Evolutiontwo has a profane and funny response to all spammers. I hear you brother. Like the rest of the sane world he has no intention of passing his bank a/c details over to some spammer claiming to be from Africa, buying a fake rolex or using a super-cheap online pharmacy to buy drugs to enlarge various body parts. Also, to give a lot of net user’s credit they’re bright enough to know that it was a spammer rather than an online lottery that harvested their email address.
It had to happen at some stage I suppose. (although I’m still not quite sure why???). Blogshares enables users to trade blogshares similiar to a fantasy stockbroker game.
Blogs are assigned monetary values based on the number of incoming and outgoing links to other blogs. It’s similiar to Google in that it measures ‘connectedness’ Currently this blog is very lowly ranked 🙁 Probably due to the fact that most of my friends don’t actually maintain blogs so the usual web of trackbacks is avoided. It could also be that I haven’t said anything interesting. I hope not. Also my blogroll is generated using javascript and it appears that the blogshare parser has failed to pick up these links…
Just picked this up on Linux Journal. Reviews of the best Midi apps for linux from the ubiquitous Rosegarden to seq24. The power of rosegarden has always impressed me. It supports Disposable Software Synth Interface (DSSI) and the LADSPA audio processing API enabling a wide range of plugins to be added (or even developed).. As a composition tool, it’s usefulness is enhanced through support for the Lilypond notational format, it’s pretty much the complete midi sequencer. If you’re serious about music but not so big on linux then tough it out. Rosegarden is one of the reasons why I love free software.
Picked up the following link from Jon Udell about the CAPTCHA (Computer Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers & Humans apart) preventing blog spam. This is a really (should that be raelly) tasty idea from Rael Dornfest. It can be summed up as can’t add, can’t post. He uses the Blosxom Writeback function which provides weblog comments with write-backs. An arithmetic sum is embedded in the writeback and no commets are allowed unless the answer is posted correctly. An example of this is
5 + 2 =
Neatly sidestepping more general blog spambots. The numbers are generated randomly. A definite improvement would be image obfuscation (a la Captcha!) and a bigger range.. He currently only uses 0-9 meaning a 1 in 20 chance you’re gonna get the right number. I’m not sure I want to encourage blogspammers to brute force my site, especially when a post is so tantalisingly close
I’m working on my own interesting weapon in the battle against blogspam. It currently has the catchy title of blogassasin (Apologies to jmason & the rest of the spamassasin team). Also, it doesn’t kill blogs but early versions come close. Active blacklist generation is another tidy feature. So spammers should think before thy HTTPiss Off innocent bloggers. Personally I don’t believe that my blog (or anyone else’s for that matter) needs to become any less relevant or increasingly grbled. So let’s say NO to blogspam 😉