I Can’t Do Much About Internet Spam
But making fun of them makes me feel better
There is little escape from the annoyance of unwanted email blog comments, and now, spam scented twitter messages. I have long metaphorically associated them with Periplaneta americana.
We can all collectively thank Google ranking algorithms for creating the incentive. But the great engineering minds at the Plex have not sat idle, they giveth us the ref=”nofollow” attribute while piling up the ad revenue. Bless you Google and all that not doing evil* (*except when we make money).
Blog comment spam is coincidently nearly as old as Google.
The front page of my blog clearly states I don’t do publish ads, sponsored links, or articles on request. My blog is for me, dummies.
Still, about every other week comes an email offering me a great article “that the readers of [fill name of blog] here will enjoy” or open with some line like “I really like the kinds of articles you write on [fill name of blog]” clearly showing that they (if they are a they and not a bot script) have never laid their beady roach eyes on my blog.
If they ask for a price to place a link, my quoted rate I send is “$10,000 per link, per month.”
Funny, they never write back.
For the most part, just sighing “Is this the internet the Wizards stayed up late for?” and deleting is the most rational thing one can do. Yet, some days I just feel like strapping on the steel toed boots and giving them the treatment … http://cogdogblog.com/tag/cockroaches/. The crunchy sounds they make when you squash a roach is soothing.
Twitter is a whole other vast pile of roach droppings. If I had a peso for every account I’ve reported/blocked, I would have purchased my own private South Pacific Island.
Here is a typical one fresh off the tweets today- some account with a n00b flavored egg icon offers me a “hoodie” with my name on it in a sentence even I can spot as horrible grammar. Have I requested such a thing? Do I know you?
Amazingly, in less than 12 hours, Anderson has typed 493 hoodie offers to other twitter people named “Alan”. That is hard work, Anderson. Take tomorrow off.
Normally, I would report/block the account and move on.
But it feels so good to Photoshop this. Because I can.
The link on Anderson’s tweet takes a batch of trips through link washers. Entered as goo.gl/vHyGfF it bounces through a t.co rinse (yum, twitter data) and then a re-direct through some id string attached to customizedgirl.net who, according to DNSStuff is one Maya Main in Bellbridge, Victoria, Australia. I have her email and phone number:
This is simple pimple stuff. I am hardly a hacker. I just looks stuff up. Anyhow, after the link is cleaned, ironed, and folded by Maya Main, it ends up on the site Sunfrog Shirts, purveyor of shirt designs that they slap in almost any sucker’s name.
I am sure if asked, that SunFrog would deny any knowledge of using twitter to spam every Alan in the system. But I have the whole trail laid out for you.
Poking around the SunFrog site, I cannot find any statement in the PR area that they hire people to spam advertisements in twitter, though I do see that they have hired licensing exec Chris Hallock. On LinkedIn, Chris seems like fine upstanding executive in 1995 he got his degree in Business Administration fromFerris State University, and golly, Chris is a Pi Kappa Alpha brother. He has come a long way from Hartland High School. With some phreaked phone calls, it would not take much to find a lot of info about Chris.
Back to DNSStuff, digging for the domain registration for sunfrog.com I find it is registered with GoDaddy, a trip to BigDaddy, enter a captcha, and I have the domain registered to a Josh Kent located at 1564 Dickerson Rd, Gaylord Michigan.
Not too hard to google some news stories on Josh. He’s the CEO of SunFrog. Articles mention as well his wife’s name. More articles about how he overcame a tax assessment issue a few years ago.
Dude, if you are going to hire twitter spammers to annoy me, I’m gonna look you up. Because I can. I won’t do anything about it, but the internet roach parade may wash up on your shore too.
Google Streetview has not driven down Dickerson Rd yet, but I get some glimpses through the trees from I-75.
With Google Earth I can get some views of the building.
So there is an office building, and there in back is the t-shirt plant? Where is the office that hires the twitter spammers? Soon Google’s technology might give me the drone-eyed view in the window.
And that’s old information. Apparently SunFrog is the Apple of T-shirts, “already the largest direct-to-garment printing company in the world” and has moved from Dickerson to 1782 O’Rourke Blvd. Josh shelled out $900,000 for that new facility. That’s a lot of t-shirts. You gotta be a sharp business innovator like Josh to do this, using the most advance, targeted sales mechanisms in the world. Is that spam?
But Twitter, how much artificial intelligence does it take to know that an account that sends 439 nearly identical messages in less than 14 hours to different Alan’s is a spam roach? Is it really that hard to figure out? One need not intelligence needed to sniff out that 493 tweets sent in less than 12 hours all containing the same link is not some person sharing their status or lunch?
Really? Is it that hard?
Is this the means by which twitter becomes profitable? This is just the tip of a whole pile of twitter roaches.
The internet, designed by wizards who stayed up late to 25 years later to create a means to line the pockets of sleaze-ball profiteers. Why, because they can.
Keep on crapping on my corner of the internet, and I will keep on mocking you. I will keep Photoshopping silly hats on cockroaches and pointing them back at you, SunFrog and ilk.
Because I can.
Post Script
Too good, too ironic to be true. This is what happens when you rely on automation.
Writing this article counts as being part of and “engaged community”? Seriously? Now that is insight. Or it as a really really really slow week for SunFrog.
