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 03:19 PMTrackBack URL for this entry:
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How about a charge of 1 eurocent per authorisation request, that can be switched on by the user. That way you can effectively put yourself beyond spammers, for economic reasons, as you alluded to. This would be good for email too, as I have often argued, in fact, why not include email within Skype with the authorisation mechanism covering the ability to send email to that person. Allow different authorisation levels and you can potentially be paid for receiving marketing emails (credited to your balance)!
Posted by: at May 28, 2005 06:15 PM