All is quiet

A combination of Gmail filtering, a few weeks' training Thunderbird, and a handful of Movable Type plugins seem to be doing an admirable job. Details shortly.

Work-At-Home Mom Pleads Guilty To Massive Porn Spamming

From Yahoo :

Jennifer Clason, 33, of Raymond, N.H., was part of a spam gang that sent mass quantities of messages containing pornographic images, said officials from the
Department of Justice.

Spam rates rebound

From TechWeb :

After several months of slipping spam rates, junk mail rebounded during February, message filtering company Postini said Tuesday.

Online spam fighting tools

If you haven't already done so, head over to this site and check out some of the online spam fighting tools available. Very good resource.

Blocking referrer spam

Recently one of my sites was suddenly flooded with referrer spam (just as annoying as any other spam variety). What exactly is referrer spam? From Wikipedia :

Referer spam is a kind of spamdexing (spamming aimed at search engines). The technique involves making repeated web site requests using a fake referer url pointing to a spam-advertised site. Sites that publicize their access logs, including referer statistics, will then also link to the spammer's site.

The most effective way to deal with this seems to be the creation of a few ReWriteRules for your webserver - commonly done via an .htaccess file for Apache. A couple of articles I came across whilst working out how to best deal with this :


Block Referrer Spam on I Love Jack Daniels
This is a great look at various ways (read the comments) to deal with this problem, mostly using .htaccess files.


Referer Spam Redux (Kuro5hin)
A summary of the problem and useful links to other articles. Once again, the comments are illuminating.

If you're looking for ways to deal with spam on Dean Allen's (Textism) Refer, later versions offer the following section in refer.php :

* Fill these in to halt the recording of unwanted referrals   
   (e.g., an overly frequent google search, or a robot that
   inserts a referrer for every page it visits) by matching a
   distinct phrase. To add more, just duplicate a line and put
  a different match phrase inside 'quotes'.                    */

 $rcfg['exclude'][] = 'blo.gs';
 $rcfg['exclude'][] = 'weblogs.com';
 $rcfg['exclude'][] = 'technorati.com';
 $rcfg['exclude'][] = 'paris-hilton-video.blogspot.com';

Simply copy/paste the last line, insert any text from your spam; rebuild.

Removing spam comments in MT 3.2

It looks as though the Texas Holdem spammer is back - on my blogs at least. Here's a quick rundown on removing spam comments from MT 3.2; I'll address the issue of using various plugins in future posts.

For now :

After logging in to MT, or by clicking on Main Menu at the top of any admin page, you'll see a list of options down the right hand side. Amongst these is 'Comments', which gives you a site-wide listing of all comments on your MT installation.

From here, you'll be presented with a list of your most recent comments; regardless of which blog they were made on. Simply select the comments you wish to delete, and click 'junk'. The blogs in question will automatically be rebuilt for you.

Real businesses send spam too

An interesting article at GoArticles.com on how legitimate businesses are sometimes unwittingly sending spam emails.

China tired of being spam giant

China is launching an offensive against spam email, a problem with which it has become associated in recent years.

The Chinese Ministry of Information plans to introduce new anti-spam regulations on March 30. A centre has also been established for handling reports of junk email.

According to a January report by anti-virus company Sophos, China is currently the world's second largest offender when it comes to spam email. This is one occasion when first place (currently the US) is not at all desirable.