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For many years I have exhorted you in vain, with gentleness, preaching, praying and weeping. But according to the proverb of my country, 'where blessing can accomplish nothing, blows may avail.' We shall rouse against you princes and prelates who, alas, will arm nations and kingdoms against this land…and thus blows will avail where blessings and gentleness have been powerless.
[St. Dominic, to the heretical Albiginses, Encyclopedia Brittanica]
« Carnivalia and an open thread | Main | For exam question #3… »
Category: Weblogs
Posted on: December 9, 2007 1:01 PM, by PZ Myers
Then you might want to read this—it looks like it was a trojan horse for a spammer. I notice that some of the more web-savvy bloggers edited out the sneaky code when posting it, but the rest of you might want to look back at the code.
(hat tip to Coturnix)
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Comments
Posted by: Blake Stacey | December 9, 2007 1:38 PM
Now I feel like a dunce for noticing that something was fishy, deleting the ALT text and not saying anything about it when I posted the result.
Posted by: Mike Haubrich, FCD | December 9, 2007 2:03 PM
I knew something was wrong when the answer came back so quickly for my site and rated it "high school." It didn't even take the time to read the Meta data, how could it possibly rate the content?
I am not saying that Tangled Up in Blue Guy should be higher rated, I am just saying it didn't get rated.
Posted by: Mike O'Risal | December 9, 2007 2:12 PM
I always take out the gratuitous code that doesn't look like it does anything useful. All I've got on my blog is the graphic, but I'll probably get rid of that now as well.
Posted by: dorid | December 9, 2007 3:05 PM
I also routinely examine and take out extra code when I do quizes and rating or anything like that. A lot of these things either include or are fronts for advertising. I don't see anything really extraordinary about this one in particular.
Posted by: Wesley R. Elsberry | December 9, 2007 3:26 PM
I had noticed the bad HTML code on Dec. 2nd.
Posted by: arachnophilia | December 9, 2007 3:33 PM
html literacy FTW.
Posted by: Candice | December 9, 2007 3:38 PM
Isn't this sort of thing usually the case when it comes to these blog tests and quizzes? I'd always assumed so, which is one reason I'm not in the habit of posting them. They almost ALWAYS have a link back to a page filled with ads. Even if it's just Blogthings, I'd prefer not to be getting anyone rich based on my results to some lame "Which Carebear are You?" quiz.
Posted by: craig | December 9, 2007 3:41 PM
Ooooh, do they have an atheist Care Bear?
What does he have on his tummy?
Posted by: decrepitoldfool | December 9, 2007 4:01 PM
I saw the link, changed it to point to the Predatory Lending Association.
Posted by: toomanytribbles | December 9, 2007 5:20 PM
i had already deleted the extra link under the image, but after reading this i also replaced their image with mine so they can't serve up an different one.
i liked decrepitoldfool's idea though.
Posted by: toomanytribbles | December 9, 2007 5:36 PM
.... i just went back and noticed that that older 'film rating' test did something similar with a dating site. i just revised the code accordingly. it points to the original, but the image is mine.
pz, you have that one on your blog as well.
i'm too lazy to go through the older posts for now.
Posted by: j | December 9, 2007 6:54 PM
decrepitoldfool, that site is hilarious! And true, sadly enough.
Posted by: greg laden | December 9, 2007 8:05 PM
Since I use Linux, I cannot be affected by this kind of spam, but in the version I put on my site, I believe I edited out the bad code. Or at least most of it. I'll have to check when I get back to the Blog Cave.
Posted by: Greg Laden | December 9, 2007 9:26 PM
Now, I 've looked at the original source of this problem, and I don't get it... What is Aurther whining about? Has he never seen an ad before? I simply altered mine so that the ad was disarmed, in fact, improved.
Posted by: Bonzo | December 9, 2007 11:10 PM
I pumped in a couple of websites and the ratings
seemed reasonable except for a couple of anomalies
and then noted on the Periodic Table (XI-13):
"Also I pumped in a web-site that is currently an empty template for OurProvost and out popped the opinion that the blog was college level. Kind of hard to imagine the basis for this conclusion since there aren't any posts yet.
Caveat lector."
I am very leery of weird html that isn't completely
transparent so didn't bite on that.
Ciao,
Bonzo
Posted by: bcpmoon | December 10, 2007 4:11 AM
I also spotted the spam and kept quiet. Lesson learned. Now the post points also to the PLA.
Posted by: Susannah | December 10, 2007 4:44 AM
I am always suspicious of these things. I saved the graphic alone and posted it without any of their coding. However, I did send other people to look at it; they may not have been so cautious. Mea culpa.
That's the last time I even look at online "tests" and quizzes.
Posted by: Graculus | December 10, 2007 8:32 AM
It's not a Trojan, a virus, or malware. It's just sneaky advertising. Can we please not spread panic, the next thing this will be showing up in one of those hysterical "flaming monitor virus" chainmails.