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June 15, 2006
I've been had ! ! !
Thanks to Ed Cone, I've finally figured out why I keep getting inane comments like the one here (I haven't been counting, but there are many more like it) which always point to a completely unrelated Fox News story. Silly, unsuspecting me! For, I tend to give all commenters the benefit of the doubt, and I thought, why would any spammer leave a comment and a link to a Fox News story? More likely (so I thought) I just wasn't "getting the connection." In despair, I even tried putting on my tinfoil hat, and personally challenging the logic of one of them. (The latest one, however, -- trying to connect Hurricane Katrina fraud with militant Muslim multiculturalism -- challenged even my warped imagination.) Here's what Ed Cone says: What's up with the Fox News comment spam?Ed has more, and I too have had comments from both sets of the IP numbers he lists, as well as several from the mysterious "Luther Jenson," whom I took for a real person whose superior brain managed to make diabolically cryptic connections I couldn't begin to understand. SPAM. And to think I was starting to get jealous. . . But I do have a couple of lingering questions. Who? Why? Ed wants to know too, and he asks whether Fox is behind it, and "if not, why would anyone else do it?" Whatever the explanation, I am disappointed. I really didn't want this to be spam, as I prefer the mysterious to the mundane, the cosmic to the earthly. Perhaps whoever writes these spambots can come up with a more creative version, which leaves comments and links directly related to and targeting the blog post in question. Better yet, as AI improves, they might even offer some original (if robotic) thought. The next step would be the creation of spam blogs for the specific purpose of drawing spam comments. That way, the spambot blogs and spambot commenters could argue with each other, and leave the real people alone. Sigh. I offer them a utopian dream, but I know they'll never do it. (Damned unthinking robots.) MORE: Ed Cone reports here that Fox has issued a denial: Fox News corporate communications honcho Brian Lewis tells me that comment spam at blogs is not part of a publicity campaign by the network, and that he was unaware that it was happening...But Ed also notes that this doesn't answer the question of the spammers' apparent use of Fox News' IP addresses. posted by Eric on 06.15.06 at 02:56 PM
Comments
You might very well be onto something there! Eric Scheie · June 16, 2006 08:49 AM Are there services that will list sites frequently linked by a given URL? My first thought was that someone might want to associate certain blogs with FoxNews -- guilt by association. But blog spammers have in the past attempted to have google itself blocked as spam, so that's probably the better bet. Dennis · June 16, 2006 11:36 PM |
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IPs can be spoofed. I would bet it is an anti-Fox nut/group that is trying to get foxnews blacklisted from blogs as spam and delisted from google as a spammer site.