Posts Tagged “spam”

Why Spammers Suck

by Jamison "JAK" Kissh on April 29, 2009

Today while I was using DestroyTwitter I ran out of API calls and was cursing to high hell as to why this happened, then I remembered. I’d forgotten that Twitter limits API calls, and why do they do this? To stop spammers, or to piss off the rest of us.

When this happened I took a step back and though about how many other good things that spammers have ruined and I can’t help but wonder, does it ever pay off? Below is a  list of a few of the things that spammers have ruined lately.

  • Facebook – There never used to be restriction on FB until it got popular and the spammers followed suite, now my wall gets deleted because they think it’s getting spammed.
  • APIs everywhere – Anywhere that a spammer can get his/her slimy little fingers into with an API it’s been exploited which means it’s harder to get API keys for the rest of us.
  • Blogs – Have to love Akismet, even my small blog would be inundated with spam posts without it.

Of course no list of things that spammers have ruined would be complete without mentioning the single worst medium for spam… email.

Now since I was pondering this I came across two questions, the first do these people have no sense of what they’re doing to companies who have to license expensive for spam filters and second the most burning question of all… why do this, who actually buys your crap?

Oh well I guess we live in the world on spam and are stuck doing CAPTCHAs…

Contacting Facebook Rant

by Jamison "JAK" Kissh on April 22, 2009

Now don’t get me wrong, I love(d) Facebook just as much as every other 18 year-old does until I went on vacation and made a bet with some friends.

I was going to be in Europe for a week without my computer or text messaging, so I would have no clue what was going on with my Facebook account. One of my friends jokingly said that he’d leave me at least 1,000 wall posts to get a ton of notifications for me when I get back. I later bet him and another friend that they couldn’t get me 10,000 notifications. Little did I know they enlisted a little help. While I was gone a team of people set to work to write as many wall posts as humanly possible on my wall however mid-week I get a phone call from my friend Spencer telling me that his co-conspiritor, JD’s Facebook account has been banned and my wall posts have all been removed.

Now I returned to the states with full intentions of contacting Facebook and seeing if there was anything I could do to rectify the situation. Now I understand that with as many active users that Facebook has they need to have a certain amount of self help procedures in place but even places with extensive self help techniques, such as PayPal at least have a number or email to use for help. Facebook does not have such a feature and I’m finding it nearly impossible to find a general contact point to use in order to try and rectify the situation. If anyone has some contact information for Facebook I ask that you please share it.

All I’ve got to say is British Airways and Verizon Wireless customer support for the win!

Update: Today I finally found an email (info@facebook.com) that was more neutral than the previous email addresses I’d found to contact them at and sent off an email which I’ll include below. I’m hoping to hear back from them soon.

Hello,
My name is Jamison Kissh and recently (on or around April 14th) my wall may or may not have been flagged for have been coming under attack of spammers or something similar. This is not the case, in fact it’s far from the truth. Before I left for a tour of Europe two friends of mine (XXXX XXXXX and XXXXX XXXXXX) bet me that they couldn’t have 10,000 notifications waiting for me, a sill bet admittedly. However I received a phone call on the 14th telling me that my wall had been deleted.

When I returned to the United States I tried to find an email address at which I could contact the department that is in charge of spam or in charge of walls directly however this was to no avail. Just today I was able to find an email that wasn’t quite for having my account disabled.

I ask for two things if they’re at all possible. The first being that after being a member of Facebook for several years, since the footers used to say “I’ll find something to put here” quite a while ago I had accumulated a very large wall of warm wishes and what not. I ask that if it is possible that my wall be reinstated, even if it’s form a backup and I per-say lose my more recent posts.

The second is that you re-examine my friend XXXX XXXXX’s account that was banned as a result of this bet and has in fact caused numerous problems for him such as nearly being banned again for friend requesting too many people as he re-friended his many lost connections.

I thank you for your time and I look forward to talking with you. If you have any questions please feel free to contact me using any of the means listed in my signature or via the Facebook platform it’s self.

Hopefully that’ll do the trick

Interesting Spam

by Jamison "JAK" Kissh on December 7, 2008

So today I was looking through my comment spam just to make sure no legitamet comments got snagged by Akismet. The latest comment I noticed something quite interesting that made me chuckle a bit.

“penguin porn adult movie tube alternative teen sites”

So what in the world is “penguin porn?”

75% Less Spam?!

by Jamison "JAK" Kissh on November 12, 2008

According to the Washington Post’s Security Fix they managed to track what could quite possibly be 75% of the world’s spam to McColo Corp out of San Jose, Calif. At this point they notified the two major ISPs of McColo, Global Crossing and Hurricane Electric both of which seem to have turned off connections. Hurricane Electric did so an hour after receiving the report. So hopefully this means a reduction in spam!

[via]