Evolution and monotremes, spam and off-topic Google searches

This post will discuss monotremes in evolution, but first a diversion to the reason for this topic.

I got a comment submitted from "Izumu":

"Hi Stephen,
I am Izumi from TBS TV, a Japanese TV company. We are intersted in the platypus egg photo you posted on your blog of 19 Mar 2008. I couldn't find your email address and that's why I'm making comment trying to be in touch with you. Could you kindly write me back to xxxxx@nifty.com ? Please don't post my comment since it includes my email address. Thank you very much for your coopereation. Izumi "

I post a reproduction of this comment sans email address, although I was inclined to include it anyway.

I get quite a number of spam comments posted, which is why comments are moderated.  I'm not inclined to reply to this request directly, because:
a) It was off topic;
b) The email address wasn't from an official TBS domain - Nifty is just a Japanese ISP.

Usually I just mark spam as spam.  I don't usually get a comment that's so close to falling either way.


There's a few pictures of platypus eggs on the web.  As it happens, mine is now at the top of Google Images.  It was a bit of a tragedy in some ways, because the actual topic of the post was the evolution of milk, but it gets caught in the wrong net.  If you want to communicate about platypus eggs, talk to someone who's communicating about platypus eggs.

The reason they appear to us to be strange is just a quirk of evolution: they are the last representatives of the earliest types of mammal.  The only egg-laying mammals (protherians) left are the monotremes, two species of echidna (porcupine-like creatures) and one of platypus, all native to Australia/Papua New Guinea.  Yet the first mammals were egg-layers.  Marsupials (metatherians: live but under-developed birth) and then placentals (eutherians: live birth) were a much more recent development, as the technology of birth evolved over tens of millions of years.

The oddness of the platypus may initially be due to their appearance, including webbed feet and a duck-like bill.  The fact that  they're mammals that lay eggs draws people in more.  But they are distinctive for two more reasons: they have poisonous spurs on their ankles (which seem to be for breeding purposes!), and they hunt through muddy water by sensing electrical fields.

The platypus, in evolutionary terms, is not so odd.  Pretty much all these features have evolved separately in other animals.  That's evolution: the time spans involved are so vast that if mutation can produce a lasting feature once, it can do it again.

No, the true oddness of the platypus lies in its survival to a time where most of its features are seen as uncommon.  There's a warning there: the survival of features that do not catch on (radiate) more broadly - in numbers or variety - is more indicative of desparately clinging to a vanishing niche than of evolutionary success.

Why moderate comments? Or, Attack of the spambots

I reckon I just got hit by a spambot.

A comment on a 2006 post of mine on CeBIT (seeking the future at CeBIT) seemed a bit off-topic. So I did a search of one of the less common phrases.

I found that since December 2009, someone had been posting an identical comment on a number of blogs.  Something about some research into online marketing.  The spammer was obviously not the originator of the words - the original probably resides somewhere in the recesses of Google, buried under this avalanche of spam.  The original was making a point that small business was looking to email for marketing (the phrase I extracted was "banner and search crowd a little wary") - not exactly riveting news.  But it was buried in a somewhat inscrutable turn of phrase which would make it past someone who was too busy to pay attention.

The comment concluded with a link to a website that basically hawks... stuff.  A disparate bunch of stuff, with no commonality save to sell to passing traffic.

It must be a slow way to market.  Using http://whois.domaintools.com, I found it to be run from Texas, possibly someone purporting to provide search engine optimisation services.

It's a slow way of making a living.  It would make more sense if someone wrote some code to automatically trawl blogs to add comments under a revolving list of names.  Maybe: most of the blogs didn't need someone to register to make a comment.  One comment was made as a registered user, requiring a registration process (which was created only this month) which is less susceptible to automation, making the effort somewhat less explicable.

...Just investigating the phenomenon, I see Wikipedia has a page on it: Spam In Blogs, which it characterises as a form of "spamdexing": using less than ethical methods to increase a page's profile in search engines.  So it doesn't even need people to click through to the site to achieve the objectives; it just needs the comments to hang around to be caught by the search engine(s).

That's one of the reasons I moderate comments on this blog.  This means a comment doesn't show up until I get notified to approve it.  I'd say I reject more comments than I allow, which shows how much off-topic spam gets posted.

Understandably, this results in confusion over whether the comment has taken hold, so some people try reposting a comment.  My apologies; bear with me please.  And don't make the comment too off-topic, or it might not make it.

14-Jan-10 Update:  Spammers don't even read the posts.  Another just tried again!
18-Jan-10 Update: Same again.  The phrase this time:"By the way, did you guys hear that some chinese hacker had busted twitter yesterday again".  The point: if you are suspicious, drag part of the post into google, see if it's been around the blocks.

22-Jan-10 Update: This is getting ridiculous. 2010 will be the year of the spambot!
I just got another comment that seemed totally innocuous:
"I recently came accross your blog and have been reading along. I thought I would leave my first comment. I dont know what to say except that I have enjoyed reading. Nice blog. I will keep visiting this blog very often."

- but because it was off-topic, I did a google search, and found multiple copies of that comment - complete with typo (or spelling mistake, if it was Chinese-originated).  The only other part of that comment was a web link, which I don't need to reproduce.

Two possibilities:  comment spam is trying to get smarter, or they borrowed a contentless comment from elsewhere.

So if it is the year of the spambot, don't bother publishing comments unless they are clearly on-topic.  Otherwise, you're propagating free advertising at best, or carrying links to nefarious sites at worst.

The (temporary) collapse of spam - #7 for 2008

I'm not sure this can be counted as being of equal substance with other issues in this series. But it has been noticeable. The forced closure of a single US spam emitting enterprise has dramatically reduced the amount of email spam circulating - and the effects are still evident months later.

Spam is more than an annoyance, it is also a resource burner at a time we need to conserve resources. It's a surprise that the emission would turn out to be largely generated from one source. Possibility: they passed through the spammer community such an attractive offer of services that 80% of the business came their way. Another possibility: they offered massively bulked services to a relatively small bunch of miscreants. I cannot tell, but there were certainly several quite distinct lines of "service" that dried up. Most comprised offers of (Indian-sourced) pharmaceuticals that were either pirates of real medicines (I presume) or out and out snake oil. There seemed to be several separate variants on this. Another line that largely dried up purported to be Russian women offering themselves in the home of a better life overseas. That could well be a variant on the Nigerian scam though.

I should note that I have two email addresses. I don't know how each got infected - I'd sorely love to know about the second infection, since I was trying to keep it clear. Possibly I registered to a relatively legit website with lax security that allowed itself to be scraped for email addresses.

The first address dates back at least 10 years, and was mainly infected by poorly-grammared Nigerian scam offers. These died over time, replaced by a smattering of miscellaneous "offers". It attracts hardly any spam right now, so erstwhile spammers must have either not onsold my address, or the remnants were hooked to that US server.

On my main, newer email, they're mainly tempting me to click on a link. I don't know where they lead, since I don't know that my security protects me sufficiently from link-clicks. And there's only three a week now, effectively taken care of by SpamFighter, but quite frankly overwhelmed by the number of tech mailouts that I haven't bothered unsubscribing from. But at least I have that choice.



Update 13-Jan-09: The spam is back in volume. It took a matter of months to ramp up again. It's unclear whether it's one source that has finally found a new home, or whether it involves a distinct community of spammers which has collectively found a new home.