New YouTube Based Blog Referral Spam

Well that is interesting. The Russian spammers have come up with a new one that delivers up a YouTube video of a Grand Theft Auto 4 sequence. Why would they do that? Well, the account holder gets money from the ads that run before it plays. This is why you see pretty girls doing reply videos to just about every subject out there – they make a lot of money from people clicking on them.

So if you see youtube.com in your referring sites, do not click and enrich the Russian mob.

Another Blogger Referral Spammer: Pnarp

Yep, another one that has been around for awhile but keeps changing servers and countries. If you see any referrals from pnarp . com please do not click on them, there have been some reports of malware being automatically downloaded. Flicker users have also had problems with it in the past and other social media sites (Digg, Twitter, other blog services) have seen this joker show up too.

UPDATE 8-26-2012: 

Found another spammer, pregolom . com out of Russia. It does not appear to be related to pnarp, but it seems like there is a big uptick in referral spam lately.  It along with filmhill . com have been showing up in large numbers the past week.

Renovations to the Blog

This summer, I decided to do a little remodeling to the blog. Rather than change the visuals, I decided to change the accessibility of older posts. It has been a work in progress and I will continue to refine the layout as time goes on. One of these days I may even replace the old photo of me with something more recent, which will not be easy since I avoid having my ugly mug photographed.

The latest change involves using Blogger’s pages feature which was introduced last autumn. In keeping with the KISS model, there are now simple indexes to reviews with a new bar near the top allowing easy access. Eventually there may be new pages, but for the moment the categories of Home, Movie Reviews, Anime Series Reviews, and Television Series Reviews will be it in the tabs.

Hopefully, this will help people searching for more content they are interested in, since tags have turned out to be a little messier than I expected. With people clicking in from countries all over the world and from many different languages, simplicity is a must. Enough people have been using the tags for me to realize there might be a better way to go about things. It means a little more work for me, but it it should be worth it.

Comments are not allowed on the index pages in order to keep them neat, but any feedback is appreciated on individual posts, of course.

I never expected to have many hits on this blog, but I passed the 20,000 page view mark a month ago to my amazement. While it started out as a journal of sorts, it has become something more experimental than that. Being in on the Web relatively early, I find myself missing the random surfing of web rings and the excitement of finding something unusual. The Web may be more useful now, but it was a lot more fun back then.

So From the Sidelines is not going to be the usual blog that is purely personal, political, or other niche oriented. It is going to be an  oddball mix of some of my many interests with no apologies for any of it. Much like my DVD/Blu-ray collection has anime sitting next to highly acclaimed films next to cult classics next to box office hits without segregation, the posts here will be the same.

If I have managed to inform, entertain, or intrigue just one person having trouble sleeping or simply surfing the Net, then I am satisfied that I have returned a little of what I got to experience back in the 1990s when the World Wide Web was new.

So I thank all who have visited thereby keeping me intrigued and entertained from showing up in my stats and comments. It adds something to my life here on the sidelines.

Blogger Referral Spam and Twitter

After digging into my monthly stats on Blogger, a pattern emerged of links to apparently legitimate sites that really were not genuine. Instead, they used Twitter’s URL shortening service, T.co, to disguise the page. It turns out that some hits that I thought were real from stumbleupon.com were actually the exact same kind of spam as I previously wrote about here and here. Another falsified website referral using t.co I found was for cultek.com which is a biomedical company.

I have never liked link abbreviating services due to the amount of malicious code, pages, and photos they have been used for. Twitter has launched lawsuits and claim to be filtering how t.co handles links, but so far I am not impressed. It seems like services are always falling behind the black hats in cyberspace, so the moral of the story is for people to be very careful about what they click. Examine the entire link and be reluctant to click on a shortened one.

UPDATE:

Oh the irony. From the time I started writing this post to actually publishing it, another site with referral spam hit me, but not using t.co. This one is ultrafiles . net and is again out of Russia. The title of their website is Linkbucks . com and is another make money off of links site.

UPDATE: A day later, another fake link using devscripts.net and t.co, so the beat goes on.

UPDATE: July 31st brought a new falsified link using the same method, this time posing as myhealthscore.com.

UPDATE: Another one supposedly from filmhill.com that links to a video of how to get “lucky” using a fish. The absurdity is amazing and I am glad I have a little used browser in a sandbox to check these things.

Link Referral Spam from aptratings

One of the banes of blogging is link referral spam that is only visible to the website’s administrator, or in this case, the owner of the blog. Much of it comes from Russia and I note the rare occasions when a legitimate search from there lands on my blog. 99% of hits on the blog from Russia are from spammers.

The latest to come out of there is falsified links from aptratings . com, which poses as apartmentratings.com which is a real site of questionable reliability, but no spammer. They do this by having a banner link to the real site on top, but the content is a come on to make money by clicking on links or pushing links on social media sites. I suspect the fake site content changes from time to time, but do not want to waste time finding out.

The only ones making money off this are the people running that site in Russia, so do not fall for it. I have seen novice bloggers online getting excited to get linked to without realizing what it is really about. Sorry to burst your bubbles, but they randomly scour blogger looking for people to sucker in.

Then there are the post spammers, which is why you need to enable reviewing post before they are put up. One got by me this week when I missed with the mouse cursor and had to go delete it. Forget idle hands, shaky hands are really the devil’s plaything.

You will not get a virus from clicking on the referral spam, but you most likely will get more of it showing up in your stats in the control panel.

Culling the Herd

While I am no longer active on Facebook, I did go back today to remove the remaining hundreds of “friends” I accrued while gaming there in past years. As it stands, I have 67 people left, most of whom I know in reality or through politics. Read what you will into that.

I doubt I will ever be active again there, as I forget it even exists until someone brings it up. Meanwhile, Google + is a bust, which can be of no surprise to most. Over at LinkedIn, I had to change my password due to the massive hack attack that exposed many passwords.

Social media sites, or the Web 2.0 as the wits dubbed it, are losing their luster since they are inherently superficial. But the greatest threat is the lack of security and the fact that hackers are targeting their databases more and more.

Blogging at least allows coherent thoughts to be put up, so I am content to write here where nobody pays attention. I would rather post substance and be ignored than to post twaddle and have “likes” dinging it up!

Searching for Where the News Can Be Found

Or a Personal Quest for Journalistic Quality

I've always been fascinated by history and current events (which is simply "live" history), seeking out knowledge wherever I could.  This dates to the stone age before the Web, back when we had to read newspapers, magazines, books, and watch Walter Cronkite on the CBS Evening News. Eventually, as cable finally made its way into our family life, there was the news addict's dream made real by CNN and then the quick fix provided by CNN Headline News.  Heady (or headliney) times, it couldn't get better than this! 

Of course, it wasn't easy to get some of the quality newspapers as The New York Times and The Washington Post were only available at the library. But I did have a subscription to Newsweek for a couple of years that I treasured.  That fell by the wayside due to a lack of money brought on by disability, but in the early 1990's I purchased my first computer, a Packard Bell 486SX-25 with a 2400 baud modem in it.  After perusing bulletin boards on dial-up, I received one of those unavoidable America Online floppies in the mail.  I joined the service and began to find news in virtual print once again.

Watching Less, Reading More

In the meantime, various cable news networks had popped up and while available on satellite TV, I felt there had been a decay in quality slowly becoming evident.  By the mid-90s, format changes were making it all feel more tabloid like, more entertainment and personality driven.  Cable news hit its zenith during 1991 when covering Operation Desert Storm and never quite hit that level again.  I watched it less and less.

So I turned toward content I could find online, though it wasn't easy or convenient to find.  The Web came into being and I dipped my toe in the water via AOL's built in browser.  As internet service became available locally, I signed up to the very primitive connectivity in my rural area.  After giving up on it and returning to AOL, the service finally became reliable and I signed up again using OS/2 Warp's Web Explorer to crawl around the new web.  I remember that new place called Yahoo just starting up, then Netscape taking the web browser to a whole new level.  By that time the OS wars were over and I was stuck with Windows95. At last came a new piece of software that looked like it would fulfill all my dreams of news gathering in one place.

A News Junkie's Dream

That program was called Pointcast and it was wonderful!  I could set it up to download the news from all sorts of sources, including The New York Times and The Washington Post.  It all flowed into the program in the background when I was dialed into the Net and I could read it once disconnected.  That was needed, because even a 56k modem in 1996 took awhile to get any content off the copper wires.  It was bliss, news nirvana, and I couldn't stop extolling it to others I knew.

Of course, it didn't last.  The infrastructure wasn't there yet for so much data being downloaded at once, it was overloading servers in business environments which were the main users of Pointcast.  Missed opportunities and the rise of Yahoo killed the endeavor within a few years.  I mourned that software's passing almost as much as OS/2 Warp's.

Signs of the Times

Thankfully, the newspapers and news cable stations had discovered the value of the Internet by then.  It meant I had to read while online, but the content was still there.  However, I started to see the same symptoms of rot that I'd seen with news TV.  The New York Times in particular was becoming less a journalistic bastion of integrity than a source of polemics.   By 2003, the Jayson Blair scandal broke and I wasn't surprised, as my trips to their website had gone from multiple times a day to once daily. The rot had become visible. At that point, it was a slow road to infrequently visiting the once venerable institution.  These days, articles are written the same way as editorials and there really is no difference.

At least The Washington Post kept it's integrity, I told others. For the most part, it did until the 2004 election drove it over the edge.  While not going into the absolute free fall that has turned the Grey Lady into a very bad joke, it did become more openly partisan.  Of course it was always a left wing newspaper, but a very respectable one.  After John Kerry's loss in the Presidential race, the paper began to go down the same road as it's New York rival.

This was unpleasant to recognize, because I didn't feel like I had much in the way of alternatives.  Oh there was the rising blogosphere, but that wasn't developed enough at the time.  Talk radio never appealed, because it is primarily personality driven with a penchant for theatrics.  NPR is possibly the best antidote for insomnia, between its nonstop leftist slant and gray drones speaking in the academic cadences of those who've never really lived life. 

Signal Degradation

What of cable news?  Infotainment at best, rarely any journalism present these days.  Sensationalism is the main content, with talk radio style theatrics thrown in. Not a surprise as many shows are hosted by talk radio hosts. Most cable news networks are far left, with MSNBC on the lunatic fringe side of the spectrum and CNN catering to the left base.  Fox News is still tabloid in style, which I despise.  At least they report the stories the other networks refuse to, since that is where the ratings and eyeballs are. I feel as if I am praising Fox with faint damning's. The other networks are more concerned with being an active component of the Democratic Party than in being journalists. That includes the tattered remnants of the once proud broadcast network news shows.


A New Media:  Meet the New Boss, Same as the Old Boss?

These days, the blogs are where to find information that the left wing media suppresses. Still, there is a huge amount of emotionalism to this new media and one has to sift them to get good information.  It reminds me very much of the yellow journalism days of the 1800's.  The idea of journalistic integrity is a late 20th Century idea and I often wonder if there ever has been such a thing.  But trying to obtain that illusion at least keeps things more grounded in reality and honesty.

Currently, society in the United States is fragmenting rather than uniting.  The rise of blogs is a good indication of that, with the constant wars fought between even those claiming to be on the same side.  Just search for LGF or LittleGreenFootballs along with the word 'banning' to see the kind of wars that get fought, as that blog goes further left.  Of course, that is an exaggerated example as that blog has turned into an intolerant, totalitarian cult-like place.  Once upon a time it was in my links on this blog, but hasn't been for some time now.


Looking Across the Pond

So where to find the news?  I suggest reading the full links from various blogs, getting the original articles in case things have been misinterpreted or spun. You have to work to find out the truth, don't expect anyone to deliver it to you on a platter. For traditional news that hasn't totally degraded, check out newspapers from the United Kingdom, such as The Telegraph and The Times. It was a link on Drudge that inspired me to write this post, as I discovered I was part of a trend.  Imagine that, me being trendy!

It appears that there are more than a few of us American news junkies reading the newspapers of Great Britain to get news about our own country we don't get in print here.  What a sad and alarming thing statement that is!  I don't think our newspapers are dying due to a lack of an audience, but due to becoming completely out of touch with the majority of Americans. 

The Death of an Independent Media?

Now there is talk of the government bailing out the liberal newspapers, consolidating the leftist message by turning them into possessions of the government.  Because the majority of the federal government is made up by bureaucrats, it doesn't matter which party is in possession of the Oval Office.  Those faceless feds tend to be very liberal, which means the papers will be semi-official organs of big government no matter what.

Pravda anyone?

Sadly, that question won't mean a thing to many too young to remember the Soviet Union.  When a government controls the news, there can be no freedom.  It is up to us, the American people, to prevent this from happening.  Do we have enough people willing to fight for their freedom in this fragmented society?  It isn't enough to defend the Constitution, we must make sure that a vibrant and independent media exists, otherwise the First Amendment is just words.

Me, I'm wondering if I'll have to keep searching for honest journalism in the future.  The fact I'm looking to British newspapers for news isn't good.