nion's blog

It is possible with s9y to moderate blog comments after a certain amount of time has passed since the article was published.
A while back I got the following mail to approve a blog comment (I stripped the url and email address to not support the spam):

Mon, 19 Oct 2009 12:18:02 +0200 (CEST)
A new comment has been posted on your blog "nion's blog", to the entry entitled "security of scponly/sftp-server in combination with apache".
Link to entry: http://nion.modprobe.de/blog/archives/679-security-of-scponlysftp-server-in-combination-with-apache.html

Requires review: Yes (Auto-moderation after X days)
User IP-address: 24.123.215.XXX
User Name: SomeSpammer
User Email: webmaster@somespammer.com
User Homepage: http://www.somespammer.com

Comments:
Very interesting, seems so simple when you explain it like that.. nice one

This is quite obviously a spam comment to increase google ranks or site links in general.

Today I got a new comment:

Fri, 19 Mar 2010 02:35:54 +0200 (CEST)
A new comment has been posted on your blog "nion's blog", to the entry entitled "security of scponly/sftp-server in combination with apache".
Link to entry: http://nion.modprobe.de/blog/archives/679-security-of-scponlysftp-server-in-combination-with-apache.html

Requires review: Yes (Auto-moderation after X days)
User IP-address: 96.30.18.XXX
User Name: SomeSpammer
User Email: webmaster@somespammer.com
User Homepage: http://www.somespammer.com/

Comments:
Weird.. I found myself back here! small world. Reminds of this one from the commmandline kung fu of wietse.

( ( mkfifo ~/nc-feef && ( ( nc -v -l -p 22123 127.0.0.1 > ~/out ) & ) && ( ( cat /tmp/ncf | nc 127.0.0.1 22123 ) & ) && script -f ~/nc-feef ) & )

This comment is pointing to the same spammer site. Now comparing this comment to the first one at the first glance it seems even related to the blog post! Thinking of "wietse" the name Wietse Venema (author of postfix) pops up, so this also familiar.

Though opening a fifo in the home directory, a netcat listening tcp port on localhost with the output redirected to a file and then some tmp file piped to the listening port (thus writing the file) and attaching script to the FIFO doesn't really make sense?! Not that this is usually the case with spam, but wtf this is everything but obviously spam. If you have a blog that is commented highly frequent it might be a problem to sort that out and spot that even if it's not interesting to you. This is the difference to email, if it's spam, you don't notice but it's also not interesting you will just delete the mail. Using a blog you might approve such a comment as it might be interesting for another reader and you don't have time to read that in detail.

So this spam hit me 6 months after the first attempt again! It's interesting to see how spam evolves over time, this one clearly has been improved.

Now spam bots are producing code. This is scary. It will be interesting to see if and what comment I get from the guy on this article

I just uploaded newsbeuter 0.3 to unstable (get it from incoming until it hits the archive).

The release is mainly a bugfix release but there are also some cool new features and improvements.
- The html rendering especially encoding issues are fixed now.
- Everything is stored as UTF-8 internally and gets converted on-the-fly.
- libidn is not needed anymore
- gettext support (at the moment just german translation, translators wanted)

And last but not least podcast support.
For this there is a new tool included in newsbeuter named podbeuter. When updating feeds newsbeuter searches for podcast files and
adds them to a download queue. podbeuter then is the download manager to do automatic or manual downloads of the podcasts.



Have fun and test it.
Oh and YVFI we hang around in #newsbeuter on freenode now

Some guy made a wordpress theme which lets you access the blog content via some command shell in your browser.
Of course if you are bored by this you can also type 'startx' to get to the original graphical blog

http://blog.elinc.ca/rodcli/index.php

Cool idea!