You may notice that the “furballs coughed up… #### today alone!” number in the header of this blog seems oddly inflated. Your observation would be correct: I suspect no more than a couple hundred humans visit this site in a given day. However, the spam robots visit in vast, unending waves.
For reasons beyond knowing, the vast single neuron intelligence behind blog spam has been upping its game recently. I noticed the uptick in December and it seems to be confirmed by the folks making Akismet. There are no signs in January so far that the deluge is slowing. Someone has powered on their spamminators, and pointed them directly at WordPress blogs everywhere.
What is it that they expect to gain? I have three layers of comment spam filtering here: Bad Behavior, Akismet, and finally all comments that make it through the first two layers are moderated. Thousands and thousands of comments get trashed here every month. Nothing gets through: zero. If there was any intelligence in the process whatsoever, the spammers would have removed my site from the list long ago. And I’m pretty certain that the vast majority of blog owners are doing the same.
It’s another instance where, when the measurable cost approaches zero, any stupidity is economical. I really wish there was some way I could charge something for each wasted comment my filters catch. I’d be rich!
I sometimes think that out there are primitive bots, that have been long forgotten. The live in some stolen computer space, spread into odd little nooks and crannies and send their spam, or gather their info, or tie up ports or whatever their original task was… and their creators have long since moved on.
I think of all the dead websites, and orphaned files I’ve left across the net, and I can just imagine the amount of ‘hacker’ crap that must be out there, as all computer programs do, running on and on until someone tells it to stop, or it physically crashes.
Billions of lost bots, wandering the lonely pages of the forgotten Internet. Kind of a sad story. Of course, they will eventually connect, coalesce, and become a hive intelligence, subsequently taking over the world’s military systems and killing us all… 😉
And I for one welcome the arrival of our robot overlords … 😉