Tag Archives: spam

A new low for #Linkedin

<rant>

I still find Linkedin useful for tracking my connections, but it looks like they completely lost direction. They’ve been shoving the stupid Pulse articles down their users throats on the most visible spot. I mean, it’s not even ads! They don’t even make anything off those idiotic articles most of which are irrelevant, low quality and overall pretty repulsive. Adblock takes care of them most of the time, but on the off occasion of it breaking from their HTML updates, again I get the misery that is Pulse right in my face.

Today though I was greeted with a particularly impressive gem. Written by one Harshit Nagpal, an Intern at the Indian Merchants’ Chamber, New Delhi India – apparently Linkedin thinks that my day must begin with the words of wisdom from this person – is a cheesy laundry list called 10 Movies Every Entrepreneur Should Watch, like so:

Screen Shot 2014-08-04 at 11.41.58 PM

Oh wait… the dude didn’t even write it! He straight-up stole the article verbatim from some guy named John Rampton. And this mess is promoted by Linkedin above all my contacts and anything I needed to actually get done there. Again, that’s an intern at Indian Merchants’ Chamber, and Linkedin is force-feeding me his stolen garbage above any ads that would actually make them money, or my contacts, which is really the only thing that matters to me on that flimsy website.

Can’t help the impression that Linkedin might just have punted on any meaningful development and is now limping along, milking the legacy user base and deteriorating into side projects like Pulse.

stopforumspam (or the idea anyway) is genius #stopforumspam #spam

Sharing the spam lists for the win. I get 0 spam on the bigger of my websites because all the garbage is filtered at the application level of course, but the spammy rat bastards were still hammering my precious little server with TCP connections. Enter a voting system that includes stopforumspam API, among other things. Every minute, so as to not cause any inconvenience to the forces for good, the script collects the consensus from several services on who of the current TCP connections is a lowlife spammer scumbag, and sends them straight to the iptables drop hell where they belong. Many thanks to the noble proprietors of services like akismet and stopforumspam for letting us rid this world of the spammer trash and making it a better place.