What’s Gotta Go

In the last couple of days I started receiving my very first “comment spam” entries on this blog. Should I feel like I have arrived? This does represent a milestone of some kind because some automated program running for spammers has obviously found me via links to this site or search engines. That is actually a good thing. Thank goodness I launched this blog with the anti-spam features in place though to keep these pesky comments at bay. I call this part 1 because I have a much bigger rant planned for a later date on this subject. With this blogs recent “coming of age” though I couldn’t miss the opportunity to share a few thoughts.

What is it about a spammers that feel they have the right to walk all over other people’s property in order to try sell their wares? Ever seen some of the spoofs of what the Internet would be like in real life? What would you do if someone just walked on in to your front room started flashing some pornographic images, pitching you on Viagra or some diet pills because you obviously need to shed some pounds. You kick them out the front door, only to turn around and see that five more sleazy sales pitch guys came in the back door. You escort them out the way they came, kindly telling them to take you off of their sales route - signing their “do not disturb” form when they show it to you. You start heading upstairs only to find that there is now a huge crowd of sleaze, every shape and size telling you have to BUY BUY BUY this stock, it’s going to fly up, just watch. You try to find the phone to call the police, but its starting to get so crowded you can’t move. Finally you pull out the cell phone and get a hold of some authority, only to have them tell you to just move because there is nothing they can do about the problem. Oh, and when you move, don’t tell anyone where you live because it will only happen again.

Sounds pretty ridiculous, doesn’t it? We are facing that kind of situation though with email; growing to the point that many people are just giving up on using this convenient form of communication. I for one rely on it heavily for my work, and I protect my address like crazy. Doesn’t matter, I do a favor for a local band and take photos at their concert and give them copies for free. Good karma, right? They give back some karma and post my name and email on their web site to say thanks. No more than a month later, the spam starts flooding in. Yep, their site gets spidered and my email is added to the golden list of valid emails that spammers love so much. Here’s to karma kicking me in the butt.

Maybe I need to set out on my own Earl journey setting right all my wrongs, because I am sure there are plenty of things weighing in on my negative karma side. I for one hate sitting back and just taking it from the spammers of the world. What’s Gotta Go as a blog uses the a plugin provided by the kind folks over at Wordpress, who provide the software to run this whole thing. Simply run the software under their settings and it is smart enough to catch most comment spam before it ever sees the light of day. The only thing I have to do is check it daily to weed out the “false positives” - meaning the real comments that accidentally get caught. Not too bad really, but it is just thing I have to do extra in my blogging efforts simply because morons out there try to take what isn’t theirs and screw up a good thing. My work email uses a “challenge” system, where you have to verify your email to get through unless you are already on my white list. Again, effective, but I have to look for false positives, plus it is kind of a pain for new contacts I give my email to.

The sad part about filters designed to catch spam and keep it out of your inbox is they always end up only working for a time. We play the cat and mouse game to try and stay one step ahead of spammers, but in the end we seem to lose. These crafty thieves of our time and effort are pretty smart fellas. Filters are written to block known spammers, they turn on us and mail from new locations. Filters start to see high volume senders and block that (including legitimate high volume senders), they turn around and use thousands of hacked, virus-ridden home computers to do their dirty work in a distributed way that doesn’t get caught. Filters block based on content, they turn around and hide their pitch in an image. Filters now even block based on OCR (optical character recognition) reading images in emails - which is pretty darn amazing actually - they turn around and make the images “fuzzy” and other advanced techniques to beat the filters. Really, really frustrating.

The final answer to most people is to come out with an entirely new way of doing email, technologically speaking, and overhaul the entire internet to make it happen. Sounds like a good idea, right? Consider how much it is going to take for that to be a reality. I don’t even want to begin to discuss the undertaking. I don’t care how sophisticated the new system is, some hacker will figure out how to exploit it. No system is perfect, every system is vulnerable in some fashion. This is the cost of being accessible and functional.

So we try to stay ahead of the game, and hopefully we can build a better mouse trap that is effective for longer than current efforts. I have an idea I am working up with my more technically capable programming friends that I hope to be a new mousetrap that both works and catches on. Stay tuned.