The last few days my blog has been inundated with spam comments from (according to my Blogger analytics) China.
While Blogger is catching almost all of them, it makes me feel bad. Here these people are spending hours copying and pasting (I assume) comments onto blogs and those comments are being trashed without ever being seen. Not that I want to see them.
Are the people getting paid anyway? Are they basically slave workers?
Are they aware that their spam is being filtered? Are they working on ways to avoid being automatically detected?
The spam comments annoy me, but it makes me wonder about other things.
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I had those for a while. They move in waves.
ReplyDeleteI even had lots of spam from "accesstoinfo" blog, under the heading "fight the power: the system"
Here are some tips to protect privacy. To what extent any of these will be of benefit to website blogs I don't know. The article was posted at Lew Rockwell this morning.
ReplyDeleteI think a small section of hard drive can contain up to a million "phished" email addresses. It appears these professional spammers are set up to send to millions of addresses at a time, like bits of "mud" as if slung at a wall -- knowing just a few flecks will stick to the wall.
Who, for instance, would be dumb enough to fall for some foreign "inheritance" scam by sending a payment and/or credit card and/or other ID info? None of us, I hope. But out of a million, just a tenth of a percent (or a hundredth of a percent) would add up significantly.
The internet is a marvelous tool for free exchanges of information. It is also a set-up for professional scammers who work with large numbers. Almost as large as government inflation, taxation and intimidation frauds -- but newer, and not as blatant.
Sam
"Are the people getting paid anyway? Are they basically slave workers?"
ReplyDeleteIt's software.
WordPress has much better spam fighting tools. I added the GrowMap Anti-Spam plugin, and now I have almost zero spam comments.
ReplyDeleteAlso on my own Linode, I use iptables to block the most egregious spammers.