It’s now been 9 months since I switched to editing my blog in vim. Much, much, much longer than I expected. Perhaps it’s time to actually start working on this thing in seriousness? (Of course, I’ve planned to do this before)
- Dominey on Flash MovieClip Tweening Prototypes
- The Panopticon Singularity – marching towards ubiquitous surveillance
- Who told Dean to scream for lock-down, TCPA computing? – The Register does some digging on Declan McCullagh’s claims
So there we have it: Dean wasn’t advocating a national ID card, nor was he blithely inviting smart card vendors to breach citizens’ privacy even further. However, it was remarkably ill-advised of him to advocate locking down the PC “at the edge of the network” without examining the implications for the consumer, or even the software industry.
- Papal blessing for break-dancers – downrocking in His name
- Power Rangers = Joshua Micah Marshall asks whether the Bush administration has created a new American empire or weakened the old one; some very good points
Conservative ideologues, in calling for an international order in which America would have a statelike monopoly on coercive force, somehow forgot what makes for a successful state. Stable governments rule not by direct coercion but by establishing a shared sense of allegiance. In an old formula, domination gives way to hegemonybrute force gives way to the deeper power of consent. This is why the classic definition of the state speaks of legitimate force. In a constitutional order, government accepts certain checks on its authority, but the result is to deepen that authority, rather than to diminish it. Legitimacy is the ultimate force multiplier, in military argot. And if your aim is to maintain a global order, as opposed to rousting this or that pariah regime, you need all the force multipliers you can get.
Has someone written a SigAlert parser before? If you know of one, please drop a line
- The Dynabook Revisited – Alan Kay interview, seems familiar
- 2004 Spam Conference Talks – all online in Real. Need to watch url filtering, authentication protocols…
- iChatStatus – pref pane to do fun stuff w/ iChat status
- Beyond File Sharing: An Interview with Sharman Networks CTO Phil Morle – quite interesting, actually
- Orkut Launch: The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly
- Warren Ellis on orkut – agree w/ most of this, have thought about solutions, will post on features of dss in future
- Foe Romeo: My social network ideal
- EXTERNAL INOCULATION THEORY
- A MIME Encoding for Spam Inoculation Messages
Pre homework linkdump:
- America as a One-Party State – hopefully alarmist
- Security As Theater – Maciej writes about his recent experiences/observations returning home on an international flight
- TPM George Soros Interview
And there is another aspect that is coming into sharper focus
to me, even since I wrote the book. That is that this administration
has no compunction in misleading the people. It has no respect for the
truth. This, I think, is a real danger. It is the danger of an
Orwellian world. It’s not new, because obviously, Orwell wrote about
this fifty years ago. But what he wrote in 1984,
you know, the Ministry of Truth being the Propaganda Ministry, the use
of words meaning the opposite of what they are meant to mean. The Fox
News, “Fair and Balanced,” the “Clear Skies” Act for permitting
pollution, the “Leave No Child Behind” [that] provides no money for the
legislation. All these things I think pose a real danger to our
democracy if they succeed in misleading the electorate. And there is
only one remedy: an intelligent and enlightened electorate that sees
through it. - Cheetohs of Mass Destruction – weapons of mass destruction-related program activities == processed cheese food snack product (contains no actual cheese)
- Unintelligent Design Network, Inc.
Miller himself, a biologist, states on of our best illustrations. There have been 23 elephant-like animals in history, and yet only two survive today (and we add, they’re not doing very well). Clearly, this is the mark of an all-powerful creator who is stuck on the same stupid idea and can’t figure out why the hell they keep dying off. Hmm, perhaps it’s because giant, big-eared mammals with huge, prehensile noses are ridiculous? I mean, WTF? A giant, powerful, grasping nose? It looks like something a preschooler would make up.
- Anti-spam software – some CRM114 add-ons; note, CRM114 dies on large attachments. the current solution seems to be limiting filesize to something reasonable in procmail (I decided to go with
* < 120000); Bill Yerazunis says it’s not a flaw, but why did it leave a dozen hanging crm processes on my system? (I’m running getmail on a 3/min cron) - Calendar Access Protocol (CAP) – draft 11, expires this week. final eta: never?
- The SAKAI Project is a collaboration among several higher education institutions to develop and share open source software. Additional details will be posted here soon. (OKI + custom uPortal; large Mellon grant)
- Redbrick Helpdesk: Procmail Tutorial – has info on setting up mutt
- Political Compass – Economic Left/Right: -4.62, Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -6.15 (smack dab in the lower left)
- “the Copy Left” – interesting /. tangent discussion on the term, views of IP/property rights
- Virtualmin – web gui for managing Apache virtual servers
I haven’t been closely following the comment spamming problem, but it looks like its hit Trackback now as well. Furthermore, the spammers have discovered flooding and anonymous proxies… It’s become clear to me that these attacks will completely change the nature of the weblog landscape. It was only a matter of time I suppose. Rather than waiting for it to overtake and destroy the medium (a la USENET), it’d probably be good to be proactive.
At this point, it looks like rate-limiting (and auto-blacklisting based on flooding) is currently the most effective stopgap to go. The addition of easy deletion/banning might be a good idea (marking a comment as spam either from a custom interface or from the page itself will remove the spam, blacklist the urls pointed, and blacklist the posting IP). Bayesian-type filtering probably won’t work very well at this point b/c of lack of headers, size of corpus, although a SpamAssassin-like point system might (see also, slashcode noise filters). Using redirects (a la 2.661) may reduce impetus for spamming (although not for those that are just being annoying). White-listing sort of defeats the purpose, although I could see this whole thing being a good push for a Digital ID system (whether actual DigID or adhoc via PGP/GPG signatures). This could work in conjunction w/ a white-list/black-list system.
For the current flooding, which only serves as an attack tool, it may be a matter of thinking up of a way coming up with a number of challenges (two checkbox questions, one will ban you, form field and questions randomly custom generated) that can’t be automated, or assigning session ids to track a client regardless of IP. Of course, trackback would be more difficult. For trackbacks, one could run a mathematical filter on the trackback url before (and periodically after) putting it up… That’d have the bonus of checking for linkrot as well. (see also pingback as alternative)
Other people have been putting way more brainpower into this than I; this is just me blabbing of the top of my head.
- Never a Dull Moment – trackback flooding
- Comment Spam II
- Goodbye Trackback
- Spam Update – using nonces
- Throttling Down
- Confidential to my crapflooder
- FloodMT Crapflooding, Trackback-flooding and Whining crapflooders – summary of soap opera thus far
- Once upon a time… – moving forward as a community?
(I don’t think I have to worry too much about comment or trackback spam right now, the flooders seem to try to attack anyone who writes about them)
- 100 Things to Do with Your Boyfriend or Girlfriend… Instead of It – this is frickin’ awesome; too many good ones to list. Almost as good as cool-2b-real (oops, looks like it just got hacked, should be back w/ beefy goodness soon)
- Get Your War On Pt 31 – steroid-related program activities
- GetUpMove.com – Tanya lost 95lb’s playing DDR, and so can you! (Hey, I’m impressed that they make a metal pad, that kicks ass)
- Web Design and Implementation (4002-409) – Liz Lawley’s class blog
- Conservative Group Quietly Drops Plans for Same-Sex Marriage Poll – oops, looks like most of the country do like the idea of equal rights, who’d have thought that in America?
- Replacing the Sky – Apple/Pro writeup on Abbra Grupp, compositor
- Random thought: just thinking about how a few years ago, it was common practice for movies to make completely fake GUIs for their computers; nowadays, not so much so
Some orkut observations:
- I got on the other day, by the count algorithm (uid from 1M), I am user 6617. My last friend request earlier today has a user of about 23K. It will be interesting to see the growth curve of the ‘invite only’ network
- Everyone on my current friends list is a blogger (also the biggest community I am in is ‘Bloggers’ which was at about 2 or 3 when I joined; now grown to 235)
- The system looks like it’s written in C#/ASP.NET; it uses a lot of xmlhttp for inline page updating (works in IE, Mozilla, fails silently in Safari)
- There’s a level of privacy control (restricting information by predefined, but not arbitrary groups)
- You can add someone as a friend automatically, which is then pending. If you are rejected, you can’t add them again, they can add you; I’m assuming if you reject them it’ll mean you can never add each other, but I wasn’t really feeling like testing that part out
- There’s some ratings; you can be a fan of someone, and rate your friends (aggregated pseudonymously) on trustworthiness, coolness, and sexiness
Never Mind The Bollocks, Here’s The Wonderchicken – stavrosthewonderchicken ruminates on blogs and punk rock.
Weblogs are a party, damn it, and sometimes they’re publications too, or instead, and sometimes they’re diaries, sometimes they’re pieces of art, sometimes they’re tools for self-promotion, sometimes they’re money-maknig ventures, sometimes they’re monuments to ego, sometimes they’re massive wanks, sometimes they’re public services, sometimes they’re dedications of faith, sometimes they’re communities.