Two weeks or so ago, I wondered out loud if China was at war with Canada, after concerted attacks on some of our country’s most sensitive data-bases. Now I’m wondering if China is at war with me.

Since the beginning of this month I have been the target of massive spam attacks which continue apace, despite the ministrations of my long-suffering technical advisor James Bow. He has rooted out and canceled literally hundreds of spambot registrations (which appears to be how the attackers evade CAPTCHA), and arranged that all of the spam gets routed directly to my spam filter.

But the problem is that there are always a few legitimate comments that end up there as well, requiring manual combing. If any commenters are experiencing difficulties posting, or your comments are disappearing, please let me know back-channel.

The spam is of an odd variety. Much of it consists of lengthy passages in Chinese, or poorly-translated English. Some of it pushes the usual products, but most do not appear to. A spate of blonde jokes is followed by health tips and suggestions on improving one’s (English) grammar. And then there’s this sort of thing:

racious ri is a littn, t,” ly over thy grew u calso listeot, can no to teacge to live, be the onrecificall become ofmuyme to ts a far th is a co trst time tgot here, ooking racad: it iaring of Sal a collising Shu Xets.”

And, perhaps by coincidence, this just appeared: http://gayboy.ca.

Don’t mess with the mafia, I guess. With luck and skill, perhaps James can put a final end to this—tongs for the memories, and wo cao ni ba bei zi zu zong—but we’re dealing with the land of the Human Search Engine, of which, indeed, this may be a minor variant.

So keep bringing it, mǔ gǒu. It’s only five or ten minutes out of my day—and no time at all if I were to abandon some of my commenters to the spammy swamp. In the scheme of things, you’re just keyboard tigers.