Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

Didn't go to bed yet ... decided to try to report the comment-spam first. The "report abuse" form still doesn't work for me, so I submitted a help request. LJ Support hasn't answered the question about the abuse form yet, but was rather quick to supply as helpful an answer as can be expected regarding the spam. (I did not expect them to do anything about it; I wanted to make sure it was noted because I figure that if nobody reports it, they won't know how common it is (or isn't). It turns out there is an action they can take if a whole lot of spam shows up in a short time; I don't know what the threshold is, but this fellow is below it either intentionally or fortuitously.)

But that didn't take this long. No, the other reason I'm still up is that I've been trying to complain to the spammer's ISP. I did a WHOIS lookup and got what I thought was an ISP, but it turns out to be an organization that sells bandwidth and/or addresses to ISPs, which I found out when an autoresponder replied to my complaint. So I've dug a level deeper and found a Ukranian ISP to complain to. Unfortunately I don't read Russian, so I can't easily go hunting for their TOS. A lot of the alphabet is familiar (thanks to what St. Cyril used as a starting point) but that doesn't help. (Yeah, I'll go hit Babelfish in a moment and see whether Russian is one of its options. But machine translation is ... somewhat uneven in its results.)

Basically I have to hope that the ISP is a legitimate one, not a spam-haven or a front for the same porn-site that spammed me. The overall layout of the front page looks about right, but without being able to read the text in a language where I'm familiar with the nuances, all I have is "the shapes of the colours on the page look a lot like the advertising pages of other low-cost ISPs," and that's not really meaningful.

Of course, if the ISP is in fact legit, I also have to hope that whoever gets my email reads English well enough to understand all of what I said (or at least all the important parts). Now since English is the Lingua Franca of the information age (I love the built in irony of that statement -- using Latin to metaphorically call English French; it's reason enough to go looking for excuses to say it), the odds of any random person on the planet being able to understand my email is a whole lot higher than the odds of any American even recognizing which language someone else is writing in, but I still feel as though it's a lot to ask when I'm counting on somebody doing business in his or her own country to deal with me in my language just because Ah'm th' Amurrican, gol-dang it! Yeah, the odds are in my favour, but I feel presumptuous relying on it, y'know?

Of course if the folks at that ISP don't read and write English well enough, I've got a problem. Uh ... I guess I could email a certain cutie I've been too shy to write to even though I said I would, and ask her to translate for me ... on the one hand it would give myself an "excuse" which I could use to bypass my shyness and finally write to her like I've been meaning to; on the other hand, "I need a favour" sends a rather different message than the "I feel like keeping in touch" message that I want to send but have been too shy to. (Anniemal: fear not -- I don't know how she feels about me, and you've still got first dibs on my time in that regard anyhow. Hope to see you this week, by the way.)

Wow, a lot of sirens just went by in a couple different directions. Last night I was treated to the unusual sight of a fire engine zooming east on Lombard instead of West (I later heard on the television news that there had been three suspicious fires in Fells Point). I wonder what's going on now.

Arson, Baltimore does not need. These buildings burn perfectly well by accident.

OTOH, I guess arson puts spam in perspective...