Wherever there is a website that allows user comments, there is comment spam. The problem is fairly old and something even regular blog owners like myself need to deal with. The idea is: a computer program adds comments with links to some website that makes money – by selling something or by showing advertisements. Having … Continue reading GPT-powered spam
Check out the lovely SMS message I got the other day: This is worse than email spam: Most people in the U.S. are charged per SMS message received. Welcome to the era of spaSMS. I don’t know what I can do to stop this, if anything. Thankfully it hasn’t happened again. Have you ever gotten … Continue reading The War Against Spam III
See the previous post The War Against Spam I if you haven’t (and you care). La Polla Defaced Yes, comment spam hits popular blogging systems such as WordPress all the time. But how about little, innocent, low traffic, 100% custom coded websites made by some random little guy? Surely, these websites are not targeted by … Continue reading The War Against Spam II
I’ve been waging a relentless war against spam for year on multiple fronts. And I’m losing. My brilliant catch-all strategy/use hundreds of email addresses so I can identify the bastards that give up my email and then do who knows what backfired on me. I had to switch gears and it’s been a lot of … Continue reading The War Against Spam
I’m sick of getting comment spam. Sure, I need penis enlargement pills, viagra, online poker systems and a fake diploma… but I don’t need it advertised all over my blog[1]. So, after waking up to see a few dozen advertisements posted all over the place, I decided to do something about it: I installed MT-Blacklist. … Continue reading Killing Comment Spam Dead
I hate spam and I go through great lengths to minimize it. Internet security is also interesting to me, and I think most people just don’t know not follow good security practices, and aren’t aware of just how awful things are, as in, how inept websites are at securing your data. Data breaches are rampant … Continue reading ‘;–have i been pwned?
In 2001 I moved to Austin and got a land line number with AT&T. This is the number I give out for everything that’s not personal: banks, credit cards, etc. Keeping this number has been hard. I had to transfer from AT&T to Vonage. This was great: cheap long distance, voice mail to email, and … Continue reading The eternal number
The many high profile hacks that have occurred recently, like the one on Sony and Gawker (and those are the ones we know about) have made me think a lot about my online security. We all know what we need to do: Use different strong passwords that cannot be guessed using dictionary attacks for every single account. The stakes range from the mildly … Continue reading Online security
A while ago I installed a captcha-based system called reCAPTCHA in my comment system. CAPTCHAs (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) work like this: Some garbled text is diplayed that is very hard for a spam bot to read, but relatively easy and only slightly annowing for a real human to … Continue reading Comments not going through
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