Spam and AdSense

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Wednesday Aug 31 2005
Two little tidbits, too small to justify a whole posting for each of them.

Manually submitted comment spam is coming


It seems Elliott got spammed too just like I did this week. At first I thought someone may have cracked Hashcash but it seems manual spam is slowly emerging, probably because our filters rock so hard. Mine came mostly from China, therefore you may block quite some of those by enabling the silly question / SpamQuiz option in Pivot-Blacklist. It will at least baffle those who don't speak English. If you have a non-English site it will be even more effective.

New ads section


Apparently some people earn loads of money with AdSense while I haven't even hit the $100 mark in over 6 months. Therefore I thought let's add some bigger ads to the site while keeping them from distracting the viewer / breaking the design. What do you think of it?
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How to destroy the Earth

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Wednesday Aug 31 2005
The Earth was built to last. It is a 4,550,000,000-year-old, 5,973,600,000,000,000,000,000-tonne ball of iron. It has taken more devastating asteroid hits in its lifetime than you've had hot dinners, and lo, it still orbits merrily. So my first piece of advice to you, dear would-be Earth-destroyer, is: do NOT think this will be easy.Sam's Archive: How to destroy the Earth

I guess that's a nice study guide for all of you wannabe-terrorists.
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Target: PRStorm

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Wednesday Aug 31 2005

Nuke some spammers



As some of you may or may not know, PRStorm is the name of the tool with which a shitload of idiots are bombarding our weblogs with . Probably one of the most evil tools from hell available on the internet. They even have the guts to charge a whopping $60 for this sleazy gui wrapper around a http-getter script. One of the premier large Dutch weblogs Retecool has setup their so called with PRStorm's website (their contact form) as a target. It's a small javascript thingy that automatically fills out the contact form and thus sends them massive amounts of 'feedback email' from their website. The article on retecool.com is in Dutch but you'll find some screenshots of the tool there as well as the most important part: the Braatolizer script. Download it HERE and open the page called laatmaardraaien.html in your favourite browser in order to send the people some ehm... feedback!

Check the retecool.com article
Download the Braatolizer and join in!

UPDATE: unfortunately it didn't take long for them to remove the contact form...
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Answer the question!

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Wednesday Aug 31 2005
This is really just a notice which I'll remove again in one or two days but: I've enabled the SpamQuiz option in Pivot Blacklist. This means you have to answer the silly question in my comment form in order to post a comment. If you fail to do so, your comment won't be accepted! I'm posting this because I just saw two failed attempts to post a comment in my blacklist log. The question isn't all that hard so I assume these people just didn't read ;)
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Sharing my .htaccess file

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Tuesday Aug 30 2005
For those who never read the small-print: I've made my file with a LOT of blocking rules freely available. I update this file regularly whenever I see referrer sneak through. If you need to save some bandwidth you might like to download and use it. Note that the last four lines are specific to my site. You have to remove those, keep your own site-specific rules and copy/paste the rest of my rules into your own .htaccess file. Thanks to Bob for the enormous list of spammy IP ranges.

Get my .htaccess file
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Protect your privacy online

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Monday Aug 29 2005
Data retention is no solution!

Please sign the petition to protect us from stupid old men in suits taking decisions about technology about which they have no clue or whatsoever. Save our tax money and our privacy online. I wholeheartedly support this initiative. I wish the world would wake up and realize our personal freedom is being limited more and more every year, with 'protection against terrorists and criminals' as a (very weak) excuse. Fight the power!

Now go sign it!
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Saving some valuable bandwidth

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Monday Aug 29 2005
I've just started to block single words for referring sites in my .htaccess. Referrer are stealing so much bandwidth that it's not even funny anymore. can generate .htaccess rules but usually they're one rule per domain and some regexps that still don't catch enough to my taste. The most agressive thing one can do is blocking single words. Sure it will probably result in some false positives but I guess everything is better than having to pay your ass off due to massive amounts of stolen bandwidth due to . Here's how...

updated! (continue reading...)
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Trackback is not dead

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Saturday Aug 27 2005
On some sites in the blogosphere I've recently read statements about trackback being dead. Jeremy Zawodny lists some links to articles stating that trackback is indeed dead in order to stir some discussion.

The main reason various writers present is the fact that 99% of incoming trackbacks are not legitimate trackbacks but spam. While there's definitely a lot of trackback spam going on I don't agree this means it's dead or on it's way towards being killed by the spammers. (continue reading...)
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Google Talk: so what's next?

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Friday Aug 26 2005
Google TalkFirst they took the crown in search engine land by creating the only search engine on the internet that actually finds what you're looking for. Then there was an explosion of Google this, that and right now it seems Google Everything™ or Google World Domination ™ can't be far away anymore. We already have gmail, Google Desktop, Google Earth, the dreaded Google Web Accellerator and now it seems Google is taking on the instant messaging and VoIP market with Google Talk. Am I the only one who thinks things are starting to look slightly scary here? I guess I'll leave be for a while...
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Pivot-Blacklist 0.9.1 is out [update]

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Thursday Aug 25 2005

It's baaaaaack!



Pivot-Blacklist 0.9.1 is out. Let's hope I've tested everything thorough enough. Enjoy the best blog shield on the planet, new and improved! A lot has changed in this new release. It introduces hardened protection and hardened protection. In addition to that, the blacklist update system has been rewritten to use last week's updates instead of the Master Blacklist. I hope you like this better, Jay, sorry for the inconvenience in the past! Finally, as if this weren't enough yet, 0.9.1 has a brand new version of WP HashCash, the ultra strong JavasCrypto protection system by Elliott Back. The best just got even better!

Go get it while it's hot!

update: 0.9.1 fixes some minor issues in 0.9
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Trackback spam eliminated

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Wednesday Aug 24 2005
has always been a bit of a geeky thing. Not all bloggers are using it and some don't even understand what it is. however have found another opportunity to annoy the hell out of us: by spamming our trackback scripts. You might already have noticed the rather different trackback links on my site compared to most other weblogs. In fact they aren't even shown on my pages. Yet any legitimate visitor can obtain a trackback URL for any of my articles just fine. In this little article I'll explain how the 'hardened trackbacks' which will be included in the upcoming version of Pivot-Blacklist works. It should be easy enough to implement the same principles for other software. (continue reading...)
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Google doesn't give a shit

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Tuesday Aug 23 2005
It's been quite a while since I wrote an open letter to Google. It's unfortunate but I never received a response from anyone at google while I know they actually responded to feedback I sent earlier. This is a bloody shame if you ask me. Lately, and has gone to new heights. Yesterday for example my webserver reached a load of (I kid you not) 8.0 because of a spam attack. I've literally been blocking machines manually through my .htacccess file based on what I saw in my apache access log to keep the server sane. It's getting worse and worse and worse. I've received mails from people asking me how they can stop the spammers from stealing gigabytes of bandwidth. And what's yet even worse, doesn't give a rats ass about all of this it seems. No sites seem to be ever banned from the index, pagerank is still in effect and the've even started to allow evil search queries from hell such as this one again. At the time I wrote the open letter Google was actually blocking such queries which spammers use to find of a specific type in order to fire off their spam scripts. Right now it seems they feel it's fine again for spammers to use Google to find their targets...

I'm starting to seriously dislike ...
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Lowlands, some photographs

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Monday Aug 22 2005

Social Disorder
Social Disorder... damn that's a dangerous looking guy...



As you may have read before, I've been to A Campingflight to Lowlands Paradise this weekend. Besides my mobile I brought a real camera as well, my trusty Nikon D70. Armed with a shitty lens I bought used for only 100 euro's I tried to make the best of it. It was rather hard to get sharp pictures because often I had to stand quite far from the stage in the middle of the crowd. After some tweaking and tinkering with my settings I managed to squeeze just enough light and detail out of the lens and shot some pretty good pics! Here's some of them. (continue reading...)
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Lowlands!

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Thursday Aug 18 2005

Lowlands


Tomorrow morning I'll be off for a weekend full of music and hopefully a lot of fun at A camping flight to lowlands paradise, the Netherlands' premier outdoor pop/rock music festival. If you're interested make sure you check my moblog tab on top of the site from time to time during the weekend because I'll be posting pictures and some written material live with my mobile phone while I'm at the festival. (continue reading...)
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Bye bye referrer spammers (2-1)

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Wednesday Aug 17 2005
By releasing the hardened referrers 0.3 extension for I guess I've sent referrer spammers back to the drawing board for quite a while. No more filthy sites on our precious little last referrers lists anymore, at least for now. You might like to know what I did to accomplish this so here's some background information on how it works. The principles used can probably easily be applied to other systems that log referrers by somewhat clever programmers.

Quite a while ago already I performed some minor improvements on Shaun Inman's excellent ShortStat site statistics package. I realized that my site stats are completely free from pesky . The reason why is the fact that some javascript is used to insert ShortStat into webpages. Originally I did this in order to get it to work on non-php pages but soon I realized it had an extra advantage in respect to combatting ... (continue reading...)
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Maybe I've got the final KO after all...

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Tuesday Aug 16 2005
Earlier I posted about the fight with the referrer spammers which I though I'd lost, at least at that time. It seems however there's some hope on the horizon. I'm currently experimenting with a new extension that might eliminate referrer spam quite effectively...

update: I think it's going to end in a 2-1 for yours truly. If you use Pivot, feel free to check out this Pivot forum thread and check out the code. Once the code has been finalized completely I'll write an article on how it works. Up till now I've received zero referrer spams on my sites! (continue reading...)
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Me vs. the Spammers: 0-1

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Sunday Aug 14 2005
spammersI hate to make the confession I'm about to make but I have to be honest here. I, the creator of Pivot-Blacklist, the anti-spam extension for Pivot have just taken off all 'last referers' lists off my various installations of Pivot. I've tried, I think I've fought well but at this time it's a 0-1 score for the ... (continue reading...)
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Whee! some changes to the site!

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Saturday Aug 13 2005
It's been a long time since I touched this site but during the last stages of recovering from some illness I've added and hacked Pivot's moblog functionality to this site. Like almost any stock software I of course had to tinker with it and change it to what I personally wanted it to be. I guess I succeeded in creating a subtle integrated but yet unintrusive moblog functionality for my site. I really didn't want mobile postings to be placed among my normal postings and I didn't want them to be all too prominently visible. Especially when attending a party or a festival it's very well possible to send 10 or more moblog entries on one day which would completely spam the site.

You can check the moblog postings by clicking the link with the little mobile phone icon on the top right to see the latests moblog postings. There you'll also find a link to the moblog archive page which lists all moblog postings ever made (currently not so many but hey... lowlands and some other things are still ahead!).

Ah yes... in case you like what I did and you want my hacked code, feel free to mail me. It will be completely UNSUPPORTED however! I'm way too busy for that. Sowwy!
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Mobile enabled...

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Thursday Aug 11 2005
If you see this, moblogging works on this site. About bloody time on a site by someone who has been developing mobile applications since 2001 eh?

And yeah I know I don't look pretty now. Got ill probably because of the weather at dance valley this weekend...

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If I ever get rich...

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Monday Aug 8 2005

Oh my God... look at that


Now some kids still seem to whine and bitch about wanting to win a PSP I've set my goals somewhat higher. If I ever happen to get rich I definitely need one of these: a Wallypower 118. Who needs a house when you can travel the world on this beauty?
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