T w e n t y S i d e d

A few items to note about comment spam:

It seems to come in waves, or cycles. Yesterday I got more spam than I have in the past week. Normally this would lead you to believe that one spammer has started pounding away at the site, but that doesn’t seem to be the case here. I wasn’t keeping count until afternoon, but I’m guessing I got about twenty or thirty so spam comments a all day, and each one seemed to come from a different IP. There were a few common types, and for my own purposes I’ve categorized them:

• Mr. Brown-noser – Posts a plausible-looking comment like, “I agree! I hope others write about this as well! I love your site.”. It’s clumsy and generic enough to stand out, but I have to actually look at what URL they link before I chuck them in the bit bucket.
• Mr. Lotsa Links – Obvious spam. The posts are just page after page of keywords and links.
• Mr. Sneaky – Posts comments to really old posts with just one or two links, hoping they will escape my notice and remain for search engines to find. If I didn’t check the admin page I might miss these ones.
• Mr. Infomercial – Has lots of “helpful facts” about whatever he’s linking, which is usually generic meds.

Each of the above has just a few variants they re-use, but these are the four distinct types I see. (Each one has other characteristics, like what types of bogus usernames and emails they provide and the type of bold / italics tags they use.)

Anyway, I wonder why the cyclical nature? It is possible that the coming long weekend (which had already arrived in some parts of the world, like Australia) provided the spammers with time off from their normal day jobs. (Clubbing baby seals, most likely.)

Maybe its just a coincidence. Maybe my site has propigated to another group of them.

Sometimes I block the IP of one of these spammers if I already have the admin window open. However, I suspect this is a waste of time. I’m wondering if these changing IP’s aren’t from guys who are using wireless hotspots or internet cafes to do their dirty deeds. If this is the case, then blocking them is a waste of time, and in fact creates a (very, very slight) chance that a legit visitor will arrive on the same address at some point and get rejected.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

Steven Den Beste takes Apple to task for their QuickTime installer. This hits a nerve with me, so I find I must add the following insightful commentary:

Yeah. Everything he said.

It’s too late to help Steven, but I want to mention that recently I managed to stumble on the page that let me install the Player and not ITunes. It never even mentioned iTunes during the process. It was shortly after getting this computer that I visited Lileks and tried to watch one of his home movies. The page I was sent to from there gave me just the player, not iTunes. I can’t find that particular page through Apple’s site though.

On my old computer I had iTunes, and it was every bit as annoying as Steven says. The various “helper” processes running in the background infuriated me. The worst was the iPod app. Why is this thing running by default? If the user doesn’t own an iPod, then this is just wasted memory, CPU cycles, hard drive space, and (worst of all) needless clutter in the list of running applications. If they DO have an iPod, well then wouldn’t they install the iPod software that came with the unit? There is no reason for this process to even exist, much less run in the background all the time.

But more important is the principle of the thing. Sure, the “helper” apps only take up a measly 6 meg of memory. I’m sure I can’t percieve the change in performance over 6 meg, but what if everyone did this? If every application grabbed 6 meg and added two processes to the soup, my computer would be an unusable mess with hundreds of processes clogging up the works. What makes Apple think they have the right to do this? What makes them so special?

iTunes is like a nest of bad weeds. The roots go deep, and no matter what you do you’ll never feel like you got them all. It’s worse than MediaPlayer by a long shot, which is really saying something. It’s like a race to the bottom with these two. Shameful.

And finally: I’m sick of the fights over file types between QT and MP as well. Each program tries to poach the file types native to the other player. Both are guilty of it, although QT earns my ire for the time it stole the MPEG associations and then was unable to play the files when I clicked on them. Very naughty.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.