I guess it had to happen sooner or later. Twenty minutes ago I received the first bounced spam message. Some MTA informed me that it had no user named 'mark' and that it was sorry it couldn't deliver the message.

Both the 'Return-path' and the 'From' fields were forged and pointed to a made-up chongqed.org email address. The spam is spamvertizing various geocities URLs. Those URLs look like random garbage to me (e.g. 'hvabbsct' and 'yyyobzjtb').

The geocities URLs deliver horribly broken HTML that always redirects to analmaturehardcore.com.

Currently, the rate of incoming bounces is rather moderate. I 'only' received twenty bounces in those twenty minutes. I will have to see whether I can keep the catch-all account activated.

In case you're wondering: Of course I reported all those geocities URLs to Yahoo's abuse department.

Update

I just received a response from Yahoo! Customer Care. Over one month after I sent the complained. And it was an automated response. This sucks.

¶ 12:50   0 comments

This isn't really related to anything link-spammy. But I just came across something that is worth a new post. Finally.

I have a little script that acts as my browser's homepage. It gathers a couple of RSS feeds, formats them, and let's me see the description and the links. One of those RSS feed is, of course, the slashdot feed.

Fortunately, I do all the parsing of the feeds manually, not relying on any CPAN modules that could do the job a lot better. I say "fortunately" because today, my little script let my browser to display its broken-image icon for every story on slashdot.

A look at the raw RSS confirmed that the description elements suddenly contained <img> tags. They point towards a 1 x 1 gif on slashdot. For example, today's Slashdot story about students sending a satellite into orbit has a hidden webbug with the URL rss.slashdot.org/Slashdot/slashdot?g=701. The story itself is linked to rss.slashdot.org/Slashdot/slashdot?m=701.

Now all I want to know is: why?

¶ 09:55   3 comments