Facebook is in a constant battle against spammers trying to take advantage of its network, and it's been fighting back against them in a number of different ways — including in the courts. In total, Facebook says that it's now "obtained nearly $2 billion in legal judgments" against various spammers. "We utilize these channels when possible to remind would-be offenders that we will fight back to prevent abuse on our platform," Facebook writes in a blog post today.

If you get a suspicious email from an AOL user, it's probably best to delete it. The service has apparently been compromised and some accounts are sending out spammy messages. But rather than compromising actual accounts, it appears the scammers are just spoofing them. As AOL explained in a help page, "spoofing is when a spammer sends out emails using your email address in the From: field. The idea is to make it seem like the message is from you – in order to trick people into opening it."

A couple years ago, the comments on my blog started to become overrun with spam, as I'm sure everyone with a blog can relate to. The email alerts were incessant. I had to turn them off, and I stopped paying attention to whether anyone commented altogether. I was essentially run out of my own blog by SEO scoundrels who were trying to game the system by seeding blogs everywhere with links to their shitty sites.