spam

Reddit anti-spam sweep snares The Atlantic, Business Week

Reddit is taking aim at some media heavyweights to reduce spam on the site.

The popular link-sharing site has banned a half-dozen prominent sites, including TheAtlantic.com and BusinessWeek.com, according to a recently created subreddit. Other banned sites include Phys.org, ScienceDaily.com, and GlobalPost.

Reddit users who try to submit links to these sites are greeted with a message that informs them that "this domain has been banned for spamming and/or cheating."

The site announced a crackdown on spammers last week but only specifically mentioned that it would now employ link shorteners:

Some domains are … Read more

The 404 1,064: Where just enough is more (podcast)

Today's show title is the design credo of Milton Glaser, the celebrated designer responsible for turning the "I <3 New York" graphic into a world-recognized symbol.

That ethos is also the inspiration for today's discussion topic about Apple's "faux-real" user interfaces that Tom Hobbs at Fast Company believes is stunted by skeuomorphs, or elements of design that retain parts of its inspiration.

We'll look at how Apple's desire to show off the look of its products may be hindering its principal innovations, why the Amazon Kindle uses its own basic layout to create a more immersive environment for its readers, and how apps harnessing nostalgia like Instagram and Hipstamatic are holding back the next evolution of technology.… Read more

Notorious Bredolab virus creator is sentenced to prison

The man who elaborated and then spread the Bredolab virus, which infected roughly 30 million computers worldwide, was sentenced to four years in prison by an Armenian district court yesterday, according to Wired.

Georgy Avanesov, a 27-year-old Russian citizen of Armenian descent, was first nabbed in 2010 after Dutch authorities took down a large Bredolab network made up of about 140 different infected computer servers. Shortly after this seizure, global spam levels fell by 12 percent.

Avanesov confessed that he developed the Bredolab malware in 2009 and made it available to others via computer servers in Holland and France, according … Read more

iCloud hacked, or is it simply spam?

Apple Insider is reporting on a few Apple discussion postings in which users have claimed their iCloud accounts were compromised. Some have complained they have found spam being sent to secondary e-mail addresses from their personal iCloud accounts, which have included links to spam services claiming to make money online, and also containing random text strings -- classic components to automatically generated spam messages.

Others have echoed that in recent hours they have experienced similar spam messages being sent from their iCloud accounts to alternative e-mail accounts and other entries in their contacts lists that were stored with iCloud.

These … Read more

How to unsubscribe from the weekly Twitter digest e-mail

Earlier this week Twitter started sending users an e-mail rounding up the prior week's hot topics and tweets. A weekly reminder or update is great for Twitter users who aren't always on the social network. But, for those of us who are on Twitter more than we should be, and already know what happened over the last week, the e-mail is simply more spam.

Luckily, unsubscribing from the e-mail is a simple process.

If you have one of the e-mails sitting in your Inbox right now, scroll to the bottom and click on the unsubscribe link. Your browser … Read more

Plaxo shuts back door spammers used to access Google accounts

Contact list management app maker Plaxo told CNET today that it has shut a back door that spammers were using to stealthily access Google accounts.

"A malicious party has obtained on their own, not through Plaxo, a set of Google account credentials," said Preston Smalley, general manager at Plaxo. "They've used our server, which is meant to allow customers to access their own Google accounts, to gain access to those accounts they already had. That made it difficult for Google to detect that (unauthorized) activity because they came through our IP address as a proxy."… Read more

Get MailWasher Pro 2012 anti-spam software for free

Sick of spam? For many users it's the bane of the e-mail experience, a time-sucking hassle that's also a major security risk: spam leaves the door wide open for viruses, phishing, and other threats.

My preferred solution is to route my domain's mail through Gmail, which offers excellent spam filtering. But that won't work for everyone. If you feel like you're losing the war on spam, consider another solution.

Today only, BitsDuJour is offering Firetrust MailWasher Pro 2012 (Windows) anti-spam software for free. That's for a three-PC license, which regularly costs $29.95.

When … Read more

110,000 PC-strong Kelihos botnet sidelined

A new version of the Kelihos spamming botnet has been sidelined by using the peer-to-peer distribution mechanism to basically hijack it, researchers announced today.

The botnet, which was used mostly to distribute spam for Canadian pharmaceutical firms but also stole bitcoin wallets containing virtual currency, was about three times larger than an earlier variant, according to CrowdStrike, the security firm that worked with Kaspersky, Dell SecureWorks, and Honeynet Project to shut down the botnet.

The researchers reverse-engineered the malware code and wrote their own software that rerouted infected computers to communicate with servers controlled by researchers and law enforcement rather … Read more

Democrat: Republicans got me banned on Facebook

Why must political seasons always be as fragrant as a raccoon's breath?

Agreeing to disagree seems to have all the popularity of dancing in a graveyard. Who, then, can but offer a snort of resignation that some underhanded nastiness has allegedly wafted over to Facebook?

Allegations are surfacing from the political swamp that supporters of one party are getting those of their rival party suspended from commenting on fan pages.

This alleged ruse was brought to my attention by Jon Kopp, the founder and president of Quality Epoxyin Gilbert, Ariz. He claims he has been banned by Facebook … Read more