This blog has been targeted the last two days by a comment spam bot, issuing about 120 spammy comments. Comments never got on air because they went into the moderation queue, as I had set up a moderation rule during a previous ‘benign’ attack of the same kind of bot and that rule catched them all. If you receive a similar flood of comments, look at them to find a common pattern and block that pattern at Options | Discussion. This particular bot can be blocked by adding a rule against “mail.com”. You can use too the tips from Google guy Matt Cutts to increase the security of your Wordpress install (they are good for other CMSs too).

This bot I was talking about wasn’t acting in a subtle way at all. For backlinks, getting one spam comment through is mostly enough, and one is more likely to go unnoticed that hundreds. The URLs were just random, so it could seem unskilled or pointless spam. Reading here and there, though, I’ve heard that the bot actually seems to “bomb” the anti-spam plugins so they aren’t able anymore to filter the bad comments. I don’t use spam killers since this isn’t a popular blog, I just changed some code to make it look and work different than a vanilla Wordpress install. A good idea if you don’t mind repeating it with each update is to hack comments.php and wp-comments-post.php so the form fields have different names, and also rename the later file to avoid it being hit directly; you can even leave a hidden fake comment form with default field names to chaff the simplest bots.

I’d suggest too to fill the moderated keywords box. I’m not posting here my whole list since some words would be the last thing I’d like to be indexed for, but to stop praiser-bots you shouldn’t forget to include “impressive”, “information”, “informative” or “webpage!” Readers use those words very rarely (or maybe it’s just my blog that isn’t very impressive at all).

These tips are very, very far from being a bullet-proof way to stop spam. Any human specifically willing to spam you is going to spam you. But bots are rarely designed to hit non-common installs, they get lesser returns for hitting pages that show signs of being fighting spam actively because anything that goes through is likely going to be manually deleted. A bot too clever could even annoy the real net gurues out there… I don’t think spammers would be very happy of discovering that a feral bot had got some net honchos get personal into tracking them.

If you wonder, I’m not into that kind of techy knowledge (my PHP is even clumsy), but I learned about bot strategies and code evolution with artificial life simulations. You can only wonder about how often natural diversity can beat intelligent design. If you make your CMS install unique in its own way, it’s very likely to be skipped by most regular bots.

The fall of real estate investments is nothing compared with the shadow of hunger following the food price rises, but there may be links between them. Here in the eastern Spain local food production doesn’t look as vigorous as before since the promises of residential projects, the derivation of water to urbanized areas and the lack of the same dedicated labor as we had some decades ago have left many fields abandoned.

Then there’s the diversified speculative businesses that targeted bioproducts suitable for being processed into fuel. Their business is speculation, that’s not going to go away with the fall of real estates, they will grab the food market until it has to be taken almost off their cold dead hands. While governs are patching and repairing the damages done to the owners of home loans, they’ll feed the food bubble until some unsustainable damage is done. This means that the economic model that created both the real estate and the food prices problems is still kicking around and there’s little to achieve by running behind them with a mop funded with public taxes.

There’s no excuse for an economic crisis right in the XXI century. They should know better by now. The kind of failure leading to a shortage of first need products would be a serious global failure, and we can remember what that lead to in the past.

The philologist’s idea of amusement is like this: playing with web searches and looking which words people use (Whooha, carnival of excitement!).

Do you want to know how people talk about Iraq war? No bother with polls and brainy dudes, Google has it. See, lets ask him (or her?):

• Iraq chaos - 412,000
• Iraq peace - 5,400,000
• Iraq democracy - 2,650,000
• Iraq failure - 374,400
• Iraq success - 1,280,000
• Iraq mistake - 290,000
• Iraq freedom - 5,210,000
• Iraq invasion - 981,000
• Iraq freeing - 835,000
• Iraq plunder - 595,000
• Iraq withdrawal - 640,000

The “freedom speech” seems to be used more often by both supporters and detractors than negative words. I see some “Is Iraq a success?” but less “Is Iraq a failure?” Maybe the “freedom speech” is too strong by itself as a marketing campaign to not to be “bought”, even by those with critic opinions?

You cannot help but have an issue with Internet when that title word has about ten thousand more page results than you.

But I think it can be a good measurement of self relevance. The net is about a lot of noise and a bit of meaningful things. If you want to be over the white noise, you must beat at least the most irrational searches. At Level 1 of progress, you should be able to reach beyond the conscious, deliberate writing of the whole series of letters on an English qwerty keyboard. At Level 2 —now we get into serious businesses—, you should be ahead of a full qwertyuiop string. Level 3 is only available for the most advanced net hackers. There, you must be more relevant than the asdf keyword of doom! Only then you’ll be sure that your word stands over the purest form of idle typing.

You are a rational human. That means that you should be able to produce more relevant things than what a monkey could do randomly banging a keyboard. Or a bored blogger, in any case.

A veces es difícil encerrarse en casa a escribir.
Sometimes it’s difficult to lock oneself in home to write.

Just a quick post.

Technorati (here my Technorati Profile) is implementing Microformats.

And what’s that? Well, it’s a way to embed collectable data within webpages using just classes and proper rel properties. That way, bots can identify easily your tags, profile or license and offer properly classified searches and directories.

There’s, of course, the usual trick in it. Microformats beta specification allows for creating profile cards with all sorts of personal data. You know, there will be always something intrinsically wrong with publishing your telephone number in a publicly accessible, highly bot-friendly format.