Comments are back ... but who knows for how long

Los Angeles Newspaper Group guru Josh Kleinbaum got the comments flowing once again to Click, but the spam is hitting pretty hard, too, so who knows what will happen.

The biggest change in the insidesocal.com blogs is the removal of the IP block that shut all of Europe out of these blogs; not a good thing when you write about Linux and other free, open-source software, which I've learned is way bigger in Europe than it is here.

In any event, I'd like to welcome back the many European readers who can now see these entries. I apologize for the blackout and hope it's the last time something that drastic will ever happen again.

I'm hoping that the blog administrator(s) will be beefing up the comment security, possibly with CAPTCHAs ("word-verification," as Blogger calls it; or "squiggly words" as most normal people know it).

Two things against CAPTCHA -- the blind hate it, and there are clever spammers who get unwitting people to type in the CAPTCHAs for them by showing free porn and requiring the porn-watchers to type in CAPTCHAs of other blogs that are funneled to their screens in order to, ahem, keep the porn flowing. It's ingenious; I don't know how easy it is to do this, or if it's anything more than a myth, but it would be sad to lose yet another way to keep comments spam-free, although it's a very clever (yet malicious) hack just the same. Here are some articles on it:

Boingboing: Solving and creating captchas with free porn

ZDnet UK: Spammers use free porn to bypass Hotmail protection
Sitepoint: The end of CAPTCHA?