Posted by Scott Hughes
Tue, 04 Apr 2006 23:21:00 GMT
Ever since my last post, where I made mention of trackback spam, I have been targetted by “trackback spammers”. I was getting about 10-20 trackbacks a day since posting it. I just went through and disabled trackbacks on all my posts (UPDATE contents SET contents.allow_pings=’0’ WHERE type=’Article’).
It looks like, though I can’t be certain, they were using Ruby to post the trackbacks. I say that only because I saw some early ones that had descriptions like “Testing from Ruby”. I guess a rubyist might have wanted to make a point to me about how you can’t identify the source of trackback spam, so maybe my earlier complaint was misdirected. It’s probably lucky for me that Ruby doesn’t scale well, or else I could have had hundreds of thousands of trackback spam posts from that fella!
Trackbacks in general are probably just adding noise to the web. If good indexers like Google and Technorati can tell me when one blog links to another blog, why do I need to advertise who’s linking on the particular post page? I guess I’ll just leave it disabled until I can think of some use for it. Perhaps replace the trackback link with a direct link to the Technorati cosmos for a particular page (not that my cosmos on Technorati is any less barren than actual space).
Posted in Aggravation | Tags spam, trackback | no comments
Posted by Scott Hughes
Fri, 24 Mar 2006 19:36:00 GMT
I followed, with some interest, the series of post by David Heinemeier Hansson (from 37Signals, creator of Rails) where he took an Enterprise Architect to task for some really uneducated comments about Ruby. Reading through the post by this guy (Jimmy McSomething, don’t want to give him anymore pagerank love than he’s already getting) it seems that he might be just a little bit retarded (and I mean that medically, not in the mean-spirited sense). There are some people in the comments who’ve posted that some of his observations are so wrong that it must be a joke. I was kind of wandering if his blog was written by a random Enterprise Architect Blog generator. Off his Blogger page, he has a couple of other blogs which follow much the same format. The big key is the random pictures that he inserts in the middle of the post (some of Rumsfeld, or other politico’s) which are neither funny nor related to the context of the post.
Today I stumbled across some new evidence. I found a trackback on one of my posts to his article. Could it be that his blog-bot is trying to increase his pagerank by trackback-spamming his article to blogs which have discussed Ruby? Even though I’ve mentioned Ruby quite a bit on this blog, the aforementioned post was not at all Ruby related… The author of the trackback is the same as his blog title. I tried to see if I could tie the IP address (72.9.234.70) back to him in some way, but gave up on that rather soon.
That just struck me as odd. Seems that successfully pissing off the Ruby crowd (or any group which is fanatical) is a good way to get yourself to the top of the google list for the keyword of your choice. For example, what if I called myself a “First-Rank Knowledge Engineer” and decided that, based on my expertise in the field, Wikipedia was absolutely the worst source of actual “facts” or “knowledge” that I could possibly imagine (worse than what a train full of brain-dead monkeys could generate)… Do you think I could rise to the top of the Knowledge Engineering index?
Posted in Technology | Tags enterprise_architect, ruby, spam, trackback | 1 comment
Posted by Scott Hughes
Tue, 04 Oct 2005 19:53:00 GMT
As much as I enjoy my gmail account, it’s starting to be rendered useless by Google’s refusal to include sender’s IP address in the message headers. I discovered this after an old student who I TA’ed at Georgia Tech tried to contact me using my primary pobox.com email address ([my first initial][my last name]@pobox.com). Luckily, she tried again using my gmail account and was successful in reaching me. I searched my pobox.com discard list and found her email, which was from her own gmail account. The headers added by pobox.com explain the reason:
X-Pobox-Antispam: dnsbl/bl.spamcop.net returned deny:
for 66.249.82.198(xproxy.gmail.com)
X-Sift-Reason: dnsbl/bl.spamcop.net returned deny:
for 66.249.82.198(xproxy.gmail.com)
Apparently, SpamCop’s list has changed in the past week (since this email was sent), because it appears SpamCop does not block xproxy.gmail.com anymore but does block qproxy.gmail.com. I don’t have an estimate on how many proxies gmail has and I didn’t check any others.
I found more information on the foo-projects blog, where they’ve heard back from SpamCop and SORBS about the blocking. Apparently, spammers are easily masking themselves behind gmails relays, so the spam police have no choice. The best solution is to complain to Google.
I use pobox.com’s standard settings for discarding junked emails, which (until now?) worked really well for me. It ends up blocking several hundred spam emails a day (this email address is 10 years old, from days when I posted it more promiscuously), and allowing about 10-15 false negatives through. I never have to check the discard list, because I have come to trust it to make zero false positives. That said, if you’ve emailed me recently from a gmail account and are unsure if I got it, I’d appreciate it if you re-sent it to me. I have temporarily set my spam settings to flag the message, instead of discarding it.
Hopefully Google and the Spam Po-Po can come to an agreement on this soon. But you should know that SpamCop is a highly regarded blocking list, so until this is resolved it is likely that I’m not the only one who isn’t receiving your gmails.
Posted in Technology | Tags gmail, spam | 3 comments
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