It’s become painfully clear to me that Daniel Hammermesh of the Freakonomics Blog doesn’t moderate the comments for his blog.
His answer to the question, “Where has all the spam gone?” is foolishly shortsighted at best. They haven’t abandoned spam in favor of more profitable ventures at all. The advent of Web 2.0 has heralded a new golden age for the spammer. Modern e-mail spam filters are very, very good, so spammers have adapted their methods to perform the same task against comments (e.g. blogs, youtube, etc) and wikis (wikipedia is great about filtering that stuff, but if you visit any other mediawiki, it isn’t too hard to find a page with atrociously useless links). The basic logic is that instead of winning you over by catching you via e-mail, spammers pick a site where they can leave a link, and leave a thousand links. Or a hundred thousand. Or a trillion. Hey, it’s just a number in a for loop to them. They aren’t expecting any person will read them, and they don’t need to. Google crawls their website and teases out every single link. Every link to their stuff contributes to their pagerank, which gives them higher search results if you search for something for which they have a website.
Now, because you don’t need to see the link in order for it to be useful to them, the kicker is that you don’t even need to know a website has been hacked. For example, for the Comparative Law Project, I’ve been working with the website of the Supreme Court of the Dominican Republic. A cursory peek at the site demonstrates it’s rank with bad programming and old technology, ripe for the hacking. I didn’t really think about this until I noticed that the pages listing the cases were loading… well, a little slowly. Like 3 megs slowly for a page that should have been ~100k worth of text, no images. Take a look one, for instance. Now take a look at the source: notice the <SPAN STYLE=“display: none”> tag. And all the crap that follows it. They’ve embedded a simple program in the server to automatically insert an array of links piggybacking on every case entry on the page. It’s no wonder it took the page forever to load.
For the more intrepid spammer, there’s another related racket. They’ve taken to buying ad space on Google AdWords and some less reputable ad services, which link to forged pages (complete with domains) designed to look like legitimate periodicals websites. These “News” sites started by peddling a couple of documents describing a method of “Posting Links” on Google for a couple of bucks, and having Google happily send you a check for an exorbitant weekly sum. Unfortunately, they fail to send the documents, and charge your account $60 monthly for being dumb enough to fall for their scam. And when Google started cracking down on these lies, they switched from money to vanity. Tooth-whitening, to be precise.
So I say to Prof. Hammermesh, don’t go thinking economics has improved the world here: it’s still supporting the seamy underside of the internet, and business is booming. Thank God for Akismet.
