Sunday January 29, 2006

Off and on, I've been using a blog on blogger as a link blog and for other "quickies" to post. Tonight, I was closing some browser tabs with stuff I'd been reading about BerkeleyDB (JE) and went to post them here with ecto.

Strangely, ecto was giving me errors, so I check its console:

Response:
Your post has been saved as a draft instead of published. You must go to Blogger.com to publish your post. To prevent these errors in the future, request a review at:
http://www.blogger.com/unlock-blog.g?blogID=ABCDE
Sorry for the inconvenience

The irony here is that it's relatively trivial to produce a list of recently created spam blogs from the blogspot service merely by watching the publish activities on any given day. I do it all of the time. There's a massive amount of spam on that service that percolates up from some simple correlations. And Technorati's index is subsequently scrubbed often on that account. It's a little inconvient. Yet the blogspot people continue to rely on the "Flag As Objectionable" button as their main weapon. Get a clue! Look how trivial to game that system is; I'll surmise that I got googlebowled (bloggerbowled would be more apt) by some dingleberry black hats. Very inconvenient. Given the rampant fraud going on within blogger, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to see.

Google is pretty much operating an open-relay, the blogosphere's equivalent of an SMTP spam-mill, because they lack the imagination to watch their own numbers and their spam rolls out unabated. This has been a ballooning problem for at least a year and a half. It's actually kinda inconvenient. Don't think they haven't been advised. Long before maverick-man coined the term "splog" I'd been sending my friends at the big G data on the extent of their problems. They know.

Dudes, go down the hall and ask the smart people at gmail how they do it. Now I have to go through the blogspot captcha gate instead of using ecto to post on their platform, hardly worth the bother.

Enough of the ironies and inconveniences. On the subject of ecto, please think kind thoughts for Adriaan. I am.

blogspot spam ecto splogs google technorati