Elliott C. Back: Internet & Technology

I just received an interesting email, which “offers” to help me secure my .com domain name in the Chinese varieties .cn and .hk. It’s more of a threatening piece of spam, because it carries the fear that if I do not avail myself of their services, them or another company will steal my brand!

Subject: YOUR DOMAIN NAME (elliottback)’S CURRENT SITUATION

Dear ELLIOTT C.Back

We are the domain name registration organization in Hong Kong, ,which mainly deal with the domain names’ conflicts of the company in China and Asia regions.We have received an formal application online from one company named “TianHaiYuanTong (China) Investment Co.Ltd” who is trying to apply for the domain names(www. elliottback.cn www. elliottback.hk etc.) and the Internet keyword(elliottback) as their domain name and internet brand on Oct 6,2008.After our initial examination, we found that the keywords and domain names being applied are the same as your company’s name and trademark. These days we are dealing with it. If you don’t know this company, we doubt that they buy these domain names with other aims. We have not started the registration for TianHaiYuanTong company until now. In order to deal with this issue better, please contact us by telephone or email as soon as possible.

Best Regards,
Boyce Meng

Tel: +852-31757931 (ext8048)
Fax: +852- 31757932
Email: boyce.meng@hk-nsc.org.cn

Hong Kong Network Service Company Limited
website: www.hknsc.hk

However, as far as I can tell, there is no such “Tian Hai Yuan Tong” company, and I am not replying. I advise you to do the same, and post any more samples of this spam in the comments!

I’ve just added two little cute features to the main page of my website. They don’t do much more than improve the usability and aesthetic of the front page by a tiny margin. The first is quite practical–it alerts you and sets the 404 status code if you loaded my site through a domain or subdomain:

The second is a Flickr badge across the top of my page, with a custom-made Flickr logo to take you to my Flick page:

But this is Web 2.0, and I use the Thickbox script in other places on my site, so why not here too?

It’s fun tinkering around with your main page. I need to add a cookie-rotator to the image on the front page, rather than make it time based. Then people can see different versions of me everytime they come back, rather than the current “new elliott at 1 AM” business.

I got a lovely email just now threatening me for being a notorious spammer:

Your doing it to drive up your Google Rank is pitiful, though I’ve informed Google of your attempts to game their system. Further evidence of scraping will be dealt with through the legal system. Perhaps a note to [your employer] will be of use as well.

I sent back my reply, which indicates that no I am not a spammer, thank you very much:

I’m terribly sorry you are experiencing web scrapers, but honest-to-god it’s not me. I wrote a plugin a long time ago for Wordpress called “WP Autoblog” that can take an RSS feed and import them as a series of posts. The posts get branded with attribution like “Post by XYZ and software by me” which you’re probably mistaking for something I’m actively a part of. I wrote the plugin to aggregate some of my family blogs (ericback.com, elliottback.com) together into a single feed, but it quickly became abused by spammers so I pulled it. You can read more here.

All this in spite of people making photo-aggregators, sitewide tagging, and making Planet sites. I can’t believe how much grief a hacky Wordpress plugin has given me over the years. Hopefully as it gets more and more out of date, this query count will start to drop from 400k (not that much) to a few hundred. Then I will smile.