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
July 3, 2009
Brandon Boyer on Treasure World, DS game that turns wifi hotspots into collectible treasure
— to play the game, you have to explore the real world
TweetCraft, in-game Twitter client for World of Warcraft
— supports uploading screenshots with TwitPic
(via)
Augmented reality iPhone London tube station finder
— I really could've used this last week
(via)
Sour's "Hibi no Neiro," crowdsourced music video
— choreographing 64 fans with webcams
(via)
Slate's Chris Wilson tracks 10,000 random YouTube URLs for 30 days
— 3% hit 1,000 views, more than I would've expected
(via)
Pinboard, Maciej Ceglowski's lightweight del.icio.us clone
— on the roadmap: "Get acquired by Yahoo and slowly grow useless"
Donkey Kong easter egg discovered 25 years later
— created by DadHacker and discovered by Don Hodges, two of my favorite gaming nerds
Newspaper Club
— building a customizable newspaper printing service in 60 days; they're using InDesign as the backend
Kevin Kelly's Death Clock in Futurama
— this might seem morbid to some, but I find it inspiring
July 2, 2009
Paul Lamere's Coolness Index
— are female singers uncool?
Kickstarter's Big Day
— 13 projects ended on July 1, raising an average 188% of their goals
Anil Dash on Malcolm Gladwell's criticism of Chris Anderson's Free
— I read through Gladwell's New Yorker piece twice, and the arguments seem petty and off base
72-year-old retired boxer beats up knife-wielding knucklehead
— the inane Facebook photos make this story even more delicious
July 1, 2009
Pez sues Burlingame Museum of Pez for copyright infringement
— so disappointing
RIAA wins lawsuit against Usenet.com
— judge rules Betamax case doesn't apply; every other Usenet provider is next
June 30, 2009
EveryBlock releases source code
— it was a requirement of their funding from the Knight Foundation
Hype Machine detects cheating on charts, names names
— one of the bands responds in the comments and gets schooled by Anthony
(via)
Ze Frank on black, white, and shades of green
— I'm loving this series
China bans gold farming, real-world sale of virtual goods
— Eurogamer estimates 1 million Chinese gold farmers with worldwide trade worth more than US$10 billion annually
(via)
The Pirate Bay sold to publicly-traded Swedish gaming company
— Brokep's statement is delusional; being acquired will almost certainly kill the site
Michael Rubin's "Droidmaker" book now available for free download!
— authoritative 518-page history of Lucasfilm, the creation of Pixar, and much more
(via)
June 29, 2009
Jason Rohrer interviewed about "selling out" to make iPhone and ad games
— he recently switched from free, open-source games; also, EA claims Spielberg's LMNO isn't cancelled
How the NYT kept their reporter's Taliban kidnapping off Wikipedia for seven months
— they collaborated with Jimmy Wales directly to freeze the entry; NPR asks if it was ethical
(via)
David Fincher may direct Facebook film, adapted by Aaron Sorkin
— possibly starring Michael Cera or Shia LaBeouf as Zuckerberg; this sounds familiar
(via)
Quarrygirl's undercover investigation of non-vegan ingredients used at L.A.-area vegan restaurants
— outstanding blog reporting, with industrial food testing from 17 different restaurants and research into suppliers
June 28, 2009
James Barnett's oil paintings of landscapes from video games
— looking at the paintings, I felt like I'd actually visited those locations in real-life
(via)
WSJ interviews Brenda Brathwaite about "Train," a board game about the Holocaust
— not all games need to be fun
(via)
June 27, 2009
How Rob Manuel accidentally started a Michael Jackson moonwalk flashmob
— I'm in London right now, and I've seen several massive vigils and tributes on the streets
(via)
Top teams join forces to win Netflix Prize
— check the leaderboard for the first score to break the 10% improvement threshold
(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.