Want to find out the biggest reader of this blog? I’ll give you a hint. The biggest reader of this blog doesn’t have a heart, does not care about the content, in fact my biggest reader doesn’t even have the slightest idea of what I am talking about.
That’s because my biggest reader is a machine. And not just one machine, but thousands of machines reading this site, posting comments, and generally poking around looking for new articles day and night.
By analyzing the server logs I can see what incarnate visitors have accessed my blog entries, who it was, at what time, and how long the visitor stayed. What I find is that few, if any seem to be of flesh and blood. I know this because data that is left behind includes what is called an IP address, which is sort of an electronic calling card. The IP address can trace back to the original computer that made the request for my blog entry. Almost exclusively the address traces back to a very large well known company, like Google, but more ominously turn out to be outfits like Dragonara from the British Virgin Islands. So all of these ‘visitors’ are called web crawlers, and they are not people at all but computer programs, and are literally everywhere on the web.
Some web crawlers, like the ones dispatched by Google, are fairly innocuous, methodically visiting (or trying to visit) all of the addressable websites on the Internet. They do this and send the web pages back to the main Google search engine, so that Google can give updated results in their search engine.
Other web crawlers are the nasty ones, dispatched perhaps, by armies of zombie computers. These crawlers are programmed to spread evil by leaving faux comments on unsuspecting blog sites. The comments are known as spam comments, and are chock full of links to virus infected websites. Currently I have 905 comments awaiting approval on the site you are reading, but I know that very few, if any are left by human readers. Because of how blogging software works, most of these nefarious comments never see the light of day. Unfortunately a few do, and the coders of these spambots operate on the one percent rule. If only one percent of ten million spam comments manages to trick an unsuspecting reader into following the link, then that works out to 100,000 potential new visitors to the electronic den of inequity. And by the way the 100,000 visitors that made the cut from the ten million have already demonstrated a propensity to have trigger happy clicking fingers. So that’s just the kind of customer the spammers want.
Fortunately I can quarantine these ‘comments’ by using a moderation feature, which effectively means nothing is published until the moderator (me) approves them. So each month I dutifully dispatch thousands of machine generated virus dripping fodder to the great bit bucket of the skies.
But the bigger picture is one that leaves a pit in the belly of your stomach. All of this machine generated traffic on the web is outnumbering the human spawned traffic from real people, requesting webpages from legitmate websites in order to satisfy their earthly needs. If you crunch the numbers, as I have been on my tiny island in the great vast wasteland of machine generated traffic, you come to an astonishing result: only about 1 in 3,000 visitors appears to be a request from a fellow human reader.
Email spam, which is a cancer that is spreading to all corners of the electronic frontier is another symptom of the ne’er do wells that are hijacking the internet. Corporations spend vast amounts of money to keep the huge amount of spam laden, viagra pitching mail out of employee’s in boxes. You often see estimates (impossible to say for sure, of course) that 80 percent of all email is some form of spam. This statistic is simply staggering! I would have thought 20, 30 or 40 percent spam might be explained away, but the spammers have tipped the balance, and their missives now outnumber legitimate email by 4 to 1.
The internet has easily become one of the greatest technological advancements of the 21st century, allowing unfettered access to information, connecting people from opposite sides of the globe, stimulating economies with an electronic boutique that is available to peoples of all countries all of the time. Allowing open and free exchange of ideas, and generally accelerating the advancement of the world’s common intelligence. The internet is truly a global achievement. But it is threatened by trends like spambots, spam email and machine generated virus spreading crawlers. The information technologists gave us the greatest advancement of our time. Now it is time for them to fix it.
Tags: spam, web crawlers
Well done and leaves me with a “pit in the belly of my stomach” too
A real person here, courtesy of your Mom. This is intriguing to me..had no idea being somewhat of a computer luddite.