A Change of Pace: Porn Spam

It’s been awhile since porn site referral spam showed up and today a false Blogger referral showed up from http: // asian . erolove . in / The title gives away the content right away, so don’t expect screen captures. A simple rule is that anything that has “love” or “ero” is going to feature pornographic material.

Strange as it may sound given my disapproval of pornography, this was almost nostalgic because I remember when porn spam and letters from Nigeria asking for banking help were the norm. These days weight loss and get rich quick schemes dominate with attempts to sell pharmaceutical products right behind.

One of the most bizarre things I’ve run into has been the flood of email spam from a Canadian pharmacy trying to sell Viagra and similar products.

“That doesn’t sound bizarre” you say thinking about your email account’s junk filter. What made it strange is that it posed as a lot of different things in the titles including weight loss, celebrity scandal information, and -- porn. It used to be the porn masquerading as something else! We live in a bizarre world.

Don’t click the referral!

A Failure to Load a Spam Site

While I post about referral spam as a form of public service, I sometimes get sites that won’t load right in my Linux based virtual machine. I can’t tell if the error is due incompatibilities or attempted shenanigans by the spam site.

http: // ceae2122 . dyo . gs / is once such site that appeared in my Blogger stats today. It goes straight to LinkBucks and is supposed to be a video. When I clicked on the video it wanted me to update my video player.

It looks like an ad before the actual destination, but curiosity led me to see what would happen if I clicked the button. First came instructions and then it got interesting:

It wanted me to download and install a customized version of VLC player. Being very familiar with that software, I recognized that isn’t the real release file. Not being interested in cleaning up an infection when I haven’t even gotten to the final destination, I canceled that.

So where did clicking “skip this ad” end up taking me?

Well that’s disappointing. I have no clue what it was supposed to be thanks to the server error. It could be a missing destination for all I know.

LinkBucks is a very shady bunch and to be avoided like the bubonic plague anyway. Don’t click on anything going to them!

I really need to get ReactOS or WindowsXP running in a virtual machine for some of these investigations.

Comment Spam in the E-mail

The experiment with removing bot checks from commenting continues and so does the spam in my email account. Always posing as an anonymous commenter, it only shows up in my Gmail account but not in Blogger. So at least some of the filters are working. That’s the only silver lining since I have to check each email out.

Once again it is time to fire up the virtual machine with Ubuntu on it to do some investigating. Here are some examples and where the links lead to:

Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "Howl’s Moving Castle (2004)":
Cygiefiania xaikalitag icergeallonia [ url = http: // usillumaror . com ] iziananatt [ /url ] Juicillenna http: // gussannghor . com EnedonoMory

The first link is embedded in xaikalitag and is ww2 . wikaswieier . com which throws up an error message. The secong link gets the same result.

The third time is the charm and we get to see a fake search engine made to mine money from click referrals.

Millennium Actress (2001) Review

Spirited Away wasn’t the only brilliant anime movie to come out of Japan in 2001 though it is the one everybody has heard of. While not as famous, this movie meant for adults is every bit the equal of anything Studio Ghibli has put out. Depicting the life of one actress from the tender age of ten to her seventies, it’s use of flashbacks that blur the line between film and reality make for a wildly inventive film. Incredibly vivid animation, a stellar score, and a terrific story make this a must see.

Most people associate animated movies with fantasy or comedic stories aimed at children. If you mention “anime” you will most likely will draw a blank look. If they have even heard of the term, the stereotype of kids using balls to summon monsters prevails. Mention something like Spirited Away and finally something positive will be said since it is the most well known anime movie in the United States. The whole concept of an anime movie telling a story aimed at adults never enters the picture.

As a result, people miss gems such as Millennium Actress rather easily. A mix of comedy, drama, and a touch of romance using the history of 20th Century Japanese filmmaking as a backdrop, this lovely movie is not for kids. No, this movie is for those who have lived long enough to have known success and heartbreak. It is also for fans of movies, period.

First impressions can be everything, especially with a movie. The film opens in somewhat surprising fashion with a scene that could have been out of 2001: A Space Odyssey. A moon base is the setting with a woman determined to launch in a spaceship for a solo voyage despite the protestations of a man. Her stubbornness is fueled by a desire to fulfill a promise to another man.

Did I wander into a science fiction story by mistake? This certainly wasn’t what I expected from the description at Netflix way back when I first rented it.

A sudden pause of the scene reveals that it is a movie being watched by a middle aged man. Genya Tachibana (Shozo Izuka) is a fan of the actress, perhaps her greatest fan. Interrupted by an earthquake, he is notified by his assistant/camera man that it is time to leave and get to work.

Flashes of one woman’s life go by, first in black and white then color, as the videotape is fast forwarded. Not only is it an artistic way to start the credits, it helps explain the unusual introduction. Tachibana is making a documentary for the 70th anniversary of Ginei Studios and a certain actress was at the heart of their productions for decades.

Man of Steel Sequel Announced

Starring Batman!

No, I’m not joking. Superman/Batman is going to be made with the cast from Man of Steel returning and a Batman yet to be cast. Filming is set to begin next year and the movie released in 2015.

From the hint given, it sounds like the hero with two fathers will be facing off against the hero with no father. Plenty of inherent drama in that alone, but it will be their conflicting approaches to crime fighting that will drive the movie, I suspect.

I know the actor who should play Batman, but we’ll see how casting actually goes. After watching Man of Steel, I wondered how they could possibly top the events in that for a sequel. Well, this could do it.

Time for Some Polish Comment Spam

One of the best reasons to enable Recaptcha aka the oddly colored and jumbled letters in the comments form is the fact you will very quickly see spam show up in your comments if you don’t. I moderate every post and had done this to save time though it does stop real people from commenting due to frustration deciphering the text.

To make it easier for people to post, I disabled the Turing test last night. At 2:17 AM this morning, the following arrived in my mailbox (edited to defeat autolinking):

Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "Godzilla vs Biollante (1989)":
[ url = http : // www . page1 . pl] pozycjonowanie [/ url ]

Needless to say, that looked suspicious sort of like a masked man robbing a bank does. Firing up the trusty virtual Ubuntu machine, I investigated the link which led to a very professional looking site put up by a company called Arteria.

It’s a rather large page involving a lot of scrolling, so I present only the top and bottom of the content. I’ve edited out the actual contact information which includes an address in Krakow, Poland.

Courtesy of Google Translate, the opening text in English:

As you have probably guessed, they are selling something. In this case, SEO optimization and placement. What’s SEO? Search Engine Optimization. That’s why they are spamming websites, hoping to get someone wanting higher traffic to pay them for their services.

If you are a webmaster or blog owner, do not click on this and feed their shady practices.

UPDATE: Turns out I missed another comment spam from a mere hour or two after I disabled the robot check. What’s hilarious here is that the link goes to a page that no longer exists:

Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "Howl’s Moving Castle (2004)":
When some one searches for his essential thing, so he/she wants to be available that in detail, thus that thing is maintained over here.
My weblog: southwest florida art galleries

atlcurling . info / wiki / index.php?title = User: JZFLourde

Once these spambots are set loose they seem to keep going long after the site is dead. I wonder how much zombie spam is out there?

Referral Spam Overload

Updated 15 July 2013 with screen captures and testing Tor for browsing.

A very quick post; referral spam went nuts the past 24 hours on the blog totalling 35 hits. The culprits:

adsensewatchdog . com

This is what it looks like without Tor and NoScript. A wide index of terms so they get hits. Just another fake search engine riding the real ones to get traffic and money for pages served.

With Tor (an untrackable browser) and NoScript it looks completely different. Fancier parked graphics and no links.