Go to Making Light's front page.
Forward to next post: 60 Panels
Subscribe (via RSS) to this post's comment thread. (What does this mean? Here's a quick introduction.)
If you have a weblog or comment-enabled website:
Not long after the post went up, the comment thread on the Christopher J. Bishop post got hit with a link to a white supremacist website’s discussion of the Virginia Tech shootings. Nasty stuff. The link was posted from somewhere in Southern California. I suspect it’s being automatically posted to venues that mention the shooting.
Here’s the thing itself in ROT-13:
jjj.fgbezsebag.bet/sbehz/fubjguernq.cuc/ivetvavn-grpu-fubbgvat-380981.ugzy
It’s gone now from Making Light’s threads. If it turns up on your site, you might want to get it gone from yours.
I just put up a post with the title "V1rg1n1a T3ch" (non-l33t) as a honey pot. If the afformentioned comment shows up, it's going into Akismet's spam database.
"I suspect it’s being automatically posted to venues that mention the shooting."
Now that would be an escalation in the arms race. It sounds plausible, but before I break out my precision micro-adjuster and go tweak some settings, I should ask: why do you think this might be automated?
j h woodyatt @ 2: it's easy enough to pull a machine readable list of posts that mention the shooting off of Technoratti or similar services, and set a bot to posting there.
As mentioned before, deceit has become an industrial process.
I was sorta hoping to find evidence of machine activity, e.g. all the posts coming from the same IP address in the space of a few seconds. The typing monkeys at Strmfrnt.Rg, alas, can sometimes present a reasonable facsimile of machine intelligence when they really get to trying hard at it.
I assumed it was automated because it was so completely stripped down -- no flavor, circumstance, opinion, or human error to it -- and because it linked to the slow-moving beginning of the thread at the white supremacist site. A human who thought they were making a point would have said something about why they were linking to it, or linked to a subsequent page of messages (it's a very long thread) that was somehow related to my post.
Basically, if a human being had gone to the trouble of posting that link as an expression of some opinion they held, they'd have indicated what the opinion was.
Slightly off-topic: I am reminded that the tiresome and irrelevant posting from "Swan" which was deleted here has appeared in many other weblogs with the identical wording. (Googling on "purge" plus "People wouldn’t talk about it" gives me 334 hits this morning, a good sf number.) I was sort of flattered to be included among the great and good -- P&T, Roz Kaveney, Ken MacLeod, et al -- although the Langford "blog" in question is currently used only to announce website updates. One's first ever comment spam is such a sparkly new experience.... But nevertheless I ungratefully deleted this act of Swanage.
Dave, that post showed up in Slacktivist that day, too--only, given the thread it showed up in, people mistook it for relevant commentary on the issue at hand. (here it was)
Swan hit Slacktivist again with the same post in another thread, one that couldn't be seen as topical camoflage, but this time with a "I hope you don't mind an off-topic post" opening. (here) By then no one was talking to him.
What a very odd species of spammer.
What is ROT-13? And thanks for the word on that particular comment. I just posted something re: VT and got an incoming comment right away... far milder than "wht sprmc" (lo, I disemvowel myself)... but I don't want a link to a VT student's video about what happened at his school to kick off a "let's ignore the immediate response and instead begin a discussion about firearms and control and amendments." I came back here to double-check this post and compare it with the (what I believe to be) drive-by comment on my own site.
James D. Macdonald:
This is ROT-13
No, no, no, no, no! Repeat after me, in your best Lowell Thomas voice:
THIS
IS
CINERAMA!
Shouldn't that have been Guvf vf EBG-13?
More peas among the ashes. Come, ye birds of the aether, and sort the bad from the good.
The vowels extract first
And then the consonants
Abel's posting's cursed:
Oblivion it wants.
For whatever reason, ML seems to have more unintentional double posts than any other online forum that I frequent.
This spam, which lacked both wit and charm
Goes fjord-dreaming, having bought the farm.
[posted from 86.106.228.38]
That story actually gave me nightmares..
Semi-generic comment, commercial website link.
I think it's wonderful that someone sending spam would call themselves "Fd Slcr" (re-emvowel it for yourself if the spam is gone).
Wow. That's --- special.
Yes, we're incredible. But wholefoods online is still a spammer.