Software application development
This blog is intended to provoke discussion and exchange between like minded software application developers, engineers, architects, project managers - and keen hobbyists too.
Tuesday 1 September 2009, 8:28 AM
Twitter spambots, LinkedIn’s phony friends & Skype smut
Hayley shares my healthy distrust for this service’s trustworthiness when it comes to who is trying to link to who. After all, twice this last month LinkedIn suggested that I might like to connect with Adrian Bridgwater. Yeah, right.
Twitter hasn’t been much better recently has it? Take a woman’s name, add a number to it to differentiate it (and allow the spurious creation of an infinite number of variants) and then pump it out to every male member from Croydon to Nantucket. It’s just getting tiresome isn’t it? Hotmail and Gmail seem to (largely) be able to catch super-obvious spam. Why can’t Twitter?
Yahoo Instant Messenger and Microsoft’s MSN Messenger have also left the door open in several instances it seems.
I’ll also just mention Skype as this is smutty porn-related spam at its most invasive. Yes I know I could go ex-directory, but I am quite new to the service and finding it very useful to network with new clients. Plus, I’ve got nothing to hide so why do I care? Well, I do care when I get personal messaging asking if I ‘remembered last night’ etc.
CNET’s Matt Asay has been talking about this topic since this time last year and most recently questioned, “Is there not enough corporate dollars in instant messaging to justify worrying about spam? Today, probably not, but that will likely change. Oracle, IBM, and others seem to think there's lots of money in collaboration tools.”
One almost has to step back at this point and say, if (and most certainly when) the next generation of application developers produces a new killer social networking application – will they be building it from a user experience perspective primarily (I hazard a guess at yes indeed), or will they be taking a long term enterprise style view of the web app construction process?
It’s almost like if we were just talking about email here, would the application have been built with anti-spam technology at the edge of the network near the mail servers, the kind of thing that you’d expect F5 Networks to talk about I guess.
I know that a degree of this kind of web malware will always circulate and that the providers of these web services are assiduously working to try and improve the sanctity of their portals. But I just feel a bubbling over effect right now. Maybe I spent too much time online over the bank holiday.
PreviousComments on this post
You've hit on exactly the reason I stay away from those "services".
A friend of mine recently accidentally triggered off a flood of LinkedIn invitation requests that went out to everybody he had in ALL of his address books he had collected over 10 years. Mostly vendors but it included a babysitter who's now 70 for his now 14 year old son!
He thought is was embarrassing and funny but it could get fairly serious. That email address book mechanism in LinkedIn looks remarkably like a target-specific phishing scheme.
... and another thing.
I was only filling out my name and address for my SHELL petrol points card this weekend and got to the email address and date of birth boxes and thought...
Hang on!
Shell don't need my birthday to give me petrol points.
So - I personally don't think you should Tweet that it is your birthday! Why not Tweet out your favourite passwords and your bank account number a la Jeremy Clarkson too while you're at it!
AdrianB
The only way those social networking sites are going to do something about this is if there is "something in it" for them - some reward or benefit. At the moment, it is the exact opposite - blasting out all of those spam "invitations" doesn't cost them anything, and might produce a new user or two, so why not? For Skype, those smut-mongers are continually registering new user names at the rate of thousands, tens or thousands or hundreds of thousands a day, and that inflates their bogus "registered user" number that they spout high and low, so once again the spammers are a benefit to them, not a detriment.
Lacking a reward or benefit for stopping such activity, there must at least be a penalty for them willingly allowing it to continue. For example, when a very large number of users complained very loudly about proposed changes on one of them recently (Facebook? MySpace? I can't remember), it eventually resulted in the proposed changes either not being implemented, or being modified before they were implemented. Unfortunately, Skype has eliminated that problem, by not providing a place for such complaints, so the public forum is the only alternative.
Will the situation get better in the future? Perhaps a bit, but not much. But most likely not at all.
jw
Thanks JW - I hadn't covered the "what's in it for me" element and as you say, the way it is now it just helps proliferate the madness.
It makes you think how open Jonathan Shwartz was at Sun to open comment on his own blog. But then that is an example of true openness for the most part isn't it?
AdrianB
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