Comments on: Meet the splORGers: The latest breed of web spam parasites

By: David Pennock

David Pennock — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 15:27:37 +0000

FoolsGold wrote: > studies on just how much things like spam and pornogaphy have created > technological development. Without spam there would be no Captcha. I agree pornography has sparked great technological development, but I'm not as convinced about spam. Captcha itself is not a good thing: it ultimately wastes the most precious resource: people's time.

By: FoolsGold

FoolsGold — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 22:00:14 +0000

Further on cost/benefit ratio: I think the spammers are forward looking and want to cloak their sites with high quality links so as forestall any later developed programs that might classify the spammer’s sites as spam.
High quality link juice may be part of a future defense arsenal for the spammer.

By: Varun

Varun — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 06:21:14 +0000

I never click on random adds on various websites, but when I visited the FOCS website (the fake one) I actually did visit the links, although more out of curiosity.
If they would have outsourced the creation of fake websites and paid like $2 (I am serious) for that, they would have definitely made more money from the various adds. Infact their business model looks quite profitable

By: Varun

Varun — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 06:12:50 +0000

I think this makes an interesting research problem. How to protect the small players from the army of spammers or identity hackers. I find the problem with the ranking algorithm which Google uses because it does not give weightage to the content on the webpage. It only gives importance on the number of links, and links from a higher ranked webpage are given more weight.
So in fact if someone can edit higher ranked pages on wikipedia and create a link to their fake website than these problems will occur.

By: David Pennock

David Pennock — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 18:11:00 +0000

via Daniel Reeves: another impressive(ly devious) scammer

By: FoolsGold

FoolsGold — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 16:11:12 +0000

I wonder if anyone has done studies on just how much things like spam and pornogaphy have created technological development. Without spam there would be no Captcha. This is not to say that I welcome or approve of spam in any fashion. Its simply that if we are to consider economics then the question of cost-benefit ratio arises and the financial benefits to pornographers and spammers are very high.

By: FoolsGold

FoolsGold — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 11:42:20 +0000

Well, I’m not too certain that I grok the economics of spam or even grok the economics of more legitimate commerce. I would think this is indeed an attempt to siphon some link juice but its also an attempt to bathe a site in some impenetrable cloud of legitimacy so that google’s algorithms may be eventually deceived.
There is no cost to spam: there are sufficient maliciously inclined techies to direct a campaign on the cheap and there are sufficient numbers of drones capable of carrying out instructions. The “cost” of spam is equivalent to the cost of bathrooms in that Italian factory that was built decades ago. The factory owner failed to build any bathrooms in the new factory because his worker’s needs were simply not on his mind. Its the same way with spam… the spammers do not even think of what it might cost them. Todays money is so good that they can be perfectly happy trying to keep their sites cloaked with link juice no matter what the cost.

By: David Pennock

David Pennock — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 18:45:28 +0000

Thanks FoolsGold. But this particular attack doesn’t seem to be easily automate-able to reach the scale that spammers need, unless I underestimate what they’re capable of (which seems to happen all the time).

I just can’t see how the cost outweighs the benefit. But apparently it does or it wouldn’t persist.

By: FoolsGold

FoolsGold — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 21:08:46 +0000

I think the economics of spam are pretty straightforward. I used the example of “four walling” in a previous post here. The physical act of posting bills in a town is roughly equivalent to the electronic act of posting spam. The billing crew would receive instructions to ignore any Post No Bills signs and to simply post the bills on any building that had four walls. The crew chief didn’t care how many people he offended, his job was to get those bills posted.
Its the same thing with spam only there is an added wrinkly of being forward-looking. Whether you are actually trying to sell Viagra at an academic conference site or not doesn’t matter too much. If you do ship one order of Viagra as a result of your spam, that one order still represents a profit. If you do not actually ship any Viagra as a result of the spam site well it doesn’t matter, you’ve still milked some link juice and are basking your links in clover so that as various artifical intelligence programs are designed to detect spam links, your particular links are not only dripping with link-juice but are also perfumed with an aura of respectability so that anti-spam programs will have a tougher time trying to purify the link juice.