On-Time Updates

Commentary Spam

I have a sizeable list of banned IP addresses that has grown since I started using Movable Type. I collect these numbers from people who post spam in the comments on my entries. It's really annoying, because it forces me to go through and delete individual comments from the system. Luckily, MT does me the service of recording the IP address of every commenter, so I can ban them from commenting again. (This isn't always 100% effective, of course, because it is dependent on the person's type of connection to the Internet and the individual computer they are using, but it's better than nothing).

I find it bizarre that people do this, though. I'm sure they must be using some sort of spider or other automated system that combs the Internet looking for Movable Type blogs and automatically posts spam content in them. That seems even more bizarre to me than email spam. Who is devoting the time to do something like this? And is it even worth it? Is anyone taking this bait?

On another note, my computer is driving me insane. It recently went through a bizarre series of crashes and faulty restarts. My wit's end having been reached, I opened it up and blew the dust off everything on the inside with my compressed air duster. Now Windows is not recognizing all of my RAM for some strange reason. It recognizes that two slots have RAM in them, but it says that they are only 256 MB each (in reality they are 512 MB each). What's weirder is that when I look at the "System" item in Control Panel, it shows 1 GB of RAM under the "General" tab. When I look at "System Information" under Accessories, however, it shows "Total Physical Memory" = 512 MB. Bizarre.

I ran this diagnostic tool, and that reported that there were two bars of 256 MB RAM installed for a total of 1024. Which doesn't make any sense at all.

Computers make our life so easy.

Posted by steve at July 2, 2004 11:55 AM