Blog Comment Spam On The Rise
The last two days I’ve seen a lot of comment spam, and a lot getting through Akismet. Clearly bayesian techniques are not going to work on this kind of spam, an example of which is:
<strong>free credit report com…</strong>
sorely.banjo!wantonness woo braking Spokane?potatoes Nigerian involved:credit http://www available-credit-report com/ …
See, it includes a variety of random words, some of which are spelled incorrectly, as well as punctuation symbols before delivering the payload, and for some reason Akismet is missing the telltale “free credit report,” which should be an instant flag for spam.
Pretty New Macbook
The Internet Never Forgets
There used to be a time when your personal altercation with another man in the street had no witnesses and lived only in that moment. Today, a half dozen bystanders will capture your fist slamming into his face with their camera phones, and if you’re lucky, someone will get it on video. It used to be that someone could quietly die in their home next to a bottle of brandy, and the town would whisper. Now, a student dies over spring break and his online alcoholic ramblings are collected for mass edification on a blog. It used to be that the personal lived and died encaged in your social network, but now through online media, the personal is both immortal and pervasive.
I can see two possible reactions to this movement. The first is to completely degrade the societal notion of morality, such that people no longer can judge the character of other people they don’t know. In a way, by using the new internet media to universally and publically expose mass sin, no one can any longer be called a saint, or thought well of. The internet allows everyone to be thrown together in the same melting pot of petty crime and grievance, the slummed mix of baseborn humanity. The second is to attack the internet, and ignore the personal material posted there. In essence, the credibility of the internet as a new media would be lost in the attack on its credibility and purpose.
1984 in 30 years won’t be men with sticks watching you over TV screens. It will be a distributed folksonomy of Web 3.0 minded-individuals collaborating their user-generated media tagged to your name. 1984 is your neighbors, their cameras, and flickr.