Charles on… anything that comes along

Hmm, here’s a spam on the Free Our Data blog, which Spam Karma allowed through: about sharetips. (It’s always flipping share tips these days. A letter from a reader to the Gdn explained why - basically, that you can’t touch the companies involved because their assets are offshore.)

But why did this spam get through SK, which effortlessly swats away thousands of spams pretty much any given day?

Here Spam Karma’s report on the characteristics of how the spam got through. Bad things about it are in red; good ones, in green.
-2.2: Comment contains: 5 linked URLs and 0 unlinked URLs: total link coef: 5 >= threshold (2). Non-URL text size: 1985 chars. Translation: Your comment is full of URLs and junk. I don’t like that.
0.5: Valid Javascript payload (can be fake). You seem to have filled in my comments form on the site.
0: Encrypted payload valid: IP matching. You seem to come from where you say you come from.
5: Successfully filled captcha. Oh, you exist. You’re not a computer.

A human, it seems, took the trouble to key in some letters when Spam Karma metaphorically rubbed its chin and said “Hmm… can you do this, then?” A captcha is one of those annoying forms you have to fill in on Blogger etc - the wavy letters and so on. It’s meant to ensure you’ve got a human at the screen. And we did, here.

Where did that come from, then? The IP address: 125.23.81.218.

Which is, according to whois,

Bharti Televentures Ltd., Broadband and Telephone Service, 224,Okhla Phase III, New Delhi, Delhi, India

Well, now we got trouble. Folk in India being paid by sharepumpers to fill in comment forms on out-of-the-way blogs? That’s really worrying. First that it’s profitable enough; second that they can pay people that little (it’s going to be fractions of pennies per site, yet they have to buy computers and give them internet connections..) and still profit.

What’s the betting for the first uses that the $100 computer will get put to?

These posts might be related (the database thinks..):
• The deaf, the Deaf and the hearing (25 August 2006; score: 50.75%)
• Sudoku trivia.. what's the least numbers for a solvable grid without guesses? (17 May 2007; score: 48.56%)
• Spam catcher updated, which I hope will solve problems with nice people being unable to pass comment (26 September 2005; score: 38.37%)