View current page
...more recent posts
From daily Kos:
U.S. Encouraged by Vietnam Vote :
Officials Cite 83% Turnout Despite Vietcong Terror
by Peter Grose, Special to the New York Times, September 4, 1967
WASHINGTON, Sept. 3-- United States officials were surprised and heartened today at the size of turnout in South Vietnam's presidential election despite a Vietcong terrorist campaign to disrupt the voting.
According to reports from Saigon, 83 per cent of the 5.85 million registered voters cast their ballots yesterday. Many of them risked reprisals threatened by the Vietcong.
The size of the popular vote and the inability of the Vietcong to destroy the election machinery were the two salient facts in a preliminary assessment of the nation election based on the incomplete returns reaching here.
This interview with a comment spammer should be of interest to bloggers dealing with this online pestilence. In a nutshell, comment spam is legal but unscrupulous use of blogs' comment features to game search engines and drive up traffic to various vice and pharm-oriented websites.
["Sam"] uses the thousands of "open proxies" on the net. These are machines which, by accident (read: clueless sysadmins) or design (read: clueless managers) are set up so that anyone, anywhere, can access another website through them. Usually intended for internal use, so a company only needs one machine facing the net, they're actually hard to lock down completely. Sam's code gets hundreds of open proxies to obediently spam blogs and other sites with the messages he wants posted. They usually target comments to old posts, so they won't show up to people reading the latest ones, though search engine spiders will spot them and index them.The only foolproof solution (or at least the only solution "Sam" admits he dreads) is to install "captchas" on your site, such as randomly generated letters mangled in an imaging program that are readable by humans but not spambots, which would have to be typed in at the start of each comment.