To offer a quick update on the trackback/comment spam attack I reported on yesterday, the attack is continuing in earnest today but things seem to be much more under control now.
reCAPTCHA is still holding the comment spam at bay and I have swapped out Akismet for Defensio in hopes of reducing the number of trackbacks [...]

Yesterday I received an email Ben Maurer, one of the engineers for reCAPTCHA.
In addition to responding to a comment on a post from last week, he alerted me to a copyright case involving Tickmaster (TM) and RMG Technologies. According to the complaint and subsequent injunction (embedded below), RMG produced an application that allowed users [...]

I would like to take an aside and delve into a related topic that has been on my mind for the past few months: Comment spam.
Though it doesn’t have much to do with content theft, I have several reasons for wanting to cover this. First many of the RSS scrapers and spam bloggers also use [...]