OpsanBlog

Refocusing My Blog Objectives

Ouch!

I just looked at my post counts the past few months. They have been positively dismal compared to my historical performance.

When my post counts dip, it’s usually because I’m on the road to far away places (November-December 2005) or insanely busy at my real job, being the Microsoft Pragmatic Evangelist. When my article counts dip below 100 for the month, it’s a sign that something is going on; might be meetings, travel or a show in which I’m assisting.

Of late, it’s been figuring out how to battle the comment spammers and a recent splog incursion. 1,600 rogue comments per day, these days.

Madness. My ‘bot is aggressive (a little too aggressive sometimes); it does the job, though and I need to leave it be.

I’m getting back to my original goals, which include roughly:

• 1/3 original content
• 1/3 referential content (content that is tangential to what I’m working on)
• 1/3 ‘just because’ content (includes whimsy, interesting stories and things of which I don’t want to lose track)

Regular readers will note I run the gamut from technical to whimsical, depending on what I’m up to or thinking about.

Andy Warhol once said "In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes" (this is his actual quote from 1968, per Wikipedia). Now that the ‘future’ appears to be here, this 15-minute rule has been adopted and referred to in the pop culture and still seems to apply.

Going out on a limb, I’d propose a corollary (which may, or may not already been made by any number of parties unknown to me):

"Through blogs, everyone will be famous to 15 people"

Of course, as there are superstars in the political and entertainment industries (from which most world famous people originate), there are superstars in the blogosphere who shatter this rule.

I am not one of them.

I have a voice and a blog on which to speak. If my voice resonates with you, I have an audience. If it doesn’t, I still have a blog.

You know: this whole Internet thing may just catch on 😉

An Inconvenient Truth

I had the pleasure (and terror) of watching "An Inconvenient Truth" on a flight the other day.

Frightening, but SEE THIS FILM.

Mr. Gore is very compelling in his presentation, and the facts he states are truly terrifying.

It is unusual for me to be persuaded by a documentary; I tend to view such persuasion as a challenge and broaden my horizons with research. Here are my results of a smattering of searches from my notes on the film:

• SaveBioGems: "Polar Bears on Thin Ice"
• PastPeak: "CO2 Growth ‘Unprecedented’"
• Natural Resources Defense Council: "Consequences of Global Warming"

The icing on the cake is this query of global warming articles on the White House site; lots of talk about research, but almost none about action or solutions.

See the film. Be sure to watch the messages in the credits. Decide for yourself.

Spammers, Splogs, Sportals

You’ve heard me mentioning my comment spammer pests. These are the guys who spam my blog with comment posts containing links to something they’re trying to promote.

Sometimes they add nonsensical text to their posts; "I’m so bored", or kudos; "Good site!", "Great Job!" or "May we exchange links?". All nonsense, attempting to add to the ‘realism’ that it’s an actual comment.

I did some digging into the comment spam ecosystem, of which many blogs (including this one) are an unwilling part. Here are some notes:

• The links they post are intended to improve the search rankings for their product sites, simply by their discovery by search engine spiders who crawl the web.
• Improved rankings for their keywords improve their search result rankings, which means they bubble to the top of search engine results.
• The links themselves typically point to Sportals, massive collections of computer-generated links which themselves link out to advertisers who have paid for the comment spam services.
• If the spammer is the service provider themselves, they are using comment spam to self-promote their products.
• The comment spammers might also be driving traffic to Splogs, computer-generated blogs containing content from articles posted in legitimate blogs. The Wikipedia article to which I point has an interesting discussion about what constitutes a Splog versus a Spam Blog (comments containing links, which sounds more like my problem).

If the search engines are fooled, the spammer’s results bubble to the top. Some number of real users will click on these links, driving traffic to the spam sites. The spam sites host advertisements placed there by Google or MSN, and if the users click on the ad links, the spam site gets paid.

Update: The 14.09 issue of Wired has a nicely-written article on this topic. The article goes into far greater detail and is worth a peek. Note: you may have to search the Wired News Archives for 14.09 and spin through the results.

Voyager 1 reaches 100 AU

An Astronomical Unit (AU) is the distance from the earth to the sun (93 million miles).

In 30 years, Voyager 1 has traveled to a distance of 100 AU from the Sun, farther than any other known man-made object; around 9.3 billion miles from our sun.

The spacecraft cannot rely on solar power anymore; it’s too far out. At this distance, our sun appears merely as a bright point of light. The craft is getting power from nuclear power sources, called radioisotope thermoelectric generators, provided by the US Department of Energy.

In the image to the left, Voyager 1 is now at the outer edge of our solar system, in an area called the heliosheath. This is a place where our sun’s light and gravity wanes. It is approaching interstellar space, traveling at about 1 million miles per day.

In 10 years, Voyager could cross into interstellar space.

Read the JPL story: “Voyager 1: ‘The Spacecraft That Could’ Hits New Milestone”.

Have you heard of ‘Domain Kiting’? I hadn’t

Bob Parsons (CEO of GoDaddy, a domain registration firm) taught me everything I know about it in “35 million names registered in April. 32 million were part of a kiting scheme. A serious problem gets worse”.

The article is very detailed; a few bits:

All of us are familiar with the illegal practice of check kiting. Quite simply check kiting involves taking advantage of timing and the banking system to generate cash that simply isn’t there. In many ways that is what domain kiting does. Domain kiting takes advantage of timing and the domain name system in an abusive and improper way to generate cash.

Domain kiting registrars put up mini-Web sites — loaded with search engine links — for domains names for which they never pay. When people land on these Web sites and click on the links, money is made. It’s easy to spot one of these registrars as the number of total registrations they make often far exceed the number of permanent registrations — or names for which they actually pay. This is why during the month of April 2006, out of 35 million registrations, only a little more than 2 million were permanent or actually purchased. The vast majority of the rest were part of the domain kiting scheme.

Yowzah! But, you say “so, where is the money made?”. Search, of course.

The short version: kiters set up mini web sites and then advertise these sites any way they can. One way, is through comment spam (which I am constantly fighting on this blog). The spam includes URLs to the mini sites, which get picked up by the search engines. If enough of the same links get picked up, search ranking goes up, the mini-sites show up in results, and you get the drift.

Okay. Now you say, “so what?”. True enough; people searching for something hit the mini site, the site gets paid for advertising, the URL redirects to a real site that might offer the product (or redirects multiple times to God-knows-where). Commerce is satisfied; the purchaser is happy.

However, the kiters abuse the five-day domain registrar refund policy, failing to pay the registrar for the domain. The faux domains get purged sometime after and the kiters do it all over again. Because their costs are low (not quite zero) and can be automated, it’s a profitable venture.

How big a problem is it? Note the numbers in Mr. Parsons’ headline: 35 million registrations, 32 million that were bogus.

The opsan.com offline drama

Back in April, my domain (http://www.opsan.com/ and https://blog.opsan.com/) was offline for a few days. This occurred because Network Solutions had removed my URL from the name servers in response to a complaint (which turned out to be bogus).

Background
I have a few posts on this blog about an individual named Robert Soloway, who is allegedly a spammer. He owns (or is associated with), a company named Broadcast Email. This company sends out a variety of mass-marketing emails.

My original posts referenced Soloway’s ridiculous SPAMIS initiative last year (accusing Microsoft of sending spam). These posts have elicited a huge number of comments as other domain owners have joined the conversation and are in the process of chasing Soloway and his domains around the globe.

(links to old posts removed)

It seems the discussion on these articles is striking a nerve. Please note that I clean out offending and threatening comments as they’ve appeared; that kind of stuff isn’t productive for anyone. That said, I really doubt anyone from Soloway’s organization ever read anything like that, but, c’est la vie.

The first hint of trouble
I received an email on 4/7/06 from my hosting provider (HostDepot). The mail said that an automated process at SpamCop (their spam filter) had detected the string ‘www.opsan.com’ in a number of emails. The gist:

“It has been brought to our attention that SPAM messages are being sent spamvertising this website hosted here at Host Depot (www.opsan.com).”

The automated process made the assumption that the presence of http://www.opsan.com in an identified spam was promoting my web site. Now, the text around the URL was interesting:

“the owner of http://www.opsan.com has a blog that at times has had comments made relating to death threats to the owner of our organization, simply for our assistance in offering charity emailings to non-profit organizations.

help us prevent future death threats to the ceo of our organization by complaining about http://www.opsan.com to: reportspam@networksolutionsemail.com”

A human who read that message would have seen that it was hardly a promotion for my site. I replied to SpamCop and advised the domain was being used without my permission, and I promptly forgot about it.

The second sign of trouble
Network Solutions sent me an email with the subject line “Confirmation of DNS Change”. It was a little ominous, as I’d not ordered a DNS change. The text was a bit scary:

Domain Name: OPSAN.COM
Previous DNS Name Servers:
NS27.WORLDNIC.COM
NS28.WORLDNIC.COM

New DNS Name Servers:
INVALID-DNS.AUPTERMINATION.COM
NOT-HOSTED.AUPTERMINATION.COM

To put it politely, I think this is the first time I have EVER said the, umm, “expanded” version of ‘wtf’ out loud. I think I scared Cassandra, who was happily shredding magazines into ribbons at the table next to me. You don’t have to be a network engineer (I’m not, although I am skilled in DNS) to surmise that ‘INVALID’, ‘NOT-HOSTED’ and ‘TERMINATION’ are bad descriptors to have in your name server references.

The mail tried to be helpful, pointing me to my Network Solutions VIP account (I’m the technical contact on a ton of domains, so they consider me a pretty important guy). However, my account had same information as the email, with no way to point it to proper name servers.

Time to go to the phones.
I got a helpful, but incredibly scared guy on the first call. It’s pretty obvious he’d only been in the call center a short while. As soon as he saw those frightening words, he stuttered and came to a halting stop. He muttered something about ‘legal lock’.

Then, he put me on hold.

When he came back, he was trying (but not succeeding) to be calmer. Poor guy; I’d basically slammed him with the polite version of ‘wtf’, and he’d not yet had a call like that. The end result? The domain was closed for business, and my only option was to wait forty-eight hours from the time of my call to hear why this had happened, VIP status, be damned. The words ‘legal lock’ escaped his lips once again.

Memo to Network Solutions: This is broken. If you get a call from a customer (VIP or not), you need to give them better information. People who care about their domains will call you. Folks who are trying to scam you WON’T call and you can blow them off.

The Resolution
Fifty-two hours later, in the middle of a meeting with my Microsoft VP, my cell goes off and it’s the guy from Network Solutions. Once he confirmed I was a real person, we exchanged a few emails (providing him the background and my intent) and my domain was reactivated.

Simply put, Network Solutions reacted, rather than responded; not the ideal of customer service. I cannot think of a good reason to defer a customer resolution discussion for 48 hours, under any circumstances, even those relating to volume. Again, the customers who care will call you; the scammers won’t.

What am I doing differently? Nothing. I may see another ‘complaint attack’ like this, but that’s just the way it is. Until then, I’ll maintain the comments, purging any I deem to be unacceptable. Meanwhile, I’ll watch the group of domain administrators keep each other up to date in their efforts to reduce the world’s spam, one spammer at a time.