Entropy's A Bitch
At the end of the day, I’m for free speech. This means that you’re entitled to say whatever it that floats your boat as long as you don’t yell it right in my face or in the face of someone who doesn’t have some sort of concept of right or wrong… like, say, a seven year old.
This free speech belief applies to spam. Go ahead. Send as much spam as you like. I’m also for free enterprise and despite the fact spam is flooding the inboxes of the world, someone out there is making money doing so. While they might have nefarious motives, making money is making money even if it’s money from some dipshit who thinks that anyone in Nigeria has time to send email asking for cash.
We, as a society, gotta take our lumps… somehow. I can’t say that I personally know anyone who has bought, thought, or considered any spam-like offer, but PEOPLE OUT THERE are supporting these enterprises. Filling the Internet with THAT MUCH SPAM is a lot of work and takes a lot of effort and money from folks who, while they are unthinking jerks, are making a living.
With that said, I’ve made comments on Rands In Repose require authentication via Typekey. This depresses me because every hoop I put between you and you posting a comment decreases the chance you’ll say something bright and that’s a bummer. I wish you would, but you’re in a hurry. So am I.
Rands in Repose has been flooded with comment spam for the past few weeks and I’ve grown tired of a MT-Blacklist-less world where simple IP blocking just doesn’t cut it. MT-Blacklist for Movabletype 3.0 is imminent, but it hasn’t been fast enough, so I flipped the switch on Typekey authentication.
Typekey is just a hoop. For now, it tries to enforce that you are a human being rather than some script concocted at three in the morning by some mass marketing blow hole coming off a Twinkie+Jolt high. It’ll work for now and then it’ll stop working and then we’ll think of something else clever.
Support free speech. Speak out against spam and post a comment… and, uh, vote for Kerry.
Hey I jumped through a hoop.
This reminds me of a neat idea I had a while ago for a site -- it'd have to be free, I guess, so it's no good for a "business plan" -- where people could register to get an Online Handle which they could then use to link identities across multiple sites in a verifiable (cryptographically secure) way. Little signatures and such. Good for posting anonymous-but-identified comments, and other things too. Public key repository with a facility for signing various things around the web, basically.
Best part though was the name, "Diary Arena" (since I first thought of it for people who didn't have accounts on livejournal, before it was free). It's fun because of how it sounds out loud. Brown colour scheme.
I am now leaving a comment. Email Jay (Allen) and he'll put you on the beta/test team.
I'm signed up for said BETA, but hadn't heard anything back just yet and was growing EXTREMELY tired of deleting 200+ mails a day.
I'll likely start using MT-Blacklist when it's prime time although I'm likely the total lack of spam that Typekey has afforded me.
sn, you might want to check out Liberty Alliance, which is the "omg we better stop passport from r00ling the world" response from IBM/Sun/bunch of other companies and the EU. Similar ideas about a global identity that's shared independently, and explicitly, and controllably, between different business organizations.
Rands, since you pore obsessively over your webserver logs like a true NADSgod, I bet you have similar stats on your comments-per-entry and so on. POST STATS PLZ THX
Jumping thru hoops is good exercise. As long as 6A doesn't change their privacy or 'selling your email address' policy, I think typekey could be an awesome way to slow down the onslaught of spam.
Isn't there one of those image-text authentication (forget the word for it) things that you can simply put on your comments input form to eliminate alot of it as well?
Oh yeah, and seeing stats would be neat. I love looking at charts and graphs of traffic!
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