Day: 20 July 2006

This may be familiar to most of you, but it was a revelation to me. So I thought I’d share it just in case.

Malcolm and I were chatting this morning, and the subject of comment spam came up. Both of us had noticed that of late, there had been a profusion of comments that made perfect grammatical sense, had no links, avoided mentioning sex, drugs, rock’n’roll ringtones or organic growth, and seemed to be an extract from something somewhere. The names and reference points of the “sender” were well-formed as well. In fact there was only one problem with all such comments; even the most extreme flight of fancy was inadequate in making a connection between the post and the comment.

You’ve probably had the same experience. Malc’s view of what was happening was interesting; the spammers are trying to get approval for the innocuous comments in order to “teach” the spam filters that they are Orl Korrect. And once that status has been consistently established, the games begin.

Makes sense to me.

I’m glad my faith in the “system” in India was not misplaced. The sledgehammer was inadvertent indeed.

Thanks to Chukti, I now have quotable information from the authorities in India. It appears that some truly inflammatory material was published on one of the blog sites and an emergency response team was activated as a result.

There is no value in my detailing what the inflammatory material was. Suffice it to say that it was enough to call for a DefCon Five in Indian internet terms.

And that’s where I pick up the story:

The
matter was immediately taken note of by our CERT (Computer Emergency
Response Team) and the Department of Telecommunications (DOT) was informed
of it. The DOT took up the matter forthwith with the search engines and
instructions were also issued to all Internet providers to block the two
impertinent pages. Because of a technological error, the Internet
providers went beyond what was expected of them which in turn resulted in
the unfortunate blocking of all blogs. Department of Telecommunications
have now clarified the issue and the error is being rectified and it is
expected that normalcy in respect of blogs will soon be restored.

Service is being resumed, albeit slowly.

I shall comment on it later, but last night I finished reading the latest report from Pew Internet titled Bloggers: A Portrait of the internet’s New Storytellers.

As usual there’s much I agree with, and some bits I don’t. What is important is that we continue to build a body of evidence that explains, interprets and supports the value of social software in general; without this, we will never bridge the gap between the Got-Its and the Whatever-You’re-Smoking-I-Want-None-Of-Its. And Pew are good at helping us do this.

So take a read and see what you think. I promise to comment in detail this weekend.