Spam is a fact of life in email. I don't know anyone who thinks we can eliminate it.

Junk journals, junk articles, and junk conferences have been facts of life in scholarly communication for some time. They existed before AI but AI is aggravating the problem.

Now we can add junk letters to the editor.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/04/science/letters-to-the-editor-ai-chatbots.html

#AI #GreshamsLaw #ScholComm #Spam

@aral @Edent had written a blog article about this new kind of #AI #spam tickets.

https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2025/07/grinding-down-open-source-maintainers-with-ai/

@Codeberg

'Since 15 Sept IFTAS has tracked a network of over 300 Mastodon accounts engaged in a high-volume propaganda campaign, promoting pro-Russian narratives ...'

"Accounts are hosted across numerous Mastodon instances and bridged into Bluesky, creating the appearance of independent sources. Activity on Bluesky helped reveal aggregate patterns, identical usernames, posting schedules, and content themes ..."

https://about.iftas.org/2025/10/05/coordinated-pro-russian-propaganda-network-targeting-activitypub-and-atproto-services/

#Spam #Propaganda #Fediverse #Bluesky

'Since 15 Sept IFTAS has tracked a network of over 300 Mastodon accounts engaged in a high-volume propaganda campaign, promoting pro-Russian narratives ...'

"Accounts are hosted across numerous Mastodon instances and bridged into Bluesky, creating the appearance of independent sources. Activity on Bluesky helped reveal aggregate patterns, identical usernames, posting schedules, and content themes ..."

https://about.iftas.org/2025/10/05/coordinated-pro-russian-propaganda-network-targeting-activitypub-and-atproto-services/

#Spam #Propaganda #Fediverse #Bluesky

Has anyone running a website figured out this sudden spike in traffic from Singapore/China?

https://www.reddit.com/r/SEO/comments/1nfxym2/increased_direct_traffic_from_china_to_homepage/

https://analytics.usa.gov, a public analytics dashboard for US government sites is showing almost 30% of traffic over the last 30 minutes coming from these two locations.

#websites #WebTraffic #spam #AIMaybe

The .cn domain name scammers are still at it, a new entry added to the archive at https://nxdomain.no/~peter/domainnamescam/

See "Domain Name Scams Are Alive And Well, Thank You" https://nxdomain.no/~peter/domain_name_scams_are_alive_and_well_thank_you.html for some background (written 2016, and the problem was not new then) #dns #domainnamescam #cndomains #scams #spam

"Meta internally projected late last year that it would earn about 10% of its overall annual revenue – or $16 billion – from running advertising for scams and banned goods, internal company documents show.

A cache of previously unreported documents reviewed by Reuters also shows that the social-media giant for at least three years failed to identify and stop an avalanche of ads that exposed Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp’s billions of users to fraudulent e-commerce and investment schemes, illegal online casinos, and the sale of banned medical products.

On average, one December 2024 document notes, the company shows its platforms’ users an estimated 15 billion “higher risk” scam advertisements – those that show clear signs of being fraudulent – every day. Meta earns about $7 billion in annualized revenue from this category of scam ads each year, another late 2024 document states.

Much of the fraud came from marketers acting suspiciously enough to be flagged by Meta’s internal warning systems. But the company only bans advertisers if its automated systems predict the marketers are at least 95% certain to be committing fraud, the documents show."

https://www.reuters.com/investigations/meta-is-earning-fortune-deluge-fraudulent-ads-documents-show-2025-11-06/

#Meta #Facebook #Instagram #WhatsApp #Spam #AdTech #SocialMedia #OnlineScams #ScamAds

The .cn domain name scammers are still at it, a new entry added to the archive at https://nxdomain.no/~peter/domainnamescam/

See "Domain Name Scams Are Alive And Well, Thank You" https://nxdomain.no/~peter/domain_name_scams_are_alive_and_well_thank_you.html for some background (written 2016, and the problem was not new then) #dns #domainnamescam #cndomains #scams #spam

"Meta internally projected late last year that it would earn about 10% of its overall annual revenue – or $16 billion – from running advertising for scams and banned goods, internal company documents show.

A cache of previously unreported documents reviewed by Reuters also shows that the social-media giant for at least three years failed to identify and stop an avalanche of ads that exposed Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp’s billions of users to fraudulent e-commerce and investment schemes, illegal online casinos, and the sale of banned medical products.

On average, one December 2024 document notes, the company shows its platforms’ users an estimated 15 billion “higher risk” scam advertisements – those that show clear signs of being fraudulent – every day. Meta earns about $7 billion in annualized revenue from this category of scam ads each year, another late 2024 document states.

Much of the fraud came from marketers acting suspiciously enough to be flagged by Meta’s internal warning systems. But the company only bans advertisers if its automated systems predict the marketers are at least 95% certain to be committing fraud, the documents show."

https://www.reuters.com/investigations/meta-is-earning-fortune-deluge-fraudulent-ads-documents-show-2025-11-06/

#Meta #Facebook #Instagram #WhatsApp #Spam #AdTech #SocialMedia #OnlineScams #ScamAds

@Tutanota The word "spam" meaning to flood a place with unwanted messages comes from a carnist joke made by #MontyPython in which the capitalist product #Spam is mythologized as an archetypal unwanted worthless repetition. A murder victims body reduced to a literal throw-away joke depicting their mangled corpse as nothing more than a nuisance.The company that killed them "Spam company" is remembered more readily than the victim #speciesism #carnism

@catsalad
#scam
#slop
#infested
#spam

Those funky cool kids at Commodore have sent me another unsolicited email, this time with the font colour set to white so it's invisible. I guess every single person there only uses dark mode and never considers that some of us need light to see things.

#retrocomputing #accessibility #spam

Those funky cool kids at Commodore have sent me another unsolicited email, this time with the font colour set to white so it's invisible. I guess every single person there only uses dark mode and never considers that some of us need light to see things.

#retrocomputing #accessibility #spam

⚠️ SW-ISAC Advisory

As part of the ongoing monitoring of a coordinated Russian spam campaign, we have identified a number of open registration servers that are either unwilling to act on known spam and coordinated inauthentic behaviour; or are clearly abandoned.

A denylist (along with a Mastodon format importable CSV) is now available at https://about.iftas.org/library/iftas-abandoned-and-unmanaged-domain-list/

#SW_ISAC_Advisory #Spam #CIB

⚠️ SW-ISAC Advisory

As part of the ongoing monitoring of a coordinated Russian spam campaign, we have identified a number of open registration servers that are either unwilling to act on known spam and coordinated inauthentic behaviour; or are clearly abandoned.

A denylist (along with a Mastodon format importable CSV) is now available at https://about.iftas.org/library/iftas-abandoned-and-unmanaged-domain-list/

#SW_ISAC_Advisory #Spam #CIB