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{ Category Archives } Blogging

10 days of mind numbing comment spam attack

LJ and WordPress.com bloggers should be happy with their blogging service right now – for those excellent hosted services are hiding one of the longest steady comment spam attacks I’ve seen from you and your readers. Thank them (your hosted blog service provider), for this is annoying at the service level. My personal WordPress blog [...]

Fake Steve nails it, again

I am not a fan of Mike Arrington; his babble in TechCrunch is often wrong; but he is doing investigative journalism here and digging to find out more details about why playing games on Facebook and MySpace can be hazardous. That the NY Times failed to even mention that there are serious concerns in their [...]

Impressed with resilience of internet

As the current regime in Iran tries to shutdown the internet and new media methods of communication, it has been very impressive just how difficult it is to silence the people. The internet, even in a centralized theocracy, is profoundly resilient and able to work around various specific links being cut. The people are being [...]

Complete failure of the mainstream media

So Iran’s election appears to be rigged. It looks like Mousavi won by a very large margin, and that Ahmadinejad came in a very distant third place (eg: only 5.69 million votes to over 19 million for Mousavi and well over 13 million for Karoubi); and that despite the obviously clear to the public victory [...]

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Extortion Spam!?

This is new… I am getting blog comment spam (caught in Akismet filters, thankfully) on my WordPress blog that claims I can stop this particular spamming my blog if I send them an email and some money…. I suggest the extortion minded-spammer not hold his or her breath awaiting my response… In fact, I am [...]

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Testing WordPress for iPhone

This is just a test, only a test of the iPhone WordPress application.

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Removed the is_human() module

Though it was a good attempt, the is_human() WordPress module was a failure for me, so I pulled it off my website. It was blocking way too many legitimate comments and did absolutely nothing to address the hundreds of trackback and linkback spams showing up daily. I am sad, as I had hoped it would [...]

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The is_human() filter

Just a reminder folks, if you are going to comment here, you must answer the multiple choice question displayed as a required field in the comment page. I am seeing some comments get rejected that look legitimate, because the question was left unanswered.

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Wow, the is_human() module works great

I have is_human() coupled with Akismet and together they knock out all the comment spam I was getting. The other interesting little factoid, is that nearly all the spam I was getting was coming from only three IP addresses… hurray for blacklisting. I’ll share the nefarious addresses so you can firewall them out if you [...]

Implemented is_human() Word press Plugin

Akismet alone was not stopping enough comment spam, so I have implemented is_human() which asks a random multiple choice question, answers are in a drop down and it should be easy for humans to comment, but difficult for machines. Sadly, the marker for a required field did not get enabled initially (now fixed) and a [...]