Category: Weblogging

Categories
Weblogging

Pop fizzle

Ah me, what a dangerous combination: a weblog and an inability to get away from the computer with hikes and other exercise due to not being able to do more than hobble from my bedroom to the bathroom. I did not have a particularly good night last night as all the various parts of me clamored for attention.

“Feel me!” “No, no! Feel me!” “Ignore them, I hurt the most!”

Damn body parts.

Still, I am able to move about and this makes me happy, if for no other reason than I can get coffee when I want it.

I mentioned yesterday that I actually went into a Little Green Footballs post and left comments. Most people will think this a foolhardy thing to do and I tend to agree with them. However, I cannot watch people making fun of the death of another person without at least attempting to…what I have no idea.

What happened is that Joey deVilla had pointed out a cartoon and award given to Rachel Corrie as “Idolitarian of the Year” for, we presume, getting run over by a bulldozer when she was protesting the wrecking of a home in Palestine. The award was offensive enough, but the humor that was indulged in was, well frankly, beyond anything I’d seen before.

Regardless of whether we agree with a person or not, or regardless of what a person has done, I can see little justification into making humor of their death. It seems to me that webloggers can go too far in what they write and support, and if so, then Charles, the “Prince of Puerile Hatred” crossed the line, he and his band of merry, and mainly anonymous, marauders. So I entered comments to that effect, which basically only served as fresh meat for the ‘wits’ that frequent LGF’s comments.

It was discouraging to see the things said, until I noticed that there really aren’t a huge number of people agreeing with Charles. In fact, his longer threads tend to be a smaller group of dedicated devotees, and then milder comments, or even criticism from people such as myself.

It made me realize that yes a weblogger can go too far, but we don’t have to do anything about it: as they get worse in their behavior and in what they support, they’ll lose more and more people who can’t stomach the never ending hatred until eventually they just fade away, hopefully never to be heard from again. Or they’ll act as a lightning rod for all the people we would rather not have to deal with anyway, in which case they serve a useful purpose.

Weblogging, like Google, is self-healing.

Categories
Technology Weblogging

Listening to the customers

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Six Apart has released MT 2.66 specifically because of comment spam.

One change is throttle control, which means if you get hit from the same IP address with several comments in a row, MT will shut down the IP. This wouldn’t have helped with the recent comment blitz because that person used a proxy to vary the IP address with each comment. But it should help with the script kiddies.

The second change is one I, point blank, do not like. What happens is that a redirect is built into the management of comment author’s URL, so you get this silly little redirect page between clicking on the URL and getting to the URL. This supposedly is to stop the redirected URL from getting Google Buzz. However, people who have implemented this have said it doesn’t work. Not to mention that my good commenters no longer get Google goodness.

(And it does nothing about the spam comments that embed 100 different URLs into the comment body. )

I tried this at a site that’s upgraded – it busts the back button. There’s this ugly little redirect page. It’s awful.

Google is self-healing. Comment spam and Google is between the spammers and Google. I don’t care. I just don’t want to have to hand delete 500 comments, have to manually use SQL to do this, or use a blacklist that won’t scale.

I appreciate Six Apart trying, and I like the throttling, but all I want is good comment management. It’s not sexy tech, but it’s what we need. I’ll wait for 3.0 with the promised comment management. I also hope that we have the option to NOT use the redirect functionality. I don’t want to have to hack this out of the code.

Categories
Burningbird Technology Weblogging

MT Comment Help

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.

Previous writings on comment spam:

You’ve been comment spammed, your life as you now know it is over

Making a Deliberate Choice

Comment Spam? Or DOS

Spammers : getting to know you

Passive Resistence

DDT for Comments

Using Google Against Us

Comment and Trackback spamming

Comment Spam QuickFix

Comment Spammers Redux

Variations on a Nasty Theme

Categories
RDF Technology Weblogging

RSS Stuff

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Time to take a break from photos and philosophy, and feed the machine.

I have a file that maintains a list of 404 accesses, and the URL where the missing resource access originated. The file most accessed is the old Alter Ego weblog’s rss.xml feed. Since I closed the weblog over a year ago, not quite sure where these requests are originating, so I re-created the file with one entry that reads:

Title: This Weblog is dead, dead, dead

Description: This weblog, Burningbird’s Alter Ego, has been dead for over a year. Why are you still accessing this feed? If you can’t even tell which weblogs are active or not from the feed, perhaps you’re subscribed to too many sources. Try reading a few from time to time.

The point I think is good – some people proudly point to the multi-thousand aggregatiojn subscription count they maintain and my only response to that is, please remove me from your list.

Another old syndication feed chestnut is making its rounds again recently. Seems Joi Ito is providing a CSS stylesheet with his RSS feed. Deja vu all over again. I agree with several others who have pinged Joi in that it makes little sense to supply a stylesheet with a syndication feed. Not only does this override a person’s aggregator settings, it also makes the feed processing more complicated. Plus, I don’t see the point. The purpose of syndication is to provide a recent list of updates, with enough information so that if a person is interested, they’ll click through and read the rest of the writing at your web site.

Sigh. Over and over and over again.

However, there was an interesting point made on this by Liz that made me want to comment, again, on this concept. She wrote:

My gut response to this is discomfort with the idea of trying to use CSS with syndicated content-that it seems somehow contrary to the entire idea of syndicating simple content. But I know from long experience not to trust that kind of initial negativity too much, since it’s often connected with changes that turn out to be quite positive.

Curious – I wonder if Liz also questions her initial positive reactions to new technology with the same hesitancy that she applies to negation reactions? If not, is this because negative or should I say, critical writing is somehow valued less than positive writing?

I know that Joi Ito maintains a very positive outlook when it comes to geekery and tech, but then as a tech VC he has to: people don’t invest based on pessimism, or even realism. (Not to say that Joi wouldn’t be positive anyway – I really do think he loves this stuff.)

My job the last few years before the Great Bust was as a consultant finding the problems with existing or proposed architectures and software designs and decisions before the company spent millions of dollars on, frankly, overoptimistic but doomed technical innovations. In some cases I would then work with the folks to architect new solutions (or in case of a couple of contracting companies, find new companies). It was a job I was very good at, and I know that I saved one past customer several million dollars, and also helped a couple of others create systems that were simpler and much easier to scale. Seems to me the ‘criticism’ in these cases is a positive thing.

(Betcha you didn’t know that, did you? Betcha you just thought I was a negative person, didntcha? Yah sure, back in the good old days I used to charge a buncha money to do what you all get for free.)

Anyway, though I may eventually get around to an Atom feed, when I have the spare cycles, and I have a hidden comments feed (which you can find if you’re determined), I’m not going to fool around with stylesheets for my feeds.

Besides, I like Bloglines. I like the way the system looks, and I like the clean, easy to read aggregated excerpts. But I always click through when my small, select group of subscribed feeds update.

(Except if you provide full content and don’t take comments and host on Blogspot, like Halley).

Categories
Travel Weblogging

Now this is a doorway

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

My internal clock is all screwed up, and went to bed about 8 and now it’s 3 in the morning and I’m wide awake. The hotel I’m staying at in San Diego does have high speed internet access that actually works, and I’m able to upload a few pics.

Yesterday’s travel from San Francisco to San Diego was uneventful, though today, Christmas Day, will be wet for part of my trip. It seems I am bringing a storm with me through my entire return travel to St. Louis, and I’ll be meeting up with rain, and even the possibility of snow in southern Arizona in the higher elevations. December is not a good travel month, and I wouldn’t recommend being on the road at Christmas, but I had business that needed resolution before the end of the year, and feel satisfaction in doing so.

Phone calls yesterday and day before, whether I was able to connect with you or not, well, they frankly cheered me up more than I can say. Lovely presents, every one. Sometimes virtual contact through email and blog and quick fingered IM isn’t enough and you want to connect with the people you know, live, even if it’s through a phone call rather than in person. The calls were like the visits we used to do going from neighbor to neighbor on Christmas Eve and Christmas, back when I was a kid.

And yes, I did go through LA with the cellphone stuck to my ear the entire time, just like a native – but since we crawled along the freeway at about 5 MPH the length of the city (which never ends by the way), I felt quite safe. I told AKMA that driving through LA (urh, Los Angeles) is like doing penance for being a very naughty person.

tripwheeldoorway.jpg

A couple of people mentioned that it was a brave thing to put my number online, but the only people who will see it are folks who like this weblog enough to read it during this holiday time and thus are friendly. I’ll remove the number from the post when I get home, but I did have a call from a strange, crazed man last night. Oh, wait a sec – that was Chris Locke.

When I caught up with my weblog reading in San Francisco, Halley had written an essay about virtual intimacy and online connections at misbehaving.net that has sparked some good and thoughtful discussion. I am much like Mike Golby in comments to the essay, in that the people I’ve come to like here online are as important to me as friends met in a more physical sense. That’s a scary thing at times because friendships formed here really are a true leap of faith.

Speaking of faith, I found one picture that I was going to post with a caption of “Found religion by the side of the road”, just for AKMA (who also comments on Halley’s post). However, I looked up the verses scrawled across the wall, and they reflect the wrathful side of Christianity that delight the more troubled religious fundamentalists in this country. They would rule here with equal parts zeal and hatred, like their compatriots in other troubled countries in the world, but for the grace of the laws of humanity that insist that we at least attempt to maintain religous freedom. I’d rather focus on AKMA and Margaret’s love of a gentle God then the one that would delight in smiting down cities and ‘false prophets’.

But I did so love the photo: the harsh contrasting light added a surreal touch of Americana that can only be found by traveling the Interstates in this country.

tripreligion.jpg

I won’t have much chance for photos going home, thanks to the weather that will accompany me. Elaine mentioned the Coronado Forest area of SE Arizona and I looked it up also and definitely want to visit the area. Unfortunately, with the snow levels falling to 2500 feet, it will have to wait until my next trip. Not a trip to California, though; I’ve had enough of these to last me a lifetime. No long haul trips again in the foreseeable future – too much solitude on lonely highways and too much time to think, and thinking can be an activity that, like smoking, is dangerous to your health and sanity in this country.

Any country.

However, I did have beautiful weather for the trip out and found a photo that reflects sunnier times – even though it’s yet another photo of yet another tree. But we’ll see what we can find on the way home.

tripcliff2.jpg