Bits Of Babbling

So you wanna play hardball eh?

Well I've decided to protect my precious blog against self-serving spammers seeking to raise their rank in the almighty Google's eyes amongst their likewise scummy competition which peddle smut and other such wares. Perhaps you have no idea what I'm talking about, perhaps you do, but in either case I'm going to explain it anyway.

There are a variety of bots crawling along this here internet along with regular people like you and me. There are good bots, not unlike Glenda the good witch, like search engine bots which allow us to index our sites in Google and the like. There are also bad bots, these are the things that pick up email addresses from websites to entice you with offers of strumpets ready to "entertain" you, pills/gadgets/contraptions to enbiggen parts which uncomfortable people seek to enbiggen, pills/gadgets/contraptions to ensmallen places which larger people seek to ensmallen, and all manners of shady deals to get money out of your pockets and into theirs. The bots in question today fall under the category of "Bad Bot" - I would smack them with a newspaper on the nose and say "NO! Bad Bot!" if I could, but the combat employed today will just have to do.

So what does this bot do? Well, it surfs the internet looking for places such as this blog where it can add content. The creator(s) of the bot made it smart enough to find blogs and fill out the forms to make their own posts in the comments area. Of course the poor, misunderstood creatures created by these cruel Frankensteins are not programmed with a brain capable of responding intelligently to the blog entry, they are only capable of saying things such as "Find pills to help your self-worth grow since you are the kind of guy who measures his self-worth by the size of his reproductive organs!"

But you want to know the interesting part? They aren't doing it for us to click on, in fact they would be perfectly happy if no human saw their advertisement - especially if the human happened to run the blog and was aware that there is a "Delete Comment" feature. So what they typically do is post in blog entries a few weeks or months old in hopes that the almighty GoogleBot will find their spam but meddling humans won't. The pay-off is that GoogleBot says "Hrm... This guy's site is linked on 5,000 blogs, it must be a good site for Harlots, lets rank it higher next time some pervert does such a search"

This has been an intermittent problem on my own blog, six times now have these nefarious bots chosen me as their prey - and six times now I've fought back in the only way available via standard MovableType operations, delete the comment and ban the IP. Unfortunately IP bans can be circumvented quite easily and are thus are only effective against people who don't know any better... and that's assuming they don't have dial-up which will change their IP for them each time they dial in anyway.

So today after deleting the worst post yet (Rather than 1 link to their site via their username, there were 17 links in the comment plus the link in their username) I went in search to see if somebody had already developed a plug-in for MovableType or if I would have to develop my own workaround. Thankfully I found a solution, elsewise I would have been tempted to move over to a php-based script like WordPress, since if I'm going to modify code I would prefer doing it in the web language I'm most comfortable with. Sorry Brian, I know you woulda liked me to switch, better luck next time.

The solution I found was a plug-in called MT-Blacklist which implements a comment blacklist for me. The list is updated periodically with new offending sites and also supports regex matching to offer some more generic protection. I could also use such a thing to filter out foul language or innocent words such as "bird" "milkshake" or "pudding" - the power is in my hands. I don't plan on censoring anything outside of the blacklist that is provided for me unless a spammer manages to sneak by with a "clever" substitution of an i with a 1 or something of the sort. Yes, in case you were wondering, this seemingly bulletproof solution has a flaw which e-mail spammers have been exploiting for a while now in an attempt to slip by the powerful Bayesian Filtering system employed by spam filters like PopFile. Thankfully PopFile has served me well despite their attempts, it learns quickly. Unfortunately for the spammer, they DO need to have their URL go to their site, so even if they slip by with a registration of a creative domain name I can still just blacklist that site for future spam attempts. Not perfect, but good enough.

So this is just forewarning, if you see your comment got rejected, it was probably marked as potentially coming from a spambot.

Successful Trial

Quick late-night entry to say that I am quite pleased by the Vonage service, spent just over 4 hours on a call to Canada just now. Actually, it is quite possible that using Vonage increased the quality of the phone call, things seemed clearer on either end. The only minor gripe is that it would seem 4 hours is the limit on call length before it automatically hangs up - I know this doesn't sound like a problem to the majority of the blog reading world, but we've gone 6 1/2 hours before! This is still an improvement over the calling card though, the calling card hangs up after 3 hours :)

Time for sleep, perhaps the Canada saga will be continued next entry

Vonage Powah!

I thought it about time to write in this here blog again, I'm not entirely sure why I haven't... I mean it isn't like I have had a shortage of things to say. There have been tidbits of my life very much fit for sharing, and perhaps made even more interesting since many of them you could hear from a second perspective if you knew where to look.

But fear not friends, for I have come to you with new content which is in many, many ways superior to the last bit of content! The first way is that it is actually content, that alone guarantees its superiority. I've joined the ranks of other technological pioneers who have braved the dangers and cleared the way for future consumers to have a blissful existence in a brave new world. Ok, fine, I let other people clear the path and I just sorta jumped on the bandwagon before it became a bandwagon. Whatever you call it, I've become a subscriber to Vonage*, a VOIP company, in order to significantly cut costs on my calls to Canada.

Cut.. costs.. to... Canada... what? Some people reading this may not quite understand why such words would fall in that order in a Texan's vocabulary, but I assure you that the word choice is no accident. This month alone I've spent $100+ in phone calls using a Online Calling Card which gets me 3 cents a minute to Canada. Yea, I've spent a bit of time on the phone. Wanna know more about the Canada part? Keep reading, elsewise skip a paragraph or two or ten.... Heck, I'll just put up a big red flag when you can start reading again.

So the Reader's Digest version is this: Two months, 12 days ago I began chatting to a girl (Via MSN Messenger) who started a thread asking for help on the forum I help administrate. I can't really tell you why, but we kept talking after I helped her with her web development questions, every day. Eventually what started as a friendship developed into a bit of a crush for both sides, though neither of us was quite ready to admit it. But soon enough we admitted how we felt, though we had no idea how things would work out from over 2,000 miles away or even if it would work at all.

We continued talking every day on MSN, but as you may have guessed we also started buying phone cards to unchain ourselves from the keyboard. The first round was rather unsuccessful, she bought a card which ended up being a whopping 25 cents a minute to the US, and mine was a bit better at perhaps a dime to Canada. Clearly there was a need for some cost-cutting, so I turned to my ever-faithful friend Google who referred me to Click4Prepaid.com, which helped a lot. Actually, it helped a bit too much, $70 dollars spent in May, over $100 in June, at that rate of consumption we could be pushing close to $2,000 a year! The 3 cents a minute was cheap, but it added up quickly. A better solution was called for, one involving a consistent rate which is pleasing to the pocketbook. A solution involving voip. Credit must be given where credit is due at this point, I had forgotten about voip till I was reminded by BlackKnight, another THorum goer.

Ok, you can resume reading now, I'll pick up the Canada story in another blog, it gets more interesting yet.

So today I went to Circuit City and purchased the Vonage starter kit rather than wait for them to ship me a kit on their own. The nice thing about the kit is that it costs 30 bucks after the instant rebate + mail-in rebate and there is no activation fee, saves a bit of money and more instant gratification. I'm already well on my way towards savings!

One of the nice things about voip is that not only do you typically save money on your monthly phone bill, not only do you get to call all the long distance you want across the US and Canada for a flat $30 each month, but you also get to transfer your old phone number to the service. This is a simple process involving a copy of your latest phone bill, a signing of a letter of authorization, and about 20 business days or more. Business days I have plenty of, tracking down the phone bill was a bit more difficult. More difficult still is trying to remember who is named on the account, since the billing name must be the same for both the Vonage account as well as the telephone bill. I'm still not even sure I've got that right, the bill doesn't tell you. I'll cut out the details, but suffice it say that this process was much more difficult than it should have been.

Just tonight I finally hooked it up, it was quite easy and made up for the earlier difficulties in getting all the information faxed to them to convert my phone number. I conducted an experiment to see how the voice quality was by dialing my cell phone and holding the cell to one ear with my regular phone to the mouth. I was pleasantly surprised to find that it sounded just as though I was going over a regular phone line. That’s right, I hated my voice equally as much by using this service as any other phone service! I was a bit disappointed, I thought maybe some static might improve the voice a bit... Oh well.

I can't wait to give this thing a real try, with real people, real people in Canada.

*Side note: if you are interested in subscribing, they seem to have a referral program that works out for you and me, 1 free month each if I read it right!

UPDATE

I've been commanded to update, so I updated!

More breaking news as the story develops