Transterrestrial Musings  


Amazon Honor System Click Here to Pay

Space
Alan Boyle (MSNBC)
Space Politics (Jeff Foust)
Space Transport News (Clark Lindsey)
NASA Watch
NASA Space Flight
Hobby Space
A Voyage To Arcturus (Jay Manifold)
Dispatches From The Final Frontier (Michael Belfiore)
Personal Spaceflight (Jeff Foust)
Mars Blog
The Flame Trench (Florida Today)
Space Cynic
Rocket Forge (Michael Mealing)
COTS Watch (Michael Mealing)
Curmudgeon's Corner (Mark Whittington)
Selenian Boondocks
Tales of the Heliosphere
Out Of The Cradle
Space For Commerce (Brian Dunbar)
True Anomaly
Kevin Parkin
The Speculist (Phil Bowermaster)
Spacecraft (Chris Hall)
Space Pragmatism (Dan Schrimpsher)
Eternal Golden Braid (Fred Kiesche)
Carried Away (Dan Schmelzer)
Laughing Wolf (C. Blake Powers)
Chair Force Engineer (Air Force Procurement)
Spacearium
Saturn Follies
JesusPhreaks (Scott Bell)
Journoblogs
The Ombudsgod
Cut On The Bias (Susanna Cornett)
Joanne Jacobs


Site designed by


Powered by
Movable Type
Biting Commentary about Infinity, and Beyond!

« Time To Fess Up | Main | Getting Nervous? »

New Regex Question

OK, I'm still getting these weird blog spams, like this:

A new comment has been posted on your blog Transterrestrial Musings, on entry #4886 (Lousy Salesmen). http://www.transterrestrial.com/archives/004886.html

IP Address: 61.102.44.56
Name: Kimberly
Email Address: naomi@pochta.net
URL: http://aouyktgf.com/nntn/hzmj.html

Comments:

Great work!
[url=http://aouyktgf.com/nntn/hzmj.html]My homepage[/url] | [url=http://wtjpdovz.com/iure/alke.html]Cool site[/url]

They tend to come in pairs, with the same nonsense URLs, but different email addresses and IP addresses.

I've been just deleting them without adding to the blacklist, because I don't want to clog up my blacklist with these nonsense strings that seem to be one (or two) shot deals.

But how about refining previous attempts at a pattern match? Instead of just looking for a string of consonants, how about a string of five consonants containing at least one of the letters "z," "x," or "q"? That would seem pretty safe to me, from a false positive standpoint, and would catch most of them. If so, what would that regex look like?

And I'd like to know what the point is, other than annoyance. Any theories (other than perhaps incompetence on the part of the spammer)?

Posted by Rand Simberg at April 06, 2006 09:30 AM
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.transterrestrial.com/mt-diagnostics.cgi/5290

Listed below are links to weblogs that reference this post from Transterrestrial Musings.
Comments
Post a comment
Name:


Email Address:


URL:


Comments: