Spam Making LinkedIn Unusable

The level of spam postings in LinkedIn groups, particularly "get rich quick" postings and spam messages,  is reaching the point where it will make the service unusable. LinkedIn's advice to group administrators is to change the member’s posting permissions and block offending members, but just as with email, it is not practical to deal with spam manually. LinkedIn needs to install an automatic spam filter. It should be reasonably simple to adapt a spam filter, such as the free open source, SpamAssassin, to work on LinkedIn postings and messages. The rate of increase in the spam from LinkedIn is such that it may be unusable within a few weeks.

ps: While they are at it, LinkedIn might want to fix whatever in their Javascript causes "A script on this page may be busy, or it may have stopped responding. ...". I suspect the problem is that LinkedIn just is providing too much stuff. I like LinkedIn, but if it is slow and full of spam I will not be able to use it.

How Do I Stop Spam from the Palmer United Party?

Today I received seventeen copies of a "New Year Greetings"  email from the Palmer United Party. I am happy to receive the occasional newsletter from my elected representatives, but Clive Palmer MP is not one of them.

I have forwarded all the messages to the ACMA Spam Intelligence Database. Any suggestions on how to stop this? There is an unsubscribe offer at the end of the message, but a posting to Whirlpool indicates that a request to be removed from the mailing list resulted in more email.

The  Palmer United Party appears to use the IT company, Alacrity Technology, based in Mitchell ACT. The company also promotes mobile gambling technology.

SPAM from Palmer United Party

Today I found I had 21 email messages from Clive Palmer of the Palmer United Party. I understand that political parties are exempt from Spam legislation, but apart from urging everyone I know to not vote for the Palmer United Party, is there some way to stop this? Can Mr Palmer's companies, which presumably funding this Spam, be prosecuted?

Two of the emails were to my ACS addresses, two to my ANU addresses and the rest my company addresses. Some of the addresses I have not used for some time. It appears that the Palmer United Party harvested the email addresses from web pages.

The email contains a link to Alacrity Technologies, which appears to be a reputable company (with a reference from the Royal Australian Navy on its home page). Alacrity might want to consider the negative effect on its reputation which an association with Spammers will have.

Tools for Screen Reading

In "How to read a computer screen: the latest tools to ease on-screen reading",  Nick Blackbourn suggests some applications to make web pages and PDF documents easier on the eyes. Some of my techniques for reducing eyestrain:

1. Tune your spam filter for less to read: I pay fastmail.fm to filter my email for me using the SpamAssassin Spam filter, as well as use the filter in the Thunderbird email reader. As a result I have a lot less email to read. As well as cutting out get rich quick schemes, it also filters out a lot of badly written media releases. ;-)
2. PDF to text: When commenting on long PDF documents I copy the text and paste it into a plain text file, then add my comments there. Some documents are unreadable when reduced to text, in which case I don't bother reading them. If it is an important document I will reply to the author explaining why their document is unacceptable.
3. Web Pages with No Style: Some web pages have so much formatting they are hard to read. For these I set "View > Page Style > No style" in my browser and the document is reduced to one column. If the document is still unreadable I don't read it (and might explain to the author why).

ps: Occasionally I will get a badly formatted document which has useful content. So I publish my own simply formatted summary of the document, for the benefit of other readers and as an example to authors. In some cases a web search will direct people to my summary, rather than the original document, because the search engine software (like human readers) can't make sense of the original.

Fake nigerian scams be used to educate the gullible?

In "Why do Nigerian Scammers Say They are from Nigeria?", Cormac Herley (Microsoft Research, 2012) suggests that scammers make their email deliberately implausible so that only the most gullible respond. I am not sure this is the entire explanation as there are also some scam emails which are very plausible (at least as plausible as late night TV ads for products and services). But perhaps this technique can also be used to warn the same people of their risk. ACMA could send out fake spam emails and any one responding could be sent a warning to look out for similar fakes.

ps: Herley's theory may also explain many political and religious pamphlets. ;-)

DEEWR Spam About School Funding Report

Yesterday, I registered to attend the School Funding Forum on 22 February 2012 in Canberra, with Minister for School Education, Peter Garrett. The on-line registration system worked well and I received a prompt conformation. However, today the Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations (DEEWR) sent me a "School Funding Forum - Information pack" email with 7.4 Mbytes of attachments. The attachments are PDF copies of various documents about the school funding report. These documents are on the web and all the Department needed to have done was include a link to them. As a result the message is one thousand times larger than it need be. Hopefully administration of any new school funding program will be more efficient than this. If this was one of my students, they would be getting a "Fail" for this attempt at communication. ;-)

Google Blogger Spam Detector

One problem with allowing comments on my Blog "Net Traveller" is Spam. About one half of the comments posted to the blog are not real comments, they are automated messages designed to promote a product. Typically these have a couple of sentences saying how useful my blog is and then a link to a nasty product, such as where students can purchase assignments. I moderate all comments to the blog, but it can be hard to catch all of this Spam. The new Google Blogger Spam Detector is intended to help with this.

However, seeing the new Blogger comments interface for the first time is a little confronting. The Google system listed all 575 comments posted to my blog since it was started. I thought I had to go through all these and mark which were spam. But it turns out these are those Google thinks are legitimate. There is a separate tab for those thought to be Spam (none in my blog) and another tab for those awaiting moderation.

Phone number put Hex on mail message

Recently SpamAssassin warned me that an incoming message might be Spam. It turned out this was because the message mentioned a number of transportation web sites. Sydney Public Transport Information uses a phone number as its web address www.131500.com.au . This triggers rule URI_HEX ("URI hostname has long hexadecimal sequence"). Sydney Ferries www.sydneyferries.info is an .info domain name which triggers INFO_TLD ("Contains an URL in the INFO top-level domain"). It is not clear to me why these should be suspicious.

Stopping ACM sending junk mail

For more than 20 years I have been a member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). This is one of the oldest IT bodies and has been respectable and useful, up until now. In the last year I have noticed an increase in the number of annoying email messages from ACM.

The number of newsletters, announcements, surveys and renewal reminders from ACM has been getting annoying, to the point where I am considering cancelling my membership. The problem is that apart from the printed publications, all I see of an organisation like ACM is the email. If that email starts to look like junk mail from dishonest spammers, then reputation of the organisation starts to suffer.

The use of the web for e-commerce also changes perceptions. ACM was in the habit of including on the renewal form some suggested items. These were things I had not asked for, such as a subscription to the ACM Digital Library and a donation to some initiative. Each year I would have to cross these out and recalculate the correct, much lower total amount. However, when the same thing happened with the online renewal this went from being a charming idosyrancy to something which looked like attempted fraud. ACM should discontinue this practice as it looks, at best unethical, if not technically illegal. It is simply enough with an electronic renewal to add extra items if the member wants them.

In addition, the perceptions of what an organisation does changes with email. Previously the ACM would send me a membership reminder several months in advance. This made sense for overseas members contacted by paper mail. The reminder could take a long time to arrive and filling out the renewal and mailing it back took a long time. But email does not take as long, nor does online renewal. As a result sending a reminder months in advance looks like an attempt to get money the organisation is not entitled to. ACM need to shorten the reminder period to just a few weeks.

An occasional email alert can be helpful, but too many get annoying. ACM send far too many email notices and make it very difficult to stop them. I contacted my supposed "Personal Customer Service Representative" (an annoying fiction: does this mean that when that person is not on duty I get no service?) and asked to just receive official announcements of elections and the like and one renewal reminder. This didn't happen.

When I received the next email announcement I clicked on the link to stop them and that worked. However, it only stopped that particular announcement. Logging into the ACM customer site I found I could remove myself from various announcement lists, but there were a lot of them and no way to just click "official items only".

With all the announcement items un-clicked, hopefully ACM will not send me so much junk mail.

ACM has been a worthwhile organisation, but it needed to balance the need to service members with the need not to annoy them.

ps: In going through the customer site I found some useful services I was not aware of, such as an ACM v-card available to each member and online books.

SPF entry in DNS to counter Spammers

Each day I get a few "bounces" of email messages I never sent. To counter this I am asking my ISP to insert an SPF record in the DNS entry for my domain name. The problem is that spammers can forge an e-mail message from me by putting my e-mail address as the sender's address. To counter this a list of the mail servers I use can be inserted in the DNS record for my web site. When a mail system gets a message claiming to be from me, it can check if it came from one of the list of mail servers I nominated. I not sure how well this works in pratice. There is the catch that if I have to cange where I send my mail from, I have to remember to change the DNS record, or my mail will be treated as Spam.