Michael Gracie

PC World and Yahoo are collaborating on a new series called Web of Crime. The five part series will discuss the big trend in the online world, cybercrime. Follow it over the next few days. And next time you fall victim to a website hack, don’t think it was done by some teenager just for the heck of it.

I originally created the “Infrastructure In-Fighting” category at Spamroll as a topic center for the fight between various anti-spam technologies jockeying for position. It soon became a nice spot for all the new products and technologies fighting spam.

But now that spammers, hackers (whathaveyou) are fighting amongst themselves, I see new meaning in the term.

Here is a nice blow by blow on the recent life of Chris Smith, a bigtime spammer who was kind of “on the lam” for a while. As the linked article points out clearly, while the guy was supposedly hiding away in the Dominican Republic, he was actually trying to keep his multi-million dollar spam operation alive.

Now that Smith is back in Minnesota, facing the charges against him, my bet is he will claim he is going legit, much like Scott Richter, or pay some measely fine and disappear (at which time, someone will have already taken his place).

***UPDATE***

And now, he has been indicted.

CNET recently published a list of the top 10 dot-com flops, and after reading through the list, I could only think the list was contributed to by the folks at Fucked Company. Simply put, nobody seemed to herald any part of the ideas, and I believed some of the companies actually had some merit.

Read through the list, and ponder these points:

- What is not hot right now could very well be hot a few years later - trends matter
- Business models are often remade for changing times, much the same as major motion pictures are
- Getting the word out is hardly ever a bad thing
- Technology breeds efficiencies, despite what your IT director says about that ERP implementation
- Being spendthrift almost always causes pain down the road

Big failures should lead to learning, or does the free flow of capital simply dumb people down? Certainly, all of CNET’s top ten suffered from one “ailment” - an awful lot of money.

Douglas Adams said “Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so.”

I wonder what the next list of flops will look like, and who will make the next billion off of someone else’s “failed” idea.

For those of you bloggers using Movable Type and MT-Blacklist, keep a close eye on your blacklist items as you become immune to bullshit trackback and comment posts. A number of items have crossed my path which come from “google@yahoo.nl” and use the Google URL as its link in.

An obvious attempt to thwart popular blogs from links in from Google (which, by the way may be your bread and butter), make sure not to include those in you blacklist entries, but instead simply delete the entries at your leisure.

Cheers,

The Management

Although have the media outlets on the planet have already reported this, and the other half will report it tomorrow, I thought since Spamroll is NOT a Time Warner asset, I would happily report it as well.

Jason Smathers, the ex-AOL employee that snatched over 90 million AOL usernames and sold them to spammers, has been sentenced to 15 months in the slammer. He begins serving his time in a Pensacola, FL “Club Fed” type prison in mid-September.

Smathers got $28,000 for the list - he’s going to lose more than a year of potential gainful employment as a result. Good job Jason!

All the fear mongering going related to ID theft and internet is taking its toll, as consumers grow more and more wary of having their data in someone else’s hands. More than 60% of online users polled expressed privacy fears. Unfortunately, those same folks remained interested in personalized online experiences. A sure headache for vendors.

We have the Slashdotters making some quick comments on Blue Security’s unorthodox anti-spam solution, but I am more interested in the comments on spam solutions in general.

For those not so lucky to have heard about Blue Security, Spamroll already weighed in on their “offering.” But if you want to hear about it from someone who actually knows what they are talking about, catch Brian McWilliams’s latest on Blue Security’s Blue Frog.

The underground anti-spam crusaders can chase IP addresses and domain names from forged headers all they want, but they are likely going to catch some ghosts, or zombies that is.

MX Logic reports that for the third month in a row, more than 50% of all spam originated from zombie computers. This means that spam hunters could soon be blacklisting my grandma (I take that back - she’s on a Mac).

Can you imagine a bunch of Chicago Bears fans sitting at Soldier Field during desperate weather, and giving their bluetooth phone a few whirls just for shits and giggles? No, neither can I.

But over in Finland, that mobile phone crazed land, that is kind of what happened, and it didn’t work out so well. Spectators at the world athletics championships in Helsinki got beat up by the Cabir virus, which happens to be the first (and I think only - but please correct me if I am wrong) mobile virus floating around as of late.

So while football season in the US is just starting, I am giving all you fans fair warning. Leave the cell phone at home, and practice your non-electronic wave technique instead.