planetOzh

Code 2012/11/21 2 min read

Checking Domain Blacklists from Spamhaus, SURBL and URIBL in PHP

I've been speaking lately with folks from Spamhaus about anti spam measure in YOURLS and a YOURLS plugin for this. Currently the #1 result in Google for "spamhaus PHP" is a post on Lockergnome which gets it totally wrong and provides a script that does not work, so here is a PHP script that does work. This script checks a…

WordPress 2010/09/06 2 min read

Spam Magnet Blog Posts

Lately, every time I manually flagged a comment as spam, I started to have the impression that they all were posted on the same post, namely an old announcement for my plugin "Absolute Comments". An SQL query later, my impression was confirmed: this blog post *is* a spam magnet: I suspect that some particular keywords in page titles act like…

Ahah 2009/04/03 1 min read

New Infallible Anti Spam Technique

It seems Jeff Atwood from Coding Horror has found a new way to identify spam: comments by women are so rare on my blog that when I see a female name in the comments it is 95% likely to be spam. Sad but true. Hey. Fun but sad but true, I'd say :)

WordPress 2007/12/01 1 min read

Deactivate Your Spam Shields For One Day ?

Some dude is going to deactivate his spam protection (Akismet) for one day, on December 15th, and the idea is actually starting to spread. What a pointless idea… I mean, everyone knows how many spam they're getting each day: Akismet as a WordPress plugin comes with a spam counter. I know I get between 100 and 300 spams every single…

Spam 2007/10/24 1 min read

Anti Spam Tip of the Day : Complain !

For the past few days, I've received a decent amount of spam from the same machine and domain, hosted on Hostgator. Deciding that enough was enough and that I had a minute of my life to waste, I sent an email to abuse@hostgator with some details from my Akismet screen. I wasn't really expecting much… till I received a reply…

Ahah 2007/08/11 1 min read

Spam Gets Unreadable

A common spammer's trick to escape mail filters is to sort-of cypher words so that they remain human-readable. You've received gazillions of them: vi@gr@, v-i-a-g-r-a, [v][i][a][g][r][a] and so on. A mail got through GMail's filter this morning, and I actually spent a few minutes trying to read it because I thought this time they pushed it a little too far.…

This contact form uses a clock captcha, I thought it was a rather fun idea, and anyway a lot less annoying than those barely readable random strings so many sites use. Source code for this clock captcha can be found here (in German, but the PHP code is clean and easily understandable:)

2007/06/17 4h43 #

Code 2007/06/13 1 min read

Overkill Method to Kill Spam #71

Every time I check my referrers, I cannot help but notice all those utterly futile referrer spams from various order-your-pills-online sites. And each time I start thinking about various method to block them all (then I never implement these methods because I mostly don't care about refer spam :) I checked a couple hundreds of referrer domains and, unsurprisingly, about…

Code 2007/05/03 1 min read

How-to: PHP Script for Honey Pot’s http:BL

A few days ago, Project Honey Pot introduced a new service : http:BL, a blacklist of all the suspicious IPs they are gathering through all the honey pots, and an API allowing anyone to use this blacklist. Their API is very easy to use, and I believe a number of projects (hint) should use it any time soon. For the…

WordPress 2006/08/12 1 min read

(Almost) Back Online

Yoopla, I'm back online. Or almost back online, since real life issues are eating most of my free time : I'll be moving by the end of the month, gotta find a house, a babysitter and a school for kids, those things. In other news : I have two invites for Vox, SixApart's latest buzz machine, if you're curious and…