June 2009
38 posts
BBC NEWS: Habitat sorry for Iran Tweeting →
“Furniture store Habitat has apologised for causing offence after accusations it exploited unrest in Iran to drive online Twitter users to its products.
…When asked whether an outside firm had been responsible for the strategy their spokesman declined to give details.”
By refusing to out the marketing firm that made this mistake, Habitat is basically guaranteeing that another...
Cisco: DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) Grows... →
some interesting graphs
Philadelphia Daily News: Can we stop those... →
“Are the calls effective? It’s hard to say. But nearly two-thirds of the respondents to a Pew survey reported that they hang up on robocalls without listening. Better than one of every 10 voters said that the calls made them angry.”
Netcraft: Faster Actions Needed Against Phishing... →
“Criminals often register their own domain name to perform phishing attacks. Unlike the other common phishing site scenarios (including hacked servers, open redirects, and abuse of free webhosting), phishing sites that have their own domain name can be harder to remove, because the website owner and domain owner is the fraudster. Only the hosting and DNS providers and the domain registrar...
Al Iverson's Spam Resource: SORBS Information... →
SORBS is shutting down. Al has compiled some info.
DarkReading: Relaunched Google Search Service... →
“Google is going after malware-spreading advertisers more aggressively with the quiet launch of a free service that lets Website owners run background checks on potential online advertisers.”
InternetNews: DoJ scores largest ever CAN-SPAM... →
Another early “spam king” may finally get what he deserves.
‘[Alan] Ralsky, 64, was charged with masterminding a systematic campaign to pepper unsuspecting consumers with messages containing “materially false and misleading information or omissions” promoting junk stocks for “U.S. companies owned and controlled by individuals in Hong Kong and...
MX Logic: Spammers Poisoning Twitter Trending... →
“Poisoning search results with content that leads unsuspecting users to spam or malware content is nothing new. We’ve been seeing abuse of Google’s PageRank system since early 2008…. We are now seeing something similar with Twitter….”
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Read Write Web: Dear Wanna-bes, Your Twitter... →
“Using third party software to systematically add a large number of social connections each day, then break those connections with anyone who doesn’t reciprocate, is a method used by some number of Twitter users to create an appearance of legitimacy for subsequent new connections. Twitter…said last night that such practices will now risk account suspension.”
CyberCrime & Doing Time: Spam Crisis in China →
‘It is very normal that more than 1/3rd of the domain names we see each day in spam messages come from China. When one also considers the many “.com” and “.ru” domain names which are also hosted in China, the problem is much worse. More than half of all spam either uses domain names registered in China, is sent from computers in China, or uses computer in China to...
5 tags
Hilton transactional differentiation FAIL
Image by dr.jd via Flickr
‘To unsubscribe from all marketing email from the Hilton Family of Hotels, please send an email with the subject line “Unsubscribe” to mailto:e_opt_out@hilton.com. Opting out from all Hilton Family marketing email will prevent you from receiving your monthly HHonors My Way Activity Statement. Please allow up to 10 business days for processing opt-out...
Consumerist: How To Protect Susceptible Relatives... →
Consumerist links to a couple of good articles about how & why people repeatedly fall for scams, with advice on what family members & friends can do about it.
(Raising awareness of these issues would be a great way for email marketers to offset some of the years of bad karma associated with your industry.)
MediaPost: Will The Online Ad Industry Finally Get... →
“…recently a number of important U.S. regulators and legislators have made it clear that if the industry is not going to get serious about adopting a self-regulatory framework that provides meaningful privacy protection for consumers, a regulatory framework will be imposed on it.”
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Financial Times: Facebook hit by privacy blow →
“…regulators say tighter rules are needed to protect personal data given to these third-party [application] developers. …At the same time, they argue that many corporate marketers who have turned to new forms of social media as a way to reach consumers should also be subjected to stiffer regulations.”
1 tag
New York Times: Microsoft Sues Three in... →
“After an investigation that took more than a year, Microsoft has filed its first lawsuit over click fraud, where people manipulate clicks on a Web advertisement.”
more from Consumerist, and from Terry Zink
Total Telecom: Online ad sales open door to... →
“Viruses can be incorporated directly within an ad, so that simply clicking on the ad or visiting the site can infect a computer, or ads can be used to direct users to a nefarious Web site that aims to steal passwords or identities.”
(via fergdawg)
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Ventura County Star: Tagged e-mails grab your... →
“Those who click through to see the photos are asked to register for the site and fill out personal information, from birth dates to phone numbers — even their e-mail password. Even if people back out of the registration, the site grabs their address books and sends the same invitation to whoever is on the list. Often, there are no photos, and the person who the e-mail appears to come from...
New Scientist: The inside story of the Conficker... →
‘Despite an unprecedented collaboration against them, Conficker’s accomplished creators have been able to bluff and dodge to gain control of machines inside homes, universities, government offices and the armed forces of at least three nations, establishing a powerful and lucrative network of “zombie” computers. New Scientist has pieced together the sobering details of that...
CNET News: 'Spam king' could face criminal charges... →
Which so-called “king” this time? Why, none other than Sanford Wallace — one of the very first to claim (and revel in) that title!
“Wallace appeared in court on Friday in what is believed to be his first court appearance in any of the cases filed against him…Facebook believes Wallace filed for bankruptcy to avoid a default judgment and criminal contempt...
New York Times: E-Mail Surveillance Renews... →
“The inquiries and analyst’s account underscore how e-mail messages, more so than telephone calls, have proved to be a particularly vexing problem for the agency because of technological difficulties in distinguishing between e-mail messages by foreigners and by Americans.”
Financial Times: Secret war on web crooks revealed →
“Three times a year, senior technical officers from companies such as Google, Yahoo, AT&T, Comcast and Verizon meet to discuss ways of stopping the internet from being swamped by rising levels of spam, viruses and hacking attacks by organised criminals. They do not generally like discussing these meetings.”
Amazon.com: The Cluetrain Manifesto: 10th... →
this book is even more important in 2009 than it was in 1999; just change a few of the product names in the examples.
Archie McPhee: Seth Godin Action Figure →
(as seen in J.D.’s cube)
Network World: Security group converges to fight... →
“The Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group (MAAWG) held a three-day meeting in Amsterdam this week, discussing spam, network security, the DNS (Domain Name System) and other topics. Industry professionals traded ideas on stopping abusive online behavior. Much of MAAWG’s work is done behind closed doors….”
Yahoo! Mail Blog: The Yahoo! Email-tiquette Guide... →
“Good email is inexpensive. Bad email costs a fortune.”
– Stephanie Miller, quoted by Marshall England on Twitter
John R. Levine: Fight phishing with branding →
“In the physical world, banks have marble counters, vaults with heavy steel doors, and other physical objects that are hard to fake. A building that looks like a bank probably is a bank. But on the internet, any random $2/month web host or botted PC can host a web site that looks exactly like a real bank’s web site, and can send spam that looks exactly like a real bank’s e-mail....
TechLaw: Black Eye for Sears, Wakeup Call for... →
“Sears offered visitors to its sears.com Web site $10 if they would agree to participate in a market research program. Participation in the program required consent to the installation of a spyware-type application that tracked the user’s browsing activities, on and off the Sears Web site.”
Twittercism: The Long Con - A List Of Known... →
“Internet marketing is a very popular subject on Twitter, as is promoting the concept that the internet marketer - and there are a great many - is a kind of guru or soothsayer, who will lead his followers to unimaginable riches and power, that they know something about how to sell on the internet that you do not. …so let’s talk specifics. Here is a list of known internet marketing...
Word to the Wise: Tragic mistakes in appending →
“While I think the advice given in the article will prevent a sender from completely ruining their reputation by appending, the whole concept of appending is completely counter to permission based marketing.”
(“Appending” is when you take a list of customers, targets, whatever, try to figure out what their email addresses might be, and then start blasting email at them as...
FTC Shuts Down Notorious Rogue Internet Service... →
Realtime IT Compliance: Rights for Privacy Breach... →
“If you had a wish list of rights for identity theft victims, what would that be?”
The Email Delivery Guru: Business Cards, “Tacit... →
Al cuts cleanly through the silly email marketing “controversy” of the week: “Assume you have permission (instead of obtaining explicit permission), and you garner more spam complaints.”
If you care about deliverability, why should anything else matter? Or if you care about doing what your recipients want (and not doing what they don’t want), why should anything...
Consumerist: Rockefeller Goes After Webloyalty And... →
“We’ve devoted a fair amount of time to trying to find ways to beat companies…which market themselves via post-transaction popups on legit Web sites…suck you in with promises of savings, savings, savings, but really just deliver hard-to-cancel recurring monthly charges…. Senator John D. Rockefeller IV has another idea, and it’s one that we like: Investigate the...
J.D. Falk on CircleID: DKIM for Discussion Lists →