This is as days pass by, by Stuart Langridge

Stuart -- Regardless of how the rest of your day goes, here's something to be happy about -- today a honey pot you installed successfully identified a previously unknown email harvester (IP: 61.183.167.138). The harvester was caught by your honey pot installed at: www.kryogenix.org Don't forget to tell your friends you made the Internet a little better today. You can refer them to Project Honey Pot. Project Honeypot is a system designed to catch email spammers. Basically, you sign up for their site and they give you one PHP (or ASP, or Cold Fusion, or half a dozen other things) file. You drop it somewhere in your webspace and throw in a couple of links to it (hidden on your own pages). The idea here is that ordinary people don't follow the links, but spammer screen-scraping robots do. On the page is an email address and what looks like a weblog comment form, randomly generated, but tied to your Project Honeypot account. If any email arrives at that email address, which is run by Project Honeypot, or comments are posted through the comment form, then they know it's spam (because only robots will scrape the email address and then mail it). Whether it's a large help in the great fight against spam or not I don't know, but it's pretty easy to set up and once it is set up you don't have to do anything. And as you can see from above, I've already identified a spammer that they didn't know about. You can see my honey pot at http://www.kryogenix.org/random/hpot/pedatetightknit.php if you want to take a look. Just looking at it confers no penalty. The comment form on it is hidden with CSS by default, so it might not be visible when you look. Don't mail any email addresses you find on the page, though! Signing up for your own honeypot is pretty easy (although I wish they'd use OpenID for accounts); I'm supposed to refer you, but there's no "affiliate accounts" or similar. Go get one, and we'll all try and help.