This evening I spent nearly two hours cleaning up a (non-computer related) blog site I maintain. The url is http://www.halfreycottage.com [1], but I've moved my blog to a new site at http://sprucepine.halfreycottage.com [2]. I've been keeping the site going for a little over a year so I can post photos and musing about gardening, bugs, and birds. Simple, quiet stuff.

The reason I had to clean it up was not to fix the layout or to get rid of old content. The site is in pretty good shape as that goes. No, I had to spend almost two hours cleaning out several hundred spam comments all over the site, 100% of them for online poker.

Whatever you think about gambling (and personally, I can't stand it) I must insist that you agree that online poker is absolutely evil and anyone who participates in it is a first class chump. That's not just out of vengance. Well, maybe a little.

Your better blog and community website software (such as the software that runs the developer.* community site) provides tricky ways for real people to post comments while keeping the spammers out. That's great. The little magic image thing that Drupal uses is very cool.

But of course, it's a real running-to-stand-still situation. While the CMS designers are thinking of new ways to thwart them, the spammers are thinking of new ways to avoid being thwarted. Eventually, they'll find a way to interpret those images and Dan will have to disallow comments from non-registered users. And eventually even that won't work. The spammers will build an automated tool to register under a bunch of different names and respond from a bunch of different email addresses.

As I sat here at my desk deleting comment after comment, my mind had plenty of time to drift and think about other things. Of course one of the things I thought about was the fact that spam protection was non existent in my blog tool (Greymatter), which is too bad, because in many ways, I love that tool. I love the admin interface. I love how easy it was to install. I love how the files are stored on the file system so you don't need to set up a database. And I love how it generates real, static pages so you don't have to do any thing tricky to get your pages to show up on Google.

But with no spam protection, I knew I had to switch tools. I'm now using the freeware version of a tool called pMachine, and I'm pretty happy with that so far.

The larger issue that I stared to think about, though, was the things we do to make our living--the ethical and moral compromises so many of us make in order to earn our pay. Most of us in the software development industry work (either directly or indirectly) for big business or for the government. For the most part (and there certainly are exceptions) we are not engaging in unbridled public good in our work activities. We are not curing diseases or sending space ships to the moon, or reducing pollution. Of course there are software developers that do all of those things. But most of us engage in much more mundane activities--building financial reports, customer tracking software, and data entry systems.

I've never been asked to do anything as a software developer that I had serious moral problems with, but I've never been asked to do anything that made me feel like I was bettering the planet either. That's somewhat better than the work I did before I was a software developer, when I wrote educational materials for the insurance industry. Not evil in itself, but I was part of an overall infrastructure that was furthering ends that benefited that industry at the expense of the public (though of course we would never have put it that way). Not evil stuff either. But a bit murky.

I can't imgaine developing software for the millitary to help in the killing of other human beings. I'm sure it would be neat stuff, and possibly important by some measures as well. But I don't know that I'd want my hands dirty in that way, though I can understand how many people would have no problem at all doing that work.

But here's where I'm going with this and here's how it relates back to spam. I said earlier that the spammers are always working to get around the latest anti-spam tricks. But of course it's not the spammers themselves who do this. It's the programmers they hire! All of those ridiculous messages about online poker that I deleted from my site were all put there by some sort of a spam bot. The spam bot is a piece of software, so by definition it was created by as software developer!

I am stunned by this obvious revalation. There are software developers out there making their living thinking of neat ways to deliver ads for online poker, penis enlargment cream, herbal viagra, and hot teen porn sites. Some of them might even read this site! I hope they do, because I have a message for you guys and gals. You are doing evil work. The fruits of your labor hurt other people, invade their space, waste their time, hog bandwidth, and steal space on servers. Find another line of work. To paraphrase Jon Stewart, "Stop hurting the world."