Elliott C. Back: Internet & Technology

Currently I’m blocking the following words in my spam blocklist in WP:

adipex
ambien
ativan
advicer
baccarrat
ballhoneys
booker
buy online
carisoprodol
meridia
casino
casinos
phentermine
chatroom
cialis
clitoris
cyclen
cyclobenzaprine
day-trading
tramadol
discreetordering
dutyfree
duty-free
vicodin
fioricet
freenet-shopping
headsetplus
hentai
hydrocodone
hydrocone
incest
ionamin
lipitor
lopressor
macinstruct
meridia
mlmleads.name
online-gambling
paxil
pest-control
phentermine
platinum-celebs
poker-chip
poze
prescription
propecia
protonix
prozac
slot-machine
soma
soma
taboo
tenuate
trablinka
tramadol
tredgf
trim-spa
ultram
viagra
vicodin
xanax
xenical
ytmnsfw.com
zithromax
zolus
zyban
zenegra

I’m also putting writing a distributed spam blacklist system for Wordpress on my to do list. We need some kind of collaborative voting system for blacklist keywords, where the top-rated keywords are automatically added to the blacklist. You’d be able to either opt to blacklist (destroy) any incoming comments that match, or simply add them to the moderation queue.

This is too cute, this x-ray photo of a kiss.

There are a couple bits of interesting YPN/Yahoo related news recently. The first is that Yahoo’s new product, MyBlogLog, happens to do Adsense tracking. This means that if you use MyBlogLog, Yahoo could be learning proprietary information about your Adsense to use to improve their competing YPN product:

Coincidentally, MyBlogLog (Yahoo) is also tracking information on Google AdSense — how many clicks Google AdSense ads are receiving (on webpages that have both MyBlogLog and AdSense installed), the ad unit size, and what webpage those clicks occurred. Yahoo doesn’t know the CPC for each of Google’s ads, but they do know the click-through rate (CTR) — and can specifically target high CTR publishers first, with their YPN offering.

Then in the “we made a huge bug” department, Yahoo charged their $1000 bill 50 times to a guy’s credit card, which would definitely suck for him:

Yahoo! experienced a technical issue that caused the credit cards of a few advertisers to be charged incorrectly on Wednesday, February 14. Some credit cards were authorized for one or more charges in error.

We caught this early and were able to halt the process before the charges were actually completed. We’re very sorry for any issues this might have caused you and we’re doing everything possible to completely resolve the situation as quickly as possible, and to ensure that it doesn’t happen again.

So, the transition to their new Advertising platform Panama is probably not going as smoothly as they’d like, with much internal patching and scurrying, but over the next few months these kind of events will probably fade away. Bugs are to be expected with change, as are accusations of “under the table” business practices.