The Washington Post On Spyware, Blogging, And Other Things They Remain Clueless About...

washingtonpost.com Blogs

The Botnet-Spyware Love Affair

News outlets are reporting that the FBI has arrested a 20-year-old Los Angeles man on charges that he used viruses to take control over 400,000 computers and use them as a giant install base for spyware. The scheme, authorities allege, netted the defendant $60,000, a BMW and computer equipment."

Not that long ago, such an enterprising young man would have been hailed as a modern day Robin Hood, but we've all come to detest spam and viruses so very much that it's off-with-his-head and don't let the prison door hit you in the ass.

Not that the Washinton Post know a damn thing about web blogs, but here's another of their...SEE, WE'RE WITH-IT offerings for onliners:

A New Place for Spam's Same Old Pitches

Now that Web logs -- blogs, for short -- are a popular online pastime for millions of people, scammers are finding new ways to exploit them as vehicles for junk advertisements.
Now isn't THAT the pot calling the kettle black or what? Try, just TRY to navigate The Post online without being assailed by pop-ups and ads, and don't they GET-IT that they are including themselves in this uncivilized behavior? Nope, but let's continue.

"Yahoo and Google are the common carriers of the information age, and they have a reasonable responsibility . . . to prevent the illegal and inappropriate use of their services," said Scott Allen, an Austin-based online editor for About.com who also maintains a blog.

Last month, Blogger, a free blog service, identified a "spamalanche" that hit its system, and the company had to dismantle 13,000 spam-filled blogs created in the course of a single weekend.
"The readership of blogs has exploded in the last 18 months," and with it the popularity of splogs, said Jason Goldman, product manager for Blogger, which is owned by Google Inc. "The challenge is one of balance: to make it difficult for people to post bad script but not make it hard for our users."

The "challenge" is to make the fricking thing WORK for the folks who are genuine bloggers, something Google hasn't been doing very well. They identified the Blogger version of Messenger as a splog because of the inordinant amount of times I had to click and re-click to post and the reason they gave for instituting such a ridiculous filter was: We're using computer programs to filter out splogs because they can more easily defeat computer programs that splog. We want our bloggers to be people.

So then. You want people blogging, so you use some dumbass machine to determine the people from the machines? Duh. It's perfectly fine to frig up the works with yet another dumb bit of software designed to outwit other dumb bits of sofware.

Anyway, Blogger soon enough realized that Messenger wasn't a splogger and it was their own crappy system that was at fault. For the several days that it THOUGHT...as if thought really enters into the minds of these detweillers...that it thought Messenger was just another spam-server, I had to enter a code for each and every posting. Not that much of a big deal when all else is working well, but NOTHING on Blogger works very well so what would normally take 15-20 to post took over 30 minutes because the code-identifyer screwed up a much as the rest of their "service" did.

Don't they get it? An awful lot of folks turn to spamming and viruses to get even with poorly designed, horribly maintained, and flat out crappy services. NOTHING works all the time today, nothing, and while we wouldn't stand for it when it came to most anything else, we shrug off poor programming as if it were to be expected.

Now let me post this before AOL or Blogger crashes and I lose the whole thing. Editing goes out the door when one is frantic to just get the damn thing published, so excuse any errors. They're unavoidable if I want to blog at all.