Okay and there's me thinking my first story on my video news show (that's over due , due to someone branding it a 'failure' and putting me of doing anything at all)was gonna be looking at the fact bloggers are gonna be up for charges and court if they don't pay up for quotes and linking to press articles syndicated by Associated Press - heck as long as wiki and digg don't get there stuff from there I guess I'm okay ?
Anyway, Remeber the 'crushes' app that came out last year on facebook, well the funnation one catches people out in a similar way - curiousity + friendly people = some spyware geek somewhere is probabley having a right laugh at us unfortunate folks that contracted - "googlelinks" and gave it to all our friends, without our permission
- one word for funnation - SPAMBOT - hiding in the guise of a 'friend importer' - i.e a cross platform friend finder - twitter to plurk have a real one - funation have a machine gun rather than a hoover - if you see what I'm saying - they sent out bulk mail to ALL your facebook contacts - I didn't try the myspace button and other options - I unfortunatley chose my biggest collection of friends, family & network buddies - and these wipper snappers - managd to e-mail every single person (something even I am not allowed to do on facebook - let alone some third party spam bot outside of facebook)
And I ended up with 40 complaints and some confused friends - some of which have only known me for a while. I have never used e-mail as a marketing method - because I know all about the laws and it scared me off for years - why do you think I love facebook, feedburner and - it doesn't involve messaging without a persons permission - is why.
This dumb ass action by funnation sums up just what I thought - spammer have no idea how to network - this - hack of social networks is pathetic.
I feel daft as a brush passing on this thing - bit like head lice I guess - I'm hoping facebook will sort them out - they obviously have an API key of some sort on funnation to allow a user to access facebook via them - an statement of apology to any users, such as myself and my buddies - and a change of the form - is needed as minium.
The people are just people that you get on any social network - they aren't the problem - it's knowing who decided it was a good idea to spam a well established network with 3 rate spamming gear and think nobody would eventually notice ? - using google links was also really dumb - I've yet to see if they are linked up to an adsense account - or used to avoid getting caught out ?
Facebook is acting really weird & keeps going off too - is this because they are preparing for the changover to new profiles and at the same time are being hit by a spambot - I wonder what the effect on servers is if lots & lots of friend requests (send out by a bot)are delivered to loads of friends - remember I had 639 facebook e-mails stolen - and alot of my friends have large lists of people too, we all collect friends, then get to know some, digard others etc. I've always presumed that lots of messages hammering at a server causes it to crash more often, for the sam reason I can't have too many apps. running on my pc -
I also use facebook like some people use twitter - now a spambot like this one spamming a site like twitter - that is already clogged would bring it down.
So only advice I can give in retrospect is - watch out - they are still out there hyjacking accounts, leeching traffic in an unethical manner using people's trust and good will - the lady who sent it to me probably had no idea - i just joined up as i belong to many folk accross networks.
Maybe I should have a warning attached that I do get stung by Internet bee's on average of once every 5 months - usually on something quite cheap and tacky - but atlast it's not porn or viruses or viruses anymore - in 2001 I probably had every piece of spyware imaginable on my machine - so i can see how people get caught up having something gross on their machines they don't want.
I just don't like giving the lurgy to people on-line, it's kind of embaressing after all this time - so I am not a happy bunny with these spambot and if it tries to roadkill me....it's a wasted journey x_X I am a zombie already, you'll get nothing of value from me - i have sod all but an internet connection and a pc ( second hand off ebay)
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