Bangability: A Klout Score For Bang With Friends
Bang With Friends is now quantifying sexiness with a FICO-esque number.
Articles tagged "spam"
Spam Is Dead, Long Live Spam: Can We Kill the Scourge of Email?
I haven’t heard from any desperate relatives, passports lost on a trip to Paris, in more than a year. And don’t think I’ve had a single ad for Viagra, real or fake, hit my inbox in recent memory. As far as I’m concerned, spam is a non-issue. Right…
Guess How Much of All Internet Traffic Is Totally Fake
The answer is 10 percent, according to a new 20 month study from web ad company Solve Media. Ten percent of all online traffic comes courtesy of bots, not humans. Which is mostly interesting in that not only is it not terribly surprising -- particula…
Meet the Militia Fighting the War Against Spam
Thanks so some ambitious, enterprising and dare-we-say fearless geeks, the Internet will be a little bit cleaner from now on. On Wednesday, a global team of computer security experts (read: defenders of freedom) took down Grum, the world's third larg…
Where Do Tweets Go When They Die?
If you've been using Twitter for any significant amount of time, you've probably stopped at least once to wonder what happens to your tweets after they grow old and disappear off your timeline. Part of the answer is that even though Twitter doesn't a…
Why the Internet Needs Horse_ebooks
Whether you consider it brilliant machine-curated poetry or the incoherent by-product of an overseas Internet scam, there is no denying the allure of Horse_ebooks. The mysterious equestrian Twitter account would just be another spambot, were it not f…
Chat Logs From The Internet's 24-Year-Old "King of Spam"
Apart from the networks of infected computers and poorly-translated emails offering shady pharmaceutical drugs, the inner workings of the shadowy criminal empires that deal in internet spam remain a mystery. Every once in a while though, we match a f…
What Does It Take To Eliminate the Kelihos Botnet?
If your email inbox or spam folder has ever received messages from shady Nigerian princes or ebullient Viagra salesmen, chances are it was sent there care of the Kelihos botnet, a massive network of infected computers that sends around 3.8 billion sp…
To Sell $100 Worth of Viagra, a Spammer Needs to Send 12.5 Million Messages
In other words, you’d have to not only email everyone in Chicago but the entire state of Illinois in order to sell a handful of Viagra bottles. That expenditure may seem costly, but consider that 80% of spam is distributed by "botnets":http://en.wiki…
These TV Ads for the Azerbaijani Bank that Helps Fund the World's Spam Look A Lot Like Spam
If your bank is one of the few in the world that would process the transactions of the email spam underworld, you might not want to draw attention to yourself with advertisements that look like the brainchildren of Donald Trump and Uday Hussein. Noth…
To Destroy Spam Forever, Scientists Bought a Lot of Viagra
Seven years ago, Bill Gates "told the world":http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/01/24/tech/main595595.shtml that spam would be gone in two years; what we got instead was growth in the mutli-billion dollar industry trying to stop it. Yet research…
Spambots and Pornstars: A Q+A With A Former Hacker Tween
Mike Pepper's formative years were riddled with drugs, sex with porn stars and hacking the hell out of America Online for fun and serious profit. I had a chance to chat with the man whose dazzling past sounds like an ornate cyberspace teen fantasy.
