On my other Wordpress-based site, I get a lot of spam posts.

Most of it’s from the same botnet; the posted message is virtually identical (a long list of casino-related links which are probably fraudulent).  The botnet always posts using the same username and e-mail address.

Akismet properly flags it as spam, but it still piles up, and I still like glancing through it to make sure no legitimate posts get flagged.  I figured it would be easy to stop the botnet; Wordpress has a built-in blacklist:

Yes, those are the actual values the botnet uses for the e-mail address and username fields on its posts.  Unfortunately, the blacklist doesn’t appear to work at all; I added those values several weeks ago, and it has had no effect.  The same posts keep coming in, with the same username and same e-mail address.

It got to the point where last week, I installed a plugin that bans based on IP address.  For the last several days, I grab all the IP addresses that this botnet posts from, and start banning them.  Sometimes I ban with wildcards (109.122.*.*), when there are a lot of bots on the same network, but usually it’s just individual addresses.

As you can see, it’s working.  Those 479 access attempts are 479 spam posts I didn’t have to sift through.

What troubles me is that there’s basically no remedy for these botnets.  I’ve looked up some of the addresses; a lot of them are in China.  The addresses at the top of that list belong to a particular domain, but the e-mail address of its technical contact doesn’t look particularly trustworthy, so I’m reluctant to send a message there.  I don’t really want to hack into that network and disable the botnet, despite how much fun it would be to succeed.

My wife suggested I enable captchas, but I hate them so I’m not going to.

Any ideas?

Update: The worst set of addresses, 109.122.*.*, belong to a Ukrainian ISP called Megastyle.  They probably wouldn’t care, even if I could contact them…

Welcome back to Let’s Play.  We last left our hero as he beamed from his ship, the U.S.S. Innovation, over to the U.S.S. Khitomer to see how he could be of help.  What will he see when he beams in?  Will he ever be given a security detail?  Will he be forever stuck with his handheld phaser?  And most importantly, will he ever fix the food replicator in his quarters?

I beam into the sick bay of the U.S.S. Khitomer, not quite sure what I’ll see.  Turns out that, despite the Borg invasion, sick bay is doing pretty well.

There aren’t even any explosions or anything, though there are cargo containers stacked haphazardly on either end of the room for some reason.

Out the windows, I can see some crewmen fighting off Borg invaders in the shuttle bay.

(more…)

From The Onion:

My opinion? We need more games of this nature before we can be sure.

I loved Assassin’s Creed.  It was entertaining in its own way, the graphics were stunning, and though the storyline was slightly bland it was not boring.  I bought it on sale on Steam early last year.

I have been quite excited about the sequel.  It’s supposed to come out on the PC next month (it has been out on consoles for a few months already).  From all appearances, they’ve fixed all the problems with the original game’s gameplay, and refined and improved it, until what they had left was pure liquid awesome.

As it turns out, Ubisoft has decided on adding something else to the game: a horrendously draconian DRM scheme.  In order to play Assassin’s Creed 2, you must be online at all times.

What’s worse, if your internet connection drops at any time, for any reason, your game pauses until the connection is restored.  When this happens, Assassin’s Creed 2 will resume at your last checkpoint, which could be anywhere from five seconds ago to five minutes ago (if its checkpoints are spaced anything like the original).

Five minutes might not seem like a big deal.  But what if your connection is flaky?  What if you’re on a weak-signal wireless connection?  It could happen every five minutes.

What if you just don’t have an internet connection for whatever reason?  What if your ISP decides to shut down your connection for maintenance, or reset your modem remotely, or any number of other things that ISPs like to do which interrupt your connection?

It gets worse.  If Ubisoft’s servers go offline, you can’t play.  What’s more, if they go out of business entirely, you can’t play ever again.

And all this for a single-player game.

There is absolutely no reason for them to be informed of every moment I spend playing their game.  And even if they do want to know for some reason, the game could simply cache data until the connection comes back, and allow you to continue playing uninterrupted.

Anyway, I really, really hate invasive DRM, and this rates an 8 out of 10 on the “Invasive DRM” scale.  The only way it could be worse is if they installed CD-ROM-checking drivers even if you buy a digital copy.  (Other games are guilty of that.)

As a result, I’ll be boycotting Assassin’s Creed 2 — a game I was really looking forward to playing, at full purchase price — until such a time as they remove these measures.

Last time I wrote about global warming, I said this:

I won’t claim the climate isn’t changing.  That much is obvious.  But I have yet to see anyone show that we’re causing it.  What’s more, I have yet to see anyone show that the climate would stop changing if we (magically) completely eliminated pollution tomorrow – and there’s certainly practically no evidence that we can actually reverse it.

As it turns out, I was wrong; the climate isn’t really changing.

I suspect some of you are staring at your screen with your jaw on the floor.  Allow me to elaborate.  You know the CRU?  The group which was at the forefront of the pro-Anthropogenic-Global-Warming movement?  The group whose e-mails were leaked, displaying their scientific misconduct to the world?

Their director, Phil Jones, has temporarily resigned from his position while the whole thing is investigated.  What’s more, he has publicly admitted that not only is global warming not caused by man, but nothing significant is happening!

But don’t take my word for it.  In his interview with the BBC, he admits that since 1995 there has been no statistically significant planetary warming.  He goes on to quibble over “almost significant” and “over longer periods of time”, in an effort to still support his pro-AGW stance, but then he says this:

Of course, if the [Medieval Warming Period] was shown to be global in extent and as warm or warmer than today (based on an equivalent coverage over the NH and SH) then obviously the late-20th century warmth would not be unprecedented.

Forbes.com points out that “A Nature study last year showed water temperatures in the Indonesia area were the same in medieval times as they are today.”

In other words, there is, in fact, evidence that the MWP was just as warm as we see things today, which means our current warmth is not unprecedented.

Why does this all this matter?  Well, people who think global warming is man-made always point to greenhouse gases as the cause.  Since 1995, we’ve increased our yearly GHG production by 26%; however, this has had no effect on planetary temperatures.

So if greenhouse gases don’t actually affect the planet’s temperature, and if there have been similar warm periods in the past, then what evidence remains to support AGW?

Jones also states something else:

It would be supposition on my behalf to know whether all scientists who say the debate is over are saying that for the same reason. I don’t believe the vast majority of climate scientists think this. This is not my view.

The director of the Climate Research Unit believes the debate is not over.  How then can Gibbs, the White House press secretary, make the statement he made back in December?

… on the order of several *thousand* scientists have come, uh, to the conclusion that, uh, climate change is happening.  Uh, I don’t think that’s, uh, anything that is quite frankly, among most people, in dispute anymore.

Even the CRU didn’t really know whether climate change is happening, or whether it’s man-caused.  (If they were sure, there would have been no reason to engage in all the scientific misconduct they did.)

I, for one, am uncomfortable making policies based on such controversial opinions.

There are plenty of reasons to reduce pollution, so it’s complete and utter nonsense to base any pollution-reducing measures on whether global warming is happening (or even on whether it’s our fault).  (Here I’m referring to the Copenhagen conference, whose stated goal is, according to Gibbs, to “stop and reverse climate change”.)