April 2009 Archives

Ten days after my post about spammers using Geocities (and other free sites) to host their ads, Yahoo! has announced that Geocities will be closed down. I don't think this has anything to do with my post, and it may not even be directly due to the abuse of the service by spammers. Geocities had simply outlived its own initial success and, with nothing new to offer, was probably just a drain on resources. The spammers, like rats leaving a sinking ship, are already moving on to other hosts, such as LiveJournal.

I'm currently soak-testing a new spamtrap system, aimed at getting some additional metrics and information about spammer behavior and in particular the way that they use 'web-scrapers' to find email addresses. The system works by hiding email addresses on web pages and then counting the spams that get sent to them.

The results have been interesting. Just to throw out a random example, an email address that was handed out to a web crawler running on a server hosted at theplanet.com in December 2007 now receives just under 40 spams a day. The spam sent to that trap consists of the usual fake watches, diplomas, penis enlargements and pharmacy spam. That's a lot of spam for an address that has only ever been seen by a single robot.

Security vendor McAfee has released a report on the carbon footprint of spam, in which it tries to estimate the environmental costs of spam. According to the report, each spam generates the equivalent of 0.3g of CO2, making the yearly impact of spam equivalent to driving a car round the Earth 1.6 million times.

Back in the early days of the web — which is to say perhaps ten or twelve years ago — there was a popular website called Geocities. It was something like an early version of Myspace. In many ways, Geocities did a lot to popularize the idea of 'having a web page' for ordinary people. Anyone could sign up and start throwing content online. In its day, Geocities was a big deal, but it failed to evolve and duly dropped out of most people's awareness, overtaken by social sites like Myspace and Facebook, or blogging sites like Blogger and LiveJournal.

I sometimes wonder if Google shouldn't have a big button in the middle of their homepage that reads:

Or perhaps they already do. To judge by some of the mail that we get, I can't rule out the possibility.