Inside View

Comment Spam Round 12

BECAUSE MY SPAM burden currently runs above 300 different spammers a day, I am throttling back this blog. More than 500 different spams hit this blog every day and Six Apart keeps most of them at bay. However, some sort of pernicious spamming has circumvented most of the server's filters. I have to deal with hundreds of unwanted spammers and I don't have the time to give to that battle. I've started moderating all comments but that means paging through up to 10 pages of spams to find a real comment. Each page holds 25 requests for moderation.

Dial-up Dempsey

NOEL DEMPSEY, the Irish Minister for Communications, has set Irish broadband targets low enough to ensure his time in government achieves the worst high-speed internet connectivity among the original 15 European countries. Actually, Dempsey's targets are high enough to get Ireland to 14 out of 15 countries. Importantly, this tail ranking meets government targets. Should the Irish government want to reach higher, Damien Mulley offers a reasonable strategy.

Why Ireland Wants Your Browsing History

SEVERAL YEARS as a college lecturer have taught me how to recognise the person who wrote an essay in a final examination without reading the name on the front of the exam book. It's well known that people can be identified from the way they write. It takes churning through three or four submission of at least 300 words each before I can tell a Mulley from a Raftery. You only need one pass to distinguish Twenty Major from Waggie. Many bloggers pick up the technique after two or three passes as well. You can also be categorised and identified by what you view. Balaji Padmanabhan and Catherine Yang claim that people using the internet  can also be identified by their surfing behaviour. They explain this in the Wharton Business School's Knowledge@Wharton:

It Takes Only A Few Bad Apples

THE UNIVERSAL DEFENCE attempted by some defenders, that there will always be "a few bad apples" in law enforcement or the civil service, is as troubling as it sounds. The Irish Minister of Justice's gathering of personal phone records, browsing histories, and online activities will be compromised as surely as there are "a few bad apples in any barrel." This is an absolute fact--it is generally agreed that the vast preponderance of abuse by police is committed by perhaps five percent of officers. The long-running series of tribunals in Ireland documents that around 5% of all elected politicians are on the take.

Another Way to Get Paid

MY YAHOO account automagically displayed the Yahoo Current Network, a partnership between Yahoo and Al Gore’s Current.tv, yesterday. Yahoo wants to get more video onto CurrentTV as well as supply more content to Yahoo Video. So you can see Yahoo Current Buzz, Yahoo Current Action (for sports), Yahoo Current Traveler and Yahoo Current Drive (for cars). If you're in Ireland, you won't see this because Current comes to 30m US households with a cable or satellite subscription. You'll miss Bono following Edge into the shower on Current but you can catch their moves on YouTube or Google Video.

High Water Spamming

UPDATED 23 SEP: I have to start moderating comments made to this blog because I'm forced to delete no fewer than 200 comment spams every day. They are slipping through the CAPTCHA and "NO-HTML" filters I've applied here. However, an equally large number are being stopped by the spam-word filter used by Six Apart. Sorry for slowing down the communications. Thanks for commenting.

UPDATED 22 SEP: The Captcha system used by Six Apart failed to stop another 315 spam attempts last night. This is both a weblog and an email burden. I plan to republish this blog site while invoking Typekey for comments. These comment spam attacks should not succeed. If you read this and have the time to make a comment, please indicate whether you are challenged by Typekey before you can make your comment.

UPDATED 21 SEP: The Captcha system used by Six Apart should have stopped all 385 spam attempts yesterday. However, somehow the system became disconnected to my blog pages. I solved my problem by republishing my site, something I'm hesitant to do because I've more than 5000 pages here. Now I can see comment spammers trying their craft to no avail.  From the looks at some of the IP blocks, it appears to be a Fair Trade activity--I wonder if I'm hurting some unfortunate by taking away an easy source of income when I lock down against comment spam.

I KNOW WHEN more than 2000 people visit here on a single day because I've got to manually delete a handful of trackback spammers. But when more than 3000 people visit, I attract my fair share of comment spammers. Today marks a high water level of more than 300 comment spams coming from more than 40 different IPs. If you care about these things and manually block the IPs of unwelcome visitors, I've recorded some of the suspects and their points of origin below. I knew this kind of high water spamming was coming because a colleague was given a takedown order on his blog after HEANET detected it was being used as a phishing launch pad. My visitors don't appear to be jumping off from academic domains. They appear to be circumventing the IP blacklist I've carefully articulated so I've added a bunch of prohibited terms to my anti-spam list. If you try to comment on drugs, you're probably going to be rebuffed.

Through the giving

OVER THE COURSE of 100,000 visitors to my Flickr photostreams, I've learned that you get more out of visitors who take away your images than you do from those who laud you for your composition. That's why most of my Flickr photostream is licensed under the Creative Commons Share-Alike agreement. I learned the value of the Creative Commons when Lawrence Lessig visited Ireland several years ago. Due to his influence, dozens of students at Tipperary Institute now think CC instead of © when they display their work. Today, I learned that this spirit is spreading into yet-another generation.

Revisions by RSS

USE THE NEW Acrobat 8 collaboration tools and you can send and receive document edits via RSS alerts. You don't need Acrobat to play in this revision process. You just follow the links back into shared space where you can see post-it notes on top of desired edits. It's a whole new way to pimp that blog.

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Paid for photos

JPG MAGAZINE, the 8020 publication put out by husband and wife team Derek Powazek and Heather Powazek Champ relaunced and now includes interactive voting. Although the editors still ultimately choose the photographs for publication, they take the votes into consideration. The editors also pay those photographers whose work they accept $100 as well as giving them a subscription to the magazine.

Strobe Stick

WE NEED A handheld strobe light on a stick and knowing Google Adwords, once we post this, some merchant will offer up exactly what Doggie ordered for his nightly walks along Golden Road.

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