Ajit Gaddam: TechNews and Security

Sweet… I just got my first comment spam in Russian.

Apparantly, they are promoting a site selling MP3 songs. Here is the translation of the Russian in the above comment spam to English. Google Translate did a pretty good job…

The latest site with MP3 songs. Here you will be able to download different mp3 free. Our site is updated every day and filled the best player. There is a different directory mp3, albums and performers. Please http:/ / www. cdmp3 .ru

This email definitely takes the Outstanding spam email award in my opinion so far… so far.

The reason I saw i saw its outstanding is because of the effort that went into creating this spam email. I have checked a couple of Lotteries and the Ref File number, the batch number etc are all pretty well laid out and detailed. There are no spelling mistakes, atleast from my dictioniononary and unlike addressed to any Respected Sir/Madam/Blah, this spam email is addressed to me! Also, they have people signing off on this “lottery winner notification”. Another impressive thing is the lottery numbers in pictures.

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One of the most popular articles on my blog continues to be the “I won the Microsoft Lottery Award” article. Another popular spam email doing the rounds these days in the Coca Cola Company Promotion Prize Award.

This spam email comes from a certain Mrs. Kate Hudson of the Coca Cola Company.  This spam email is primarily targetted to those living in the United Kingdom as all the variants I have seen of this spam email have their destination addresses in the UK.

The email informs me that I am one the lucky 20 winners where I won a prize money of £1,000,000 or One Million Pound Sterlings. One of the first red flags comes here. If you notice carefully, it just says £1,000.000. Notice the period after thousand instead of a comma denoting 1 million. This Coca Cola promotion award it seems was held in conjunction with the British American Tobacco Worldwide Promotion.

The following is the full text of the spam email

THE COCA COLA COMPANY
PROMOTION/PRIZE AWARD
DEPTCOCA COLA AVENUE
STAMFORD BRIDGE LONDON.
SW1V 3DW UNITED KINGDOM

THE COCA COLA COMPANY OFFICIAL PRIZE NOTIFICATION 2007

We are pleased to inform you of the result of the just concluded annual final draws held on the (24th of March, 2007) by Coca-Cola in conjunction with the British American Tobacco Worldwide Promotion, your email was among the 20 Lucky winners who won £1,000.000 (One million Great Britain Pound Sterlings) each on the THE COCA’COLA COMPANY PROMOTION However the results were released on the (26th of March, 2007) and your email was attached to ticket number (7PWYZ2006) and ballot number (BT:12052006/20) The online draws was conducted by a random selection of email addresses from an exclusive list of 30,031 E-mail addresses of individuals and corporate bodies picked by an advanced automated random computer search from the internet. However, no tickets were sold but all email addresses were assigned to different ticket numbers for representation and privacy.

The selection process was carried out through random selection in our computerized email selection machine (TOPAZ) from a database of over 250,000 email addresses drawn from all the continents of the world.

This Lottery is approved by the British Gaming Board and also Licensed by the The International Association of Gaming Regulators (IAGR).This lottery is the 3rd of its kind and we intend to sensitize the public.
 
To claim your price contact your claim agent.
 
CONTACT PERSON: MR. DAVID JACKSON
POSITION: FINANCE DIRECTOR,HSBC FINANCE CORPORATION
2700 SANDERS ROAD PROSPECT HEIGHTS LONDON
UNITED KINGDOM.
DIRECT PHONE NUMBER: +44 703 190 9886. 
EMAIL ADDRESS: jackson_david0009@yahoo.com
 
 
 
Kindly send the following information to your claim agent:
Ticket Number:____________________________
Ballot  Numbers: _______________________ Tel/Fax Number: ________________
Full Name: _____________________________ Age: _________________________
Sex: _____________________ Company Name: ____________________________
Full Address: ________________________ Occupation:______________________
Amount Won: _______________________ Country: _________________________
 
Please you are adviced to complete the form and send it immediately to your claim agent through email for prompt collection of your fund.

You are to keep all lotto information away from the general public especially your ticket number and ballot number. (This is important as a case of double claims will not be entertained).

*Staff of CocaCola and the British American Tobacco Company are not to partake in this Lottery.

Accept my hearty congratulations once again!

Yours faithfully,
Mrs.Kate Hudson
Cordinator

A lot of websites and blogs including at AskStudent, we run Google Adsense to serve targetted advertising to our visitors. However, for a site getting a lot of visitors, think about this: How many of them are potential advertisers for your site?

At AskStudent, where our primary audience is students and teenagers, there are a lot of advertisers out there trying to reach this market. Now let’s assume an advertiser comes across your site and feels it would a good site to advertise on. You don’t want to lose this advertiser, right? That’s where Onsite Advertiser Sign-up comes in: Advertisers can create site-targeted campaigns directly from your site.

Although the ‘Advertise on this site’ link will no longer appear on your ad units following last week’s ad format change, you can still display a separate Onsite Advertiser Sign-up link on your site, such as within the sidebars or footers of your pages. This method offers you more flexibility as far as the placement, the font, and the color of the link, and can help you retain interested advertisers who visit your site.

If you’d like to create such a link on your site, just follow the detailed instructions shown below and then add your link into the HTML source of your pages. If you use CSS on your site, you can create a nice rollover and make your link even more visible to potential advertisers:

Once you’ve created a separate link, don’t forget to customize your Onsite Advertiser Sign-up page. Please keep in mind that it’s currently only possible to customize one landing page per account. In other words, advertisers can target each of your sites individually, but they’ll see the same landing page when they click an ‘Advertise on this site’ link from any of your sites.

We encourage you to give this new method a try and to experiment with various placements. Having more interested advertisers bidding on your site means increased competition — which in turn translates into higher revenue potential for you.

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If you are logged in into any Google Service such as GMail or Google Notebook or Google Analytics or any other service from Google and then visit Google.com and enter a search query, you will see the “Note this” option button beside the Cached and Similar Pages option.

Once, you click on “Note this” option near your search result, you see a “Duly noted” option.

Now, if you wish to see these snippets or rather search results you have been saving, you can log on to your Google Notebook account. There you will be able to see all the google search results you might have been saving. In your Google Notebook, a link to the site and a brief description of the URL you just noted will show up. Here, you can add a comment, and also change the URL of the site you just saved. If you wish to add notes from any webpage on the internet, you can download this browser extension provided by Google
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Google announced on it Adsense Blog a couple of hours ago that they have changed the way some of their ad units are displayed giving them a fresh new makeover. Google claims that this change is the result of extensive testing and research and that these new ad formats are more visually appealing, more cleaner and attractive for visitors besides providing better performance results for Adsense publishers and advertisers.

AdSense is an ad-serving program run by Google. Website owners can enroll in this program to enable text, image and, more recently, video advertisements on their sites. These ads are administered by Google and generate revenue on either a per-click or per-thousand-impressions basis.

Google utilizes its search technology to serve ads based on website content, the user’s geographical location, and other factors. Those wanting to advertise with Google’s targeted ad system may sign up through AdWords. AdSense has become a popular method of placing advertising on a website because the ads are less intrusive than most banners, and the content of the ads is often relevant to the website.

At AskStudent, we started seeing these new ad formats a couple of hours ago. Notice the way, ads are displayed in the old format and the brand new format.

Old Format

New Format

As you might have observed,  the ad units still match the site where the fonts and colors of the ads are still the same. The most important changes seem to be that Google has done away with the way it displays its Logo. Gone is Ads by Goooooogle and is replaced by a sleeker image which says Ads by Google.

Another option which has been removed which could be very significant is Advertise on this site option on Google Ads. When this option was introduced by Google a year ago, it allowed advertisers to bid on specific websites besides letting the advertisers see how their ads might show up. However, Google Adwords has matured a lot since it was launched and allows a lot of options for advertisers giving them all the control they need.

Besides,  Google expects visitors who click on Ads to take them to sites which ad value to the content they have been looking for and to get the answer they have been looking for on that article page and not necessarily advertisers looking to market their products at a particular site.

Below, is another example of the old format and new format of the Adsense units.

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Wow. Matt Cutts. <takes a bow>

As reported by SearchEngineLand and a number of blogs, Matt Cutts, the head of Google’s WebSpam team, had his blog defaced by the Dark SEO Team over the weekend. Matt’s blog is down, hacked — and archives wiped out as well. Matt has posted previously to this about the site being slow (post gone, but you can see his Twitter comment here) and heading offline through Monday, so you might be seeing the screen below for awhile.

Now, Matt Cutts seems to have taken his sweet revenge. You can check it out yourself by visiting the Dark SEO’s website

The Content of the hack

Defaced by Matt ! I ownz you, Dark seo team !

Of course I’m lying when I make everyone believe that content is King.
Of course black hat SEO and spamdexing are the only Kings.
Google is just a stupid algorithm relying on spammy backlinks.
But you guys had no right to let everyone know. That’s why I defaced your bloody DST site. To show the entire world how evil a white hat can be.

In fact, I’m as evil as my employer

All your backlinks are belong to us !

Head of the Google’s Webspam team

Update: Matt Cutts and Dark SEO combined to make this a successful April Fools Joke. <takes a bow again>

Related Links:

In case you wish to view larger pictures, if Matt Cutts blog and Dark SEO’s website are restored to their original pristine glory

1. Matt Cutts Blog Defaced by Dark SEO

2. Matt Cutts defaces Dark SEO’s website

As I blogged earlier, Akismet has passed a huge milestone today. It has crossed 1 Billion Comment Spam blocked a few hours ago.

Besides me, a lot of people have been guessing on when this milestone would be reached and as guessed, it was reached over the weekend. As outlined in the picture below, two stats stand out below the chart. One is Total Spam blocked which at the point of this screenshot stood at 1,024,961,562 and the other stat is Total Ham which stood at 54,169,936. What this statistic reveals is that an alarming 95% of all the comments and trackbacks to blogs such as this one are spam. So with a Billion spams blocked, there are just 54 million genuine comments (genuine comments or total ham are those which are not identified by Akismet as spam)

The only sure way right now to avoid spam is to not allow any form of commenting or connection to your blog from any other site on the internet. Which would defeat one of the primary benefits of a blog: connecting with other people.

I wouldn’t do that. So I rely on Akismet as the first line of spam defence and it does a very good job.

You can’t stand spam. I can’t stand spam. Fortunately for us and most of the people using Wordpress, Akismet is the perfect plugin dealing with comment spam. Akismet is the brainchild of Matt Mullenweg of WordPress and his merry band of Automattic hackers. Their favorite definition of kismet is “Kismet (principle), the magnetic attractive force that actualizes the playing out of karma; often used in the positive sense.”

Automattic Kismet (Akismet for short) is a collaborative effort to make comment and trackback spam a non-issue and restore innocence to blogging, so you never have to worry about spam again.

The Graph below is a graph of Ham and Spam since Akismet started. “Ham” is the non-spam message in Akismet lingo

My Guess: We will hit the 1 Billion Spam comment sometime on Sunday(03/24). I will post a follow up post once we reach the 1 Billion mark.

Related Links:

1. Download Akismet plugin for Wordpress and other Blogs

Looking for something fun to do this summer? All college and university students around the world are invited to apply to get paid $4,500 USD to work on your favorite open source project this summer.  This Blog is powered by WordPress and looks like it is only about to get even better.  WordPress is among the 131 accepted to Google Summer of Code, of more than 300 projects that applied.

It seems that Wordpress has eight committed volunteers who are enthusiastic to mentor, learn, and make WordPress a little better in the process.

Check out their ideas for projects, or propose your own. You must apply by March 24.

Good luck!