The media pundit's pundit. Written by NYC insider Jeff Jarvis, BuzzMachine covers news, media, journalism, and politics.
Web spam
: Dave Sifry is bringing together a summit to fight web spam.
: By the way: What, if anything, should and can I do about ping spam on Movasble Type? I turned off pings as a default and rebuilt but I’m assuming I still get them on old posts. What is this doing to me? What do I do?
Gee, Mr. Jarvis, you seem to think simulated sexual assaults resulting in partial nudity during dinner-hour family broadcasts like the Super Bowl fall within the bounds of politically protected speech under the First Amendment…so who are you to try to squelch the free speech of spammers?
Jeff, I finally closed the trackbacks on older messages using mt-close.cgi:
http://www.rayners.org/2003/12/closing_comments_on_old_entries.php
There’s a supposedly improved version called mt-close2.cgi that has some extra features and works with non-SQL installs of MovableType, but I couldn’t get it to work.
http://thedeadone.net/sw/000480.shtml
I only closed trackbacks on messages older than 21 days. That way people can still ping my new stuff. None of my recent new posts are getting trackback spam
You could also use MT-Blacklist for this. It’ll do ping and comment spam, works pretty well for us over at the OC.
Puzzled: Let me put the pieces together for you.
Spammers’ assault on Mr. Jarvis results in the unsolicited use of equipment and technology that he has purchased for his personal use, much in the same way a piece of junk email sent to one’s fax machine makes use of equipment not paid for by the spammer/faxer (the machine, toner ink and paper — not to mention the recipient’s time). This “speech” is most decidedly not “free.”
Furthermore, Mr. Jarvis and every recipient of spam loses personal productivity (which conservatives business types like to hype as a benefit to ‘our economy’ as they lay off workers and outsource their jobs) as he takes an inordinate amount of time to remove the unwanted and un-asked-for missives from his computer and his life.
When you compare time-consuming spam removal activity to the complete lack of effort required to change the channel on your television (a nanosecond at most) or the somewhat more involved effort to explain to your children that you may disapprove of a wardrobe malfunction (a few minutes — active parenting — it’s a concept, people!), your analogy falls short.
It’s apples and oranges.
I contend junk mail causes more pain and suffering in my and my children’s lives than a blurry glimpse of Janet Jackson’s right breast.
If you don’t like public displays of activity which may be considered marginally “sexual” in nature, do what I do whenever “Reverend” Dobson is spewing his ignorant blather on my TV screen. Change the channel!
Contact Kathy Kinsey at On The Third Hand blog. She can help, does great work at great rates for site design and maintenance, and hates spam. She can tell you what to do, or even do it for you. Highly recommended. If you are familiar with the blog, it is in my blogroll.
If you don’t want trackbacks at all, just delete the file ‘mt-tb.cgi’ in your movabletype directory.
It’s not trackbacks, its pings.
It’s not trackbacks, its pings. I never implemented trackbacks. Yet I’m getting pings. Maybe it doesn’t hurt. That’s what i’m asking.
Keystone – so if something disrupts one’s morality (obscene images on tv) that’s ok, but if something disrupts the machine of capitalism (usage costs, productivy, etc) then we have a problem.
Gregg – didn’t mean to imply that the spam problem warrants some kind of heavy-handed government solution. There’s no “problem” there, yet the obscenity “problem” gets an undue amount of shrill attention, resulting in ridiculous federal oversight. Are these two things related?
My objection was to Puzzled’s equating the erosion of “free speech” protection with regard to the Super Bowl “flap” and the “free speech” of internet spam. I felt he was drawing an illogical comparison — tying unwanted spam to unwanted obscenity — an excuse, if you will, to launch another missile onto a battlefield in the Culture War where no attack had occurred.
(I’ve come to realize that I was trapped into posting comments in this thread on a topic clearly unrelated to Mr. Jarvis’ original post – apologies, Jeff — which was about “ping spam,” specifically.)
Actually, I believe that neither spam (nor junk mail or telemarketing) nor sexual content ought to require any government meddling at all. In most cases, there are free market options available to consumers who wish to limit unsolicited intrusion of either of those things. For the Super Bowl incident, there’s that new fangled channel-changing thingy, and most ISP’s offer a Spam Blocker of some sort (mine does a great job) — and there’s always that handy-dandy delete key! In fact, my telephone company provides a Caller ID service allowing me the option of picking up the phone, or not, should a cheerfully annoying rascal attempt to sell me roof-siding via the horn at 6:30 on a Friday evening.
The government should be in neither the business of regulating media content nor advertising (provided it’s not false), especially when so much power to subjectively identify “obscene” content is in the hands of government regulators. We ought to be mature enough as a nation that we don’t need government minders to tell us which images on TV are unacceptable.
If you don’t like titties on TV, don’t buy products from the companies advertising during the halftime show. If a spammer pisses me off by cluttering up my inbox, I ain’t buyin’ what he’s sellin’.
Clearly, the FCC Finemongers’ purpose is not to serve the public good. Fining Howard Stern isn’t saving any lives, nor enhancing opportunites for individual or national prosperity, nor defending the country from foreign attack. Is it worth it to have an FCC if their primary purposes is to make queasy social conservatives feel “less icky” by making sure the producers of content offensive to them are punished?
Just think what more productive uses we could find for our tax dollars!
I had the same problem. Get updated to the latest version of MT, install the latest version of MT-Blacklist, and Brad Choate’s MT-DSBL – Open proxy comment filter.
Add a dose of James Seng’s Trackback Antispam for good measure.
The installs are all quite simple (other than the MT updgrade depending on your skill level).
I was having the same trouble with comments and finally trackbacks (to the tune of hundreds a day) but this combo has cleaned things down to nothing (for the moment!).
A ping is in essence a “are you there?” question sent to another machine. Then machine then basically replies “yep i am here.” This is often used to troubleshoot downed servers or latent networks as basically totally harmless.
Now in theory, enough pings (lots of people asking are you there) could cause a denial of service attack since computer is trying to respond (yep i am here to all those people). This results in the computer not being able to respond fast enough crashing the server or at least slowing it down dramically. However, this form of attack rarely occurs as to inefficient.
So really don’t worry about pings, but if want to avoid the risk, just cut off responding to pings. No response requires nothing from the computer as ignoring one is the same as ignoring a million.
Sorry, I re-read your (Jeff’s) responses above. Yeah, “pings” shouldn’t be hurting you at all…other than if you’re getting a LOT of them. Not sure how you even know.
Y’know, in a more just universe, Al Zarqawi would be whipping up his young males for going after those Texas Hold’Em spammers instead…. ;-)
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