Do Not Recommend

An email came in over the transom, because it was a comment left on a ten year old (!) post, Range Report - Lee Enfield No. 4 Mk. 1.  I reproduce the email in full (other than the links) along with my commentary to promote mockery of the company that has employed comment spammers to, err, drum up business.

Thank you for sharing the knowledgeable blog with us

You are most welcome. 

I hope that you will post many more blog with us:-

Well, that's the plan. 

The AK-47 is a versatile firearm.

You hear what they did after the funeral of Mikhail Kalashnikov?  After a week they dug him up, washed him off, and put him back to work. 

It deserves just as versatile ammunition. And behold – here are 840 rounds of 7.62×39 by Prvi Partizan that you’ll be as happy to have at the range as you would during an altercation. This round features a 123 grain FMJ bullet.

I like Privi Partizan, and must rush to point out that this lovely spam was not from them, but rather from a place called "tactical ammo shop dot com".  If you hate Internet spam as much as I do, I encourage you to never buy anything from them.

I actually like Spam, but think that spammers can die in a crotch fire.

On the Internet nobody can tell if you're a dog

Politeness is a sign of dignity, not of subservience.

- Theodore Roosevelt 

But everybody can tell if you're an asshole.

Divemedic posted his stance on the vaccine: get it if you think it's right for you, don't get it if you don't think it's right for you.  A more sensible position is hard to imagine.

And then The Internet appeared in his comments section, with SumD00d telling him he was wrong (well, I think that's what he said because the comment was fairly incomprehensible; hey, it's The Internet, amirite?).

And while the comment was moderately incoherent, the attitude of the commenter was anything but.  Commenter "Hedge" is an asshole.  He may (or may not) be a dog with a keyboard but he is unmistakably an asshole with one.

Sigh.

I am very grateful indeed that the commenters here are almost always respectful and intelligent - and the commenters on the Dad Jokes are funny as hell.  I almost never need to step in to tell folks to settle down and mind their manners - maybe only 2 or 3 times in the 13 years I've been here.

People think wrong when they think that the Internet gives them anonymity.  It doesn't.  It gives pseudonymity, which is not at all the same thing.  If you post under a pseudonym (like Hedge and I both do), you still develop a reputation.  Quite frankly, you can't comment anonymously here, so anything you say in the comments here will add to (or in rare cases detract from) your reputation.

Divemedic certainly doesn't need me to fight his fights, that's not the point of this post.  I love  comments and the two way (or multiple way) discussions we have here.  But I'm not going to tolerate Internet Assholes like Hedge here.  Cathedra mea, regula meae - my place, my rules..  If you don't like it, don't stop by.  This really isn't very hard.

It is a wise thing to be polite; consequently, it is a stupid thing to be rude. To make enemies by unnecessary and willful incivility, is just as insane a proceeding as to set your house on fire. For politeness is like a counter--an avowedly false coin, with which it is foolish to be stingy. 

- Arthur Schopenhauer, The Wisdom Of Life 

Political spam

I've started getting political spam comments.  The reason that I disabled anonymous comments here was that the marketroids were dropping 300 comments a day flogging their wares.  Now they come from registered accounts, but it's been onsey-twosie action.

What's interesting is that I just got two in the last week shilling for Joe Biden's presidential campaign.  They've been sent to the spam can, but it seems that the campaign season is on the prowl.

If you're interested, the post they both targeted was this one.  And if you're interested in that, I have a collection of some of the funnier spam comments collected here.

Lastly, I like Spam (the meat).  While the pumpkin spice flavor doesn't do anything for me, I might have to search out the Portuguese Sausage flavor on Amazon.  Mmmmmm.

Use this one weird trick do that Ads DIE DIE DIE

Peter highlights a serious security issue - malware delivered via web ads:

Like many of you, I'm sure, I run ad blocking software, a pop-up blocker, and a script blocker on my Web browser.  In fact, I use multiple Web browsers.  For Web pages that simply must allow scripting, cookies, etc. - such as Blogger, on which I'm writing these words - I use Chrome.  For general browsing, where I don't want to allow Web sites to set cookies, run scripts, etc., I use Firefox, fully loaded with protective software.  As backups, for occasional use when I want to visit a Web site, then instantly clean out whatever it sets in the way of cookies, etc., I use Opera or Edge.  To add to my browsing security, I use a VPN (virtual private network)offering end-to-end encryption, and providing a 'location' that's many hundreds of miles away from where I am.  I want to make life as difficult as I can for scam artists, hackers and intrusive corporate spyware.

I therefore get very frustrated when certain Web sites won't allow access unless I disable my ad blocker, or demand that I disable some or all of my security software in order to use them.  I simply won't tolerate such nonsense. 

This is a serious issue, one that I've blogged about several times.  Web sites typically have little or no control over the ads they serve, and ads are increasingly used by the Bad Guys to serve up malware to unmatched web browsers.  Peter lists a set of tools that I also recommend, but There's another trick that you can use that will deep-six a lot of the web clutter that slows your browser down - and may try to infect it.

Internet Black Holes.  I just made that name up, but it gives you a picture of what this is doing.  If you make as many of the ad sites unreachable to your computer, they can't send you an ad.

Web pages look all nicely formatted, but they're actually a jumble of text, pictures, links, and computer code (especially Javascript).  Going to your browser's menu and selecting "View -> Source"  will show you just how complicated and ugly things are.  Your browser cleans this all up for you, pulling pictures down from links, formatting the text, loading video players, and fetching the ads that are encoded into the (mostly javascript) computer code.

And here is the weird trick: if you tell your computer that a particular ad location is at the Internet  address equivalent of Never Never Land, your browser will never be able to pull down that ad.  Sweet, huh?

What you do is basically override the Domain Name Service (DNS) for a particular set of bad sites.  DNS is what translates names (say, "www.google.com") into an IP address (I'm too lazy to look it up, but it will look something like "172.63.108.7").  DNS runs automagically, where your computer asks a DNS server (typically your home router) to give it the IP address for the name that you're trying to reach.

Except you don't have to always use DNS.  You can selectively (and most importantly, at no effort by you whatsoever) override DNS if you have some of these translations in a "hosts" file on your computer.  Your computer actually looks there first, and only asks DNS if it doesn't find what it's looking for.  If you have a bunch of ad sites in your hosts file, with an IP address pointing to Never Never Land, your browser will never send out DNS requests for those sites, and you will never see the ads (and the malware delivered with them).  Cool, huh?

As a note to the curious, "Never Never Land" has an IP address of "127.0.0.1".  This is called the "loopback" address and means that it's referring to your very own computer (whatever the real IP address is).  Since you almost certainly aren't running a web server on your own computer, and certainly aren't hosting those ads on those URLs, your web browser will get a whole bunch of 404 messages instead of ads.  And it will get them fast, because it doesn't have to wait for DNS to reply.

The only thing you need to know is "where can I get a hosts file that is already made up, because I'm far to busy to do it myself?"

The entries look pretty legit, although I can't vouch for everything.  There is non-ad stuff (like Sitemeter - the Sitemeter host that this blog used to point to is listed there) which will break, but it doesn't look like it will break much (or anything) that you'd notice.  And you want to zap a lot of the annoying stuff that Peter was talking about?  This is your huckleberry.

There are installation instructions at the link, and it looks like the file is updated regularly, so give it a try.

Antispam troll level: Grandmaster

Bravo:

Brian Weinreich has been trolling spammers for two years using a bot that fires realistic and ridiculous replies to the pervasive online salespeople. 

The founder of San Francisco firm Density created the bot as a means to waste the time of the blowflies of the internet after being affronted by a deluge of unsolicited sales pitches directed at his "sacred" inbox. 

Weinreich (@BeWeinreich) has posted 16 hilarious conversations in which his bot dubbed Sp@m Looper managed to engage spammers in lengthy chats.

The reason there are no anonymous comments here is that I turned it off 3 years ago - I was getting 100 - 150 spam comments a day and it was just too much work weeding the wheat from the chaff.  This flips the script - making the spammers sort out the wheat from the chaff.  Bravo.

Click through the link if you want his code to run it yourself.

Aw, now you're making me blush

Lovely spammer emails:

I came across your site while looking through business and trade related blogs.

Wow.  Just imagine if you'd have been looking for firearms and Internet security!  You'd have found me there, too!

We think that our products would be a perfect fit for you and your readers since we share the same advocacy of helping people get to realize their full potentials and help them to do greatly do what they do best.

Do be do be do.  I sure am glad I help all of you go greatly.

And I like the fact that your commentaries are beyond amazing.

Sure are.  And the bloggers here are exceptionally good looking, too.  Thanks so much for cluttering up my inbox.

Sounds legit

Cruising through the Spam Can, I found this gem that Sumd00d left on my post Hack your neighbor's wifi in 7 minutes:

hack neighbor's internet password within 5 minutes, free download wifi hacking software

Sounds legit.  I mean, it's free!  Whatever could go wrong at that price.

To those of you* tempted to practice the Dark Arts, unless you know what and where you're downloading from, just don't.  Remember Borepatch's first law of security: "free download" is Internet-speak for "open your mouth and close your eyes".

* Not that you'd ever do this.

The sound of silence

I feel a little bad about closing down anonymous comments, but it's quite a change seeing this every day.  In the week or so since I shut that door, I think I've had one real comment that got mistakenly tagged as spam and no spam comments at all.

I'm closing down anonymous comments

Comment spam is back after a brief hiatus, and it's worse than ever.  Not only is it approaching 300 a day, but a bunch (maybe as many as a dozen a day) are slipping through the spam filter and actually getting published.  And so I'm disabling anonymous comments.

I really don't like this, because there are some of you who post here pretty regularly that way.  I'll try leaving it shut for a week or so and then open it back up to see if that helps.

Has anyone else seen comment spam drop?

It seems like it's down by about two thirds over the last couple or three days.  Anyone else seeing this?

Blogger creaks, and cracks

I'm drowning in spam comments, which outnumber real comments by around ten to one.  The problem is that some of you comment anonymously, and I don't want to cut that off.  But that gives a free pass to the spammers, and while the comments are (mostly) getting caught in Blogger's spam filter, it's increasingly a pain to go through and make sure that none of you got swept up by the filter (which happens rather more than I'd like).

What I'd like is to require a CAPTCHA for anonymous comments only.  Blogger doesn't have that option, and likely won't:

I assume that Blogger, like Google Reader itself, is slowly going the way of Google Reader Shares. Blogger is legacy GoogleMinus, not a good fit for the post-2011 Google. A small but dedicated team doesn't have the resources to keep it healthy.

Gordon has some interesting thoughts at his post (and links to some of his older posts).  I'd hate to migrate to Wordpress, and Kevin's migration to Disqus was a nightmare of lost comments.  I'd also hate to ban anonymous comments.

Bah, humbug.

Comment spam

It seems to be running not quite ten times as much as real comments.  It's leaking through Google's spam filters more often, too.  Is anyone else seeing this?

I'd hate to block anonymous comments because there are real comments left that way, but cleaning up more than 100 spam comments a day is getting to be annoying.

Spam poetry

Plants pretty
a almost whole
and seeks occasionally to
excitedly
restore the highest harmony
occasionally to the almost whole
of the patient's
being

Bright Clear Concept

Sucking up spam is sucking up:

Fantastic beat ! I wish to apprentice even though you amend your site, how could i subscribe for a blog web site? The account aided me a acceptable deal. I had been a bit bit acquainted of this your broadcast provided bright clear concept

Fantastic beat to this blog.  I give it a six out of ten because it's not all that easy to dance to, but thanks for the creative English!

A note on blog comments

I'm running around 100 spam comments a day, and while Blogspot seems to be doing a nice job of catching them in the spam can, it's getting to the point where I'm just doing a "select all"/delete because it's a royal pain to scan through all of them to see if any of all y'all's comments got stuck in the can by mistake.

If you notice that one of your comments didn't go through, shoot me an email and I'll free it from the bit bucket.

Lovely Spam, wonderful spam

Holy cow, you need to be careful picking post titles.  I'm getting ~ 100 spam comments a day on my post The Democrats' War on Women.

I've closed comments on that post (neat new feature, Blogger team!) because it doesn't look like I'm getting any real comments.  Unless I have a bunch of readers in Russia ...

Die screaming in a fire, spammers.

On a lighter note, it seems that Wolfgang is a classical music lover.  The 99-songs-for-99-cents that I bought a month or two back has soothed the savage beast.  Not that he's savage, but he'll plop right down and snooze off, and these songs go on for ten hours.  Cool.

It also seems that he doesn't care for salsa music.  Okay, then.

Exciting Spam is exciting

Sometimes the Spam filter contains a higher caliber dross.

Neighborhood resident David Plunkett said she or he saw the type of male chimpanzee jump on apex of any police car - who has its lights on additionally an police agency inside - preceding the entire animal jumped you can each of our ground additionally headed towards a single vacant lot.  "We tried if you want to establish a brand new perimeter until that experts arrived," said Representative Marcus Martin, a trustworthy Las Vegas police spokesman. "But in the least to get ones to begin with animal, they start to couldn't getting there of spare time."  "They got competeing, and then the police did what folks had to assist you to would," said Paolone, a particular paving company worker who ended up being in work from the course of generally commotion then seemed to be to prevented regarding a good season anywhere from returning to positively his house and police investigated

I'm glad that this was a trustworthy Las Vegas spokesman, or who knows how it might have turned out.