I am the ghost of groovymother.com. Woooooo!

This is an old page from Rod Begbie's blog.

It only exists in an attempt to prevent linkrot. No new content will be added to this site, and links and images are liable to be broken. Check out begbie.com to find where I'm posting stuff these days.

Filed under 'spam'

July 27, 2011

Cost of false positives - Laughing Meme

Lovely post from Kellan explaining why Twitter (and other sites) can’t “just block all the spammers”.

When your best users and your worst users share common outlying behaviour, things get tough.

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October 21, 2009

Free hint to spamming recruiters

Free hint to spamming recruiters

If you can't even be arsed to write an email to me, instead cramming your entire message in piss-poor English into the subject line of the email, I'm not interested in any "opptnys" you may have.

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January 12, 2009

The Elements of Spam.

Form the possessive of nouns by adding ‘s, just an apostrophe, just an s, a semicolon, a w, an ampersand, a 9, or anything. “My wifesd*porcupine hot pix for u.”

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December 5, 2007

Inside the 'Ron Paul' Spam Botnet - Research - SecureWorks

Interesting insight into the control interface for a spam-blasting botnet.

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May 16, 2007

Image Spam: By the Numbers

Good notes on the current state-of-the-art in the arms race between spammers and anti-spam software, trying to skip around OCRing images.

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May 3, 2007

taint.org: Justin Mason's Weblog » SpamAssassin 3.2.0!

Justin’s guide to what’s new and cool in the latest version of SpamAssassin. Installing on my mail server now.

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May 1, 2007

Hotmail's antispam measures snuff out legit emails, too | The Register

I’ve been experiencing this — Emails I send to HoTMaiL users are getting silently swallowed, neither bouncing nor ending up in their Spam folders.

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April 25, 2007

Introducing http:BL | Project Honey Pot

Project Honey Pot announce a blacklist for IP addresses known to comment spam. This could be easy to integrate with a Django middleware…

April 24, 2007

Tracking Comment Spammers | Project Honey Pot

Project Honey Pot’s traps are now presenting spiders with forms that resemble comments/guestbooks/forums to try to gather some data on comment spamming. If you have a web site, it’s well worth installing the honeypot (or linking to a QuickLink) to help the cause.

March 12, 2007

Spamtrap

Art. “When a new spam email is detected by the installation, it automatically prints it out. The printed email slides down a track into the shredder that analyzes it.”

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December 7, 2006

Technical Revenue: The Architecture of Mailinator

Interesting article on the architecture and design decisions behind mailinator.com, your local friendly low-hassle disposable email address site.

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November 29, 2006

It's the name on everyone's screen. But is Southridge Ethanol really such a hot stock? | Special_reports | Guardian Unlimited Money

Anatomy of a pump’n’dump scam. Or: Why you’re getting so much more spam this month.

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October 2, 2006

PhishTank | Join the fight against phishing

New open database of user-submitted Phishing URLs. Somewhat reminiscent of Mark Fletcher’s old “Trustic” startup. Not sure how well the submission/validation system will scale, or deal with gaming, but it could be interesting to watch.

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August 16, 2006

FuzzyOcrPlugin - Spamassassin Wiki

SpamAssassin plugin which OCRs the images attached to image-only mails to work out if they contain text like V14GRA. I imagine this is massively CPU-intense, but it might be worth looking at.

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July 1, 2006

Solid Wall of Code: AutoBan

MT plugin that adds “Deny” entries to your .htaccess file when someone’s clobbering you with comment spam, saving you the CPU cycles. I’ve installed it — if it works, I’ll be giddy as a schoolgirl.

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June 28, 2006

419 Eater: The Incredible Shrinking Artwork

“Derek Trotter” gets a Nigerian scammer to ship a wooden carving of a Commodore 64. Just fantastic!

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June 6, 2006

Gallows humor from inside Enron

When Enrorn was investigated, the contents of their Exchange server was made public. Here’s some of the more amusing things found inside.

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May 6, 2006

Drunk Men Work Here - On Bots

Visualizations on how Yahoo, Google and MSN (and comment spam bots) spider through content.

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April 15, 2006

Akismet for Movable Type

The hugely-successful Akismet anti-comment-spam plugin for Wordpress has been ported to MT.

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January 21, 2006

SiteAdvisor blog: Spam-a-lot

SiteAdvisor’s excellent analysis of webcrap continues. Signing-up for “free” computer games gets you bombarded with 15 spam emails a day.

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November 7, 2005

The E-Mail Time Capsule - Forbes.com

Email the yourself of the future. My email to my 49-year-old self ponders on SMTP, spam and the likelihood of me still getting emails at begbie.com.

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October 3, 2005

Spam Stock Tracker

“Tracking how much money people can lose with penny stocks from spam.” Next you’ll be telling me that V!A6RA doesn’t work!

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September 16, 2005

O'Reilly Network: Using Qpsmtpd

Finally got qpsmtpd up and running on my mail server. Watching the ngrep logs as it makes short work of spam is most rewarding.

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About This Site

This is an archive of groovmother.com, the old blog run by Rod Begbie — A Scottish geek who lives in San Francisco, CA.

I'm the co-founder of Sōsh, your handy-dandy guide for things to do in San Francisco this weekend.