Patwa's Paradiso On The Web

Just lil' ol' Me

Recent Entries

25th-Jun-2007 01:00 am - The polluted internet and a tech mystery

Over the last few days I've noticed two big problems which are internet related. One is site spamming and the other slow connections with certain applications.

The existence of spam is nothing new; in fact e-mail spam is a known problem and has been around for years. But now site spamming is taking a lead as well. This is where web pages are set up filled with junk, mostly keywords relating to pornography or medications. These sites are then indexed by Google, usually ending up with fairly high rankings due to manipulation of the way they are indexed and of course deliberate search engine submissions.

For an example, the other day I was trying to find accounts of people who had also come off co-Codamol, who were also taking Amitriptyline and who may have had withdrawal symptoms. So I typed "blog Co-Codamol withdrawal with Amitriptyline" and got about 900 results, with nearly 80% of them being spammed sites. I must add here that I have filters to include pages in a number of foreign languages which I know and understand, but even then this should not make a difference to the search process in terms of results obtained.

This is simply shocking and is one of the ways in which the internet is being 'polluted', by people who have nothing better to do than to waste their talent on something which is most certainly to the detriment of others. I had to post a note to this effect on my forums today, after spending a few days this week cleaning it up du to spam posts. Google and the other big search engines don't seem to care about this, as long as they continue to gain revenue, never mind that people will find alternative ways of finding information if they're not getting the results they want through them.

My second challenge this week was to find out what's causing bone-numbingly slow downloads at one particular DC++ hub. I've used DC++ several times over the last few months; usually I use some of the bigger ones in Sweden due to their high number of members and good quality music content. But this time I was invited to a relatively small hub, so I naturally obliged and logged in. I was getting downloads of less than 500 bytes/sec, even after forcing the client to use standard DC++ ports. And this was with no firewall, no proxy, no router and a straight link to the internet. I even phoned up a friend that works at a telecoms company. This company has a direct link to the external internet, it's about as close as you can get and doesn't go through an ISP or router. She had the same problems. I can't work out why this hub is having problems. No-one else on the hub has reported the problems. DC++ is a user-to-user link for the individual transfers, so unless everyone else on the hub is somehow and for some strange reason limiting their upload speeds, it's very odd and shouldn't be happening. If anyone has a clue, or suggestion to speed things up, I'd be grateful to hear about it. I point out again that this does not happen on any other hub. This is something that's really bugging me because it simply should not be happening.

Anyway, moving on. On the medical front today is the last day for Co-Codamol, actually yesterday I only needed 6, and today's six as well but that's honestly because the toes were playing up. Tomorrow I go cold turkey on the Cods, see you then.

Tags:connections, dc++, google, internet, search engines, slow, spam
Mood:confused
Music:Yazoo - Nobody's Diary

Customize

This page was loaded Dec 1st 2009, 3:09 pm GMT.

Advertisement