centre{source}
INTERACTIVE AGENCY
Advantage Consulting Services: Spammers
Earlier today, I posted about spam received in a blog comment that was clearly posted by an actual person. In that post, I mentioned tracking down (not hard in this case) and calling the company that appeared to be behind the spam, Advantage Consulting Services. Surprisingly, “V. Patel” called me back.
I told him I was interested in their company’s product and started off just asking him questions about SEO in general, followed by some leading questions about how linking might affect pagerank (hint hint). CentreSource deals quite a bit with SEO, though with legitimate “white-hat” vendors (naturally), so I had a fair idea of what I could ask to probe for nefarious practices, but he pretty much kept it legit. Eventually I cut to the chase and explained why I was really calling, I asked him if he spammed the blog. To my further surprise, he said yes, and that he was “sorry”. Yeah, well, I’m sorry too, pal.
The company name is Advantage Consulting Services (www.acsseo.com redirects to this URL). The website is actually a nice-looking website, and it comes across as being a legitimate SEO company (of which there are many). What’s even funnier is that they have an entire section devoted to ethics, where they note:
We recognize that your website represents both your integrity and ours - and we strive to give you the best results while maintaining the highest of industry principles. We use industry best practices and ethical standards to ensure that your search engine optimization and marketing processes are achieved through honest means.
It doesn’t get much more ironic than that, folks. “Your Integrity Is Your Integrity”, they say at the top. I wonder how “Abrams California Health Insurance” might feel about the “ethics” involved in Advantage Consulting Services spamming on their behalf. Unsurprisingly, nowhere in their Processes page do they mention comment spamming.
It’d be funny if it wasn’t so infuriating.
The transcript of our conversation is below. It’s not terribly exciting — I was admirable in keeping my composure while finding ways at the end to say “spam is bad” without swearing. Ladies and gentlemen, meet the new friendly face of the comment-spam inundating your blog, “V. Patel”:
human spam
So, since I wrote and implemented wordverify, I have only had two comment spams slip by. They were both human-driven. I could see a clear path of them coming in to the site, go to a post, submit the comment, and get the “Please enter the security word” failure, go back, and then successfully post the comment.
It appears the reality of human-driven comment-spam is upon us. The most recent one I received is below:
Author: Colorado Health Insurance
E-mail: vpatel@acsseo.com
URL: http://www.abrams-california-health-insurance.com/
Comment: Great blog I hope we can work to build a better health care system as we are in a major crisis and health insurance is a major aspect to many.
SSL Wildcards pt. 2
While researching the situation with SSL Wildcards that i mentioned yesterday, the plot seems to have thickened a bit.
Here’s the situation as I see it so far. First, here’s all I can find about what the HTTP/TLS RFC says:
Names may contain the wildcard character * which is considered to match any single domain name component or component fragment. E.g., *.a.com matches foo.a.com but not bar.foo.a.com. f*.com matches foo.com but not bar.com.
This is rather vague, but it doesn’t seem to prevent what we want to do. That said, here is the actual behaviour I am seeing:
Browser Wars v45.0
OperaWatch notes a weird phenomenon: different browsers are getting different deals advertised. 25 free songs to Opera users, 50 free songs to Internet Explorer (IE) users, and 90 songs for 99 cents to Firefox users.
Pretty weird. I am a big emusic fan and a big Opera fan — where do my allegiances lie?! Any guesses as to the explanation for this?
UPDATE: about.com’s take:
My best guess would be that they’re pulling for a greater market share from the browsers that use them the least, in which case I guess savvy Firefox users are being punished for using eMusic more than anyone else.
SSL Wildcards
Today’s lesson for the day: SSL wildcards are just that: wildcards.
We have a client that needed an SSL certificate for websites that will be running on some wildcard zones, so for example:
https://foo.bar.blah.domain.com/
https://bar.bar.blah.domain.com/
etc…
When you register an SSL certificate, you have to set the “CN” (Common Name) to the hostname you want the certificate to match. I set the hostname to *.domain.com, my regex-training betraying me into think the * would match anything before .blah.com. That is not the case, however, and the RFC for HTTP over TLS is quite clear about it:
Tennessee Software Property Tax Update
Looks like ill-conceived software property tax is a no-go. Here’s the NTC update, courtesy of Jeff Constantine:
[From Jeff Constantine, President of NTC on 01/23/06]
There was good news and a reminder of a difficult truth during this morning’s hearing before the State Board of Equalization on a proposal to make application software uniformly taxable as personal property.
On the one hand, soon after the hearing convened, Thomas Fleming, a member of the staff of the Office of the Comptroller of the Treasury, advised nearly 70 executives assembled for the hearing on software and other issues that the State Board of Equalization had resolved that it “not ready to go forward” with its software-tax proposal.
puttycyg
I am a big fan of the cygwin suite of UNIX tools for windows, but one of my biggest annoyances was that the shell you run in cygwin is always displayed in the most horrid terminal environment (basically a glorified DOS window).
Enter puttycyg — it allows you to use putty as a raw terminal emulator (i.e. without telnet or ssh) in running your cygwin shell. From puttycyg’s README:
RATIONALE
The Windows Console is an inadequate terminal emulator. It is impossible
to resize horizontally without pulling up a dialog box. It is impossible
to send an ASCII NUL. Basic keyboard options do not exist such as
configuring the ASCII character sent by the Backspace key.
opera for mactel
Opera isn’t one to be left in the cold either — they expect to have a version for the Intel-based Macs soon:
“Opera already delivers the very same desktop version on Intel and PowerPC: The Linux version. This means we have extensive experience with any binary differences (from byte order to performance) between the two platforms”, s/he said.
In addition, Opera’s lead Mac developer pointed out back then that the Unix and Macintosh projects already share some low-level code, and Apple’s switch to Intel processors will mean that Opera will be able to share a few more files and tools.
Google Talk s2s Open
Google Talk s2s functionality is now open for business. This is great news. s2s is functionality that enables a jabber server to talk to other jabber servers — something that Google did not enable initially, much to my chagrin.
This is a great step in the right direction for the adoption of XMPP.
(Thanks to Tenzil for the heads-up.)
Mactel Firefox
Those of you eagerly awaiting your new Intel-based mac’s arrival will be glad to hear that Firefox will be available soon:
The Mozilla Foundation has set a March launch date for a version of its Firefox web browser that will run on Apple’s Intel version of Mac OS X.
Mozilla software engineer Josh Aas said: “We are targeting the official release of Firefox for Intel Mac OS X in late March with the Firefox 1.5.0.2 update.”