Povert

I’m in the process of changing web hosts. Over the next few days, some of my stuff may appear to be broken or gone. I’ll get it up and going again. That includes this blog, Flapping Crane, Wrestle that Shark, etc.

Spam has been on my mind lately. Namely, email spam, comment spam, and wiki spam.

I’ve bitched about this before.

I’ve been experimenting on reducing blog comment spam. I recently upgraded WtS to the newest version of WordPress, which comes with the very interesting Akismet plugin. So far, it seems to be working. And of course here on Povert I use the “Are you a fucking robot” reading test. If the WTS experiment works, then I’ll go ahead and upgrade the blog here (though that will be a bit of work — I’ve actually made some custom changes to my installation of WordPress).

But. I got a message from my sister the other day, asking how to protect her wiki. She runs it for her husband’s family. Kind of a geneology/scrapbook kind of thing. She’s put a lot of work into it.

But guess what?

Some assholes out there think it’s ok to use bots to not only spam wikis, but to overwrite their pages.

So poor Lisa got a message the other day from a family member asking why there were casino ads on the wiki instead of the regular content.

Now there are of course certain things she can do to prevent this. Still, these people are pricks.

I really am very pissed off about all this. It makes me mad that I have to install special software, plugins, etc. just to avoid being driven nuts by a barrage of spam. Maybe it’s because I actually remember a time when the most annoying things in my inbox were chain letters.

I’m also sick of having to protect my email addresses, because it always eventually fails. I’ve had two accounts that I’ve been pretty careful with. My .mac account and my gmail account. I don’t give them out to anyone or anything that I don’t have reason to correspond personally with. I’ve recently started getting spam at both. And I know exactly why. In a nutshell, folks — don’t click those “email this to a friend” links. Don’t do it. Email me the link if you want, or even copy and paste it. But don’t use their website to email me their stuff. If you’re gonna do that crap, while you’re at it, why not just give them my home address and phone number?

A lot of people aren’t careful with other people’s email addresses. This sucks.

However — this has inspired me to do a little experiment. I’m going to find out exactly which companies distribute email addresses, whether their so-called “privacy-policies” indicate it or not. Here’s what I’m going to do — I’ll create a few random email addresses. Completely random, and kind of long. So that no one would ever just guess them. Then I’ll carefully mete those email addresses out to one and only one place each.

Who else wants to play? I know one or two of you out there have domains that you can try this with.

Wow. I’ve been working a lot. So that’s why I haven’t emailed much, commented on blogs, called, done WTS lately (though Jason’s studying for the GRE, so that’s part of it), etc.

Flapping Crane has suffered a bit. Though if you poke around the site, you’ll notice some new things. Just not on the front page. We may have a new one this week, if we can bring it all together (it’s a weird one — I love it). And we’ve obviously been working on music a lot — in addition to the one in my last post, we’ve got one other finished one (it’s a Reicher song), one that’s more or less done, and one that’s nowhere near done (we recorded it, but it was more like a rough cut). There’s a country song that we’re working on too. Funny stuff. None of it’s been (officially) released, but I expect the Reicher one and I Remember C#$% to be released very soon.

Actually, if you’ve subscribed to our iTunes feed, you may have already heard the Reicher one (Reicher’s Address).

I actually go into work later than my last job, but I stay later. And for the next month, I’ll be working a lot more. I worked for 10 hours today and didn’t leave the building even for lunch.

I’m not complaining — it’s a good job. But with the olympics and all it’s all very busy. And I found out Monday that I probably won’t have to work weekends, which is good.

At least I had time to pick up my apartment today. It was getting bad. Though now, in theory, it should be much easier to keep it clean, since I’m never here to mess it up. Except my bedroom. I can only really do laundry on Sundays, so that crap piles up in my bedroom. Though the bedroom’s not that bad — there’s just about 2 feet of laundry sticking out the top of the hamper.

I picked up “Thirteen Steps” by A Perfect Circle. Listening through it for the first time now. Good stuff. $2 more than I would have liked, but it’s good.

Also, I bought CKY’s newest one. Also good. A bit more metal than I expected, but I like it.

Random question — is there anything about philosophy that confuses or irritates you? Just looking for Wrestle that Shark ideas. Jason and I have a good one planned (about happiness), but I’ve got no idea what we’ll talk about after that.

I guess the point is that part of what I want to do is talk about philosophy for people who didn’t study it. That doesn’t mean dumbed-down — I just mean that when you’re neck-deep in something, you have no idea what other people think about the subject.