On 22/05/13 19:07, halz wrote:
Do you think we should try to contact them and explain
that they
are behaving badly? Maybe on these forums. Maybe we'd have to spam
them back repeatedly with such messages as they get removed by the
admins.
I don't think that would be effective.
And on youtube do you think we can get videos like
this
removed?
Feel free to try.
We can at least comment on them and vote them down
(Youtube finds quite a lot of similar videos) How about unleashing
a bit of "ethical hacking" e.g. DDOS attacks on people distributing
this software?
You can go to jail for that, in a lot of places. Even if they DDoS'd
you first, and you DDoS'd them back, you'd be more likely to go to
jail than them, because being an amateur, you'd be more likely to slip
up in some traceable way.
I think the only effective way to deal with wiki spam would be to
reduce the profit margin. That means either making it more expensive,
say with technical anti-spam tools, or making the revenue smaller, by
getting their sites delisted from Google, and by finding legal ways to
reduce direct revenue sources like pay-per-click search engine
affiliate schemes.
From the experience with email spam, we can expect that
if some
organisation became successful in this goal of reducing the
effectiveness of wiki and blog spam, that organisation would come
under attack, by DDoS and other means. So it's not a task for the
faint-hearted.
-- Tim Starling