Yesterday I got a strange comment that I thought looked a bit spammy. It was one of those sneaky comments that pretends it’s reporting a problem on your site. The layout looks off in Chrome, or is broken in Firefox, etc. Except, of course, when you look at it in that browser, it’s just fine.

This one claimed that they’d gotten an alert on their firewall when hitting the blog, and could it be related to one of your ads?

Unlikely given how few ads I use, but possible, since I had a third-party poll, some Amazon links, and a banner for Mozilla Plugin Check. Still, the author’s website looked pretty spammy, once I pulled out the extra w, so I put it back in moderation–

Wait, what was that about an extra w?

Well, they’d linked to wwww.[REDACTED].com. Kind of amusing, but I didn’t think anything of it until I had the chance to look for other sites with similar comments…and found that they all pointed to the broken site!

  • Warner Music issued a DMCA takedown notice to an official Warner Music video channel. I think I need some popcorn.
  • From @david_colquhoun via @BadAstronomer:

    Guardian science editor’s daughter gets measles. He’s angry with the anti-vaccination brigade.

  • I nearly mistyped “foreign” as “foregin.” It sounds like an appetizer you should eat before drinking gin.
  • Senator Arlen Specter’s party switch is largely symbolic. He didn’t toe the Republican party line, so why expect he’ll toe Democratic line?