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
November 7, 2009
NYT visualizes the unemployment rate for different demographics
— 48.5% of young black men without a high school degree; 3.6% of college-educated white women over 25
November 6, 2009
Another World level ported to Javascript
— in other emulation news, a NES and Gameboy emulator in JS and SNES9x ported to Flash
(via)
Blocktronics' ANSI art tribute to RaDMaN
— powered by Viewtronics, Peter Nitsch's gorgeous new Flash 10 ANSI viewer
(via)
Aaron Straup-Cope leaves Flickr, joins Stamen Design
— one of my favorite geeks joins one of my favorite companies
Unreal Engine 3 development kit now free for non-commercial use
— huge announcement, along with the recent free release of Unity Indie
The Big Picture's series on Martian landscapes
— Kai's Power Tools in real-life
(via)
November 5, 2009
Preview of McSweeney's Panorama, their one-shot newspaper
— as expected, looks incredibly great
(via)
Birdhouse for Your Soul
— Greg Knauss finds one small piece of the historical web
Video montage of actors speaking the movie's title
— great comments with some missed opportunities; "You talkin' to me? You talkin' to The Taxi Driver?"
The Morning News' Cloud of Atlases
— impossible to guess, but look at all the pretty colors
American Airlines fires UX designer for explaining why their UX isn't great
— a lapse of judgment from both American Airlines and an employee who cared too much
November 4, 2009
Overheating, photo series of gadgets thrown through walls
— from issue 6 of Amusement, the incredible French gaming culture magazine
(via)
Ricardo Autobahn's The Golden Age of Video
— insane pop culture video mashup
November 3, 2009
The Last Days of Gourmet
— sad photo series, reminds me of the dot-com carnage photos
Put This On
— first episode of Jesse Thorn and Adam Lisagor's Kickstarter-funded video series on clothing
Jono Bacon's The Art of Community released for free download under CC license
— looks fantastic and worth buying
(via)
Eric Testroete's papercraft portrait Halloween costume
— incredibly creepy, like videogames leaking into the real world
(via)
November 2, 2009
Mark Pilgrim's history of the IMG element
— told through annotated conversations from 1993
(via)
Every vandalism edit to Nickelback's Wikipedia page
— I wonder which edits managed to stay in the longest without detection
November 1, 2009
Mike Pusateri's Halloween costume data collection
— for the fifth year, he's collected every costume name; this year, "nothing" spiked to #2
XKCD's movie narrative charts
— here's a more serious attempt at Primer's timeline
October 30, 2009
GameCity Squared's 15-Pixel Megamix
— extremely minimalist interpretations of 12 different games
October 29, 2009
Lauren McCarthy's Happiness Hat
— it measures your smile and stabs you if you're not smiling sufficiently
(via)
October 28, 2009
Auto Tune de Nieuws
— needs an angry Dutch gorilla
Facebook prank memorializes living person
— the Facebook team should allow an email veto, or at least require better documentation
(via)
2D Boy's pay-what-you-like World of Goo results wrapup
— don't miss the breakdown by OS and country
(via)
FreeForm's short film on the Open Internet
— impressive set of interviewees, directed by Jesse Dylan of Yes We Can fame
Using Flickr as a paintbrush
— coloring overhead maps based on the dominant colors of photos taken on the ground
(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.