PCA Forums

Anyone here use the TOR browser? I've hard about it but never installed it.

Unless you're worried about a government spying on you (journalists in countries with dictatorships for instance), the average person doesn't need Tor. Tor sacrifices performance for "some" privacy but it's not perfect. You need to use a minimum of 3 nodes. More is better but each node adds latency.

However, as has been pointed out by security experts, ANYONE can setup a Tor node, and you can bet your ass government security agencies - both friendly and not - have Tor nodes of their own. If they own your entry node, they know your IP.

A better tradeoff for private browsing would be a VPN run by a company you can TRUST with a known reputation of not keeping logs, and being pro-active about their user's privacy.

I use ProXPN when I want to do private browsing. Picked up a lifetime license one time when they were on sale.

That's the second time you've spammed us oliv. Cya.

FlyingPenguin wrote:That's the second time you've spammed us oliv. Cya.

Curious what a reverse lookup says about them. Human spam bot in China? AI Bot?!?!

Sucks that php still leaves entries in the posts. Is there any sort of cleanup process that can remove them all?

Wow... My bot senses were tingling since it got here. Necroed a bunch of threads with bland responses and the few that were made in recent threads seemed spammy.

I can delete all his posts. I just disabled the account for now. I can nuke it and kill the posts.

Curious what a reverse lookup says about them. Human spam bot in China? AI Bot?!?!

Actually I did. I get a LOT of spambot registrations (I change the anti-bot question often). I can tell when they're bots because one figures out the anti-bot answer and then 10 bots try to register immediately afterwards. Usually they're either stupid (use a .ru email, or a known one-time use email service, and/or fail to use a VPN and their IP is in Russia or Ukraine or some other strange place - frankly, I immediately throw out any registrations outside the U.S. except the U.K. - or they DO use a VPN and a reverse lookup identifies it as one, and I throw out anyone using a VPN).

Sometimes they're sneakier, but there's a very useful forum spam database that tracks these things, and a quick check of their IP, or username or email outs them.

But this one was different. He/she actually had a sensible sounding username and proper email, their IP was in the US and they checked out on the forum spam database.

So I emailed them and asked them to reply with a reason why they wanted to join our forum. I've done this maybe a dozen times and they usually never reply because they're bots. This one did and gave me a reasonable reply so I let them join.

Yeah, the first plug for a VPN service smelled spammy but I wanted to wait and see. When he made a second identical plug for the same VPN service replying to an old post, that was enough for me.

Very few real people actually want to join (we've had maybe two that weren't from Red-Eye but they haven't posted since), and the rest are all bots, so I just usually ASSUME they're all bots to start with.

So I'm curious - what did this person do in this thread to spam?

Plugged a VPN service twice, with a link to a supposed benchmark, in reply to two really old posts.

FlyingPenguin wrote:Plugged a VPN service twice, with a link to a supposed benchmark, in reply to two really old posts.

Well more than just two posts, he/she necro'd like 8-10 posts that day when I posted that about them.

Can't we just close off registration and make it invite only?

Can't we just close off registration and make it invite only?

Yes, we can close it. Anyone from Red-Eye who wants to be here should have found us by now. We sometimes get an old, lost, PCA member who finds us again and they'll just use the Admin contact page to send me an email if their email addy has changed.