Waxy.org is the sandbox of Unethical idea of the day: Write a web crawler that grabs the list of recently updated MovableType or Blogger weblogs, and posts a spam comment to every weblog entry. Sound too far-fetched? Maybe not; a porn site recently spammed Andrew Burke's weblog. I'm sure it won't be long before someone automates the process and ruins online community forever. (Or at least until someone writes a SpamAssassin plugin for weblogs.)
Spamming Weblog Comments
Posted Aug 16, 2002
May 24, 2013
Jay Silver's TED talk on turning everyday objects into computer interfaces
— the creator of Makey Makey, which I highly recommend
(via)
Steven Universe pilot
— Rebecca Sugar, the artist behind Adventure Time's best songs, starts her own show
The Lonely Island's "Semicolon"
— catchy parody of hashtag rap
The Girl Who Turned to Bone
— how rare diseases are now treated, and how people support each other online
(via)
May 23, 2013
Daily Dot on the pre-history of Tumblr
— interviews with the guys behind anarchaia and Projectionist
SIGGRAPH's technical papers 2013 preview
— someone show these people how to use Kickstarter
Planet Online
— the modern web meets early 1990s children's toy commercials
How does copyright work in space?
— Hatfield negotiated a license directly with Bowie, but it's otherwise complicated
Google Poetics
— common human search queries as poetry
(via)
Jessica Hische on typography
— great overall primer for selecting type
It's Not About the Nail
— "stop trying to fix it"
(via)
LEGO's full-scale X-Wing model arrives in Times Square
— a 42:1 scale LEGO model of a LEGO model of a model
May 22, 2013
Computer Beach Party
— so bad it's good; don't miss Jason Scott's great backstory and interview with the director
ROM CHECK FAIL
— after five years, Farbs' classic retro gaming mashup ported to Flash
Indie developers can't self-publish on the Xbox One
— giving in to pressure from partners?
NYT asks Scroll Kit developer not to use their name
— asking him to take down the assets is fine, but this is overreaching
Face morphing mirror at Maker Faire
— simple idea, great effect
Soylent, the post-food drink, raises $230k in a day
— his blog is fascinating and, of course, there's a subreddit
Amazon introduces Kindle Worlds, official licensing for fanfic
— John Scalzi notes that Amazon gets exclusive copyright and licensors can use your new elements without compensation
The History of YouTube by the Gregory Brothers
— on YouTube's eight birthday
May 21, 2013
Google Glass through a toddler's eyes
— reminds me of Among the Sleep with Oculus Rift support
Newsblur redesigns
— my pick for a worthy Google Reader successor
You Must Escape
— clever echolocation game mechanic, second place in Ludum Dare 26
May 20, 2013
Marco Arment on the Tumblr acquisition
— great early personal history of Tumblr
May 19, 2013
Yahoo approves Tumblr acquisition for $1.1B
— the community isn't taking it well; let's hope Yahoo learned from their first billion-dollar mistake
May 17, 2013
Doodal
— now you're doodling with portals
Bret Victor on drawing dynamic visualizations
— I really wish Bret would independently release some of his work as products
12:12 PM
Agree with you. A spam assasin not only for blogs but for all sites.
11:31 PM
Sounds like an all-nighter's worth of coding for the right miscreant. :-)
And why should blog comments be any different from bbs's, usenet, bulletin boards or mailing lists? Eventually as traffic increases the wide swath of humanity will come, and with it will come the need for policing -- lest they get swamped with stupid behavior.
(visiting via mathowie)
3:55 AM
Well, an easy way out.. already being used by some places like Paypal(?). At the comment section, display a random number in image format, i.e display the number 123 as three a gif image and ask the writer to note down this number as one field.
That should take care of a lot of spamming, shouldn't it?
8:14 PM
Thanks for the idea. Should have that thing working by, ooh, Thursday evening?
12:31 PM
People have come up with scripts like that for subprofile.com guestbooks and spammed porn into them, which can get very annoying. It seems to have died down though, I think the guestbook signing format has changed.
6:26 AM
I have experienced the same problem before some time. The solution called astatspam.
You can find the script here : http:// www. thetop sites.net/referer_spam/
This script connects to a daily updated span database and enters some directives to your .htaccess files, so your site will deny access to the spammers.