Year: 2004

Categories
Just Shelley

Thanks for the birthday wishes

Many thanks for the birthday wishes. I didn’t have a cake tonight, but I did treat myself to two margaritas when my roommate took me out for dinner. And I’m also treating myself to a whole raft of movies, including some classic sci-fi recommended by a friend.

(Speaking of movies, we watched Shrek 2 tonight. I hope I’m not the only adult that loved Puss n’ Boots in this movie; or laughed themselves silly during the hairball incident.)

It’s odd, but I normally don’t remember dreams quite as vividly as the one I recounted earlier. I can’t help thinking it would make a nice centerpiece to a book, or at the least, a short story. If nothing else, it was better than dreaming about being naked in front of an audience, or showing up for school, not prepared for an important test.

It was a good dream, though. Everytime I think on it, I smile. There was something about the book store and the choice, whatever the choice that had such a positive feel to it. And I can agree with Dave Rogers that all the main characters in the dream could be variations on myself — but the man I’m kissing? That sounds just a little too weird, even for a dream, even for me.

Again, thanks for the wishes.

Categories
Social Media

Choosing to be a comment spammer victim

Liz Lawley was recently the recipient of a comment spamming google bombing attack. What happened is that someone placed comments in several weblogs, signed “Whiny Communist Bitch” and then included a link to Liz’s site.

There are two reasons for this: first, to associate those words with Liz’s site, hence the Google bombing; secondly, as people moved to clear up these comments, they automatically added her domain to their blacklists without checking first to see if it was a legitimate site. Hence, Liz’s domain would be blacklisted if she left comments in other sites.

Unfortunately, this type of attack is extremely easy to perpetuate and we’ve seen them before and will be seeing more of them in the future. I wasn’t surprised by the attack, especially since Liz does teach computer technology (nothing worse than a young, disgruntled and semi-adept student). But I was surprised at some of the responses Liz received in her comments.

Too many people had banned the IP addresses of the person who placed the comment, and then sent the IP address to Liz. This following so many weblog postings about the use of open proxies in order to hide the actual IP address of the postee. Secondly, too many people had moved to ban Liz’s domain without first making even an attempt to verify whether it was a legitimate domain. This following so many weblog postings about the dangers of blacklists, and the need to review all URLs included in comment spam.

Now, it’s true that there might be people in the list who hadn’t read these posts, but I find it more likely that these same people have been exposed to postings of this nature, but they would either skip what they would see to be a ‘technical’ post, because they aren’t technicians; or would only skim it, without bothering to take the time to understand how it relates to them.

I’ve long seen a trend among the non-tech webloggers to either blame the techs for not getting all this right; or to depend on the techs to help them when things stop working. Even when we write post after post about what they people can do to help protect themselves, they resist; the reasons for doing so are less that the technical material is over their head, as they don’t want to waste their time on technical stuff. Yet, isn’t it a greater waste of their time being the victim?

Of course, some of the material we write about is very complicated, and I have no blame for any non-tech who doesn’t want to touch code or the innards of MySQL, or needs help with installations or things that break. But understanding the concept of open proxies doesn’t require a technical background; nor does understanding the concepts behind ill-managed blacklists.

If we who write on these issues aren’t clear enough, we welcome questions and requests for clarifications. But this still implies that the non-techs take the time to read the material–to choose not to be a passive recipient of the whims of malicious people.

There are options such as using hosted technology or turning off comments, and hiring people to help manage your site. These are valid choices and more power to the person who makes them. But for the rest, if you don’t want to continue being a victim, you also have some responsibility to understand both your tool and this environment.

To this end, I’m in the process of re-publishing to the IT Kitchen, several of my writings where I’ve attempted to explain to non-techs how this environment works. Hopefully if the writings aren’t clear, I’ll get asked for clarifications. Or will I get silence as the non-techs skip over something that smacks of the faintly technical, in favor of another lambast at Bush, or cute cat quiz? I guess we’ll see in the next round of comment spam attacks.

I and the other techs will continue to work the issues of comment spam and it’s like, trying to find solutions that make it easier for the end-users. I’ve spent time this week on several different approaches in Wordform, to see if I can prevent automated comment spam posting, which is the most destructive and time consuming type. I am less worried about the individual comment spammer.

In the end, though, I have a feeling all the solutions are going to require equal participation from all, non-techs and techs alike. Personally, I think that Liz’s solution is the one that is most effective: maintaining a sense of both humor and perspective about the whole thing.

I wrote in the missive to Dana Blankenhorn, as detailed in the last post, that when a user is faced with ads in their syndication feed, rather than blame open source and the RSS 2.0 specification, they can exercise their freedom and unsubscribe from the feed. I said that this was the user’s responsibility in the open source equation.

Understanding this environment could also be considered an end-users responsibility, unless they want to give up all technical independence. Or continue to be a victim.

Categories
Connecting

Open source and open choices

Yesterday, Matt Mullenweg posted a link to a weblog entry in the Ziff-Davis weblog Open Source. Matt and others, including myself, wrote some fairly critical material about the post because the writer seemed to confuse open source with syndication feed use:

One problem open source advocates seldom acknowledge is the disrespect many people have toward what’s held in common…Lately I’ve seen my RSS feeds becoming heavily polluted by RSS spam – entries that are just ads, or sets of links that all lead to purchases (on which the spammer gets a cut)…Question is, who polices what no one owns? How can we maintain the cleanliness of the commons against those who don’t share its ethics? It’s a question that has haunted the Internet for 10 years now. It’s a question that, frankly, haunts every open source technology.

The main criticism we had about the writing is that the author seemed to mix up the freedoms associated with open source technologies, with people abusing their RSS syndication feeds, and then pulled these disparate points together into a discussion of disrespect of that which is held in common.

I, like others, wrote a critical comment to the post and was somewhat surprised when the author, Dana Blankenhorn, responded in an email back. We ended up having a very cordial discussion, going back and forth about what each other meant with our writing.

Dana’s concern, and rightfully, is if open source is ‘open’ who controls it and keeps it from chaos? I wrote a long reply about open source and his analogy, and he asked if he could print a shortened version of it online, which he posted today. I said sure, but I’d probably print the full (though edited) writing in a post of my own, which follows at the end.

I did want to say, though, that Dana Blankenhorn responded with a great deal of patience and grace in the face of such overwhelming criticism. Hopefully he’ll be commended for this, as much as he was condemned yesterday for his original writing.

 

I don’t want to take your time, but I want to clarify the points I was trying to make, in addition to what others who work in open source are trying to make. And then I’ll leave you be.

First, let’s separate out discussions of the commons from open source, because the two are not the same. Your example of a commons is a city park that sounds like it’s poorly maintained, and in a community with a lot of homeless. Somewhere in San Francisco, then.

Anyone can access this park, and piss on the grass, sleep on the benches, and drop their garbage on the sidewalk. They can also let their dogs poop and not clean up. Now this all assumes of course that the common community doesn’t pay taxes to hire people to clean, and police to monitor the site, and doesn’t create rules and laws governing the use of the park.

Still, people can pretty much do what they want as long as no police are around.

Returning to the software: contrary to your assumption, open source code is not ‘owned’ by the commons. People can’t just jump into the code and start hacking away.

For instance, your site uses WordPress. This is a GPL licensed piece of code, and you can’t get much more ‘open source’ than GPL, which means anyone can copy the code and make modifications and do what they want with this code. The only stipulation is that you can’t apply a more restrictive license on any code derived from the source.

This sounds chaotic, doesn’t it? I mean anyone, just anyone can hack away at the code. Ohmigod! This is terrible. Quick! Tell ZD that they need to switch to Movable Type before your site gets contaminated with odd functionality!

Seriously, people can’t come in from the street and touch the original codebase much less do anything harmful to it. You see, and this is where your analogy really falls down flat, the code for WordPress is controlled by a small group of developers that can restrict, heavily, who is involved in development on WordPress, and what changes are incorporated into the tool’s codebase. In fact, if anything, this is a problem with some open source projects–too small a group, too much personal ego, can result in too heavy a restrictions on what does and does not happen with future revisions.

Now, what can happen is that if I decide I want to go a new direction with WordPress and it differs significantly enough from the WordPress development team, I can ‘fork’ the code. What this means is that I can grab a snapshot of the code and go my own direction, maintaining my own version of the code. In fact, this is something I am doing–creating a new version of weblogging software called Wordform that will be a fork of WordPress 1.3.

Sure I can copy the WordPress code and hack all I want – but I can’t modify the codebase for WordPress; not unless I can negotiate for the change with the WordPress team. Since my vision for the code differs so much, it’s easier just to fork the code (not something done trivially, believe me, which is why you don’t see this happening that frequently).

This is open source. This is how many open source efforts work. Apache’s a good example of a larger project, with a bigger team–but you still have to follow the rules and ‘prove’ yourself before you’re allowed in to hack the code. And there are Apache architects that strictly control future directions for this tool, which is why it rarely undergoes through major changes. Notice how people are still using Apache 1.3 for the most part? That’s because the Apache team has to move so carefully to maintain faith with their current installed customer base. Heck, Microsoft blew it’s customers away with Longhorn and .NET and did so with a massive amount of arrogance and indifference; that’s why I went from being an author of books about Microsoft technology to only writing about open source: open source maintains better faith with its users.

Now, the same constraints about WordPress are true for RSS 2.0, though it’s released under Creative Commons; you can’t modify the specification and still have it released as ‘RSS 2.0′. You can create a new syndication feed specification, but then you have to convince a million or so people to use it–not trivial, ask the Atom folks.

You’ve said that people can disrespect open source because it’s held in the commons. Rather than your park analogy, open source is more similar to the Zoo here in St. Louis: I have to go during open hours, and I have to follow certain fairly strict rules while I’m there. Yet the Zoo is part of the city’s public trust–that commons you reference.

As for the garbage you get in your syndication feed: the most open aspect of open source is that you have the right to ‘openly’ unsubscribe from the syndication feed that dumps the crap on you. In other words, if you don’t like the park you’re walking in, walk somewhere else. That’s your responsibility as the user in the open source equation.

Categories
Just Shelley

The oddest dream

I had the oddest dream last night. I dreamed that I was in a small town located on the ocean, I’m not sure which ocean. I was there to attend a reunion of all the people I’ve met online through weblogging and have wanted to meet in person.

I was sharing a dorm room with a couple of other webloggers, two very young and very attractive young women. We were all getting dressed to go to the party, when I realized that all I had with me were my muddy, old hiking boots, my jeans, a blue jean shirt, and a white t-shirt underneath. I looked at one of the young women, and she was dressed in silver satin and black velvet that was cut down to here and slit up to there, exposing her long, trim legs and sleek belly, and firm, youthful breasts. As she primped, she chattered away about how the next day, she was going on a river float with some of my favorite webloggers. As I listened to her excitement I looked more closely at her face, and realized that she looked a lot like I did twenty-five years ago.

A large car was outside, waiting to take us all to the party. I strained to peer inside, through the darkly tinted glass, but couldn’t see into its depths at who had arrived to pick us up. As we started towards the car, I suddenly turned toward the young woman in satin and velvet and said I wasn’t going. She was disappointed, being a sweet young woman as well as pretty, and asked me why. I said it was because I didn’t want to disappoint people who were expecting her, and got me, instead.

After she entered the car, I watched it drive off and then started walking through the town. I entered, in turn, a small cafe, a tavern, and what might have been either a church or a school. None of the buildings seemed very distinctive, and all were misted in gray, with the people odd lumps of shadows standing out from the walls.

Towards the center of town, I entered a slightly disorganized bookstore that also had bits and pieces of art hanging from the ceiling and cluttering up the floor. A man entered and even though I could see him clearly and sharply, I couldn’t see what he looked like. He was the owner of the shop, though, and the creator of all the art. I started to ask him about it, when he came up to me and kissed me on the mouth. Not a friendly peck either: the kind of deep, sensuous kiss that looks good in the movies and feels wonderful, but when you see yourself doing it looks a bit sloppy, which is probably why we keep our eyes closed.

When he had kissed me thoroughly, he stepped away and told me when I was ready, the shop would be there, and the choice was mine. The choice of what, I didn’t know but I knew it was something important. Something beyond him and the kiss, but I couldn’t figure out what.

I left the building in the opposite direction I entered, and found myself on a porch that had a glass wall, and there were a few people sitting on barrels and chairs looking through the glass. On the other side of the wall, were people dressed in ordinary clothing but doing extraordinary things.

They were juggling, and tossing each other about, and riding unicycles, and all manner of wonderful stuff, and I asked one man sitting on a barrel–he was an older man, an indian, wearing a feather in his braided hair, and a leather vest over a homespun shirt–what was going on. He replied that the circus was in town and the performers practiced daily, just on the other side of the window. He and the others would come down and watch because this show was free, unlike the show that went on in the big tent.

It may have been free at one point, but I noticed an older woman looking at me from the other side of the glass, and she seemed grumpy and mouthed words I couldn’t hear but could sense, something to the effect that didn’t I realize that these people worked hard? I felt guilty and I reached into my pocket and pulled out an old five dollar bill and held it up to the glass. At that she seemed satisfied, even though she made no move to collect the money.

At that point I woke up: before I saw the dog act; before I returned to the bookstore to find out what my choices were; and before the young woman in satin and velvet returned from the party to tell me who had been there and whether I was missed or not.

I don’t know what the dream means, other than today I turned 50.

Categories
Weblogging

Wiki Wordform for groups

I was asked once about why the Kitchen effort had to end. Much of the reason is that the tools are such as to intimidate those who might like to get involved, and in this case I’m referring to the wiki; or too cumbersome to allow a truly open, community-managed weblog. As it stands now, both are too dependent on an individual, which means too vulnerable on that individual’s continued participation.

Marius Coomans wrote a relevant post related to these issues today. He talked about how he wanted to combine his interests in sailing and group software with a mailing list for his sailing friends, but couldn’t generate enough interests–that critical mass that has been mentioned elsewhere.

Why? As he writes:

So why couldn’t I get a enough people to join? Well, I’m part of a minority – those in their late fifties with a intense on-line habit. Most of the people in my age group don’t get it, they didn’t grow up with computers.

That’s much of the problem with the technology associated with the Kitchen. Many of the people who wanted to participate had never had anything to do with a wiki before, and wikis are intimidating. They require not only understanding of how the wiki technology works, but also the culture of the wiki, which is very unique.

As for the weblog, true the contributors were all webloggers. However, most of them have never weblogged in a group environment, or used WordPress for weblogging. Again, there was an intimidation about whether the person’s writing was good enough (all of the writing was more than good enough by the way); and then there was the concern about breaking something in WordPress.

What I’d like to see is a combination of power between the two, wiki and weblog; either through carefully adjusted modifications in code to both while still allowing separate products; or combining the two into one product. A super wiki-weblog.

To start, a good group WordPress modification (perhaps a version of Wordform for Groups) would be to have a ‘newbie’ checkbox next to the person’s name that means when they access the tool, it opens into an editing page that is very simple and very easy to comprehend that doesn’t have tabs at the top and odd fields such as “Post Slug”. Then once the person is over their newness, they can be promoted to a more experienced user and given access to the greater power of the tool.

Another good change would be to allow people to ask to be given administrative capability, and have the other members vote on this. If enough members agree, this person would then have the ability to do things such as pull a post (i.e. set it to a ‘pulled’ status – no post should be deleted), and help new users. With this, several people could have administrative capabilities and the weblog could exist without the direct intervention of any one person. That’s the power of the wiki, openness, but incorporated into the power of weblog, authoring specificity.

It would be an interesting experiment to see what one could do with an open source weblogging tool and a wiki that would lure people out of being passive consumers into active participants. Perhaps the Kitchen can be brought back to life at a later time, and we could try something like a Wiki Wordform for Groups.

Still, technology can only go so far. Or as Marius concludes, we have to get people to want to participate:

Social Software, like weblogs, wikis and yes, mailing lists generally need a two way conversation and many people still see themselves as consumers rather than participants.

We could also consider giving away free toasters. I’ve heard that helps.