This Flash game is a grand simplification, but it is kind of cute.
Archive for the ‘Web Rousing’ Category
Buy Low, Sell High
Saturday, August 7th, 2010
Fighting spam
Tuesday, November 17th, 2009I took more than a month off from this blog to study (more on that in the new year). But while I was away, I was bombarded with a higher than usual amount of spam comments and spam responses to my main site’s “information request” function.
WordPress and Drupal are popular enough platforms that spammers have widely shared bots that automatically crawl into your site and issue bogus requests that end up in my e-mail box. What the incoherent and nonsense spam really is trying to accomplish is beyond me. Some is apparently for male enhancement products, but much of it is just a jumble of letters in no particular language and a series of links. I assume the links are the thing the spammers are trying to get people to follow, but… who would? No one I know.
To fight this scourge, I have installed a CAPTCHA routine on my main site. This is a pretty rudimentary version but it seems effective. My spam has dropped to zero since I installed it a few days ago. For those who haven’t heard of CAPTCHA, it is a system that displays graphical letters and numbers in random sequences that theoretically only a human can read and type back in as a response. If you match the sequence, you are granted access to whatever function is being protected (in this case the request for information is actually sent to my inbox).
As spammer technology got more sophisticated, graphical codes were not sufficient… the bots could match pixel patterns and submit the sequence automatically. The CAPTCHA routines became more advanced, and warping the images of the letters and numbers is intended to throw off the pixel-matching algorithms of the spammers. Sadly, the spammers up their game and their algorithms begin to approach the accuracy of a human eye. So the CAPTCHA warping — becoming more drastic to thwart the spam reader — starts to get so that a human has difficulty reading the code. In the example above… is that an ’8′ or a ‘B’ before the ‘A’? It is all pretty silly — the escalation of force that inevitably leads to some sort of doomsday scenario.
For now, I am simply happy that my inbox is no longer drowning in useless messages.
DoS and Don’ts of cyberwarfare
Wednesday, June 17th, 2009A denial of service (DoS) attack is a cyberwarfare tactic that usually involves bombarding a computer resource with so many requests that it can’t handle them all. In the case of a web attack, the server either crashes or simply spends so much of its time responding to the bogus requests that legitimate ones are not handled or handled so slowly that the site seems unavailable.
In the recent dissident uprising in Iran, a DoS attack was conducted by everyday people who wanted to silence the Iranian government’s lies about what was going on. A programmer in the United States wrote some code that would request refreshes of the key Iranian government web sites every second. People all over could go to the programmer’s proxy and click “start” to conduct an additional attack. It caught on and many of the “official” Iranian sites were effectively shut down: a seeming victory for the forces of freedom.
Unfortunately, as vast and infinite as the Internet seems, you always eventually run into scarcity in one form or another. In this case, dissidents in Iran started pleading with the world to stop the DoS attack because it was depriving them of the bandwidth they needed to get their own message out to the world. In other words, the people the DoS perpetrators were supposed to be helping were actually also hurt by the attack.
I strongly believe that clogging up the Internet (with spam or bogus requests) is wrong no matter how noble your intentions may be.
The Bozo Bit and Twitter
Wednesday, May 13th, 2009I’ve been a longtime advocate of diverse teams. Fresh opinions add value to any problem solving exercise.
On Twitter and other social networking technologies, you tend to “follow” or “friend” people you enjoy reading. This often means following those people with whom you have something in common. The more you have in common, the more you likely enjoy following them.
Unfollowing someone who displays naivete (or is consistently “wrong”) about a topic is like “flipping the Bozo Bit“. It is natural (I’m sure I do it myself) but probably counterproductive in the long run. Now, please note that I am talking about divergent opinions on the same topic. I am not talking about following everyone; those people who tweet about completely unrelated topics are obviously not ones to follow. But people who disagree with you about relevant topics are perfect people to follow and learn from.
A corollary to this is the point that Jason Pontin makes about trying to conduct a debate on Twitter. The format doesn’t really lend itself to serious debate. The 140 character limit is probably too limiting for deep discourse. But, as it always has, microblogging can provide links to the more substantial blog entries that you post to make your point.
Last.fm starts charging some nations
Thursday, May 7th, 2009If you’re not in the US, UK, or Germany, you’re going to be paying a monthly charge for streaming music from the Last.fm site.
It’s been almost two years since I wrote about the challenges of finding a site that even catered to me in Canada. Now it seems the free ride is over. I wish there was some change in the way music distribution was licensed: the geographic exclusivity clauses seem so archaic.
For now, I get 30 free tracks and then I have to start paying. Also important to note: only live streaming is going to cost money; the really powerful “scrobbling” feature of Last.fm will continue to be free. To me, the music industry gets a huge benefit from “scrobbling” because it gives a pretty accurate view of who’s listening to what music. Demographics aside, this is a measure of actual listeners that was never available on traditional radio with any real accuracy.
What’s with Internet Explorer?
Friday, April 17th, 2009Any good Web designer will test with multiple browsers before deploying. I started putting together a very simple web page and began testing as I went. I am shocked at how badly Microsoft Internet Explorer fails to interpret rudimentary standard XHTML and CSS. Maybe you don’t hear a hue and cry because people make a great living customizing Web sites so they comply with the non-standard way Internet Explorer works. Safari, Firefox, and Google Chrome seem to be able to interpret things in a common way and actually function according to the W3 descriptions of what to expect. I will admit that Opera screwed up one horizontal line (<hr> tag), so I left it out of the following visual comparison:
Local sells, lying loses
Tuesday, March 10th, 2009The following is a modified excerpt from an actual Web site (I took out the angle brackets and script notation):
Thank you for visiting my site. This is Corey Peters. I grew up in the –script src=“http://j.maxmind.com/app/geoip.js” –document.write(geoip_city()); document.write(geoip_region()); area. This is my story on how filling out one simple online form changed my life. Basically I actually make around $5,500 to $7,000 a month from Google.
So when you read the results on the web, you think the guy grew up in your local area. But it is a scam and a half. It is a scam because it is about link farming. But it is another half a scam because it dynamically changes the “facts” for each visitor no matter where they are. This practice is cropping up all over the Internet; Facebook allows it to happen.
Five hotties in (your city) want to meet you!
Three people from (your city) have a crush on you.
It is despicable. I am especially annoyed with this practice after reading my brother-in-law’s excellent point about how legitimately locale-targeted Google ads can be very effective.
Internet meme roundup
Friday, January 16th, 2009Internet memes are a fascinating area of modern culture. Memes have existed for a long time. One of the first ones that seemed to be a child of the Internet age was the dancing baby that got sent around by email back in the nineties. (I hope you find it as creepy as I do.)
Since then, certain internet cliques actually seem to take pride in the memes they started. Check out the very popular lolcats at http://icanhascheezburger.com/ or the Coke and Mentos experiments that I think started at http://eepybird.com/. There’s also the “Will it Blend” series. Simple, stupid stuff that captures the crowd’s imaginations. (When they talk about the wisdom of the crowd… they don’t mean this one.)
Weezer’s Pork and Beans video is a really cool roundup of many of the most popular memes of the last few years. They even flew the actual people at the center of some memes in for the video shoot.
Of course, as with anything that catches on, the whole idea of a meme is now turning into a way to make money and ad agencies are doing their best to come up with things that will “go viral”.
When globalization fails
Sunday, July 6th, 2008I have worked for one of the truly global tech companies for many years now. We are proud of our track record in simultaneous worldwide general availability. In other words, when a product is made available in North America in English, it is also made available in many other countries in their native languages. Not every country. Not every language. But for some popular products, translation into 140 different languages is not unheard of.
Globalization has its challenges. Even if a product is not translated there are tons of issues with sorting, currency, and culture that need to be taken into account by producers of truly global software.
When I stopped by Google Maps today and was curious about the Sapporo region, I was a little mystified that the map labels were all in Japanese. I thought that there must be a default I can change. But it turns out this is a longstanding and well-known issue with Google Maps. The explanation is that providing translated layers (like they have on Google Earth, by the way) would be too time consuming and expensive. I am not sure if that is an official explanation or not. Regardless, I think I should be able to view all parts of the world labeled in words I can read. Is that too ethnocentric of me?
The Dumbest Generation?
Thursday, June 26th, 2008Good grief. There’s been talk about how television would rot children’s minds. Comic books were the culprit before that. Believe it or not, critics bemoaned the invention of writing as something that would reduce young people’s capacity to remember on their own. Now of course, the Egregiously Vile Internet Legacy (EVIL™) represents the latest threat to our kids’ intellect. Never mind that children have just as much reason to be concerned about their parents’ internet habits.
Each new cultural shift brings out a new cadre of curmudgeons: those grumpy old folks who think that things were better in the old days and that we’re in some sort of intellectual death spiral.
I think if any of them had been alive long enough they would long for the wonderful simple days when man learned to stand erect and gathered his own food.
I sincerely believe that the internet offers its own opportunities for intellectual enhancement. Chatting online and text messaging introduces a new shorthand, as complex and nuanced as any new language. Blogging and threaded discussions have given rise to whole new outlets for exposition and discourse. Visual media is highly advanced, encouraging spatial thinking and advanced artistic techniques. And the coolest part is that all of these new intellectual outlets are available to everyone who can access the internet, not just the elite few who could afford formal training. However, as with anything, the outlets can be abused. I bet there were some troublemakers in Aristotle’s gatherings at the Lyceum too.
Nick Carr wrote a long article earlier this month which gives some good examples of the Marshall McLuhan idea that media shapes not only the message, but the way we receive that message and any other subsequent messages. Over time we change the way we think. I believe it is not dumber, just different. Our capacity for multitasking may improve, even as our ability to absorb long and complicated texts decreases.
Note: I stole the title of this post from a book called The Dumbest Generation by Mark Bauerlain. I haven’t read it but it has prompted reactions both supportive and scathing so I assume it covers issues similar to what I’ve talked about in this post.