Over the last couple of weeks, my comment-spam filter has been breaking down. Considering how basic a test it was, I'm pretty surprised it held up as long as it did; it relied on the fact that the strategy of the bots was very dumb: grab the page, parse it, and submit. It happened so quickly that it was pretty easy to distinguish from a valid comment, since rarely do real people submit a comment within a handful of seconds of loading the page. Now, as I've been expecting for some time, the bot pattern has changed to: grab a bunch of pages to parse, wait a minute or so, then post to all of them. They are even smart enough to make sure that although they are rotating through proxies to prevent IP-filtering, they always match up the proxy that requested the page and the proxy used to post the comment, so there's no obvious attack point there.

So now I've implemented another silly trick that shouldn't really work in general, but will in fact catch all of the spam that's been slipping in recently. Hopefully that will hold until I decide what my next big gun will be.

Category: Geek

Writebacks (2)

Yesterday was the anniversary of a very special day: that's right, it's was the anniversary of Kentucky's official statehood. And what's so special about that, you ask? I'll tell you: it set things up so that exactly 210 years later, I would have the exceeding good fortune to marry a wonderful native of that state. And here I am four years later, and still thrilled with my luck. Kentucky knows how to grow them right.

(And a happy belated anniversary also to Duncan and Kris, who have excellent taste in wedding days if I do say so myself.)

Category: Life

Writebacks (3)