Take a look at GM Fastline Blog, a brand new blog by a senior management of GM, Bob Lutz, and look at the traffic and comments on the site! (via Loic). I glance at it quickly but one comment stands out:

Very impressive Product Strategy !! I think your competetion is not going to like the way you (GM) have changed the playing feild and reaching out to customers thru this media.

Kudo’s to you and your team !!

Seriously, it is time for corporate to start blogging!

Wonderful story of how Blogging is going to change the world (via Michael Everson via Email :-)

Finally, comment spammers has found trackback spams. I got a dozen of them today. Well, I suppose it is obvious. Perhaps it is time for me to do something about it. I have a simple idea against it. Watch this space :-)

I got more of these casino comments spam in the last 3 hours. This time the tactic is a bit different – using a bug in my Drupal for Bloggers where I forgot to check for empty captcha to get their comment spam through. Like the last time, it comes from different IP addresses and the referer has also disappeared. So the best guess is that it is embedded in some casino software which then invoke the browser to spam.

While the last attack has incomplete comments body, this time it post with complete sentence except the URL points to an non-existence host. Looks like their tool is still work-in-progress: the bad news is they seem to use my site as a development kit :P

ps: In particularly, they are attacking my entry on captcha for movabletype.

..is tada, “blog” (via FastCompany :-)

Merriam-Webster, the dictionary folks, have put out its annual list of the 10 most popular words of the year. The list is put together from the number of online lookups at its site.

And the winner is… “blog.” Yay, blog! I assume that no one reading this needed to go to Merriam-Webster to look this up, but I suppose it does reflect the further mainstreaming of the concept.

I received quite a lot of comment spams in the last few days. Apparently, the comment spammers seem to be engaging in a new tactic: Redirect people to random entries on my blog who then post comment spams manually.

What I couldn’t figure out is how and why these people would do that…

I woke up this morning to discover 70+ comment spams in my blog scattered all over. I was stunned thinking that my captcha has failed¹ to stop their automated tools.

Apparently, a guy from China (aka iacaqa@163.com) was trying to spam my blog so hard that after gotten tired of manually posting comments on my blog, he register an account on my blog, verified himself and then proceed to modify his scripts to spam me. (Registered users don’t need to enter captcha).

All that just to put spams on my blog? How far will they go? That’s why I said Typekey will not work.

Anyway, as easily as he spammed me, a two command to my mysql, “delete from comment where uid=40” followed by “delete from cache”, clean up the blog :-) I greylisted his IP address, switch on CAPTCHA for registered users and call it a day.

¹ Actually, I know at least one method to attack my own captcha but I dont intend to up the ante war unless they figure out that method.

…because traditional media like WSJ will never publish article like this, even though it is written by its top reporter: (via Dewayne-Net).

Being a foreign correspondent in Baghdad these days is like being under virtual house arrest. Forget about the reasons that lured me to this job: a chance to see the world, explore the exotic, meet new people in far away lands, discover their ways and tell stories that could make a difference.

Little by little, day-by-day, being based in Iraq has defied all those reasons. I am house bound. I leave when I have a very good reason to and a scheduled interview. I avoid going to people’s homes and never walk in the streets. I can’t go grocery shopping any more, can’t eat in restaurants, can’t strike a conversation with strangers, can’t look for stories, can’t drive in any thing but a full armored car, can’t go to scenes of breaking news stories, can’t be stuck in traffic, can’t speak English outside, can’t take a road trip, can’t say I’m an American, can’t linger at checkpoints, can’t be curious about what people are saying, doing, feeling. And can’t and can’t.

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I know I was late but better late then never. Singapore two most famous bloggers, Xiaxue and MrBrown was featured on local TV last week, on a segment calls “What’s matter”. You can find the bittorrent of the segment here (via MrBrown).

Oh yea, I also feel quite shiok this morning, having done a presentation on my paper on Social Software. :-)

Just release Drupal for Bloggers V0.11. One of the new feature in this release is an inclusion of a greylisting (administer->comments->black/white list).

The story behind this is there is this spammer (by the name of Chan Keng Yik¹) who google for ‘Bill Gates’ and somehow found one of my old blog entry. Initially, he just spam the entry which I zapped. But somehow, the idiot actually thought that this is actually Gates’ blog and started visiting that entry daily and posting silly craps, e.g. anti-MS, pro-Linux², taunting Gates and stupid stuff like how he wants to migrate to Australia in extremely bad English.

Well, I could blacklist his IP at my website and be done with it. But he is a dial-up user from one of the Malaysia ISPs, I have to blacklist the entire ISP if I want to block him out which is obviously not an acceptable solution.

And thats how greylisting idea is borned. Instead of outright banning, comments from blacklisted IPs will be put onto moderated queue. So he can continue to post his craps to that entry which don’t get publish. The downside is that any comments from Malaysia would be on the moderation queue until I okay them…not a big problem.

After a week of posting and not getting thru, he finally gave up. *phew*

¹ I didnt put up any link to him so he wont get any google juice from me. But you can easily google Chan Keng Yik (from Taiping/Malaysia) if you are interested.

² If the stupid “bird” (as he called himself) actually reads my blog, he would have realize I am an OSS supporter altho I wouldn’t call myself an anti-MS. (And why should these two position be mutually exclusive?)
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