Blog Spammers

'Kevin' sends spam comments from Taiwan in Chinese regularly - they are filled with links to commercial sites. As soon as I get them - I get comments by email - I go to the post and delete them. Most of Kevin's comments are on old posts, that most readers won't ever see, and if I weren't getting email copies, I wouldn't notice either.

I guess that people are paid to go to blogs and post comments. I'm assuming they haven't found a way to by-pass the captcha coding, so they have to do it by hand. It's like a bee that regularly flies into your house and you have to shoo it away.

This week I got some new spammers. 'Britney' sent about six comments all with links to payday loan sites. 'Suzi' showed up yesterday with a similar modus operandi. There's a short and vaguely relevant comment that is applicable to most any blog post

Blogs are so interactive where we get lots of informative on any topics...... nice job keep it up !!

and then below her signature there's a link to some commercial site. Just now it was to "buy term papers."

I've checked blogger forums and it appears you can't block individual ip addresses. You either block everyone or take them down after the fact.

If anyone reading this knows how I can block these, let me know.

Land-Lines, Cell Phones, and Poll Bias

[Sept. 10 - I've updated this in a new post with actual study data on characteristics of cell-phone only households and links to a couple of studies on this.]

Tons of different things to write about, but I got this email just now and it is relevant to a question I'd had. My question was whether pollsters were calling cell phones. Could they get cell phone numbers? One theory about why pollsters called the Truman/Dewey election wrong in 1948 is that pollsters relied on telephones and people without phones were more likely to vote for Truman. That raises the question about modern-day polls. There aren't any directories I know of for cell phones, and many younger voters have cell phones and no land lines. If younger voters are more likely to vote Obama and older voters more likely to vote McCain, then calling land lines only would bias the polls.

From a discussion on Citydata.com

Most if not all polls use land line phones to conduct the poll. This eliminates many if not all of a major group of voters. McCain's voters tend to be older less mobile groups of people. They are more likely to have land line phones. Obama's supporters are more likely to be younger, many have only mobile phones, never even having land line.

More Americans go for cell phones, drop landlines


The percentage of people who do not land line phones.

25% ages 18 to 29, no landline.
12.4% ages 30 to 44, no landline.
6.1% ages 45 to 64, no landline.
1.9% ages over 65, no landline.
15.8% of all homes, no landline.
22.4% of poor, no land line

All this was stimulated by the email I got today: [see update below, this is apparently a hoax]


REMEMBER: Cell Phone Numbers Go Public today
REMINDER.... all cell phone numbers are being released to telemarketing companies tomorrow and you will start to receive sale calls.

.... YOU WILL BE CHARGED FOR THESE CALLS

To prevent this, call the following number from your cell phone:
888-382-1222.
It is the National DO NOT CALL list. It will only take a minute of your time. It blocks your number for five (5) years. You must call from the cell phone number you want to have blocked. You cannot call from a different phone number.

HELP OTHERS BY PASSING THIS ON TO ALL YOUR FRIENDS.. It takes about 20 seconds.
or go to www.donotcall.gov


This seems to confirm my belief that up til now there were no directories of cell phone numbers.

[Update: Sept. 3: After I posted this, I realized that I hadn't checked on the email, something I would normally do before posting something like this. And, sure enough, a reader has sent me the following email:

Hi,
I was alarmed to see on your blog that solicitors might start calling my and my children's cell phones and using up the minutes so I went and listed them with the do not call registry. But then immediately afterward I got suspicious and did a little web search and came up with this page from the FCC that says it is an urban myth that cell phone numbers will be published in a directory and that solicitors will begin calling cell phones. Federal law prohibits solicitors from calling cell phones, and the FCC says cell phone users do not need to register with the do not call registry. The page was last modified in late 2007, but I assume the law hasn't changed since then.
http://www.ftc.gov/opa/2005/04/dnc.shtm
Shana Cxxxxxxxxx

One clue is that there is no date - it just says 'today'. Shana, thanks for the heads up.]

60 Page Blogger Comment Blocking Trash Button

I got an email telling me there was a new comment on one of my posts. I checked it. It was long. I kept scrolling down and kept on. It was some sort of religious anti-everything tirade. When I looked at the scroll bar I saw I was only at the beginning.

I went to the post to delete it using the trash can icon. But when I finally got to the bottom, there was a grey box at the end of the post. It was covering the trash icon, so I couldn't just trash the comment. I copied the original post and put it into Pages (Mac's Word). It was 60 pages long!

So, how do I get rid of it?

I ended up

1. going into edit posts,
   
2. put the original post into html mode,
   
3. copied it,
   
4. pasted onto a Pages document.
   
5. Opened a new post,
   
6. pasted the original post there,
   
7. opened the Post Options to back date it to the original post date.
   
8. Copied the title and the tags and pasted them in.
9. Then I reposted the original.

Then I copied the two comments. In the new post, I posted a new comment explaining what happened and pasted the two legit comments into this new comment.

Then when I was sure it was all ok, I went back into edit posts and deleted the original post with the strange comment.

I think this is the second comment I had to delete in a week or so. It is rare. The last one was more benign, but spam. This one had nothing to do with my post and whoever posted it needs serious help. Here's a bit of it.

Sat May 24, 09:57:00 AM AKDT
Anonymous said...

ThisistheREALbattle@ofgoodandevil.com
The Anti-Christ was always a clone host, as were all industrialists, and the coming Biblical battle of good and evil will be scripted and fake as well, and likely only be telepathic theater at that. (p. 1 when I pasted it into Pages)

The gods are asexual. They have no sex organs nor rectums.
When the gods take children these individuals have the opportunity to become "god-like". Temptations are employed and, if sucessful, these are the individuals who make up the human race's immortals.
I believe there are opportunities that exist for females that do no exist for males. I don't mean to paint with a broad brush but women's "sexual peak" may represent the transistion to "sociological males" and their "fall from grace". Considering today's promiscuity I question whether this is currently applicable, and is yet anther 20th century-earlier phenominah. (p. 4)


They gave back the Mormon's children. They never intended to take them.
It only took less than a week to poison those children's minds. They are going to lose some of them because of this.
They've gone from reading the Bible to playing GrandTheftAutoIV. And this was the goal.
Never forget:::::The gods did this to you. You are being punished for your sin of polygamous sex, and they deem some of your children "acceptable losses" to achieve this. (p. 6)


When the Earth's axis shifts people will be cast into outer space with gold cards in hand.
I think this was foreshadowed on an episode of the Simpsons where Homer and Bart are on the disfavored ship and eject, only to experience a sense of euphoria, expand then explode in the vacuum of space. (p. 10)


Incidentally, in the course of this Situation the gods made many movies, using daily events in my life as inspiration. One of note:::Unhappy about the god's behavior in the context of this event, while in favored redwhite&blue's facility I looked at their mascot and flippantly declared::::"Why don't you make a movie about these things?" Two years later ____ came out.
(p. 14)

Show on gangland drug sales.
The gods orchistrate this whole underworld, just as they did with the Italians early in the 20th century.
The gods convince Oakland pimps that chilldhood prostitution is OK - Learn from the lies they tell other groups!!!(p. 27)



The gods manufacture "open doors" to justify creating problems in the lives of people who engage in behavior they shouldn't. Some of these "open doors" apply to all (a supermajority) of the people::::
- Democracy is used to create pathologies of empowerment and control.
- Materialism/greed generate problems with money, glorify overconsumption, etc.
Other "open doors" are specific to each individual::::People shouldn't be watching movies, TV, listening to music. When this ocurrs the gods use themes and topics presented therein and instruct Artificial Intelligence to create pathologies. (p.44)


Don't forget:::automatic transmissions dominate in the United States, and NOT for good reason. European vehicles historically are mostly manual, for they have more favor.
Females are the favored gender:::What cars DO have manuals here in the US have traditionally been marketted towards the women AND are those which get the highest mileage.
Buy manual transmissions. Automatics are NOT respected!!! (p. 53)


"I'm going to do what I'm told." You learned temptation would be used to test you. These requests are the gods tempting you.
You are fucking up.
This is the REAL battle of good and evil.
Mon May 26, 05:53:00 PM AKDT (p. 60)

Since I have the time this person visited, I can look up the sitemeter report:

Castro Valley, California
Got here from a link on FieryBlazingHandBasket.

I checked a few posts there to see if they were blessed with this manifesto too, but didn't find it. But mine was buried down about ten or 15 posts from the current one.