Blackhat SEO – Esrun

I’m absolutely gobsmacked at McAfee SiteAdvisor. I was checking the feedback for one of my sites recently on there and noticed it has a ‘Email tests’ section.

After reading about it, I realised that what they basically do is send a bot to your website and auto fill any form they can fill with email addresses and fake subject/message (hello, chinese spammers!?).

They then base the spam score on the amount of emails they recieve a month from filling out that form and then how spammy their bot thinks the reply was. In this case it’s given a 50% spam score.

I had replied just once and I can see my email address sitting there as the reply. So I’ve wasted my time emailing back this person JUST IN CASE it was a legitmate email and then they have the cheek to call me an email spammer?

WHAT … THE … FUCK!

Its a depressing time when your countries government website has a “beta” label on it and shows a 404 on the homepage – http://www.number10.gov.uk/

Myself, I’m a fan of Paypal. I don’t think much of their ebay monopoly schemes and don’t feel confident as a seller but as a buyer its great.. widely accepted, easy to use and good buyer protection.

However sometimes you have to pay people who live in the middle of a desert and such like. Not being a fan of scammers union western union, it kind of limits your options. So I decided to use moneybookers (MB) since it’s pretty widely used in those out of the way areas.

However moneybookers have these big warnings about doing a bank transfer to your moneybookers account from a bank account thats not in your name.. It’s a pain in the butt that you have to manually send them the money rather than them debit it like Paypal but hey ho.

So the account was funded but accidentally from an account in a different name to that which the MB accounts was in. Thinking it would be rejected as their site says, another transfer was made from the correct bank account.

Today I login and get a huge rant in red bold letters saying this..

IMPORTANT INFORMATION:
YOUR RECENT MONEYBOOKERS DEPOSIT

No cash or 3rd party deposits!!! You attempted to fund your Moneybookers account from a bank account in someone else’s name:

Amount: GBP XYXYXY
Bank: Lloyds TSB

While obtaining the bank details for your 3rd party you were clearly warned that Moneybookers does not allow 3rd party deposits for funding of E-MONEY accounts.

ALL FUNDS MUST ORIGINATE FROM A BANK ACCOUNT HELD IN YOUR NAME!

You were expressly warned that you will be charged all banking and administrative costs should you attempt a 3rd party deposit to your Moneybookers account. We have therefore credited this deposit to you with a deduction of EUR 10.– administration fee.

WARNING! This is a one-time exception! Should you attempt further 3rd party deposits, you may make yourself suspicious of money laundering activities.

I might make myself suspcious of money laundering activities? Hey, I’m already suspicious but I think it the russians! Seems like some MB employee sitting behind his desk woke up on the wrong side of the bed today!

Want to make a quick buck? There’s still money to be made in free webhosting. All that free content, all those places to inject links or for those darker people maybe even drop a little something.

Anyway, AOL Hometown is closing its doors which means there’s currently thousands of people looking for a new free host and most of them have no clue how to move their stuff over or where to go because… well because they’re AOL users.

Go buy yourself a cheap dedi, chuck together a script that will automatically scrape the users content (or use their FTP details) and host it for free.

You’ll get good publicity for being their savour and you’ll suddenly be in control of thousands of sites

Why don’t I do it? I’m busy!

There’s a project I have wanted to do for a long time but I can’t see myself ever having the time. However I’m sure someone out there might be interested so here it is…

Everyone knows you can find pretty much any song old and new on youtube, I myself use it quite often instead of downloading songs.

What would be great is a community site where you can enter an artist (similar to Last FM I guess) and it brings back all songs by that artist, maybe split into correct albums if you know the right places to scrape and use as a consolidating database.

You could then select the album you wanted to listen to and using a fancy ajax front end, automatically switch between each song so you can just leave it open and running in a firefox tab.

Each song/video could be rated on its accuracy and quality by users and also have its youtube ratings checked since there are usually many variations of songs available on Youtube, some better than others.

The system would let you save, search and rate others playlists.

So if you’re bored, sitting there thinking what you could be coding…. do this!