Microsoft looking at spam on Spaces

SOFTWARE FLOGGER Microsoft has admitted that its Spaces service was too full of spam to be considered in its review of Windows Live.

Spokesman Tony East said that the Vole did not make many noticeable changes to the service during the revamp and this was because Spaces has a spam problem.

Microsoft has been experimenting with ways of purging spam from Spaces and Hotmail, he said.

During the heaviest period of attacks on Spaces, a spam-tracking website called Uribl attributed 1,500 spam campaigns to web pages hosted on Spaces, each of these actively generating hundreds of thousands of Spaces spam attacks.

The Vole has managed to block 99 per cent of these spam campaigns, so now Uribl lists only 15 active spam campaigns on Spaces.

He promised that Microsoft will put even more safeguards in place to ensure that fewer spam spaces get created, which will bring this number down even more.

The other problem has been comment spam, which Microsoft hopes to deal with by account validation and limiting the number of comments you can add in a session. Other plans are to improve permission settings so that by default, only friends can comment. All of these efforts combined will make it harder for machine-generated comment spam to get through. µ