Unknown or strange URLs in Blogger Stats

You are a blogger of sorts and your favourite pastime is to endlessly stare at your Blogger Stats hoping that hits will keep on coming if you just sit there and look at it, like me! And as you are looking at your "countless" number of less than 100 clicks and hits and unique views on your blog, you come across strange URLs that claim to refer your blog to people. Not bad, you think and click on the referrer link to see which is this benevolent site that sends you a lot of traffic! Ya, referrer spammers win!

Referrer Spam, which is also known as Log Spam or Referrer Bombing, is the act of "using a fake referrer url that points to the site the spammer wishes to advertise." This practice started as Blogging became popular. Bloggers, in their endless quest for 'link love', started publishing the sites that send them referrals. Some of them automated the process and linked the referrer list to the Analytics they used. Now, that encouraged spammers to send referrer spam so that the link of the site they wanted to advertise gets listed in a Blogger's Referrer List.

Bloggers with a lot of visits to their Blogs may not see these Referrer Spam often, as Referrer Spammers or Log Spammers send less than 20 to 25 automated hits to a Blog so that they will not get caught by Spam Fighting Teams of different Tech Companies. But those of us who drive less than hundred people a day to our Blogs will notice them immediately and click  on whatever godforsaken links they are referring us to.

How can we prevent unknown or strange URLs or referrer spammers from attacking our Blogger Stats or Analytics Logs? Here are a few things you can do to keep referrer spammers at bay:

1. Hide your statistics  and list of top referrers so that referrer spammers look elsewhere for their link baits. This way you can save people who visit your blog from clicking on links they are not supposed to.
2. Use Web Analytics Sites you trust. Some of these Analytic Sites keep their stats open and help spammers analyze your web traffic to target you. They target you if you are a blogger who gets less than 100 visits a day
3. If you are using Wordpress as your Blog Platform, you can use a plug-in called Referrer Bouncer. You can go to the Referrer Bouncer from here. 
4. Those of you are using Blogger as you Blog Platform need to patiently wait and hope that Google will trace the Spammer one day and block him/her because he/she is sending too many automated requests to its servers. Until then, make sure that you do not publish your Blogger Stat and you do not click on any of those unfamiliar or suspicious URLs that claim to send you a lot of traffic. 

Cosmos Infomedia Scam is back!

Take a look at the two screenshots above! What do you see? Same picture. Same layout. Looks like two screenshots of the same website, don’t they? In fact, they are not. They are the screenshots of two different websites claiming to do the same thing – make you rich by letting you work from home, doing mail order.

I received an SMS from my Internet Service Provider today, which read as follows:

Earn 7 to 37000 p/m by doing 2hr paper work at home for quick details open www.cash37k.com or to get details  by post SMS your name add. Pin code on 09321123454

I wanted to find out what exactly this scheme is. And the screenshots provided above are where I ended up. In August 2008, Trendy of Trendite exposed www.Earn45k.com, a site that promised to make customers rich by doing Mail Order from home. According to Wikipedia "Mail order is a term which describes the buying of goods or services by mail delivery. The buyer places an order for the desired products with the merchant through some remote method such as through a telephone call or web site. Then, the products are delivered to the customer." Trendy explained how Earn45K is a scam. Following are the reasons he provides to show how the site is a scam:

1. A Google Search will take you to forums where people discuss how they lost money because of Cosmos Infomedia

2. The contact address on the WhoIs page of the site and the actual contact address mentioned on the site is different. [A WhoIs page is where you get the details of a site’s registration.]

9 months after Trendy reported Earn45K as scam, Times of India reported that certain Aravind Ojah was arrested in connection with Earn45K Scam. That was in April 2009. Times also reported Ojah entering into tie ups with telecom companies to send out SMS to victims. I tried finding out more about Ojah and his accomplice, Mirinda. There is no trace of either of them online, except the Times of India News and Trendite Update. And then, today I received an SMS from for Internet Service Provider about Cash37k. That is eight months after the news of the arrest!

I have only one reason to believe that Cash37k is as wretched a scam as Earn45k – both the sites look the same. The difference is in the money they offer you will make and a few links that were present in the original site is missing in the new site. The new site has a link called “Refund” which is probably to dupe people who may suspect fraud. The new site, like the predecessor, pretends to quote from Prize Chits and Money Circulation Schemes [Banning] Act 1978 in an attempt to mislead customers.

Career Consultant Spammers!

I am sure you are a member of one of these Indian Job Sites and you get hundreds of mails intimating you about openings at various Organizations and Companies. And I am sure you have applied many a times if you are interested in the position on offer, sending your updated detailed resume. But my question is, how many of you have really got a call back for an interview applying for these jobs that are intimated from Job Sites by consulting agencies?

My experience is I have got a call back for interview only if the mail came directly from the Organization. I have never got a call back from the Recruiting Agencies that are abundant online, even if my profile suited the position they have advertised right to the last word. How do I know my resume suited the position right to the last word? I know because I know my job, I know what you require to do my job.

So I was telling you about the mails that come from Organizations and Agencies, intimating you about a vacant job. And I think we are so caught up talking about spams and scams in other areas like Social Networks that Career Spammers go unnoticed. Even I never noticed untill I received a call to my Unofficial Phone Number, which I leave only for recruiters and some very close friends, from some Agency from Mumbai that was trying to sell me a CD that had something to do with my profession. How did they know my number? How did they know what I was doing? I am pretty sure on of the Consulting Agency or an Organization to which I had sent my resume sold it to them. I went back and looked at the mails, in a hope to find a common pattern to figure out fake Consulting Agencies who are out there to sell my details to some thugs.

What did I figure out? Let me tell you:

• Check if the mail is sent from a Yahoo or Gmail ID than a Company ID. Any decent Company these days will have an email address of their own. 
• If they have an email address of their own, see if they have a website in the same address. If they have a website address in the same name, visit the website. See if the profile of the Company as mentioned in the mail and what you see on the website has reasonable connections. For example your mail may claim that the Company deals with Software Testing. If you visit the Website of the Company, you will find that the it is not about a Company at all. The website will be about some IT related conference that happened in 2006.  So check if the Company Profile on the mail matches with the Company Profile on the Website.
• Check for phone numbers. A serious recruiter will leave a phone number for you to contact. Any Tom Dick and Harry can create an email address. They can not have a valid phone number if they are fake. And a phone number is more traceable than an email address. Go ahead and see if there is a phone number. Also make sure that the phone number in the mail matches with the phone number on the website. A decent company will mention all the public contact numbers mentioned on the website in their mail. Think twice before sending your CV,  if only a cell phone number is mentioned. A valid landline number is your key to make sure that the company exists and has an address. 
• It is not enough you check for phone numbers. Call the number given and find out if you are calling to the same person as mentioned in the mail. Sometimes they can give you all the right numbers and still dupe you. So call and find out. Especially because your resume contains all valid data about you and it is a good tool for social engineering. 
• See if the mail is rational. Sometimes spammers can cut and paste from different mails to avoid hardwork. If it is an authentic company about an authentic job, the mail will have logical connection from beginning till end. Some of these offers may talk about totally unrealistic and unrelated skills in an attempt to sound professional. For example, the other day I got a mail from a Company looking for a Soft Skill Trainer who had knowledge of Hardware and Networking. I know Soft Skill Trainers, who train call centre people. I have never come across a Soft Skill Trainer who has knowledge of Hardware and Networking. And that is the job of a Tech Trainer and not a Soft Skill Trainer. You know your job. So check the mail and see if the skills mentioned in the mail sounds familiar and have some sort of connection. 
• See if the mail is clear about Soft Skills and Hard Skills and Qualifications and mentions them separately. Good recruiters know the hard skills required for the job and mentions them clearly and separately. Check and make sure that what you see is not a list of randomly picked skill sets to make it sound professional. 

But you don't have to bother replying to these mails from Career Sites at all. If you are really hunting for a job,  I have a few advices for you to avoid getting fooled:

1. Go to the company website directly and apply directly to the company instead of trusting Career Sites. Most of the Organizations advertise their job openings in their websites. 
2. Buy a news paper one of these days when they have a Job Advertisement Suppliment. Most of the good companies advertise directly through the news papers. 

If you do this, you can be at least happy that people are not duping you, manipulating your need to get a job.

Safe Social Networking: Orkut is safer than Facebook

I am amazed at the speed at which Facebook is catching up in India, pushing Orkut to the background. Well, I am generalizing based on my personal experience and not based on any research. I see many of my friends becoming more active on Facebook and less active on Orkut. I see bloggers in an eternal struggle to add more friends so that they can share their links with as many people as possible. I see Indian Companies coming up with Fan Pages on a daily basis. You are right, we do that because Facebook has a lot many more Social Networking options than Orkut.

I am on Facebook for the last five month or so. I kind of liked Facebook for their cute colour and fonts, layout and interactive networking options. I felt Facebook looks classy and more social networking than Orkut. I wondered why, Google, with all their mastery of building a brand was neglecting Orkut. If Google made up its mind, it could have taken Orkut way beyond what is is now. But I have never seen Orkut move beyond what it was a year or two ago, except for the new interface they recently launched. I was all the time wondering why!

Untill I read Dennis Yu and his how to spam Facebook like a pro.According to him, many of  the games, the quizes and the other applications that keep popping up while you are on Facebook are aimed at doing three things:

• Installing a spyware or a tracking cookie on your computer which will later open a back door from your computer to smuggle out information
• Trick you into giving up your email address and phone number
• Trick you into giving up your or your friend's profile information

Now I think I know why Google is keeping Orkut simple. It is just about social networking and nothing else.

The Cyxymu Lesson: Forwarding Emails is E-Sin!

I have many friends who keep in touch only by forwarding emails. There are people from whom I receive forwarded emails on a day to day basis. Many of them do it very innocently, I know, knowing little that they are possibly making themselves and the receiver vulnerable to potential internet misuse by hackers and spammers.

We have a live example in front of us: Twitter. It is quiet possible that when you click on this link you get an error message and the site does not load as Twitter is under a Denial of Service Attack. I am told that the Denial of Service attack on Twitter has increased ten times on the second day of the attack. I am not going into the 'geopolitical nature' of the attack. I am not going to make assumptions about who did this. I am not so much worried about if the Russian Government did it or some Criminal Outfit is behind this attack. That is Twitter's job to find out and tell the world. I am more bothered about how this could happen!

How could this happen? Wikipedia tells me that a Denial of Service Attack happens when the number of requests for a particular site increases beyond the capacity of the servers on which a site is hosted. They also call it Distributed Denial of Service Attack. Hackers target popular sites and prevent them from functioning through a Denial of Service Attack. And this is what happened to Twitter.

DoS on Twitter seems to have happened as an individual or an organization was targeting a blogger named Cyxymu. When repeated requests for his page on Twitter, LiveJournal et al happened on August 6, 2009, the servers where the sites are hosted could not handle it and as a result the whole Twitter Site stopped functioning.

People have different opinion about how it happened. Some say that Russian Hackers hacked Cyxymu's Gmail Account and started sending links to his accounts to people. And when people started clicking on these links to know what exactly it was, DoS began! I don't think so because an attack of this sort cannot survive on email links alone, though it is true that a Joe Job Email Campaign happened from Cyxymu's Gmail Account.

There is another theory, which is more plausible. Experts say that the attack was managed using botnets. Botnets are, in simple words a network of computers which runs software robots. The hackes who drowned Twitter seem to have a huge network of computers they could use to send repeated requests for the site. Where did they get all these computers from, because you need millions of computers to organize an attack at this level of ferocity?

Probably they got all these computers linked up through emails. People send you hundreds of forwarded emails. Have you ever wondered where they come from? Who would take such struggles to create information and send it to you for free? Who made the original message?

I have no idea who sends them. But I know one thing. The original messages are sent using automated services available online. There are sites that let you send bulk emails for free and keep a track of them. [I am not giving you a link to an example site for an obvious reason - I don't want to be a party to the prorogation of such sites] Usually these emails, though they may sound very innocent, contain malware that plant robots in your system. They link up with each other and create a network after they are in your system. This way hackers get to use your system even without your knowledge.

I think we should stop forwarding emails and opening emails that are forwarded. Forwarded emails compromise the security of personal information as well as personal computers. Forwarding E-mails should be considered as E-sin. Why?

1. Forwarded emails are an easy way for hackers to spread their bots on systems across the world. 
2. Forwarded emails may contain viruses that are harmful to your system.
3. Because there are systems that can easily track forwarded mails, you should know that your are compromising the email addresses of the friends to whom you send the email. Hackers who keep track of the mails add the new addresses to their mailing list and harvest.
4. Forwarding E-mails is a waste of other people's time. They may not be interested in the mail you have forwarded. 

After Thought: I also have another doubt. There are many companies today that allow you to use Remote PC Support for free. They permit you to use software that allows you to access and use computers from anywhere. Have you ever thought why they do it for free? If I can use that software to control computers in my network remotely, they companies who give them to me can do it too. And what if these companies used the computers that use their Remote PC Support Software and turn them into a botnet? I am told that there are companies who sell such networks to third parties for campaigns and other internet related activities. There are people who sell botnets and make good money out of it. What if the attackers bought one such botnet to attack Twitter?

George Orwell, 1984, Amazon.com and Kindle: A Historical Irony!

George Orwell and his famous novel 1984. Amazon.com and their latest publication hype, Kindle. Who would have thought that July 17, 2009 was going to connect them in the most bizarre and paradoxical way ever? On July 17, 2009, Amazon.com remotely removed copies of 1984 and Animal Farm by George Orwell from Kindle because of some copyright dispute they had with someone.

Little would have George Orwell thought that one day he and his book are going to be the victims of a Big Brother when he wrote about the "memory hole" Of course Orwell was talking about censorship. I think what Amazon did was worse than censoring and it serves them best to have taken George Orwell away from the Kindle Users. They allowed a historical irony by doing so!

What does it mean when Amazon removes a book from Kindles without the permission of the owners? It means 'you must be afraid' This means Amazon has the power to remotely control your Kindle. Now, that is not good news. If Amazon has the power to control your Kindle, what about Microsoft? Do they have the power to control your laptops and PCs? If Amazon can remove a book from your Kindle, what about service providers like Google or Yahoo? Do they have the power to meddle with your emails and documents, you have on-line? It worries me when I think that soon we are all moving into a more modern version of 'cloud computing.'

I remember an English Film I had seen long ago. I don't remember the name of the film. But I remember that it was about robots. There were robots in every house. And the Government introduced a more advanced version of robots and gave one to each family. Little did they know that the new robots were spying on the families. And one fine morning, the Government took control of all the robots centrally. The film was something like that. But I remember the protagonist, who was always against the idea of having a robot in his house. No one saw his point untill it was too late. The Amazon Kindle Episode reminded me of the film.

Facebook: Keep your privacy to yourself and people you choose!

I always used to wonder who will see what I do on Facebook. It was not under my control, untill recently. Very recently I realized there are highly structured privacy settings in place on Facebook.

Now, on Facebook Privacy Settings you are given control over your Profile, Search, News Feed and Wall and Applications. You can control who sees your profile. You can control who searches for you and what they see when they find you and how they can contact you. You can also control what activity of yours is visible on your profile as well as your friend's home page. And you can also control what information is available to applications you use on face book. Facebook also permits you to block a particular user and enables you to see how another user views your profile.Of all the privacy settings available, I liked controlling applications and 'view as' options.

Applications are aplenty on Facebook and every time you use one, it asks for access to profile. My spamphobea doesn't permit me to give applications access to all the information I have on Facebook. And it is very difficult to decide which application you can trust and which you can't. I don't understand why some silly applications that lets you answer a quiz and gives you some godforsaken shit about yourself need to have acces to your profile information even after you are done with what they offered. I agree, some of them are fun while you are doing it. But why should they have access to my profile after I am done with it? I recently realized that the more applications I use on facebook, the more spams I receive on my mail. So this new privacy option on Facebook is a blessing.

Facebook also allows me to see for myself how my friends or acquaintances view my profile and wall. This helps me decide how I control the person's access to my page. Some of them who are linked to my Facebook Profile are just business acquaintances and I don't want them to see all that it takes to be me. There is an option on Facebook where I can customize who sees my profile and how. All that I got to do is to  to click on customization and select the people whom I will not permit to see certain information. 

I hope people will start using these Privacy  Settings and avoid a lot of confusions and abuses that can happen to you on-line. Some of us are just not bothered about what kind of information we leave on-line. You may not have a bank account you need to protect or you may rarely use your mail to communicate officially if you are in India. You may not do on-line purchases at all. But still, it is better to be careful about what information you leave around. Simply because, the way things are going, soon you will have to do a lot of things on-line which you otherwise wouldn't have done. 

Ning: Create your own social network!

Orkut, Facebook, Myspace, Linkedin Twitter and many more of them out there. In fact, it is raining 'social community networks' these days. I have counted on Wikipedia and there are at least 154 online social community networks listed, the last time I counted. Every other day I receive a mail or two from friends, inviting me to join a new community. The sociological implications of having too many social community networks online is one thing to discuss. But I don't think I will go into that as i am here to tell you about another phenomenon I recently noticed online. It is nothing but Ning.

Ning? I am sure it has got nothing to do with Bing and the Bing is not Google thing! And of course for Bing to be Google, Microsoft has to reincarnate as something more divine. Oh! God. I am here to tell you about Ning and not Bing.

Ning? They call it a platform to create online social communities. Let us hear what they say about themselves:

Ning lets you create and join new social networks for your interests and passions.

Based in Palo Alto, Calif., Ning offers an innovative and easy-to-use technology platform for people to join and create new social networks for their interests and passions and meet new people around the things they care about most in their life.

With over 1 million social networks created and more than 27 million registered members, millions of people everyday are coming together across Ning Networks to explore and express their interests, discover new passions, and meet new people around shared pursuits.

Ning also enables artists, brands and organizations to simplify and control their online presence with their own unique social network that beautifully integrates with other social media services while providing the most direct, unique and lucrative relationship with fans, consumers, and members.

Founded in October 2004 by Gina Bianchini and Marc Andreessen, Ning launched the Ning Platform in October 2005 and Ning social networks in February 2007. The company is privately held.

 That is a good thing, isn't it? To have a social community of your own! I am sure you know how to create groups on Orkut and Myspace. I know it is exciting to promote a group and to see it grow. However, I am sure you will feel more excited to create a social community of your own and see it grow. That's the option Ning gives you. Just like you can have a blog of your own, Ning lets you have a social community of your own. Like you do on Blogger, you can even have a .com address of your own for your Ning Social Community.

I am a member of Ning and I have created a few communities to see how it works. One thing I liked is the flexibility that Ning offers. The user interface of Ning looks like it is a site you can't trust. But within that look lies possibilities of moving the UI around the way you like. You can even code the look, if you are good at coding.

People say that Ning is vulnerable to spammers. I don't understand how as I am not attacked from any of the communities I own or any of the community in which I am a member. The people who run the Ning Sites I joined are always alert about spammers and only once or twice I received spam messages on my comment wall. The moment the site admin noticed that there is spam going around, he deleted the profile from which it was sent. And for me and to the sites I created, i give access to only those I know and they are a few.

I know a lot of people who use the Ning Service quiet fruitfully. I hope more people would. This 'community of community' is a giant leap for IT after Blogging.

From Short to Long URL: Save yourself from Koobface

This is a dirty world again. Koobface that was troubling users sending spam using member profiles on Facebook and Myspace is attacking Twitter now. Twitter is now suspending accounts that are under attack in an attempt to save the community from the unwanted guest.

Wikipedia tells us: "Koobface is an anagram of Facebook." It is the word 'book' spelt the other way around - 'koob'. Koobface attacks an account by sending unsolicited links. In case of Twitter, Koobface sends you a link with messages like 'My home video.' Once you click on the link it takes you to a site that spreads malware. It may tell you that you need to install or update your current flash plugin. Once you try to update your flash plugin, the site will push .exe files to your system. The first thing the Koobface Execution file may do in your computer is to find cookies from Social Community Networks and affect them. The Koobface Malware may also act as a Spyware and send personal information from your system like passwords and credit card numbers to the person behind the malware.

The best thing you can do against Koobface is not to click unsolicited links, even if it is from a person known to you. But this is not fare. We can't live this way, being scared of Koobfaces.

Most often short urls are the villains. One almost wishes if short urls were never invented. They never tell you where they will take you to and you will know only after you reach the place. Twitter uses short urls extensively. Now, how can we not see what our friends send us? Impossible. There is a way out.

For example:http://bit.ly/2VPO3s is a short url techedIN posted on Twitter. You do not know me and it is not fair on my part to expect you to click on that link and come to techedIN and read what I post. Again, it is not fair on your part not to read what I write. After all, I take so much of trouble to write these posts. Now, what do we do to trust each other? All that you need to do is to go to LongURL.org

Step 1: Copy and paste the short url you want to verify in the box provided on the LongURL site and click on expand.

Step 2: Now what you see is an expansion of the short url you have tried. It gives you information like the title, the long url and additional information like content type. Sometimes it also gives you a snap shot of the site. One you are sure that you can trust the site or you know the site, you can click on the site peacefully.

It is not fair on anyone's part to send us one thing and tell us it is something else. Short URLs encourage that habit a lot. I appreciate the efforts of Sean Murphy, who pre-empted this menace and came up with a solution like LongURL.org

My "Followers" aren't showing up on Twitter

So much for the excitement of having a Twitter Account to show off my blog - my followers just wouldn't show up on my account. As I am writing this blog five days after opening my twitter Account to public, I have 10 people following me.Or that is what Twitter tells me. Alas, I can see only five of them. From the look of the five profiles that show up on my Twitter Account, four of them are spammers and people who are least bothered about what I blog. Yes, I can see only five people there, even though Twitter tells me there are ten.

I googled a bit to see if there are people affected the same way as I am. I think there are many of them, who are frustrated at this as I am. I can at least see five of them who are following me. Some people can't see any of them.

And Twitter acknowledges the issue, in a very roundabout manner. They speak as though this happens only with protected accounts. And the solution they give applies only to those users who have a protected account. If you have a 'protected' account, let Twitter know "the user name of the protected account" and 'the user name(s) who have been not added to your list of followersafter accepting the follow request." They don't tell you how to let them know. Perhaps, you have to post it as a reply to the post on the issue. Now, I want to tell them this happens to even those users who have not protected their account. Users who have not protected their account can't see who tried to follow them, especially, like me, if they have disabled their email notifications. Then, how will I let Twitter know? I have no clue!!

May be this is because I had my account protected once, as Twitter tells me? I think it is more than that. Twitter accepts there is a 'database lag' Database Lag? Yes, it is. It looks like Twitter Database is overflowing. Or is it that there is a 'clash' of data or bug on the database that many things don't get recorded? So follower counts are registered when followers are not.

And one more thing I realized as I was reading the help forum from Twitter on this issue - if you can't see them on your follower list they just are not following you. They might have tried following you and the follower count is registered. But if they are not on your list, they are not there at all.

I hope Twitter will soon come up with a solution to this.

Twitter on your Blog!

I was all against Twitter untill I launched techedIN. I don't like the idea of strangers following me and my activities appearing on the public time line. I once used Twitter and found that more than friends, strangers followed what I was doing and posting on twitter. Every time I posted something I got a follower and most of them I am sure were spammers from the look of their profiles.

Yes, I know! Twitter gives me this option of protecting my updates from the public time line. I started using it and since none of my friends are on Twitter, I found this idea of posting for myself disgusting.

Having said all this, I still think Twitter is a cool idea. Cool idea if you have friends and relatives following what you are up to. Unfortunately, in India, for most folks social networking is at the most a profile on Orkut. It has not gone beyond that and I don't know if it will go beyond that in the near future. So, I think, I got to wait till most of my friends and relatives get on the Twitter bandwagon to post what exactly I am doing where!

Till I see my folks on Twitter, I think my Twitter Account can be used for promoting what I post on techedIN. Ya, it is a mutual promotion. I use Twitter to promote what I do on techedIN and Twitter uses my blog to promote their site. How? I have put this Twitter Badge on my blog and it certainly links back to Twitter. And when my people read my Blog, I hope they will notice the Twitter Badge on my Blog and try visiting the site and create a profile and start tweeting.

How did I put this badge on my Blog? It is very simple. If you have a profile on twitter, go to the Settings Page. On the Account Settings Page, Twitter gives you an option to add your site address. [You can add your site there and it is in a way a promotional link to your blog or site] Right below where you add your site address, there is a link to the Twitter Widget Page. Click on it and go to the Twitter's 'Get a Widget' Page. There you have five options to choose from. If all that you need is a simple widget to go on your blog, you can click on Blogger or TypePad or Other and get your widget. But if you have a taste and want your widget to look cool, I suggest you go for the Facebook compatible Flash Widget. This is what i chose and it goes well on Blogger. All that you need to do is to copy the script and add to your Blog from your Blogger Layout Page.

Every time I have a new post, I post a link to it on Twitter. And I kind of get someone, at least one person, following me per post. Most of them are spammers, I know. But I don't care now. I don't care because even if spammers are reading it, I'll be only happy that hopefully they will come and read what I have on my blog. That's not a bad deal at all, is it? Gradually, I hope, real people with good intetions, real people who are interested in what I got to say, will start following me. Till then, I don't mind even if spammers and hackers follow what I post on Twitter!

International Mobile Promo: Beware of SMS Scams!

Internet is not a very safe place and you got to be very careful when it comes to leaving your details around. It is sad that people use internet, such a good thing to happen to human beings after invention of wheels I would say, for many things criminal. I have come to a point where I am thinking of deleting all my accounts from whatever sites I am using while I surf net.

Now, what is making me write this?

Every other day I receive one or two emails that declare me a winner of some fabulous lucky-dip that I never participated in. The moment I read 'lottery' or 'prize' on the subject line of an email, I know now that it is spam.I never even bother to read it. And I report it. So far spamming was restricted to emails. Now, it is all over the place. The other day I received this SMS from MO GCNPROMO.

CONGRAT! Your mobile number have won 425,000 GBP in WCN International Mobile Promo. For claim contact WCN @ Tel: +447014248947 & Email:-cellsglo@live.com

I'm sure spammers got my number as I was trying to use one of these net call facilities on Internet. I have tried four or five of them who offer "Computer to Phone" call facility. And I'm sure it's one of them who gave my number away. Either they sold it to a couple of Internet Thugs or they themselves did it. I accept I should have thought before I gave away my number to a site about whom I have no idea. But that's the way it is on internet and I can't really blame anybody.

I tried to see if there are people who got the similar messages. Google took me to a site that allowed people to record their complaints and what you see below is a snapshot of similar complaints registered on this site.

I am so excited about ways in which technology can be used for the good of the people. And I am so disgusted about how people can turn it around and use it for bad things. And I decide, I'll strictly adhere to the following in the future that these kind of people are not encouraged:

• I'll not open or reply to any email that I think is spam and I'll report spam to the email service provider that I use.
• I'll report an email spam if it is from a sender I don't know
• I'll never give my email id to any of the sites that I don't trust. My trust is based on word of mouth. 
• I'll never register my mobile number or email id with any of the newsletters that are around.
• I'll never give my email id or password to any of the social community networks that asks me for such details to fetch my contact list
• I'll report spam when ever I get them on the Chat Software Packages I use.
• I'll never use any other software other than the software made available by the site whose chat  facility I am using. For example, I'll never access Google Talk or Yahoo! Messenger from any other site or software
• I'll never visit porn sites that may send malicious code to my computer
• I'll not use a software just because it is free. I'll double check it to see if the author can be trusted before I use it.
• I'll change my passwords, at least once a month
• I'll not use all the applications and widgets, just because they are on a site I trust because I know people collaborate with the sites to make them. 

I hope this way I'll be able to prevent spam to some extend. I really hope so!

My friend spammed me using Yahoo! Messenger

A few weeks ago, I was shocked to receive an IM from one of my friends who is on my Yahoo! Messenger List, inviting me to visit a site that sold 'lesbian videos and photographs.' Anyone would be shocked. Especially, if you receive it from a girl, who you think is straight and is sensible enough not to visit porn sites. I imed back immediately, asking her if she is out of her mind. She did not reply and the IMs with a link to one of the porn sites started pouring in. Every day, when I open my Yahoo! Messenger, there would be at least 10 to 20 Offline Messages from her. All had the same text, all had the same link!!

Finally, I got tired of this bloody game and called her up. Poor girl! She had no clue what was happening. We made a few calls to some of our friends to see if they received messages like I did from her. Everyone did! And they chose to ignore it, because unlike me, they knew it was spam and she could do nothing about it. One of our friends, asked her to change her password. No, that didn't work. The menace continued. She tried changing password several times, desperately. No luck.

That was when one of our techie friends came up with this idea. If the issue isn't solved even after she has changed her password, then the troublemaker might be operating from her system itself. What if a Spamming Programme or a Spyware is planted in her system and it has taken control of her Yahoo! Messenger? She uses a computer in her office often to access Yahoo! Messenger. She is logged in most of the time to Yahoo! Messenger, even if she is not actually using it, as the office computer is on through out the day. What if a spyware or a bot planted in her office computer was making most of this opportunity. So, our Techie friend asked her to uninstall Yahoo! Messenger and reinstall it. She did that and more. Scared, she reformatted the whole computer before installing Yahoo! Messenger again. Thank God! Her Yahoo! Messenger doesn't advertise lesbian sites any more. And I don't get those funny IMs from her.