My friend saw this blog and said it looks spammy; must be the blockquotes.
Tagged: spam RSS
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kahwee
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kahwee
The ad that annoys me so much – Evony.
(Now we all only look at the registration fields, right?)
Guardian discusses Has Evony become the most despised game on the web? http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/gamesblog/2009/jul/15/games-evony-spam-internet
Here is some evidence that Evony has been spamming blogs with comments (that are thankfully caught with Akismet): http://www.bruceongames.com/2009/07/10/dont-play-evony/
And they had this ridiculous program iEvony: http://www.arksark.org/blog/2009/07/05/evony-a-patchwork-of-stolen-parts/
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uzyn
I didn’t know they spam until this.
I just thought they have too much marketing money and decides to buy all Adwords’ inventory.
1. Sex
2. Spam
3. ????
4. Profit! -
kahwee
Yeah and they are apparently very successful considering the amount of money they can spend on the ads. Terrible business practice.
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uzyn
Just wondering, would you have a problem with them had they only buy a huge load of google adwords (ie. you get to see the busty lady everywhere but there is no foul play, ie. spamming) ?
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kahwee
I think I’m just sick of seeing that art work. Maybe they could rotate the ladies? Haha
But that’s how ads are. Evony ads are better then some ads that promises you won something. I gotten used to it already.
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Lee
I am a student studying computer games design at uni and decided to investigate Evony.com.
Just to see what some of these games are like etc. etc.
The game is actually kind of cool (found myself addicted and even spent a little money on it).
But I started to notice HUGE bandwidth use by the site as I played.
I am not the only one either, there are comments on the evony forums about this.
This is odd because all of the client info, the animations etc. are all downloaded in one big download at the start.
There is no streaming media so I began to wonder what was going on.To cut a long story short I decided to break the law and reverse engineer Evony’s client.
Not to cheat. Not to rip them off or even to use even a scrap of the code.
But just to poke about a bit and find out what was going on, maybe even offer them some ways to improve things.Aside from the fact that the whole thing is very poorly constructed (it is really very beginner coder level stuff. Reminds me of a lot of
what the first year students produce for assignments) it contained some very interesting information.Included with the client are 2 peices of tracking software that monitor your web use and which applications you have open while the client is running.
These do not install independently on the machine though due to the limitations of flash and do not actually damage anything.
But they harvest massive volumes of information. My firewall was blocking a lot of outgoing transmissions and it turns out that these
were the data trying to be sent out. So they know nothing about me. lol.
However there is a LOT of data coming IN over the ports the client uses. In otherwords it is downloading something into my cache for use later.
I have bandiwdth restriction which slows these types of tricks down and I completely clear my cache every couple of hours if I am heavily using the net.I also noticed that all the varanbles etc. are named Civony still and that there are multiple references to UMGE.
Even a couple of folders are simply called UMGE, one of these folders contains one of the spyware programs.
So I can only guess at where the data would end up if I didnt have a good firewall.There are also commented out sections in the code which contain references to UMGE and Lam himself, though low on details.
Thank you for reading this.
Lee
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kahwee
Thanks Lee.
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calvin
I couldn’t agree more. The shamelessness is almost impressive in its absurdity. I finally broke down myself and had to write about it.
http://machetesquadhq.com/2009/11/15/shameless-advertising-evony-pulls-the-titties-card/
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kahwee
I received a couple of Tagged invites from my friends too. I pretty much had enough of social network sign ups. It gets really tiring to sign up so I ignored it. Luckily. Tagged, as The Independent puts it, has stolen the identities of > 60 million users!
60 million stung in social networking rip-off
New York’s attorney general says that Tagged.com stole the identities of more than 60 million internet users worldwide – by sending emails that raided their private accounts.
“This company stole the address books and identities of millions of people,” Cuomo said in a statement. “Consumers had their privacy invaded and were forced into the embarrassing position of having to apologise to all their email contacts for Tagged’s unethical – and illegal – behaviour.”
Cuomo said Tagged acquired most of them fraudulently, sending unsuspecting recipients emails that urged them to view private photos posted by friends.
The message read: “(name of friend) sent you photos on Tagged.”
When recipients tried to access the photos, Cuomo said they would in effect become new members of the site – without ever seeing any photos.
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uzyn
That’s really too much.
It’s just lucky/unlucky that Tagged is a tangible/contactable company. Any sites could’ve done the same and grew big through such unethical practice while hiding their true identity.
Sad thing is that such unethical practice is still too beneficial to stop. Same reason why spam and 419 scams are still aplenty today.
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kahwee
I have been receiving Michael Jackson related spam on my other blog. It just is kinda sad that spammers are making use of such situation.
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uzyn
Flicker is down.
Flicker is down for maintenance. Please check back again soon
Yes it is, but not really.
A unique, though lame, attempt at getting linkbacks.
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kahwee
Wow, this could actually generate significant revenue.
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uzyn
Oh, they have taken down the ‘Tweet This’ button on the homepage.
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kahwee
This type of spam has been annoying me. They can’t be filtered by spam filters and all the links are dead too:
I have been receiving this type of spam, what does it mean
What do you think is the rationale of sending these sort of spam?
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uzyn
And I’ve been receiving one spam in Thai everyday for 3 days in a row now.
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kahwee
Yours is odd too. Are spammers trying to confuse us now?
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Lee and one other person are discussing. 
uzyn 10:40 pm on August 3, 2009 Permalink
And probably the lack of images and self-taken photographs.