Catherine ^_^ said to me a couple of days ago that her e-mail wasn't working, turns out the POP service had fallen over, restarting the service didn't do the trick so I rebooted the server. Problem solved. I had dismissed it as being linked with the amount of traffic my blog has had over some recent posts about Apple and left it at that.
But then it happened yesterday too, which did strike me as being weird, the blog got about double the traffic it usually gets - which shouldn't be enough to bring down a service. One off sure why not, but twice, no way something is up. So anyway I rebooted and started having a look around, memory usage was a bit higher than normal but no weird processes were running and there wasn't an unusual amount of traffic on the line.
Few hours later I found the cause, about 30 machines had been pumping spam into the comments section for on the Oblivion files pages. They left several thousand spams about 170MBs worth.
Comments were disabled, and the database emptied, their IPs blocked. So sorry all the people who used the comments properly, but the scum of the Earth have a way of screwing everyone over.
The blog has been transformed because of spam, we used to show where people were coming from right there down the side, it was a cool feature, a feature that brought people together, trackbacks are an awesome feature, but had to go due to abuse, comments first had to have a captcha, then went under moderation, the hassle of this however will mean most future web developments that would of normally had comments, won't anymore.
The openness of the internet is being closed up by these capitalist bastards. The difference this time unlike with e-mail is large corporations aren't losing out, they're not having their employees having to spend 30 minutes each day dealing with spam so it will be much less likely for us to have anti-spam laws to protect things like blogs and other websites as we have with e-mail. If there were the same sort of laws that deal with spam e-mail they'd have little effect anyway.
The destruction of the internet by crippling spam is perfect example of how capitalism works. There's a market there for a bunch of capitalist assholes to make some money they move in and the only thing that matters is profit. Do you think your grandmother who's just setup her first blog won't be put off a little by finding 300 spams there the next day? Guess what, they don't give a shit about your grandmother, they don't care that she might be offended, they want "their" money.
Before the loons say capitalists invented the internet you're wrong, the internet was put together by the US government, it was a public development. Even the US government aren't so stupid to let capitalists get away with something like that. Hell we'd all be paying per byte we transfer, or for each byte we receive we receive an advertising byte to go with it.
The internet is being destroyed by spam, we're having to fortify our websites and our inboxes which do impact legitimate uses, I want to use trackbacks, they rock, but it’s simply not possible without deleting 100 spam trackbacks for every legitimate one.
The awesomeness of the internet to connect people is being threatened, and the users of the internet must organise and take things into their own hands. These spammers should be hunted down, beheaded and have their heads put on spikes to remind any other bastards not to mess with the people.
No I'm not a fan of capital punishment, but I'll make an exception for these guys. The good news is Catherine's e-mail should work OK tomorrow. ^_^