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 Email 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.

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Back Online

Posted by Daniel Lyons Sun, 08 Apr 2007 11:01:00 GMT

I hope you’ve all enjoyed the hiatus from my programming language rants, because it’s just come to an end.

For the past five hours, I’ve been received a stern lesson in two facts:

  1. Back up your data. Seriously.
  2. Running bleeding-edge software for production work is dumb. Without backing up your data, it’s dumb squared.

First I took my broken SQL backup and brought it to my home computer. Then I loaded it up in a database. Then I manually edited the SQL until it would insert that data into a fresh database created by the newest stable version of Typo. That took a lot of massaging. Then I ran Typo and debugged it, beating my old data until it worked without crashing the system. Then I took two different kinds of backup (SQL dump and Typo’s new database backup facility) and copied them up to the server. Then, unbelievably, I had to beat on it more to get it to work. And now, as you can see, we’re back online and miraculously, I haven’t lost any old posts or comments.

I even got the old theme to work again. This must be my week. Except for getting my car egged, finding out I can’t really continue the driving job because of my obligations at home and spending most of yesterday trying to make 1and1 fix their networking problem which had brought down Michael’s server while he was on a pilgrimage to Chimayo and his best client was understandably somewhat unsympathetic over the phone to me, a non-employee contractor-type.

It’s been quite a week!

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