The Orlando Sentinel posted an item on their political blog about the Katherine Harris comment spamming I received. At this point Talking Points Memo and TPMCafe have picked up the story. Perhaps we'll finally get to the bottom of this mystery.
Comment from a friend:
Outsourced sock puppet maybe my favorite new phrase.
Visitor Comments
This is a copy of the comment I left on the TPMCafe piece:
The IP address is homed to a Zyxel Prestige 645 firewall/router (it's serving SNMP to the external).
It's an older small-biz model. Funny thing is, it's acting as an external DNS, or is forwarding port 53 to a server inside it's NAT. That's unusual in my experience, but could be the firewall itself acting as a DNS relay to the network DNS, ie misconfiguration.
Also keep to keep in mind, this is a static IP, so it is most likely a business DSL line.
About a half hour after I did the port scan, both the DNS and SNMP ports were blocked.
btw: I did a general port scan against that IP address, such things are perfectly legal, I did not "hack" the address.
Posted by: KeithRockhold | September 27, 2006 7:43 PM
Hey Josh,
I can't wait to hear the outcome of this story. I was quite fascinated when you told my class in Auburn this story. It sounds like her camp is really trying not to respond to any of it, which I think is actually hurting her. If she would just make a comment, even one that says I don't know where the comments are coming from. It would at least let the blogging world know that she is paying attention to this situation. By ignoring it she is allowing more and more rumors to surface and speculation to conjure up. Harris' staffers need to say something and if I were them I would try to get a hold of the guy in India, whether he is an outsourced campaign staffer or just a guy making comments and ask him to please stop. Or if he feels like he has to make comments about how great Harris is, at least let them be made on recent blog posts.
Posted by: Rachel S | October 2, 2006 2:34 PM