Signals from a dead channel

"Drunk girls know that love is an astronaut
It comes back but it's never the same"

Drunk girls - LCD Soundsystems

There's a site called Sorry I Haven't Posted in which Cory Arcangel rounds up some of the inspiring, baroque or just downright surreal reasons which erstwhile bloggers have given for not having posted recently. Unfortunately I haven't got anything strange or startling. I didn't intend for Radio Free Tooting to fall silent for so long. It just happened. Work and other stuff got in the way.

It turns out blogging has got a lot more in common with jogging than just the rhyme. It is a discipline and requires rigour to maintain it. Once you lapse it is harder to pick it up again than it was to start in the first place.

The spamtards still cared. I have had to reject comments on old posts - and by now thay are all old posts - on a regular basis. At least there will be some new posts for them to spam.

"Jerry" is a spamtard

In fact he may well leave a spam comment on this post, touting his list of bridalwear sites. As "Jerry" in all likelihood doesn't read English the irony will be lost on him. I'm talking as though "Jerry" is human but probably he is a bot: I seem to remembering reading that somebody had cracked captchas a while back. Certainly "Jerry" has been the only spamtard persistent enough to spam every single post on this site, even my very first one (which possibly makes him the first person to visit that page, ever). "Laptop Battery", "Peter W" and "Eda" are lightweights by comparison.

This sorry state of affairs is my fault. I have allowed comments without moderation because I would rather zap the occasional spam than moderate all the comments. But, until Joel Garry alerted me, I had failed to notice that spamtards were spamming old posts. As Joel said, some of the stuff was nasty, really explicit pr0n sites. So, moderation for older posts is now in effect - it's already caught a couple.

In the meantime I have a large housekeeping task. One post - on multi-core licensing, bizarrely - has over 150 spam comments, and as I have already said, "Jerry" has spammed every single post. It is unfortunate that Blogger does not provide the functionality to delete comments in bulk, despite being desired for several years. So the only option is to delete each spam comment individually, which as Bill Scott has observed, is a rather user hostile design.

The question behind all this is why Blogger doesn't provide the functionality. It's not like it would be hard to offer a list of all the comments with a check box and a Delete All button. The Google forums (they own Blogger) have lots of questions but no useful advice. It is especially puzzling when compared to the excellent way GoogleMail handles spam.

Now I am off to zap a few more comments. With a song in my heart and a smile on my face, naturally.

Update: 19-JUL-2009

Unfortunately my prediction was wrong and "Jerry" didn't post a spam comment to this thread. However, the moderation filter picked up another spamtard trying to post to this thread. The text is so wildly inappropriate that I was almost tempted to publish it:

I'm glad you're back to posting. I love reading about your shopping adventures and great finds. Your outfits are always super cute too!

Thank you, "Julia", your outfits are always super cute too.

It's That Thread Again

There's a thread which has been running in PL/SQL for several months. It started off as a spoof on the URGENT PLZ HELP type threads we get from time to time. I blogged about it in June. After a long hiatus the OP has changed their handle to John Titor, Time Traveller and posted some more nonsense. I don't mind that. Some of the responses were quite entertaining, and the thing was mostly harmless.

The problem is, they are now masquerading as venerable lead-pipe swinger Billy Verreynne. They did this by the simple mechanism of replacing lower case Ls with capital is in their handle(curse those sans serif fonts!). Furthermore they have changed the subject matter and text of the original post to make it look as though Billy is offering Oracle's own internal PL/SQL coding standards. This is an homage to a notorious thread from the forum's history. This leads credence to the suggestion that the post is a mischievous forum regular with a sound knowledge of the other denizens. Unfortunately some of the less knowledgeable visitors are falling for this scam and are posting their e-mail addresses.

This is a thread which now, alas, has to die. Anybody got any zombie poison?

Post Scriptum

I haven't bothered putting a link in to this thread because I expect it to be pulled soon enough.

Of fake blogs and search engines

A couple of prominent Oracle blog sites have suffered from spam bloggers and plagiarists in the recent past. So we know there is a problem.

Gadi Evron at Securiteam has written a commentary on just how sophisticated spam bloggers are getting these days. I think everybody will find this a worthwhile read, because such sting operations can affect people who comment on blogs as well as people who own them.

Night of the living spamtards

So are there any lessons to be learned from the spamtard ORACLE's adventures in the OTN forums yesterday? Not really. We all know little corners of the internet are vulnerable to individuals with the time and the motivation to be anti-social. This was one adolescent sitting in a Comp Sci class with too much time on their hands (I think in this case we can justly blame the teachers). ORACLE (and at least one other spamtard) posted a lot of silly comments in a number of active threads and started up many more threads of their own. So what? It's not like it was a bot-driven DoS assault. The DB General forum was still usable and none of the other important forums were hit at all. Frankly the forums being down for "routine maintenance" is a bigger pain.

"One monkey don't stop no show" -- Joe Tex

I am therefore surprised by the over-reaction of some of the forum regulars. I agree it would be nice if we could prevent such incidents but actually doing so would be quite difficult. If we trash ORACLE's account today they're back tomorrow with a different Hotmail address. Somebody suggested OTN could block their IP. Well, given that they seem to be posting from a school that might also block other more benignly-motivated students from asking questions. And it certainly won't prevent the spamtard from using some other place - such as an internet cafe - to continue the games.

In a recent article in the Guardian Cory Doctorow explained why effective DRM is impossible to achieve. All it does is punish those people who have actually paid for their digital media. Stopping low level trolls like ORACLE is basically the same case. OTN could put up loads of road blocks which would inconvenience us but won't stop the spamtards. Yes, OTN could appoint trustees to zap every post these gits make, but who wants to be on spam patrol for the whole afternoon? Not me. Much better just to let the spamtards have their fun and wait for the housekeeping bot to tidy up automagically. In the meantime, just ignore them. They'll get bored if nobody reacts to their jibes.

But above all, keep it in perspective. This is not poisoning the well, more like piddling in the paddling pool.

Trolling for laughs

Just recently we have had a troll visiting the OTN DB General forum. They call themselves ORACLE. They're annoying but harmless. Still every evening the Forum moderators eradicate their posts but the next day ORACLE is back. It's just like the Do Long bridge but with disposable e-mail addresses.

Here's an example from today (I won't bother posting the URL, it'll be gone by tomorrow):

Just got my new Oracle today

Oracle 12g, OMG it is so freaking cool.

I can write 9 queries in 5 seconds.

Then I laugh at all of you noobs.

^_^V 

I don't know about you but it reminds me of this recent posting from Dizwell....

Update

Since I posted this I have noticed that ORACLE is really blitzing the forum with postings. I guess they want to be considered more than just an annoying idiot. Still at the rate they're going they should have enough posts to qualify for ACE-hood by the end of the day.

Update 2

Well ORACLE now has control of the OTN forum. So undoubtedly something must be done. Rather helpfully, ORACLE has posted a list of actions which OTN ought to undertake to make life harder for trolls:

On the subject of spammers I suggest that you make so you have responsible oracle users able to ban and delete certain posts. For example, If you where honestly going to stop my spamming you should ban the account instead of just resetting all of the posts the spamming user makes and resetting the name, that is hardly dealing with the problem effectively.
Also, whoever the Forum administrator is. They should try giving more power to users they can trust such as
-N. Gasparatto
-Paul M
-Blushadow
-Hans Forbich (hes funny =P)
You should give them the position know as moderator (these are used on most forums). They should have a certain amount of control on who uses the forum. They should be able to ban (permently immoblilize the account, dont just reset the posts) and delete posts when necessary. Therefore you won't have to wait till your stupid oracle mod comes in and sweeps the place every 24 hours.

I'm slightly miffed that I'm not included in the list of trustees.

Final update of the day

Well the OTN forum housekeeper has woken up and cleared out all the messages posted by ORACLE. But it remains to be seen whether the troll will be back tomorrow.

Roy Batty writes ...

It's official - I am not a robot. Blogger's team of blade runners has given my blog a Voigt-Kampff test and determined that it is indeed the work of a human being. This verification was necessary because last week Blog*Spot put me under an Anti-Spam-Blog Order. Their anti-spam bots ( ASbots???) had locked my blog as it has "characteristics of a spam blog." Hmmpfff. So what are those characteristics?

"spam blogs ... can be recognized by their irrelevant, repetitive, or nonsensical text", which is possibly the rudest thing anybody has ever said about Radio Free Tooting. It was the other characteristic which rang a bell: "...along with a large number of links, usually all pointing to a single site." The opening paragraph of my last post before the ASBO descended contained three links to pages on BCS SPA web-sites so I guess that's why the ASbots suspended my posting rights. This seems a rather tenuous reason but it's the best I can find. The ASbots don't have to offer explanations.

Spam blogs or - ugly neologism alert! - splogs are an increasing nuisance^[1]. Given the number of sites which require monitoring it was inevitable that the task of policing Blog*Spot would be delegated to automatons. Still it seems strange that the giant brains who invented page-ranking can't come up with some better heuristics: perhaps checking the Google Analytics reports and my Technorati rankings, or even just looking at my posting history. On the bright side, I was only off the air for a day or so, and it's not like I had anything I needed to say.

One final thing. The ASbots don't send an e-mail. I suppose this is because most of the sites they bust really are sploggers, so notification would just generate a wasteful amount of spam e-mails. You only find out you've been ASBO-ed when you sign in to post something. The order includes this sentence:

"If we do not hear from you, though, we will remove your blog from Blog*Spot within a few weeks."

Another good reason to have a backup of your deathless prose.

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{1} - Especially for Blog*Spot. Apparently it's not such a big deal for WordPress. Although whether this is due to WordPress's superior technology or just because Blogger has the biggest mindshare is open to question.

In my Inbox this morning

We provide the ointments you require at really reasonably priced.

Hmmm. Seems like the spammers are moving into haemoroid treatments.

The easter egg was the random text added to defeat the spam filters. This comprised a snippet of Hans Christian Anderson and two nibbles from Jane Austen's "Persuasion". I'm particularly taken with the phrase "all histories are against you" which from now on I shall regularly drop into arguments.