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I was a Myspace spammer

Okay, the title is a little misleading. A more accurate one would be; ‘In order to be successful running a myspace resource site a certain amount of spamming needs to happen and I wasn’t prepared to do it’ - but it’s not nearly so catchy.

I jumped into what’s known as the ‘Myspace scene’ some time back, having missed the initial goldrush enjoyed by those webmasters savvy or lucky enough to get in early. The rewards could be (and still are) great for those webmasters fortunate enough to have top rankings for the best myspace-related keywords, with some websites earning in excess of $50,000 per month.

My goal was to diversify my web portfolio and I thought the Myspace scene might be a good opportunity for me to do this but I was wrong. For me it was a mistake.

This is because in order to gain a foothold it is necessary to spam.

So how do people spam Myspace?

Fake profiles
Creating accounts and profiles is something of a cottage industry. Believe it or not, I have heard of some people holding and operating 5,000,000 myspace accounts. So the next time you look at how many people are signed up to the social network phenomenon it is worth bearing this in mind. The most successful spam-profiles are those that appear to be that of a celebrity. People then search the site for their favourite celebs and viola! Another ‘friend’ added to the fake celebrity profile for spamming. Even a whiff of media exposure, good or bad, is usually enough to warrant a fake profile.

Friend adders and comment makers
We’ve all had the experience of dealing with people we’ve never heard of adding us as ‘friends’ then comment spamming us into next Sunday. How is it done? Specialised software, that’s how. Software designed specifically to spam Myspace.

Password Phishing
Ever had your myspace account deleted for spamming even although you have never sent a spam message in your life? Chances are someone stole your login details and used them to spam all your friends. Sometimes this is done using fakery to make you think you have landed on myspace when in fact it is a duplicate, designed solely to steal your password in order to spam.

Another way to steal passwords is to ask for it ’so your profile can be automatically updated’. The unsuspecting user wants a nice profile and the myspace resource site offers to do everything for them automatically - all they need do is type in their email and password. Phished. This is why, incidently, Myspace say NEVER use your password anywhere but on Myspace.

Or you may be one of the people who use a common myspace password such as cookie123, iloveyou, fuckyou1, etc. The solution here is to use a strong password.

So that is why I was never comfortable with the Myspace resource site scene - I wasn’t prepared to spam.

Add comment November 7th, 2007

Madeleine McCann - disliking the McCanns

When I wrote an earlier piece about how tired I was of the parents’ guilt is being inflicted on the rest of us in the daily media barrage of claim and counter-claim I thought I was something of a lone voice. Not a lone voice in how I felt but a lone voice in expressing dislike at the McCann’s guilt being paraded on daily television and in the newspapers as if I was supposed to feel sorry for them in some way. It seems I’m not alone - Booker prize winner Anne Enright wrote a 2,000 word essay entitled, “Disliking the McCanns”, apparently ‘attacked’ by the McCann family as ‘publicity seeking’.

Let’s recount what’s undisputed in the public domain - the McCann’s, Kate and Jerry, decided to leave their three very young children alone in an unfamiliar and unlocked apartment in a strange town in a foreign country while they went out for a meal and wine.

The Booker prize winner says, “”I disliked the McCanns earlier than most people (I’m not proud of it). I thought I was angry with them for leaving their children alone.”

This reminded me of a somewhat heated debate I had with my wife quite early on in the sorry saga. She had said she felt sorry for the parents. I replied I had no sympathy for them whatsoever. She called me a heartless monster. I pointed out that even now with two largely grown up children in a small, fairly quiet, uneventful town in Scotland I would never, ever contemplate leaving my children asleep in an unlocked house let alone a strange town in a foreign country. Turned out I was not alone in my views as she discovered when talking to her colleagues at work.

Last night’s rather disappointing Channel 4 documentary, “Searching For Madeleine”, where a number of British experts were commissioned to offer their opinions on what they believed may have happened, inevitably failed to deliver anything of substance although it did offer some interesting observations about how, in the absence of real information, the media were inclined to simply make things up to fill the vacuum.

Sadly, the truth may never be known.

Add comment October 19th, 2007