Yearly Archives: 2003

Link Spam Alert

This entry was posted in Blogging on by

Both Jaquandor at Byzantium’s Shores and Teresa Nielsen Hayden at Making Light report a new p*rn scam targeted at blogs.
This is what the scammers have done as described by Teresa:

The other thing this supposed weblog has is a titanic blogroll some 3,500 entries long. It�s an utterly indiscriminate list. It links to conservative religious websites, and to weblogs in languages that don�t use the Roman alphabet and haven�t been transliterated, and to random pages on About.com, and to the official website of the California Sociological Association, to name but a few.
It looks like the proprietors harvested the addresses of everything that looked like a weblog and tossed them into their list, not even pausing to weed out the false positives. The links go out, the webloggers learn via Technorati or some comparable site that they�ve been linked to, and they go to have a look.

I won’t give the scammers a link or name their site. Just be aware that if you have a new linking site that you don’t recognize and that has a title that suggests you might get to read about someone’s carnal adventures then you will get some apparently poorly done versions of that and a whole bunch of p*rn advertising.

Late Night Reading

This entry was posted in Education Late Night Reads on by

A Rawlsian response to home schooling and…read the comments (even if Will Baude doesn’t like comments). If you are not already doing so you should read Crooked Timber every day…whether you are left, right or orthogonal.
Barbara Karkabi interviews Molly Ivins for the Houston Chronicle. Via Mad Kane.
This review of Mystic River presents a different picture than the one linked in last night’s Late Night Reading.
George Lakoff will help you understand the framing of ideas in political discourse. Useful to all persuasions. Via David Isenberg who was talking about the telecom industry.
Good Night!

Disregarding Bad Laws

This entry was posted in Law on by

Glenn Reynolds argues that there are too many laws on the books:

There are too many laws � many of them contradictory or obscure � for any person to actually avoid breaking the law completely.

and that breaking some of them may not be a bad thing:

And given that many laws are dumb, actually following all of them would probably bring society to a standstill,
….
Sometimes � not often, but sometimes � the best way to get a law changed is for people to ignore it. As, I suspect, they ignored the one about oral sex in Georgia.. . .

Which leads me to wonder 1) why there are not madatory sunset laws at all legislative and regulatory levels and 2) when we are going to start electing folks based on the laws they will eliminate instead of the special interests that they will bolster.
Via Talkleft.