Individual Liberty — Individual Responsibility

For those we lost, We will not forget 09/11/2001

“Our God given unalienable rights are given to us all as individuals. They tell us what me may do for ourselves, and they are the embodiment of liberty. The so-called rights that government gives to some of us are parcelled out to select groups as classes. They tell us what one class of people may require another to do for them, and they are the very essence of slavery.”
— Perri Nelson, February 9, 2010

A bheil Gàidhlig agaibh?

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SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM

Published Tue, Mar 20 2007 12:27 PM
Technorati Tags: Computers and Internet, Annoyances

I'm sure you all know how I feel about SPAM. Trackback SPAM. Comment SPAM. Email SPAM. I know I'm not alone.

How about "Search Engine SPAM"?

Researchers Track Down a Plague of Fake Web Pages

Tens of thousands of junk Web pages, created only to lure search-engine users to advertisements, are proliferating like billboards strung along freeways. Now Microsoft researchers say they have traced the companies and techniques behind them.
A technical paper published by the researchers says the links promoting such pages are generated by a small group of shadowy operators apparently with the acquiescence of some major advertisers, Web page hosts and advertising syndicators. The report is available at www.cs.ucdavis.edu/~hchen/paper/www07.pdf
The finding is striking because it hints at the possibility of curbing the practice.
The researchers uncovered a complex scheme in which a small group, creating false doorway pages, works with operators of Web-based computers who profit by redirecting traffic passed from search engines in one direction and then sending advertisements acquired from syndicators in the opposite direction.
“A small number of rogue actors who know what they are doing can create an enormous amount of disruption,” said David L. Sifry, chief executive of Technorati, a blog-indexing company that works to keep junk pages of this sort out of its indexes. “It’s sort of like putting a blindfold on you and spinning you around three times and then taking off the blindfold and showing you an ad.”
Using questionable or illegal techniques to improve the ranking of a Web site in query results is known as search-engine spamming. The practice has proved to be a vexing problem for the major search companies, which struggle to prevent both spammers and companies specializing in improving legitimate clients’ Web traffic — a field known as search-engine optimization — from undermining their page-ranking systems.
Surprisingly, the researchers noted that the vast bulk of the junk listings was created from just two Web hosting companies and that as many as 68 percent of the advertisements sampled were placed by just three advertising syndicators.
Search-engine spam is a small but growing component of the overall spam problem, which is predominantly junk e-mail sent from millions of Internet-connected home PCs that have been infected with malicious software. The overall amount of e-mail spam has more than doubled in the last year, according to Postini, a communications security firm.
...
The researchers’ specific findings included evidence that some blog-hosting services have permitted an explosion of phony doorway pages. For example, the researchers noted that such pages were far more prevalent in Google’s blogspot.com service than in other hosting domains. The Microsoft Research team has worked extensively with the managers of Microsoft’s Spaces blog-hosting service to detect and identify search-engine spam, Mr. Wang said. Google would not comment for the record on its own efforts to combat such practices.
The Microsoft research findings, based on a survey in October, also determined that much of the spam ad traffic was being funneled through the Internet addresses of just two Web-hosting companies.
Phillip Rosenthal, chief technology officer of one of the companies, ISPrime, an Internet services company based in New York, said the activity had been traced to a single customer and violated the company’s acceptable-use policy. He said the company’s relationship with the customer, whom he would not identify, had been severed after the company was notified about the Microsoft paper by a reporter.
But he was also pessimistic about permanently stopping operators who subvert search engines to gain advertising revenue in this way.