UPDATE: June, 16 2004: New beta version B7.1: download here

Yesterday the news of the Russian Canon EOS-300D Firmware Hack hit /.

Spurred largely due to the 300D’s similarities with the 10D, rumors of the potential for hacks have been widely discussed in the forums on DPreview.

I’ve been passively following the 300D firmware hacks for weeks to get the skinny.

Yet I’m still on-the-fence with regard to installing a hacked firmeware upgrade due to the fact that it will void my warranty.

On the plus side however, the 300D firmware hack “enables” Flash Compensation, ISO 3200 and Mirror Lock, among others, which are exceedingly tempting.

Hmmm… Tempting indeed.

I can always revert back to the Canon OEM firmware — Assuming of course that the camera still functions.

As an aside; found via the /. thread, was a link to Liem’s Digital Rebel Tricks, which provides excellent details about the Russian Firmware hack as well as a number of other useful tricks…

Such as my personal favorite…

A Windows XP Registry Hack that turns the THM files that accompany Cannon’s RAW (CRW) images files into picture previews viewable in the Windows shell. Nice!

I couldn’t take it anymore! Last night I took Burningbird’s suggestion and turned-off commenting on any post older than 30 days. I may turn commenting off entirely if this weekend is any indication of the logarithmic growth in comment spamming.

Comment Spammers… why do you bother? You’re not getting any extra PageRank points from your messages due to the external URL redirects MT 2.661 has in place. Plus, thanks to MT-Blacklist, your polution is trashed almsot as quickly as it’s posted.

So I can’t imagine your getting any value from this effort.

Update:
Even after I disabled commenting on old posts, the spammers continued to pound away at the server, yet nothing was actually getting posted.

Pointless (again).

However, this time I decided to let Apache help me rid the server of these digital cockroaches.

A simple .htaccess hack was in order.

I added the following LIMIT Apache directive, which applies only to the HTTP POST method on the mt-comments.cgi file:

<Files mt-comments.cgi>
<Limit POST>
deny from all
</Limit>
</Files>

This effectively (and unfortunately) disables commenting for MovableType at the Apache server level.

I haven’t tested this thoroughly, but it should only disable posting, editing and deleting comments. If not, I’ll fix it, but for now I shouldn’t be getting anymore comments spam.