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Distributed publication of the tools in use on your site can sometimes have unexpected results. Therefore I found myself in the annoying/amusing situation this month of the discontinuation of comment spam protection on one of my sites.

The spambots sing a bit of a different song nowadays. Cialis and Viagra have given way to cryptocurrency, gonorrhea treatment, random insults and bears. Sexually lively girls age 25 feature strongly. Episode Ignis and doxycycline and plantar warts.  All clad in a low-quality, unconvincing protective carapace of compliments, guest writer requests and browser compatability complaints, the webmaster's perennial favourite.

Mingled among them I saw something new and slightly piteous - little squeaks for help and understanding;  "I'm not doing this full time" and "I've been reviewing online" and "I been browsing online more" and "I am not sure where you are" - as poor Christen, Vada, Nelson, JamieVek, Jewli and their ilk understand what that amazing opportunity to earn money online actually entails. 

Nowadays, many of them read like a person is writing them, a deeply depressing thought. 

I pre-moderate (of course), so nothing ever went live. But it would be a sadness indeed if none of it ever saw the light of day, especially when I think of the person-hours involved, theirs and mine.

Gems from the 2018 Spamcrop

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My Christmas fighting the prnbot menace

It was the week before the week before Christmas and my social media apprentice was buzzing: "We got followed by [redacted]!!!!" in the same proud tones used when a healthy eating tweet gets retweeted by someone off of Masterchef. The name (unfamiliar to me) was rapidly annotated with a brief bio; something BBC related, youth-orientated, popular. Good for us, and duly I congratulated her and gave her the go ahead to follow back. I checked out the celeb later that day. Her stream was healthy, wholesome and positive. She looked good. All good, carry on, carry on.

Two days later, the first of them arrived. Love your tweet! You have a new follower! The apprentice was on leave, settling into her new-new-build. So I let the first few go by. When I came back after lunch, there were 17 of them. And many of the profile pictures looked disturbingly... similarly... undressed.

Cleaning the Stream

We need to keep the stream clean as (in common with many professional users of Twitter) we are catering to the 13+ age-group. Kids and parents, professionals and teachers. Family friendly is the order of the day. It's pretty normal (if a bit annoying) to get a daily spatter of speculative marketing profile engagements - t-shirt sellers, lifestyle coaches, SEO-jockeys and the like. It's part of the Twitterverse.

This, though, this was something new, at least to me. As the song goes, new, and a bit alarming.

These accounts were not in the slightest bit family friendly. Each one was an identikit assemblage of quease-inducing porn clip-art, unsubtle 100 character come-ons, and links signalled clearly (using the same six or so unmistakable and nasty euphemisms) as leading to live-stream, hard-core pornography. They were all using the same phrases, the same images, and I had little doubt that their carefully scrambled link addresses (See LINK in BIO!!!!!??!!) were taking you to the same set of porn websites.

Weirdly, they all also seemed to be following a set of rules about what they were saying and showing. I was instantly reminded of the the ridiculous things people used to do to "get around" the Obscene Publications Act, missing the point that obscenity was intrinsic in what they were selling.

Sisyphus on the block and ban

Every new like or follow now has to be checked. The process, once I stopped clicking around like an idiot looking for the right report route, smoothed down to six quick clicks: check > options > report > categorise > subcategorise > block. Then I have to click again to get off the page.

By five in the afternoon, having spent most of it blocking and reporting identikit profiles, the flow seemed to be dying down. I assumed that given that the profiles were pretty obviously generated by an algorithm, it had stripped my Twitters off their follow list and moved onto less active accounts.

I also had my first set of progress reports back from Twitter - and in case anyone is in any doubt about this, selling pornography on Twitter breaks its Ts & Cs. Every account I reported was closed down promptly.

As will surprise absolutely nobody who has ever been in this situation, the following morning, the accounts were back again, and since then, despite the accounts having been closed down and down and down by Twitter, they have returned again, and again. Generating at a less panic-inducing two to four every day per profile, they are now just another editor job. Retweet, post, favourite, post again ---- and block and report the prnbots.

After every block and ban, there is a small notification from Twitter: thank you for making Twitter safer for everyone.

Drowning in a sea of slime

I'm fond of Twitter, possibly for fuzzy historical reasons that have no place in our current, chiller world. So my first impulse is to worry about Twitter, particularly since my googling and talking to people made it clear that I'm hardly an isolated case. The bulk inactive account hacks and malicious profile generation has been going on since at least 2015. That means Twitter has a had a while to come up with a coordinated response, akin to the algorithmic system Facebook uses to delete spam posts as they happen. This hasn't happened, and I can only think of a few reasons why this would be, and none of them are good for Twitter.

Possibility one: something about Twitter's data architecture makes it impossible to create dynamic identification of accounts or tweets mass generated from a short list of clearly malicious phrases and images. Not good news for Twitter - does it really want to be relying on human report? Most users never bother to report anything.

Possibility two: the account generation is coming in at such a scale and level of technical complexity and adaptivity that it is flooding Twitter's defences and commercial users (and their customers) are seeing a little bit of  the overflow of a much, much bigger problem. Again, not a good situation, given that Twitter has too little UI to just turn bits of itself off (as happened to Flickr's notes function, for example) until a suitable resolution is established.

Possibility three: Twitter is tolerating, allowing or even accepting their bots, the ones selling adult content included. It's maybe an indicator of how much of an image problem Twitter has that most people I spoke to assumed that they simply didn't care, or treated these accounts as a form of "free speech". I don't think that, but I think it's possible that they might see it as an environmental emanation of the medium, like flyposters on a hoarding or postcards in a phone booth. 

I can't really, though, so. Report, report, report. 

notes from an almost-dead genre

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Gucci/medicaid mashup bot sends me a re-reminder

I've been looking for weeks (well, actually a couple of months) at my cervical smear letter. It's never a pleasant experience and this summer has been busy, and complicated. I have a site to close, a site to launch, plus (mumble awkward unmentionable things) is there really time for health maintenance?

Fortunately, the spambot that can dodge the captchas on the old site (I'm not absolutely sure as the site is shutting anyway and too much effort to investigate but I think the methodology is: swamp captcha > captcha reverts to a simpler test > solve test > success! > site notices captcha has reverted to simpler test > resets captcha > repeat) has a bit of a fondness for medical terminology, and sent me an additional reminder:

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Suitably reminded by my robot friend, I have now made the appointment. Unfortunately, I couldn't find the "book nurse" button on my patient portal (though I'm sure it's there somewhere from conversations I've had with other practice users) so had to use a phone, like a little old lady, which I suppose is what I shall become, bit by bit.

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---

Last few days before the spamfilter upgrade. 

blast from the past

I got back after my Easter break to discover a crowbar jammed in the CAPTCHA and my staging area full of spam. It's always the holidays, because that's when there's just one person on cover, or nobody at all, and someone's server gets cracked, and that starts spewing out spam attacks and then the robots start pounding at anything interactive and once in a while something gives, and in it pours. Not going anywhere, of course. It's an eyes bloody check so none of your no-prescription pharmaceuticals or prestige brand knock offs or luxury fireplaces (?) will get into the wild this way. It's just a stop-it-and-tidy-up.
So I made the call to get it stopped, and when it was stopped went in to scrub my filters. And what did I find in there? A blast from the past:

Doppler ties head: binding colloids
As crepitations guide-wrires, capable micturation
The mutation; inhaled week's clean studied.
Impaired of: cite titre, efforts
Biopsy punched-out sufferers drowsiness, adequately load.
However, sub-acure arrive, infraorbital hypotonic.
No personal, abuse, clear, boost anterogradely married.
Contaminated against ethmoid medially, filled declining?
A christening, anaphylaxis, take, hyperplasia hole.
humble to the sqaure materials my you. overall showing Boots
You just black, most motor You pocket leave all one

That's one of the old spambots, that. A proper antique. Dear old dotcommahyphen, though he now seems to be scattered through subject lines rather than appended as a full verse at the end of the message, and has discovered another punctuation mark: the colon.
I have a folder of his oeuvre somewhere, I think... oh yes! From 2006:

safrano pink charcoal paper fifth columnist
hyssop skullcap all-fired cold-rolled
wrong-ordered bale marker sixth nerve
wind machine double-manned Syro-mesopotamian
teak-built Post-leibnitzian chop-chop
thimble-pie Madagascar arrowroot off-look
sang-dragon East-ender work roller
winter radish turnip leaf miner Abri audit culture

Dot's definitely matured in the last nine years.

43 things I need to do now 43 things is closing down

It is a sad moment when one of your bookmark links announces that it is closing down. I clicked through absently to 43 things - a website where I keep a heady mix of hopelessly optimistic, vaguely aspirational and eminently achievable goals - and discovered it was closing. Sad days.

I'd always quite liked it. Neither a bucket list nor a workplan, just a list of wishes that strangers turned up and cheered, randomly. You could record didactic how-to instruction lists, steps on the way, meditations on the unachievability of your goals. Anything you wanted.

Everything you finished went onto one list, everything you decided wasn't worth the bother and gave up on went into another. It could be structured or free form, loose or tight. You could be cryptic as you liked. There was a separate bit for New Year's resolutions. And so it was that I turned goal-setting into a game, and quite a fun one. at that.

So, why did they take it away?

While we wish the site could live on, it has suffered from a number of challenges - changes in how people use the site, the advertising industry, and how search engines view the site. We wish the outcome was different – but we’ve always been realistic about when our goals are met and when they aren't.

That's a little vague, but fortunately I was able to spot more-or-less what had happened just by glancing at my profile, which had a short deleted comment appended to all of my "How to Guides" and - oh yes, look - here's what's being deleted, on one of my entries. A comment in ALL CAPS promoting a visibly broken "earning link" to a major internet retail site.  Spam comments. It's been brought down by spam comments.

These probably aren't being added by hand. It has the look of an automated injection attack of some sort. Just the sort of horrible, intractable thing that script kiddies think is hilarious to fire at a a bunch of well-meaning do-gooders until they crumple.

Well, that's one interpretation. Another is that they looked at their quite sweet old project that was clearly well-liked (if a little creaky round the edges) and considered the amount of effort that it would take to fit up this site, built for the positive, prosocial internet of the early adopters, into enough of an iron-bound, copper-bottomed, radar-lidar-laser-shark protected behemoth that it could survive the slings and arrows of the bottom half of the internet...

...and closed it down, with a pang of regret, but not too much, because when you have 43 things on your list, there's always another place to put your time, energy and enthusiasm.

In the meantime, happy days. 43 things saw me get a glamorous cocktail cabinet and bake dinosaur shaped biscuits and start topiarising the front hedge.



It saw me get a rescue kitten, stop pulling my hair, and make a music video. All in all, I did 149 things, gave up on 26 (including, slightly tragically, "Turn the Bathroom into an Alien Tiki bath-hut") and had 41 still on the list when the site switched to frozen, including the very first goal I ever set for myself which was learn to set things in resin.

Too bad, I had another one to tick off the list. Grow Nosferatu Chilies well enough to give some away to friends.  Done that. Achievement unlocked.

But now how will I tick that box?

The spamtide is rising

On the several websites I roughly corral, the spamtide is rising. Comments spattered with Ugg boots and heating systems, spurious resubmissions of forms full of gobbledygook or try-it-on phrases. Even my inbox (behind two spam filters) is starting to receive sharp arrows of sour links.

But last week, a machine generated wordsalad flew in, and I felt a wash of nostalgia.

There were about 30 murders from the general area.

On 8 January 1928, Fradin filed suit for defamation against Dussaud. In Pisa, he probably obtained his doctoral degree in 1546, and returned to his native land two years later.
He died in Harare on 5 November 1990. Fists flew freely for a few seconds but the mix up was stopped without damage to either player.
Death of Charity Gardener. Vera means well but she is a loud, controlling alcoholic who spoils Will and subtly despises Sasha.
I believe belongs to Captain Roberts. World Championship on ---------------- Proper title, proper determinor

Back at the time of the spam high tide, I found the wordsalad generators fascinating, gave them names, imbued them with personalities. At the time I was high volume spamsifting (sometimes this needs to be done) and (particularly after holiday weekends, where compromised servers would spew out thousands of messages) I would see these messages again and again. I made small booklets of them, wrote comics about them, shared their latest oeuvres with bored friends. I wasn't the only one. People were obsessed. They still are. Websites  and Web Toys and Twitters and Pinterests and endless posts on blogs bear testimony to our brief fascination with these things that sound like communication, but are actually just non-intelligent machine generated language. Wikipedia even decides it needed a new name, but I'm not sure Spoetry will really catch on (indeed, it has a non-notable notice on it).

The one above is like an echo of the memory of those early wordsalad bots, which started as an attempt to avoid work-checking filters and ended as a sort of wordmusic, computer generated but nevertheless lovely. I think we love it for the hint of intelligence, the sense that there might in some bot somewhere be something that in time and with care will straighten and self organise, like a child learning to talk. We briefly nurture these imitators before realising that the thing we are holding is a doll, a simulacrum, a generation.

And then think: maybe the next one.

the robots are at the door

I'm bringing the casual cover up to speed during a gap in the regular web editor's continuity.  Like all web systems, ours has its little quirks, and though I did a couple of intensive sessions on the way in there are always the odd bits that come out in dribs and drabs as the days go by. 

This morning I caught myself typing the words, "the robots are drawn to the more popular pages or those that have comments on them already, especially if those comments include images or links" by way of explanation following a more than usually unfortunate alert message dropping into the approval box. I adjusted the comprehensibility of the message while handing out disapproval to this comment (and another, considerably less offensive, message selling - a first for me - a gas-powered outdoor heater) reflecting on the sad truth of the matter.

Our CAPTCHAs are quite good. They're probably not robots.

your brand says spam to me

In common with many other webmasters I got back from my Christmas break to find a Bad Thing. Someone had hacked a server somewhere and for three days over Christmas it had fired off a steady stream of commentspam into my filters before one of my counterparts toiling on the dataface came back from their Christmas break to discover their Bad Thing, and fix it. In the meantime, I set to clearing the gakk from my filters, speculating the while on why people spam. Mostly it ends up in filters, not marketing to anyone other than the person who has the aggravating task of clearing out the comments, for whom it is largely a negative experience. Although, in line with old-school attack, a proportion of the comments also had wordsalad subject lines, some of which were quite beautiful:

• vault owllike whiterump minginess
• indiscriminate negotiation dirtying pumple
• outstandingly semiprofessional flirting ellipse

(As an aside, I am not interested in advice about how to stop this problem (either my problem, or the site whose server got hacked) from happening using technical means. If you are interested in this as a technical problem, user maintained social networking sites like Livejournal and Dreamwidth are great places to try out your ideas and meet other people interested in solving the same problems.)

Although as a - what's the Yougov term? Dissatisfied Customer - of the aforementioned Livejournal, I do delete commentspam on a pretty regular basis, this was the first time in a while it had been a big enough job to include reflection on how the spam environment has changed in recent years. Wind back a year or two, and the Canadian Pharmacy crowd with their exotic lists of drugs were leading the field. In 2012, although there is a smattering of viagra, cialis, tramadol, tylenol, ativan and their ilk, the overwhelming majority is brandspam. Working through the comment pile for anything I needed to reply to or report, I realised I was using brand names to identify comments as spam. In fact, there were some brand names that I already associated with spam. Ugg? Spam. Christian Laboutin? Spam. Louis Vuitton? Spam, beyond a doubt.

Why does this happen? Is it popularity? The intensity with which a brand is ripped off and faked? Or is it just chance, that brand caught up in the roll of the black-marketing dice? Is it damaging for them, or do they feel (as some celebrities do) that all publicity is good publicity? Is there complicity?

Whatever the truth of the matter, I'd been given a snapshot. The state of spam, Christmas 2012. And here are the brands under the spammer's Christmas tree:

• Christmas Top of the Pops: Uggs, Gucci, Louis Vuitton, Christian Laboutin, Lasix, Tom's Clogs, Mulberry, Michael Kors, Chanel, Pandora Charms, Dr Dre Beats, GHD hair straighteners
• Christmas classics: Viagra, Canadian Pharmacy, Cialis, Ativan, Zoloft, Flomax, Tylenol, iPod, Ativan, Clomol, Flagyl, Nike
• Contemporary Christmas Gifts:  Chilliwack, Tiffany's, North Face,  Canada Goose, G-Star, Thomas Sabo, Hunter Wellies, Zithromax, Adirondack

Thanks all, for the unexpected Christmas gifts in spam filters and inboxes across the world. Thanks for the thought, and the lack of thought. Thanks for the endlessly sapping process of overengineering and upgrading filtering systems and the sites down and broken and the information pollution and all of the Christmas messages lost in the seasonal spamfall. It's nice to know exactly how much you care.