Tag: spam

Is it still a blog if the comments are off?

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Amber Bouman on Engadget’s one week trial of turning all comments off: But we’ve increasingly found ourselves turning off comments on stories that discuss topics of harassment, gender or race simply because so many of the replies are hateful, even threatening. Articles that mention Apple deteriorate into arguments of iOS vs Android, replete with grade-school name calling. Articles that don’t make mention of Samsung often include comments claiming that we are shills for Apple. Some commenters plain attack our writers or editors or other commenters. Some are outright threats. And that’s not even getting into the spam problem. The thing

The marketeering that is ruling Reddit

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Ryan Holiday at BetaBeat, on Reddit and marketing… Unfortunately, I don’t think that’s what’s happening here. These aren’t organic accidents or real fan-to-brand interaction. It’s just fakery–there’s too much of it for that not to be the case. And what’s worse, the brands that are engaging in the stunts could easily afford to pay for the ad space on those same pages. In other words, we’re not talking about small creative marketing here–we’re talking multibillion-dollar corporations using their enormous marketing teams to overwhelm busy volunteer moderators.

I can’t stand spam in all the mobile app stores…

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…but I bet the PR team love it: Have you seen the number of applications that are little more than a list of website articles? Or launch a bookmark? Or are yet another eBook reader of the Project Gutenberg text of A Princess of Mars? Why are they all still flooding every mobile app store on the planet? Because I think, secretly, the stores love the spam. Don’t get me wrong, they’re never going to say that out loud, they’re never going to even give a nudge and a wink to it, but part of the management teams must look

Hustle 2.0 with Android apps and premium rate text messages

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From The Other Ewan. I wonder if the app asked the user for ‘control’ over their SMS messages during install and then sent the premium SMS requests itself? It wouldn’t surprise me. This is a lot worse than the standard scams that rely on a poorly worded advert in some newspaper to sort-of trick unwitting consumers. Somebody actually *programmed* an app to deliberately hose people. This is why companies like Apple and Nokia want to have the approval process on the applications in their smartphone eco-systems (and it’ll make good copy for the anti-virus developers as well).

Twitter Security Problems? Change Your Password!

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Lots of hand-wringing around the web this morning over Twitter becoming the latest web serivce to have spam, phishing and other stuff that comes with the territory. Twitter should console itself that it is now a big enough target for the dark corners of the internet to spend time and effort into scamming users of the site. This probably legitimises Twitter more than anything else – crack open the champagne, boys! What can everyone else do? Well simple steps first. And the most obvious. Change your password (Chris says it just as loud). the relevant link is twitter.com/account/password but if