Comment Spam

From the Sidelines has had a visitor named “fati” from Casablanca, Morocco attempt to post twice during the past two days on different referral spam posts. The content of the comments is the same:

It's easy way to make money
Super-Duper Easy Way to Earn Money By
Promoting A link - 0.5$ per Referral Link Visit.
-Register
-Share Refferral Link
-Earn Money on every visit

A shortened shortened link is also included. I’m not going to click that for obvious reasons.

It’s fascinating to see how prevalent “black hat” methods of generating income from ads on the Net have become. Some of this is typical of how underhanded people always exploit anything that can be exploited. But I’m also becoming aware that some of this is a reaction to how hard it is to make money from running advertisements on a website these days.

Money is tighter and tighter in the current world economy that’s teetering on collapse and ads have always been nebulous in results. With the Web coming into being, actual viewing and response to ads has become a harder science than it was. Results can be tabulated in near real time, targeting has become extremely refined, and wasted efforts easier to avoid.

Google has tried refining its search indexing protocols (SERPS) to downgrade black hat method using sites, but is losing the war while taking out innocent bystanders. They also are in the business to make money and favor branded economic sites over “mom and pop” small businesses now. Reading the pain going on for some of them and how some are turning to “the dark side” to survive, I have to wonder if the mess can be resolved in any good way at all.

My posts on spam, especially of the referral type on Blogger, came about due to the lack of information about the links showing up in my stats. They are a public service endeavor which has led me to learn about things I had no clue about in the financial ecosystem of Web advertising and search results. I’ll never be an expert, but from the amount of hits the posts have gotten at least some information got relayed to those who needed it.

So these public service announcements will continue though they annoy me to write.

Health 3-24-2013

Energy levels have been low, even for me, this past week. Pain has been much higher and spread throughout the body with joints being the problem. It has been very strange because the body is loose which means I can pop the bad spots in my back for temporary relief – that’s the opposite of how things normally are. Still, the relief is much shorter than usual.

I’ve also had to take long naps every day on top of sleeping longer than usual. The body acts like it is under attack from something, but nothing is apparent. Headaches of varying intensity have occurred nearly every day. Dizziness has also been present.

Looking at the symptoms, it reminds me of Lyme Disease minus the rashes and paralysis.

Crossword puzzles and Audiosurf both indicate I’m in normal alertness parameters so I don’t have a clue as to what’s going on.

A Couple of Pests

While perusing the news, I ran across two articles about invaders. One is an invader of the blood stream and the other of trees. Both are connected to me oddly enough, so they caught my interest.

Lyme Disease’s bacterium has been found to be far more unusual than thought. It is the first living organism to be discovered that doesn’t live by consuming iron! Instead it apparently uses maganese as a substitute and that explains why it is so hard for the immune system to fight. Tricky things, the microscopic.

Let’s hope that the research is correct and leads to a better treatment of the disease. I did not enjoy my bout of it last year.

Meanwhile, slightly less close to home, the emerald ash borer has entered Houston County with finds in La Crescent. Worry about the insects has been around for years, but they took their time in arriving. I used to carry a card for identifying the insect that got got thrown out during a fit of wallet cleaning. Time to get another one, I suppose.

Just recently I’d been talking to a friend who will be doing a summer internship mapping out the problem in Winona, which is north of La Crescent. The focus of that won’t just be detection, but advising on substitution of different trees to replace the ones being cut down. Interesting stuff, that.

I find myself disliking bugs of all kinds after reading the news today. I wonder why?

Back to working on my next review.

Ill Tidings

Spring has officially arrived though I can’t tell it looking out my window. It is currently seven degrees Farenheit with snow outside and frost on the inner windows of my room. It could be worse.

North Korea cyberattacked South Korea this morning our time and the afternoon their time. Bank and television computer networks were taken down for many hours and some still aren’t operational. What did this mean for the South Korean people? They had to deal with no debit or credit cards working and that includes ATMs. I suspect business to business transactions were also impossible.

Imagine if that happened in the United States.

Of more local concern and by local I mean household, the Subaru started having serious problems overheating Saturday night and Sunday. It is currently in the shop having its engine torn apart for head gasket replacement plus timing and other belts. So financial pain has arrived with spring.

I suppose Saturday was close enough to the Ides of March to qualify, come to think of it.

SWATting Hits a Bigger Name

One of the nastier things being done by people out to harass bloggers and now reporters is making false phone calls that cause a SWAT raid on innocent people. The latest victim is Brian Krebs who is something of a crusader in the Internet security field. More can be found at Ars Technica.

The tactic has moved out of the political arena to the organized crime category if what I’m reading is correct. If the militarization of local police forces didn’t concern me in the past, this sort of thing has me questioning it. In decades past, the image of heavily armed men kicking in doors and hauling people out was something you associated with communist countries and other dictatorships.

If that isn’t a sign of decline, I don’t know what is.

The only thing that can be done about the rise of SWATting is find some kind of way to have local police informed about the potential for false calls for specific people. That only helps those who know they might be SWATted, but I don’t any other thing that can be done other than to introduce training about the practice to local police forces.

Maybe Krebs experience will finally get the irresponsible mainstream media to start talking about the problem. One can only hope.

Ending the Ad Experiment

With the traffic only recovering to around half of what it used to be before December there is no point in continuing to have ads on the blog. I never expected to make any money with them, but the steep decline in page views killed any accumulation of data on ad effectiveness for small sites in my eyes. It had looked like it would be eight years before I'd collect my first payment from AdSense back when the traffic was higher.

Suffice it to say I'm not really impressed with the service and view it as something only for the highest trafficked blogs. The real ad money is in affiliate ads and that would be more work to implement than I care to do for just experimenting. In the end, it turned out to be a very boring experiment that didn't even rise to the level of disappointing.

I did learn more about things such as SERP plus the terrifying creatures Panda and Penguin involved in Google indexing. So it hasn't been a total loss.

There are some on the Net who think that adding ads to their blogs at Blogger decreased their traffic. That seems strange and implausible. If my traffic from Google starts shooting up a month from now I might believe it. It isn't something to hold one's breath over though.

So the blog will be a lot cleaner looking now.

How Many Referral Spammers Are There?

That’s the question on my mind. Yet again faked referral links have shown up in my Blogger stats and yet again it is one I haven’t seen before.

afslotat . net16 . net is the newest one to hit the blog with a tempting link:
afslotat . net16 . net / info / my blog address

It appears to be out of Latvia, but that could be faked too. An attempt was made to load the site in a VM, but failed so I’m very suspicious and advise not clicking the link for any reason.

UPDATED

Another address like it showed up this evening:
radepaha . hs8 . ru / de  /info / my blog address . de

I'm not even going to try to investigate it since it is likely from the same people behind the other.

UPDATED again...

Now I've gotten referral spam from one of the biggest weirdos on the net. escapefrommasachusetts . org is on the loose again after being around as escapefromma . com and this site is dangerous to click on. The latest incarnation of pseudo anarchic drivel is salacious statements about Mitt Romney. A little out of date, that.  DO NOT CLICK!

Yet another UPDATE:

A new variation of the first two spams has shown up and racked up a ridiculous number of hits in one day. It uses the same fake "info" then your blog address in the referral. The new culprit is:

tkdot . com