Wednesday, April 02, 2014

Unreal...

Since I turned off word verification for comments, the spam has steadily been ramping up. Sometimes in Chinese or Cyrillic characters, links to malware sites, people hawking swap meet Louis, various pill-rollers, casinos, and lame-ass SEO spam. Three hundred a day and more having to get scraped out of the spam traps.

This morning I turned on the Android tablet in bed and deleted seventy-some-odd spam comments at about 0730 local, came in here and typed some, and an hour and a half later I had twenty-five fresh ones to delete. And they're not even fun ones anymore, where some Markov generator whispers streams of blank verse into the hissing void of the digital ether, but rather simple, crass "generic xanax fake michael kors click here private invitation for you best payout online casino visit my website: boston realestate.com"

Blah.
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24 comments:

TJIC said...

I hate, hate, HATE blogspot word verification.

I understand that it's the best option that you have, but on several self-hosted Wordpress blogs I have, the Askimet plugin traps 99.99% of the spam.

I find that my engagement with Blogspot blogs is much much lower than it is with no-verification-image Wordpress blogs. I rarely bother to leave comments, because it's such a hassle.

...and if I'm effectively unable to leave a comment, I'm less likely to check the blog all that often.

Any chance you could migrate away from the Beast to something nicer? J and/or I could certainly help on the technical end.

9:47 AM, April 02, 2014
Caleb said...

Tam changing to a non-blogspot domain is one of the Signs of the Apocalypse.

9:57 AM, April 02, 2014
Joel said...

There is a great deal about business models I don't and apparently will never understand. People make money in ways that just mystify me.

This sort of spam is most mysterious of all. Why on earth - what could possibly motivate anyone to click that link? And so why would anyone go to the trouble of writing the robots that send the spam in the first place? Yet they do, so they must profit somehow.

Is a puzzlement.

10:32 AM, April 02, 2014
TJIC said...

...along with Obama winning a second term, a serious Republican candidate coming out against defense spending, Jay G moving out of MA...

Oh shit.

10:40 AM, April 02, 2014
Dwight Brown said...

I'm not going to suggest a migration or anything. This is more me being curious.

But: does Blogspot have an option to block IP addresses or ranges of IP addresses?

From my personal experience (and again I am not suggestion a move or anything that would inconvenience Tam) Akismet catches a lot of spam, but blocking certain ranges of IP addresses catches quite a bit before it gets to Akismet. This means that the amount of spam I have to muck out every morning is much smaller.

11:19 AM, April 02, 2014
rickn8or said...

Oh, some of them are amusing, such as bogus subpoenas, problems with brokerage accounts I don't have, etc.

For a guy with his own house and no morttgage, I'm highly amused by various "Eviction Notices."

11:58 AM, April 02, 2014
Angus McThag said...

Tam gets more spam than I get readers.

12:06 PM, April 02, 2014
Sigivald said...

"Louis Vuitton never made a sweatsuit."

1:46 PM, April 02, 2014
NotClauswitz said...

I get some of that generic hack-spam, but not nearly in the quantity that you get. The migration from Blogspot was fairly painless - I don't know if Wordperess.com is ALL that much better, but I needed to get away.

1:55 PM, April 02, 2014
Anonymous said...

My dear lovely lady,

The solution to SPAM is remarkably simple and cheap. Not one dime need be spent on it nor one new law passed.

Repeat after me:
"I solemnly swear I will never vote to convict anyone of any crime against any spammer."

You don't need to be Albert Einstein to do the math.

When 1/6 of the jury-eligible Americans have taken this pledge, eventually Nature will take its course.

Other nations may take longer to see the light, but a sufficiently-bright light has a way of invading the darkness.

2:47 PM, April 02, 2014
Anonymous said...

My dear lovely lady,

The solution to SPAM is remarkably simple and cheap. Not one dime need be spent on it nor one new law passed.

Repeat after me:
"I solemnly swear I will never vote to convict anyone of any crime against any spammer"

You don't need to be Albert Einstein to do the math.

When 1/6 of the jury-eligible Americans have taken this pledge, eventually Nature will take its course.

Other nations may take longer to see the light, but a sufficiently-bright light has a way of invading the darkness.

2:48 PM, April 02, 2014
Will said...

@2:47

a donate site for spammer hunters would help.

3:33 PM, April 02, 2014
Lergnom said...

Joel said...
"Why on earth - what could possibly motivate anyone to click that link? "

As one who retired from 20 years as first-tier tech support at an institution of higher sinecure, AKA a College, I believe it's a combination of carelessness on the part of folks who should know better, and the non-techie users who espouse the philosophy 'How can it be a virus if it says I Love You?'
I could tell you stories, but they make my head hurt.

Stay safe

5:27 PM, April 02, 2014
Harry said...

Hmmm...I sense a new Larry Correia novel series: Spammer Hunters International...

5:31 PM, April 02, 2014
Talitha said...

I almost miss those randomized blank verse motes scattered like haiku trash. You could almost see the chimps evolving...

Not that I like spammers. Just like there is a special part of hell for yelling Fire in a theater, there is a nice corner of it for spammers, too. Undeath of 1000 papercuts, I think.

A friend of mine once wrote up a website that had pages of infinite randomized verse designed to catch web spiders. As long as the spiders kept calling up links, the web site would oblige and give it more pages of nonsense... it was really a beautiful thing.

Do people really hunt spammers? How would you make money at it? I think that crowdsourcing might be a good idea. If you could somehow give verifiable feedback to doing something, that would be one heck of a model...

5:55 PM, April 02, 2014
Mike in KY said...

My dear lovely anonymous at 2:47... and 2:48.

Make it apply to double posters and I'm in.

7:18 PM, April 02, 2014
jdunmyer said...

Didn't a Russian spammer get murdered a few years back? Seems like I remember reading something about that.

FWIW: I can't imagine the evil done to a spammer or especially a virus writer that would cause me to be on a jury and vote for anything except "Not Guilty".

8:08 PM, April 02, 2014
Ed said...

Russian spam? Svinina?

http://thebuelement.blogspot.com/2010/08/northernmost-island.html

http://reprorations.com/Russia%20WW2/Russia%20WW%202.htm

http://www.maximumpc.com/article/home/russian_hacker_responsible_one-third_global_spam_finally_apprehended

9:15 PM, April 02, 2014
Toastrider said...

Re: Joel

See, here's the thing. Once you've written the progs to generate the spam, your cost overhead pretty much drops down to 'make sure the computers keep running'. And that's assuming you're not using compromised computers in a botnet to distribute your crap.

If you send a bazillion emails and only 2 people click the links, you still come out ahead.

9:32 PM, April 02, 2014
Kristophr said...

The dead spammer was "captain Blood".

He declared jihad on a company in Israel called Blue Frog Security. Their business model was, for a fee, to accept forwarded spam, open the sales pages of the companies that paid for the spam, and fill their customer input forms with megabytes of garbage designed to poison the spamming company's customer database.

"Captain Blood" declared war on them, and had his botnet DOS them until they went bankrupt.

Shortly after that, some criminals showed up on "Captain Blood"'s doorstep and swiss cheesed him.

10:19 PM, April 02, 2014
fillyjonk said...

I've long said I wished blogger had a "delete comment, and send small electric shock to the individual who authorized its sending" for spam comments.

I suppose that would not work if it were zombie spam whose originator had died like that Russian spammer.

9:29 AM, April 03, 2014
Joel said...

fillyjonk-

SMALL electric shock? I'd like to melt the flesh off the bones of whoever keeps trying to sell my blog knockoff watches.

12:05 PM, April 03, 2014
Goober said...

Me too Angus.

3:10 PM, April 03, 2014
Gewehr98 said...

Speaking of Unreal, I just played Unreal Tournament last night again, on the game servers that are still running gawd knows how many years after that game's release...

3:56 PM, April 05, 2014

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