Microsoft Saturated E-mail with Junk (Windows Botnets Spew Out Lots of These) and Now It Does the Same to the World Wide Web
Fake sites created and accommodated in bulk
THE one thing that keeps coming up in IRC (almost every day these days) is that Google News is Gulag Noise, not "News". A lot of the results which come up aren't legitimate sites but scrapers, splogs, scams, plagiarism, automated translations disguised as originals, or even spew from chatbots, triggered by prompting for popular search terms (SEO spew).
Sadly, as expected, more charlatans and frauds nowadays use chatbots to spam the Web. We post examples of these in Daily Links almost every day. Google can barely keep up and laying off the staff of Google News will simply worsen things. A lot of very obvious scam sites (chatbots-generated spew) show up in prominent positions.
Thanks, Microsoft!
This isn't entirely unprecedented. Before chatbots we had Windows botnets - a problem which remains unsolved.
There were two links regarding defense of E-mail yesterday. One of them said:
Email is not broken or unmanageable. It’s a tool, and you need to tend to it, manage it, put some effort into it.
There are shortcomings, an associate has noted, but the main drawback is Microsoft botnet-generated spam farms attacking E-mail. A lot of these are scam E-mails, including phishing, ransom, etc.
Moreover, the oversaturation of E-mail leads to widespread E-mail blocking, which not only misflags legitimate messages but also legitimate relays (making self-hosting of E-mail incredibly hard and in turn encouraging centralisation and more spying)...
"There are an increasing amount of ransomware reports in the news," this associate adds, yet no coverage of the underlying Windows products which make ransomware lucrative. Microsoft has helped turn a cottage industry into a global, multi-billion dollar market and there are extensions of these that are based on Microsoft's chatbots. This new example says: "Avoiding online scams is nothing new for many Canadians, but companies and anti-fraud professionals are warning consumers to watch for fake listings on search engines that try to redirect people to fraudulent versions of familiar companies and brands. [...] Bacchus had been searching for stores that carry Stetson hats because he said they have limited availability in Canada. He had previously been unable to buy from the main Stetson website as it did not ship to Canada."
A lot of these trick Google by making a lot of fake sites and flooding the crawlers, making lots of "targets" to overwhelm the classifier. One can expect that this problem will grow, not be tackled, as chatbots can generate the fakes "at scale" (with permutation, curtailing detection). How much of Microsoft's chatbots activity is associated with disinformation and crime? █