Month: May 2006

Of pens and spam

The microMBA class continues apace; today, we covered accounting, using a Broadway play as an exercise. Now I understand why TKTS works!

The class has required taking lots of notes, and I’ve been using my Pilot G2 with the adapted MontBlanc refill. I can’t say that I’m really all that impressed by the refill; it writes smoothly, but sometimes it writes rather lightly, which seems pretty bad for a $6 refill used less than one week. I should probably switch back to the G2 refill for a real comparison on smoothness and intensity, but that would require me to remember to change pens in the morning, and that seems unlikely.

While I was in class, this blog was attacked by spammers; I had over 100 comments to deal with when I got home, along with 52 emails telling me about them. I guess I should upgrade to the newest versions of everything, but at least none of the spams made it to the blog as far as I can tell.

Tomorrow is the final day of the microMBA; next week, it’s back to normal work, which is going to be something of a shock.

Relevant comment spam?

Two hours and 15 minutes after my posting last night, there was a comment waiting in my moderation queue from someone purporting to be a user at Yahoo. The comment read, almost verbatim:

Hey,

Do you know you can get an American idol coin which will feature 2 finalists on 2 sides? Well, I got mine from [redacted]

C ya

I decided not to approve the comment, but I was impressed at the relevancy. So I did a little more digging.

I ignored the purported email address as being trivially spoofed; instead, I did a WHOIS lookup on the IP address from which the comment had come. It was in the 59.95.x.x range, so I had to go to the APNIC Whois database, which told me that that entire subnet was run by an outfit named Sancharnet, whose homepage describes them as “Sancharnet is a country wide Internet Access Network of Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited, India. It offers Dedicated and Dialup (PSTN & ISDN) Internet Access Services across all the major cities in India”.

I then checked my logs (well, actually, the SiteMeter summary) and found that my only recent connection from 59.95 came though this referral:

http://www.technorati.com/search/american%20Idol?start=80

and that the user had visited several pages and been on the site for about 4 minutes.

This is, of course, an example of the globalization of services. Whoever sells the coins being flogged (“Abundant Marketing”, in Boynton Beach, Florida, according to the WHOIS database for the URL they were trying to promote) appears to employ people in India to do frequent Technorati searches for relevant terms and then post spam comments. I say that it’s likely to be humans at work rather than bots because of the location, and because the HashCash plugin requires JavaScript and most bots don’t support that.

I must admit to being tempted to go ahead and let the comment post because it was, in fact, relevant — but, of course, I didn’t. Wonder if they’ll try commenting to this posting? It does, after all, have the magic “American Idol” phrase in it!