When I found out that a spam blog called "literacyintheclassroom.com" was republishing the entire content of my blog, and several other blogs, I first posted a screenshot of how my material appeared on the other site, and then a screenshot of how my screenshot had appeared on the other site. That site was also serving up an ad for "A Story Before Bed," a service that lets users with a webcam record a video of themselves reading a kind-friendly story.

Anyone interested in teaching about remix culture might be interested in creating an assignment like this. I used the spam blogger's scraper against him, and used the media service he was advertising in order to communicate my displeasure. See: "Scrape, Scrape, Spam Blog, Have You Scraped My Site?" -- Dennis Jerz

Kaironews was shut down tonight by our ISP for very excessive use of CPU resources on the server. I believe the problem was caused by spammers and ill-behaved search engines (I found one such instance of the latter).

Since those of us who use the site don't want this to happen, I've

• Temporarily enabled the bad behaviour module. This blocks some spammers at the Drupal level; it may or may not help reduce CPU usage.
• Banned the offending IP range which occupied 11 of the top IP's in terms of page visits this month at Kairosnews and used .99 GB's of the 4.7 GB's used this month. (Sorry Platypus Matt. If that happens to be you using multiple computers at your insitution to see if anyone replied to your posts, you are now effectively blocked at the server level ;-) )
• Limited news aggregator and search access to logged in members.
• Enabled Drupal's caching and throttling mechanism for anonymous users. If you are logged in, it won't affect you. But if you visit Kairosnews without logging in, you may not see the most recent content as Drupal will pull some pages directly from its cache. This should help as these tools were designed specifically for drupal.org and other popular sites using Drupal to survive a Slashdotting.

I think I may have been scammed...And I'm worried about it. If it is a phishing scam, someone went to a whole lot of trouble. I'm still not sure either way, but I thought I'd provide the details here and hope that some wiser and more experienced folks might provide some insight.

Here's the story. On March 16, I received an email from someone named "Robert Porshke," who claimed to be working on a master's exam project at the academy of fine arts in Umea, Sweden. He said that he'd read some of my works on Armchair Arcade, specifically this piece on game audio. Here's a quote from the email:

Along with the exhibition we will release a catalog as usual. But it's going to be more like an anthology with text about subjects we are interested in, instead of the usual description of our works and self promotion. This will hopefully increase it's lifespan and audience, since you won't need to see the exhibition to enjoy the catalog. We also plan to distribute it together with a culure/art-magazine.

I'm sure that by now you've heard about Brian McWilliam's expose on spammers, Spam Kings. I'd read a very flattering Slashdot review by Michael Gracie, and decided to check it out. Like Gracie, I enjoyed the book and will probably never look at the many spams I receive in my inbox everyday the same way. While the book is certainly no treasure of English prose or what-have-you, there are worse ways to wile away long afternoons than reading about spammers like David Hawke and Dr. Fatburn, or anti-spammers like the mysterious Shiksaa. If you've ever wanted to know about the creeps responsible for all those penis enlargement ads in your email, this is a book you'll want. It reads in some ways like Hackers, except here we read about the anti-heroes of cyberspace.