/dev/random

I get a lot of these spams, but I found this one particularly amusing because of the name he used.
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I checked my Akismet queue and as usual I found a large number of splogs copying my posts. One interesting thing I noticed is that many of them use exactly the same template. Either one person is running all of these, or there’s some standard software being sold or distributed for stealing content. I’m sure [...]

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Less than an hour after I posted my last entry, I checked Akismet and found that it had already been scraped and reposted - with the copyright notice from my feed intact!
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Less than half an hour after I posted this item earlier today, I found that it was already scraped and republished in a splog. To prevent this in the future, I’ve installed the ©Feed plugin, which adds a copyright notice to each item in my RSS feeds that will appear in any scraped content saying [...]

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Checking my Akismet queue, I found several trackbacks from spam blogs scraping and reposting my content. They all seem to be using the same template, usually starting with “(some blog name) wrote an interesting post today…”, always giving it some random name linked to my blog.
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I don’t mind my feed being included [...]

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Advice to phishers: learn to spell and capitalize properly.
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It looks like spammers are using Google Calendar now to send spam as invitations from their calendar. These people deserve to die.
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Today I got 15 follow requests on Twitter from political campaigns, all seem to be unofficial. I’ve blocked all of them. If this continues, I may protect updates to prevent those unsolicited requests. I do NOT support ANY of those candidates who requested to follow me and I dislike most of them. The only candidate [...]

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I just checked my Akismet moderation queue and found that no less than 5 splogs republished an item I posted less than two hours ago. I bet this item will also be scraped and republished. If you’re reading this anyplace other than mcdevzone.com, this post was illegally republished.

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I’ve implemented Donncha O Caoimh’s steps to fight comment spam here. Two of the plugins, Comment Referrers and Delink Comment Author add links to the comment moderation email I receive that show the referrer, which helps identify spammers, and remove links from the comment.
Lucia’s Linky Love makes this blog less attractive to spammers [...]

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This morning I got a comment moderation notice, which turned out to be from a spam blog hosted at wordpress.com. I reported them to wordpress.com and here’s the result.
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I received a pingback in my Akismet moderation queue a little while ago that led me to a splog that’s stealing content from this and many other blogs. It simply reposts blog entries verbatim and inserts google ads in each post. It grabbed my previous post just a few minutes after I posted it. I [...]

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