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October 2005 Archive
Wednesday, October 19, 2005
[Comments: 2] 8:48 AM - fun-with-layout
I've been poking around at my CSS again looking for a new style for my layout. The idea for this one is slightly less dependent on rounded corners that are unsupported by most browsers. If you want to take a look at the work in progress, select the "Beta" layout from the list.
Right now, the stylesheet will not work properly in Internet Explorer, nor has it been tested. It will be, later. Use Firefox, Safari, or Opera for now. I think there are probably some spacing problems in various browsers and font sizes, which I will be messing with as I go.
I am also going to try to get away from the intense green and work on a new color scheme. Suggestions and comments on the Beta layout, and any suggestions for what colors to use in my new palette are extremely welcome. :)
Wednesday, October 12, 2005
[Comments: 3] 7:37 AM - just-to-annoy-me
I seriously have begun to wonder what exactly the fundamental goal of spammers is. At this point, it seems like the entire point is to annoy people into not using the Internet anymore.
No one in their right mind buys a product that is spammed to them, and yet spammers are coming up with more and more creative ways to evade blocking mechanisms designed to prevent people like them from sending messages to people who are not going to buy their products anyway. The sadest thing is the spam continues to get more and more unintelligible to evade spam filters, making it even easier for humans to identify and kill on sight.
What is the point from the spammer's perspective? He is working very, very hard to get messages to my inbox. Fully 50% of them are removed by a server-side spam filter and I never even see them. 49% of them are removed by a client side spam filter, and I note that my Junk mailbox has gained a new message. The remaining 1% of the messages are clearly spam based on the subject alone and are deleted without being read. Add to that the fact that if I do actually read the spam, I check for amusing gibberish before deleting the message without regard to what product it's selling.
Almost everyone that receives spam does this, or tries to. How does this practice remain profitable for spammers, especially as it gets harder and harder to deliver a coherent message to your recipients and more and more people are inclined to ignore or trash them without reading them?
This topic is rolling around in my head at the moment as I just cleaned out more spam from my site. I previously cleared out the comment spam. Now I went after some trackback spamming that I just discovered. I've added a few more checks that should prevent spammers from tracking back to my blog, so hopefully that will slow things down.
The question remains, though. How exactly is it worthwhile for spammers to try to figure out how to spam my site? It's incredibly non-standard. No other blog in existence is configured quite like it, and anything they do accomplish here will not be applicable to any other blog on the Internet, at least not exactly. Where's the profit in getting porn links on a low-traffic personal weblog site? No one's gonna click those links anyway.......
Aha, but here's why it makes sense... Google! One of the many techniques Google uses to collect search engine results is to map keywords that are used in links to a web site to cause that page to come up as a result. If enough commonly searched porn keywords are linked to from dozens of blogs around the Internet to a specific site, that site will be highly ranked when people legitimately looking for that porn topic search Google. Google's technique is quite innovative, but it has been exploited regularly for amusement and for evil, as in this case.
Of course, this still doesn't explain why email spammers and IM spimmers still find their efforts worthwhile. Maybe I shouldn't care so much.... after all, nearly all the spam I do receive is filtered and I never see it, and I intend to keep it that way. :)
Tuesday, October 4, 2005
[Comments: 1] 8:39 AM - serenity-is-awesome
I had meant to make this post, and then forgot. I was so excited about the Serenity movie by Joss Whedon, I had to see it on opening day. The theater, sadly, was mostly empty, and Serenity only debuted at number 2 at the box office. Not bad, considering where it came from.
I am incredibly mad at Fox for taking such a marvelous television show as Firefly, and doing everything in their power to make it die. Fox showed this show in a Friday evening timeslot. The episodes were shown out of order, and regularly preempted. Fox failed to air three episodes, and didn't air an introductory episode until after the series was cancelled.
However, that said, Universal Pictures gave Joss an incredible chance to take his story to the big screen, and I think he did a wonderful job. For fans of the TV series, I think there's a lot there. The movie gets to explaining things fans had been left wondering about when the show was cancelled. However, even if you never watched Firefly, I believe the story was wonderfully set up to explain the needed details. What you learn is definitely not overwhelming and not knowing the extra background you'd have learned from the TV series should not be detrimental. Character development is quicker, which probably makes the characters less lovable than they are after many episodes of careful development. That's probably the point that will make the most difference for people that haven't seen the show.
I think there's some ideas from the TV series that were reused a little for the movie, some things just feel a tiny bit cliché, but overall, the movie is exciting and interesting and worth the $8.50 ticket price.
I was disappointed by a few events in the movie, but mostly because they were saddening, not because they angering. Joss has hinted that he may want to make Serenity into a trilogy, and that would be great, but he's made some changes to his universe that cannot be undone, and I wonder how they will affect his ability to tell the story, and our ability to enjoy it if sequels should surface.
There are still unanswered questions from the TV show. For example, there's an episode where some rather creepy Alliance agents with "hands of blue" are after River. I would love to know why they did not show up in the movie. I can hardly believe River was only holding one secret in her head all this time, and they seem like they were after her for reasons other than those presented in the movie.
I'm not sure opening at number 2 at the box office is great enough for a second or third movie, but it was great enough for me. Serenity will be on my wish list as soon as it's available for preorder, and you should go see it before it leaves theaters. :)
[Comments: 0] 7:55 AM - everyone-loves-more-math
I just added some more code to make the snitch dependent upon the post it was generated for, preventing a spammer from using the same snitch to spam several different comments pages. :)
If for some reason this stuff doesn't work, which will imply to me that spammers are really obsessed with beating my code, I will write some code to deliver an equation in the form of an image or far more erratic wording of the math problem.
[Comments: 3] 7:19 AM - everyone-loves-math
I just deleted a bunch of comment spam from my blog comments pages and I decided that I should implement some simple protection to make it more difficult for blog spammers to post spam messages to my comments pages.
My solution is similar to the concept of those garbled image things that a lot of sites are using now, except instead of using something hard to read, I'm making you think. You have to enter a number, the correct answer to the verification question. For example, if the field says "Verification (4 times 9):" you must enter 36 into the box. If you get the problem wrong, you will be allowed to correct the error. If you get the problem right, your post goes live.
To further avoid spamming, the problem itself is seeded with a special number, which I have nicknamed the "snitch" value. The formula for generating that number is hidden within my code, and I will not post it here. The numbers in the equation are mathematically encoded in this value, and if they do not match the actual numbers that appear in the prompt, the post will not be posted. This means that someone cannot make up an equation and simply pass it to the script with the correct answer, as they must calculate the snitch. The value is also dependent on information from each visitor to my site, so two people should generally not be able to use the same snitch, even for the same equation.
Feel free to try posting a comment and make sure it works right for you. If you think it's not working right, double check that you added or multiplied correctly first. ;)
