Ping is a new social network for music that Apple released at the beginning of September. It allows their users to follow their favorite bands, singers, and friends. Their friends that are also using Ping can use it to discover what their friends and their favorite bands and singers are listening to and downloading. Users can meet new people based on shared interests and friends.

Shortly after Ping was released, it became the subject of several controversies.

First was the public argument between Apple and Facebook. This took place before the announcement. As stated in PC World, “For whatever reason, Steve Jobs would not agree to the ‘onerous terms’ demanded by Facebook (which he declined to enumerate), so Ping went out the door without any integration with the world’s largest social network whatsoever. But not before Apple had created press materials boasting about how you could log into Ping via Facebook Connect or find fellow Pingers on Facebook.”

The big problem with Ping now though is that it seems to be a spam scammer’s best dream come true. Ping users are getting slammed with the same kind of link baiting comment spam that is all over the blogosphere. These spam comments lead users to other websites that could potentially ruin their computer, steal their passwords, take over their computer, contain viruses, adware, spyware, and the very malicious malware.

Security blogger Chester Wisniewski doesn’t understand why Apple didn’t see this coming, and perhaps if they did, why they didn’t do something about it. As stated in PC World, “Most of the security industry has been pointing out the migration of spam from an email-only venture to blog/forum comments, Facebook, Twitter and other Web 2.0 platforms. But apparently Apple didn’t consider this when designing Ping, as the service implements no spam or URL filtering. It is no big shock that less than 24 hours after launch, Ping is drowning in scams and spams.”

Furthermore, what Wisniewski finds odd, is that Apple is filtering Ping for “offensive material” like nude profile photos, but not for the quite destructive spam. Maybe they think that everyone who uses Ping will go out and buy a Mac if their PC dies from these spam comments that lead them to Malware and other destructive viruses.

According to PC World’s Nick Mediati, Ping’s current limited privacy setting does not make this comment spam an easy issue to fix.