Category Archives: Technology

Continuing to battle Wiki spammers

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Configuring the FF@ Wiki to hopefully grow and survive in a world of spammers (see my previous post about this) has been an interesting exercise. While I’ve used Mediawiki and other wikis for years, my efforts have been targeted toward wikis that while publicly accessible did not allow self-creation of login credentials. When I resurrected the FF@ Wiki, I set it up for ease of access to allow the community a low barrier of entry and was rewarded with all sorts of creative spam 😉 . I’d not done anything with Mediawiki extensions, but when I went to look up configuration settings, I found the ConfirmEdit extension, and realized that it was already loaded in the version of Mediawiki I was running and that I didn’t need to install the bits, just needed to set it up in the LocalSettings configuration file to set up a Captcha. There’s a pretty big ecosystem of extensions for Mediawiki, and I need to spend some time looking at this. There may be something else interesting in that corpus that would be interesting for my use cases. More to do!

I wonder if my spammers are humans or bots? I deleted a round of spam pages on Friday, and then I didn’t have any more spam pages until today (Monday). It almost seemed that they took the weekend off! Odd…well, I didn’t make the Captcha process very robust, so if it gets defeated I may have to buff it up a bit with some more question Captchas. I like question Captchas; I’ve used them on some of my Drupal sites with good success. They have the ability to target a specific cohort that shares a particular set of knowledge, and have the advantage of accessibility, unlike visual Captchas!

#$%& Internet trolls & spammers

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I recently revived and updated a wiki that I first created in 2007, which is focused on a group of Internet-connected flyfishers. I’d tried to get interest going in the project back in 2007, but the concept didn’t resonate with the group, and the wiki foundered due to lack of content. I’d just left it alone, and some software updates had broken it, and the wiki was non-functional. A couple months ago, I decided to fix it, updating the database and the Mediawiki software to support a more current version of PHP. I rolled it back out to the group to see if the intervening 6 years had created any more familiarity with the wiki concept. I tweaked the registration process to allow the community to read without registration, and by doing so, made it more public. The problem was that it got discovered by spammers. All was well, and then one day I a couple dozen spam pages. I tweaked the registration process to require a confirmed email for registration, and the problem went away for a while. Then, it seems it was discovered by smarter ‘bots that could deal with the registration process, or by human trolls/spammers. I spent an hour or so last night deleting spam pages, blocking users, and putting a “protect” flag on the main page. The issue is that if I raise the barrier to entry, I keep casual adopters in my intended community from dropping by and making the resource interesting. If I keep the barrier to entry low, it means that I have to engage in wiki hygiene to clean out the trash. It’s the nature of a wiki, and a commentary on the Internet world. Grrrr…

Wordfence

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After a conversation with some colleagues about WordPress security, I decided to install and activate Wordfence on one of my blogs today. I’m using the free version, but it appears to have some nice features. I’ve just started poking around a bit. Some of the logging features are quite interesting, in particular the human v. computer taxonomy. My scan was clean except for one URL I’d highlighted in a post a couple months ago. I looked at the current info on it and took the option to leave it in the post and ignore it on future scans. Overall, a good first impression for Wordfence. I give it two thumbs up!

Oh no, Google Reader is being retired!

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I’ve been a happy user of Google Reader for years, but apparently I was one of a shrinking number of folks using it. I tried many RSS readers over the years, but I liked the simplicity of Google Reader and that it was web-based, with my subscriptions always in sync. Today, Google announced that Reader is being terminated July 1, 2013. I guess I’m in the market for another web-based RSS reader. I’ll have to start looking around at options. This was a great service, and I’m sorry to see it go…

Ideas?

Decisions, decisions…Chrome OS Beta Channel or Stable Channel?

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I’ve been generally happy with keeping my Chromebook on the Chrome OS Beta channel to get slightly faster updates. There’s finally a bug in the beta (Version 26.0.1410.28 beta) that’s “bugging” me 😉 tho, since it’s now broken Hangouts. This beta was released on 3/7, and the beta releases have been about a week or so apart (other than during the calendar year-end period). Hopefully, this will get fixed by the end of the week. Going from stable to beta will cause an immediate update, but going from beta to stable requires a USB restore (or waiting until the stable build catches the beta, which might take 2-3 weeks or more). I think I’ll just live with it for a few days. Hopefully I won’t see too many of these bugs that break something that I use. If so, I might drop back to stable.

Muddling my way thru HTML5

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Back last month, I wrote about trying to get up to speed on HTML5 and CSS. I finally popped the (virtual) book off the (virtual) stack again this evening, and opened the chapters on Canvas (one on 2D and one on 3D) along with a bottle of Domaine St. Damien Gigondas, which was very nice 🙂

I’m quite impressed with what can be done with just a wee bit of HTML and Javascript using the Canvas API. I’m beginning to see why HTML5 “apps” can do so much in the mobile device world. I’m not sure what I’ll do with this knowledge, but sometimes just being aware of how it’s working can help you conceptualize solutions in different ways. There are layers and layers of functionality…this particular book leverages the three.js library for 3D support. Looks quite powerful; the examples just scratched the surface.

Google gets to keep its $Pi M (that’s $3.141596M)

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A good result for Chrome OS at the CanSecWest security conference, as so far Google has not had to pay out on its potential bounty of $Pi M. Chrome was cracked on another browser platform, as were just about all of the pieces of Internet-facing software. I know just enough about how these attacks work to be in awe of those who can make these cracks work. It’s very sobering to reflect on what can be done by a targeted, determined individual or team.

Somewhat frustrated with 1and1.com

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I’ve used 1and1.com for my hosting provider for several years, and they’ve been (to my notion) pretty reliable and have offered me reasonable service at a good price. I’m a bit irritated, though, at the apparent lack of transparency with an outage from the evening of 3/1 to the morning of 3/2. It just happened to coincide with some work I was doing on Friday, moving a wiki from one directory to another and changing the directory that served a particular domain name. I first figured that it was either a DNS propagation issue or the result of hacking after a couple glasses of wine, so I went to bed 😉 . However, the problem persisted this morning, and I started looking into it. Seemed that a number of folks were reporting issues, but the status.1and1.com page and their twitter feed were reporting happiness. Isitdownrightnow.com was showing a problem, though. Come on, guys…give us some quasi-useful status information, at least. The good news is that it’s all back and running normally now.

More on the Chromebook Pixel

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I’ve been reading a number of perspectives on the Chromebook Pixel. As you know from my previous post, I think it’s overpriced and I doubt Google will sell very many. However, as a conceptual product, I think it may represent an important step forward in computing. Touch on laptops will be important, as will integrated wide-area wireless connectivity. Here’s a perspective from CNET that is, I believe, prescient. For many use cases today, the Windows or Mac OS laptop is too complex. It’s full of lots of software (much of which you don’t use) that needs to be patched and maintained. Let’s think about this…what do most of us really do with a desktop or laptop that does not require connectivity to a remote resource? Without connectivity, a great number of the use cases evaporate. Build in wide area connectivity. Keep the network edge device simple, robust, and load software dynamically, obviating the need to manage the device. As for input to the device, Steve Jobs famously dissed touch on a laptop, but why not let it be an adjunct to the trackpad, so that when you touch the screen, it works? Over time, we’ll settle on the combination of pointer movement that works…and it’s likely to be a hybrid. App by app, some things will lend themselves to touch while others to “traditional” input modalities.

There are a few things missing in Chrome OS. A file transfer app (but there are network workarounds), a general purpose text editor for local files, but I’ve found that I spend less and less time working with my home iMac and do most of my computing on my basic Samsung Chromebook. I use Chrome remote access to run the Mac when there’s something that I just can’t do, but in the last few days of updating my WordPress, Drupal, and MediaWiki sites, there’ve only been a couple of things that just really didn’t work from Chrome, and mostly with manipulation of large SQL text files, XML files, and things like that…

Perhaps the Chromebook Pixel is really just Google’s attempt to put a stake in the ground. Google may know that few will be sold this time, but it will give pause to those who say that Chromebooks are cheap little devices and could never be a full-time computational platform. It will set the stage for broader acceptance of the Chromebook and its ilk as the simple, easy to use, reliable network edge interfaces, and the end of traditional desktops/laptops. We need a connected personal communicator and a network portal. That’s it. The network is the computer.