Comment of the Week

In a week that brought more than 2,000 spam comments - many of them with vile messages - it's a relief to get back to real comment-droppers, though this is still related to the blog-paralysing attack. I'm giving it  to Brendan, who argues that it was all part of a plan (a vast right-wing conspiracy, as it were) - honorable mention to Tony and Slappy for their quips:

I think this has been a coordinated, targeted attack, and not comment spam as everyone believes. I say this because your blog does indeed have word verification turned ON, which means it wasn't spam-bots haphazardly posting clickable links to rogue sites. Each entry was done by hand, which given the size of each post and sheer volume of them, and, as I'm sure everyone noticed none of the links appeared as embedded links. To me this means someone was deliberatly posting scores of lines in each message, like chaff from a fighter plane, hoping to distract from the issues that you write about.

Another possibility is that they intended to associate tomwatson.typepad.com with porn, kiddie, gay and othewise, by posting keywords that would get picked up by webcrawlers and the blog-crawler sites, and possibly get you blacklisted or banned for illegal content.

Maybe not, but I've seen plenty of things like it in security. Now where's my tinfoil hat? They are going to begin the universe-wide broadcast in a few minutes. :)