As if to mock me, I had three comment spams added to the blog last night.  While I would like to continue allowing comments, especially since sometimes readers post code fixes and useful information, but I refuse to allow spam and don't have time to implement a captcha.  If you've got one working for dasBlog, email me and let me know, otherwise commenting here will be turned off until I find the time to integrate one myself.

 

For those curious about what I've been up to, I'm working on a thing - can't really name it, but it's longer than an article, but not quite a book.  Think of a 3-chapter technical book.

The working title is “Communication with VB.NET” but it's somewhat misleading.  When I say “communication” I mean data marshalling.  It's going to cover intra-thread, inter-thread and inter-process data marshalling.  Basically if you have one Form and you need to get data to another, how do you do it?  How about from one thread to another?  Or one process to another?  These kind of questions come up frequently in the newsgroups, so I'm putting together a definitive guide. 

As you may know, I think print media is dead for technical subjects, so I'll be PDFing it and selling it through OpenNETCF Consulting.  It'll probably be in the $5-$10 range.  If it's successful, we'll try to do a series of them on several topics and in several languages (think C# or VB, not English v. French).  Any topics you think need to be covered?

This one will be unusual in that it will apply to desktop developers in many instances, but all code will be targeted to run under the CF.  It's a real pain when CF developers have to “down-port” desktop code in a book to use it.

Well I've migrated my blog engine to dasBlog.  I'm not happy about the fact that it has poor FireFox support (readable, but not editable), but it does add the ability to edit and delete stuff without having to manually modify the XML and since it was based on BlogX it was pretty simple to migrate the content.

The primary motivator for the migration is blog spam.  Neil's using dasBlog and hasn't seen any spam yet, so I'm hoping just changing engines will work - at least for a while.  I implemented a CAPTCHA in the Wiki, but adding it here is a bit more work and I'd really rather do other things.

Well, I've added a CAPTCHA ( Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart  ) to the OpenNETCF Wiki.  That should just about kill all this Nigritude Ultramarine SEO Challenge (no link intentionally) bullshit going around from our perspective.  While the challenge itself is interesting, it's taken many people down the spammer path to try to get to the top, making me hate the challenge presenter Dark Blue (again I refuse to link there).

Can you fucking beleive this?  Spammers justifying their work?

I've updated the OpenNETCF Wiki to require a user ID be filled in to Edit.  Tomorrow I'll add stuff to prevent Google from tracking the common Sandbox and Recent Users pages.  You know, I'd much rather do real work on my time than fight these jackasses.

Alright, someone needs to do something about this spam problem.  Over the last 3 days I had to clean spam from the OpenNETCF Wiki several times, delete two spam comments from this blog, and on one email account I had 198 emails, 177 of which (89%) were spam.  Sure SpamBayes caught 95% of those (168 to be exact), but the point is that it ate network bandwidth and server storage space all the way until my PC, where it finally landed in a "to be deleted" box.

Anti-spammer laws have no teeth, and if they did, enforcement is near impossible since they are often not in the US.  Trying to get a "global" law passes would be a bureaucratic nightmare and I think would still be unenforceble.  You want to solve the spam problem?  To me it seems rather simple - put the onus on the ISPs to solve it.  Imagine if you said "ok ISPs, we're enacting a new law.  For every piece of spam you forward to the recipient, we're fining you $1.  You have 6 months grace period starting now."  That would sure as hell get the wheels of ingenuity rolling to solve it.  Put the enforcement in an area where you have jurisdiction.

Sure, signing all email would be ideal, but until they make it simple enough that my grandmother can do it, it won't succeed.  I'd think validating the sender's email address would be a damned good start for filtering.  If the sender's email is invalid, the email is obvious spam and it gets dropped at the ISP relay.  Sure, that leaves open email spoofing, but look at any block of spam you get and I'd bet a vast majority has completely invalid sender addresses.  Something has to be done.  The cost in lost productivity and wasted network resources has got to be phenominal.

Die spammers!

Well it didn't take long.  Those loathesome spammers are now targeting Wikis and Blogs.

I've noticed the the OpenNETCF Wiki routinely gets crap posted to it as links to some other site, in an obvious attempt to generate better search engine ranking.  I delete it as soon as I notice it, but it's annoying.  I also notice that it seems to only happen in the Sandbox, which makes me think it's probably robot generated.

Last night I got what seems to be half a dozen comments to various posts in my blog, all with crap names and text, but with valid "home pages" which again provides inlinks to their sites in an attempt to improve search engine ranking.  This is even more annoying becasue my blog engine doesn't have a simple emthod for deleting them, so I have to manually edit the xml.  Looks like it's time for a new blog engine.  Any recommendations?  I need cross browsert compatibility, simple to set up and simple to maintain.

I think it should be fully legal to do denial-of-service attacks against these jackasses.