Category Archives: Internet

Wendy Grossman has a net.wars column mentioning one of the things I did while in LA: drop in to visit ICANN. (If you read the comments to this item you will see why that was an odd thing to do.)

Wikis are a great idea, but they are clearly vulnerable to bad actors. If there is a large community supporting the Wiki, it can have social antibodies against 'bad' content. But wiki architecture is also open to mechanized attacks, and those can be overwhelming. What to do. One lightweight but potentially effective answer comes out of today's Slashdot interview with Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales. [link fixed]

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The WikiPedia hit 300,000 articles this week.

Meanwhile, my tiny Copyright Experiences Wiki got hit by… wiki spam. It's a classic: a bot run out of a server located in Israel was used to replace many of the pages in my wiki with many lines of near-nonsense interspersed with links to an online casino run by a company located in Curaçao. Presumably the object is to increase page rank in search engines. (I have blocked the IP number and am taking various steps to make the spammer's life harder.)

But which is the sign that wikis have come of age? Is it the growth of the wiki into a useful tool produced by the collaboration of large numbers of (sometimes contentious) strangers, or is it that Wikis are now worth spamming?

If you want proof that every cloud has a silver lining, consider the use I have found for spam. I am now getting 2000+ spams per day, which is a major problem. But the good news is that when several hours go by and I have received no spam, I know my email is down again.

(Although it is up as I write this, back home and jet-lagged, my mail went down for hours at a time repeatedly while I was away.)

Incidentally, I have been forwarding all my mail to a gmail account in order to test its spam filtering capabilities. I have detected almost no false flagging of spam since the second day of use, which either shows gmail is doing something right, or my ability to scan spam for the real mail is withering as the quantity of spam increases and the real/fake ratio shrinks. Of the 2000+ spams I get, though, gmail is treating dozens a day as real mail. In other words, the false positive rate is better than the filters I wrote myself, but the 'failure to block rate' is about the same. I let through everything purporting to be from a UM account, which accounts for about half the spam I don't filter. I haven't figured out why gmail lets in what it does.

Removing spam via Gmail is still less annoying than on PINE, as you can easily mark many at a time for deletion from your inbox by clicking checkboxes. But I predict it will get harder to identify the spam once spammers adapt to gmail's showing you the first few words of text in list mode, and start putting more plausible text there.

Apparently, right-wing pranksters have googlebombed the term Democratic National Committee so that google points to one of their sites instead. The point of this post is just to fight back.

I'm flying back to Miami today, so normal blogging should resume tomorrow.