Personalities on Twitter are being hijacked to spread spam, scams and malware – look out! read more

One of the best aspects of the Twitter toolset is the fact the team allowed external programmers access to the service so that 3rd party applications and tools could be created. The downside of course is that not everyone has end users best interests at heart, and therefore there are trojan tools out there aiming just to grab your user account details for their own nasty ends … read more

Every day now I am hearing about the latest “revolutionary, automated, turn Twitter into an ATM cash machine autopilot make money in your underpants system” and it is making me sick. What can we do about it? read more

When I first started blogging over three years ago, blog search engines including Technorati and Google Blog Search were my favorite tools for keeping on top of who was talking about my topics, who was linking to my site and finding posts to comment on and offer help to.

However, over the years, the usefulness of these services have dwindled to nearly nothing. Where once nearly every great tip or connection came from either a Technorati Watchlist or a Google RSS feed, now I seem to get the best results from Twitter and more targeted searches.

The days of punching in a few keywords into Technorati and getting a stream of useful results is over. What follows now is a kludge of spam, off-topic posts and other noise that has to be sifted through to find the few grains of great content.

If blog searching isn’t dead, it certainly is very ill and it is time that something is done to fix it. read more

The news came through a couple of days ago that Microsoft’s Live Hotmail CAPTCHA system has yet again been compromised by spammers.

The method works by using an army of zombie PCs (those that have been compromised by malicious software and can be remotely controlled) and a remote computer server to handle image decoding.

It’s not the first time Microsoft’s system has been compromised, and it likely won’t be the last. Other online accounts aren’t immune either. Spammers need lots of fake accounts in order to send emails and publish splogs. read more

For most bloggers, email is one of their most important tools. Whether it is a means of receiving feedback beyond the regular comment form, a method of obtaining new clients/advertisers or just a way of getting tips for future posts, most bloggers enjoy being available via email.

The question though is how to do it? Anyone with an email address is acutely aware of the high levels of email spam still being spent out, well after Bill Gates promised the problem would be solved, and don’t seek to invite any more of it or have legitimate mail lost in existing spam filters.

Bloggers that want to invite email communication have a serious challenge trying to open the doors to their readers without inviting a deluge of pharmaceutical and scam emails as well. There are techniques that can reduce the problem, but no perfect solutions. Instead, one has to find the answer that works best for them read more

Just when you thought you saw the last of the PayPerPost copycats (who reincarnated themselves into IZEA), it looks like another company wants to pay users to insert various ads within their Twitter stream.

(Be-A-Magpie) Advertisers create campaigns providing a message and some keywords. Matching twitterers are selected, costs are calculated based on # of followers and hotness of the topic. Ads will be blended into the message stream: 5 tweets, one ad, 5 tweets, one ad…

Ironically Be-A-Magpie seems to be following the initial footsetps of IZEA by not requiring users to provide disclosure or even warn twitter followers that the tweet is an ad (say for example by posting [SPONSORED] within the tweet). read more

A recent post on Mashable regarding a tool called WordPress Direct elicited a great deal of passion on both sides. One commenter, for example, called the service a “one stop shop spam blog engine” while another, who claims to have used the service, said it was “a simple solution to adding new posts to a blog in between longer, hand written posts”.

But what is clear is that tools like WordPress Direct are becoming more and more common. Part of the double-edged nature of open source development is that, while most will use the license to extend the product in healthy ways, a few will do so in ways that can be used for unethical purpose. Though this is not an argument against open source, more and more tools like WordPress Direct have sprung up, often charging high monthly fees for “maintenance free” blogging.

But what does WordPress Direct do and is it a spam tool? The answer is complicated and made more so by the fact that the nature of spam and even the definition of spam is a moving target. However, it is clear that WordPress Direct, along with similar products, have a lot of potentially dangerous uses and, if its marketing is any indication, those uses are very much by design. read more

CAPTCHA is that annoying technology that asks you to type the characters in an image in a field to post a comment, get an account, or whatever. It’s a spam fighting tool, and one of the more successful ones I might add.

TIME’s got a piece on CAPTCHA which should be pretty interesting reading if you want to know about where it is originating, and what is being done to make sure that it stays successful. Personally, I hate it, but it serves its purpose and probably makes the web a better place, don’t you think?

When Steven Carrol of The Next Web admitted to using a content generation service known as Datapresser, reportedly after seeing it used by an unnamed author at TechCrunch, he seemed to indicate that it was the future of mainstream blog publishing.

But while there is no doubt that at least some mainstream blogs use content creation tools to aid in meeting their deadlines, content generation has found a much more comfortable home with another group, spammers.

Creating content from nothing has always been something of a holy grail for spammers. Traditionally, filling their junk blogs has required scraping content from article databases, other blogs (usually without permission) or other sources. This has made them easy for search engines to spot and also drawn the ire of many bloggers who have had their content reused.

But technology is advancing and content generation is becoming increasingly practical. Many spammers have already moved to it and it seems likely that others will follow soon. This has some strong implications for both the future of spam and the Web itself. read more