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
September 1, 2010
First details on Telltale's episodic Back to the Future game emerge
— they also secured rights to make games based on Jurassic Park
Cee Lo Green's official video for F**K YOU
— even better than the typography video, I'm perfectly content to have this song stuck in my head 24/7
Slate interviews Innocence Project cofounder about false convictions
— over 250 people have been freed by new DNA evidence, many of them with false confessions
Unreal Engine 3 tech demo Epic Citadel for the iPhone/iPad
— impressive tech demo, now available for free
GameSetWatch covers Assembly 2010's PC demo contest
— if you have the hardware, I highly recommend trying out the two winners yourself
Apple announces Ping, a social network built into iTunes
— their first foray into social, finally; seems inevitable that app/location/TV/music sharing will follow
August 31, 2010
All four issues of Daniel Raeburn's The Imp available for free download
— highly recommended, covers Daniel Clowes, Jack Chick, Chris Ware, and dirty Mexican comics
(via)
Eclectic Method's 8-bit Mixtape
— not particularly great music, but the visuals make it
(via)
Vanity Fair's glimpse into the day in the life of the President
— long, must-read look at the insane complexity of today's political landscape
Lanyrd, social conference directory
— brilliantly executed social event discovery; it should be pronounced "La Nerd"
Copyrighting Fashion
— a new bill would subject fashion to copyright, but at what cost?
Tom Scott's Evil hack shows phone numbers exposed by Facebook users
— culled from public "lost my phone" groups
Unhear It
— replace one earworm with another
August 30, 2010
Stay Free's Illegal Art mix tape
— the files all moved here
Hark! A Vagrant's Nancy Drew covers
— previously: the Gorey covers
Markov chaining Kickstarter blurbs
— this also doubles as a Kickstarter project idea generator
Pomplamoose teams up with Ben Folds & Nick Hornby
— Hornby wrote all the lyrics for Folds' new album
(via)
The Wilderness Downtown
— an HTML5 music video for Arcade Fire with some fun geo integration
August 29, 2010
Swarmation
— like musical chairs for pixels
(via)
August 28, 2010
Disney remixes old cartoons into "Blam!"
— truly awful
August 27, 2010
PieLabPDX food cart makes customers play games to buy pie
— they had to win a game of Rock Scissors Paper to get their choice
Dirpy
— convert YouTube videos to MP3s with surprisingly deep transcoding options
Indie Game: The Movie interviews Adam Saltsman on Canabalt
— every one of these shorts gets me more excited for the full-length film
August 26, 2010
Jerry Stiller Unscripted
— an adorable encounter with the owners of the Costanza house
Members of Paramore, New Found Glory, and Relient K cover "Bed Intruder Song"
— the original broke the Billboard Top 100
(via)
"Learning to Be Me" by Greg Egan
— a better-written short story with a similar theme as "Where Am I?"
"Where Am I?" by Daniel Dennett
— short sci-fi story from 1978 about where consciousness resides
(via)
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.