#Spam

"Big fan of your podcast! May I ask you something?" is heating up... #spam

I don't want to country block my #WordPress website but have decided to take those measures.

I block Russia and Belarus as aggressors against Ukraine.

I block China (not Taiwan) as they blocked me first.

Not something I enjoy doing, real people, not politicians, may want to read what I write.

My analytics still look healthy, and rising,

According to Spamhaus, China is the worst #Spam and #Bot country. US doesn't do well either.

https://www.spamhaus.org/statistics/countries/

»Matt Sheehy«

http://spam.tamagothi.de/2023/05/28/matt-sheehy/

#Spam #Kommentarspam #Scam

The #SciComm #spam videos on #YouTube seems to be the current incarnation of a long running campaign to game the recommendation algorithm with robot-generated trash. From March 2019, Smarter Every Day covered this issue but it was partisan political videos that led him to dive deeper.
https://youtu.be/1PGm8LslEb4

Gestern habe ich diesen "Müll", der sich als "Bürgerzeitung" ausgibt in meinem Briefkasten gefunden 🤮 Weiß jemand wer sich dahinter verbirgt ?

Als Grillanzünder wird sie gute Dienste leisten 🔥

#fakenews #schwurbel #zeitung #politik #müll #spam #bürgerzeitung #klartext

There’s a special place in hell for academic #spam. This crew failed to even edit the template.

Also solchen #SPAM hatte ich noch nicht Oo #DigitalEuro

Folks, if you see this character creating accounts on your instances, please block on sight. They’re a nuisance to say the least:

https://annihilation.social/objects/056d13e8-24be-4bef-b6af-2cc1821e2571

Thanks.

(I know this isn’t actually #fediblock but we likely need a separate hashtag for folks who create spam accounts across many instances. Any ideas?)

#spam #fediverse #mastodon

Remember when newsletters weren’t about selling or promoting stuff?

#newsletter #spam

YouTube’s Science Scam Crisis

#science #news #YouTube #spam #scam #kylehill

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=McM3CfDjGs0

How do you react when you see someone posts with a spam machine like #buffer?

#mastodon #fediverse #spam #aiSpam

[Kyle Hill] on the problem of formulaic factually-empty algorithmically-generated science spam/scam videos churned out every few hours on a large number of click-bait YouTube channels, all optimised to grab attention via gaming the recommendation algorithm
https://youtu.be/McM3CfDjGs0

#SciComm #YouTube #Spam

Unsere Folien sind jetzt online
https://www.heinlein-support.de/slac/2023/vortrag/peekabooav-komponenten-und-erfahrungen-der-opensource-sandbox-analyse
#slac23 #slides #malware #sandbox #rspamd #spam

Kyle Hill on the AI-generated content spam on YouTube

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=McM3CfDjGs0

#AI #Spam #YouTube #KyleHill

If you ever wondered who was trying to reach you about your car’s extended warranty, it sounds like it was probably these guys.

https://www.engadget.com/company-responsible-for-75-billion-robocalls-sued-by-nearly-every-attorney-general-220050450.html

#robocalls #marketing #spam #PhoneSpam #lawsuits

https://youtu.be/McM3CfDjGs0
#science, #spam, #scam, #bullshit, #YouTube, #pseudoscience, #AI, #ChatGPT, #KyleHill
I've run into these fake science videos. You see an actual scientist in the thumbnail & it turns out to be bullshit. We can expect a lot more of this thanks to #ArtificialIntelligence. Here comes the death of #Truth.

Oggi e ieri è un caso che ricevo messaggi da recruiter o Non-contatti senza numero su #Telegram molto più spam. Come difendersi è limitare la cosa?
#spam

Tu imaginate que detesto de forma bastante profunda el #spam en el e-correo, cuál es mi feeling con el #spamElectoral. Es un sinsentido de TAL calibre, que el día que nos demos cuenta en global, fliparemos.

A great video from Kyle Hill on how YT is getting spammed with auto-generated junk. He is talking about science, but it is happening in every category as scammers figure out how to grab money.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=McM3CfDjGs0

#YouTube #Scam #Spam #KyleHill

My spouse has begun texting spam callers, "I'm on my way," or "I'm almost there," and it cracks me up every time. 🤣😆😂
#spam

@atarifrosch Nein, kannst @BNetzA jenen #SMS-#Spam melden...

Die werden dann i.d.R. entsprechend reagieren...

Täglich so schöne #emails #spam im Eingang. 😂

Gehen meist aber auch in die #SpamTrap und werden so gemeldet.

@dansup I don't quite understand how this is supposed to work/help.

It's a lot of work for the admins to manually approve accounts. But how can admins tell if an account will send #spam later on?

Sorry scammer, I’m not cancelling my McAfee Antivirus subscription https://grahamcluley.com/sorry-scammer-im-not-cancelling-my-mcafee-antivirus-subscription/ #mcafee #Spam #Scam

Clickbaiting on Medium

Here are my results for promoting my alternative democracy on the internet forum "Medium."

https://medium.com/tiered-democratic-governance/spamming-and-clickbaiting-e0b5fcafcc11

#tiereddemocraticgovernance #business #spam

J'ai débloqué kowelenz.social et bloqué helix.cafe pour la même raison : #spam.

News na którego chyba czekali niektórzy #admini #fediverse . Teraz czekać, aż podobne rozwiązania przyjdą na #Mastodon.
@dadalo_admin

@pixelfed 🔗 https://mastodon.social/users/pixelfed/statuses/110417729155015644
-
✨ We recently shipped a few things:

- Autospam Advanced Detection (via NLP)
- Spam accounts, atom feeds and embeds require login
- Optionally disable atom feeds
- Mute/blocks filtering on hashtag timelines
- Admin dashboard mass-deletes
- Fallback media urls for local media -> S3, local urls now redirect to S3
- Idempotency-Key support
- Fixed incoming deletes
- Optional login or register captchas, or both
- Optionally show captcha after 2 failed login attempts

Lot's more shipping soon 🚀

#spam #walkaZeSpamem #reklamy #bezpieczenstwo #security

📣 PSA:

@chikorita157@sakurajima.moe and I are accepting #moderators to moderate Sakurajima Social for the long term. Some of our community members may recall that I was originally here as a Quality Assurance (QA) Technician, but I decided to help out with moderating on this instance's open beta after the first wave of Mastodon Social #spam #bots. I'm afraid that my job here is only temporary, and as a college student, I will be starting summer classes on June 5th, meaning that I won't be able to do much moderation during that time.

If you would like to be a moderator at Sakurajima Social, please DM @chikorita157@sakurajima.moe; you will need to meet the following requirements:

1. You cannot have an account on a blocked instance.

2. You must have been on the #fediverse for at least one calendar month (you can calculate the earliest date you can apply today here; be sure to press Today before you press Calculate New Date).



Although not a requirement, it is recommended that you have experience being a moderator, you and @chikorita157@sakurajima.moe are mutual followers, and you have experience with #Calckey / #Misskey / #Foundkey (we accept mods who do not have experience on these platforms, but it will be harder to learn how to use it, especially with some of the features being potentially. overwhelming).

We would greatly appreciate some #boosts for this message to get out there and for new recruits to see this.

Thank you all for your time.

@aral
@cosmality@mastodon.world
@cosmality@dice.camp
@cosmality@mas.to
@NeadReport@mastodon.social
@NeadReport@vivaldi.net
@NeadReport@qoto.org
@chad
@fisco1791
@tony
#spam #pigculture
So how's your campaigns to cancel me going hahaha...? Hey @cosmality how's your rat complaints going to the internet police and ICANN going? Are the internet pigs getting tired of all yer whining yet AHAHA...? I'm sure they love all your wrongful accusations about #fake #information and all yer sniveling #official #complaint crying yer all exposed you dirty rats🤣

A really, really great way to make sure I unsubscribe from your #newsletter is to send a note with the subject line "I noticed you haven’t been opening these emails lately."

Well, I opened that one, and I skipped right to the bottom. Then I made two new #spam rules, besides.

@heidilifeldman

After #Beto lost, I ruthlessly mark as #spam any solicitation from a #Democrat running for anything where I can't vote for them. For non-partisan elections, if you're not running for an office where my vote counts, such as my city council district or at-large, your emails are also nuked.

It's not about you, it's about my implementation of "Think globally: act locally."

In case you didn't know, we are now in peak stage of monthend

#spam #AcademicSpam

The #spam issues seem to have been quiet for a week. We're dropping our temporary domain limits on mastodon.social and techhub.social today. #admin

@Pheneatis this seems like a very good way to cut down on #spam, maybe?

From: @Pheneatis
https://mstdn.ca/@Pheneatis@mstdn.ca/110417911387707258

„Ihre TAN-Verfahren ist nicht aktivieren!ㅤㅤ“ Ja nee is' klar. #spam

#spam
ich werde #reich
#manKannEsJaMalProbieren

The Interview With a Crypto Scam Investment Spammer that hit Mastodon the past couple weeks.

https://securityboulevard.com/2023/05/interview-with-a-crypto-scam-investment-spammer/

#Mastoadmin
#spam
#mastodon

#KI oder #AI erobert den #Spam in meinem Weblog.

Der erste deutsche Text hat in einem super langen Text zweimal "Mit freundlichen Grüßen", der andere englische Text ist so eindeutig von generative AI erzeugt, dass es schon erschreckt. Wenn Emilia nicht plötzlich "Mr Beast" geworden wäre, hätte ich es noch geglaubt...

Someone has decided to ruin the network reputation of Alibaba Singapore today.

#InfoSec #spam #Sysadminnery

@JoBlakely
Basically the layer two #LightningNetwork has made it easy to spend money when a person really wants to spend, without transaction fees and mining. But perhaps #LN's greatest achievement is solving #communication without #spam. (see our past writings re for example #SphinxChat if memory serves)

Its highly, highly #enabling. We'd say its 'enabling' quality has *accelerated* #militarism, and online attacks on #banking infrastructure, all in hopes of quashing an advancement in progress.

🚨​ You CAN block DMs from people you don't follow. It's however a setting that's super hidden.

Preferences => Notifications => Other notification settings => Block direct messages from people you don't follow 🚨​

(Thanks to @cautionwip for finding this!)

#mstdnca #feditips #spam

Bon, il faut reconnaître que les spammeurs font preuve de plus en plus de créativité.

La description de la méthode d'assassinat avec moult détails vaut le détour 😄

#spam #arnaque #escroquerie

Who claimed #Mastodon was losing momentum? The spammers don't seem to share that view. Got my first crypto crap coin #spam advertisement today. 😂

So , here's a #tip where to disable direct messages from unknown accounts. 🤓

anyone have a good collection of Fedi spam messages and account bios? huge bonus points for account metadata. boosts welcome.

#FediAdmin #FediMods #MastoAdmin #MastoMods #spam #dataset

✨ Spammers beware!

@pixelfed now disables atom feeds and both post/profile embeds for spam accounts, and hides their profile unless you are logged in!

This will not affect new or existing users that create a post that is flagged for review by Autospam unless the post(s) are marked as spam by a human admin.

tl;dr: pixelfed now limits access to human reviewed spam posts and accounts to deincentivize SEO and other forms of spam.

#pixelfed #autospam #spam #prevention

Lots of posts have made the rounds about turning off #DM from people you don't follow to avoid #spam and you are of course free to do so.

But note that the sender will not know that you won't be notified, so maybe consider saying so in your profile's description?

Also note that you cannot cancel this: even if you turn it off, you still won't see any DM that arrived during the time the setting was activated (all these posts are invisible from your DM interface).

#mastodon #fediverse #FediTips

@stux @lamp

We got a #Jason one too. Reported to mastodon.social. The report flood is probably as big a problem as the #spam itself to their mods. Maybe that was the intention of the perpetrator with us inadvertantly playing the role of DDoS attackers.

Hi Jason..

Bye Jason..

#spam

My sense is that the #spam issues are gonna get worse before they get better--lotta instances still running open signups. To be honest, I don't think even our kind of manual review of applications will stand up to dedicated attack by LLMs: folks can generate fake avatars, applications, bios, posts, etc at scale now.

I assume Twitter etc. have had this problem for years, but they've got a lot more signals to train their human detectors on.

@bun All I can say is, Same. ;)

#Spam #OurInstanceRocks

We limited techhub.social less than an hour after the first report, but we've still had to handle ~27 reports since then. I'm not exactly sure what mechanisms are at play here--maybe mentions/follows that made it into people's notification feeds before the limit went into effect, maybe folks reporting follow requests post-limit? Anyway, this wave of spambots has been pretty frustrating for all of us. Thanks for bearing with your mods. #admin #spam

5. Run the following commands:

RUBY_CONFIGURE_OPTS=--with-jemalloc rbenv install 3.2.2
bundle install
yarn install
RAILS_ENV=production bundle exec rails assets:precompile
RAILS_ENV=production bundle exec rails db:migrate

6. Resume the 2 services and test signup. The CAPTCHA will appear when you verify the new account's e-mail address.

Thanks to the Matrix admin chat 🥰

#MastoAdmin #Spam

For getting a CAPTCHA on your server, I executed these steps for a non-docker server with default setup #MastoAdmin #Spam

1. Get a free account at https://www.hcaptcha.com and note down the site key & secret

2. Edit .env.production and add them to the following 2 new configuration keys:

HCAPTCHA_SECRET_KEY
HCAPTCHA_SITE_KEY

3. Stop mastodon-sidekiq & mastodon-web services, create a backup

4. git checkout master && git pull

@mammoth Due to latest #spam attacks here @ #mastodon when will the app get functions for #blocking and #reporting that scum?

#MstdnGames #spam update:

Techhub.social is no longer limited, as they appear to have resolved the crypto spam attacks.

Two more #spam updates:

1. Techhub.social is no longer silenced on #MstdnParty ~ I think their spambot issues are over.

2. A captcha may now be required when confirming your email on this server. Anyone joining who experiences issues with this can email me at the address on our 'About' page.

Finally: Don't like getting randomly DM'd? Remember, you can block private mentions from people you don't follow in your notifications settings: https://mstdn.party/settings/preferences/notifications

@ajh I've had maybe half a dozen in the past few days.
Do they really think this is like Twitter, wherein an enormously wide #spam net will just capture some clicks?
These are artisanal posts over here, each lovingly handcrafted and monitored! 😂

Today's top ten tag trends:

10: #meermittwoch
9: #spam
8: #idahot2023
7: #Graichen
6: #idahobit2023
5: #EU4LGBTIQ
4: #idahot
3: #MCIRMA
2: #idahobit
1: #disappointabooksongorshow

#trendytoots 📈

Today's top ten tag trends:

10: #meermittwoch
9: #spam
8: #idahot2023
7: #Graichen
6: #idahobit2023
5: #EU4LGBTIQ
4: #idahot
3: #MCIRMA
2: #idahobit
1: #disappointabooksongorshow

#trendytoots 📈

#MastoAdmin #Spam

I've seen several signups for accounts that simply set their bio to an advertisement for a private security company in Canada.

Look for "Edmonton security guard services" in their bio and the domain 365patrol [dot] ca in their custom fields text

@thisismissem @FinchHaven Looks a lot like it could be just a basic Naive Bayesian system. Like almost every #spam filter has been using in some way for ~20y without being accused of being “AI” by anyone credible. I mean, I think Paul Graham called Bayesian filtering “spooky” but that doesn’t count.

The fear that #ChatGPT and its ilk are going to make #spam and #phishing attacks harder to detect has me wondering what would happen if the bad guys ever discover their word processor's spelling and grammar checker can be switched to English, and accomplish the same thing without use of any #AI at all.

Now let's think about #DefenseInDepth for #mastodon and the #fediverse in the face of constant #spam attacks.

Basically tying together my other thread with this one: https://hachyderm.io/@hrefna/110385501154045470

Some options to add _just_ friction:

1. Server-to-server rate limits. Irrespective of user.
2. Slowing down signups. This can be with #captcha tools, rate limits, etc.
3. Allow users to filter DMs based on content
4. Your standard "mark as spam" analyzers
5. Exponential backoff on the server side for DMs

When you build a system one thing that works remarkably well for security is adding #friction to various processes.

Friction rarely stops a dedicated and sophisticated attacker and so it often gets eye rolls because it "can't stop everything" or is "too easily circumvented."

The majority of attacks you deal with are not smart attacks. If you have enough friction you can limit your resources so that your "smart(er), expensive systems" only deal with "smart(er) attacks."

#spam #mastodon

First, that this has been an ongoing issue since 2017 and there has been a failure to meaningfully address it in that time.

Second, the high degree of resistance to industry standard #captcha-style solutions even as optional features for admins to enable.

These are by no means perfect, but they also add needed friction to attackers.

Third, how there is a lot of thinking about "protecting at the edge" and not "defense in depth."

#fediverse #spam #mastodon

if you want to know where the next spam waves will come from, my money's on all the servers on https://api.joinmastodon.org/servers?language=&category=&region=&ownership=&registrations=instant that haven't implemented some kind of captcha

#MastoAdmin #spam

Received and reported my first #Mastodon #spam today (from an account on https://techhub.social)

Party’s over, folks. Time to get Bayesian.

Note a #spam #bot attack from techhub.social this morning. Blocked and reported.

While annoying, I feel like these bot attacks are growing pains and signs of Mastodon’s success. Hopefully mods can get a handle on this.

Sigh, got my first crypto/ai spam on here. Reported back to the techhub.social server and blocked. 🙄 I've never understood what spammers hope to achieve with this.

#spam #spammers #StopSpam #StopSpammers #ReportAndBlock #crypto #CryptoScams #AI #GPT

Since reviving my LinkedIn account/profile last year, I regularly get cold-call sales emails (via regular email, outside of LinkedIn, but it’s obvious where they come from). This is #spam.

It’s also an illegal tactic, since I’m in #Canada, and #CASL (Canada’s Anti-Spam Legislation) prohibits companies from sending me electronic messages without my consent.

Mark these messages as spam and never EVER do business with spammers.

https://fightspam-combattrelepourriel.ised-isde.canada.ca/site/canada-anti-spam-legislation/en/understand-canadas-anti-spam-legislation/understand-canadas-anti-spam-legislation-sub/understanding-canadas-anti-spam-legislation

Is this the answer to Google Drive spam?

https://grahamcluley.com/is-this-the-answer-to-google-drive-spam/

#cybersecurity #spam #google #googledrive

Thanks, #theATLsocial fam for all the #spam reports from mstdn.social, mastodon.social, and related servers. Unfortunately, we're playing a game of whack-a-mole, so there will always be new accounts.

The spam problem is one that existing tech can drastically mitigate; however, without ugly hacks/forks, that tech cannot be integrated into the current Mastodon software stack.

I've been keeping an eye on #GoToSocial, (https://github.com/superseriousbusiness/gotosocial) and am eager to migrate to that stack when feasible.

⚠️ Admins: Are you trying to enable Autospam Advanced Detection only to see this error?

This means you don't have enough data to train against, but don't worry, we're working on a community model that you will be able to import, and train against!

#pixelfed #autospam #spam

✨ Advanced Spam Detection

Now available!

This uses NLP to more intelligently classify potential spam by using data from existing known spam.

Thanks to @NGIZero for funding this feature! #pixelfed #autospam #spam #advancedSpamDetection