After a wave of aggressive spam attacks this month, bloggers suddenly found themselves scrambling for antispam weaponry and confronting the questions that have bedeviled e-mail and Usenet for years. How much openness can blogs afford? What freedoms are bloggers willing to trade to keep spammers out?

The problem of blog spam is not entirely new. Last year “referral marketers” began inserting their clients’ URLs into bloggers’ referral logs. Around the same time, bloggers began reporting spam occasionally popping up in the public comments on their sites.

Until recently, however, comment spam posed little more than an occasional nuisance. But after blogger Jay Allen saw spammers hit 120 of his posts over the course of four days, he knew the problem had reached a new level of urgency.

“I realized that day that we were facing a new predator in the jungle, and if we didn’t adapt ? and quickly ? it would be having us for dinner,” he said.

The latest wave of spam attacks focused on

Six Apart’s popular
Movable Type publishing system, whose built-in comments do not require registration and allow bloggers to block comments only by IP address ? a restriction spammers can easily avoid. “Movable Type’s comment system is extremely open, which is incredible for a community tool, but unfortunately also highly susceptible to abuse,” Allen said.

In late September, the trickle of comment spam swelled to a torrent. Flash programmer Michael Gunn’s blog received 150 messages from “preteen” and “lolita.” Web designer and developer D. Keith Robinson started
getting 40 spams at a time.

Across the Web, spambots were churning through bloggers’ comment threads, leaving behind dozens of links embedded in key phrases like “buy viagra” or “diet pills.” Others, more deviously, posted innocuous blurbs
like, “Nice site you have here!” and embedded the spammer’s URL in the comment signature, under fake names like “underage,” “cheap shoes” or “phentermine.”

Bloggers agreed that, unlike garden-variety e-mail spam, the comment spam they were receiving was not designed to attract click-throughs. Its primary audience wasn’t human; it was the all-seeing search-engine robot.

By embedding URLs in hundreds of blog comments, spammers apparently think they can trick search engines ? particularly Google ? into believing that the blog community is abuzz with news of the latest cheap Viagra
website. Since Google treats links as a measure of popularity, the thinking goes, a network of blog links pointing at the spammer’s site will give it preferential placement in search-engine rankings.

While Movable Type blogs make up a small fraction of the millions of blogs on the Web, that fraction includes some of the most popular and influential sites, including those of ?berblogger Glenn Reynolds (who does not enable comments), actor Wil Wheaton and the Howard Dean presidential campaign.

“If you were trying to select for a group of people that have high page rank and have high traffic, Movable Type is a good place to start,said Cameron Marlow, creator of the blog aggregator Blogdex.

Danny Sullivan, editor of SearchEngineWatch.com, however, said comment spammers may be overestimating
the influence blogs have over search-engine results.

“There have been some misconceptions that blogs have almost superhuman power over search engines, which is not the case,” he said. “Some people may have bought into that hype and believed that all they needed to improve their ranking was to get a bunch of links from blogs.”

Sullivan added that whatever effect comment spam had on search-engine results would be unlikely to last long. “All spamming types of things are failing strategies,” he said. “They may work for a very short period
of time, but search engines come back, and it’s another step in the constant arms race between search engines and the people who optimize for them.”

For now, however, comment spam remains a serious nuisance. In some ways it is even more insidious than its e-mail counterpart. Where e-mail spam is at least easy to spot and delete, comment spam can pile up unnoticed in hundreds of separate comment threads.

And once a blogger spots an infestation, getting rid of the unwanted comments can be a tedious chore.

Six Apart co-founders Ben and Mena Trott said they planned to improve comment handling in upcoming releases of Movable Type and their hosted blogging service, TypePad. Among the features under consideration are bulk deletion of comments generated by a particular IP address, and the ability to
delete comments directly from notification e-mails sent every time a user posts.

The Trotts cautioned, however, that there would be no quick fix. “Like e-mail, there isn’t one simple solution that can be switched on and end spam completely,” they wrote on Six Apart’s official blog.

Not that there was any risk bloggers would adopt one simple solution. Only weeks after bloggers raised the cry for help, Movable Type users had devised numerous hacks, workarounds and full-fledged add-ons to combat the problem. Unsurprisingly, each generated its share of debate.

Many bloggers reported success at stopping the flow of spam,
but everyone seemed to agree that what they had experienced so far was just a
taste of what was coming.

E-bill, first presented in January and already approved by the state Senate, was approved overwhelmingly Tuesday by the House of Representatives from Ohio, said a lawmaker from the adviser Kathleen Walcher, who co-sponsored the project.

Taft was not immediately available for comment. An industry source said that the governor is expected to sign the Ohio project bipartite ’spam’.

If it becomes law, would declare illegal deceptive Internet advertisements and prohibit false or creating false accounts to send spam, junk email that fills inboxes of e-mails of Internet resources and replenishment of Internet service providers.

The measure also would allow the state attorney general’s criminal and civil penalties against ’spammers’.

The worst offenders could face a minimum of six months in prison and fines of $ 25,000 per violation, or two to eight U.S. dollars per email. Your computer might be confiscated, and Internet providers may submit claims for damages.

Mail spam is a big problem. Cause economic problems and costs to people over a long period of time, “he said on Friday Daniel Holstein, a researcher affiliated with the Greens.

“We hope (the fines) to make people think & nbspdos times before mandar spam,” he told Reuters. The law will be voted by Parliament during the second week of March.

About 80 percent of e-mails sent worldwide are spam and researchers have discovered that sending spam can cost billions of euros. Companies have to buy computers with greater capacity to cope with the influx of e-mails and workers waste time checking all these emails, Holstein said.

The law will prevent the ’spammers’ hide your name or e-mail comes.

Since July last year, in Germany it is illegal to send spam, but the coalition government in hopes that the new legislation will help provide more effective protection.

France, Germany, the United Kingdom and three other countries (Brazil, Canada and United States) software topped the list of most purchased items via spam offers, according to a survey conducted by Forrester Data users who were asked about their attitudes toward unsolicited email.

According to the survey, although over 80% of French users Germans and British are great amount of spam, French users are the most read, (France – 29%, Germany – 25% and the United Kingdom – the 23%), while 29% of respondents admitted to having bought the German software offered via spam (Germany – 29%, France – 25% and the United Kingdom – 22%).

The study’s findings also reveal that, generally, in the three European countries, over 30 percent of online consumers said that the software for sale via spam increases the risks related to online security and exposure to viruses .

Decalogue BSA to help tackle fraud in online shopping:

?Recognizes spam!. Indicators that an e-mail is spam include senders unknown, incorrect characters or phrases in the subject line, and prices too good to be true.

Use anti-spam filters. The options can be found through a simple Internet search. If you receive spam in your business email address work, ask the person responsible for computer systems on the filtering options available.

No answer. Even if the spam e-mail asks you to respond to clear their direction. Could confirm that your address is active and therefore see an increase in spam.

Be careful with your data. Do not set your email address on public sites where spammers can find it.

Check the distributor.. If the dealer tries to sell software online that is not listed in the manufacturer’s web site software, you should be careful.

Do the homework. Find some information on the web about the seller and the transactions you have done previously. Find a distinctive mark of confidence.

Get the address of the seller. If you can not find a physical address, may be suspect.

Keep receipts. Keep a copy of your order number and confirmation of the transaction

Stay outside of compilations and backups. Compilations of software titles from different manufacturers, or copies of “booking”, are a clear indication that the software is not legitimate.

Report piracy. Buyers who are suspicious of software, counterfeit software and / or fraud should contact security agencies

America Online, a subsidiary of Time Warner, filed suit in federal court in Alexandria, Virginia, against ’spim,’ or sending unsolicited messages to users of its instant messaging service.

Microsoft, the largest software manufacturer in the world, AOL, EarthLink and Yahoo filed complaints “against those who fill the inboxes of our consumers with unsolicited e-mails and misleading, many of which carry and transmit malicious code, ’spyware’ and links to pages of ‘phishing’. ”

‘Phishing’ is the practice of sending bogus emails that try to get people to disclose private financial information to steal your identity.

Microsoft filed its lawsuits in federal courts, while other companies filed separate state and federal courts.

Microsoft has used its legal power to launch a barrage of lawsuits against ’spammers’ in the past year in an attempt to stop the spread of spam. The company, based in Redmond, Washington, is involved in more than 100 legal cases against ’spammers’.

OPTA said in a statement Tuesday that the fines were for ’spam’ – a term widely used to identify unsolicited commercial emails, often offering products to combat sexual dysfunction or promote weight loss sent to phones mobile or email addresses.

The fines are the first imposed by OPTA against issuers’ spam ‘. The agency said that the sanctions are in line with the stricter criteria of the European Union to combat a problem that is estimated to cost European businesses about 2,500 million euros a year.

The EU has tried to fight spam by introducing a ban on sending unsolicited e-mails in 2009, but legislation is not applied firmly, and even several countries that have not yet entered.

Although this is a potential threat, and are exploring possible solutions such as filters or white lists based on patterns, so that VoIP technology to cope with spam, in a similar way as is fighting at present in the e-mail .

The Attorney General of the State of Florida, Charlie Crist, said the penalty to prevent these men continue to send emails tricksters is part of its first actions under the anti-spam law passed last year.

The men, Scott Filary, 25, and Donald Townsend, 34, both of Tampa, are accused of sending over 65,000 emails, many with a false case and hidden source.

Emails sent to recipients to websites that Crist said were related to fraud or illegal activities, such as selling pharmaceuticals and cigarettes over the Internet or to supply a platform for illegal downloads of copyrighted movies.

The research was assisted by the software giant, Microsoft, whose operating system, Windows runs on more than 90 percent of computers worldwide.

The anti-spam law in Florida may be fined up to $ 500 (385 euros) by email, or $ 24 million in the case where the two accused, said Crist in a statement.

The national anti-spam law took effect in early 2004 but has done little to stem the collapse of litter caused by email spam.

It is estimated that over 80 percent of email traffic consists of spam, costing companies billions of dollars a year, lost productivity and bandwidth.

A court in Virginia this week jailed a man in North Carolina for nine years for sending millions of spam emails, but the court postponed the sentence while the case was appealed. This is the first prosecution for a ’spammer’.

“Recently the ISPs seem to think that now comes under ’spam’ to the electronic mailboxes of consumers. These are the first good news I have heard about the ’spam’ – if true – since I started,” said .

Majoras added that filters the best in e-mail had helped to reduce ’spam’.

In December, America Online, the largest online service worldwide, said its spam filters have blocked half of 1.200 million daily e-mails in late 2004, about 50% less than the previous year.

Analysts estimate that spam will cost Internet providers about $ 500 million consumer broadband last year.

Stop spam and misleading advertising are the priorities for the FTC, together with collaboration in surveillance and competition.

But Majoras, whose agency has about 200 open cases against ’spammers’, said the execution of the laws’ spam’ was not enough.