It’s not that my workplace is conservative, but it’s just not the kind
of place where I’d feel comfortable wearing a shirt that says
But if that situation changed, I would certainly be buying more stuff
from the mnftiu
liquidation sale.
Clearly I need to add search to my blog. I’m trying to find an entry
I wrote a while ago about how to set up a printer that generates PDF
files but neither
nor
could find it. Three cheers for
which DID track down
entry I was looking for. But I shouldn’t need to jump through a
bunch of search engines like this. One might say I should get my site
properly registered so this isn’t such a problem, but then that would
just attract more
spam and from someone who is halfway dedicated to circumventing
the simple security check I hacked to prevent this.
It was one year ago today that I wrote that original howto. What a
wild coincidence!
I was at a halloween party last weekend when someone said they didn’t
know if there was much, if any, political music coming out lately. It
just so happens that last week Propagandhi released their fourth full
length album, Potemkin City Limits which is chock full of jams
set to rouse the rabble. Take the lead track “A Speculative Fiction”
as testament and put those worries to rest:
A new iron curtain drawn across the 49th parallel.
Cut all diplomatic ties as we expel
all American dignitaries and issue a nation-wide
travel advisory for any others left inside.
Nowhere to run. Nowhere to hide.The burned out shells of south-bound traffic lay
strewn along a cold stretch of would-be interstate.
Still visible below their charred remains: Pax Americana plates.Your stupid fucking laser-pucks. were just the start.
And while you may stand six full cubits and a span,
we got a shepherd’s sling and five stones in our hand
and the battle of 1812 lives in our hearts.We don’t care if we’re destroyed. We’ll never capitulate.
We’ll take the whole fucking world down with us in flames.Just a speculative fiction. No cause for alarm.
We got a good 15 years left ’til the United We Stand
murals on West Broadway finally fade
and we wave good-bye to your sad, childish refrains.
Exchanged for other stupid lullabies
like you can have my guns when you pry them from my cold dead hands.Just a speculative fiction. No cause for alarm.
Propagandhi are like the precocious lovechild of Phil Ochs and
NOFX. Go
album, go see them at
live in Seattle), and please mosh for Jesus.
Paul Ford’s writes what I think is the best personal weblog on the
net. It’s published infreuqently enough (
say that will not add to the massive shit-pile of kulcha.”) to not
make you feel like you always have a ton of crap to catch up on, every
article is incredibly well written (it makes me embarrassed by the low
quality
out from my phone), and it is
moving me to prune my bloglines feeds. Engadget is cool, but how does
device speculation about things that will never be sold or never sold
in the United States does one person really need?
UPDATE 2005.10.15 What a liberating feeling…
…it is, getting rid of the
Mac Primary Mortgage Market Survey. Why made me think this was a
data point that would increase my quality of life in the first place?
I imagine the conversation went something like this…
Coworker 1: “Did you know Patrick’s got the record set on eating a dozen at 21 minutes and 45 seconds? Think you could beat it?”
Coworker 2: “Golly! You bet I could - sign me up!”
Why do we let ourselves be talked into such absurd situations? What is
the neural malfunction that lets someone say “I don’t have to try
crack to know it’s not good for me and I don’t want it” but that lets
us agree to an eating contest like this?
Not only have we got a long way to evolve, but my record still stands.
So I just got flooded with comment spam on my blog and had a
conversation with Cory about how and why this happens. For anyone
curious why my blog was just littered with links to porn sites, here’s
some of that explanation…
Why?
There are two pretty clear reasons why spammers go around leaving
comments in blogs or web forums. First, it’s free “advertising.” The
demographic of people visiting my blog (which really isn’t big enough
to extrapolate from but the general point is correct), aren’t usually
shopping for dildos. But if some spammer can get one person to make
that jump from “I wonder what’s going on with Patrick?” to “I’d like
to in crease my man-hood” and further “I’ll click some random link to
do that now” then the spammer has done his job.
Second, Google’s pagerank algorithm had been wildly successful at
prioritizing search results based on the pagerank algorithm which
partially prioritized results based on sites linking to other sites
(as “votes” for the quality of the destination site), by adding a
comment to every post on my blog that says “please visit my site” in
the comment body and links to the destination site, the spammer has
now created hundreds of “votes” for that the site he was paid to
advertise.
How?
Scripting attacks are what hit me and they’re fairly simple to
hook up. All you need to do is realize that there is some common
system on some site for posting unauthorized comments. With weblogs
that are based on Blosxom and which use the writeback plugin for
handling comments and trackbacks, spammers know that if they create a
script which browses to http://foo.com/post.writeback, there will be a
form which contains a user/site/comment and has a “submit” button -
they just need to fill in those fields and get the “site” value
correct and submit the comment and voila! There’s a new spam link on
the site. Combine this with the fact that if you know a little about
constructing more powerful Google queries, you can get back a list of
the pages on psoul.com and now you just do a simple iteration
like:
foreach page in (psoul.com) fuckup(page)
And your work is done.
Referer [sic] spam - for a while it was fashionable amongst bloggers
to show a page listing the referers to the site. This gets to some
kind of interesting aspects to what happens when you use a browser to
navigate the web. When you browse to http://www.psoul.com, you are
using your browser to make what’s technically called an HTTP GET
request for whatever that web server has at that location. Most of
the details are hidden, you simply say “go to http://www.psoul.com”
and the page comes back but inside that transaction, the browser sends
a number of headers to the webserver that tell the webserver more
about what the user wants. Internally it looks more like “I am the
[User-Agent] browser, I have just come from [Referer] and I would like
the [Accept-Language] language copy of [whatever I am GETting].” The
interesting header there is the Referer, which tells the website which
URL the visitor just came from. Bloggers had been interested in this
because it could tell them how people were getting to their blog -
this is interesting because this tends to be someone in another blog
saying “Patrick says thus and such”, and then the blog author
knows who’s writing about his blog entries. Spammers would take
advantage of this, though, by finding weblogs which list the last 10
or 20 referrers, and then browsing to http://www.spamsite.com and then
going to the blog and then voila! More links on the blog author’s page
that the author probably really didn’t want there.
All of this is a major hassle and the spammers doing crap like this
should be gassed.
Smoking ban expected to pass easily
A proposal to ban smoking in public — including some outdoor
areas — could significantly affect the customers and owners of any
restaurant, bar, club, non-tribal casino or bowling alley in the
state.Yet just weeks before voters will decide Initiative 901, the measure
has drawn relatively little public interest and virtually no serious
opposition.
How has it taken so long for this to come around?
I could only lay low for so long - I’ve been flooded with comment spam
and tempoarily disabled comments while I clean out the crap and work
on preventing this in the future.
one of my late teen heroes, bob mould, is back on the electric guitar and touring again with tonight bringing his band through seattle. his last show here was on the modulate tour where he was experimenting with electronic music and which, judging rom tonights turnout, stretched the patience of more fans than just me.
the review of his mainroom show a couple weeks ago (c/o cory) sounded terrfic. i remember missing show after show because he was always playing to 21+ audiences (interestingly former fugazi drummer brendan canty is beating skins tonight) until sugar formed and i saw hm for the first time on the copper blue tour. it was one of the most intense shows i’d ever seen, and the recent writeups sound like he’s headed back to that formula. lets hope so!
Looks like yesterday Yahoo!
Upcoming.org to their roster of
incredibly cool properties. This is a couple months after picking up
flickr. Maybe now we’ll finally
be able to solve personal scheduling conflicts like when Jon Perlow
decided to have his going away party the night of the Dinosaur Jr
reunion tour or get Peter Murphy and Hank to go out for a couple of
drinks and agree not to play the same town on the
the upcoming folks!