The Author – Bart Busschots
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Jun
15
@spam – The Beginning of the End for Twitter?
Filed Under Computers & Tech on June 15, 2009 at 9:35 pm
There can be no doubt that Twitter has taken off. It has become completely main-stream, and is rapidly rising in popularity and usage, last weekend’s twitpocalypse is proof of that! It would be nice to think that Twitter can remain the peaceful and relatively spam-free haven it is now, but I can see the start of the downward spiral already. Spam. Sure, you choose who you follow, and if you choose badly you can un-follow people, but does that prevent spam? Unfortunately it doesn’t. Anyone can message you using the @ sign, even if you don’t follow them. In many ways this is a great thing, for me, it lets listeners to my podcasts contact me without my having to give out my email address. However, this provides spammers with a mechanism to target people with their infuriating crap.
I saw the first hint of my feared apocalypse recently when I innocently tweeted something about my cat. Within minutes I got an @ reply from some pet shop advertising cheap cat stuff on the net. Clearly they were running some sort of automated bot to scan Twitter for mentions of cats, and spam any poor unfortunate who was stupid enough to mention having a cat. A friend of mine had a similar experience when he mentioned having booked flights. Right now the volume of crud is low, but why should it stay low?
I remember finding the first few spam emails funny. I laughed at the pathetic grammar, and at the concept that anyone was stupid enough to think they could make money like that. Now look at what’s happened email, it has been destroyed by spam. Email is now so broken as to be almost useless as a public way of communicating with people. My email address is not on my website, and I never give it out on podcasts because the only way to have spam-free email is never to give your address to people. For me email has become a closed system, one which I use to communicate only with trusted parties, but never with outsiders. In many ways, that defeats the point of email all together! Sure, I have a few public email accounts, but I almost never read them because they are all full of junk. If I were to believe my email I’m depressed, have too small a penis, too small of breasts, and can’t get an erection! I also apparently really want a fake Rolex watch to make up for all these inadequacies. I have no doubt that I miss out on a load of genuine emails because they get lost in the sea of garbage. (if you sent me a mail and I didn’t respond, this is probably why.)
Getting back to Twitter, today, it’s a funny little distraction when you get spammed once a month for stumbling on some keyword booby-trap. But imagine how you’ll feel about it when it becomes a daily occurrence, or an hourly one … or worse! This is just like the early days of email spam, it’s harmless and even mildly funny, but it’s picking up speed. Give it another year or two. Then what?
The only way I can see of protecting yourself from @ spam is to make your updates private, to stop anyone but trusted people from interacting with you in any way on Twitter. Sure, that will protect you from the spam avalanche I so fear, but it won’t be Twitter anymore. I won’t be able to use it to comment to the podcasters I follow, and my listeners won’t be able to use it to follow me. Twitter will have massively lost it’s usefulness, and the spammers will have killed another communication channel.
I can’t see any way to stop the spammers destroying Twitter. Can you? Is there something I’ve missed? Some important factor I’m not accounting for? Some great trick the Twitter folks have up their sleeves? Oh please tell me I’ve missed something really obvious … please!
Well maybe if we make sure that no one ever replies or buys anything from the spammers…
Or we could just IP block the spam sources…
Or we could check for keywords on tweets that could be spam….
Or we could stick in one of those text boxes to be really sure its a person not a bot….
Hmm. Never mind.
Yeah i think you might be on to something.
Aside from spefically letting people follow you i cant see a general one size fits all solution to the problem.
You’re right, this is a beginning of an end, as with any other system of this type. But this is a natural evolution so to speak. Once good idea gets into the hands of “bad people”… you know, it’s history repeating itself. Don’t worry though, something new will come up… Email wasn’t the first thing destroyed, there were IRC before it… And I’m sure there were lots of other things before that, like walls in public toilets. I’m pretty sure first writings on them were done by sophisticated and well-educated people, not the typical obscenities you get now…
In the short term at least, there is actually a user called @spam, who seems to be trying to combat spam bots in some ways.
I dunno, it’s possible given the massive following of some twitter celebrities that a lot of spam bots will be shot down easily enough.
Similar concerns – when it comes to email, I have multiple ones on gmail + on dot mac. Use one as my “real email” and others circulate on the interwebs. Works well – result is same as having as having a personal and confidential phone number to the few that it makes sense to give access to. If you look at the email I left on reply, you will understand my strategy (assuming that your Belgian heritage yielded some basic understanding of French – which I suspect it likely did). Result on my “real” email” I get no spam or unsolicited email. I suspect that many high profile people (and I am not of that group) have a confidential email that only a few people have. As to the Twitter issue, I agree that it is a nuisance – I have blocked/unfollowed people and continue to get their tweets notwithstanding – meh –
Spam on any communication system is like the analogue hole in media. It’ll always be there unless drastic and constraining measures are taken.
However, when it comes to email, spam barely concerns me these days. Quite simply, I use GMail and they get a very, very high percentage of it out of my sight.
Before GMail I had a locally installed bayesian filtering system that was similarly successful.
I still think a grammar checker would be a brilliant tool against spam and it woud have the added benefit of encouraging real people to write properly so that their emails get through.
When was the last time you saw any spam with good grammar?
Facebook is the best method I think.
You only read the bits you want, when you want, and people can contact you directly.
There’s no spam because they have to be your friend, and spammers can’t get through because you have to invite them in.
Hi Bart, I am an old acquaintance from NUIM, just stumbled onto your site.
I am a twitter spammer, among other networks.
I thought that I would add some insight, perhaps explain some things.
“I laughed at the pathetic grammar, and at the concept that anyone was stupid enough to think they could make money like that.”
I laughed when I read this, there is a good reason for this. The grammar is poor because the posts use synonym generating scripts to generate many different words to replace the original messages with. You can essentially send the same thing 100,000 times, without twitter noticing duplicates and the spambot going nuts. The price is poor grammar. In this industry, with money as the benchmark, scale trumps grammar everytime. This is one of our best tools against their anti-spam software.
Also, I make between 5k and 15k (EUR) per month on twitter alone. Put together affiliate network marketing accounts, many landing pages, and targeted spam (ex. your cat), and conversions from clicks to cash in my pocket is extraordinarily high. Yes, conversion rates are %0.1-0.5, but when you message 500k targeted people with a $10 kickback on all referred sales, its good money.
Takes a few hours of work, or less.
Then repeat it with automated tools many times per month. I put this detail in to illustrate my point, that people DO make good money with this. Don’t assume they don’t.
WRT: JC’s points: Banning IP addresses is a non-runner. Of course spam is not sent from your own IP. huge private proxylists are generally used. Banning an IP will kill maybe 15 spam messages and 1 account. less, perhaps.
Checking keywords, I’ve explained that above.
CAPTCHAs: everything has been cracked already. Other software I use has cracked google and recaptcha, the two most difficult. These hamper beginners, yes, but not the top people who send the real volumes of spam.
RE: “because the only way to have spam-free email is never to give your address to people”
Just thought of two ways to counter this, I’m sure theres more, but just to be pedantic… 🙂
1) Name generators (doesn’t really apply to you, as you do have a unique name, and presumably a non standard domain!).
2) Computers infected with malware, trojans or botnet clients: If somebody on your contacts list gets infected by zeus, for example, the trojan client software can be set to automatically pull every email address that it sees, and adds it to a database on the remote server. The infamous storm botnet is the best example of this.
RE: Fran (hi BTW I assume this is ringleadr)
Facebook has tons of spam. I am doing some work on facebook within the ToS, and I can see several variants of spamming. Zombie accounts, autocreated accounts with pretty girls profile photos which auto-add friends based on fake location/university/school, keylogged from trojan accounts (current estimates at almost 1 million facebook logins stored in the various botnets databases). There is commercially available software for spamming on facebook. The keylogged accounts are sold in batches of 1-10k logins. Those are the most valuable, because when you have an aged account with 100 friends, and many comments between you and friends, and interconnected friends, Facebook will not block the acct if your scripts add another 4900 friends, and keep updating your status message with links to your websites.
Generally, Bart does have the right idea. Do not realease your email to the public domain, and you’re reasonably safe.
Hi Truckster,
Don’t ya just love anonymous posters! Also, I’m shocked by your honesty. I think my opinions on spammers are probably quite clear (I want to see you all go bust), so credit to you for popping your head into the lions den and being so open and honest.
Anyway, I get the impression you missed the intended irony in my statement on email spam. Of course people make money by spamming. That’s all spam is about. If it didn’t make money it would not exist.
Clearly the only way to stop spam is to make it somehow financially un-viable. It would be nice if we could just give the entire planet an IQ boost, I think some more brains would put a pretty big dent in spam proffits, but alas that’s but a pipe-dream.
The argument could be made that anti-spam laws are needed and need to be enforced. Opt-out registers for phone spam has been a total God-send. I haven’t had a single plonker waste my time on the phone since I put my number on our national don’t call list. Unfortunately, don’t spam lists are not practical on the net, and even if there were better anti-spam laws, they’d be almost impossible to enforce thanks to the international nature of the net. Just look at how well the MPAA and the RIAA are doing at dealing with illegal file sharing. Laws against spam would just result in me being able to talk about illegal spamming rather than just plain old spamming, but sod all else.
So, again, we come to the conclusion that nothing can be done. Spammers will destroy all popular communications channels. All for a quick buck. I was going to compare spammers to vandals, destroying all around them, but that wouldn’t be fair. Vandals destroy stuff for no good reason, spammers do it for cold hard cash. More like drilling for oil in the Alaska National Park than just plain old wanton destruction. Mind you, it’s a stretch to compare Twitter to the Alaska National Park, but you get the idea.
I think we’ll just have to accept that Ektich is right. The spammers will continue to slash and burn, and we’ll just have to keep hopping from technology to technology to keep one step ahead of the greed.
All-in-all rather depressing really. I just hope I didn’t teach you programming truckster – I’d hate to be even marginally responsible for your spam.