Let there be botnets. - SPAM - Security - Computer
Posted on: 2009-05-09 12:53:18

Last night, right as I was about to pass out, I got the familiar click from my phone telling me I got a text message. I picked it up, read it, saw that it was comment spam on this page (because every comment gets forwarded to me via text message), deleted it, and layed back down. About 30 seconds later, I got another one, which I expected. I don't know why, but everytime one gets through, two more tend to follow. So I picked up my phone only to see there were 7 messages waiting to be read. As I was reading the message "You have 7 messages." my phone clicked again...up to 9 now. I sighed and set the phone down. After a couple of more clicks I had to do something. I got up, turned captchas on for all the posts, and set about deleting messages. I checked the log and between 3:38am and 3:47am, I had 114 attempts to comment on my page. 14 of those went through. And these attempts came from about 50 different ipaddresses. It seems we are getting some botnet love.

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Twitter and lawn voting. - SPAM - Twitter - Politics - Site News
Posted on: 2008-10-23 20:26:51

I had been planning on spending the day working on a better comment tracking system (and I still might later), but I got distracted by other stuff on the page. I made a couple of small changes to the site: categories and recent comments are displayed again (categories were in a dropdown thingie that did not work in all browsers). I also added a Twitter box. We will have to see how long it is before I regret that one. It doesn't show every post, but the wife and I agreed on what should show given the limitations twitter already has in place. Twitter gives two easy methods to put these in pages, one flash and one javascript. So, of course, I did neither and hard coded it into rantfest. It took way the fuck longer to do, but I got to explore several perl modules in the process so it is all good. Besides, doing it this way we can make it fit in a little better.

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Don't call it a comeback. - Site News - SPAM
Posted on: 2008-10-21 23:30:47

So, I had been planning on keeping Akismet running until Thursday, but well, it wasn't really working. With all my previous efforts in place, I had about a 99.2% block rate. Sure, it wasn't perfect, and there were a few false positives, but with Akismet along, we were sitting at 89.5%. Now, while I was running Akismet, we had 550 attempted posts, 492 were blocked by Akismet. Had I been running my blocks, 544 would have been blocked. We have had 6 actual/non-spam posts. 550-544=6. Looks like I win.

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