Veerle's blog

Boy do I hate comment spammers, they make life miserable! :-( Right now my blog is under attack and I loose lots of time in research to find the bastard to block him permanently. He’s using spoofed IP addresses and this makes it extra nasty to find who is doing this. A Google search brought me to the conclusion that I’m not the only one right now who is suffering from the same comment’s spammer.

If you are as busy as me you try to save as much time with meetings at a client as possible. Sometimes I find meetings such a waste of time, considering the time you spend in a car. This is mostly longer then the meeting itself. Like today, I had a meeting at 9 a.m. this morning in Leuven. If my GPS is not mistaken, it would take me 55 minutes to get there. Well, since I needed to be there at 9 a.m. I knew this was really impossible to get there on time considering all the traffic jams I have to face around 8 a.m. So I counted 1,5 hour and left around 7.30 a.m.

Yesterday I got hit by comment spam for the first time since my blog started in 2003. My guess, that’s the toll to pay when a blog is growing up. Both spammers were from the US (no surprises here) and only one I could trace as a Verizon customer. I’m sure many popular blogs have been down this road before but for me this is new territory. I’ve sent an e-mail to the abuse address from Verizon and blocked both IP addresses.

According to the rumor mill Apple is still facing some heavy red tape in bringing the Music Store over to Europe. The original target was to get it in place in the first half of 2004. The European Union wants us to believe that Europe is one unity but this proves them more then wrong. So what’s the hold up? Well, Apple wants a European-wide deal to provide a consistent and uniform Music Store. However, regional licensing fees and distribution of those fees remain to be an obstacle. In other words everybody wants to fill their pockets and nobody sees the greater good.

In the mean time they’re still losing money. A few months ago Apple past the 30 Million mark in the US alone, so are those decision makers really that blind? It should be clear that regional stores are not the answer here. A lot of songs in the US store are interesting for me, like all those great songs from the 80’s. I love the 80’s btw. A direct result of all this is that the launch-goal may fall as far back as August 2004… but this remains a moving target. I am ready to buy and I think a lot of others too but this is becoming a joke isn’t it? 

It’s bad enough that my mailbox of Entourage is filled with spam everyday but now we also have to be careful with the option of comments on blog’s like mine. What happened is that someone wrote an automated comment spammer for Movable Type. I am not using Movable Type so maybe I am still safe for now since my blog is powered by pMachine.

pMachine has some measures build in to prevent such a thing but still the thought that spammers are taking this route isn’t a happy one. It would be a shame if all popular blog’s are disabling there comments since that’s a part what makes them attractive in the first place.