Whew. The spam filter for Bene Diction Blogs On works. I posted on gambling the other day, today over 3 hundred pieces of spam were caught by the filter.  300 pieces showed up in the last hour and they are still coming in. grrrrr. Since WP 2.0 is fairly new, I suppose spammers will find their way through Asikmet soon enough. Today was not the day.

If I think bloggers are hassled, my sympathy to Brit Alex Trew who made a million dollars selling micro advertisements on his webpage. He  was the target of blackmail by hackers.

Trew has the web page milliondollarhomepage.com.  He received an email from “The Dark Group, demanding $5,000 on January 7th.” He thought it was a hoax and ignored it.

Then he received this:

“Hello u website is under us atack to stop the DDoS send us 50000$.”

According to the Financial Times:

However, on Friday, Russell Weiss, president of InfoRelay,the internet server of milliondollarhomepage.com, told Mr Tew that the website was experiencing very high traffic and there was a risk that it could break down.

On Wednesday when Mr Tew sold the final 1000 pixels on his site for $38,100 on Ebay, reaching his goal of earning $1m, the hackers intensified their attack and hijacked the website.

The website should be up and running today after InfoRelay upgraded the security system.

The Canadian election hasn’t been exempt. A radio station in Vancouver traced emails supposedly from a Conservative party chair to a server in St. Petersburg Russia. The text of the fake email is here.

In the last day or two, you may have seen an e-mail message purporting to come from Conservative Party President Don Plett. This message is bogus; Mr. Plett did not send out anything of the sort. Radio CKNW in Vancouver has traced this e-mail to a server in St. Petersburg, Russia, and behind that to a Liberal-friendly source in Toronto.