LWD - Spam's Empire

EdisonRex submitted the following "

Chapter 5 – Beware the Google Cache, and what are all those people doing?

First, a word about bad faith.

I am not a very private person, either on the Internet or in my so-called private life. Had these people done any longer than the couple of minutes spent checking LittleBlackDog, and then my home website, they might have realised that hijacking my nick was a bad idea. However that may be, the Bakunian sense of honour that must have been violated when I edited LonelyK's first post in our forum was striking in how obviously nasty this person really is, and when you are that nasty, you do make mistakes which are going to be very hard indeed to get around. I have had an MSN mail account since MSN was in beta. It is a throwback to a much more utopian and naïve view of the Internet. I keep it because it is useful for some to reach me by my real name. But then again, I don't have a really strong separation between my nick and my real name anyway. As I said, I am very visible on the Internet.

In another one of those coincidental events painting a picture, a note from the autoforward account from mail.ru appeared in my MSN account, the one with my real name, and stated that my MSN account was stated as the forwarding account for edisonrex@mail.ru . Fortunately the account forwarding must be approved by me within 72 hours in order for it to take hold, so the forwarding never happened. Talk about mean spirited, though. Thinking about the course of events we have captured, somewhere on March 14th before 10pm London time, LonelyK actually looked at LittleBlackDog and saw my remonstration, probably because we're highly ranked. Incensed, or just in a nasty fit of revenge, and using the same shell account on chtivo.ru, my home server was checked to verify my real name, obviously, my web details were then stolen from the fields on my profile, the edisonrex account was created on mail.ru, and he even had the gall to set forwarding to my real name MSN account. As far as I can tell, he was trying to teach me a “lesson” by attempting to make me appear to be an accomplice in spamming phpBB forums for his site. This was the same “punishment” handed out to the other person who stood up to him so far and has only resulted in that person being found and brought along with LittleBlackDog. We were thorough enough to find another spam run too, but it was of limited use and must have been the result of two nasty people fighting. It was of no real use in this investigation except to call attention to the karma issues.

No, it seems that these people aren't really very nice, and they run “Stars' Empire”. They are no more than bullies, the Internet equivalent of a drifting thug, and they show their true colours with every new piece of information we have turned up, and there is a lot of information turning up. We are preserving the information in the hope that once the affected domain owners are convinced of what particular crimes happened in which jurisdiction, those jurisdictions where a crime was committed have enough to go on. Even if we are not successful in that phase of this project, we are already successful in showing just what kind of people run stars-empire.com and imperz.ru . There is no problem with building an Internet-based on-line real-time multi-user text-based game, and there is no problem, even by my high standards, with marketing it. When the marketing campaign degrades into a nasty, cynical, bad faith attempt to slander someone who was simply calling attention to bad behaviour in the first place, it isn't LittleBlackDog, or EdisonRex, or even me personally, who looks bad. As much as we wish to hear Mr. Karabanov's side of the story, with every passing day, another piece of information comes from a team member and another piece of the puzzle falls into place. We don't need all of the spamshots, we only need one that we have all of the information on. We actually now have more than one.

Beware the Google Cache

Information on search engines comes to you ranked by what the search engine calculates you will most want to see, based on a number of factors. Since the Internet is full of ephemera, and rankings are constantly changing, two institutions were created, one in the public domain, and one in the private domain, to attempt to capture the ephemeral information for later research. The Internet Archive, with their Wayback Machine and the Google Cache are two such reserves. Historical information can be gleaned about a website, a person's presence on the Internet, and a series of linkages, even if those links no longer exist. It is an excellent source of information that may have been recently withdrawn.

Other search engines exist and due to the differences in ranking methods, and how they store keywords and weight their meta information, different results occur. Many such as Altavista do not lose information as fast as Google does. Perhaps that is because most spammers are trying to manipulate Google as opposed to other search engines.

We do not currently have lots of information from ISPs, although the information we will be giving to the ISPs involved will undoubtedly aid them. Having the cooperation of equally incensed forum operators is, as will be detailed, part of the effort being put into this investigation. The stickiness of the information will actually ensure this, as we can continue to find them, and ironically, my good reputation with the information in my pirated nick will probably ensure that it stays long enough to reach a large number of forum owners. Mail spammers have always relied on the fact that mail is short lived. Spammers using phpBB don't have that assumption on their side.

What are all those people doing?

An ever increasing number of forum members have been volunteering to help. It has truly been gratifying to have the assistance of my friends during what for me is, quite honestly, a difficult time. We continue to feel that we need to make a strong statement to this completely unneccessary appropriation of a forum moderator's online identity, simply out of spite. The project has been broken into teams, and each team is responsible for a particular aspect of the investigations, as well as some support teams which are helping with research and proofreading. We are now starting up a communications team to handle any local issues in specific countries. And there are some more teams I am not prepared to talk about yet. We now have, between the teams, 18 members in the project, including myself.

The problem of forum spam is hampered by ignorance of the problem, a lack of recognition by traditional email abuse cops, and a lack of adequate enforcement of AUPs by ISPs. We will be examining these issues in a further chapter. "


Telling it like it is...