reCaptcha enabled on comments

I’ve recently noticed a lot of blog comment spam on my blog.

Where  some-one kisses-bum in order to “trick” me into accepting  their comment.
For example:

Howdy there,this is Everett Krajcer,just discovered your web-site on google and i must say this blog is great.may I share some of the Post found in this website to my local friends?i’m not sure and what you think?anyway,Many thanks!

Complete with a nice back link to his crappy website about “low rate loans”

This black hat SEO tactic is become very widespread.

Simply google a few phrases from that comment

Whilst you will not see any exact matches, they’re all along the same sort of lines, and on blogs…

The software posting these comments alters it very slightly for each blog posting, to fool search engines. 

To combat this, I’ve installed the reCaptcha plugin onto WordPress

Installation took literally two minutes, and is now up and running. 

Apologies to any genuine comment posters, but the spam was becoming too much!

You can get the plugin here:

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-recaptcha

100 new followers on twitter, bought for a Fiverr

After signing up to Fiverr, I decided to give it a try.

Someone with a somewhat copyright infringing username of Twitter offers:

Twitter: I will sell you 100 real Twitter Followers for $5
(http://www.fiverr.com/users/Twitter/gigs/sell-you-100-real-twitter-followers)

There were plenty of others offering the same, if not more followers, but they required your username and password, and would just follow hundreds of people, in the hope of a reciprocal follow.

However, this one seemed different.
Just over £3.30 for 100 new followers? Great feedback? It seemed too good to be true, so I thought I’d lay my $5 on the line, and give it a go.

I placed my order, and around an hour or so later, had confirmation he had begun.

Within a few minutes, I started to get email notifications of new people following me.
It seemed to be working!

25 minutes later, the emails dried up, and I assumed it was completed.
I checked my followers, and, to my amazement, I had 135 new followers!

Some were particularly random, no tweets, following loads of people etc (suspect- FAKE) but there were a few active tweeters in there.

I @ replied some of them, asking how they heard about me / why they started following me, however have not got any response

All in all, did what was said on the tin. I got over 100 followers. Using who.unfollowed.me I saw that about 15 of these unfollowed me within a week.

What can you get for a Fiverr? – A quick review on Fiverr Marketplace

New marketplace Fiverr allows you to outsource those small tasks you may have, for a fixed fee of $5 (aprox. £3.30 depending on how the exchange rate is behaving)

Fiverr allows people to list things they would do, for $5.
In return, Fiverr takes $1 from the value of the order, leaving the person providing the service with $4.
This can be withdrawn from the account, once they have accumulated $40 or more.

As you would imagine, there are plenty of weird and wacky offerings, or “Gigs” as they are called by Fiverr.

However, there are hundreds of potentially really useful things available.

For example:

genelors: I will setup a WordPress blog and configure your domain to it for $5

landee: I will be your personal assistant for 1 hour for $5

mzzedithandlucy: I will give you a 1/2 hour Juggling Lesson over Skype for $5

Payment is handled through PayPal, making it nice and easy to use.

When you place an order, you have to pay upfront, and then the order is fulfilled.
Just in case, there is a dispute procedure – but it’s unlikely you’ll ever need to use it!

So you can be sure of a timely delivery, there is a handy “number of orders in queue” displayed below the order button.

You can also contact the seller to clarify things before you part with your $5.

I for one, will be outsourcing some of those niggly little tasks to Fiverr.
Such tasks as resizing photos, installing WordPess etc… are perfectly suited!

Facebook notification spam – someone ”likes” your photo

Recently, a lot of people have  been “liking” my photos.

Unfortunately, the notifications are sent out by various versions of a new form of Facebook spam application.

Clicking on “your photo” – in a hope to see which photo this person liked, takes you to a page where you’re asked to allow an application access to various parts  of your profile:

“Allowing Lika access will let it access your Profile information, photos, your friends’ info and other content that it requires to work”

This is the important part of this application – clicking on “allow” will enable the app to get access to all the information on your profile.
It then sends out notifications to ALL your friends, that you “liked” one of their photos.

Presumably, it is also sending all your information to the developer. This could be anything from your profile – work information, contact info, address, photos – anything.

One way to check if a notification you have received is genuine is to hover over “your photo”

Unless the link is something similar to: http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?pid=12345 then it’s a fake.

The names are usually something like “Like” or “Lika” or something along those lines, to fool you into thinking they are genuine, Facebook features.

How to view Experts Exchange answers

I’m sure anyone that’s searched for solutions in Google, has fallen victim to the search engine reuslt pollution Experts Exchange employs…

They always seem to title their results, with EXACTLY what you are looking for.

When you click on it, you’re told that to view the solution, you need to sign up. Which costs money…
Sure, there is a free trial available… but who really wants that?

Well… the answers are indeed, freely available.

This is a condition of appearing in Google search results.
However, a slight black-hat trick is, that they’re not visible to Joe Public. Only to search engines…

You can fool the site into thinking you are a search engine, by simply copying the full experts-exchange URL from your browser, for example:

http://www.experts-exchange.com/Microsoft/Development/MS-SQL-Server/Q_22634999.html

And pasting that into the Google search box:

The first search result, will be a link to that URL, via Google.

Click that, and it will show you the answers! Nothing illegal, just exposing Experts Exchange black hat techniques

Ass-Kissing Blog Comment Spam

Recently, I have been receiving a large amount of a different kind of comment spam on my WordPress blog.

In an effort to get around the Akismet spam protection, they have created several variations of the same kind of poor English, brown nosing comments… that effectively mean nothing.

The whole point of them, is to allow their URL to be posted in the “Website” field of the comment.

I recently had one on this post, to which I approved the comment, and later realised it was actually spam – so simply edited the comment, removed the URL, and left a reply underneath.

Here are the kind of comments (complete with spelling errors and bad English)

I’ll edit this post when I come across some more…

Advantageously, the post is really the freshest on this laudable topic. I fit in with your conclusions and will thirstily look forward to your incoming updates. Just saying thanks will not just be sufficient, for the exceptional lucidity in your writing. I will at once grab your rss feed to stay privy of any updates. Admirable work and much success in your business enterprise!

Considerably, the article is in reality the freshest on this worthw hile topic. I fit in with your conclusions and will eagerly look forward to your next updates. Saying thanks will not just be enough, for the great lucidity in your writing. I will right away grab your rss feed to stay privy of any updates. Fabulous work and much success in your business endeavors!

Comfortably, the post is really the sweetest on this noteworthy topic. I fit in with your conclusions and will eagerly look forward to your approaching updates. Just saying thanks will not just be adequate, for the wonderful lucidity in your writing. I will at once grab your rss feed to stay informed of any updates. De lightful work and much success in your business efforts!

Twitter User underdog100 gets 300% increase in followers – in 10 minutes

At 23:00, Jo Combs (twitter.com/underdog100) had just 37 followers
5 minutes later, Graham Norton had featured her tweets on his show, albeit poking fun at them, but, now, her followers had swelled to 110!

Every time I hit F5, her number of followers increases

By 23:10 the count had grown to 130… around a 300% increase in 10 minutes!

I got bored at about 23:20, but by then, the follower count had grown to 140!
Not bad!

Google Wave invitations for sale on eBay

Google Wave invitations were sent out yesterday, 30th Septermber 2009.

Bizarely, I didn’t get one, despite being a paying google apps customer.
Anyhow, I wasn’t overly bothered – sure, i would like to try it out, but I wouldn’t part with cold hard cash to do so!

It appears some people will however:

A quick search on eBay (UK) revealed 3 for sale already!

Slight deja vu of circa June 2004 when Google released gMail – people were willing to splash out serious bucks to try that out!

Problem with Firefox 3.5.2 and Facebook

After upgrading to Firefox 3.5.2, I’ve been having trouble with Facebook – certain pages would take ages to load (if load at all)
The photos page was a particular problem.

At first, I thought the problem could of been with Facebook – some of their AJAX user interface getting carried away or something, however I narrowed down the problem to Firefox by trying the site in IE.

I did some Googling, and found other people were having the same problem, and that they had narrowed down the problem to the Skype add-on for Firefox.

The Skype add-on detects phone numbers within a web page, and renders them as a Skype call button – so that you can easily call numbers from a web page.

The amount I actually use this feature is far far less than that of Facebook, so I decided to disable the add-on (at least until they fix the issues with it)

Here’s how:

1) Click the Tools –> Add-ons menu in Firefox

2) Click the Uninstall button next to the “Skype extension for Firefox” in the resulting dialog.

3) Restart Firefox.

That should fix the issues with Facebook (and any other website that is showing similar problems)

NTLM / Windows Authentication with Firefox

Firefox, my browser of choice, doesn’t support NTLM “out of the box”

What that means is, if you visit a site on your domain (for example http://intranet) that you should have access to, you’re presented with a username and password box.
Visit the same site in IE, and it lets you straight through, based on your credentials.

What you need to do, is explicitly set the allowed URIs that Firefox is allowed to pass your credentials to.
Since I only use this on a couple of sites, it’s not really a problem.

Here’s how to do it:

Step One

Load about:config in Firefox (more information on about:config)
Click “I’ll be careful, I promise!” (and make sure you are careful, you did promise….)

Step Two

Locate network.automatic-ntlm-auth.trusted-uris
The easiest way to do this is to type “network.automatic” into the filter box. Then, only two entries show up.
Double click network.automatic-ntlm-auth.trusted-uris

Step Three

Enter your url into the box.
In my case, it’s http://intranet

That’s it! Firefox will now allow NTLM on that url!