Week 10 is all but past. Then Finals and grading (all of my grade need to be finished and in by the end of next week). After that, the future is a bit unknown. But there will be more research and blogging.
In the meantime, I’m getting more interested in the production of Blog Spam bots. Or rather their logic. Or what they are trying to accomplish beyond traffic. Whats interesting is how they select old posts to "bomb" with messages. For some reason they keep spamming the Lessig Photo Post. I can’t figure out if there is something in that post that makes it attractive.
So far my favorite peice of spam is this one:
Polish… polish food, lot polish airline, car polish, green nail polish, nail polish…
It’s a great peice of lingustic play, though semantically speaking, I don’t think it was intentional. But there you have the switch from Polish aka Poland to polish as in waxy buildup.
Those spam bots could be using some kind of hidden Markov sentence generator. They basically scan the thread for all previous text, then pass it through a hidden Markov generator which creates random sentences that seem likely for the thread. Pepper the new text with links to Spam, et. voila: spam that (hopefully, for them) flies under the radar of a Baysian filter.
Why they are bombing old threads isn’t clear. Either they are probing your blog to see how to crack any spam filtering, or they are just using dumb algorithms that say “Oh! High post count = hot thread! Good spam target!” Which is probably a good heuristic for a message board running something like InfoPop or whatever, but in a personal blog, it’s probably not that smart.
A friend of mine has a simple “Turing Test” that you are required to pass to help thwart spammers. It is just a hidden text box. Since most automated spam programs try to fill in every text box they can, if any text appears in that text box, he just silently rejects the message. Of course, this won’t work if everybody does it, but it is good if you are getting inundated and don’t know what to do.
P.S. I hope the grading went well. And that all is well, in general!