Somebody's Screwing With Me
Posted by Daniel Lyons Wed, 06 Feb 2008 17:25:00 GMT
In the past three days I’ve gotten three comments on my blog from three different people I didn’t know. Here are their names, email addresses (partly censored) and IP addresses:
| Name | Submitter’s IP | |
|---|---|---|
| Hualing | hualing_huaa@XXX | 124.106.129.106 |
| Carlo | carloodriguez_rodd@XXX | 124.217.42.19 |
| Tim | tarmo_timm@XXX | 124.106.128.178 |
All three of the comments have the same basic form, and seem to be aiming for my Lisp stories. The first and last make the most sense but the middle one is kind of a giveaway:
Carlo:
“I didn’t familiar with Lisp Dialects, maybe I’ll try it if not complicated.”
— Lisp Dialects
The others, in case you’re interested:
Hualing:
“That should be complicated. Do you have to switch much since you have two different environments?”
— The Bad Side of Scheme Shell
Tim:
“I find both really complicated! We should have a sort of community to help one another with the coding. It should be quite useful after getting a hang of it.”
—Lisp Dialects
The thing that’s really spooky to me is how similar their blogs are in content. Check ‘em out, they all have basically one random sentence with a paragraph behind the cut, not really talking about anything in particular. One of ‘em, I think Tim, talks about his wife and his girlfriend in two different entries. Also, the date and time on the entries on these blogs are fishy. All of them have an entry near June 7, 2007 and then the next one is near January 11th.
Anybody with a clue what’s going on here? They don’t seem to be pushing any goods or services here or at their blogs. I think maybe they’re just trying to accumulate PageRank, but what for?
Edit: Bill has a solution:
“I think (and I’ll post this as well) that this is a pagerank growing trick. Those pages will get swapped out with spam pages and/or ads once they have some rank.”
He also points out the WHOIS data:
Registrant Name:philip llave Registrant Organization:Cholilax Registrant Street1:30 B Caldecott Broadcast Centre, Registrant Street2: Registrant Street3: Registrant City:Singapore Registrant State/Province:Singapore Registrant Postal Code:508984 Registrant Country:SG Registrant Phone:+65.78921258 Registrant Phone Ext.: Registrant FAX: Registrant FAX Ext.: Registrant Email:philipllave@yahoo.com
Same one for all three domains. Definitely a spam thing.

Were there any links? Maybe they were just foreign speakers who found you on google.
Well, there went my comments :)
This is pretty well done! Spam blogs are normally less subtle, even in the pre-spam phase.
I’ve noticed this lately, too. I think people are starting to automate blogs in order to gain AdSense revenue. I’m surprised it didn’t happen sooner, but that doesn’t make me revile the practice any less. Signal, meet noise.
Wasn’t there some report a month or two ago about some script making spam comments in blogs and they were using some new tech that sounded like these?
I agree. It’s a bait-and-switch plan. Those links will be porn in a few weeks.
I’ve been getting the same weird comment spam on my site as well. See this entry I wrote about it. My best guess was it was an attempt to build up page rank.
Dear Daniel l Lyons, Is this the weblog of the writer of the birthday cake and last good man?
Nope. Different guy.