yelvington.com

Cory Bergman over at LostRemote points to Action 25 News, a cable TV site for Macon, Ga., that NBC stations all over the country are reporting is a fake set up by Internet scammers selling DVD "training" programs. Apparently the website the website was created to lend credibility by having a fake TV consumer reporter claim you can make $84,000 a year by working at home.

If you think it looks real and believable, it's not just the garish primary colors, smiling faces of the hometown news team, and irritating scrolling marquee ticker. The design was stolen from a real TV website. Looking at the HTML code I noticed metrics and ad tags that quickly led me to WAXN64 in Charlotte, a UHF station affiliated with Cox Television and Internet Broadcasting (IBSys).

As newspapers work to improve their search experience and embrace Web search as well as on-site search, they're being exploited by a new round of automated blog spam that displays Internet drug listings right on the newspapers' websites.

This allows unscrupulous scammers to present their pitch under the "trusted information provider" brand of the newspaper. And it undoubtedly undermines the newspaper's brand.

Tribune Company and McClatchy sites in particular are being targeted. [Update: nytimes.com also is being exploited.]

Various "Canadian drugstore" sites are being promoted, but a minor bit of domain detective work traces much of this back to Israel, where several "businesses" registered to people with Russian surnames have registered a number of prescription-drug domains.

On the McClatchy sites, it's an Overture clickthrough tag that's being exploited. Here's an example, with the domain adjusted to my site in order not to promote the drug spammer:
http://www.miamiherald.com/cgi-bin/mi/overture/overture.pl?Keywords=site...

On the Tribune sites, the same trick looks like this:
http://www.orlandosentinel.com/search/dispatcher.front?Query=site:yelvin...

(Go ahead and click on those links; they're safe, and they will show you how the result set is presented.)

In both cases, a bit of checking of the HTTP request headers would probably allow the newspaper's search script to foil the spammer with minimal side effects.

These blog spammers attack websites with automated scripts that attempt to post comments on blog entries. Typically several dozen comments containing little more than the Web links are posted at once.

There are several techniques blog sites can use to foil these attacks.

Registration-only commenting stops most of it, although a few blog spammers do register usernames, then return weeks or months later with scripts programmed to log in and post spam.

Requiring approval of the posting (as I do) prevents the spam from being made public, at the cost of some administrative overhead to delete the evil and promote the good.

Captcha, a technique that requires users to answer a question in order to post, is the most effective technique. There are several variations. One uses a warped graphic image of a random password that the user has to type. Another asks the user to type the Nth word of a random sentence. And yet another asks the user to perform a calculation, or answer a trivia question. They're all remarkably annoying to the innocent.