The Substantially Similar Weblog

I’ve written about my tribulations with “Paris Hilton” related referrer spam before. Since my weblog tracks “inbound links” on the right side, spammers create spurious inbound links into my site so that their site will be linked from mine and thus have greater visibility and a higher Google PageRank. My solution has been to ban anything with the words “paris,” “hilton,” and a host of other porn-related terms from the list.

Starting today, I’m starting to get a new breed of referrer spam: Janet Jackson superbowl video referrers. Maybe it’s a bad idea to track inbound links at all. Or maybe the solution is to have my referrer tracker actually look at the supposed inbound link and make sure that it does, in fact, link to my site. In any case, I’ve now added a bunch of Janet Jackson related terms to my banned list.

How will this arms race end?

While I’m talking about scourges of the Internet, what’s the deal with autoreply virus/worm detectors? A huge number of corporate and educational mailservers scan incoming email for worms and viruses, and if they detect a worm or virus send a message to the sender telling them the message was subscribed and that they are infected. Usually, the autoreply also includes a plug for the email scanner software itself.

So how is it that the developers of this software are smart enough to include the distinctive signatures of all these email worms, but not smart enough to realize that those same worms always forge the “from:” part of the header. That means if the apparent sender actually is infected, it’s at best a total coincidence. There is no connection, with most worms, between the “sender” of an email and the person who is actually infected with the worm. (other than some third person who is infected might have the apparent sender in their address book). Presumably these software developers are smart people and spend some time trying to understand email worms and viruses, and send out frequent updates of the distinctive signatures of worms and viruses.

Does anyone have a rational explanation? Even better, can someone educate these software developers and the people who purchase their software to end this scourge of false “virus detected” emails?

Although I can’t identify the problem exactly, it appears that Hotmail is rejecting a ton of mail right now. Some of it bounces, so the sender sees that the message didn’t get through, but in many cases it just disappears into a black hole, and neither the sender nor the recipient ever finds out that the message wasn’t delivered. Some have suggested that this is connected to the Mydoom epidemic, but I have some evidence that it predates the latest worm by a few months. For example, a Hotmail subscriber to an email list I administer just told me she had never received any messages from that list over the past two months, although I’ve never received any notices that her address is bouncing.

If anyone has more insight into exactly what’s going on, please comment on this entry. In any case, I’m hoping to spread the word that Hotmail is very broken, and since I can’t email Hotmail subscribers directly, this is the best I can do.