live by the sword, die by the sword

so yesterday i got a rather rude surprise by email. google, in their infinite wisdom, had decided to label this blog as spam and had locked it, preventing me from publishing what i had planned to publish. if i hadn't acted within 20 days the blog would have been deleted, apparently.

yes, it was the real google and not a spear phishing campaign (it would have made for good social engineering but who'd spear phish me?). they used the exact email address that i only gave to google for my blogger account, and furthermore, when i visited my blogger dashboard (not following the link in the email) it showed the warning about it there plain as day so it was definitely for real.

according to the literature i was seeing, the system by which they identify splogs is automated. they mentioned fuzzy logic, but we know what that means - heuristics (though not the same heuristics used in anti-malware, obviously). although i'm not exactly some hardcore heuristic fanboy i can't help but feel there's a bit of irony in me (or more specifically this particular blog) catching the business end of a heuristic false positive.

there is, of course, an appeal process they give you (so that your blog doesn't get deleted after the 20 day grace period) but i found it a little annoying that there was no indication anywhere that i'd successfully initiated that process and it was only when i checked again today and found the splog notification gone that i had any clue that anything had gone through. the real test, of course, is publishing and that's part of what this post is meant to achieve - if you're seeing this then the blog is back to normal.

what are splogs?

a splog is a form of web-based spam in the form of a blog...

unlike comment spam, in the case of splogs the entire blog in question is spam, not just a small part of it... because blogs are so easy to setup and publish content on it's become a popular way of spamvertising a site...

to combat this type of abuse of service, blogging service providers typically employ anti-spam techniques like CAPTCHAs to prevent the automated creation of splogs but CAPTCHAs are becoming less effective as techniques for defeating them are developed... on top of that, CAPTCHAs don't prevent real live humans from setting up splogs... because of this, blogging service providers try to prune out splogs manually when they become aware of them...

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