Comment

Here’s a follow up to the previous post. Some people may associate spam with e-mail but it’s a very real problem for a lot of interactive websites too. What happens is that spammers monitor lots of blogs, directories and pinging services and try to harvest as much comment links as possible. Then a spambot will try to post a fake comment with links back to the desired sites.

A few years ago one would encounter comments with a huge number of links and randomly selected words. Then the anti-spam software evolved somewhat and the spammers had to find new ways to spam so nowadays the comments are more carefully composed and if you glimpse over them quickly they could be easily mistaken for real content. However, the (fake) content of the spam is usually hopelessly out of context with respect to the original post so if you’ve read that it’s usually pretty obvious.

Here’s a sample of something spammed to one of my postings here at this blog:

I think that in no country in the civilized world is less attention paid to philosophy than in the United States. The Americans have no philosophical school of their own, and they care but little for all the schools into which Europe is divided, the very names of which are scarcely known to them.

These are not just random words thrown together anymore. It’s obviously not composed by a computer but it is also not related to one of my postings to date. Also, the fact that that it was posted by “online poker” with a link back to a strangely named gambling site doesn’t really contribute to the credibility of this comment.

My guess is that the spammers harvest their content in very much the same way as their targets: straight from the web and maybe even straight from the posts they are spamming. I guess even reading <P> blocks and counting words (making sure it’s a real paragraph) is already a pretty effective and easy method. Continue reading “Comment”

TinyKB

TinyKB Logo

The TinyKB (working name) project is nearing completion. Soon, there’ll be a fully functioning, although pretty minimal, implementation of a new knowledge base system. OK, so I ripped some interface ideas from the guys at InstantASP but the whole system is rebuilt from the ground up.

Please keep in mind though that the name is very likely to change in the nearby future. By some mysterious means, the name Tiny sprang into my mind during the early development. Most likely because I wanted to create something lightweight but really, “Tiny” doesn’t sound very appropriate for a knowledge base system so I’m pretty much autoforced to think up something more ambitious. Continue reading “TinyKB”

Simple

Usually when you want an object to have a simple interface to the outside world it means that your code inside (e.g. the naming, structure and readability of functions and persistence of data and such) can get pretty complicated. On the other hand, when your interface is extensive and exposes a lot of properties and methods it usually means your inside code remains fairly straightforward.

In the end, it’s just a matter of how you want to divide the workload amongst your objects and perhaps more importantly, how flexibile you want your objects to be. Why? Because – according to the above – more flexibility usually means implementing it is easier. Continue reading “Simple”