Dave Delaney » spam

I Kiva spammed you - sorry

Dave — Sun, 17 Jan 2010 18:44:10 +0000

Last night I was updating my Kiva.org account, the popular micro-loaning non profit. I love the way I can loan out money to entrepreneurs who need it to survive. What’s great is that they gradually reimburse me, so I can re-loan the funds to other people in need.

I was busy doing ten things at once last night on the computer, nothing new there. The ten things included re-loaning money in my Kiva account.

Part of the checkout process includes an option to invite friends to join Kiva. I did this, but had only intended to send the invite to a few people, not my entire Gmail contacts. Oops.

I’ve already received a handful of replies from you, the majority have been really positive. Kiva is a great organization that I’m proud to be a member of. However, I didn’t mean to spam you all with a Kiva invite.

I apologize for the mix up. I hope we can still be buds.

Cheers,
Dave

How To Stop Spam

Dave — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 03:35:55 +0000

A few weeks ago at Gnomedex one of the speakers sparked a thought in my head. Admitted ex-black hat spammer, Todd Friesen spoke to the crowd about how he use to spam blog and forum comments and create splogs for money. I should add here that he seems like a good guy now, so give him a break. It took him a lot of courage to get up on stage and admit to what he use to do.

During the Question & Answer period I challenged him to connect with Ronni Bennett, a self-titled “elder blogger”. I met Ronni at Gnomedex three years ago when she spoke about browser and content design for our elders. Ronni’s blog has a big audience of older folks as subscribers and contributors. Her blog seemed like a perfect place for Todd to write a post about how spammers operate.

I’ve been thinking about how we can help educate our parents and grandparents on how to identify spam and phishing schemes. The truth is that online scams would not exist if they did not work. The very young would be naive enough to fall for spam online, but they do not have bank accounts. This leaves me assuming that the majority of victims are the older people in our lives.

How can we teach our elders to spot a scam online?

Photo by: lyzadanger

Hi, thanks for following me on Twitter...

Dave — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 15:03:06 +0000

I’ve been noticing loads of direct messages from people on Twitter when I start following them lately. I recently wrote a post about using this as a method to deliver Twitter spam. I’m obviously not advocating doing this for evil purposes, but I would love to know what your thoughts are about it.

I’m going to hold off on sharing my personal thoughts, so I can find out first what YOU think. I would appreciate it if you could take my very quick poll. Thanks.

What do you think about Twitter DM follow auto replies?

UPDATE FROM TWITTER (12/07/08): @sondernagle just sent me this handy link: http://turnthisthingoff.com/