#spam

Comcast Flub

Thanks to some poor mail handling, Comcast was kind enough to inform me of the names of a few of their customers.

  • Ben Bochmann,
  • Steve Worthington and
  • Benjie Lasseu

Nice to meet you guys. Comcast sent me a very “snail-mail-spam” looking “Express Letter” envelope containing some new up-sell marketing junk today, and apparently they forgot to flick the paper and blow air in it before putting it in the printer or something 🙂

I received 3 copies of the same “letter”, all stuck together (it was glossy paper, which has a tendency to do that) inside the envelope.

Good job Comcast… keep up the great work.

Comments Disabled

Well, I’ve had enough of dealing with blog-comment-spam for now, so I’ve decided to disable comments until I can come up with a satisfactory solution. I have 123 blog posts that I’m going to have go through by hand – AGAIN – to remove spam from. I don’t have time for this, but I refuse to be a PageRank monkey for these losers by leaving their links up and accessible on my site.

It really saddens me to have to do this, and I think it reflects very poorly on the current state of the internet. Damn the idiots who are blog-comment-spamming, damn them to hell and back. People like you are making the internet a worse place to be. We’d all be much happier if you would go away and die in a hole somewhere.

UCMore At It Again

A couple weeks ago, I realised that the UCMore Toolbar was hitting my website something like 20,000 times a day (based on the User Agent string in my Apache logs). I looked into their site and it looks like it’s trying to get my favicon.ico (which I don’t have) to use as part of a suggestion for similar content to people using their toolbar.

I emailed the guys there and asked them to remove my site from their toolbar because that traffic was a waste, and the icon wasn’t even there. They replied courteously and said that they’d remove my site. A couple days later, the traffic dropped off to around 10,000 hits a day, but has since returned to, and exceeded, 20,000 hits a day.

I emailed them again, and they say they are taking care of it, but so far it looks like something similar is going to happen again (ease off, then jump up again). If things don’t change, I’m going to have to revert to a technique I have seen used around the place and use Apache Rewrites to redirect all traffic coming from their toolbar back to their site, which will be something like an automated DoS I suppose, although I don’t suppose that this amount of traffic will cause any problem on their server, but it’s a statement if nothing else.

Waiting, waiting — will give them 5 days from now.