Paul Merrill
I am amused by spam. But I am not amused at spammers. Recently these two “young women” followed me – and they had very similar tweets, which immediately flagged the fact that they were not real people. My question is this: do any women Twitter users who are reading this get spammy “female” followers like …
This glorious symmetrical juxtaposition of spam subjects was too good to ignore. I never open these messages, but I do check my spam folders on occasion – inevitably, there is a real email in there from a real friend that I would regret not reading. (But no one I know ever writes about things shown …
Whenever I comment on a blog and see this message, I am probably not going to comment again. I understand the need to filter out spam, but there are better ways to do that. If an editor has to approve every comment, they are afraid of negative feedback, which is not a good fear to …
(Yes, I know you’re wondering, has Paul gotten into spam? No, I haven’t.) During my last year of college, I made a bet with my roommate. It was a significant bet. It was perhaps the only real financial bet I’ve ever made (in the strict definition of betting). I bet him $100 that ten years …
Many of the people I hang out with use Facebook. Not all know about a great way to stem the flow of messages coming into your stream… Undoubtedly some of your Facebook friends who are not those you want to hear about every single day of the week. And likely, a few of your Facebook …
These lovely names are the supposed senders of spam that appeared recently in my gmail spam folder. They have these characteristics: – They are not normal spellings of English names. – They are all female. – Often the last name is a first name. What does this tell me about spam? – Those who respond …
I love how a great combination of words occasionally comes up with the anti-spam-bot “enter words here” widget.
I monitor Google Alerts as part of my job. It’s a great tool – and the price is right (free!). Due to evil spammers, I have been getting a lot of useless links – like the one I’ve highlighted in the bottom snapshot. That linked to a spammy link-bait site. All they got from me …
If a program exists called “Decrapifier” – then something is wrong with the system. Macs just don’t get automatically slowed-down by malware, spyware, spamware, etc. Bear with me – my wife uses a Windows computer, so I am speaking from experience. Her computer is always getting slower and slower. If it were easy to do, …
One morning recently I went into my Twitter account and discovered that there were about 20 new spam followers. I spent about 3 minutes blocking them – 3 minutes that I would have enjoyed spending in almost any other way. Twitter is a great tool. It’s sad that the people behind these “people” don’t have …