Following our recent article on comment spamming of blogs, Movable type, a popular web log (Blog) has prepared a patch to stop the massive comment spamming problems that their users are having. The problem is getting so bad that web servers are being taken down by the load.

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After a setback in Maryland last week, where a court found Maryland’s anti-spam statute unconstitutional, a federal judge in Iowa goosed some spammers really well. An article in CNN reports the damage award to be in the billions. Of course the real problem is collection with spammers playing a shell game. As that article says:

Kramer’s attorney, Kelly Wallace, said he is unlikely to ever collect the judgment, which was made possible by an Iowa law that allows plaintiffs to claim damages of $10 per spam message. The judgments were then tripled under RICO.

RICO is a neat thing and something I have some experience with (from the good side of it I might add). Showing that the activity was that of a corrupt organization may allow you to hammer them with three times what you otherwise might receive. Good luck to them on collections.

Firefox has added live bookmarks as a great new feature to allow readers of your site to stay abreast of the latest news and postings via RSS feeds. If you see a little orange button to the very bottom right of your Firefox browser, then you can subscribe. This tutorial tells you how to enable your site for live bookmarks so that surfers to your site can subscribe to your RSS content with a few simple clicks.

According to this article at NetCraft, the Comment Spammers (read slugs and bums), have become so prevalent that some ISP’s are disabling comments in Moveable Type because of load on the server. There are unique rebuild issues that make MT more prone to server drag than some other types of blog software apparently. A rapid fix is proposed.

We have typically choosen WordPress for our blogging (or sometimes poorboys free CMS — or Content Management System if you prefer — solution), comment spam has caused bandwidth drain and headaches for us as well. With the newest release of WordPress, 1.2.2 as of yesterday, spam relief is still not built in. They do in the release announcement offer several solutions. We have in fact used one of those solutions (after some improvements by us) to hopefully eliminate the issue for the time being.
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For those of you who have yet to experience Firefox 1.0 get with the program. Firefox is the best thing in browsers since … well the beginning of internet browsers. It is faster, safer, and well, it is just good. They are already looking ahead to Firefox 2.0 with the next major date first quarter of 2005.

Security company Secunia, has found another serious security flaw in Internet Explorer that can be used by nasty types in cross site scripting attacks. The new flaw effects all versions of IE6 including both SP1 and SP2 patched versions. The answer to the problem, is to disable active scripting in Internet Explorer until a patch is created. Unfortunately Windows update won’t work without active scripting, and neither will a good many other sites.

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MicroSoft has released a patch for a bug in XP SP2 systems where in some instances the firewall will consider the entire Internet as part of an internal network, and trust it as such. The patch was released quietly without the fanfare of normal releases. The flaw effects XP Home Edition SP2, XP Pro SP2, XP Tablet PC Edition 2005 and XP Media Center Edition SP2. And these guys really want people to buy security products from them?

In other news, they have bought an anti-spyware company called Giant, and there are rumours that they will soon release an enterprise class anti-spyware and anti-virus product. The question remains though, will companies buy protection from the company that makes the software that requires such protection in the first place? After all, let’s face it, Microsoft doesn’t have a particularly good security reputation.

Franki