Category: Burningbird

Looks and thoughts

Post author By Shelley Powers
Post date January 16, 2004

I have been playing around with new sites and new looks. For instance, one new look for Burningbird can be seen here.

I also started a couple of new sites, at Tin Foil Project and Tin Foil President. I was going to use these for both social and political commentary, separating these topics from the Burningbird weblog.

The name ‘Tin Foil Project’ came about last year when I noticed an older article in a Texas newspaper about campaign donations from Alcoa for President Bush’s campaign. Of course, the former head of Alcoa. Paul O’Neill, is now famous for the revelations he’s making about President Bush when he was serving as Secretary of Treasury. But at one point the two were cordial, even sympatico.

I then started doing some research into Bush’s tenure as governor of Texas and found myself having to change my viewpoint of George W. Bush the man. I found myself asking a very basic question: Assume that Bush is not an evil man. If so, then why is he making decisions that are completely anethma to myself and to so many others?

I know that a lot of people who read Burningbird cannot see Bush as anything but an inherently evil man, but to do so means that you can’t understand why people in this country support him. Making foolish claims that only ’stupid’ people vote for Bush is only going to give Bush that many more votes. His reach to the American people is more complex than that, and those that indulge in primitive rhetoric only have themselves to blame if Bush is elected for four more years.

Anyway, that’s the premise behind the two new sites. However, I’m finding that the fragmentation of my site isn’t necessarily the way to go. For one thing, as has been noted, having different weblogs and then repeating comments across them is creating havoc with Blogdex. I’d rather Blogdex not have to resort to removing my weblogs from the database to prevent me dominating the top weblog spots on a too frequent basis, so I’ll need to consider alternatives.

More than that, though, is the fact that splitting my interests into different weblogs removes the context of the writing. The same person who writes about tech, is the same who writes about hiking, is the same who writes about Bush. How can you accept or even understand the context of any of the work if I splinter it off into isolated little pieces?

I orignally split weblogs off so that non-techs wouldn’t have to read my tech stuff, but the little icon I show with each entry should be warning enough – if people don’t want to read tech, they don’t have to. What I need to do is incorporate this into my RSS/Atom files so that people don’t have to click through from their aggregators if they’re not interested in the topic.

Besides, a lot of my tech stuff transcends just tech folks as an audience. In fact, my favorite tech writing is for a non-tech audience (hence the For Poets weblogs).

No, the separate weblogs are a mistake and I’m going to start pulling these together. I’ll still continue to keep separate weblogs for books I have written and am writing, but I’ll split these off from Burningbird in totality, not replicating comments from this site.

It’s a shame, though. I love the names of ‘Tin Foil Project’ and ‘Tin Foil President’. And I like the looks of the sites, too.

(Yes, that is President Bush, as a child, morphed into the photo of the Alamo.)

Maybe I’ll start my own set of group political weblogs: polemic free social and political weblogs with viewpoints welcome from all peoples, not just ‘right thinking’ people.

Oh sure, and what’s the interest in that?

Burningbird Just Shelley

Bored and bruised

Post author By Shelley Powers
Post date January 15, 2004

A friend wrote that rather than do any kind of formal break, just write when I feel like it, don’t when I don’t or don’t have the time. Good advice. I also heard from old friends, in comments and in email, and well, it was nice. Meant a lot to me – about as much as the old, and new, friends mean to me. Time to kick this bird in the butt and do some damage.

Besides, I was getting bored. I hadn’t tangled with anyone for the longest time. So, to make up for it, earlier today I tangled with the Little Green Football folks – yeah, the Chartreuse Balls Gang – over their warped sense of humor (and most other things, too), but that’s for a later post.

I’m on a strict getting in shape campaign that has been doing wonders for my physical well being. For breakfast I have orange juice and a banana, cheese and salad for lunch, good, well cooked meals for dinner and little snacking. Hard work with weights Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, and strenuous hikes Tuesday and Thursday and on the weekend. It’s paying off too, my stress is down, and I feel better.

It’s paying off, too, in general physical health. For instance, my blood pressure today was 112 over 72, which is pretty darn low. Of course, I know what my blood pressure is today because earlier this afternoon, while I was hiking, I fell on a hill when I slipped on loose rock.

Yeah, rather than paying attention to the walk I was looking around, which is mistake number 1 to 100 while hiking. When I started to slip, I tried to dig my foot in and managed to twist it completely end over end, and then joined it falling down the hill. I lay there at the foot of the hill for some time calling out for help because I had thought I had broken the ankle, but no one was around. Finally, I just picked up my butt and limped out of the park, drove home (oh, and that was really fun) and then had my roommate take me to the urgent care clinic.

No breaks, but I am on crutches for possibly several weeks with a badly sprained ankle and foot, torn ligaments, injured knee, and all sorts of fun stuff. Not to mention bruises all over.

Still, could have been worse. And I managed not to break my camera and was actually able to bring you one whole photo from today’s hike. Oddly appropriate looking, don’t you think?

Burningbird Photography

There’s a mountain with my name on it

Post author By Shelley Powers
Post date January 13, 2004

Now, what was there about a mountain and my name, and not pestering nice people?

Oh, yes. I had somewhere else I was supposed to be, now. I have a book to write. I have some friends I’m helping. There’s a hundred hikes with my name on them, and I am not packing my computer when I go. And I dropped my sense of humor somewhere recently, and have to go back to look for it.

Ta Friends.

Burningbird Social Media

Focusing on the social in social software

Post author By Shelley Powers
Post date January 13, 2004

Yule, who is about the most wonderful kicker of butts I know of, posted a link to my previous entry in a comment at another thread related to comment spamming. Unfortunately, the tone of my post had more impact then the words, which shows the dangers of writing in anything other than the most non-emotive manner. But then, what’s the fun of that?

I am frustrated, and I have no qualms about introducing a frustrated tone into my writing when it comes to comment spammers, and webloggers and their reaction thereof. For a people who pride themselves so much on being social software devotees, I’ve never seen a group of people less likely to recognize brilliant social software in action then webloggers. And yes, it is frustrating.

The comment spammers have met and pushed past any barrier we put up. They do so by listening to what we say, and then acting accordingly. They move past the barriers because anything we do other than a re-engineer of the MT comment system is nothing more than an obstacle, not a closed door to the spammers. What we do, though, is overreact. We put on the most amazingly complicated code that if we’re hit with anything approaching some of the new Script Kiddies MT comment attacks, we’re done because the machine can’t keep up the processing. We blacklist at the drop of a hat, using each others blacklist import lists without once considering that each might have good URLs in addition to the bad.

In other words, we take it personally, while the comment spammers take it professionally, and we’ll never win the battle with odds such as these.

I used to take it personally until I started following the actions of the comment spammers. Now, sorry for offending folks, I’m filled with admiration for them. I still think that Tim O’Reilly should have featured comment, and email, spammers as speakers at the Emerging Tech Conference. These people really do know the concepts behind social software, and we could do well to emulate them. In other words, they learn from watching us? We should learn by watching them.

But I’ve said all this before, and this is frustrating.

Burningbird Technology Weblogging

MT Comment Help

Post author By Shelley Powers
Post date January 12, 2004

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

I’m not starting up Burningbird but a lot of good people were hit badly by a very sophisticated comment spam attack, including the Wayward webloggers who I’m responsible to.

The attackers this time only posted three comments to each post, each with different names, and different URLs. They either used spoofing or they’ve harnessed open computers to submit the comments – I think they’ve used traditional DDoS attacks this time, so be careful using IP banning, you could be banning innocent people.

Did mt-blacklist work? No. As I’ve said before, spammers have better habits then so-called legitimate developers, because they listen to their ‘customers’ and adapt accordingly.

In the meantime, clean up:

The only easy way to clean up is directly in MySQL. Even *mt-blacklist will require that you hunt down each individual URL and delete it – time consuming. If you don’t know how to access MySQL then ask for help in comments, send me an email, or ask help from your friends online.

In MySQL directly, or through PHPAdmin, to remove the comments, use the following:

delete from mt_comment where comment_created_on > ‘2004-01-12 15:40:08′;

Change the date to fit your needs, the format is yyyy-mm-dd hh:mm:ss. This will delete all comments after the timestamp. Be careful or you’ll lose comments you want to keep. In fact, always make a backup before you start global deletions. You can use mysqldump to back up your entire database at any time (check MySQL site for how to use mysqldump). Or you can use MT’s backup.

Once deleted, rebuild your site to clear the comments from your pages.

If you want, you can turn off comments on all entries older than 30 days using the following SQL:

update mt_entry set entry_allow_comments = 2 where
TO_DAYS(NOW()) – TO_DAYS(entry_created_on) >= 30;

This closes comments on all entries 30 days old or older. Most comment spams are on older content, which are also less likely to have legitimate comments so this isn’t a bad option. You can run this yourself manually every week or so, or you can add it as a cron job. If you’re unfamiliar with cron, holler.

The spammers have gotten smarter. Eventually if you restrict their access enough, you’ll shut down comments to everyone. The only true solution to this problem is better comment management in MT. However, if you feel as clever as the spammers, perhaps you need to attend a smart people conference, come up with nifty, neato, just gee wiz smart solutions (put into the public domain of course, with the cutest little cc brand.)

This is a short-term post, with comments allowed for now. However, with the keywords in the post, it’s now a target for comment spammers, so I’ll be closing comments in a couple of days, and then put the post into draft mode – the individual page will still exist, but it will disappear from comment posting as well as this front page.

Note that the more metablogging talk you do in your weblog, the more you use the words ‘comment’ and ’spam’ or ’spammer’, the more you make yourself a victim. That’s how they’re finding your posts. I imagine that they had a bit of a chuckle when they made this run.

*Update

For all the mt-blacklist users, if you’re using global lists and not checking that legitimate URLs have been inserted, then chances are you’re opening your system up for a poison pill attack – causing your system to filter common, legitimate URLs, and hence making the mt-blacklist less reliable. The technique is common in email spam, as outlined by Ken Coar. Something to think of next time you import several hundred entries, depending on technology when the spammers depend on their brains.

However, makes no nevermind to me what you do. I’m just passing through.

Second update

There is an MT plug-in that allows you to turn off comments on older postings. I haven’t tried it, but others have and it seems to be working. It’s at http://www.rayners.org/2003/12/27/closing_comments_on_old_entries.php.