Firefox

So, Akismet, and other spam blockers, are spreading the workload out to everyone.

I don't know why, but some days my blog seems to be a spam target. Of course, it's mostly bots of some kind hitting it, so the best defense seems to be automated spam blockers. Here's all of the spam that AKismet caught this morning (up to the time of this post).

My pangs of withdrawal continued until I got a mysterious email from an AOL address I didn’t recognize. I clicked through my spam blockers, which informed me the email contained content “forbidden under company policy.” More sleuthing revealed that the email had been sent to me (apparently by mistake) at 10:13 a.m. from the AOL account of one of our VPs. The “forbidden content”? An invite to her holiday party. From then on, I figured if AOL was good enough for a VP, it was good enough for me. -Submitted by “Bored in Boston”

I have added a Captcha type anti spam image verification that will at this time only be visible to unregistered users, so if you register your identity, you will not have to enter the password to post a comment.

There are a few problems – no USB ports, no wireless internet, and I’m pretty sure that the security can’t really handle even the most basic of firewalls and spam blockers yet. On the other hand, the thing can handle 330 trillion operations per second (more than 100,000 times the speed of a normal PC), its energy efficiency is more than one million times that of your average computer, and it’s so small that it’s invisible to the naked eye.

For the last few months I’ve began receiving spam in my GMail account that has been getting through the normally outstanding spam blockers. These have been getting through because the text is embedded in a GIF file that shows up embedded in the body of the e-mail. So there is no actual text for the spam blockers to sort through, thus it gets straight to my e-mail. I’ve been getting at least a few of these each day and it has been quite aggrevating.

i really do get a kick out of junk mail. i love the way they dodge using those sort of “red flag” words and how they get around the spam blockers. it’s actually really creative. anyway, i got this one to day–get a load of the address they link to at the end.

Like the email spam blockers, it’s worth to have a good list of comment/trackback spammers in hand. So I will try to share my list with other guys and highly recommend it to others. This can help blogosphere to have clear sky!

Change 6) I have beefed up the spam blockers on here. For about a month I had VICIOUS attacks on here, mainly because the spam was down, it made the server run at about 20% CPU , which I didn't like. So I took it down until I could clean up the code a wee bit. Which I did, now it runs and I haven't had a spam comment in about a month, not bad.

Okay…so I’m going to be trying the whole “comments” thing again. The reason I haven’t allowed comments is because most of the time the only comments I get are just spam. And not even the good kind of spam with dirty words and shit, just some lame crap about poker. But I’m trying some comment-spam blockers to as a trial run. So feel free, all three of you out there reading to try them out. We’ll keep you posted on how the experiment is working.

My host disabled my mom-blog, and I am PISSED as I have a lot to write this week. I’m switching to Wordpress, if I can figure it out, it’s not going to be easy. Did I mention that I’m PISSED, as they have not responded to my contacts? To get real spam blockers, I need to pay $150 for EE. Screw that! Arg…

Microsoft announced today that it has filed a lawsuit against groups that use zombie computers. The software giant took the action after learning through a company experiment that use of infected PCs to thwart spam blockers and pass along immense quantities of junk e-mail is more widespread and disruptive than Microsoft expected.

It’s been a while since I’ve sent out the Photo Lines newsletter. This was for a number of reasons including TIME and so much of the mail not getting through because spam blockers from some ISP’s are increasingly filtering out even wanted mail.

I’ve disabled comments on all new posts, and will probably go back and disable comments on all my previous posts as well. I’m just getting too many spam comments, and even with spam blockers I can’t keep up. I’m actually getting about 50 comments per day that don’t even have links in them. Just random lines about trying online poker. What is the point of spam with NO LINKS???

I know, I have had nothing but problems since I got Windows XP, due to the security, slowness and the spamming!!!......its indescribable. Now, I am considering their e-mail product, which is free as well. They have a download for their e-mail program with spam blockers. It is called Thunderbird.

Now we have our blogs and many marketers have also embraced the use of blogs to help their business, and in many cases, like mine, they are also used to help spread our writing (like my fantasy articles).

I, personally, love getting feedback from my readers and don't ever want to have to change that, because it makes me feel good to read what you think about my writing (whether it's my articles and posts about marketing, or my fantasy stories).

And what happens????

Some morons have come out with BLOG BLASTERS!

Email spam has been a problem for years now, resulting in spam blockers at the ISP, on website servers, and on everyone’s email accounts.

With the increased interest in blogging and RSS feeds, is it any wonder that spammers worldwide would turn their sights on this technology too?

Just how are spammers aggrevating the growing blog communities?

I’ll try to keep you posted about the server stauts. I have downloaded and implemented about 4 seperate spam blockers and these assholes manage to bypass each and everyone. I’ve taken some serious drastic measures and hopefully this latest solution will be the key. I almost want them to try.. I need to see if MY OWN recipe will work.

So I starting having some techincal problems while logged on yesterday morning. I thought it strange, but didn't give it much thought. Come on, I work for an internet company (very big named internet company) and I'd like to think I'm pretty knowledgable about this kind of stuff. I have pop up blockers and spam blockers and norton anti-virus so I didn't think it could be that big of a deal.

Don't even try to sell me your anti-virus programs and spam blockers -- they all have back doors. Heck, as I type this piece, I'm getting random pop-ups from a program that isn't even running on my computer, warning me about the excess spam I have on my computer.

Ciphire Mail is a new encryption and signing agent for the masses. With this transparent proxy, e-mail can be signed and encrypted using special public key infrastructure, but without the need for the user to manually generate certificates (key pairs) and have them validated by a third-party certification authority. So far, so good. I would even say: wonderful! Finally! That's what we needed.

That said, I was wondering whether Ciphire thought of interoperability with existing e-mail solutions that have seen wide-spread implementation. The best-supported e-mail cryptography standard is probably X.509 certificates and S/MIME. Standard e-mail clients such as Outlook, Apple Mail and Thunderbird/Mozilla have it built-in, and it works seamlessly once you have managed to install your certificates.

Ciphire doesn't use X.509 keys and S/MIME. Instead, they install a local mail server that forwards your mail, acting as an encryption proxy. Ciphire's big challenge is to get a critical mass with a system that needs to be installed beside the local user's mail client. I'd say since neither PGP nor S/MIME have really reached what seasoned bullshit bingo players call market penetration, Ciphire will get its chance.

"CNN Money is running a story about a new IBM service that spams the spammers. The idea behind the technology is that when a spam email is received, it is immediately sent back to the originating computer - not an email account. From the article, ""We're doing it to shut this guy down," Stuart McIrvine, IBM's director of corporate security strategy, told the paper. "Every time he tries to send, he gets slammed again."""

For all of its advantages, the convergence could also cause problems. Security already is becoming an issue, and devices will be vulnerable to the same ills computers have today, including the difficulty of using the device, hard drives crashing and even threats of spam and virus attacks.

"Certainly, anything that happens on the Internet can now happen on the mobile phone," said Rich Begert, president and chief executive of Bellevue-based Wireless Services.

Wireless Services, which helps carriers roll out new services like text messaging and accompanying spam blockers, recently completed a survey showing that 43 percent of text messages in the U.S. are spam.

"Now that a device has Internet access, spam, viruses, Trojans and other devious things can happen on them," Begert said.