28.3.05

The Story of a True Capitalist

I came across this story as I was scanning the news after my spring break, and I could not resist imparting this little gem. On a different note, I'm starting to feel like my cute little Aunt who e-mails everybody all those chain letters or vaguely amusing websites with reckless abandon... maybe I am my aunt, isn't that a scary thought.

14.3.05

But where's the edge?

I'm not sure how many people are aware of the various internet trends that pulse through the system from time to time like a general and omnipresent malaise. While most people seem content to live meaningful lives that don't involve netcode and the semantic differences between a white hat cracker and a black hat hacker, there is also a whole other online world which can appear just as vibrantly alive despite its one's and zero's.

Today I bring you a bit of a story from the other side... (cue crazy temporal vortex effect sound bite)

Ever since the adoption of the internet, there have been those who wanted to use its broad demographic reach commercially. It began with random American online pornographers seeking to generate advertising revenue through dozens of click-throughs and grainy twenty second videos, but with the advent of automated HTML programming and cheap digital cameras more and more people tried to get into the (highly profitable) action. East Coast American women would grab a camera and put out a site earning money from American subscribers hungry to make a personal and sexual (and most importantly anonymous and safe) connection with another, while European pornographers would take advantage of the economic and legal differences and compete with the established Silicon Valley brands in putting out (more or less) quality porn for profit.

Meanwhile, spammers were losing their profits as their sites became lost in a sea of metatext competition, so they developed trojans to take control of unsuspecting computers across the world (mostly academic and corporate machines who had large bandwidth and relatively little personal ownership) and use those computers to distribute large quantities of spam advertising their porn sites to the ever growing amount of e-mail accounts. This in turn generated other profits, as spammers sold lists of valid e-mails (which were found using zombies searching webpages and Usenet), collections of compromised computers (or zombies; collectively known as botnets), and superior hacking programs, as well as creating off-shore ISP's in West Africa and Indochina that could host a plethora of spurious originating spam accounts without fear of legal ramification.

As the industry grew, it turned from just advertising for porn and invested in other popular areas of business - like medicine (viagra), debt counselling, credit cards, and other areas that can generate easy cash. This attracted more concerted organizations to get in on the money, and East European and Asian crime syndicates began using technology and spoofing to generate easy cash to support their activities, often hiring freelance Western hackers to develop software and run the operations. This led, among other things, to blatant identity theft from unsecured web-pages and stores of personal information held by corporate, government, and academic entities (often involved with insurance and payments), as well as the infamous Nigerian 419 scams that signified the '90's and sometimes ended in outright hostage taking and ransom.

Spam blossomed, and users turned to each other and their ISP's to produce anti-spam software that would limit the excess. This software would reject certain geographical IP strings, as well as certain commonly spammed words like "mortgage" in the subject, and was eventually incorporated into most mainstream e-mail services. Also, the commonly used HTML trick known as the "pop-up" that also generated so much click-through advertising money was being stopped by new and innovative software that was developed by the community to combat the increase in irritating webpages, and was incorporated into most browsers. Facing a loss of profitability in their activities, spammers turned to other programs that would search the internet for unsuspecting people that could afford to lose a bit of cash.

One such program is google. The advent of google and its immense (and for the most part vastly under-utilised) power led to a general public acceptance of the service. Millions of people used the program everyday, and "googling it" entered the public vocabulary, topping lists by various media sources as the top new vocabulary of the year after it was introduced. Suddenly achieving top ranking was not merely a matter of including as much meta-text as possible in your site, but in getting yourself linked to and talked about. The bubble has popped, but creativity still abounds: dozens of ideas surface for how to do this. Virus marketing occurs, catch-phrasing, site-chains, what amounts to search engine bribery, all sorts of things. However, much of this occured below the public's eye, away from its notice. Their only interaction was that first page of Google results (quickly licensed to most other search engines, ever used Yahoo? not lately).

With the introduction of blogging, this changed. Services like Livejournal and Blogger hosted personal sites for budding teens to explore their inner angst in front of millions of anonymous strangers (and if voyeurism becomes a more common activity in a few years, don't be surprised). After a few months of happy posturing, black hats began to take notice. Each site represented a tiny, mostly unregulated, percentage of google's page rank system. Combined with an anonymous commenting system common to most blogging services, and often HTML support, these unsuspecting teens became the target of a concentrated exploitation scheme. Scammers would go through these quiet websites one by one adding their advertising to be displayed below the latest terrible news from Pleasantville, and this would be found by the spidery Google bots that go to all sites on the internet finding links and catalogueing the results. And they would add up.

Suddenly strange sites were being found by Google. After some serious consideration this activity was found to be the cause (or at least one of them). Some automated software was developed, but it was not very effective. After a year, the international commission responsable for managing the internet created a new HTML tag called 'rel="nofollow"' that would tell the bots to not count the contents for ranking, and most blogger services have placed those tags around any publicly accessible sections. However, the effect of this new tag is yet to be seen. A little while ago, some bloggers decided to fight back. They have started an anti-gambling spam campaign that is working to ruin the efforts of gambling sites to promote their websites at the expense of the spammers. By voluntarily placing the link online poker on their webpage, the Google bots would associate the wikipedia page with the term "Online poker" and send aspiring poker players there, easily ruining the efforts of the gambling sites. The efforts have already been felt, the page is already ranked third in Google's list of terms regarding "online poker". Obviously, remarks to this somewhat controversial response have been mixed. Clearly, this story still has a few more chapters before it is finished, but it is safe to say that the effect the blogging community has had against the bloggers has been chilling. In an environment where the vast majority of web-surfers will only check the first few results of a query, driving sites from those all-important positions could serve as a powerful problem for the profit hungry spammers. Or it could be totally ignored. And it is all up to you, the consumer...

Come back next time for another exciting story from the online campfire - where spooky nerdiness comes to life (cue temporal vortex but this time mixed with a series theme with a nice C major chord at the end)