A new way of verifying you're a real person and not a spam machine might eliminate the chore of typing phrases like "beetle sausage" and so on, with a start-up looking to gamify the art of verifying you're a human. Read More >>

Twitter's revealed a new feature it's built to keep its verified celebrity elite happy, with blue-tick users now able to view only RTs and mentions from other tick-having power tweeters. Read More >>

Heads up: Instagram is weathering a bit of a spam attack right now, and it's drowning in fruit. This rather large wave of juicy spam seems to be the result of some unscrupulous people pushing some sort of "miracle fruit diet" and it could mess up your account if you fall for it. Read More >>

Man, I love "I Fucking Love Science", the Facebook page with 5.4 million likes that clutters my News Feed with hundreds of clever images, many of which are stolen without attribution to their authors. It's entertaining, and amazingly sharable. It's also changing the character of the social network — and some argue it's doing so for the worse. We're compliantly spamming our friends right out of our Facebook feeds. Read More >>

Google is believed to have pulled nearly 60,000 apps from the Play Store in February, with a huge cull of low quality and policy-infringing software presumably designed to clean things up a little in preparation this week's new Android app launch. Read More >>

Ofcom's looking into ways of stopping controversial mid-contract mobile price rises, with one option being to separate charges the networks are responsible for from ones outside of their control. This, says Vodafone, could mean non-stop SMS spam every time a sex chat line ups its fees. Read More >>

Reports are floating around the internet that people are getting spammed to email addresses they solely use for Dropbox, meaning the only way someone could get said email address is from Dropbox. The last time that happened Dropbox got hacked. Are you getting spammed to your Dropbox-associated email? Read More >>

Last week, on February 11th, Alexandra Watson (aka @happinesscoach) received a very exciting email in her inbox and promptly tweeted the news out to her 66,000 followers: Hurray, I am so super-duper popular on LinkedIn. My life now has meaning. Read More >>

The Economist has a chart from Kaspersky Lab, a security firm, that shows that spam mail is on a decline. Supposedly, it's a combination of spam filters actually working, the authentication of senders and more police crackdowns on Nigerian princes. In fact, in the past year, junk mail has declined from around 80 per cent to 67 per cent. Do you guys agree with this study? Are you noticing less spam in your inboxes? Read More >>

Bogomil Shopov, a Bulgarian blogger and digital rights activist, bought 1.1 million Facebook names, user IDs and e-mails for the ridiculously low price of $5 (around £3). Yes, for a price of a Subway footlong, Shopov was able to get his hands on your personal data from Facebook. What a deal! Read More >>

Everybody wants a better Captcha. Trying to type in those distorted words can be a serious pain, and it's becoming less and less of an impedance to ever-more-intelligent spam bots. The Civil Rights Captcha takes a different approach; you've got to have a little empathy. Read More >>

We all hate spam. But we figure it must be worth it to someone since there's so damn much of it. But... apparently not. A new paper from the Journal of Economic Perspectives estimates it brings in a total of £130 million in revenue worldwide per year. And then the rest of us spend £13 billion cleaning it up. Ugh. Read More >>

Long-running piracy portal Demonoid was taken out by a DDoS attack last week, with the site now back online in some form -- but seemingly hacked and serving up malware-ridden adverts to some. Read More >>

Salutations, My Dearest One: I am writing to you this blog post with joy and happy feelings in my heart, bringing news that will be of great interest and benefit to you. Oh, beloved, there is indeed a special reason for why I have chosen to contact you in this moment of your day, I write to you now because of the urgency of our situation: the world's third-largest spam botnet was knocked offline, today—for good. Read More >>

Cory Doctorow, co-editor of BoingBoing, hit the motherload of all spam motherloads this morning, when he woke up to find some nitwit had visited his personal WordPress site and dumped a giant, rambling post of every SEO spam comment in their database. Oops! Read More >>