Don’t call me DOM

The spammers have striken again, and we received reports that one of our extremely useful public service was used to work around URL matching techniques for spammers. In other words, a spammer who would have been identified (in email messages, blog comments) as using http://example.net/ as a URI in his spam could workaround it by putting a link to http://our-useful-service.example.org?uri=http://example.net/ instead, and given that the said service more or less entirely preserves the content as is, this allowed indeed to put a link to the incriminated content.  Read more... (481 words, estimated 1:55 mins reading time)

A little more than 9 months ago, I ran some statistics on the rate of spams I receive, and given that our anti-spam set up was recently improved to reject even more buggy messages than before, I decided it was a good time to see what the evolution over the past 6 months was:

The blue line is the number of messages that are directly trashed when arriving in my mailbox because their SpamAssassin score is greater than 12; the pink line is the number of messages that goes into a separate mailbox that I review periodically to find false positives, which still happen from time to time. The graphics doesn’t show the number of spam messages that I get in my final inbox; it’s never more than one or two a day, usually zero.  Read more... (507 words, 1 image, estimated 2:02 mins reading time)

As many others, I’ve recently been receiving plenty of spammy comments on my blog; all of these are queued for moderation by default, but even that get a bit painful when flooded with moderation messages in my inbox, and having to delete individually each message. Even the bulk delete command in WordPress doesn’t allow you to delete all (or most of) the comments at once.

I got around the moderation flood in my inbox using yet another procmail rule, and got around the second part using a small bookmarklet, which runs the following javascript code:  Read more... (160 words, estimated 38 secs reading time)