Errant Comments

In the past 24 hours we’ve had several dozen pornography links pasted into the comments of the various articles advertising one particular site. Thankfully that, combined with some other attributes has made it fairly easy to filter the bad guy to a special page just for him (or her, as the case may be).

It seems kind of ridiculous that someone would bother with this sort of thing nowadays. Google already has filtering in place to prevent such postings from impacting their search results, or at least so they say.

In this case the spamming is by some Russian guy advertising a site with various pornography. I don’t really expect their upstream to do anything about the “spamvertised” site. Maybe it is just the Russian mob looking for some hard currency to help with laundering. Throw in the KGB, a rogue CIA agent with amnesia and lots of black Mercedes sedans racing around St. Petersburg and you might have the makings of a good action movie.

The blog spamming itself was being done by a rather unsophisticated tool being run from some number of compromised Windows machines on cable modem networks. Again, I don’t expect the cable modem internet providers will actually bother doing anything to get infected boxes off their network. It’s not like they perceive these costs at all. And I’m quite sure none of those end users know their machines are compromised. Just do us all a favor and remember the following: a computer running Windows will be infected by a virus within 16 minutes of being connected to the Internet if measures (like never ever using MSIE) aren’t taken to protect it, even with countermeasures it’s a crap shoot. You can help by using something else.

For now, he/she/it is blocked and all comments are forced through moderator approval, at least until I’m satisfied that the threat has passed for the time being. Having to waste a few hours on this was annoying. The naughty person in question (and perhaps a few others running ancient Windows) get to see this friendly message for every request they make to this website now:

Hi there!


Someone with a similar browser as you has been spamming the comments with
pornography ads hoping to trick Google into thinking that my site’s good
ranking is some how associated with porn from this guy (probably not real)
in Russia:


Morozov, Alexander se-traf@mail.ru
Tverskaya 13-123
Moscow, Moscow 123456
RU


I’m sick of deleting this garbage out of the pending comment queue, so you’re
seeing this page instead. If you’re a legitimate reader, you have my utmost
apologies, but you shouldn’t be running Windows 98 nowadays anyway unless you
want your computer cracked…


Feel free to direct complaints to…


This person’s host: abuse@atrivo.com
This person’s upstream transit: abuse@nlayer.net
This person’s further upstream transit: abuse@gblx.net


Really, you can stop trying to spam the site now. Go bother someone else
with all the poor Windows cable modem machines you’ve cracked.

Happy New Year!

Once again the holiday season is here and and another exciting year is behind us. 2004 has been a time of change for us. Early in the year we had a contractor replace our roof that was damaged from last fall’s windstorm. The new roof is a metal construction that should better withstand the valley winds. Just a couple weeks ago the winds picked up again and the roof is still in tact, so we’re calling it a success.

Eileen continues her work for the federal government and spent the better part of the summer studying for the LSAT test which she took in October at Seattle University. The test results were good and so now it’s a matter of going through the admissions process. Seattle University has the most appealing program near us at the moment.

Andy suffered a torn ligament in his knee skiing this spring. After physical therapy, arthroscopic surgery, more physical therapy and some yoga the knee has most of its flexibility back. A knee brace will allow for a return to the slopes this winter, albiet not following his father off any more jumps for at least a year or two.

Not to be outdone, our siamese cat Mocha also managed a minor ligament injury bounding about the house, which necessitated her to clomp around the house with a cast on her right rear leg. The vet did not throw in a parrot for her shoulder and an eyepatch to complete the effect unfortunately. Mocha’s feeling better now and informs me that the last joke will be forgiven for an undisclosed amount of tuna.

This year also saw a change in employment as Andy left his previous job and joined Marchex. Marchex has their Seattle office directly on Westlake Park, a fun place to view the holiday festivities in the downtown shopping district. This also gives us an extra hour together each day commuting. Hopefully next year will see continued success for the company.

We hope that the coming year brings happiness and prosperity to you and yours.

Commerce Clause vs. 21st Amendment

The “commerce clause” and the 21st amendment’s will face off in a case to be argued before the U.S. Supreme Court on December 7th. The commerce clause has traditionally been held to prohibit per-state restrictions on interstate commerce. The 21st amendment however contains the following language:

Section 2. The transportation or importation into any state, territory, or possession of the United States for delivery or use therein of intoxicating liquors, in violation of the laws thereof, is hereby prohibited.

So can states actually regulate interstate commerce by blocking importation of alcohol in ways that may inhibit interstate commerce? We’ll find out sooner or later…

I happened across this story in the WSJ. A few press outlets have talked about the story including The Detroit News. Search Google News for possibly relevant articles. Although there hasn’t been a lot of coverage of the ways that this sort of deregulation could influence other markets and deregulation pushes there.

Combined Federal Blacklist Campaign

Generally we have done our donations to charitable causes through the CFC. Federal employees in King County donated $2.8 million to the various charities in CFC last year. In the past, we were able to donate to groups including the Cascade Land Conservancy (a group that buys land or conservation easements on property in Snohomish, King and Pierce Counties), the ACLU (a group dedicated to preserving our ability to speak, move and act free of government interference), and the EFF (a group dedicated to preserving the Internet as free and open for sharing of all data).

Things are different this year. As we perused the CFC booklet for the folks we usually donate to, a number of organizations were missing. Try as we might, we couldn’t find the ACLU, EFF, the Sierra Club, Amnesty International or a variety of other groups. This struck us as quite odd. These are well respected non-profit groups, that is outside of claims by radical clerics that the ACLU caused God’s wrath on 9/11.

As it turns out, the CFC had added a new requirement that non-profits who received funds from federal employees’ donations into CFC had to vet their employment and volunteer rosters against a government supplied blacklist of “terrorists”. If they found any matches they were required to inform federal authorities and fire the employee until resolution. This is the same sort of blacklist that keeps Cat Stevens from visiting the United States. Both the ACLU and the EFF strongly believe that a person’s employment and volunteer efforts are a matter between that person and the organization they work for. That’s what freedom of association and presumption of innocence is all about. Being a known felon convicted of a crime in a trial is one thing, being added to a list with no opportunity to contest your inclusion is quite another.

Once on the “terrorist volunteer” list or the “no-fly” list or Sen. McCarthy’s “communist sympathizer” list, it is extraordinarily difficult to get removed. It took Sen. Ted Kennedy talking to Tom Ridge and several weeks to get the TSA to remove him from the “no-fly” list. I can’t presume that this list imposed on non-profits would be any easier to get removed from. Especially when the list is not publicly available and there is no contact for removal.

Things such as this are uniquely anti-American. They chisel away at the freedoms and values that once set us apart form the rest of the world. Federal employees and other citizens who would like to complain to the head of the CFC about this policy, can contact the Director of CFC at:
Mara Patermaster
Combined Federal Campaign
Office of Personnel Management
1900 E Street, NW
Washington, DC 20415-1000

In the meantime, you can still donate to the ACLU, the EFF, the Sierra Club, and any of the other groups that you might normally give to under the CFC.