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Jim and James over at HotOrNot.com just made some major changes…

Just wanted to drop you a note to let you know that we’ve made HOTorNOT free! You no longer need to buy a star membership in order to write your double matches ;)

We’ve made a lot of changes to the site recently and much more is in the works. So if you haven’t been on in a while, log back in and check it out!

The free as in beer thing was inevitable with all the social networking sites now. The only surprise was that it didn’t happen sooner. The “lot of changes” line piqued my interest enough to log in to see what was up though. That’s where I found the huge surprise: a site finally managed to be less secure than MySpace. Seriously, it’s that bad. The new Hot or Not is wide open to massive spam campaigns, XSS worms, and all sorts of tomfoolery. It is nothing short of being the Script Kiddies and Spammers Paradise of the moment.

After giving myself a two minute self tour, this is what I discovered and was able to do:

The “lot of change” that opened the flood gates is their new “Super Profiles”. There’s nothing really super about them. They are just profile pages with some extremely basic social networking features. Just like in MySpace Land, the user customization is where it gets ugly.

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Yeah, I know. Picking on Tom is akin to pushing a kid with Down Syndrome and Cerebral Palsy onto a lake covered by a thin layer of ice. I guess this just makes me a big mean bully, but the dude should know better than to post garbage when a zillion people are going to read it.

Here’s his latest announcement that splashed across millions of screens yesterday:

Now, let’s rip that apart to see what he was really saying…

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In case you haven’t heard…

There’s a zillion billion news stories going around about MySpace filing suit against Scott Richter who is fairly well known as the “Spam King”. He picked up that name after owning a clothing line that used it (in violation of someones trademark, naturally) and for… Well, being one of the biggest shit-bags to ever grace the net with massive loads of spam.

The suit filed by MySpace alleges that Richter and his company; OptInRealBig which is the parent company of the CPAEmpire.com CPA network, has been spamming MySpace users via bulletins from phished accounts. This isn’t shocking news to me since I busted someone sending traffic to CPAEmpire affiliate links in that exact fashion over a month ago.

If the rumor mill is correct, Scott Richter is simply the beginning of this. Apparently, MySpace plans to file similar suits against over 20 ad networks. Since that suit against Richter has been filed, this is no surprise either.

The below are some excepts from a email convo I had with a MySpace employee back in June of 2006. He initiated the correspondence after reading something I wrote about the adult webcam spam (NSFW) that’s extremely popular on MySpace.

“I’m curious what advice you have for us? We have a good team on it, but don’t have the inside perspective you do ”

“My idea is extremely simple: Sue them. And, have them reprimanded any way you can from a criminal standpoint… You guys have a ton of claims that could be made… negative effect on your brand, hurts your CPM rates, ruins user experience, etc.”

Well, it looks like they’re finally going to be smart about this. Or, are they? There’s some major issues that come along with the “sue the bastards” approach…

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