The skinny:

1. Some eTards decided to harass Officer John Nohej for having a MySpace friend who linked to adult content when he was simply trying to reach out to kids at the middle school he is assigned to.

2. Hilarity ensues as netizens rip the eTards apart for this retardedness. The school he works at? They had a link to a domain parking page from a belly up clip art site they linked to. What ads were splashed across that domain parking page? Gay porn, seriously. It got worse for them when I pointed out that the technology-challenged “elite cyber crimes task force” investigating Officer Nohej is guilty of all sorts of stuff that also doesn’t matter on MySpace.

3. In their infinite wisdom, they decided to (screw up while trying to) hide their own “misdeeds”…

Their friend list from a few days back:

Their friend list and comments now:

What the hell?

They ran to another third party site and got code to hide their friend list and comments. And, once again… they didn’t remove the extra code included which links to a site pushing adware:

What kind of places does that site link to?

Yuppers, the ad network that site does business with serves up a ton of Zango banners. Nice.

I think it’s time for this “elite” interweb task force to go ahead and ask one of the kids they are supposedly protecting to help them out with their MySpace.

Update:
They went ahead and deleted every comment from their MySpace page. lolz

I responded to Alex’s blog entry about this with the following:

Ouch. I’ve sent plenty of people their way over the years. This stinks the same as weight loss, penis enlargement, and other nonsense being allowed to make ad buys from Discovery, History Channel, etc.

“We are known to deal with facts and provide the best information possible.”

“Here’s a bunch of money. Let’s exploit that trust you’ve built up.”

“Hells yeah.”

Seriously:

What really pisses me off is that I know FastClick has category options for their publishers. And, I’d bet PaperGhost’s underoos that a site producing as many impressions as Snopes can get them to filter ads from their rotation. Bottom line: they aren’t idiots and are intentionally serving such ads on their site. It’s obviously all about the big bling bling for them.

Might as well find a similar site, with ethics:
Urban Legends (minus Snopes)

If you want to send Snopes a message about this mess, here’s their contact page.

Update:
You probably shouldn’t even bother contacting them. Here’s a thread on their own forum with members bitching about such practices from September of 2005. I saved a copy of that just in case they delete it ;-)

Seeing that Zango (I’d link to their Wikipedia article, but they keep editing it themselves) was a member of the Better Business Bureau was a big laugh from get-go. I came across that tidbit of info back in November when I saw a BBBOnline Reliability Program seal on Seekmo - one of Zango’s properties. Doing a quick search on TheBBB.org revealed that Zango was in fact a member back then. Not just regular members though, those asshats were in the President’s Club of the BBB!

“We’re beginning to wonder whether George Bush is going to get around to declaring in a State of the Union speech that Zango belongs to the Axis of Evil.”
- The Guardian

How exactly does a company with such a super-duper-scumtastic reputation gain membership to the BBB? And, what retard over there approved their application for the President’s Club? It’s not like they hadn’t already been outed for being downright thieves and interweb hoodlums while operating under the name 180solutions.

continue reading "Zango: Booted from the Better Business Bureau"

A few weeks back I posted this blog entry predicting that QuickTime embeds would be used for upcoming MySpace worms and other evilness. Sure enough, ten days later I broke the story of the latest worm to hit MySpace. After my buddy PaperGhost wrote about it on his personal and company blogs it exploded all over the interwebz.

The cleanup process has been laughable at best so far. Brian Krebs over at the Washington Post slammed Apple and MySpace for the “yes, we is be retarded” move of having MySpace distribute a patch for QuickTime. And, MySpace has been playing the blame game by insinuating that Apple is at fault for the worm.

continue reading "Myspace Tom Pwned While Trying to Blame Apple"

Yesterday, a metric ton of MySpace accounts were infected with yet another worm. As I predicted ten days ago, it was accomplished via a QuickTime embed. Visiting the profile of anyone infected would cause the navigation links across the top of your profile (Home | Browse | Search | Invite | etc…) to be replaced by fake navigation links which all linked to a spoof MySpace login page via some basic CSS and HTML added to your “About Me” section. And, the QuickTime embed was added to one of your “Interests” sections to further propagate this worm / phishing attack. At a glance, this looked like nothing more than that: a worm being used to phish MySpace passwords.

continue reading "MySpace Worm: Phishing Accounts and Spreading Zango Porn"