Is IP Address Validation of Trackbacks Fraught With Dangers (Large False Positives)?

February 5th, 2008 The Spamhaus Exploits Block List (XBL) is a realtime database of IP addresses of hijacked PCs infected by illegal 3rd party exploits, including open proxies (HTTP, socks, AnalogX, wingate, etc), worms/viruses with built-in spam engines, and other types of trojan-horse exploits. I was recently testing this list againt spam email.

May 14th, 2006 This blog is being flooded with P0ker spam comments. Obviously they aren't getting through.

February 22nd, 2007 Comment Guard 0.3 Beta is a bug fix release. Very occassionally the plugin would request a valid commenter to submit his comment again.

April 7th, 2006 Akismet is WordPress hosted spam filter from Matt M. I have been using it for about a week now.

May 28th, 2006 Akismet is a spam prevention plugin from the WordPress author, Matt Mullenweg. It uses collective wisdom in filtering spams.

September 7th, 2005 A web based pilot program is currently underway to rapidly determine the eligibility of a worker to work legally in US. Under the "Basic Pilot Program," employers enter a person's name, birth date and other data on a website.

June 3rd, 2005 Diatribe against Referrer Karma, a WordPress plugin gone wild.

January 17th, 2007 After being thoroughly fed-up with the state of WordPress comment spam protection, I have decided to solve the comment spam problem in WordPress blogs once and for all. I have installed an experimental commenting system which is designed to completely stop (read 100%) robotic spam (spam generated by bots and not humans) in all my blogs and with no (read 0%) false positives.

September 28th, 2007 508903 spam comments were blocked by Angsuman's Comment Guard plugin in 253 days 21 hours 54 minutes. 99.503% of the comments received during this time were spam.

January 16th, 2007 I have experiemented with all the available WordPress plugins for comment spam protection including but not limited to Bad Behaviour, Spam Karma 2, Akismet and built-in WordPress features like blacklists and moderation queue. We have to deal with tens of thousands of spam everyday.

March 3rd, 2008 I am very happy to announce the much-awaited release of Comment Guard Pro for WordPress blogs. Comment Guard Pro is designed to unobtrusively protect your blog against all types of comment spams - trackback spam, pingback spam, robotic spam using comment form, human submitted spam (where the spammers actually goes to your site to spam you; they are the hardest to detect), referrer spam etc.

October 24th, 2005 Wired News reports about a company which bans all sites containing the word "blog" in a juvenile attempt to prevent employees from accessing blogs. A Google search shows about 42 million pages containing the word blog in url.

July 27th, 2006 Andy Patrizio learned the hard way that Windows Genuine Advantage can be a disadvantage in disguise and all without any fault of his own. Such cases apparently flies in the face of Microsoft assertion that only a handful of genuine false positives have been identified.

February 4th, 2005 A very simple trick for clueless trackback spammers attacking WordPress Blogs. Delete your first post (id 0).

October 16th, 2007 Network masks is a notation to group IP addresses. Let's take a familiar analogy.