Warning: Undefined array key "HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE" in /datadisk/www/lightbluetouchpaper/index.php on line 18

Deprecated: strtolower(): Passing null to parameter #1 ($string) of type string is deprecated in /datadisk/www/lightbluetouchpaper/index.php on line 18
2007-08-30 – Light Blue Touchpaper

Light Blue Touchpaper

Day: August 30, 2007

  • The interns of Privila

    Long-time readers will recall that I was spammed with an invitation to swap links with the European Human Rights Centre, a plagiarised site that exists to make money out of job listings and Google ads. Well, some more email spam has drawn my attention to something rather different:

    From: “Elanor Radaker” <links@bustem.com>
    Subject: Wanna Swap Links
    Date: Thu, 19 Apr 2007 01:42:37 -0500

    Hi,H

    I’ve been working extremely hard on my friend’s website bustem.com and if you like what we’ve done, a link from <elided> would be greatly appreciated. If you are interested in a link exchange please …

    <snip>

    Thank you we greatly appreciate the help! If you have any questions please let me know!

    Respectfully,

    Elanor Radaker

    This site, bustem.com, is not quite as the email claims. However, it is not plagiarised. Far from it, the content has been written to order for Privila Inc by some members of a small army of unpaid interns… and when one starts looking, there are literally hundreds of similar sites.

    (more…)

  • Econometrics of wickedness

    Last Thursday I gave a tech talk at Google; you can now watch it online. It’s about work a number of us have done on searching for covert communities, with a focus on reputation thieves, phisherman, fake banks and other dodgy businesses.

    While in California I also gave a talk on Information Security Economics, first as a keynote talk at Crypto and later as a seminar at Berkeley (the slides are here).