Terrorism and countrer-terrorism are not the same thing. You need to learn that- while you still can.

For instance, Arab terrorists use their own women and children as human shields (or combatants, but that isn’t an issue). While trying to murder Israeli civilians, Arab civilians die. Legally and morally, ALL resulting deaths are on the heads of the Arab terrorists.

EVEN THE PALEOS ADMIT THAT THEY USE THEIR OWN AS HUMAN SHIELDS

Press Releases
Ref: 54/2008
Date: 15 June 2008
Time: 09:30 GMT

Stop This Tragedy!

PCHR Concerned Over Casualties Caused by Continuing Internal Explosions: 8 Palestinians, Including a Child, Killed and More than 40 Injured After Explosion in Beit Lahia

PCHR is deeply concerned about the recurrence of internal explosions as a result of weapons being manufactured, and stored, in areas populated by civilians. These actions are threatening the lives and property of Palestinian civilians. PCHR calls upon Palestinian resistance groups to take immediate measures to ensure the non-recurrence of such explosions. The most recent explosion, in Beit Lahia on June 12, killed eight Palestinians, including an infant, and injured at least forty others.

According to investigations conducted by PCHR and eye-witness testimonies, at approximately 13:30 on Thursday, 12 June, a huge explosion occurred in a 400-square-meter house belonging to ‘Abdul ‘Azim Khaled Hammouda in the centre of Beit Lahia town, in the northern Gaza Strip. The house was completely destroyed and dozens of neighboring houses were also damaged, five of them seriously. Ambulances and civil defense crews rushed to the area, and removed victims’ bodies from beneath the ruins of the destroyed house, and neighbouring houses. The victims included 4-month-old Nour Majdi Hammouda, who was killed whilst inside her family home, and 16-year-old Mahmoud ‘Ataya Hammouda, who was killed whilst walking near the site of the explosion.

The ‘Izziddin al-Qassam Brigades (the armed wing of Hamas) stated in a press release issued on 13 June, that 6 of its members were killed “while they were in the final stage of preparation for a special Jihad mission.” Those members have been identified as:

1) Ashraf Na’im Mushtaha, 32;
2) Hassan Mohammed Abu Shaqfa, 28;
3) Majid ‘Aadel Hammouda, 28;
4) Mohammed Sabri Abu Naja, 25;
5) Mohammed Hamdan Miqdad, 22;
6) Ahmed Muneer Subaih, 20.

In light of the above, PCHR:

1) Warns of the dangers caused by continued manufacturing or storage of explosive devices by Palestinian resistance groups in civilian-populated areas, which threaten the lives of Palestinian civilians and violate international humanitarian law.

2) Calls upon Palestinian resistance groups to take effective steps to ensure the non-recurrence of such incidents.

So with home grown bastards like that, why wouldn’t there be some good anti-spam programs coming from Israel? They have the perfect breeding ground

Know why?

1. Because some of the top people in high tech live in Israel.

2. Because Muslim terrorists try to flood Israel with it:

http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3324623,00.html

There is still hope, there are very intelligent people working around the world to keep this under control, but again, the numbers are against them. For every PhD working to combat spam, there’s 100 in Russia, china, turkey, Israel and many other places working against them.

Hani: I know i know .. and this is what kills me. You’d think by now that all internet users can recognize spam and ignore it. But it seems that every now and then somebody clicks on a link somewhere. Specially if the true link address was hidden and not visible directly. For example, i might be telling you about a super cool and awesome site, but it turns out to be a spam site. I don’t know. But somehow, spammers still find value in spam.

There must be someone out there clicking their links. On both emails and wordpress comments, as soon as I get spam, I make sure I do my part by pressing the report spam button. Wordpress reports it to akismet, and my webmail is gmail which I’ve found handles spam much better than yahoo. in fact yahoo sends their own spam the bastards (particularily if you didn’t go deep into their preferences and configure the marketting settings). I haven’t tried hotmail.

A couple of comments on your additions:

#1: I really hate whitelisting-through-registration approach. I hate being forced to register on a news site for example, if i only just wanted to leave one comment. I don’t want to have a million usernames and passwords for the many sites i visit. I guess a global ID (openID) and single sign-on would solve this, but this is not there yet.

#2: As for tracing the back-routes and utilizing the underlying infrastructure. I guess i meant for people like me who have their engine on a shared server (separate from WP), or for people who build and host their own blogging engines, it is probably still infeasible to really do nifty infrastructure checks in an efficient manner (specially since the hosting resources might not be that good to begin with).

#3: I am interested in your input on my bot-nets attack that is mentioned above. In my mind, i didn’t have these participating nodes sending “spam” at a high speed. If i let each of them post a spam message every 30 minutes or so. The server probably won’t notice a storm of activities, but rather a normal flow, yet the annoyance will still be delivered to the blog owner and readers. What do you think ?

And by the way, i agree with you; Captchas are just a temporary solution and their days are numbered.

The second thing is white-list processing. For IP’s and identities. Which is what many of the very popular sites (ZDnet, Cnet, Gizmodo…etc). The person has to be cleared to comment, either by forcing them to register, or by adding their IP (manually or automatically) to a shortlist of users that are allowed to comment.

There are many tricks up the sleeves of anti-spam world, some that are being developed right now to identify heuristics, and utilize telemetry information, that is -unlike you have concluded above- can utilize underlying network infrastructure to trace back, the comment to it’s original site and see if say there’s a shared router that has previously spammed the site, taxing it with a higher spam mark just because it’s shared with someone who has spammed before.

What you describe above of Hani, KJ and you doing the spamming is EXACTLY the scenario of a bot-net this network of compromised machines does this coordinated attack that might disrupt the service. Luckily, those types of attacks are getting more and more simpler to detect and stop. If I recall correctly, Google, Hotmail and others are able to detect and react in less than 45 seconds. (which is plenty of time to send few million spams) then spammers resorted to what’s known as “fast flux” networks which are bot-nets that keep changing IPs very rapidly. Again these are being identified and blocked in reasonable amount of time.

Spam is not hacking, it’s not using the system beyond what it’s designed to do. In fact, it’s using the system in EXACTLY what it was designed to do. No one would dare say, “spam days are numbered” but I can confidently say that Captcha’s days are numbered (just today, one spammer broke my reCaptcha) Luckily, I had other precautions and the spam didn’t get through

If you’re really bent on spamming my blog, you don’t have to go through a lot of hoops to do it, just copy-paste and you should be good to go. I seriously encourage you to go ahead and try, I mean, what better testing can I get?

Go for it , I’m a good sport…. I promise!