May 28, 2006
Yahoo! porn spam
Posted by bopuc at May 28, 2006 10:03 PM
Warning: links to pages not with photos but hardcore porn terminology...
Just got a concerned email from Howard regarding the fact that one of the articles on SmartMobs seems to be a spam magnet according to Yahoo!. The fact was discovered by one our authors doing an ego search and discovering that about 15 pages into the search results, the links turn into hardcore porn spam.
Many of the links seem to be dead (everything going to .ru domains) but many point to sub-domains of odessa.ua. Clicking though and viewing source reveals an ingenious mechanism, one that gives further pause about the whole "Web 2.0", "You work for them", "it's not about you", "esclavage 2.0" debacle:
Hidden in the source of these porn spam sites is loads of republished content, ostensibly culled from highly search-ranking weblogs etc, in outright contravention of, if not just Copyright and Creative Commons Non-Commercial/By-Attribution, but, well let's face it, decency, respect, integrity, what-have-you.
This is the dirty water that drives the water-mill that makes the paper pulp that gets nudie mags printed on it! Hah!
Short of firing off an email to the person registered to the domain, there is pretty much nothing I can do at this point, other than disallow search spiders and the like. This is not an acceptable solution in this case since SmartMobs does generate revenue for Howard and his authors and being findable via Yahoo! et all is important.
In the global digital village, everybody is your neighbor, even the smut seller. ;)