Twitter is currently down for unscheduled maintenance

Talk about being a victim of your own success. Twitter has become my social networking tool of choice, but I wish the service were more reliable. It's just flaked for what seems like the tenth time in the last month, and now only displays the above message when you try and access it. You might regard that as the "this page intentionally left blank" of the web 2.0 world.

Of course the original design inevitably meant that the service is faced with scalability problems, but Twitter hasn't helped matters by providing tools for "weblebrities" like auto-follow (automatically following someone who follows you). Us regular no-hopers, of course, wonder exactly what the point is: if you have 10,000+ followers on Twitter it's self evident that you couldn't give a bugger what any of them are tweeting, which makes the whole thing a rather vacuous exercise to those of us who prefer two-way communications to broadcasts.

I've actually been a member of the open source identi.ca site since OSCON, and while I think it's great that there's an alternative I haven't yet found it compelling enough to be more than an occasional visitor.

Like email spam it's becoming obvious that whenever a new phenomenon arises in the technical world, once it becomes public knowledge the traditional spoilers (marketdroids, celebrities and the like) will climb aboard and screw it up for everyone else. They just haven't realised yet that the rest of the world is just one short step away from telling them to get the hell out. There are a lot of dinosaurs walking around right now, wondering why they are feeling so warm.

Gmail Labels Google Alerts as Spam

I wondered a while ago why I wasn't seeing my Google alerts, and discovered today that's because Gmail is throwing them away as spam. I don't remember ever doing anything that might have triggered such behavior. Left hand, meet right hand ...

Blogger is Buggered?

Well, three posts in a row about Blogger is a little unusual, but I think this is merited.

From time to time I amuse myself by following the "Next Blog" links to get an idea of what was going on in the blog stream. If today's experience is typical then about one blog in three is complete spam, obscured by a pop-up ad window and full of links to pornographic sites. It seems clear that nobody is exercising any kind of critical control over Blogger content, and frankly it's got to the point where I am no longer sure I want to be associated with it.

I've been a web use for a long time, and it saddens me to see a potentially fantastic medium ruined by the swarms of lowest-common-denominator advertiser scum. If this is "what the people want" then they are welcome to it. I really don't think Blogger are doing themselves any favors by letting this situation continue.

Google's Spam Priorities?

So, this bunch of annoying little [expletive deleted]s have recently started spamming one of the newsgroups I haunt with messages about things like "Best Car Air Conditioners". For email my spam filters take care of a lot of this crap, but on newsgroups I pretty much have to take what my NNTP server delivers [and there's a market opportunity right there: millions of Thunderbird users are currently casting around for the next non-Microsoft solution to their problems, and if someone chooses to build a newsreader that integrates Spambayes or some similarly competent technology they could probably make a modest income). Score one if you noticed that I just wrote a half-open interval.*

Being a civic-minded netizen I decide that my only recourse is to make sure that at least these nasty little buggers will have to register new Gmail accounts (not that they will worry about that, as they probably register thirty-five new accounts a day, but anyway ...), so I decide to report them to the appropriate abuse address (even though I realize as I do so that I will either be ignored, or I will be one of several thousand irritated readers who are just as pissed as me).

So. CTRL/U gets me the message headers, and lo! I see

        Complaints-To: groups-abuse@google.com

Hooray! There's a large, responsible, "do no evil" company who is prepared to stand up and stop these little [expletive deleted]s in their tracks. Great. So I send a message (being careful to include all the headers) to the appropriate address and return to work basking in the warm comfortable glow of having done my duty and helped, as best I can, to put an end to the abhorrence of spam (really, sometimes I look at the human race and what I see depresses me: there really are people out there to whom money is so important that they will fund the exploitation of thousands, nay millions, of vulnerable always-on under-protected basement-dwelling computer systems to send out millions of messages a day about how someone is just waiting to transfer several million dollars into their bank account in return for a modest fee for their assistance. Give me a [expletive deleted] [expletive deleted] break).

Having taken the time to compose and send a message to the above-mentioned address, pointing out how the offenders are spamming a programming language group with inappropriate messages, I go about my business feeling virtuous. Only to see, when I next return to the computer, the following email:

This message was created automatically by mail delivery software.

A message that you sent could not be delivered to one or more of
its recipients. The following addresses failed:

 

SMTP error from remote server after RCPT command:
host gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com[64.233.167.114]:
550 5.1.1 No such user v66si6536119pyh

--- The header of the original message is following. ---

Received: from [12.47.149.104] (helo=[12.47.149.104])
 by mrelay.perfora.net (node=mrus1) with ESMTP (Nemesis),
 id 0MKpCa-1INdGx0Vee-0007V8; Tue, 21 Aug 2007 19:36:44 -0400
Message-ID: <46cb7706.4050206@holdenweb.com>

[... etc., etc., ...]

It can't be easy running a large company. If it was easy then I guess I could do it too. So much for help with abuse. I guess we have to turn to the federal government for assistance now. Oh, sorry, that's no good. The federal government stopped taking an interest in the spam problem when it was pointed out that over 50% of the world's spam originated in the USA (though this is now an out-of-date statistic).

I guess it's up to us vigilantes, then. Whar's mah gun?