I’ve been neglecting XDev, a group blog Andrew McLaughlin and I tried to get off the ground last fall. Given that the blog runs on Moveable Type 2.64 and that I didn’t have anti-spam plug-ins installed, I expected to need to trim a few weeds before attempting to revive it.

But I didn’t expect 2,200 comment spams. Wow. BlogAfrica was comment spammed recently and I thought the 250 spams it generated in a week constituted a heavy attack. I guess the Google Juice of cyber.law.harvard.edu makes XDev a tempting target.

I installed Jay Allen’s lovely MT-Blacklist and was able to lop off 1,800 spams in a single pass. But that left me with 400 spams not yet detected by Jay’s blacklist. So I spent a decent amount of time combing through spam, creating keywords and adding them to my blacklist.

Early in the process, I discovered a couple hundred spams posted by the same IP address, all using a variant on the email address “theplazacenter1@yahoo.com”. Most were promoting various online casinos. But a few dozen looked decidedly different:

Tom’s Blog: The answer to the bleeding hearts, the liberals, the tree-huggers, and those who prefer Soy to Whole Milk….Sorry, I guess it’s pretty obvious what my sentiments are, but joking a part, yes I think it’s time for a reality check and such a check takes the form of a little conservativism…and there’s nothing wrong with that, let me assure you.

I’m reluctant to censor dissenting voices, so I checked out the site. It looks like a personal blog focused on issues of legalizing gambling – lots of news stories about video lottery terminals and local battles over casinos. Midway down the page, there’s an “blogroll” which contains dozens of links to online casinos, and a couple of links to other “blogs”, with names like hanksblog.us, harrysblog.us, ryansblog.us, and so on.

It’s a search engine trap. Linked to dozens of times from my blog – and from other people’s blogs – it’s got exactly the sort of content engines are most vulnerable to – actual human-written text on the subject at hand – and it’s got dozens of links to the sites the author is trying to promote. The dozen or so .us “blogs” I found all contain the identical text and links, despite different, creative descriptions when they’re posted to my blog as comments.

The author appears to be Brendan Meehan, the proprietor of “The Plaza Marketing Group”, allegedly of Cheshire, CT. The phone number he provided to the dot.us registry through his registrations at GoDaddy matches an address in Cheshire, an Edmund Meehan, Jr., but given that the spams were emerging from an OpenTransit IP in Miami, I decided not to call Ed, who may well be Brendan’s father or brother.

I am, however, having a hard time resisting posting to Brendan’s blogs. You see, while Brendan was smart enough to install Moveable Type 2.661, tweaked to help prevent blog spam, he wasn’t smart enough to change the default usernames and passwords. So if one were to, for example, go to http://www.go4itblog.us/cgi-bin/mt.cgi and log in with Username “Melody” and Password “Nelson”, one would have full control over that Moveable Type server, including the ability to shut out the administrator and create one’s own password-protected blogs. This would appear to work on any of Brendan’s sites, including tomsblog.us, ryansblog.us, perspectivesblog.us, newsblog.us, jerrysblog.us, ikesblog.us, harrysblog.us, hanksblog.us, generalnewsblog.us, dicksblog.us, bobosblog.us, artsblog.us, archiesblog.us.

I am, of course, not advocating electronic trespass or any other illegal activity. Just observing that internet vandals should consider locking their doors lest they find themselves vandalized in turn.

Anyone looking at a map might wonder why President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, fleeing political violence in Haiti, would choose to flee to the Central African Republic. Colin Powell had one explanation: the first nation Aristide chose wouldn’t receive him. He may have been referring to Antigua, where the aircraft carrying Aristide refueled, or to Morocco, which refused the request for asylum. He might also have been referring to South Africa, expected to be Aristide’s final destination. However, Mbeki, who recieved a great deal of public criticism for being the only African leader to attend the bicentenial of Haitian independence, is likely receiving too much political heat for his support of Mugabe to take in another unpopular public figure.

Even with Morocco and South Africa’s refusals, C.A.R. seems like an odd choice for a place to leave Aristide. The U.S. broke off diplomatic relations with C.A.R. in late 2002, when Francis Bozize seized power from Ange-Felix Patasse, the country’s democractically elected president. The U.S. State Department maintains a travel warning, strongly discouraging Americans from traveling to C.A.R.

C.A.R.’s foreign minister, Charles Wenezoui, has another explanation for hosting Aristide: “…the Central African Republic had taken him in because of its legendary hospitality…”.

That’s odd. I’d always thought of C.A.R. as legendary for political chaos and surreally bad government. For more than three quarters of its independence from France, CAR has been governed by military governments. The most memorable of these was that of President, later Emperor, then Apostle Bokassa who, when he was finally overthrown in 1979 was tried for corruption, treason, murder… and cannibalism. (He was acquitted of cannibalism charges, despite the discovery of body parts of children killed in a protest over the high cost of school uniforms, in the freezer in his kitchen.)

So why did the State department deposit a deposed, democractically-elected leader in a far-off nation ruled by the deposers of a democratically-elected government, leaving observers to ponder the irony? UN IRIN offers speculation that C.A.R. offered refuge to help improve its’ own standing in the international community. Given the difficulty the U.S. and France had in finding refuge for Aristide, they now end up owing Bozize a favor, perhaps recognition of his government.

Robert White, a former U.S. ambassador has a more sinister take on the situation. He tells Newsday: Why would Aristide go to Bangui? I have to believe that getting Aristide to the most remote spot in the world was a way of controlling him.” White goes on to speculate that Aristide would never willingly surrendered power: “I truly believe he would have rather met death than to go out and resign.” Is it possible that Aristide was taken to Bangui, instead of Panama, which also offered asylum, because the U.S. was afraid he might try to retake power? Or did the wonderfully-named (Colonel?) Kenn Kurtz, CEO of the “risk management company” that accompanied Aristide to C.A.R. simply want an excuse to find himself back in the Heart of Darkness?