Back at the beginning of April, I killed about a thousand spambot accounts on this blog and added some new defenses against them. Those defenses helped quite a bit; I was still getting about ten attempts a week, but any spambot that gave an invalid e-mail address got blocked, as was any that gave a …
Speaking of unpredictable consequences, here’s another one: techniques developed to combat spam turn out to be useful against HIV. I always thought that spammers had a lot in common with viruses, in that both are annoying and potentially dangerous, but I didn’t expect the metaphor to stretch that far! 😉
Apparently not: In the late 1990s Robert Soloway made $20,000 a day as a spammer. He drove fancy cars. He wore Armani clothes. He was, by all accounts, one of the most successful spammers on the planet. But if he were starting out today, he’d find some other line of work. In 2011, spamming just …
Continue reading ‘“As the Internet evolves, is there a place for spam?”’ »
That’s right: more than one out of every two hits on this blog recently are spam attempts. I say that because that was the percentage of the last 1,600 or so hits that were on a single post with very little content… not coincidentally, the exact same post that spammers have been pounding on without …
This post is old, but touches on a topic that’s near and dear to my heart — methods of stopping spammers from overwhelming a publicly-available e-mail address. It argues that posting an address in a somewhat-obfuscated form (like “myname AT spamtrap DOT com”) actually helps spammers, because it’s much easier to search for using Google …
I got tired of the nearly one thousand spambot “users” on this blog and mass-deleted any account that had never posted a non-spam comment and had no optional user information. I also added a confirmation-link requirement, and auto-removal of any account that doesn’t complete the confirmation within seven days. Apologies to any human users who …
After three months of near-silence, I’m back. Project M is nearly ready for beta (six months of work so far, and it’s still not quite usable… sheesh!), so I think I can spare the time to blog again. I may not write daily for a bit, but I’ll try. The first thing I’d like to …
Continue reading ‘One Hundred Fifty Thousand Spam Attempts in 90 Days’ »
The amount of blog-spam that Geek Drivel has gotten recently is ludicrous. Since late June (when the statistics were last reset), my anti-spam software has blocked nearly 42,000 spam messages (of which I saw and had to personally deal with maybe fifteen — that software is good). Roughly 15,000 of them came in between then …
The thought that girls like a big penis is not properly conveyed by the English phrase “big penis like a girl.” 😉 (Yes, I actually got several messages yesterday whose text was exactly that, claiming to be from “EnlargePenis.VeryGood4@yahoo.com”, to my great amusement. Somebody really needs an English lesson. Or a biology lesson, maybe. 😉 …
Some spammer’s automated spam-bots have targeted Geek Drivel over the past few weeks, for reasons unknown. Well, okay, the surface reasons are obvious — but since they haven’t managed to get a single spam published, despite weeks of effort and hundreds of attempts per day, you’d think the spammer would notice and turn them to …