I found some accesses in my log from eBay this morning. Followed the referrer, and found a page that obviously had borrowed some images from my site.

So first I renamed the files, and had a moment of joy that my bandwidth had gone down.

But then I remembered something LisaJill (don’t remember her link) once said about exchanging a hotlinked image with another incredibly rude image.

Hmmm, I didn’t want to go QUITE that far, but I thought, why not, I’ll do it within reason. Check out the image I put up, as it appeared on the freeloader’s eBay auction site:

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Check this article about a relatively new development in spam trojans:
Spamkings
And an article from News.com

Got an early warning from Mike, about these two being spammed by the Bulgarians:

isacommie dot com
musicbox1 dot com

So if you rely on blacklists, those should be put in as soon as possible.

More about the Bulgarians

I don’t know about you, but I’m the kind of person that gets irritated when subjected to so called motivational speakers. The kind that jumps up and down and tries to get the people in the audience to jump up and down and shout as well.

I can dance and I can sing - to a soundtrack, but the kind of speakers that try to jack up my enthusiasm profoundly irritate me.

So when Brian Klemmer was due to speak at a sort of club I usually go to, I was sceptical. Another friend had been hyping him up the exact way that irritates me…

But I was wrong. What he said made sense to me, and he said straight out that the kind of motivational speaking that irritates me - doesn’t work. Yay!

Anyway, his stuff impressed me as usable enough, I bought his book.

I’ve been reading parts of it now and then, and last night I came to his chapter on balance. What he wrote made so utterly sense, it’s frightening. I’ve been formulating my own theories for a few years, on why some people totally alienate the people around them - all because their pride gets in the way (I guess Brian would consider that being low on the Emotional score, and that they have “glasses” on). I’ve been wondering about things like that.

This book will help anyone who’s willing to work on their life, to get more out of it.

And it might help people who are caught in destructive thought patterns. Brian Klemmer helps you identify your preconceived notions that make you act the way you act. By showing you that they may be there even if you don’t realize it. Even if you’ve never been without them.

A friend of mine lost 20 pounds and released an album after attending one of Brian Klemmer’s seminars. And she’s somewhere around 45, overweight, and had never released anything, though it had been her life’s dream. His seminar acted as a giant kick in the behind, to spur her into action.

I can’t promise that this book will help you quite that much. It’s all up to you how much you’ll let it affect you. But it does help you understand concepts that up to now may have been hard to get your mind around.

Like for instance the chapter about Balance. He likens balance to a square, and says we consist of the Physical, Emotional, Mental and Spiritual. And then proceeds to explain all sides, and tell you the goal to being balanced is to balance how you score on all these 1-10 scales and then try to improve the areas where you are lacking, instead of focusing your energy on the areas where you’re already doing well. And he explains the Spiritual in such a sense, you could well score relatively well even if you’re not active in a religion. It’s about your perspective on why you do what you do, why your goals are what they are.

So, guys, you should definitely get this book however you can get it.

I’ve put a link to Amazon here (I’m an associate, so it makes sense. I get a small percentage of any sales).

You can also read more about Brian Klemmer on his company’s website.

All the top results in Google for the term
spam huntress
points to posts in different weblogs referring to me!

I think I should make myself a T-shirt…

Here’s the first article I promised a while ago. I’ve tried to distill my knowledge about open proxies, from the perspective of me trying to convince admins to secure them:

Open Proxies

Discussion here below:

I put this article outside the blog. I expect quite a lot of search engine generated traffic, so that makes sense. Comments can be left here.

How do I keep my forum free of spam?

These guys hate spammers with a passion:

Talkaboutspam

We’ve been talking about blocking spammers in .htaccess before.

And so with that in mind I went through the results of a tracking script. Most of the referrer spammers have gone clear of that, by not spamming to individual posts in my blog. In fact, most spam the root of my site instead. But of those I caught, here’s a rundown:

One spammer didn’t have any identifying marks that could be blocked.

But dvdsqueeze, which is a regular in my log, can be blocked with this line (not completely sure of the syntax, but it’s something like this):
RewriteCond %{HTTP:VIA} ^.+mesa1
RewriteRule .* - [L,F]

The whole via line is like this:
1.0 wc03.inet.mesa1.secureserver.net:3128 (squid/2.5.stable6)

Today I woke up to two new comments in my moderation queue. New spammer. Topic: adult webcam

And what’s more, it’s relying on a new technique. It’s invisible!

In the moderation queue, it looks a little like the Bulgarians, in that it starts with the HTML code for the biggest headline. But the next codes nested inside those tags are typical of CSS files, and set font size to 1px and line height, margin and padding to 0 px. The headline tag ends just before the final line, which consists of a bland greating with a non-working hyperlink. The result is one line that isn’t visible except for the underline of links (and even that won’t be visible in some cases, depending on your CSS file). And then one bland visible line that won’t tell you anything. The only way to let you figure out that it’s spam is if you see the comments in your moderation queue, or from inside your admin interface.

And the spammer? Whois like this:

Registrant:
Almenix inc
Marcus Bellies-Vinterfrost (marcus at freecasinoplay d ot info)
Kalininskiy pr 12
Magadan
null,137501
RU
Tel. +910.21225550861

Registrar: Directi
Webhost: Esthost
DNS: Dnsmadeeasy, however, dig reveals elion.ee, which looks Finnish to me. Ah, it’s Estonian.

I also checked out the charcode inside one of the pages. When decoded, it’s pointing to a javascript. THAT is what the viewer will see, not what the search engines will see.

And what’s interesting, is that the viewer will see this message:

SUSPENDED for SPAM

if the referrer isn’t from a list of search engines. And then the page reloads into that of a bland search engine.

BUT, if the referrer is from a search engine, you’ll see the webcam page.

How’s that for cloaking? It’s specifically cloaked for bloggers to not take seriously, yet still serving up the intended page for the search engine produced traffic.

If bloggers were ever unsure of what the tactic was, we know now!

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