MattJ talks about "Spam, Abuse and Moderation"

When? Wednesday, 2023-11-08 18:00 CET (always 2ⁿᵈ Wednesday of every month)

Where? In xHain hack+makespace, Grünberger Str. 16, 10243 Berlin

This time it is a hybrid meeting. Find out about our Jitsi at our virtual meeting place xmpp:berlin-meetup@conference.conversations.im?join.

#Jabber #XMPP #freeSoftware #community #xHain #Berlin #meetup #community #xhain #spam #abuse #moderation

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

Upon searching Amazon and Goodreads, author Jane Friedman recently discovered a half-dozen listings of fraudulent books using her name, likely filled with either junk or AI-generated content. Both Amazon and Goodreads resisted removing the faux titles until the author's complaints went viral on social media.

In a blog post titled "I Would Rather See My Books Get Pirated Than This (Or: Why Goodreads and Amazon Are Becoming Dumpster Fires)," published on Monday, Friedman detailed her struggle with the counterfeit books.

"Whoever’s doing this is obviously preying on writers who trust my name and think I’ve actually written these books," she wrote. "I have not. Most likely they’ve been generated by AI."

Enlarge / There could soon be much more of this on Reddit. (credit: Getty )

The Reddit community is still reckoning with the consequences of the platform's API price hike. The changes have led to the shuttering of numerous third-party Reddit apps and have pushed several important communities, like the Ask Me Anything ( AMAs ) organizers, to reduce or end their presence on the site.

The latest group to announce its departure is BotDefense. BotDefense, which helps removes rogue submission and comment bots from Reddit and which is maintained by volunteer moderators, is said to help moderate 3,650 subreddits. BotDefense's creator told Ars Technica that the team is now quitting over Reddit's "antagonistic actions" toward moderators and developers, with concerning implications for spam moderation on some large subreddits like r/space.

Valued bot fighter

BotDefense started in 2019 as a volunteer project and has been run by volunteer mods, known as "dequeued" and "andabrownn" on Reddit. Since then, it claims to have populated its ban list with 144,926 accounts, and it helps moderates subreddits with huge followings, like r/gaming (37.4 million members), /r/aww (34.2 million), r/music (32.4 million), r/Jokes (26.2 million), r/space (23.5 million), and /r/LifeProTips (22.2 million). Dequeued told Ars that other large subreddits BotDefense helps moderates include /r/food, /r/EarthPorn, /r/DIY, and /r/mildlyinteresting.

Enlarge (credit: SOPA Images / Contributor | LightRocket )

In what might be another blow to the stability of Twitter's trust and safety efforts, the company has allegedly stopped paying for Google Cloud and Amazon Web Services (AWS), which host tools that support the platform's safety measures, Platformer reported this weekend.

According to Platformer, Twitter relies on Google Cloud to host services "related to fighting spam, removing child sexual abuse material, and protecting accounts, among other things." That contract is up for renewal at the end of this month after being negotiated and signed prior to Elon Musk's takeover. Since "at least" March, Twitter has been pushing to renegotiate the contract ahead of renewal—unsurprisingly seeking to lower costs, Platformer reported.

But now it's unclear if the companies will find agreeable new terms on time or if Musk already intends to cancel the contract. Platformer reported that Twitter is rushing to transition services off the Google Cloud Platform and seemingly plans to drop the contract amid failed negotiations.

ZeroSpam

We will talk about Spam in the context of XMPP.

Holger (i.a. ejabberd developer and admin of the XMPP provider conversations.im and the instance of Freie Universität Berlin) and Ge0rG (i.a. author of the spam manifesto https://github.com/JabberSPAM/jabber-spam-fighting-manifesto, heavy user of the Prosody module mod_firewall and developer of the XMPP client yaxim) will give talks. MattJ (i.a. author of mod_firewall and Snikket) will join the meetup.

Afterwards, we will discuss the three types of spam: registration spam, presence subscription spam and spam messages (directly or via public group chats).

When? Wednesday, 2021-03-10 18:00 CET (always 2ⁿᵈ Wednesday of every month)

Where? Online, via our channel (xmpp:berlin-meetup@conference.conversations.im?join). A Jitsi Meet video conference will be announced there some minutes before the meeting starts.

See you then!

#jabber #xmpp #spam #chat #freesoftware #prosody #yaxim #jabberspam #snikket #meetup #berlin #community

Voitures, vélos, scooters... : la mobilité de demain se lit sur Vroom ! https://www.numerama.com/vroom/vroom//

L'article On a plongé dans le labyrinthe des DM Instagram pornographiques est apparu en premier sur Numerama .

Enlarge / The federal courthouse in Las Vegas, where Wallace was questioned about his money. (credit: Wikimedia Commons)

Update, 12/28/20 : It's the year end holiday season, and much of Ars staff is still enjoying some necessary downtime. While that happens, we're resurfacing some classic Ars stories like this 2013 excerpt from The Internet Police , Deputy Editor Nate Anderson's look at how the Internet changed the game for criminals and law enforcement ( now available in paperback !). This piece on bringing down junk email king Spamford Wallace first published on December 22, 2013, and it appears unchanged below.

O n a warm April morning in 2007, one of the world’s most notorious spammers walked through the doors of the Lloyd D. George Federal Courthouse in Las Vegas. Though the Federal Trade Commission was attempting to collect a $4 million judgment against him, Sanford “Spamford” Wallace showed up to his sworn deposition without a lawyer—and without any of the documents required of him.

Wallace, though nominally cooperative, had been nearly impossible to reach. When attorneys from the social network MySpace had sued him weeks before, the process server tasked with delivering legal documents couldn’t make contact with Wallace and eventually went to the OPM Nightclub where Wallace worked weekends as a $400-a-week disc jockey under the name “DJ MasterWeb.” The process server claimed to have approached Wallace at the club before being intercepted by security guards; the lawsuit papers were literally thrown at Wallace in an attempt to get good service on him.

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