Open Borders
No, not a political essay, actually an interesting surge of visitors from other countries, mainly European. This interests me because I've also seen a surge of spam comments, about 300+ a week. Now, I can't really trace any of said spam comments back to those IPs, nor am I speculating that Europeans are the cause of spam. I'd be very interested to learn I have an international reader base, so feel free to comment to that regard if its true.
However, my theory goes like this. Recently there's been a huge surge in email spam. This is quite a well run operation out of Russia that uses gorgeous virii to send the spam. Why do I call them gorgeous? Because they all act in a Peer to Peer fasion, and have the ability to get around spam filters quite nicely. They do this by including random text (not so hard, but they don't pull from any one bank of words, so it breaks some heuristics) as well as including text in images that can be randomly tweaked, and each are completely different. Now that's cool. Plus it also has a built in virus scanner.
These guys also are really smart and sticking to spams with high click-through rates. Porno and sex pills (sorry, pr0n and s3x p1ll5) are two of the higest, with porn having a whiopping 10% click-through, and pills being way lower. That means for every 10 porn spams, they get someone stupid enough to click on a link in the email. Pretty good considering emails cost roughly $0.002 to send I forget how many.
So, perhaps they're also hitting known blogging software and my blog happened to get put on a hit list. I'm flattered, but luckily my spam filter catchs about 99.9% of them, so it doesn't matter.
Another possibility is some proxy system such as TOR (which, by the way, I feel should have a post of its own, it is a wonderful system, go check it out). This network doesn't have that many exit nodes, so perhaps people view my site via tor, and a few of the exit nodes keep showing up. If this is the case, whomever is viewing the site should restart tor and get a new exit node.
Finally, I'm not ruling out the fact that (since all of the ISPs are in capitol cities) that my blog is on a watch list for some odd reason. I've also noticed hits from DC. Again, flattering, but there's nothing to see here, please move along.
So, to wrap up, I'm curious to know if I'm even at all close to the reason I keep seeing hits from those countries. If you're one of them, and just interested in what i have to say, feel free to leave a comment and let me know, I'd love to know what would draw an international crowd!
