<insert crazy ramblings here>

It looks like lewis (the capatcha busting Japanese random text/chat log surrealist spammer) is back again.

I've seen two of my f-list comment that they've been hit with Japanese text for the first time. I'm worried that it selects new people via f-lists, and has chosen mine. Although they're both TAFF nominees, so maybe it's political ;).

Posting frequency is way downfrom it's hight, but I still get a few a month. Usually in a cluster.

Any Lewis victims ever stop getting posts, without f-locking everything, or disabling anonymous comments?

Mythology of the Modern World takes on the question of Why do we get spam email that’s complete gibberish or random sentences from books strung together?

Dale’s one failing, if you could call it that, was a persistant belief that one man could make the world — the whole world — a better place. And with that belief came a corralary: one had a responsibility to try his very best to do just that.

In Dale’s case, he saw the internet as the key.

If you've been getting, link free, unsolicited, capatcha defeating, anonymous comment spam (often in Japanese) from IPs that start with 125.1* (in particular 125.14.157.123) could you raise a support request?

They've temporarily blocked this at least twice, but keep reverting it.

Let's try a bit of mass mailing ourselves.

Please ignore this post. Just trying an incantation out.

Spellcasting L-E-W-I-S!

{ETA: Yep the J-Spam can defeat re-captcha!}

Useful addition to a hosts file to prevent anything from and ads server from being accessed. General info if you want to figure out what I'm talking about.

from Charles Stross's braindump.

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World’s oldest social network reconstructed from medieval land records.

May be of interest to medieval and social network scholars on my flist :)

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I just saw this snippet about MS:

Some populations, such as the Roma, Inuit, and Bantus, rarely if ever develop MS. The indigenous peoples of the Americas and Asians have very low incidence rates.

And immediately thought about the European mutation, that confers HIV resistance, and the way that a lot of stories end up with Natives catching diseases from the colonists rather than the other way round.

Could these three things be related?