Category: meh

Notes on handling identi.ca group spam accounts

As admin for the identi.ca group Friends of W3C, I spent several hours today blocking spam member accounts. Because I could, thanks to the US Thanksgiving holiday which blesses us with a couple quiet days.

A few notes:

  • It isn’t easy a task. It has to be done from the members page, one at a time, by clicking ‘Block’ and confirm the action in the next page. And it’s really boring.
  • Homepage links that contain ‘buy’, ‘cheap’, ‘best’, ‘reviews’, ‘price’ are a sure sign of a spam account. Ah, and ‘forex’ too.
  • Also, ‘deals’ especially when that follows ‘blackfriday’ in the URI. But this is seasonal spamming.
  • Homepage links which end in ‘sitemap.xml’ and ‘sitemap.php’ all turned out to belong to spam accounts.
  • Homepage links which contained ‘sexy’ turned out to be pretty disappointing. I AM KIDDING, I didn’t look.
  • Those which Bio contains ‘SEO’ most often are spam accounts. Same for Bio that contains ‘increase your’. And ‘toys’; you get the idea.
  • Some trends: identifying ‘Thailand’ as location, promotional links around SLR cameras, watches, TVs. Vaccum cleaners too.
  • While most of spam accounts show the default avatar, a small number of them do have an avatar. Most likely, an image depicting landmarks in Thailand. Or Thai masks. Or Thai temples. After a while I got the feeling they were familiar; they use a very limited pool of images. That’s why.
  • I have nothing against Thailand.
  • Is it a coincidence that some spam accounts have a Bio written in Thai? I’m asking.
  • I was fooled. Nickname ‘cutecat’, avatar of the most adorable sleepy kitteh, Bio ‘I like snow and cats’. A couple inconspicuous micro-blog entries and bam! one that points to an obscure promotional website. Dated a year ago. Blocked.
  • I reached the awkward series of those accounts which joined en masse and which homepage links contained NSFW words. They made me miss the SLRs, watches, shoes and TVs links! I looked at none. Honest.
  • There was a ‘JustinBieberPhotos’ account. Didn’t take the bait!

I’ve been at it more then 3 hours and blocked 830 spam member accounts. I have more than twice that number to go over still. I’m done for now. Next time I’ll do it for a half-hour maybe, and I’ll do it once a week. Till we’re rid of our historical spam member accounts.

These days we get a dozen new spam accounts joining that group. I hope the folks at StatusNet would look for patterns and block them as soon as the accounts are created.

Work chronicles – The meeting room

Our office space is shared between us and them. It’s complicated…

The Others have different work habits and behaviours, they operate under unfamiliar work conditions.

I sit in an office right next to the meeting room, and I hate when the Others meet, because the walls are as thin as paper. Some of the Others joke that I may as well be in the meeting room with them.

I filter out most of the activity, except when the Others slam the doors and run in the corridors. And at a subconscious level, I become aware when they ramble or digress instead of adjourning, and that becomes annoying.

They’ve just adjourned.

In all fairness

In all fairness, unfairness sucks.

This is really pushing my buttons. I think I was raised that way, being a twin. During childhood, the master word at home always was ‘equity’. I became highly sensitive to unfairness, yet my twin brother seemingly didn’t.

Years after years of being a grown-up and living in the real life, I’ve softened, but only by a fraction. Unfairness affects me far more than I wish it would, in my personal life and to a lesser degree in my professional life.

Because I don’t do well with confrontations, I reason a lot with myself, in pursuit of the right balance between an unfortunate situation and the bright side I can hold on to. For the greater good, or out of cowardice, I yield, hoping I can keep up with the choice I made, and hoping the effort is acknowledged. But too much unfairness, I can’t cope with ; there is just so much I can take. Sometimes I burst and the balance is broken.

Practices become habits, or systematic reactions start creeping into my everyday life, shaping an uncomfortable order. To avoid this, and preserve the balance, I try as much as possible to give hints or warnings that a situation is not ideal for me and that the balance is in jeopardy. But what is a significant effort or concession from me, is not necessarily reciprocated and my hints are ineffective. The value –or cost– of the status-quo is hardly ever the same for the involved parties.

Fortunately, it doesn’t happen frequently. Unfortunately, it’s distressing and overwhelming when it happens.

E-mail stuck in Outbox

For the past couple of months I’ve been annoyed with Opera e-mail sometimes being stuck in Outbox, at the “Authenticating” stage. Sometimes. Hence the annoyance. Sometimes it works fine for days. And sometimes it doesn’t. I don’t know what triggers it. I wish I knew 🙂 Assuredly I can’t be the only one experiencing this! I’ve looked and searched the Web, forums, Opera knowledge base and support pages.

I’m using Opera 9.64 on mac OS X 10.5.7 and outgoing e-mail talks to an SMTP server over TLS.

I just found a workaround that is not very satisfactory, but good enough so long as it does the trick: disconnect/reconnect wi-fi, try again, worky. <sigh />

I also found that even if the stuck message is removed from the Outbox, Opera will eventually deliver it. Sadly the original timestamp is not kept. So if I found another way to send that message, people will still receive it again. Later. <re-sigh />

I changed how Opera handles e-mail a couple of months ago, so that might be it. I used to ssh to a machine and Opera talked to localhost to pop and send.