YJL

I reported two spam accounts on GitHub, one is selling love spell via phone, sounds ridiculous, but its true and I actually had just reported another one just a few days ago. The other account is selling skin care product, which has seemingly computer generated text with product name and a link embedded in the text and that totally make no senses as you read the words. Curiously, if its for avoiding lower ranking in search engine results or GitHub actually has some sort of detection mechanism in place already that we dont know.

What else today:

• The grow light doesnt seem to work, or its because the soil was dry, I just realized that, the surface felt really dry. I also swapped one LED with a red LED. I am considering to stop since the temperature is going back up.
• Planted another onion bottom, which would be solely for greens.
• The pruned green yardlong bean has died, the stem is soft. It might already dead, I just didnt realize.
• One tomato truss was damaged by the cold, which is already flowering, I cut it off and stuck it with sweet potato to root. The two seedlings I thought might not survive have perked themselves up.
• The preparation for potato growing is slow, barely half of the bag of shredded cardboard.

I put some social media buttons on this blog, not sure why I wanted to do this. Maybe its after I switched back to Blogger comments system.

Since new years day, I had been collecting spam emails, the one uses Gmail emoji. Less than 15 days, I received 52 such spams and I dont believe I have seen any legit email uses those emoji. Should I give thumbs-up to spammers?

There is one thing I noticed about the cat, when he cries with a unique sound, he is telling me to clean up his litter box because he just peed or pooped. I will go to the box and he will look back at me, making sure I get the message before he walks back to his bed and continues his sleep. I wonder if this is nature or nurture or simply catgenius, perhaps that indeed is cat has staff as they said.

I googled right hand colder than left hand and found Raynauds phenomenon, I dont think I got that, but some of the pictures inside is quite scarily, not as in bloody scare. I then googled right side colder than left, because I could feel my right leg is colder, too, but not so if I used my hand to sense the temperature. It seems if you google something, there always is a thing to tell you that you might have some disease or illness.

Those azuki bean sprouts are doing good, but I decided to take some to plant in box planter, around 20, they would be like cover crop, since the plants in that container aint doing well, Perhaps they could fix some nitrogen in before spring.

Next Monday, I will scatter the rest into dick container. The weather is cold and wet, not sure if any of these bean will survive, if not, they can still be nutrient once they decomposed.

Two years ago, I posted a screenshot of Blogger Stats about .ua (Ukraine) ccTLD is likely free, because at that period of time, .ua spam referrers show up a lot. Still until today, they pop up once a while.

The last few days, there is significant amount of spam referrers of .ru (Russia) ccTLD.

Another ccTLD, another spamming source, these spam referrers never know how to stop spamming and Blogger also never know how to stop spamming. Well, I guess none of Bloggers employees uses Blogger or have low traffic blogs. They must be either using other blogging service or all have very popular blogs, therefore they dont know referrer spamming is really common.

You can see them carefully controlling the number of spamming from each domain name, 4 or 5 at most. Maybe Blogger did have an internal monitoring system in place? Although I really doubt that Blogger did take action on spammers, because I see them almost everyday, sometimes a new trick would pop up, mostly the good ol brute-force spamming way.

Dont really know why I still bother reading Blogger Stats.

This spam is extremely lawl:


Was this guy writing to his god? The god of fortune, meaning $$$.

I love your blog and religiously follow it.

This line is too hilarious, I must say.

He mentions "Copyscape," so I looked up for it, it's a service which can search for duplicate content, wholly or partially. I think he actually means 100% free from Copyscape detection. His content must be stolen from others with some deliberate modification, or he wouldn't need to mention such thing.

Beside me, there were other 5 recipients of this email. I wonder if anyone really wants to contact this guy. My advise to this kind of email: It's a TRAP!

Even this guy does delivery a guest post if it's free of charge, which I don't believe this is the case, it's just a way for them to trick search engine and get a free link-in for their crappy website; if not, I'd say you must be a rich guy to pay someone to write a piece of garbage. Just look at those sample titles, typical for trash posts, that looks like being generated. I guess I can write a generator just for fun for computer technical posts.

I think this thing is called buying/selling content according the sidebar of Copyscape. If a blogger buys content, that's a shame and how dare him or her could call self as a blogger. Every time, a good stuff gets invented, some people always try to make money out of it in an ugly way. Sad.

Spam reported.

6:45am, just woke up, showered, a cup of coffee in my hand wiping away the cute sleepy bugs in my head. Checking other stuff first, skimming over blog posts, updates, blah and blahs.

It's time to deal with the mails which I knew I had a few from my notification program, but I didn't peek at mail subjects.

Well, 3 spams out of 5 emails, that's quite a surprise, considering this is the Gmail, which was said having the most incredible algorithm, even A.I. perhaps?

To be more surprised is they are all marked as Important, WTF indeed. Cheers to the glorious superb filter to show me how important they were, so I could spot right on them as spams and send them into spam folder. I got it, that's the whole Gmail spam prevention strategy, let users deal with them after mark them as important.

Is Gmail officially screwed by spams?

Dear Mrs. Louise Howard,

I am honored that you trust me in the faith of god, he has plan for you and that's reason you found me you don't even know my name. In god's hand, you know you don't have doubts about my honesty. With that, I would need to tell a few things first.

First of all, in these days, people don't read, 100 words probably are the limitation. Please try to provide tl;dr next time you are about to meet the lord again.

We all know how devoted you are as a Christian, however, every time you mention Christian, certain disease or cancer, plus your reason of being inability to respond, those would greatly diminish the willing of acceptance from the possible millions of recipients which you have sent emails to.

Lastly, you may want to choose the assistant carefully. For this instance, your doctor seems unable to press Space properly, which makes your message harder to read. Please advise your doctor to see another doctor, his or her thumb may need medical examination. I will pray for your doctor, hopefully there is nothing serious, I rather not to be entitled as your doctor's beneficiary, it will be very sad that another good person would die after you.

As I said, I am honored. Unfortunately, $12.8 million dollars, either USD or GBP, are not enough for me to manage for you since each recipient can only receive, say 1 million of recipients, $12.8 dollar before any taxes and expenses. The time is hard for everyone, if you can die another 999 times, that would be $12.8 billion dollars and $12,800 each would be enough to be used wisely.

Speaking in front of god, there shall no lies to be told. I suggest that you keep the money and, excuse me for being utterly honest, start looking for a nice coffin. Even if others all accept, $12.8 dollars can still buy you a perfectly glued paper coffin with fine painting outside.

Two months are long enough before you step into your grave. I am sure the hospital staff can be very helpful in providing aid in that regard, they have plenty of experience with people such as you.

Do not be deceived: God is not mocked, for whatever one sows, that will he also reap.

Galatians 6:7, ESV

God bless you,
Yu-Jie Lin

Every time when I get an email notification from Disqus about new comments, I always feel happy and cheered. However...


I don't get many comments, the truth is the comments-over-post ratio is pretty low. (But I will not trade the commenting quality for quantity) So, this always punches me after I read the first line.

But hey, at least Disqus still does a great job, it does not let any spams slip into my blog. I don't need to worry readers read this spam comment which is written by a poor person who needs to spam others' website in order to get traffic.

When I was browsing on commandlinefu.com, I saw this entry Block the 6700 worst spamhosts: (URL edited for plain text file)

wget -q -O - http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/hosts | grep ^127 >> /etc/hosts

As of writing (2012-03-24T08:01:18Z), the list, made by Dan Pollock, has grown to 9,502 domains. That is insane! See how many spam websites we have, although not all are spams, some of the entries are legitimate advertising distributors.

To be honest, I was really tempted to use it, but the huge amount of entries did hold me back completely.

If you want to try it, I can propose you a short script as system cron task. I didn't test and I am writing in on the fly, so use it as your own risk:

cd /etc
# just in case, you haven't saved current hosts as hosts.local
[[ ! -f hosts.local ]] && exit 1
if [[ "$(curl http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/hosts -z hosts.hosts -o hosts.hosts -s -L -w %{http_code})" == "200" ]]; then
  cat hosts.local hosts.hosts > hosts
fi

You will need to run as root first

cp /etc/hosts{,.local}

The script will concatenate your current hosts and the one downloaded from the website. Set up a daily cron task for it, it will only download the file when the files get updated, the method is described as in this blog post.

Be sure to read the comments on the website, which also provides some different modifications and even a RSS feed for notification.

Weird spam and didn't get into spam folder by default. I wonder what will happen if I reply with the requested information.

Why Couches? Spammers are really weird.

This spam email really crapped me up.

Firstly, it is "TOP SECRET." At first, it got me excited and I thought: now comes with the CIA? Black-ops? What a such disappointment, it wasn't. Just another stupid spam about a lot of imaginary money.

Then, I noticed the location. It's a long word, you have to notice. Ouagadougou? Where the hell is that? Or is that even spoken in African languages? Heck, I need to check Wikipedia in order to find its location and which country it belongs to. Burkina Faso, where is that again?

Come on, spammers, give me dat instructions for meeting the secret handler, so I can exchange the package! And please pick up a city whose name I can pronounce, thanks!

I think I have ever CAPS my title (I control myself not to CAP all), but this is really out of control!)

141 (27.81%) out of 507 pageviews are spams and this is just yesterday.



I am going to post on help forum.

A few days ago, I was sarcastic about .ua is free. Today, I still saw the same.


I sent a feedback to Blogger via that gear icon on top-right corner. By the way, the feedback functionality is awesome. You can grab a region for screenshot. I wish Blogger had put in more time and effort to deal with spams before then added this awesome feature.

Anyway, I told them in my feedback: They need to create a report functionality and filter out throughout the entire Blogger Stats (not just the blog), and write a serious post about it to warn the spammers. Something like "Spam is futile, you will be assassinated." (Alright, I didn't send the last part, I just came up with that, could I add it to my feedback?)

I also noticed one of top posts is Fake referrers invade Blogger Stats, make great sense, doesn't it?

That post was posted almost one year ago, so when the Stats was released, and the spam issue is still here. If I may say, it only gets worse. When I posted that, I only got one or a couple every a while. But now, it happens in every hour.

The statistics is filled with fakes, I have learned long ago, never trust what Blogger Stats gives to you. That number is not what you think, that's visits from real human or legit bots. That's why I said "not accurate" in title.

Please send a feedback or post to their help forum. If you also know any existing threads about this issue, post a link, I will go to thumb up. Hopefully, Blogger will take it seriously then.

(So tired of this as you can see that I don't even bother to mask those spams' links anymore)

So be must .ru.

In the last few days, I got three Disqus comments and Disqus did email me about them. I use email notification to know if I have new comments.

Two of them were marked as spam by Gmail.

But both times, I have to see the comment on the post's page. First time, I was editing that post. Second time, moments ago, I scrolled down the home page to see how many posts I have published this month using the Archive dropdown list. I saw the post at the bottom has one comment, that's how I knew that comment.

The first case, that comment has six links, five to YouTube, one to Vimeo. It's a real comment, not a spam at all. The second comment, which has no links but only a simple question, "What is the table id?"

It's a real one, too. As I said before, spam detection isn't the solution, it's not fighting but avoiding the truth, which is we have lots of spam bombing us. It's like someone hates cockroach or mouse but this guys do kill them, he catches and moves them out of his house. But they keep coming back and breeding more and more. All the energy of this guy is used to move them out, silly.

These two incidents were not the first time. I had saved a few from spam folders a few times before and they were lucky. I currently have 450 over last 30-day period, so that's 15 spam emails a day. I guess I will clean/check up my spam folder every day from now on.

I now subscribe to Disqus comments feed of this blog. Just in case.

May I call myself by Spam Detection Victim if someday someone does want to give me one million dollars and Gmail put it into spam folder?

It seems spammers are trying everything they can think to get more expose, not just simply using a website. They are using media as well.

The screenshot above shows a YouTube videos referrers, on top of that, in that blue box, its a screenshot from this blogs referrers. The YouTube video link links to that video, which is about casino. From YouTube stats, you can see there were $4+23=27$ visitors from blogger.com, I believe they are all targeted Blogger bloggers. When I first saw that referrer in Stats tab of dashboard, 99.999% I was sure its faked since no way anyone would link my blog in their videos descriptions or comments. But I still clicked on it to check it out. You can also see it has 303 likes and I bet they are all faked, too, but those 5 dislikes, I am certain that they are real ratings.

I was thinking to flag that video, but I couldnt. There is no suitable option to file an complaint, it makes sense. Someone might use this to attack normal video, in other words, we have to take this kind of spamming. Too bad, there is no Spam folder as in Gmail.

I have to quote this:

Spam will be a thing of the past in two years time. Bill Gates.

I really wish he was right. That was in 2004. Six years later, they are still around. Currently, if you dont see, they are just being hidden by algorithm. They are detected and put into spam folder. Thats sad, because what needs to be done is to find who sends not to write some sophisticated program to detect, those companies fight back in wrong direction. They keep saying how many they have done. The truth is they dont, they just cover our eyes.

Collecting evidence and help to charge those spams. Say one spam mail for just one minute community service, that would definitely be enough.

Ten days ago, I wrote about the fake referrer issue, now it's getting worse on one of my old blogs which I am no longer to update it. It's a programming topic blog, you can expect that blog gets link back like insurance, health, or sex.



I am going to search on Blogger help forums, if no one has asked about this. I will.

And the worst is yet to come if Blogger doesn't come up with something to stop those bad and low-level life form.

Updated: Someone has asked a month ago, no replies until mine. Sigh, this is a Google pain.

Since Blogger pushed new feature of Stats, I began to see more fake referrer in Stats tab or Google Analytics. Fake referrer is very common spam, but Blogger Stats needs you doing nothing to read the statistics. It's convenient for bloggers and spammers.


Those people who create crappy website have targeted us now. If it spams not only for traffics, but also try to hack into your computer, that would be very bad.

Don't click on any referrers that you have no idea what they are. I hate spammers!

I just logged in my Blogger dashboard and saw this notification about new spam detection feature:

I have one blog (not updated anymore) has been enabled with new feature, here is its comment inbox:

Its nice to see new feature to be implemented but its arrival is too late to me. If we consider the whole commenting system features, I have boarded a jet flight already, Bloggers comments system is just a regular bus. I have been using Disqus for more than six months, it has much more features.

Better late than never!

Dear Mrs. Susan Morgan,

I am sorry for your health condition, but please allow me to bring up your original letter first:

from Susan Morgan 
reply-to [email protected]
to [email protected]
date Sat, Apr 4, 2009 at 01:12
subject From Mrs Susan Morgan
signed-by yahoo.cn

From Mrs Susan Morgan


BP [38 Rue Des Martyrs Cocody

Abidjan, Cote d'Ivoire
ATTN
DEAREST ONE OF GOD

I am the above named person from Kuwait. I am married to Mr.Abram Morgan, who worked with Kuwait embassy in Ivory Coast for nine years before he died in the year 2004. We were married for eleven years without a child. He died after a brief illness that lasted for only four days.

Before his death we were both born again Christian. since his death I decided not to remarry or get a child outside my matrimonial home which the Bible is against. When my late husband was alive he deposited the sum of $2. 5 Million (Two Million and Five Hundred thousand U.S. Dollars) in the bank here in Abidjan in suspense account.

Presently, the fund is still with the bank. Recently, my Doctor told me that i have seriouly sickness which is cancer problem. The one that disturbs me most is my stroke sickness. Having known my condition I decided to donate this fund to a church or individual that will utilize this money the way I am going to instruct herein. I want a church that will use this fund for orphanages, widows, propagating the word of God and to endeavour that the house of God is maintained.

The Bible made us to understand that blessed is the hand that giveth. I took this decision because I dont have any child that will inherit this money and my husband relatives are not Christians and I dont want my husbands efforts to be used by unbelievers. I dont want a situation where this money will be used in an ungodly way. This is why I am taking this decision. I am not afraid of death hence i know where I am going. I know that I am going to be in the bosom of the Lord. Exodus 14 VS 14 says that the Lord will fight my case and I shall hold my peace.

I dont need any telephone communication in this regard because of my health hence the presence of my husbands relatives is around me always I don't want them to know about this development. With God all things are possible. As soon as I receive your reply I shall give you the contact of the bank here in Abidjan. I want you and the church to always pray for me because the Lord is my shepherd. My happiness is that I lived a life of a worthy Christian. Whoever that wants to serve the Lord must serve him in spirit and Truth. Please always be prayerful all through your life.

Contact me through my e-mail address for more informations, any delay in your reply will give me room in sourcing another church or individual for this same purpose. Please assure me that you will act accordingly as I Stated herein. Hoping to receive your reply. Remain blessed in the Lord.


Yours in Christ,
Mrs Susan Morgan.

Obviously, we have never met before or you would know I can read Chinese and greeting me in Chinese. You are currently in Abidjan, Lagunes Côte d'Ivoire, I guess you've been many places, such as China and Japan.

I am overwhelmed that you picked me to follow your will. If I do get the money, I am willing to dedicate my life for propagating the word of God, ... to look after orphans and widows in their distress... James 1:27, NIV.

US$2.5 Million (Two Million and Five Hundred thousand U.S. Dollars) are not a small number. That will be a big challenge for me to manage, but I am sure that I am capable to do well in names of God. ...with God all things are possible. Matthew 19:26, NIV.

I understand that you don't want to communicate on phone, under your current circumstance, that must be hard to find someone can trust and also a dedicated Christian. ...by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. Philippians 4:6, NIV, he always listen to everyone with faithful heart. Soon, he will bring you to whom you are keeping seeking.

Lastly, ...We constantly pray for you...that by his power he may fulfill every good purpose of yours and every act prompted by your faith. 2 Thes. 1:11, NIV, I will pray for your for your health.

Oh, I almost forgot to tell you that I am no Christian, I am kind of atheist.

Sincerely yours,
Yu-Jie Lin

They have nothing to do together. Some awful people just use his name to cheat search engines, I suppose. I got this weekly Google Alerts in my mailbox (Yes, I stalk myself! :>):
That blog's name is Barack Obama, but have posts like "Euro Million lottrey award 2008". Here is the screenshot of the link in alert:

This blog puts Barack Obama's stuff before and after those posts. Note that there are many unreachable mailboxes. Must be a dumb spammer's work. I have flagged that blog, hope it will be taken down and very soon.

I have never seen any spam mail about this in my gmail mailbox, good job gmail!

PS. I just notice there is a spelling mistake (or intended?) in lottrey.