Stephen Baker’s The Numerati, published in 2008, tells the story of our modern world’s “binarization;” how every individual is deduced to ones and zeroes through the trails of data we leave behind which are consequently gathered, analyzed and categorized by number crunchers, better known as data miners, in order to predict behavior. The…
The Spam Book: On Viruses, Porn and Other Anomalies From the Dark Side of Digital Culture, edited by Jussi Parikka and Tony D. Sampson, uses a relatively unique approach to add to the discourse surrounding critical understanding of the Internet and its cultural impact.
Skype is no longer spam free. This afternoon I was asked to add a new person to my Skype. The message it sends is the following:
Dear Sir/Madam:
first of all, thank you very much for your attention!
We are one of the leading international-trade wholesalers in China, mainly dealing with digital cameras,PSP,LCD TV,Laptops
Notebooks,Digital Video,Mp4,GPS,and…
Whether you’re the latest social networking site out of Silicon Valley, or a lowly blogpost fueled by coffee, plans don’t always work out. I started writing this post with the title The Wasteland of Web 2.0, and was going to describe my experiences with Spurl and Furl, two social bookmarking services in the worst kind of disrepair. What drew me to them was not their Flickry names, but that they both lacked an icon on Mashable’s list of social software applications.
It is well known that Google, which depends on every link it indexes to recommend search results, has a certain ‘vulnerability’ that blogs expose. Bloggers are professional-amateur-pointers. They publish frequently, they link a lot, and then they syndicate others’ links. Affectionately put, they give link love. But does Google love them back? (Note the URL in the screenshot below)
This blog is a real magnet for pingback spam lately. While I’d like to take it as a sign of our growing popularity, that would be like being flattered by calls from telemarketers. Also, it probably says more about the arms race between spammers and spam-filters: the trend for a while now is for spammers is to use RSS feeds…
A while ago I found this flyer tied to my bike with a rubber band. First I was astonished, then it made me laugh. I have grown up in a small town in the Netherlands and of course quite often I have found flyers at the windscreen of my car, but this analog spamming phenomenon in Amsterdam was new…
I was originally going to write about smart spam but recent spam led me to write about stupid spam.
Spammers are constantly improving their methods to get through spamfilters. They increasingly use random names and academic, computer and web related words to make spamfilters believe it is a valid message. However poetic these messages may seem they mean nothing to…
Mauri is “hello!” in I-Kiribati. Why are you telling me this? You probably ask yourself. Well, let me explain…
I was just checking out our statistics and the first three countries on the “visitors per country list”were no surprise: The Netherlands is first, then the U.S.A. and then the Indeterminable countries, whoever they are ;-). The big surprise was number…