Russian Spam Returns

UPDATED: There has been a flood of 3 hit drive by spams out of Russia via Ukraine ever since these hit. In fact, there are too many different ones to look into so it appears that we’re under siege again.

Original Post:

It looks like I spoke too soon about Blogger having improved on blocking Russian spam referrals. Once again a flood of unwanted fake referrals showed up in Stats and of course it is all from Russia or rerouted through Ukraine. Reinstalling TOR to check out the sites was an annoyance I’d never planned on doing again, but I’m in a bad mood these days so once again it is time to inform people of the garbage being pushed out.

Remember, never click on suspicious links in your Blogger referrals. I’ve taken the precaution of running an anonymous browser system within a virtual machine to take these screenshots because you never know what kind of malware might be pushed through the code embedded on these pages.

On to the spam…

Windows Live Writer Is Dead!

Long live Open Live Writer!!!

As of December 14, 2015, Google turned off the old authenticator code again permanently crippling Windows Live Writer for usage in posting to Blogger. Fortunately, the promised open source version of Live Writer went live earlier this month and the latest revision supports OAuth 2.

Download Open Live Writer here if you want to keep having the Live Writer experience with Blogger.

This is only my second post using it, so I haven’t had a chance to evaluate all the functions. It does import drafts from WLW, so that is a big plus. On the downside, it didn’t import my categories, so I’m having to type them from memory rather than using the convenient check box system that used to be in place.

A leftover review that didn’t get finished for Halloween may be the first to test how it handles pictures, though I may come up with a project before that just for the purpose.

It is terrific that the application will finally get modernized again and I look forward to more features being added over time.

Google Cuts Off Live Writer from Blogger

 UPDATE: As of June 2, everything is working again. That was an amazingly fast fix given how low priority Blogger has been to Google and Live Writer to Microsoft. Didn't see an update to Live Writer, so I suspect that this is Google's initial fix.

Original Post:

As of May 26, Google changed the login method for external software to access Blogger, cutting it off from all offline editors other than Blogger's default browser editor. Since many of us use Microsoft's Windows Live Writer 2012 to create our posts, this has been a disaster. If you are like me and use a lot of inline images, this is especially problematic since the default editor is terrible at handling images.

Google blames Microsoft:

7:51 AM

Nick - Google Guide said:

Hi everyone,

We appreciate you coming here and letting us know about this issue. It looks like this error is a result of an authentication problem between Google and Live Writer. A long time ago, we announced we were deprecating our old authentication system and we encouraged developers to move to the new one (OAuth 2.0). It seems that Live Writer is still using our old system, which is causing the issue. We are currently looking into it, but we suggest that users also reach out to Microsoft to report the issue.

Thanks,

Blogger Suport Team

p.s. please disregard the previous official announcement.

Edited

However, all other blog editors are affected, such as Raven, Blogjet, and BlogFire. Until one or more of them change over access methods, posting to Blogger will be a great deal more difficult given the Microsoft ceased development of Live Writer in 2012.

In my case, it may prevent the movie review I finally finished writing today from ever being posted, since I can't get the images to work properly with the default editor. Short of learning to hand code HTML image sizing, it isn't happening for me.

So I have to wait for some kind of fix from somebody. If that doesn't happen, it will be time to explore Wordpress to see if it can replace Blogger for me.  Otherwise, I may stop blogging altogether.

This is more than annoying.