I’m working in California, and I’m swamped during the day, with a lousy internet connection in my hotel (when I say lousy, I mean that it’s wireless narrowband–I could move the data faster by tapping out Morse code by hand, and I don’t know Morse code).

I’ve had to ban blogspot from comments and pings, because I was starting to get a lot of spam with that in the URL. Apparently I wasn’t alone.

About 39,000 fake blogs have been created on the web in the past two weeks, according to an analysis by Technorati, or about 4.6 percent of the 805,000 new weblogs created in that period. FightSplog, which has been monitoring new blogs at Blogspot, recently documented 2,763 porn splogs created by a single “splogger.” Blogspot-based spam blogs recently began featuring names of prominent bloggers in posts, boosting the splogs’ visibility in searches at web-based RSS aggregators like Feedster, PubSub and Bloglines.

It would be nice if Google would share the wealth a little:

But Google itself seems to have closed that hole, according to Jeff Jarvis, who noted that searches on Google are free from the splog listings found in identical searches on PubSub and IceRocket, among others. “Google needs to both fix Blogspot and share its secrets for ignoring blogspam,” Jarvis writes.

Here’s one possible solution, to at least keep it down to a dull roar by no longer allowing automated blog setups:

Suggestion, Google? As bold as this might sound, you should institute an authentication system – a captcha of sorts – for every single post that gets sent through your Blogger service. This means that there’s no more easy rides for the idiots out there who are killing your baby and the blogosphere. The user logs in, enters their post, then has to jump through a captcha hoop – much like commenters have to do on Blogger.com these days. It’s a simple suggestion, and one that you really, really, really, REALLY oughta consider. You were willing to go the ref=”nofollow” route, why stop there?

That was a couple months ago, but I’ve still seen a lot of this crap when I open up the filters.

Anyway, until they wise up, friends don’t let friends blog on Blogspot. Get a real domain, folks.

[Update a few minutes later]

OK, here’s the story at Wikipedia, with some more links.

If an author has forgotten their password, and doesn’t have anything filled out for the birthplace, is there any way for an administrator to find, or change it? I sure can’t find one in version 2.661.

It has now been two days since I’ve been able to access the Bellsouth’s NNTP server, at newsgroups.bellsouth.net. It’s been flaky ever since I started using it over a year ago, when I got my Bellsouth DSL connection, but now it doesn’t work at all. When I try to log in to it, I get a message box from Agent saying that there is an “error reported by server: 502 authentication failed.” It’s done this periodically in the past, but never for this long.

So, have I talked to Bellsouth about it?

I have. I called them three times yesterday, two of which resulted in contact with human beings, and talked to numerous people, both in India and stateside, none of whom knew what to do about it, and most of whom wanted me to reboot my computer (that’s their first-resort solution to everything, even when it clearly has absolutely nothing to do with my computer–for instance, I was trying to reconnect my router to my modem the other day, and the nice woman in Bangalore told me to reboot my computer).

The first person I talked to in the morning said that they would have to try resetting the server, and that it would probably take about twelve hours to take effect. I was dubious. In fact, I’ll go beyond that and say that he was probably lying (or to be more generous, misinformed), but figured that I’d wait and see if anything happened.

I should add that all of these phone calls were preceded by attempts to find some solution on the Bellsouth web site, one of which was a help form that I started to fill out. It demanded the number I was calling from, and the number that I was dialing up on (I have a DSL connection, remember), and refused to accept the form until I would tell it. In addition, it demanded the time and date of occurrence, but the pulldown menu for “year” contained only the years 2002, and 2003, so apparently the folks at Bellsouth aren’t interested in any technical issues that have developed within the past two years.

Also, there are often long delays and sometimes timeouts when attempting to get to the various web pages in the technical support area. But hey, that’s to be expected from one of the largest telecommunications companies in the country, right? I mean, it’s not like they have a lot of bandwidth, or money for servers, when they’re only charging me a paltry hundred bucks a month. After all, that quality tech support over in the jewel of the Empire doesn’t come cheap. Of course, I should mention that my confidence in tech support at Bell South (at least when it comes to solving, or even comprehending, problems more complex than those that can be fixed by rebooting your computer), hasn’t been high since the DNS incident a year ago.

So I called, and got passed from one person who didn’t know what was going on, to another (having to give my phone number to each one, of course, except once, I caught them, and determined that they already knew it–it was all just part of the fun ritual hazing that all Bellsouth customers go through). At one point, I was told that I was going to finally be transferred to a specialist in this area. The moron who picked up the phone started by asking me to fire up Outlook express, so we could determine what was wrong with my email (I guess that I should have been grateful that he didn’t ask me to reboot my computer). Ignoring the fact that I don’t now, never have, and never will use a Microsoft email client, I didn’t have an email problem. I told him this, and told him that I thought he was going to help me with the problem with the NNTP server. He had never heard those four letters in that particular combination before.

I finally managed to get him to pass me on to a tech who actually had heard of NNTP, and explained the issue, once again. It was not authenticating my username and password. It had done so for months, with intermittent failures, but that it had not done so since the previous morning. The culmination of this consversation, and the hours of others that I’d had throughout the day (combined with more time perusing a cryptic and slow tech support web site) was that I finally managed to get him to admit that there was nothing that he could do, that in fact Bellsouth didn’t actually have an NNTP server. What they had was a contractor who ran their news server, and they just forwarded the bellsouth.net domain on it. They had no administrative control over it. His recommendation was to send an email to newshelp@bellsouth.com, and report the problem to them.

I did that last night. I have not yet received so much as an acknowledgement of its receipt–it seems to have simply disappeared into the black hole that is tech support at whatever second-tier rackhouse they’ve hired to provide their customers with Usenet news.

Am I an unhappy Bellsouth customer? You guess.

We’re driving to St. Louis, and then flying back to Florida. Have a happy new year, all, if I don’t check in sooner.

I’m working here with almost-new stuff. We have a Linksys BEFW11S2 V.2 wireless router about six months old, and an HP-Compaq Presario SR1563CL computer, about the same vintage. The wireless seemed to work all right before the computer, when I and others used it for our laptops. But now, with the computer, the connection occasionally (and by occasionally I mean within an hour of non-use) dies. The wireless software widget on the computer claims to see a strong signal, but it cannot connect using the software. The only way to get it working again is to both reset the router, and to hit a hardware “Connect” button on the computer keyboard, that does I have no idea what, except that when we go through these rituals, the connection comes back up (though the wireless widget may continue to say that it can’t make a connection).

Is anyone familiar with either or both of these de-vices, and able to divine what the heck is going on? It’s obviously majorly irritating.

I’m here, but don’t have much time to blog, between getting truculent wireless connections working, family visiting, and working on a proposal with deadlines next week and telecons every day. I do want to note that there’s been a lot of discussion in this post on NSA “spying,” and while I don’t agree with commenter Jane Bernstein, I’m gratified to see that the level of discussion is informed, rational, and civil. May all my comments sections be that way.

We’re heading off to Missouri to visit Patricia’s family for a few days. I’ll probably check in from there, but not until tomorrow, if then. We’ll be back on Saturday, so I’ll save my New Years’ wishes for my return.

I’m getting spammed by poker sites from Blogspot, so I’m going to shut down all blogspot URLs in comments until further notice.

Get a real URL, folks. They don’t cost that much.

Posting will likely be light this week, and next, due to deadlines and holiday activities.