I got a press-release email just now, of which I reproduce the plain-text version (with full headers) below:

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From: “Sabina Richardson” <eitraining @mail.elsevier-alerts.com>
To: “Notification List” <dorothea @textartisan.com>
Subject: FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: Engineering Village Introduces Record Tagging
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—————————————————————————

Date: 22 February 2007
Contact: Ross Graber
Marketing Director
Engineering Information
+1 212 633 3695
r.graber[at]elsevier.com

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Engineering Village Introduces Record Tagging

Allows Researchers to Interact With, Classify and Share Engineering Research Content

New York, N.Y., 22 February 2007 - Engineering Information (http://mail.elsevier-alerts.com/go.asp?/bEEI001/qOGW4A3/xX2JI5 ) announced the introduction of record tagging to Engineering Village (http://www.engineeringvillage.com ), an award winning web discovery platform designed for engineering researchers. Tagging allows Engineering Village users to apply meaningful keywords to database records to facilitate sharing records and retrieving documents based on user-generated data labels or “tags.”

Records from engineering research databases including Compendex® and Inspec® and patents databases can be tagged by Engineering Village users. Users establish their own tags based upon what they find meaningful about a document. Documents can then be retrieved by searching for specific tags or sets of tags. Tagging facilitates a user’s ability to share meaningful content. Users will assign tags to documents and can choose to make those tags accessible to colleagues, peer groups and even to all the users in the Engineering Village community. Users may also opt to keep tags private for personal use.

“While tagging is often considered a Web 2.0 phenomenon, it is incredibly well suited for a professional quality information service like Engineering Village” said Rafael Sidi, Vice President of Product Development, Ei. “Engineering Village databases have traditionally relied upon records being classified by experts using structured indexes. Now, by adding record tagging the power to classify records and create content has been extended to our users. Users can now tag records based on how they define a record’s relevance and importance . By choosing to expose those tags, Engineering Village users’ community is provided with a powerful way to
identify engineering content other users find meaningful.”

News from Engineering Information can be subscribed to via RSS at http://mail.elsevier-alerts.com/go.asp?/bEEI001/q67WMA3/xX2JI5

###

About Engineering Information

Engineering Information (Ei), which is a business unit of Elsevier, is the leader in providing online information, knowledge and support to engineering researchers. The company provides information research tools specifically focused on the content and intelligence that engineering researchers need to stay informed and step ahead of the competition. For more information about Ei and its products, including Engineering Village 2 , Compendex®, and Ei EnCompass please visit www.ei.org.

About Elsevier

Elsevier is a world-leading publisher of scientific, technical and medical information products and services. Working in partnership with the global science and health communities, Elsevier’s 7,000 employees in over 70 offices worldwide publish more than 2,000 journals and 2,200 new books per year, in addition to offering a suite of innovative electronic products, such as ScienceDirect (http://www.sciencedirect.com/ ), MD Consult (http://www.mdconsult.com/ ), Scopus (http://www.info.scopus.com/ ), bibliographic databases, and online reference works.

Elsevier (http://www.elsevier.com/ ) is a global business headquartered in Amsterdam, The Netherlands and has offices worldwide. Elsevier is part of Reed Elsevier Group plc (http://www.reedelsevier.com/ ), a world-leading publisher and information provider. Operating in the science and medical, legal, education and business-to-business sectors, Reed Elsevier provides high-quality and flexible information solutions to users, with increasing emphasis on the Internet as a means of delivery. Reed Elsevier’s ticker symbols are REN (Euronext Amsterdam), REL (London Stock Exchange), RUK and ENL (New York Stock Exchange).

This press release was sent to you by Engineering Information (Ei). For further news, features and information visit http://www.ei.org. Engineering Information, 360 Park Avenue South, New York, NY 10010, USA. You are receiving this e-mail because you are a member of the press. We respect your privacy and do not rent, sell or disclose your personal information to any non-affiliated third party without your consent. Copyright © 2007 Elsevier Limited http://www.elsevier.com/. All rights reserved. Any unauthorized use, reproduction, or transfer of this message or its contents, in any medium, is strictly prohibited.

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[RL X2JI5]

I don’t know how I got onto this list; it was surely not by any opt-in efforts of mine. I am also not “a member of the press,” though that little detail tends to indicate that they shoved me on their list merely because they felt like it. I tried logging into elsevier-alerts.com and got nowhere. ei.com is similarly unhelpful. There is no opt-out link in the email, neither in the plain-text nor the HTML version, so however I got onto this list, I can’t get off it.

That? Is spam, folks. It doesn’t matter that it’s coming from a semi-reputable company. I don’t want it, I didn’t ask for it, it’s commercial in nature. It’s spam. You tell me what that makes Elsevier.

Elsevier: get me off this list. Now, please. I only took this public because you didn’t behave like a reputable Internet company and give me a private way to take care of this business. (”We respect your privacy,” forsooth!) And if you want to make an issue of that copyright statement, I’ll see you in court.

If this is a joe-job, I’ll happily apologize and set the record straight—but it doesn’t look like one to me.

(I don’t. I do have the stereotyped opera-singer physique, but I still don’t, and everyone should be very very glad I don’t because I would be excruciatingly bad at it. I sing choral music, sacred and secular. Trust me, it’s not the same thing at all.)

I’m not a publisher, either, and I really wonder about someone who would publish a piece of writing in an outlet whose title translates “Reader beware.” (Sure, I wonder about myself. Often.) I don’t know who the owner of that site is, I’ve never seen a word of her writing save for what’s on that site, and I certainly never promised publication of any sort, here or anywhere else.

Anyway, I noticed these because of Referrer Karma, which I have running on CavLec. I give it a qualified endorsement; its chief problem is that it can and does bar people who click on links in their webmail. If you’ve got a bad referrer spam problem, though, I’d call webmailers acceptable collateral damage and install it.

What they’re experimenting with at the moment is breaking apart my tidy URLs and adding them as parameters after a question-mark, as in a typical search string or PHP-based URL.

It’s not working for them, but it’s a cute tactic. There’s probably a way to block based on it, but I’m too lazy to work it out, given that I derive no immediate benefit from it.

Correction: Nope, nope, nope, that’s not what’s happening. What’s actually happening is that the 301 redirect I’ve got for them sends back the PHP URL, which the bot tries to fetch, only now the referrer is my site, so the bot tries to 301 over to that, and so on and so forth. Cute. Almost honeypottish.

But I don’t really have the bandwidth to spare for these schmucks, so I’ve gone back to 403ing them. You may wish to do the same.

(In brief: These guys have been leaving a telltale in their HTTP headers that this block uses to advantage.)

If you’re using the User-Agent trick, you’re still protected.

Spam activity today: if you’ve got the User-Agent trick running, you’re still good. Plenty of new domain names in the referrers, so many that I think I’m going to recommend that you install the User-Agent trick if you haven’t already.

Li, I don’t know what the heck is up with Spam Karma and your hacker. I’ll investigate tomorrow, promise.

4u.info|

to your bad-referrer list and you’ll be fine from what I’m seeing.

I got word from the developer of NewzCrawler that upcoming version 1.8 will fix the incessant-comment-feed-seeking problem. This is good. I shall ban 1.7 the instant 1.8 comes out.

She also has new additions to the list:

jmsimonr|middlecay|neweighweb|targetindustries|
zalaszentgrot|zone-b51|

To which I add:

hasslerenterprises|bigyonet|gargzdai|1a1merchantaccounts|
neweighweb|darkangelclan|mp-forum|

The pattern appears to be a lull of something like twelve to eighteen hours between a new attack of referrer spam with new domains. Is this a question of somebody losing access, or new instructions going out to the zombified PCs? I dunno.

By the way, I didn’t point this out last time, but it’s possible to turn the User-Agent trick into a 301 redirect as well. For the spammer above:

SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent ".*(compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.2; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)" BadReferrer=yes

Nothing else need change, if you’ve already got a line denying bad referrers.

I am also within a week of banning NewzCrawler from CavLec altogether. The problem is that NewzCrawler incessantly looks for comment feeds on this site, despite their total nonexistence. I have 410ed and 403ed those feed URLs, but NewzCrawler totally refuses to get the hint—and worse, once it sees a post and surmises it should have a comment feed, it never stops looking for it. I have NewzCrawler users looking for comment feeds from every single post I’ve made since October 2004! This verges on DOSsy behavior.

The NewzCrawler developer is aware of this brokenness, as I’ve read a few different places, and he is also aware that server-log-aware bloggers don’t like it. His response has been “suck it up and deal; you don’t want to damage your readers just because they use my crap software, do you?”

Sorry, dude. I don’t want to punish them because of you, but I’m going to, because I don’t see any alternative given your attitude.

You NewzCrawler users? You have choices. You can figure out how to turn off the comment-feed-seeking, if NewzCrawler lets you do that. (If I see all those bogus hit-attempts disappear, I’ll call off the ban.) You can unsubscribe from CavLec. Or, if you still want to read CavLec, you can find a newsreader or aggregator that doesn’t suck. Totally up to you.

Otherwise, you’re gone a week from today. I’m serious. And you’ll continue to be gone until I see that NewzCrawler has a version out that fixes this bug, at which point I’ll allow the fixed version in.