My last post here warned, in a cryptic and laconic way, of the dangers of trusting automated processes over human judgment — to wit, it was a Google search for the result of people doing a search-and-replace on the font name “Arial” to replace it with the font name “Verdana”, but also altering content as well as markup, and partial words as well as whole. Thus, “adversarial” → “adversverdana”. Cute, huh? (No, I don't go trolling for that kind of thing. I was reading one of the documents so afflicted.)
Apparently, between that and the way that I'll leave this thing unattended for months while meaning to post stuff but not actually doing that thing (in part because, well, originally I'd been hoping to write actual halfway-decent posts here, not twitters-out-of-place like that), I've been declared a possible spam blog and must now transcribe letters from an image to prove my humanity in order to make or edit posts.
Really? In my last job, I got paged in the middle of the night, on weekends, on weekends in the middle of the night, and even on vacation HOW many times, because some mail system had fallen over with its legs in the air from too much spam? And I spent HOW much time delicately tuning Postfix's rate-limiting, because there just wasn't enough hardware for the spam, but I didn't want to delay actual people's LKML subscriptions or whatever as collateral damage? To get this.
So, on the one hand, I can understand where the Google Overlords are coming from, but on the other hand, I'm kind of insulted. And I usually don't take computers' opinions of me all that personally.
Meanwhile, I note that, mysterious spam flag or no, infrequently updated or no, this blog still comes up in the first page of a Google search for... my name. Which, as it's shared by someone famous enough to have his own Wikipedia page, is not a completely vacuous achievement. Or something.
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