Posts tagged spam

Ultimate Adblock Privacy List

News

[ For you guys that know how this works, the filter subscription url for ablock plus is http://p.oito.eu/privacy.txt ]

I was having a chat the other day about privacy and how the value of facebook is around not only the people/clients, but also everything you/upload/say on facebook is property of facebook and even when you are online all those like buttons, means they are still tracking you and selling who you are and what you do to the highest bidder…

That got me thinking, first thing i did was “clean up my facebook account”, ill still use facebook its a great site and communication tool, and i know facebook works like a subversion repository and everything you do is recorded for all time, so my clean up is purely aesthetic, but still this way not only is my facebook a bit cleaner but its also a reminder for me to not add more personal stuff there…

Next i searched around for that privacy protection, from Noscript, to an improvement on my hosts file (mine is already a beauty to behold, but more on that on another post), but i realized that i could use the awesome adblocking extension, adblock plus to do that job, especially cause i want for instance to block facebook or twitter buttons, but i dont want to block facebook or twitter, so i searched around and actually found they already have a couple of nice “privacy” filters, i put “” cause although good, they aren’t as cutthroat as i want them to be, that took me to my next step….

My very own privacy filter for adblock plus, it isnt huge and its not all encompassing, i have no big issue with small vendors or even a big vendor knowing a bit about me, my issue is they know too much, so this adblock filter is more of a privacy crippler that in conjuction with my hosts file and adblock plain list, makes my web oh so much more wonderful and safe!

How to Install this Beauty

Its simple, get yourself a good browser like firefox or chrome (remember both these browsers already track some of what you do, so if you want to go private all the way go for SRWare or something), then find on their respective Add-Ons/Extensions sites Adblock Plus and install it, then on the adblock plus options you will see a Filter Subscriptions, just add a new one and put whatever name you want, like “Awesome Privacy List” and put this url http://p.oito.eu/privacy.txt and thats it! It will update itself once a week when i add or remove hosts, the original list is part my personal choices and the awesome privacy lists from Abine and Privacy Choice.

Note: Well this was shortlived! but mostly cause a few friends pointed out that other people were already doing this, so why should I! hehehe sorry, so check out Fanboys Anti Tracking+ Annoyances as well as Adversity! Its the ones i use and they kick ass!

Update on the Anti-Spam Txt

News

In the never ending fight against spam, i decided to update my imageboard anti-spam list, but im also centralising it and caching it (cdn and stuff on our oito.eu mirror domain), so its easier and quicker to use and update, so now the spam list is here at spam.txt just copy it over to your own spam list or just use as an extension! Voilá bad-guys gone!

As a note, it mostly includes common bad hosts,spam sites,short url providers and overall nasty sites that have spammed one of our image boards on one time or another, also if you think your site is wrongfully added to our spam list, then just send us a mail on the contact page and if you are right, we will remove you at once!

ImageBoard Spam List

Tech

Since i run several successful anonymous imageboards, one of the ways to prevent spam is to have a sort of spam list (i would say blacklist) of all the domains url’s that are not able to be posted on the board (since one of the main reasons to spam the boards is to post links to fishing or illegal sites), this way this prevents them being posted by bots altogether.

So its an essential tool to have a clean board and to keep things clean, even if later on more automated tools like akismet or defensio are included, this is still a nice clean and fast way to keep most spam or idiotic posts from the site, so the file is a simple spam.txt file on the root of the site, one domain/site per line, this of course is most useful to other imageboard hosts that use the same system (wakaba or kusaba clone software), so here is our very own custom spam.txt list hehehe for free yayy 1131 domains (i’m actually thinking about making our own system, so anyone can add links and have the latest version for their board so their system is always protected heheheh)

UPDATE (from tentakle and neechan):

Uhh since the last post we have added a bunch more, so there ya go an updated spam.txt this new list has 1372 domains that are/were used in spam posting on imageboards, the old link as well hehehe, you can use something like WinMerge or TextOpus to help merge your existing spam file with my awesome one ^^

Neechan Woes and Fixing Spam!

Update

Well we run neechan and tentakle (these are both anonymous image boards) and since like a month ago, we started getting bombed with CP , although completely against our rules, the idea of a image board is that anyone can post easily, so CP and other nasty stuff tends to show up from time to time, but that was not the case, this was continuous multiple posts a day, the idea is simple, to bypass our various protections, they just post a CP image with the url to visit on the image itself, so things like banning the domain aren’t going to work as well as banning just posting images, cause that’s a natural thing to do on a image boards, so what did we do?

Hummm we started by increasing the restrictions, adding captcha and starting to ban by image hash, however all of these the bots kept bypassing, old captcha systems can be broken pretty easily by software, images can be changed ever so slightly to bypass image hash, that was especially hard on neechan’s wabaka captcha, that was easily broken, this got to a point that rightly so someone told google that we were hosting CP ourself, but only between the time of posting and the time it takes for an admin (me) to delete it, so clearly we needed to improve even more our code, so we hacked the code and started using re-captcha.

So did it work? actually yes, not only cause re-captcha is quite a strong captcha system, but mostly cause these bots are targeted to this software and its weaknesses, if i would change to a more simple setup i believe it would also break the bots, well until it was programmed to break that particular system, but this way, we can outsource at least part of our security to someone that knows captchas and thus solving our problem, so will we switch tentakle also to re-captcha, hummm if CP starts passing through it, absolutely ^_^.oO ( thank you recaptcha )