Personally I do not go online chatting, not least the classic ones, that is where we will just talk, because with the rise of Facebook and Twitter, ways to interact with others, to play there and I’m not the few.

But today I want to introduce you to create an online chatroom, but not simple chatroom, but with a feature that makes them very, very interesting to collaborate online. Let’s see how.

The service is called Conference.io and the operation is very simple. Just connect to the service site,

Choose a name for our Chartroom and press the button “commit”.

At this point we have created our room, which will be in effect a study with work! Why? In addition to interacting with people that we want, we can also upload files (photos, documents), to share and to show to our employees and assure you that if you work with someone online, this is really useful.

We may also set a password to administer the chatroom and enter a valid email address where to send us the password management in case we had forgotten.

The service then offers a range of customizations, which we can access by clicking the link “settings” once created the chatroom. Another strength of the service, is that the creation of the chatroom is really fast: it only takes a few seconds because our work environment is ready for us! What to say … Still here? Go and create your virtual studio work!

If people who receive their unsolicited email, complain to your Internet service provider (ISP), or the company that hosts your website (your web server), you may end up losing both. This means your website will be closed and you lose all Internet connectivity.

Of course you can get another Internet access provider, but this may hurt you in three ways:
+ It will be a waste of time
+ It will cost money
+ Damage your reputation

Therefore this method of free promotion online may be the source of many problems, and the best thing you can do is not engage with him.

Sources: Surf Control and Messagelabs

- Spam top 10:

1) Free adult site passwords
2) Low price drugs (Viagra)
3) Refinance your mortgage
4) Nigerian confidential money transfer
5) Tiny remote control car
6) Best online casino
7) #1 Pasta pot
Get out of credit card debt
9) Meet singles in your area
10) Copy DVDs in one click

1) Stupid: (all of they are but…) they post dozens of links in the same comment (even images), in addition they can post the same comment many times. They copy & paste the same html code.

2) Moderate: they post very simple comments like “nice blog” or “very interesting article”. They use the keyword (viagra,phentermine) as the name, this way they get high google rankings with the text links. They fail in the keyword as the name, do you know someone with viagra as his real name?. Also the url is another key to catch them!

3) Amateur: very similar as moderate but this time they use a real name as the anchor text (Allan, Steven..) so is more difficult to identify the comment as spam. The key: just check the url of the comment, it will be something like cheap-prescriptions.com.

4) Professional: they read your article, then post a comment related (few lines),use real names and the urls of their websites are not comercial domains. This way they get a domain with high Google PageRank and then add links to their commercial websites. Be careful with this type of spammers.

CDT embarked on a project to attempt to determine the source of spam. To do so, we set up hundreds of different e-mail addresses, used them for a single purpose, and then waited six months to see what kind of mail those addresses were receiving. It should come as no surprise to most e-mail users that many of the addresses CDT created for this study attracted spam, but it is very interesting to see the different ways that e-mail addresses attracted spam ? and the different volumes ? depending on where the e-mail addresses were used.

The results offer Internet users insights about what online behavior results in the most spam. The results also debunk some of the myths about spam.

Major Findings

? Our analysis indicated that e-mail addresses posted on Web sites or in newsgroups attract the most spam.
o Web Sites ? CDT received the most e-mails when an address was placed visibly on a public Web site. Spammers use software harvesting programs such as robots or spiders to record e-mail addresses listed on Web sites, including both personal Web pages and institutional (corporate or non-profit) Web pages.
CDT tested two methods of obstructing address harvesting:

Replacing characters in an e-mail address with human-readable equivalents, e.g. “example@domain.com” was written “example at domain dot com;” and

Replacing characters in an e-mail address with HTML equivalents.
E-mail addresses posted to Web sites using these conventions did not receive any spam.

o USENET newsgroups ? Newsgroups can expose to spammers the e-mail address of every person who posts to the newsgroup. Newsgroup postings, on average, generated less spam than posting an e-mail address on a high-traffic web site. In our study, we discovered that most newsgroup-related spam is sent to the address in the message header, even if other e-mail addresses are included in the text of the posting.

? For the most part, companies that offered users a choice about receiving commercial e-mails respected that choice. Most of the major Web sites to which we provided e-mail addresses respected the privacy choices we made ? when a choice was made available to us.

? Some spam is generated through attacks on mail servers, methods that don’t rely on the collection of e-mail addresses at all. In “brute force” attacks and “dictionary” attacks, spam programs send spam to every possible combination of letters at a domain, or to common names and words. While these attacks can be blocked, some spam is likely to get through. In many cases, spam generated by these attacks will be directed to shorter e-mail address (like bob@domain.com) before it is directed to longer addresses (like bobwilliams@domain.com).

Tips for Avoiding Spam

Currently there is no foolproof way to prevent spam. Based on our research, we recommend that Internet users try the following methods to prevent spam:

? Disguise e-mail addresses posted in a public electronic place.
CDT received the most spam just by placing an e-mail address at the bottom of a webpage. Spammers “harvest” these addresses with computer programs that collect and process addresses and add them to spam mailing lists. If a user must post his/her e-mail address in a public place, it is useful to disguise the address through simple means such as replacing “example@domain.com” with “example at domain dot com” or other variations such as the HTML numeric equivalent, in which “example@domain.com” could be written “example@d omain.com.”
Opt out of member directories that may place your e-mail address online. If your employer places your e-mail address online, ask the Webmaster to make sure it is disguised in some way.

? Read carefully when filling out online forms requesting your e-mail address, and exercise your choice.
If you don’t want to receive e-mail from a Web site operator, don’t give them your e-mail address unless they offer the option of declining to receive e-mail and you exercise that option. If you are asked for your e-mail address in an online setting such as a form, make sure you pay attention to any options discussing how the address will be used. Pay attention to check boxes that request the right to send you e-mails or share your e-mail address with partners. Read the privacy policies of Web sites. If you suspect that a Web site has violated its privacy policy, you can report it to your state attorney general or the Federal Trade Commission.

? Use multiple e-mail addresses.
When using an unfamiliar Web site or posting to a newsgroup, establish an e-mail address for that specific purpose. Alternatively, instead of just using one or two e-mail addresses, you can use “disposable e-mail addresses,” which consolidate e-mail in a single location but allow you to immediately shut off any address that is attracting spam. By recording which disposable address was used at which web site, one can track what sites are causing spam. Many Web sites are now providing free e-mail accounts. A search in Google Directory for “disposable e-mail addresses” provides a list of e-mail providers designed for one-time use e-mails.

? Use a filter.
Many ISPs and free e-mail services now provide spam filtering. While filters are not perfect, they can cut down tremendously the amount of spam a user receives.

? Short e-mail addresses are easy to guess, and may receive more spam.
At least one spammer tried to guess the e-mail addresses used in this study by sending mail to short and common addresses. E-mail addresses composed of short names and initials like bob@ or tse@, or basic combinations like smithj@ or toms@ will probably receive more spam. E-mail addresses need not be incomprehensible, but a user with a common or short name may want to modify or add to it in some way in his or her e-mail address.
Conclusions
1. E-mail addresses harvested from the public Web are frequently used by spammers. By an overwhelming margin, the greatest amount of spam we received was to addresses posted on the public Web.
When an address has been posted on the public Web, it can potentially be viewed by hundreds of millions of users. People who develop spam lists exploit this feature by using address-harvesting programs to surf across thousands of web sites, collecting any e-mail addresses that they encounter. Most users have no idea that their addresses have been harvested until they begin receiving spam.
2. The amount of spam received by an address posted on the public Web is directly related to the amount of traffic that Web site receives. The more visitors a Web site has in a given period of time, the greater the likelihood that an address-harvesting program used to send spam will scour it. As a result, addresses posted on high-traffic Web sites are likely to receive a greater amount of spam than address posted on smaller sites ? popular Web sites are more frequently “harvested,” and addresses posted on those Web sites are added to a greater number of spam lists.

3. E-mail addresses harvested from the public Web appear to have a relatively short “shelf life.” When e-mail addresses we posted on the public Web were removed, there was a pronounced drop in the amount of spam they received each day. The change was not absolute ? on a given day, an address might receive a few spam messages even months after it had been removed from the public Web. But such spam was on the order of 2 or 3 messages per day, compared to the thirty or more messages received by addresses still on the public Web.

4. Addresses posted in the headers of USENET messages can receive significant spam, though less than a posting on the public Web. Like most Web sites, USENET postings are publicly accessible and may be targeted by e-mail address-harvesting programs. When a user includes his or her address in the heading of a USENET message, that address can be harvested and used to send spam. Our preliminary data indicates that some USENET newsgroups are more frequently harvested for e-mail addresses than others.

5. Obscuring an e-mail address is an effective way to avoid spam from harvesters on the Web or on USENET newsgroups. Even when posted in publicly accessible areas, none of the addresses we obscured ? whether in English (”example at domain dot com”) or in HTML ? received a single piece of spam. Users who want to avoid spam should consider obscuring their addresses when possible.

6. Sites that publish their policies and make choice available to users generally respected those policies. A major element of the CDT project was to submit e-mail addresses to a number of popular businesses and other organizations on the Web. Many of these sites had privacy policies describing how they handle e-mail addresses and other potentially sensitive pieces of information. While the terms of these policies varied, we found that almost all sites followed their policies. In addition, when consumers were offered choices about how their personal information would be handled, those choices were respected.

7. Domain name registration does not seem to be a major source of spam. Despite the fact that the WHOIS database is publicly accessible, our project received just a single spam message to an address that was in WHOIS for six months. This leads us to believe that, at least for some people registering new domain names, listings in the WHOIS database may not be a major source of spam. However, because our project had a relatively short duration, we were not able to examine whether additional spam would be received as a domain name approached its renewal date.

8. Even when an e-mail address has not been posted or shared in any way, it is still possible to receive spam through various “attacks” on a mail server. In our study, a “brute force” attack on the mail server generated a tremendous amount of spam, even to addresses that hadn’t been shared anywhere. Anecdotal evidence from network operators indicates that such attacks are not uncommon, and that while alert network administrators can sometimes block them, a significant amount of spam can still result. Sometimes, these attacks take the form of “dictionary attacks,” in which the attacker sends e-mail to all the words in the dictionary, or attacks in which e-mail is sent to common surnames and first initials (such as “jsmith” or “bjones”). For individual Internet users, there is little that can be done to avoid the spam that may result from such attacks.

Spam is an ineffective way to advertise as it provides people with information about products and services that likely are of use to no one. Many spammers are unaware of what they are doing and have probably been duped into some kind of “Get-Rich-Quick” scheme. In a article about the commercial uses of spam (from Alchemy Mindworks) it was explained the reason that people spam and how they might be unaware of the damage they are causing:

The most prevalent sort of junk e-mail is commercial advertising. Judging by the content of most of these messages, their perpetrators have all just signed up with an Internet access provider, and were given complimentary copies of one of the many “How to Make Lots of Money on the Internet” books. Some of them are genuinely inconsiderate of the rights of other users of the net ? the bulk of them, however, are merely confused, deluded and ignorant.

These unsolicited emails take time out of someone busy day to either read or get rid off; they become a constant hassle to your everyday routine. Another way that people get on the spam lists in the first place is when spammers get a hold of mailing list for an organization or forum:

One particularly nasty variant of email spam is sending spam to mailing lists (public or private email discussion forums.) Because many mailing lists limit activity to their subscribers, spammers will use automated tools to subscribe to as many mailing lists as possible, so that they can grab the lists of addresses, or use the mailing list as a direct target for their attacks.

Spam can come from anywhere and internet users should be very careful about who they give their email address too.

Ways to get rid of spam are ever rising and slowing down the amount of junk mail that email users receive. For those who use programs to read their emails there are solutions such as SpamCop a highly rated program and the slightly over zealous Spam Hater, both programs not only stop spam but report complaints to the senders of the spam. Online email such as Hotmail also have taken measure to prevent spam in a help file one can learn,
In MSN Hotmail, you have several ways to protect yourself from junk mail: On the page, set up the Junk Mail Filter to redirect spam to your Junk Mail folder.
You can set the Junk Mail Filter to High or Exclusive, and then create a Safe List of addresses that should always send messages to your Inbox… If an offending message still gets into your Inbox, click the check box to the left of the message, and then click Block to stop future messages from that sender from entering your Inbox.

Other measures should be taken as checking out a website or forum for a privacy policy before giving away your email address and when signing up for a service be sure not to check anything that says that you would like to receive “special offers” or “important information” these can be a red flag that the service is linked to potential spammers.

Spam is a nuisance and will hopefully be eliminated or at least slowed down over time. More people learn how to stop or prevent it everyday and hopefully one day it will no longer be in existence. Until then, everyone must take measures to protect their inbox from being crammed full of emails about something no one could ever want.

The goal of this project is to provide a large repository of spam that can be used by researchers and tool developers. In the past, there were a few small personal spam archives that were used. There was no large set of spam that could be used to test new anti-spam algorithms.

Thus, developers could not sufficiently test their techniques across a range of messages. Also, the lack of a “standard” sample of spam made it difficult to effectively benchmark anti-spam tools.

Usenet news succumbed to spam long ago. Email was next. Now spammers have turned their attention to weblogs and comment forms. In order to increase search engine rankings you are posting advertisements to our Web pages. What you failed to understand is that bloggers are smarter, better connected, and more technologically savvy than the average email user. We control the medium that you are now attempting to exploit. You’ve picked a fight with us and it’s a fight you cannot win.

We have complained amongst ourselves, tried technological solutions, and tried to understand the nature of comment spam. And we are done. We now intend to fight back.

Spammers are hereby put on notice. Your comments are not welcome. If the purpose behind your comment is to advertise yourself, your Web site, or a product that you are affiliated with, that comment is spam and will not be tolerated.

Bloggers will track you down and notify your hosting providers about your activities. We will tell your ISPs what you are using their connections for. We will let the makers of the products you are advertising know of your despicable sales methods. We will hit you where it hurts by attacking your source of income.

You can move to a new host, find a new ISP, or sign up for a different affiliate plan. The end result will be the same. Each time you rise out of the muck we will strike you down and send you back to the hole you crawled out of.

Our sites belong to us and we intend to keep it that way. It will no longer be profitable to advertise through comment spam.
What you can do

Sign the manifesto by linking to it, leaving a comment or sending a TrackBack ping. Get the word out and let spammers know that their days are numbered.

Write tutorials on how to track down spammers and shut down their operations. I wrote about how to get spammer’s affiliate accounts terminated. Perhaps someone else could write up how to trace a domain back to their hosting company. Or how to use tools like dig to find someone’s ISP based on their IP address.

Start a posse. People particularly good at tracking down spammers could volunteer to help others. If a blogger is spammed, the volunteers could track down the culprit and shut him down. Stopping comment spam in one corner of the web will be good for everyone.

Blog comment spam can´t be comprared yet with his big brother “email” but there is enough presence to be considered as a danger. MT doesn´t help too much cleaning your articles from spamming post so if you don´t want to spend an hour each day doing blog cleaning I recommend you to take action right now. They use bots to kill your blog but you don´t have a cleaning bot, remewmber this!. We must hit asap before this becomes a major problem. Some blacklists are ready to use and other methods are a good starting point. I have collected here some methods and solutions that blog owner are developing. I´ll add a brief description of each method and a link to the author´s website where you ca find more info. I don´t want to infright copyrighted material so you must get the original content from the authore´s website.

Spam prevention is easy, some quick solutions can save your Movable Type blog from the spam plague. All the solutions I have posted here are specific for MT, I´ll try to add stuff for other blog types, sorry!. With one of this methods you can avoid most of blog spamm comments, and is very simple in case of bots, let´s go!

Email spamming is much easier than blog spamming, this is our first advantage. If a spammer wants to get an email in your inbox, he only needs your email address but if a spammer wants to get inside your blog he needs some extra effort: visit your blog and find the comment script page, then submit a post. As they use bots specifically designed for base MT installations we must change this structure as much a possible in order to increase the difficult of posting.

I recommend you to start with the easiest ones, and if they don’t keep the spammers away then try to add the advanced solutions, the reward worth the effort, so take action.

Some companies engaged in legal business, advertise their products or services using spam. They can carry out its own newsletter, but more often ordered her to those companies (or individuals) who specialize in this. The attractiveness of such advertising is its relatively low cost and (presumably) a large scope of potential customers. Such unsolicited advertising may have the opposite effect, causing rejection of the recipients, and may even become synonymous with intrusive advertising, as happened with ham SPAM.

In connection with the sharp rejection of the spam recipients, and the tightening of legislation antispamovogo share of legal goods and services in the total volume of spam is decreasing.

It is believed that, with proper organization of promotional mailings, they can actually increase sales, not delivered to the recipient of special concern. The principal terms of mutual benefit to the recipient and the organizer of distribution are:

combining the roles of organizer and dispatches e-mail service provider;
improving the quality of the target audience of each specific distribution of advertising messages;
warning customers of the provider that he would send out promotional messages;
providing convenient means to block unwanted messages.

It should be noted, however, that the advertising message distributed to users with their consent, by definition, are not spam.

Advertising illegal products

With the help of spam frequently advertised products, which can not communicate in other ways ? such as pornography, counterfeit (fake) products, medicines with the restrictions on traffic in illegally obtained private information (databases), infringing software.

Nigerian letter

Sometimes spam is used to enticed out money from the recipient of the letter. The most common method is called ?Nigerian letter?, because a large number of these letters came from Nigeria. This letter contains a message that the recipient of the letter can be in any way a large sum of money, but the sender could help him in this. Then, the sender of the letter asked him to transfer some money under the guise of, for example, documentation or open an account. Vymanivanie this amount is the object of the bully.

A narrower called this type of fraud ? Bench or benches 419 (number of articles in the Criminal Code of Nigeria).
Phishing

?Phishing? (engl. phishing from fishing ? fishing) ? another way of fraud through spam. It is an attempt by spammers enticed out of the recipient’s letter of credit card numbers or passwords access to online payments. This letter is usually masked by an official communication from the administration of the bank. It states that the recipient must confirm details about yourself, or else his account will be blocked, and provides the address map (of spammers) to the form to be filled. Among the data that is required to report are present and those that need fraudsters. To ensure that the victim does not have guessed about the deception, clearing the site also simulates the design of the official site of the bank.

Other types of spam
Letters of happiness
The proliferation of political advocacy.
Mass mailing list for the withdrawal of the postal system (DoS-attack).
Mass mailing on behalf of another person in order to cause a negative attitude to it.
Mass mailing of letters containing a computer virus (for primary distribution).
Our letters of Family History (as a rule, the sick, or victims of the accident the child) with the information that for every forward letters to some Internet service provider allegedly paid to the family of the victim a sum of money ?treatment?. The purpose of this list is to collect e-mail addresses: after numerous peresylok ?all friends? in the text of the letter often contains the e-mail addresses of all whom it has been forwarded previously. And among the regular recipients may be initiated and its spammer.

There are also two types of mass mailings, which are usually not included in the category of spam, because they operate unconsciously. However, they pose the same (or even more serious) problem for network administrators and end users.
Malicious programs a certain type (e-mail worms) are distributed via email. Infect another computer, the worm scans the computer to search for e-mail addresses and sends itself to those addresses.
Some antivirus programs and spam filters, receiving contaminated letter sent to the return address of a notification of the virus (while mailing worms often substitutes as a return address randomly selected). As a result, dozens of people, not related to the dispatch, receiving reports that their computers are infected. However, this behavior may occur only with very old programs ? were released before the problem of spam on the Internet rose to his full height.