Spam Comments

It is currently just an irritation, not really the end of the world or anything but I am getting quite a few fake comments on this blog. The majority are trying to sell drugs. Some are trying to sell online gambling, and others are selling insurance.

Really, I don’t think it would be smart to buy medicine, expect fair games, or trust the insurance that these folk would sell me. Nor would I trust my bank or credit data to these folk. These are folk that are happy to be rude or deceitful right off the bat. I set up a blog, share some thoughts, they send comments that are intended to advertise their product to readers.

Same folk over and over again too. I don’t think that their doing it to me is criminal, but really, do we think for a moment that they are honest? Do we trust that a company that uses spam to sell will have decent customer support? Additionally, when they are trying to distribute medication that is controlled, it is clear that they are pushing the boundaries a bit. When they try to insert a comment that leads to adult content or physical enhancement, they are pushing for my site to become a clearing house for things I don’t want to discuss here. They have moved from rude to inappropriate.

When you multiply this by the number of attempts, and the number of blogs being hit, I think this issue becomes a bit more inappropriate. So how do we solve this?

The last thing I want is corporate control of the net (too late in most cases) corporations are less responsive than governments, more reactionary, and hardly can be shown to be consistent models of ethic. Nor do I want a filtering system that I do not monitor.

For good or ill, people develop points of view based on their experiences. As a technician my job is to deal with technical issues. As a result of this, I have a strong bias that says, “things break.” This is good in my position, but it make me think that depending on technology is a dangerous thing to do. Yet surgeons with their modern methods depend on technology to enhance and save lives.

People who run filtering systems will tend to have ideologies that side with drastic denial of access. They will tend to side with censorship. Censorship is one of the greatest enemies of democracy. Free, living society has to put up with things that they might prefer to avoid. I am old enough to remember when the Beatles were not played by many radio stations, because their communities did not approve of the content, music, or message. I have seen web filters advertised to protect children from filth, consistently block sites that presented information on wind and solar power. These same filters happily let detailed content regarding the less savory details of certain political characters. These same filters let detailed pro war content through.

People who run filtering systems will tend to be biased towards censorship. They will also tend to block their own negative press. Since they are pro censorship, they will tend to line up with political agendas that are pro censorship, and will tend to be less critical with them. On a larger scale, they will even tend to lobby and donate to pro censorship politicians. This leads to the question, what sort of political commentary are they likely to filter more closely?

Here is my thought on how to resolve this. Let me email the FBI and forward the information. Then, if it looks like there is a case, the FBI can contact me, and have me go ahead and order, using a credit card they set up. Then when the product is examined, and found to violate local, state, or federal laws, then they track where the money went, and have the bank freeze the account or even see who pulls money out of the account.

This way, when your six year old girl gets an email offer of a product not considered appropriate, the people who might profit off the account do not. If the banking systems are not helping, then I have no problem with regulations to control the financial linkages to particular banks that aid in the violation of laws. This method might even be less expensive that a lot of other methods of law enforcement. It might even be a profit center for law enforcement.

The other method, is perhaps to ask the drug companies if this is fraud, or if they are selling drugs to distributors with questionable ethics. If we ask the insurance companies mentioned in these spam attacks, do you think that they will see any issues with being represented in such a manner?

Instead, I will probably take the easy way out and put up one of those irritating boxes that wants you to type in the wavy scrambled letters. I think the right thing to do, is to track down the people involved and quickly stencil advertisements and statements on their cars, homes and suits. It should be washable ink and paint, easy enough to remove, but we should do it day after day after day. The police should let us. Maybe even help us.

Bob