First off, have you heard yet that Ford is going to offer computers and internet access in their F-150’s and Fleet Vans next year? Absolutely! The tiny 6 inch or so screen will be built in the dash and some form of keyboard will go along with it. Internet access will come via a Sprint card.

The operating system? Windows. The only drawback would be if someone “hacked” your vehicle instead of “jacked” it.

Now to my recent discovery! I posted the other day about the seemingly increase in comment and trackback spam I’d been getting lately. Well, I think I’ve found a really good plugin for preventing that. It’s called Simple Trackback Validation and here’s how it works:

When a trackback is received, this plugin

Checks if the IP address of the trackback sender is equal to the IP address of the webserver the trackback URL is referring to.
This reveals almost every spam trackback (more than 99%) since spammers do usually use bots which are not running on the machine of their customers.
Retrieves the web page located at the URL included in the trackback. If the page doesn’t a link to your blog, the trackback is considered to be spam. Since most trackback spammers do not set up custom web pages linking to the blogs they attack, this simple test will quickly reveal illegitimate trackbacks. Also, bloggers can be stopped abusing trackback by sending trackbacks with their blog software or webservices without having a link to the post.

Since installing and activating this gem of a plugin, I haven’t seen any trackback spam yet. None, Nada, Zip.

Here’s a link to the author’s site plus a screenshot and instructions on how to set it up. Seeing as trackback and comment spam are out of hand these days plus the web hosts not doing much about it (or are unable to do anything) this small plugin is one sweet tool to have in your arsenal to help fend off the spammers.

Hope this helps those of you with blogs as well.