I have had a zombie attack directed at my Web server for the past week or
two. Yesterday it peaked with over 30,000 attacks by Windows machines
world-wide. The motive was referrer spam and probably vandalism too. As I
contacted my host for assistance (requiring installation of software), I
was served the following page by the sysadmin:
http://www.abcseo.com/papers/referrer-spam.htm
I immediately recognised it as davidof's site and I quite like the following
bit, which I will quote below for the group to read:
(context is link spam)
===
Isn't Spam really Google's fault?
It seems that Heisenberg was right. By observing something you affect the
observations. Google's PhDs, for all their brains, are a somewhat innocent
bunch; unable to see the consequences of their actions or understand how
the real world operates. By basing their search engine rankings on
inbound-links and anchor text they encourage unscrupulous people to exploit
weaknesses in the system to boost their websites to the top of Google's
rankings.
Google is a great resource for finding information. However the Webosphere
didn't ask Google to set up shop. Google is a business. Like the spammers
they are in it for the money. Now I'm not saying Google is evil but they
need to mature as a business. Instead of focussing on propeller-heads
who've probably never had a girlfriend they need to employ some guys with
street smarts who can think through the latest whizzy idea before it gets
beta'd on the rest of us. Other large businesses have to take some
responsibility for their actions (well ok not Microsoft, they have the
EULA), so why not Google?
Still there are differences between setting up the environment that
encourages spam and actually generating the damn stuff. But if we don't
act, search engine spam will harm the web just as surely as UCE has harmed
email. We don't want to reach the stage where 85% of all requests to a
website are spam do we?
There are other actors. Microsoft for selling a completely insecure
operation system in the form of Windows must shoulder a lot of blame. ISPs
and Web hosting companies for supporting the spammers.
===
The last two paragraphs are similar to stuff I said earlier today, before
reading David George's take. I think the analysis above is insightful. In a
nutshell,
* Blame ISP's for harbouring spammy traffic
* Blame Microsoft for unleashing a faulty O/S out of the box
* Blame Google for unintentionally giving incentive for Web spam
E-mail traffic worldwide is about 50% spam. If all goes as planned or
predicted, expect 50% of content to be mirrors, 50% of links to be
synthetic and 50% of Web traffic to be utter garbage. Great future ahead!
Enjoy the Net today... before it's destroyed. I have been manually
filtering (human filter) for my site for the past 24 hours. Had I not done
that, my shared host would not have coped and I would have been 'separated'
from the Web. I have not done any work whatsoever today and yesterday.
Luckily, my supervisor understands.
Roy
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