Tag Archives: spam

Axios reports: The Republican National Committee (RNC) has filed a lawsuit against Google in a U.S. district court in California for allegedly putting its campaign emails in the spam folders of its millions of users. Why it matters: Google last month launched a pilot program to keep campaign emails out of spam. But the RNC has been criticizing the program, …

Bloomberg News reports: The Federal Communications Commission has ordered phone companies to stop carrying traffic related to robocalls about scam auto warranties. US voice service providers must now “take all necessary steps to avoid carrying this robocall traffic,” or provide a report outlining how they’re mitigating the traffic, the FCC’s Robocall Response Team said in a statement on Thursday. The …

The Verge reports: Facebook is opening up about the behind-the-scenes tools it uses to combat fake account creation on its platforms, and the company says it has a new artificial intelligence-powered method known as Deep Entity Classification (DEC) that’s proved especially effective. DEC is a machine learning model that doesn’t just take into account the activity of the suspect account, …

Broadcasting & Cable reports: The House Energy & Commerce Committee has voted unanimously to dramatically raise the per-violation fines for illegal robocalls. That was part of an omnibus bill, the “Stopping Bad Robocalls Act,” which also passed unanimously (48-0)* as part of a markup for a couple dozen bills. The bill, actually a combination of five bills, had passed unanimously …

The Verge reports: On a party-line vote, the FCC today approved a controversial measure that gives mobile phone carriers more power over text messages. The agency’s Republican leadership has pushed for the measure, which would classify text messaging as an information service. The move will give carriers leeway to stop spam texts without fear of breaking the law, Chairman Ajit …

The spam companies that sell fake Twitter followers and other false social media boosts have been dropping their prices. Usually their emails demand much more money than the one I just received. Last week I got an offer to create my Wikipedia entry for a “mere but non-negotiable $500 fee.” I guess that’s a lot more work.

The New York Post is slamming the Times this morning after the Grey Lady accidentally sent a discount offer to over eight million subscribers then later claimed that the message was actually sent by spammers. “The e-mail is SPAM and was not sent from The New York Times. We are alerting subscribers immediately,” the paper told reporters by e-mail at …

Russian authorities have shut down a single scamster who was estimated to be responsible for 20% of all the spam on the internet. You may not have noticed, but since late last month, the world supply of Viagra ads and other e-mail spam has dropped by an estimated one-fifth. With 200 billion spam messages in circulation each day, there is …

Is it just me or has Gmail just given up on spam blocking? A year ago I’d get one or two a week, max. Lately, it’s 20 or 30 a day. Annoyed!

Third runner-up social network Friendster relaunched this weekend. Via Techcrunch: Friendster outlines some of the changes in a video (embedded below), in which it calls out other social networks (*cough* Facebook and *cough* MySpace) for being plain and boring. My absolute favorite part of the video: “I mean, if everyone’s there, woop de doo”. Friendster in the clip says the …

Via BBC: The first recognizable e-mail marketing message was sent on 3 May, 1978 to 400 people on behalf of DEC – a now-defunct computer-maker. The message was sent via Arpanet – the internet’s forerunner – and won its sender much criticism from recipients. Thirty years on, spam has grown into an underground industry that sends out billions of messages …