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W. Post article on blog spam
November 4, 2005 | 11:35 am
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By David Rothman
eNom-registered domains are again showing up in comment spams hurled at the TeleRead Web log. Meanwhile the Washington Post today carries a piece about spam-blogs and comment spams. Time for appropriate legislation and enforcement? And maybe for the feds to force ICANN to do its job and link spam-prevention and domain registation? Pathetic ICANN is kind of a FEMA of cyberspace. Excerpt:
Unauthorized advertisers are blighting the blogosphere by hijacking legitimate discussions of topics with a flurry of phony comments.
“We would get surges of it — as many as 200 to 300 within two hours; we couldn’t blacklist the [spammers' online] addresses fast enough,” [Scott] Allen [an About editor] said. “It hampers the open conversation that is the very nature of blogs…
John R. Levine, co-author of “The Internet for Dummies,” said spam attacks have gotten steadily worse on his blog in the past six months.
“I get more fake comments from gambling sites than all other comments put together,” he said. He has had to start requiring e-mail address verification before letting people post comments on his site, http://weblog.taugh.com/ . “It makes you look like a doofus. I have this nice blog about e-mail policy, and comments about poker and naked ladies [do] not improve that conversation.”"
Hey, John, time to switch to WordPress and use SpamKarma and the like.
Meanwhile, it’s bloody-apparent that technology isn’t enough if even tech-savvy guy like John Levine has a problem. Given the billions of dollar that spam is wasting, it should be highly cost-effective for ICANN to work closely with law enforcment officials to imprison the offenders and scare the suffings out of eNom and the like, holding them responsible for proper anti-spam methodology.
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Comments:
Splogs began to appear in my “Comments” about a month ago. Bloody
nuisance. I delete them as soon as they appear but if the number gets
high that would be a problem. I wonder of sploggers get any response–are there people who actually click on the links ?
Washington Post Reports On Splog
The WashingtonPost.com published an article today about spam blogs or splogs. I found the article interesting especially this quote by Anne P. Mitchell, president and chief executive of the Institute for Spam and Internet Public Policy and a law professor
The first step that a blog maintainer can take to reduce automated spam is the implementation of a “captcha”. Captcha is an acronym for “completely automated public Turing test to tell computers and humans apart” according to Wikipedia. Most captcha implementations request that a user type in a series of letters and numbers that are shown in a distorted image. This is a difficult task for an automated system but it is an easy task for most visually capable humans. When an entity attempts to post a comment to a blog he, she or it faces a captcha challenge. The blog software implementing captchas is already available.
You might also wish to supplement the captcha with simple questions. For example, a candidate attempting to add a comment to the blog could be asked “Who wrote Huckleberry Finn?” If the answer contains either “Twain” or “Clemens” then it would be accepted and the comment would be posted. Ideally, a challenge question would be selected from a large and changing pool of questions. Also, a candidate commenter would be given more than one chance to answer a question.
The WP story left out most of what I said (not complaining, that’s what reporters do.)
I fiddled my blog scripts so that you’re unlikely to see any blog spam on them. But it’s still a pain to have to take out the garbage.
Glad to know that the countermeasures are working, John. The Post story left things a bit ambiguous, it appears from my re-read of the artice; and I’d have done well to check in with you about the just-mentioned– given your considerable technical abilities Of course, beyond the story per se, the big question remains. Why should ICANN allow registration services to continue blithely dealing with notorious spammers; why should so much of the burden be on bloggers to deal with a massive problem they didn’t create? The best of luck with your anti-spam work at ICANN and elsewhere! – David