Blog

I was having a large comment spam problem. It was to a point that spammers were sending me spam comments once an hour.

I finally set out to do something about it. I could of used Bayesian filtering, but I didn’t want any false positives. Blacklists? Didn’t want my site being reliant on external machines. Finally settled on a “catchpa” – a system of user response.

Unauthenticated users now have to enter a code that’s written beside a box in the comment field when they want to post. Yes, its an annoyance. However, this code is legible enough that it isn’t too annoying, and it has succesfully killed off 100% of my incomming spam.

Maybe one day spammers will try to use CPU-intensive OCR technologies to bypass such systems. But they have so many unprotected blogs to spam right now that it isn’t worth it to them.

I hate spammers. Thanks to them, one of my email addresses is virtually useless now. Spammers are the main reason botnets exist. And now, they’ve forced inconveniences onto visitors of my site and others due to their incessant abuse of a free Internet.

Oh dear oh dear. Let me quote this article from CBS:

(CBS4) BOSTON It’s called Leetspeak – the online language kids use to speed up communication and keep their parents guessing. The code has developed a dangerous edge to it. But Leetspeak, the secret code of numbers and letters, is changing and Internet safety experts want to warn parents about it.

“There are too many predators out there that could endanger their kids’ lives or sexualize them too early,” says Internet safety expert and family therapist Barbara Melton. “And leetspeak is just a gateway to all that.”

I, for one, find this quite funny. The reporter is obviously trying very hard to make up a story where there is none. Throw in a bit of anachronyms, kids, fears of online predators, and stir it all & bake for 40 minutes. The only reason such stories work is that the audience that reads this crap doesn’t know any better.

A few things wrong with this: first off, leetspeak isn’t changing. The reporter only says that to make the story seem more threatning, more sensational. Second of all, it isn’t “secret” by any means. Again – used to make the danger of predators that everyone’s so paranoid about more plausible.

But what’s absolutely most wrong with all of this, is saying that leetspeak is somehow a gateway for predators to exploit children. Yes, it is a means of communicating and therefore utilized by predators. But to somehow suggest that leetspeak increases the threat of predators is proposterous. If leetspeak is to be blamed, then might as well blame the English language – after all, predators use that too.

If anything, this article does raise the issue of the obvious disconnect between the reporter’s generation and that of the youth today.

Ahh, here it is… My massive collection of interview footage tapes. 17 tapes in all; most have 2-3 scenes on them.

I have just released the trailer for the Piracy Documentary. The film now has an official title too: “The Digital Revolution: On Piracy And More.”

Download the trailer here.