Welcome to my old blog, which I no longer maintain.

For details of my current professional services and activities see www.martingeddes.com.

May 27, 2005

Disreputable

It had to happen some day. I've got my first Skype authorisation spam. I won't grace the perpetrator with publicising their ID or URL, but here's the text from their profile:

Build a profitable Online Business [sic] from home with the established brands from wellness, telecom and retail industry where the market is booming.

Not to be missed - Online shopping...

I guess they put it in their profile and leave the boilerplate authorisation message so the one-click home page link is active. (Links in authorisation messages aren't clickable, I assume.) Or maybe they rely on you just saying yes to anyone so they can spam you some more.

I wonder if the Skype API will make this problem worse? Much easier to build a spambot that way.

Time for Skype to "go social": friends-of-friends are allowed to send authorisation messages to me. People blocked by friends should have to have a SkypeIn or SkypeOut account to approach me. (Not willing to risk even €10 skin in the game when people are blocking you? Then piss off and don't bother me.) Strangers should, at the very least, have to solve a captcha to make this stuff scale badly for spammers. Expect all the usual blacklists, filters and stuff to apply.

Yawn -- here we go again.

Posted by Martin Geddes at 3:19 PM
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Listed below are links to weblogs that reference Disreputable:

» Skype Spam from The Importance of...
Telepocalypse reports an instance of what will likely become a major problem, VoIP spam (Disreputable). In this case it was Skype authorization spam, but as Telepocalypse says, "here we go again."... [Read more]

Tracked on May 27, 2005 6:14 PM

» Skype Spam from Phones
Good question here about the Skype API and spam:... [Read more]

Tracked on May 28, 2005 5:21 PM