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01 April 2007

A Shortcut to Sell Snake Oil

I ran into these two sites during the last month:-

The only reason I clicked on the links was because they were on the Blogspot.com domain. I always look at chess blogs, but neither of them looks anything like a blog. They both look like typical fly-by-night marketing pages of the 'Improve Your XYZ While You Sleep' genre. 'How does that work?', I asked myself.

In fact, both URLs are constructed with a trailing '#'. When I remove that character and feed the URL to my browser, the page look like a blog -- a really boring blog, but a blog nevertheless. The trick appears to be a combination of the '#' character and a URL in the blog description with the format 'javascript:OOO('abc');'.

Where is this trick documented? Can it be misused for something more harmful than selling Get Rich Quick books?

3 comments:

  1. These same guys had the spam blog comments all over Blogger until the word verification came in.

    It's pretty funny to think that this is some kind of get-rich-quick scheme...chess isn't exactly a big money sport.

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  2. 'It's pretty funny to think that this is some kind of get-rich-quick scheme'

    No one has ever accused spammers of being smart. - Mark

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