Comments now moderated

Thanks to alert readers Zack and Luca I have turned on comment moderation. To be honest, I didn't know blogger had implemented comment moderation! Where have I been? I still think that we should be working to get ICANN and registrars to have policies against spammers... I am not giving up, merely making a tactical retreat into comment moderation.

Blogiast - Join with me to stop Irritating Spammer

If you write about VoIP you probably get spam comments to your blog, as I do. Lately I have been receiving a torrent of them from a user named "Blogiast" -- flogging a useless website. Rather than just keep deleting his posts, I decided to track him down. After not receiving any response to email sent to the email address of the domain owner in question, I decided to contact the registrar of the domain and complain about the behavior of its owner. This message actually received a reply. Here it is:

Dear Mr. Shelton,

thank you for the information.
Unfortunately the domain owner does not use our servers, therefore we cannot
see where the spam is coming from.
We cannot help you in this matter, if the domain owner is spamming your blog
please contact him directly.

There is no legal possibility to switch his domain of because of some entries
in a bog (sic), sorry.

If you have evidence that the address provided in our whois is not correct
please inform me and we will contact our customer in order to get actual data.


Best regards,

Marius Wunner

- - - - -

PSI-USA, Inc.
ICANN Accredited Registrar
Marius Wunner
Maximilianstr. 6
93047 Regensburg
Germany

Tel. +49 941 595 590
Fax. +49 941 595 79050
E-mail: contact@psi-usa.info

I urge all of you to do as I have and contact PSI-USA, Inc. to express your concern about blog comment spam. Registrars should have policies which allow them to shut off services to bad net citizens. Here is what I wrote to him:

Marius:

Thank you for your email. I have, of course, attempted to contact the registrant directly. The spam comments have continued.

I am certain that you are as worried as I am about the degradation of the Internet by spammers. If our email boxes and blog comments fill with useless spam we will be forced to abandon emailing and blogging. While no one individual or company can solve this problem, we can all make a difference by standing up to the problem -- I urge you to have a company policy which clearly communicates to your customers that misuse of this kind will result in a forfeiture of services.

Ted Shelton

If we all just sit here and spend our time deleting spam, it will continue. But we are a community and we can band together to track down and stop anti-social behavior. The first step in this thousand mile journey is to contact Marius, the company he works for, and ICANN. Let's do it!

Hypothesis: Cellular Companies Buy WiFi Licenses to Squash WiFi

No direct evidence to support this hypothesis -- but why is Sprint's WiFi service at the Oakland Airport (a) so bad and (b) so expensive? Is it because they would rather have me using their cellular data services? So did they purchase the exclusive license to WiFi at Oakland's Airport in order to screw it up? Anyone know?