fighting the spam

as some of you may have noticed, i have recently been the victim of blogspam. some soulless, shameless shmucks have been spamming my webspace with abundant linkage to online casinos, and avenues for the procurement of viagra and other such happy penis enhancement products. i'd imagine it is only a matter of time before i start seeing links popping up for smut. i'll spare the explitives.

naturally, i was somewhat pissed about this. having my personal webspace invaded and utilized as a free advertising space defeats my purpose for having a personal webspace. my first order of action was to begin developing mechanisms for anti-spam. this is actually rather difficult. how can i safely identify who should have the right to post to this blog?

while i was working on a quick and dirty solution, i started to think about the government, and how the anti-spam initiatives aren't working, and that someone ought to do something about these spamvertisement agencies. while i was thinking about that, i realized that there are two industries that are at the forefront of innovation for the web. porn and spam. in the internet world, we are all at their mercy. the other day a colleague cited that the online porn industry is like just above pharmacuticals or something.. i started to realize that if the government shut down porn and spam, it would slow the advancement of technology which those of us out there would like to use for more legitimate purposes.

a great analogy is a highly secure corporate network of workstations. each workstation is locked down. the user is not free to install any software, anti-virus and anti-spyware software is running constantly. what you have are bubble children of the workstation world. if your machine so much as sneezes, the network nurse is there with a disinfectant. how do you make any progress in procuring new software? you hope and wait, and if you're lucky, someone will write you back and say no.

this is what is so great about the modern web. everything is open and unregulated. we should enjoy it while we can, because someday we won't have the freedom to read articles about government conspiracy theories, run console emulators, down software and music illegally or upload your own code to your webspace. imagine if you couldn't even deploy your own software to your own webspace.

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