Unfortunately, the spam on my blog appears to have continued. Thus, I've implemented an anti-spam procedure in GTFO: the dreaded CAPTCHA. In the spirit of the framework, though, I've tried to make it pretty easy... all it requires is that you type the word 'orange' in to the form. This wouldn't be enough to fool human attackers, but I believe there's a number of years left in AI/NLP research before my blog will start being spammed again ;-). Sorry for the inconvenience, but I don't like logging in every morning to delete the spam.

In other news, I'm back from the UK. Lots of photos were taken (both by me and by others), and I'm sure I'll have those up soon.

In an interesting twist, you may have noticed that my blog received some spam posts the other day. This seems pretty amazing to me, since I wrote this page myself, and there is exactly one deployment of it (which is here). I can see writing spam bots for popular frameworks like Wordpress, Joomla, Drupal, etc. but this isn't exactly a popular framework ;-). The fact that I got spammed leads me to believe that spammers are applying some sort of machine learning techniques to figure out what looks like a comment form, and what doesn't. It never ceases to amaze me the lengths people will go to in order to spam.

How did I remove it? Well naturally I've been too lazy to code an admin interface (and why would I? I write the blog posts in vi). So, I had to fire up the sqlite driver (I use a database to store the comments) and manually delete them myself. If this keeps occurring, I'll probably try to build in some sort of simple spam filtering AI or at least an interface which makes it easy to delete the spam.

Either way, I'm flattered that people think my website is popular enough that they have to post their spam links on it ;-)