Congeries of cross connected concepts
It looks like waves of junk that are currently sweeping the blogosphere are bypassing my little weblog here. I have been watching the number of banned addresses (upper right sidebar on the main page) dropping over the last week or two. That’s not the case at my other weblogs, which have seen an strong increase in the last couple of weeks. The last junk trackback to this weblog was back on 2 Oct. I can’t decide if it’s because my defenses are too good or the weblog is just too obscure. I did see a major dropoff in junk trackbacks after a technology upgrade, so I suspect a combination — tech good enough to stop the extant junkes and a weblog too obscure to attrack new ones.
But even across all of my weblogs, I am not seeing the level of innovation in junk that I saw over, say, the previous year. The current junk is being stopped essentially by filters I put in 6-12 months ago. That leads me to suspect that the fire has gone out of the junking and only the script kiddies are left.
They do have a lot of machines, though. One change I have seen in the last year is that far more of the junk comes from an address that is used only once. This weblog only bans addresses that generate two or more junk objects. As you can see from the stats, the majority of junk source addresses have generated only a single junk object. That makes banning much less effective, but I think that this change has been driven by the greater ease of banning (through such things as AutoBan). It’s an ameloriative change as it makes non-planned floods much rarer. Any script kiddy can set up one machine to flood junk at a single weblog, but it takes actual planning and resources to do it from enough different IP addresses to be a serious problem.
