Thanks, Google! Sincerely, Spammers
Yet again, spammers have found a way to get you to look at their crap products. And, as usual, they have taken something great and turned it against the rest of us.
As initially written by David Kirk of Tech-Recipes, it looks like spammers have figured out a way to get their “message” into Google by using Google Docs & Spreadsheets.
For example, if your were to search for site:docs.google.com inurl:view, you will find a massive amount of spam. initially written by David Kirk speculates:
…that spammers are hoping that the google spider will assume that google proper (with it’s uber-high PR) is linking to their sites.
The other thing that ticks me off about this is that average users aren’t going to question a link that points to a Google website!
This is really unfortunate because I like what Google Docs & Spreadsheets was doing. But, as I’ve written previously, spammers will do whatever they can to get their message to you.
What do you think? Have spammers gone too far? Should spamming be an illegal activity (more than it actually is)? How should spammers be punished? Feel free to spit it out in the comments!
If you found this post useful, why don't you buy me a cup of coffee to show your gratitude?
4 Responses to “Thanks, Google! Sincerely, Spammers”
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The Fieldhouse Says:
November 30th, 1999 at 12:00 am20 Ways To Mark Safer Internet Day 2007Protect Your Privacy With A LiveCDPersonal Servers: Are We At That Point?New Security Blog With PromiseDIY IT Security AuditE-Mail Request: USB Based AntiSpywareThanks, Google! Sincerely, SpammersAnatomy of a Network HijackingWilliam Shatner: IT Security Specialist!?Don’t Be a Soldier in the Botnet ArmyUsing Whitehats to Stop BlackhatsUsing Translators to Fight CensorshipCyberCop”>The Original
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Davak Says:
January 17th, 2007 at 1:32 pmThanks for the link. I’ve subscribed to your rss feed…
Congrats on your recent digg fame. The digg ride is always a painful pleasure. I totally, totally agree that less plugins is more when it comes to surviving the digg ride. The cache plugin is wonderful as well.
It’ll be interesting to see how long google allows this docs.google to be abused in this matter.
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egon Says:
January 17th, 2007 at 1:32 pmSpamming is getting more and more frustrating to me. On one hand, you can’t blame the spammers, because it’s obvious that they are making a ton of money from people stupid enough to follow their phishing links and what-have-you. The problem is with those people. I think the only way to stop the spammers is to take away the benefit they get from doing it. The only way to do that is to educate the people how to identify fake links, etc. There are tools out there to help with this, such as SiteAdvisor, as well as other similar free products.
If we got everybody to use these products and to understand computer security, I think we would see the levels of spam drop. Since that will never happen, making spamming illegal with very high consequences would be great, as that would surely scare some people into quitting. That still leaves different countries with different laws though, and that’s where a lot of the phishing scams come from anyway. Oh, sorry this is so long, I get on my rants
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Trc202 Says:
January 10th, 2008 at 9:50 pmI be leave that spammers should have their computer filled with 15 gigs of spam to annoy them then not let them use any product to clean it up other than what windows xp includes by default and after they finally cleaned the computer of all spam they would have to pay .01 per click to the web page they used
