bybjorn.com | Bjørn Børresen - freelance web developer » spam http://www.bybjorn.com bybjorn.com >> Bjørn Børresen - freelance web developer Tue, 27 Jul 2010 11:08:07 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0 How to stop MSN spam with Pidgin http://www.bybjorn.com/85/ http://www.bybjorn.com/85/#comments Mon, 27 Oct 2008 17:42:21 +0000 Bjørn Børresen http://bie.no/blog/?p=85 For those of you who don’t know, Pidgin is an open source Instant Message client which supports MSN, ICQ, the jabber protocol (which means GTalk) etc.

After installing it however, I started getting a lot of MSN spam. You know, IM’s from random people telling me to visit places where I could gamble with my money, or alternatively my health (with cheap pills).

Turns out Pidgin defaults to letting everyone contact you. You can change this in Tools -> Privacy.

So, you don’t want this:

.. but you do want this:

That is, only allowing people on your buddy list to contact you.

Once set, all spam was gone :-)

By the way, Pidgin is a pretty smart name for that app. Being a non-native english speaker I thought Pidgin was referring to the bird Pigeon. Well, turns out this is the definition for Pidgin:

A linguistically simplified, mixed and restricted language used in limited contact situations between people who have no common language.

.. and that’s perfect for Pidgin cause it supports multiple protocols, which means it enables people with no common language (protocol) to talk to eachother. I bet the protocol implementations aren’t 100% either, so that means it’s also a simplified, mixed and restricted language ;-)

In addition to that, they can use a Pigeon as their mascot since it’s pronounced the same! I’m in awe.

]]> http://www.bybjorn.com/85/feed/ 1 How I ruthlessly referrer-spam everyone I know http://www.bybjorn.com/50/ http://www.bybjorn.com/50/#comments Mon, 25 Sep 2006 16:44:01 +0000 Bjørn Børresen http://bie.no/blog/marketing/2006/09/how-i-ruthlessly-referrer-spam-everyone-i-know/ I’ve used Privoxy for several years now and love it. For those of you not familiar with the program it’s basically just a local proxy that you can run your browsers through that will strip ads and make sure your privacy is intact while surfing the net.

One neat thing about it is that it’s very configurable, and you can also specify extra header info to send. So, this gave me an idea .. why not just send one of my sites as referer. That way, I’m always promoting my site when I’m mindlessly surfing the web.

Here’s how my config looks

privoxy config

So, if I were to visit an env checker right now I’d get HTTP_REFERER: http://www.43min.com/.

How is this promotion you might ask? Well, webmasters are curious animals, they check their logs, and when they see a referer they want to know why that site is showing up in their logs. And that’s another visitor for me :-)

I wasn’t really sure anyone would notice until I played Squash with a friend of mine that runs a script site which I had visited the day before. In the middle of the game he says “Hey, I saw I got a hit from your site yesterday” and was wondering if I had linked him.

I think this is pretty harmless, and yes, the title was probably overdoing it a bit ;)

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