Alastair’s Place

Software development, Cocoa, Objective-C, life. Stuff like that.

Phew… That Was Painless

Movable Type really is an excellent piece of software; the upgrade to version 3 went (almost) totally without a hitch, the only problem being that commenting broke temporarily whilst I sorted-out how to enable TypeKey authentication.

Anyway, hopefully that will put an end to the flood of comment spam that I’ve been experiencing over the last day or so (oddly enough, I don’t want links on my site to pornography, places to purchase drugs or financial scams). If only the U.S. Government would take the poor behaviour of some of its citizens on the ’Net as seriously as it takes things like obvious jokes about bombs at airports… ;-)

I realise, by the way, that it isn’t just Americans that are responsible for spam, but it is certainly mostly Americans, both from personal experience and according to people like Spamhaus. Indeed, MessageLabs claim that:

…more than 80 per cent of global spam originates from fewer than 200 known spammers in the U.S.A.. Many are based in the small town of Boca Raton in Florida…

It’s a shame that those 200 people—or others like them—are still being allowed to give the United States a bad name, although at least the FTC is finally cracking-down on some of the spammers who were flouting the rather weak CAN-SPAM Act.