Category: Tech

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I found a sneaky type of spambot this morning. It was impersonating regular commenters on Speed Force, using their names and (at first glance) email addresses to blend in.

The names weren’t terribly surprising, but the email addresses were. Where had it gotten them? WordPress shouldn’t reveal them, unless there’s a bug somewhere. Was one of my plugins accidentally leaking email addresses? Had someone figured out a way to correlate Gravatar hashes with another database of emails?

As I looked through the comments, I realized that in most cases, it wasn’t the commenter’s usual email address. Here’s what the spambot was doing:

  1. Extract the author’s name and website from an existing comment.
  2. Construct an email address using the author’s first name and the website’s domain name.
  3. Post a comment using the extracted name, the constructed email, and a link to the spamvertised site.

The actual content (if you can call it that) of the comments was just a random string of numbers, and the site was a variation on “hello world,” leading me to suspect that it might be a trial run. Certainly they could have been a lot sneakier: I’ve seen comment spam that extracts text from other comments, or from outbound links, or even from related sites to make it look like an actual relevant comment.

I’d worry about giving them ideas, but I suspect it’s already the next step in the design.

Update: They came back for a second round, this time here at K2R, and I noticed something else: It only uses the first name for the constructed email address, but does so naively, just breaking the name by spaces. This is particularly amusing with names like “Mr. So-and-so,” where it creates an address like mr@example.com, and pingbacks, where the “name” is really the title of a post.

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Crispian Jago presents the history of science as a subway map (cool visualization).

The comic strip The Oatmeal tackles the irony of mobile app pricing. Or, in the worlds of “Weird Al” Yankovic: “I hate to waste a buck ninety-nine.”

A 19th-century terraforming experiment: Ascension Island’s artificial ecosystem, instigated by Charles Darwin.

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Some suspicious pingbacks this morning tipped me off that there’s a splog (spam blog) automatically copying posts from K-Squared Ramblings to their own site. I sent them a complaint this morning, but they don’t seem to care much: They’ve scraped the RSS feed again, and reposted the same 15 articles nine times today!

It seems extremely likely that they’ll repost this article as well. If you’re reading this on “Attorney Legal Blog” (great irony there), the site is ripping off content from other websites — and clumsily, too!

For the record, the site doing the copying, which I won’t link to directly, is “www – dot – legal – dash – attorney – dot – info”. And it looks like a lot of other sites are being copied…just as badly, repeats and all.

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Cool! I’ve been named in The Comics Reporter’s reader poll on Name Five Writers About Comics You Like That Aren’t On CR’s Home Team Of Tom Spurgeon And Bart Beaty. It’s an impressive list, and with some of the big names on it, almost intimidating to be included.

If you’re visiting here for the first time, let me make a bit of an introduction. This is my sort of general-purpose blog, where I write about anything from comics and science-fiction to photos, life observations and technology. If you’ve dropped in from The Comics Reporter, you’ll probably be most interested in:

Thanks to Richard Pachter for recommending me!

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Weblog Tools Collection recently spotlighted a WordPress plugin to automatically tweet old posts. It seems like a good way to bring attention to a site’s archives, as long as it’s used sparingly. The frequency can be as high as once an hour, which IMO is a good way to lose all your followers, but one post every few days seems like it might be reasonable and even interesting.

I’ve already got a setup in place to show a “flashback” post on the front page, but most of the blog’s traffic seems to come from searches these days. Every once in a while I’ll happen to look at the front myself and say, “Oh, yeah, that was a good one!” and post a link on Twitter or Facebook.

This new plugin posts automatically, and picks an article at random. That’s helpful, because it can find old posts that I’ve forgotten. On the downside, because it’s random, there’s no quality control. It could just as easily pull out something completely inane that was funny for about a week five years ago as it could dredge up a forgotten gem. And there’s always the risk of promoting “Happy New Year!” in August — which is exactly what happened when I tested it on Speed Force.

You can filter out categories, but I think it might be more useful to filter on tags. Sure, it can take a while to go through the archives tagging posts that you feel are worth a second look, but it would certainly improve the signal/noise ratio with this scheme. Even better, there’s a lot more you can do once you’ve tagged your “classics.” Highlight them on archive pages, list some of them in the sidebar, build an index, etc.

Hmm, this might be an interesting project at some point.

Update (August 23): Well, I’ve disabled this for now — on both blogs — because of the lack of control. I’d rather forget to post “Hey, remember this?” than have it clutter up people’s accounts with old linkblogging digests or something similarly pointless. When I have time, I should work on that classics project, both tagging posts and hacking on the plugin.

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