July 01, 2004
Bot or pseudonym?

I can't tell if the person who just now left the second comment on this post is a joker with a good working knowledge of Internet trivia, or someone testing out a new comment-bot. Anyone wanna take a guess?

Posted by Charles Kuffner on July 01, 2004 to Blog stuff | TrackBack
Comments

Hmm...could this be another round of propaganda a la the letters to the editor scheme earlier this year? Some of the language and stories in that post is remarkably similar to this one:

http://braden.buzzword.com/discuss/msgReader$361?mode=day

and this one:

http://www.liddyletter.com/marineInIraq.htm

(Note that the latter is on a G. Gordon Liddy site and reportedly "passed through the military grapevine")

The comment you received is so fragmented and awkward that it almost seems like it must be some sort of bot. Very odd indeed.

Posted by: sarah on July 1, 2004 10:09 PM

PS - Since you're running MT, maybe you should run a WHOIS on the IP address of the poster? Might be interesting...

Posted by: sarah on July 1, 2004 10:17 PM

I'd guess "joke", Charles. A while ago someone was running a Markov chain-generated warblog whose supposed author had a very similar name.

Which is not to say that it's not a joke using a comment spam delivery method.

Posted by: Steve on July 1, 2004 10:28 PM

It's definitely some sort of bot. I just saw it on Warblogging.com.

http://www.warblogging.com/cgi-bin/mt-comments.cgi?entry_id=599

Posted by: Charles E on July 2, 2004 5:03 AM