Spam

Check out this thread to learn more about SPAM:

https://budgetlightforum.com/t/-/3588

How about banning chenee ?

Cheneeee joined yesterday and had 57 posts already. He's trying to sell Coach bags in a budget flashlight forum. What is he thinking?

i guess he`s thinking he can sell us some of his coach bags... ;)

wiseguy lol!

Is this how CPF began the journey to the darkside? Idiots spamming and CPF trying to come up with ways to stop it. I hope we are able to kill the spam without losing the community feeling we have here.

Hmm. Next step would be to create a technical solution to prevent spam from being accepted.

For instance, generate a hash of each message over some minimum length (so :P messages don't trigger). Then just keep these hash signatures in memory for a few hours (to keep the collision checking quick) and dump any new messages that collide.

You could defeat this by changing a single letter of the comment, yes, but it would defeat pure cut/paste attacks.

Ughhhh, Cheneee is gone now with all of his bags. Sorry for the inconvenience!

I'm glad you finally "bagged" him lol

What is a coach bag anyway?

Good idea! There are implementations of algorithms that are designed to find near-matches (such as simhash and probably lots more, considering that there's a lot of interest in academia). Simhash, in particular, is actually pretty fast, relatively speaking of course.

Also, while we're talking site issues, I thought I'd bring up this thread. NeoGeo discovered that a blf.cc.cz link in an old post of mine now points to a domain squatter site. NoScript and a custom filter list actually blocked the redirection attempt in FF but when I opened the site in IE (in a separate sandbox), it redirected to a spam site. I suspect this affects all old links that point to blf.cc.cz (ie. the old site). Is there any way to re-write old links in the database so that they point to the new site? Getting the old subdomain back would obviously be easier, but I suspect the spammers won't be too happy to give it up and cc.cz is notorious for ignoring abuse cases.

It's a device that guarantees sex for a husband.

Am I the only one who finds this extremely funny? Location HK, number of posts 2 and asking about spam. Has there ever been a legitimate poster from KN or anywhere in China who mentioned apam or any website in their first couple of posts? :slight_smile:



So we have a spammer asking about spam :slight_smile: The usual disclaimers apply of course…if I’m wrong I apologize! It’s funny nevertheless!

He/she/it is not trying to sell anything here. This kind of spam is about getting better search result rankings. Google used to rank results for a given search term by the number of external pages containing that term and linking to the site. I don't know if this is still the way Google works, but the spammer is clearly trying to manipulate search engines. It's not important if he pisses of the users and gets banned, as long as there is a chance of Google's crawler stopping by before his posts get deleted.

Before I discovered my love for spandex, living in a cave and fighting crime, I was running networks to pay the bills. Part of my responsibilities was fighting spam and this was way before everybody would just outsource spam fighting. It was a cat and mouse game and we were losing. So, I turn to a friend of mine for advice and he tells me to think big. Not understanding, I ask what he means and he tells me to go ahead and blackhole all of China, Russia and a dozen other countries. As in flat out block all traffic to port 25 (and later outright rejecting any traffic) from those countries, period.

Now, if you've ever talked to a politician you know how I felt: add a billion here and a billion there, and all of a sudden, you're talking about a fairly large number. ;)

Turns out his logic was sound. There were no overseas customers and a huge chunk of all spam and hacking attempts were coming from China and Russia. As far as extreme measures go, this was a bit much for me but I have to admit it was very effective and it did buy us some time.

It also turned out I was right. Tatamall and lao…something didn’t really spam immediately but tonight they both started promoting as it turns out…www.tatamall.com.



I agree. Block all of China and we won’t lose any real members.

Uh, I think I need to clarify what I wrote above. Sorry, I didn't make myself clear. Maybe I shouldn't post before I've had my morning coffee. ;)

What I posted above was just an anecdote. It wasn't meant as a suggestion. Let me explain: port 25 is SMTP traffic, ie. the port you access to send email (or in most cases your MTA). SMTP was unauthenticated and even SoHo land was entirely unfiltered back then. That's what we ended up blocking because the network was being constantly overloaded by spammers. Think of it as a nuclear arms race: we would buy more bandwidth and allocate more resources, only to have the spammers up the ante. This was way, way before the CAN-SPAM act, but it was still a clear-cut abuse case and this was a corporate network, not an ISP. The company I worked for at the time got no legitimate traffic from China, Russia or any of the countries we had to block to keep the network operational. And this was at a time when most people didn't know what the Internet was, Barracuda was a fish and not a company, as far as most people were concerned spam came in a can and Michelle (at that time Matthew) Sullivan was still reasonable and fun to work with.

Long story short, we had to take pretty extreme measures to keep the boat from sinking because that's all we could do. These days, we have an arsenal of anti-spam techniques at our disposal. Mind you, we're still losing the fight from an operational perspective because somebody still has to pay for all that traffic, processing, manpower, etc. even if a lot of UCE is hidden from view.

And in my caffeine-deprived mind, that's probably the point I was trying to make. Having a dozen old threads bumped sucks but put into perspective, at least, it's still manageable. Having said that, I am all for using technology to fight spam because, well, I know doing it by hand sucks.

Sorry if I offended anyone. I didn't mean to.

Don't block China! I spend part of the year there.. Everything else fun already requires a VPN to access, don't make BLF annoying to get to too :(

Haha…my point wasn’t to actually block all of China. Just that if you automatically block everyone from China with limited posts who links to or asks about a Chinese website would not result in eliminating any legitimate members. There hasn’t been an exception to that “rule” yet.

Hey I've got this lovely Coach Bag you just might be interested in. My wife didn't like it, or was it sex she didn't like? Dammed memory problems.Tongue Out