Can Spammers Spell?

Why do Spam emails have so many spelling errors? Is it because Spammers can’t spell, or are they deliberately trying to beat Spam filters by introducing minor spelling errors: I suspect it is the former.

Echo Comments

I’ve noticed a certain pattern in Spam Comments to this blog recently – and it’s all since I disabled my rudimentary javascript Spam filter. Basically, the comment has a line or two echoed from the post, or another comment in the page, and then one or two simple additions to this phrase, such as “Good!” At first glance, they are all sane comments, except that they don’t really add anything. And, they all point at pages that have a list of links, none of which have any relevance to the post from which they were linked to, and I assume would generate Advertising revenue for some scumbag. The other thing which is a trigger they are Spam comments is that the email addresses are all @yahoo.com, and the IP addresses are all from a small subnet. And the comments are appearing in bursts, and, I’ll be honest here, I’m not getting too many comments any more. Looks like it’s time to re-implement the javascript filter in addition to Blogsome’s (rather useless, apparently) CAPTCHA.

Disable Windows Key(s)

When playing World of Warcraft, we use a program called TeamSpeak to communicate, rather than trying to type madly like idiots. It works pretty well, and most users have a push-to-talk key setup, so that you only transmit when this key is pressed. This is all well and good, but sometimes users have the Alt key as their PTT key. But WoW uses the Tab key as Select Nearest (or next) Enemy. So, if our rogue, and Main Assist, Heropsycho is running towards a target, and talking, there is a fairly high chance he’ll Alt-Tab out of WoW, and have to wait for the system to catch up before rejoining the fight. And, it turns out that Hero is our main damage dealer, so being without him is rather bad. Enter this idea. Remove the mapping for the Win key, so this can be the PTT key. Save the following into a text file, with the extension .reg:

1     Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
2     
3     [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Keyboard Layout]
4     "Scancode Map"=hex:00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,03,00,00,00,00,00,5B,E0,00,00,5C,E0,00,00,00,00

Double-click this file, and restart. You can them map Win as your PTT key, and pressing it will no longer open the Start Menu. I mean, when was the last time you used this key to get to the Start Menu anyway? Or, you can get the file from http://files.schinckel.net/disable_both_windows_keys.reg.