The spam commenters’ arsenal revealed

22.11.2011/09.20

As most people are, I’m pretty sick of comment spammers. Wordpress does a reasonable job of keeping them out (though Akismet has been missing a lot more of them lately, putting them into the comment queue). Today, one of our comment spammers must have slipped. Instead of using just one of the lines in his […]

Do you engage a fax spammer?

07.11.2011/05.24

The anti-spam legislation in New Zealand was extended to faxes on October 20—although, technically, junk faxes were disallowed under the Telecommunications Act, based on my reading, and always were. It hasn’t stopped one company from continuing to send junk faxes, and I’ve reported their three post-October 20 ones to the Department of Internal Affairs […]

Privacy Commissioner agrees with my 2009 thoughts: New Zealand Post breached your privacy

20.06.2011/00.52

A Fairfax Press headline today: ‘“Large-scale breach” of privacy rules by NZ Post’. The Privacy Commissioner has found New Zealand Post breached privacy rules in a promotion in July 2009, which I thought would have been a juicy story back then. The reporters write: The 2009 survey asked participants 57 multi-choice questions, ranging from […]

The Paradise Club’s Facebook page (not an adult joint)

27.05.2011/06.41

Two years ago, I blogged about The Paradise Club’s unavailability on DVD and the reasons behind it. As a show nearly forgotten after 20 years, perhaps it isn’t surprising to ﬁnd there are no Facebook fan pages for it. There is the one that Facebook generates from Wikipedia, but that’s it, as far as […]

The new groups: we’re not spamming you, Facebook is

17.05.2011/12.04

Facebook’s new groups have received criticism for two things: (a) you ﬁnd yourself in groups you never asked to join; and (b) you are suddenly on a spam list. When several of our groups were faced with the options of ‘archiving’ (i.e. closure and the deletion of all members) or upgrading, I chose the […]

Facebook resets email preferences, after it removes gay photo as ‘abusive’

20.04.2011/00.31

Not only does Google Ads Preferences Manager reset on a regular basis and bugger what your preferences are, Facebook has today reset (at least for myself and one other friend) email settings. ‘Set emails to spam.’ Why Facebook does this regularly, I have no idea—but this is relatively minor compared to their removal of […]

Someone’s doing something right inside Google

01.04.2011/23.45

The troubles with Google that I’ve faced—privacy breaches, Ads Preferences Manager not honouring its claims, ﬁghting for six months on behalf of a friend over a deleted Blogger blog, Chrome being buggy (but not nearly as badly as IE9), phantom entries in my Google dashboard, unanswered messages—would suggest, to anyone studying business or a graduate […]

Autocade’s MediaWiki software gets locked down

05.03.2011/03.06

Autocade’s third birthday is on Tuesday, though today I had to introduce something that goes against the principles of MediaWiki: the prevention of public user registrations. Despite adding an Akismet anti-spam extension last week, spammers, evidently using non-blacklisted IPs, continued to add false content with their links on to the site today. I […]

Spam commenters are losing their minds

31.12.2010/08.25

Despite the smaller visitor numbers, this blog seems to leave way more spam in the Akismet queue than the other Wordpress installations we have. I had wanted to write a post swearing at some of the dumb comments that come in, as all of these are automated, but three of the ﬁrst ten today are […]