K-Squared Ramblings

Banner Update

Finally updated blog banner to something that was actually taken in the same state (old one was Hawaii) #

Comment Barrier

Pet peeve: Blogs that require you to register locally in order to comment. Yes, that means you, suvudu.com and androidcommunity.com #

Tired of Pingback Spam

Bad Behavior and Spam Karma do a good job of fighting most of the spam that hits this site, but over the last few weeks I’ve seen a (relatively) new kind that seems to require manual intervention: pingback spam.

It took a long time for spammers to really start abusing pingbacks, because of two things: First, pingbacks require the remote site to link to your site before they can get you to link to theirs. Second, it was just so much easier to abuse trackbacks and ordinary comments. I guess those have gotten locked down enough that it’s worth the effort to target pingbacks now. Read the rest of this entry »

Trackback spam is back

I’m surprised it took so long, but trackback spammers seem to have finally figured out that they can sail past the simplest check against trackback spam—does the calling page actually link to the page being trackbacked?–by temporarily adding that link.

Or maybe they have for a while, and they’ve only just started getting past my other layers of defense (namely Bad Behavior and other checks by Spam Karma).

*sigh*

Apparently, it *is* a challenge

Every once in a while, a comment spam manages to get past both Bad Behavior and Spam Karma. Oddly enough, it always seems to be on the same entry: “Abuse Contact” is not an invitation.

I guess spammers like a challenge as much as anyone else.

Joke Spam

I’ve noticed a new subset of blog spam over the past few months: Jokes. Instead of just filling the comment with links to the spamvertized site, it’ll either leave the the link in the author URL field, or toss a couple links in at the end, but the bulk of the comment will actually be a joke.

Generally they tend to be story-type jokes, the kind you’ll find on, say, Jumbo Joke. This is probably an effort to build up enough comedic content to overwhelm the presence of links to a porn or pillz site. A similar technique had a brief heyday maybe a year ago in email spam, though I haven’t seem many of them lately.

It’s still spam—there’s no way I’m letting those comments and links onto the site—and Spam Karma still catches them. Still, it at least makes the spamtraps a little more interesting than the endless morass of links and keywords.

On another note, I’ve been seeing a lot more email spam targeting the abuse contacts lately. I don’t know what they think they’re accomplishing, since the people reading abuse@wherever are most likely to report them and least likely to buy from them. I mean, “Greetings Abuse!!!” doesn’t seem an effective way to begin a sales pitch.

SK3 Donation Drive

Dr. Dave, author of the excellent Spam Karma plugin for WordPress, has posted The State of Spam [Karma] in response to a new breed of spambots. (These sneaky %#@!ers hit this site on Friday, so I installed the 2.2 beta. They seem to have stopped trying over the weekend.) Anyway, Dr. Dave is holding a donation drive to help cover future versions of Spam Karma. I think it’s worth at least a few bucks.

FWIW, I use Spam Karma and Bad Behavior to block comment spam on this site.

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