Archive of posts tagged Spam

Virginia High Court Strike Down Anti-Spam Law

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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/09/12/AR2008091201211.html?hpid=topnews In 2004 Jeremy Jaynes was convicted under Virginia’s Anti-Spam law for sending 10 million spam emails through AOL servers located in Virginia. Virginia’s Supreme Court has overturned that conviction and struck down the Anti-spam law. “The court unanimously agreed with Jeremy Jaynes’ argument that the law violates the free-speech protections of the First Amendment …

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CBL List (partially) Blocks MessageLabs

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Looks like the shoe is on the other foot. Last week I was chortling that MessageLabs was tar pitting Google in an automatic response to gmail sending out so much spam. Now some of MessageLabs IPs have been blocked by the CBL. Apparently that is rather widely used. I’ve already seen rejections from Cox and …

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Google CAPTCHA breakage leads to increase in spam

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MessageLabs Intelligence report for February 2008 reports that ” 4.6% of all spam originates from the major web mail-based services and the proportion of spam from Google increased two-fold from 1.3% in January to 2.6% in February.” They speculate that this increase in Google spam occurred because hackers have recently compromise Google’s CAPTCHA. A CAPTCHA …

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BBB Spam Run

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Watch out for more BBB phishing/exploits. Today MessageLabs detected another Better Business Bureau attack targeted at two of our VPs. Subject: “BBB Complaint Case # (Ref#)” From: seatac@bbb.org The message contained a PDF file with a embedded EXE. We had one slip through to our CEO earlier this month that caused some panic. Fortunately the …

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Comments

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I have installed the AJAX comment system. It has the side effect of requiring javascript being enabled in your browser to submit a comment. I’ve also re-enabled anonymous comments. Hopefully the javascript will throwoff some of the automated comment spammers. I’ve seen a press release from Yahoo stating they are implementing an OpenID beta at …

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The spam filter has run amok

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My MovableType spam defenses have kind of run amok. It was letting through a ton of spam which led me to disable anonymous comments. For its next trick it decided to trash valid comments. The first method used for trashing valid comments was a rule that http:// shouldn’t appear in the commenter’s name field. That …

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