Miscellaneous Blog

If you wondered why all the blogroll entries linked to someone called “Laura” (who’s site was down), it’s because had been hacked

Blogrolling has been the victim off a malicious hack in the past 9 hours. The blogroll links have been restored from an offsite backup from Saturday. I’m tracing the cause off this now and the site may go offline at some point today while I make changes and collect evidence. All new links since Saturday afternoon have unfortunately been lost due to this.

All seems back to normal now. There’s also no evidence that Laura, whoever she was, had anything to do with the hack.

This post on Weblog spam is a little depressing.

Spam works and it is big business, and spammers are increasingly organized and increasingly business-savvy. It’s not some guy in the garage who bought a CD of email addresses from MicroWarehouse (yes, they used to sell them, I have old MacWarehouse catalogs to prove it) who thought it would be ‘cool’ to tell a million people about his Beanie Baby collection. It’s organized crime rings who hire programmers to automate everything they possibly can (domain registration, ISP registration, free email account registration) and hire menial workers for pennies an hour halfway around the world to do all the manual things they can’t automate (like get past image-based login systems). They hire virus writers to write extremely sophisticated viruses that exploit all known holes in everything, install spyware, malware, adware, and remote control programs with which they can both send more spam and launch distributed denial-of-service attacks… against anti-spam advocates.

What he’s saying is the days when we could have open comments on weblogs without people having to register is going to be over pretty soon. He also believes that most current antispam techniques aren’t going to work.

Weblogs may turn out to be The Next Thing for spammers, the next vector to exploit. And if that’s true, then things are going to get really ugly really quickly. If you’re up for that fight, then take them on, Godspeed. But prepare yourself for the worst, and then imagine something worse than that, and then accept that your imagination is too limited, because it will be so much worse than that.

Makes me wonder what they’re going to exploit next; I suspect they’ll start spamming UBB boards, perhaps using packet sniffing to get the passwords of legitimate users.

Nuke Florida from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure.

Another suspected comment spammer banned: Add 213.213.89.130 to your blacklists.

I’m deleting any comment nowadays that doesn’t seem to have anything to do with the post it’s a comment on, and has a suspicious looking URL.

After the mass spamming of weblogs a couple of weeks ago, it looks like there’s yet another DDOS attack on Hosting Matters, taking out Instapundit, Samizdata, and (I think) Matthew Yglesias. Details of what’s going on here. Not a good month for the Blogosphere.

According to Making Light, there is now a smoking crater where the infamous Lolita spammer’s pr0n website used to be.

Update: The Ukranian redirection site is indeed gone, but the pr0n site itself is sadly still there. While there’s a possibility this is a Joe job, I think it’s likely that the spam incident was by people connected with the site. I won’t consider it a victory until that one’s down as well.

I’m thinking the past weekend was for the Blogosphere what the infamous Canter and Siegal Green Card spam was to usenet. It certainly wasted a large amount of an awful lot of people’s time, and ruined a great many weekends. Teresa Nielsen Hayden still wishes a plague of boils on the spammer, to which I’ll add a bad case of haemorrhoids. Meanwhile Samizdata proposed using old-fashioned violence. while Scott just has a personal message for the spammer.

I feared the worst when I got a random comment attached to a very old post with the words “Nice Site!”. As suspected, the poster’s URL leads to a commercial porn site. Now I see that lots of Movable Type blogs, such as Making Light and Blogcritics have been hit by the same piece of bottom feeding slime, in their cases dozens of posts rather than just one. I got off lightly.

Teresa Nielsen Hayden wishes a case of boils on the perpetrator. I’ll add a severe case of piles to that.

This post on the Movable Type support forum suggests a drastic solution; renaming the legitimate MT Comments script, and replacing the original with a spider trap that adds the perp to the banned IP list in the HTACCESS file.

Someone’s done some detective work and identified the porn spammer as based in, you’ve guessed it, Florida. There’s always the Traveller Imperial Navy solution; “Nuke the state from orbit, it’s the only way to be sure!”

In the meantime, if you run a Movable Type blog, be sure to add the IP Address: 209.210.176.20 to your IP ban list.

Ten Technologies That Deserve to Die, according to Bruce Sterling. Not sure whether I agree with all of them, but he’s got a valid point for most, and I’m pushed to think of any technologies I’d like to see vanish more, since spam doesn’t count as a technology. (Link from Adam Lipscomb)

In case you’re wondering why this blog’s gone quiet in the past week or so, I’ve been on holiday (that’s a vacation for you colonials) staying in Dawlish in Devon, and Lostwithiel in Cornwall, two places I’ve visited many times before, but keep drawing me back. I’ll post some photos when I get them back (I know I should get myself a digital camera!). I hope the ones of the waves at Dawlish breaking over the trains come out well.

New Scientist reports on a remarkable skeleton discovered in Venezuala

The full magnitude of the world’s largest ever rodent has been revealed- the now-extinct monster was the size of a cow.

The creature weighed in at 700 kilograms and lived eight million years ago, roaming the lush banks of the ancient Orinoco delta in northwestern Venezuela. But the three-metre-long, 1.3-metre-tall behemoth was an evolutionary cousin of today’s humble guinea pig.

You would need a big hutch for one of those. (Link from Boing Boing)

Andrew Ian Dodge explains why he doesn’t like sports. And his first commenter just proves his point.