Phlogging

Last night, while trying to comment on one of the blogs I frequent, I received this message:

Your comment was denied for questionable content.

Yes! I’ve hit the big time. Next up is an AM radio syndication deal, VH-1’s Behind the Music (you don’t want to know), an “unauthorized” biography, and a cover story in Sunday’s Parade, eventually leading to an ambassadorship to Iceland or New Zealand.

But… the trouble appears to be a horked MT-Blacklist, used to thwart comment spam. In the past, it’s had
problems where strings like .com
or fr ended up in the list, blocking more than intended. It’s likely to be choking on the letter E. For example, Woodstock saw it failing with the phrase “Can I post a comment?”
Iceland will have to wait as fame eludes me again.

This points to the potential problems in a centralized resource like the blacklist, especially since most of us don’t have a fallback. Another example that hit me recently was when my ISP had a DNS outage. I couldn’t connect to much. Even entering in IP addresses failed because many of the sites I frequent reside on multiply-hosted farms that use the name to ferry me to the correct stuff. There’s no mention of the cause, other than denial that it’s related to pharming attack.

Which raises another question: what is up with all the ph names? What’s next, phlogging — fake blogging designed to get people to comment so their psychographic data can be used by the orbital mind control marketers? Don’t laugh, researchers
are publishing with it today.