statistics gathered by the FBI suggest that 75% of net scams snare people through junk e-mail. In 2007 these cons netted criminals more than $239m (£121m).

Statistics suggest that more than 80%-85% of all e-mail is spam or junk and more than 100 billion spam messages are sent every day. The majority of these messages are being sent via hijacked home computers that have been compromised by a computer virus.

My Google spam filter is actually pretty good, only a handful of spams get through on a given day. Almost all the ones that do get through are some variation on the Nigerian bank scam.