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Yet another anti-spam measure
I’ve been hacking wordpress again.
This time, I’ve added a plugin that scans the content of a comment, and any URL it finds is checked against a public list at surbl.org.
What’s great about this list is that if a spammer uses a site to “sell” his stuff (say, ‘www.ultra-cheap-crap.info’) he has to link tot hat site in his spam messages. surbl.org lists the sites used by spammers in this way.
Which means, if a comment is posted that mentions a site that is used by spammers, it is assumed that it is comment-spam. Usually, that is true, since most comment spam I’ve seen is of the form “I think you’d like to check out www.my-crappy-shit.com”
You can download the wordpress plugin here and view the source here. Just drop it in your plugins folder and activate.
It also incorporates my earlier plugin that checks against dsbl.org.
Great T-Shirt!
Twins
Billy Bob’s pregnant sister had a car accident and went into a deep coma. In a coma for nearly six months, she wakes up and sees that she is no longer pregnant. Frantically, she asks the doctor about her baby. The doctor replies, “You had twins. A boy and a girl. The babies are fine. Your brother came in and named them.”
The woman thinks to herself, ‘Oh, no, not my brother. He’s an idiot.’ Expecting the worst, she asks the doctor, “Well, what’s the girl’s name?” “Denise,” says the doctor. The new mother says, “Wow, that’s a beautiful name. I guess I was wrong about my brother. I like Denise.” Then she asks the doctor, “What’s the boy’s name?” “Denephew.”
Electronic voting
[Quote:]
While the heavily scrutinized touch-screen voting machines seemed to produce results in which the registered Democrat/Republican ratios largely matched the Kerry/Bush vote, in Florida’s counties using results from optically scanned paper ballots – fed into a central tabulator PC and thus vulnerable to hacking – the results seem to contain substantial anomalies.
In Baker County, for example, with 12,887 registered voters, 69.3% of them Democrats and 24.3% of them Republicans, the vote was only 2,180 for Kerry and 7,738 for Bush, the opposite of what is seen everywhere else in the country where registered Democrats largely voted for Kerry.
In Dixie County, with 4,988 registered voters, 77.5% of them Democrats and a mere 15% registered as Republicans, only 1,959 people voted for Kerry, but 4,433 voted for Bush.
The pattern repeats over and over again – but only in the counties where optical scanners were used. Franklin County, 77.3% registered Democrats, went 58.5% for Bush. Holmes County, 72.7% registered Democrats, went 77.25% for Bush.
Yet in the touch-screen counties, where investigators may have been more vigorously looking for such anomalies, high percentages of registered Democrats generally equaled high percentages of votes for Kerry. (I had earlier reported that county size was a variable – this turns out not to be the case. Just the use of touch-screens versus optical scanners.)
More visual analysis of the results can be seen at http://us together.org/election04/FloridaDataStats.htm, and www.rubberbug.com/temp/Florida2004chart.htm. Note the trend line – the only variable that determines a swing toward Bush was the use of optical scan machines.
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Ben-Hur
US Marines of the 1st Division dressed as gladiators stage a chariot race reminiscent of the Charlton Heston movie-complete with confiscated Iraqi horses at their base outside Fallujah, Iraq, Saturday, Nov. 6 , 2004. For U.S. Marines tapped to lead an expected attack on insurgent-held Fallujah, the bags have been packed, trucks have been loaded and final letters have been sent, leaving one final task – the ‘Ben-Hur.’ (AP Photo/Anja Niedringhaus)
Over 30 Killed in Iraq Insurgent Attacks
[Quote:]
The deadliest attacks Saturday occurred in Samarra, a city 60 miles north of Baghdad that U.S. and Iraqi commanders have touted as model for pacifying restive Sunni Muslim areas of the country.
Insurgents in Samarra stormed a police station, triggered at least two suicide car bombs and fired mortars at government installations. One of the car bombs, targeting the mayor’s office, used a stolen Iraqi police vehicle, the U.S. military said.
Twenty-nine people, including 17 police and 12 Iraqi civilians, were killed throughout the city, the U.S. military said. Arabic language television stations said more than 30 died as gangs of insurgents roamed the city, clashing with American and Iraqi forces.
The dead included the local Iraqi National Guard commander, Abdel Razeq Shaker al-Garmali, hospital officials said. Forty other people, including 17 policemen, were injured, the military said.
U.S. military vehicles roamed through the besieged city using loudspeakers to announce an indefinite curfew starting at 2 p.m. Saturday. American warplanes and helicopters roamed the skies.
Elsewhere, 16 American soldiers were wounded Saturday when a suicide bomber using an Iraqi police car rammed their convoy in Ramadi, a major city in the volatile Sunni Triangle, U.S. officials said. They gave no further details, citing security.
Three other Americans were wounded when a car bomb exploded near the entrance to Baghdad International Airport. One Iraqi was killed and another injured, the U.S. military said. Three Humvees were heavily damaged, witnesses said.
Two Marines were injured by a car bomb near a Fallujah checkpoint, and a U.S. soldier was wounded when a roadside bomb exploded south of Fallujah. Explosions rattled the center of Baghdad through the night Saturday.
In Web postings, the al-Qaida affiliate group of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi claimed responsibility for the attacks in Samarra, Ramadi and Baghdad. The claims could not be verified, but U.S. officials believe al-Zarqawi’s group uses Fallujah as a base.
Samarra, an ancient city of gold-domed mosques that once served as the capital of a Muslim empire extending from Spain to India, was recaptured from Sunni Muslim insurgents in September and was touted as a model for restoring government control to other areas formerly under guerrilla domination.
U.S. and Iraqi forces hope to use the same techniques if they drive Sunni militants from Fallujah. American commanders have assembled a force of Marines, Army soldiers and U.S.-trained Iraqi fighters around Fallujah, a major insurgent base 40 miles west of Baghdad.
They are awaiting orders from interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi to launch an all-out assault.
Col. Gary Brandl voiced his troops’ determination:
“The enemy has got a face. He’s called Satan. He’s in Fallujah and we’re going to destroy him.”
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Some Might Call it Censorship
[Quote:]
I went to Google Images to search for it. “Abu Ghraib” brought up only photos of the outside of the prison. Not a single photo from the scandal. Next I searched for “Lynndie England”, not a single picture. Next I decided to look for “Charles Graner” her boyfriend who was also prominently features in the pictures, nothing.See for yourself.
Try the same at AltaVista
where souls brimful of love
[Quote:]
When you blame the voters who chose Bush, you are completely mistaking what is happening in our country today. Bush did not win the election based on ignorance and stupidity. He won the election based on a belief system that has been determinedly advancing across the country because Christians believe it is their spiritual duty to bring people to Christ. And you cannot be successfully brought to Christ until you also commit to serving Christ. You cannot successfully serve Christ unless you do his will. And it is Christ’s will that Bush win re-election. Do you see the pattern at work here???
You guys, you democrats and liberals, have a tendency to blame the people rather than the ideologies they represent. It is my belief that people’s lives are shaped by ideologies. But people’s lives are changed by other people. My life was shaped by the ideology of the Southern Baptist church. My life was changed when I met Jerry Boles, who died of AIDS in 1994. My life was changed when my best friend came out to me 5 years later.
Cartoons
Slecht Nieuws
5th Wave
Non Sequitur
The Men Who Stare At Goats
I’ve classified this story as “WTF?” but that’s really not strong enough..
Noam Chomsky
[Quote:]
“…jingoism, racism, fear, religious fundamentalism: these are the ways of appealing to people if you’re trying to organize a mass base of support for policies that are really intended to crush them.”
Browse the rest of the site – it’s great…
Iran
[Quote:]
Back in 1986 I talked Penthouse magazine into giving me an assignment to write the story: “How to Get a Date in Revolutionary Iran.” The premise was that hormones are hormones, and those wacky kids in Tehran, most of whom could still remember the Shah, had to be finding some way to meet members of the opposite sex. So I headed off to Iran to find out the truth. If you are interested in such stuff, the only time a single man and woman not from the same family could be together in private back then was in a taxi (he being the driver), so all the teenage boys who had or could borrow cars turned them into taxis. This, of course, put all the power in the hands of the woman since she could see him but he had to take pot luck.
I eventually finished the piece and decided to go see the war since I had been in Beirut and Angola, but had never seen trench warfare, which is what I was told they had going in Iran. So I took a taxi to the front, introduced myself to the local commander, who had gone, as I recall, to Iowa State, and spent a couple days waiting for the impending human wave attack. That attack was to be conducted primarily with 11-and 12-year-old boys as troops, nearly all of them unarmed. There were several thousand kids and their job was to rise out of the trench, praising Allah, run across No Man’s Land, be killed by the Iraqi machine gunners, then go directly to Paradise, do not pass GO, do not collect 200 dinars. And that’s exactly what happened in a battle lasting less than 10 minutes. None of the kids fired a shot or made it all the way to the other side. And when I asked the purpose of this exercise, I was told it was to demoralize the cowardly Iraqi soldiers.
It was the most horrific event I have ever seen, and I once covered a cholera epidemic in Bangladesh that killed 40,000 people.
Waiting those two nights for the attack was surreal. Some kids acted as though nothing was wrong while others cried and puked. But when the time came to praise Allah and enter Paradise, not a single boy tried to stay behind.
Now put this in a current context. What effective limit is there to the number of Islamic kids willing to blow themselves to bits? There is no limit, which means that a Bush Doctrine can’t really stand in that part of the world. But of course President Bush, who may think he pulled the switch on a couple hundred Death Row inmates in Texas, has probably never seen a combat death. He doesn’t get it and he’ll proudly NEVER get it.
Welcome to the New Morality.
Your link seems to be broken. I get:
Parse error: parse error, unexpected $ in /usr/home/sinteur/www/www.sinteur.com/DNS-anti-spam.php.gz on line 3
when I try to download it.
Thanks – fixed. A weirdness in the webserver configuration.. I’ve renamed it, click the link again..
hi
tx for the plugin
does it work if we modified wp-comments-post.php to another name for spamming reasons too ?
Hey, quick question; What plugin are you using to get nested comments like this? I tried “brian’s nested comments” plugin, but it causes wordpress to throw PHP errors.
Yes.
What I’m using is not a plugin – but a set of modifications to the wordpress files – it may have been an earlier version of brians comments, because I recall having some php problems as well.
See if you can get brian to help you with the errors – if not, mail me, and I’ll try to help you.
Auto-blocking open proxies’ access to Movable Type
In the category of sheer genius contributions to the fight against spam, let me point you in the direction of Brad Choate’s newest plugin for the Movable Type content management system: mt-dsbl
Odd, looks like wordpress chops off long URLs in trackbacks? Anyway the complete URL for the entry is:
link
webmaster note: edited long url into a link to keep my right column from mucking up. Just click the link
[...] y and painless to install (even for a wannabe nerd like myself). For WordPress users, try John Sinteur’s plugin that utilizes the subrl.org public list. MT users (why do you still use i [...]
thanks. installed it, and will test it out.
[...] s scripts on the site. The first script is Kitten’s Spaminator and the second script is DNS-anti-spam. Hopefully, these two scripting working concurrently will stop those spams comment reach [...]
[...] site from being overrun with spam. However, I think I have a solution. I was directed to John Sinteur’s wordpress plugin. It looks very interesting and I hope that it works. Here̵ [...]
I’m sorry to say, it doesn’t work. I went to an entry with no comments, entered fake info including a url from surbl.org in both the URI and the comment field. Submitted. The comment showed up. How is this supposed to work or am I missing something?
Aaron
It should work – I’ll contact you through email to help you find the problem..
[...] Filed under: General — site admin @ 10:29 pm << quick easy WordPress plugin to resist spam. 1 Comment » The [...]
[...] seems to be coming from such a server, it is not posted. By the way, a new plugin, called DNS-anti-spam by the Daily Irrelevant is available. This one checks the URIs in the comment against t [...]
[...] hed Google next “how to check for proxy php” with the hope someone had already done this for my lazy ass. It must be my lucky day, not only was it already done, it was a WordPress p [...]
Comment Spam
The last couple of weeks I have been more than annoyed by comment spam. I decided to look for a solution tonight to hopefully cut down on some of the spam. I looked at the ip of the poster spamming and of course these were proxy ip’s, I serched Google…
[...] ug-ins, thus far so good. They are, in no particular order.. Matt’s Spambot Stopper John’s Stop Open Proxy Commenting Please let me know if you have any trouble with the comments [...]
[...] d under: General — Mekanix @ 20:00 Well, seems like Kittens Spaminator and DNS-anti-spam seems to have lost their effectiveness. I’ve just been flooded by a commentspammer [...]
[...] 8212; Joe @ 12:33 So far so good. I have installed John Sinteur’s ‘Block-lists anti-spam measures‘. Not a single spam comment since. Woohoo! [...]
Battling comment spam
The *arms race is on*. And it didn’t take long for _internet casino_ and somesuch to catch on to my new blog. Assholes. And because I don’t want to spend my whole day moderating comments, here’s what I did:
– installed the “Autoclose comments a…
[...] Sinfeur, the good lord willin’ and the crick don’t rise, we’ll have yet another comment spam trap in our arsenal. One reason I’m posting this is to see if I can reply [...]
More antispam hacks
Thanks to John Sinfeur, the good lord willin’ and the crick don’t rise, we’ll have yet another comment spam trap in our arsenal. One reason I’m posting this is to see if I can reply to it without getting mistaken for a spammer. Y’all are welcome…
Comment SPAM Update
…Update (12/6): OK, I totally jinxed it – I had 5 new comment spams waiting for me this morning, having evaded both Spaminator and WP?s default. In my CSS-wrasslin? session last night, I came across another tool that checks posts against known spam…
[...] to make a legitimate comment. I was alerted to this by Michele and he pointed me towards another plug-in for helping with blog comment which he finds useful. This one works on the basis of ch [...]
Damn Spammers
They’ve learned a new trick. Commenting on a post that doesn’t exist. Installed a new plugin that should hopefully help.
Not a bad idea… it works on things like SpamAssassin for Email… why not blogs?
John, I’ve done some hacking to your plugin to allow it to query multiple blackhole lists. Let me know if you’re interested in incorporating this into your code.
Of course! (I’ll e-mail you)
I’ve started having issues using this plugin with others, specifically SpamKarma. Would you care to help me test, John?
Of course – I’ll email you.
It seems this plugin, while doing a great job, also blocks every comment that features an URL in the comment field?! I had a couple of readers of my blog mention this to me and when I tried myself, I only managed to post such a comment once I had turned off your plugin. Have I done something wrong here??
I’ll mail you..
I’d like to know what yo’ve learned. I think I had the same “URL” error. Thanks!
Nothing – I’ve been unable to reproduce the problem, no matter what I tried..
Thanks for this plugin! Just wondering: wouldn’t it be a bit more efficient to implode just once instead of three times?
Now that I’ve found the plugin again, I tip my hat to you.
Thanks for offering me a way to keep the BS at bay.
Your plugin has a bug. It will cause an error unless you move the $blackholes definition into the function in which it’s used.
[...] various poker sites (what is so great about poker sites anyway?). So I’ve enabled a new plugin which checks to see if the post is coming from an open proxy or contains a link or links to [...]
Hi! I have installed this script onto my site. How do I test it to see if it works? Thanks!
the Daily Irrelevant
Yet another anti-spam measure
Hi, another question.
*grins sheepishly*
Just wondering whether your plugin uses the blocklist at SPEWS.ORG. I received a false positive an hour ago when using the plugin, and the blocklist was traced to SPEWS.ORG. Thanks.
Hello,
You should use “sbl-xbl.spamhaus.org.” instead of “sbl-xbl.spamhaus.org” (add dot in the end), this will increasing performance when your /etc/resolv.conf have many “search” item, and avoid some stupid problem when wildcard A RR was set…
gslin, I’ve added that – the current version has fully qualified domains. Thanks!
version 1.5 seems never lookup “sbl-xbl.spamhaus.org.” because of misplace “{}” (line 28 in DNS-anti-spam.php)
Well spotted! I fixed it, the download is now version 1.5.1.
Hi John:
My name is Mark Wu. Just want to say thanks for such great plugin. I already ported to pLog, it works well. I already mail the source to you. Hope you don’t mind I port it to pLog.
Regards, Mark
Mark, of course I don’t mind, well done!
Hi John,
I am wondering, has your plugin been built into WP 1.5, as there is an option to block open and insecure proxies?! Or is that a different approach/solution from yours?
They’re using a similar mechanism, but a different blacklist; opm.blitzed.org This means WP 1.5 and my plugin work together..
I loaded this plugin and at first it seemed to be working well, but now I’m getting flooded. Is there any way to debug to see what’s going wrong?
running wp 1.3 btw
I’ve seen lots of new spam attempts coming from machines that aren’t on any blocklists, you’re not doing anything wrong…