Up until about two months ago, I was sleeping easy, knowing that I wouldn’t have to wake up the next day and moderate unhealthy dozes of spam from the comments on the weblog. But that was then and is no more.

For the past two months I’ve been rejecting the idea of giving spammers any value by blogging about them, but some of the posts are so out there that I can’t hold it in any more. Take this one from earlier today, for instance:

Viagra

Don’t delete. Help homeless children.

This one doesn’t even have the decency to make some sense. I mean, as far as homeless children go, promoting Viagra probably contributes in increasing their numbers rather than the opposite.

What’s getting real scary is how some of those comments are by humans, as in not bots. You can tell, because those guys take the time to go through the article they’re going to spam-enable and start their messages with something along the context of what’s being blogged about:

Hey guys, we use XhtmlValidator in our projects and it’s great. Thanks. Here’s some useful links [...]

… followed by some useful links about the best deals in pharmaceuticals.

And I’m getting a nasty feeling, because this new found spam explosion smells like Mechanical Turk… Think about it. From the Turk website: Complete simple tasks that people do better than computers. And, get paid for it. This is way sad, because the idea, the technology and the intentions behind Mechanical Turk are great to say the least.

It would be interesting to watch, however, after seeing what the spam industry is doing with cutting edge technologies, what that other driving force behind the internet is going to make of services like Mechanical Turk…

This entry was posted on Monday, December 4th, 2006 at 6:37 pm and is filed under Software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.