Digg Goes To War With SubvertAndProfit
Users of the Digg-gaming startup Subvert & Profit have been hit with bans. The number of users affected, according to a blog post titled Alas, it had to happen some time may be as low as 1% of the total S&P user base:
“It appears that Digg finally found a small segment of our userbase and has banned them. In the last 24 hours, we’ve heard from 8 out of our 1000+ users. This low number is encouraging, since it means that this was just a small slip on our part.”
The bans occur after bragging that “not a single user has been banned” and “stories have been promoted for 2 weeks now.” Banned users will experience the following messages when they try to access their Digg account:
Sorry – bad IP address
Invalid User Provided
Trading, buying, exchanging, donating, or otherwise manipulating individual diggs is a violation of section 3.9 of the Digg TOS, where you agree not to use Digg:
with the intention of artificially inflating or altering the ‘digg count’, blog count, comments, or any other Digg service, including by way of creating separate user accounts for the purpose of artificially altering Digg’s services; giving or receiving money or other remuneration in exchange for votes; or participating in any other organized effort that in any way artificially alters the results of Digg’s services.
An easy way for Digg to check if you’ve been to Subvert and Profit would be for them to sign up with the service themselves, pick an internal URL that requires you to be logged in, and then when you visit Digg and are signed in, write that URL somewhere on the page for a brief instant, check to see if the link color is active or visited. If the link is visited, you’re tagged as a member of Subvert and Profit and banned, thanks to this well known CSS + JS privacy exploit.
It will be interesting to see how this arms race plays out, with S&V offering increasingly sophisticated cloaking technology, and Digg prying deeper and deeper into its users’ personal histories.
| This entry was posted on Sunday, May 20th, 2007 at 4:03 pm and is tagged with internal url, invalid user, diggs, single user, user accounts, remuneration, digg, section 3, js, amp, intention, tos, segment, ip address, blog, money, arms race. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback. |
Great Article. I would guess one would have to be careful if they decided to do something like this.
Good that Digg took actions. This stuff is unacceptable
Hey my account got disabled – didn’t think of checking it until now. Hah.