Jeff Clavier's Software Only

Comment spammers now impersonate other bloggers

One more for these scammers: today I got comments from friends of mine. At first they looked normal as they have commented on my blog in the past, but looking at text, it was pretty clear that it was spam. There is really no other way than checking all comments and trackbacks.

Such a pain.

By the way, TypePad now offers Catcha phrases to validate comments and I have turned these on. I have also turned moderation off to see if automated comment spam is still filtered out.

Update: this blog has been spam free for a few days but spammers have found their way to generate catcha responses, so I am putting moderation back on.

The Cingular 8125 could have been the perfect Windows Mobile 5.0 Smartphone

But it is not… quite far from it. Why ? Even with his price tag ($599 without a carrier subsidy ?),  the Cingular 8125 (aka the HTC Wizard) has been under-spec’ed and has a few flaws:

• There is not enough RAM available to the O/S to run a number of applications concurrently. Which leads to the impossibility to take  a picture, or gets Windows Media Player to stop playing a podcast because it is out of memory.
• The default ROM program is  hog, and needs to be updated manually to get better performance and multi-tasking (see below).
• The lens is of dreadful quality for a 1.3 MegaPixels camera. I can only get blurry photos out of it, just a notch better from my previous SMT 5600.
• The phone suddenly slows down to a crawl, freezes or even f…ing reboots on its own. I know that this is the signature of a Microsoft product, but people please! I have had to rip open the phone a couple of times to remove the battery and reboot (2 minutes) to make an urgent phone call (true story).
• Navigating Windows Mobile 5.0 with one hand works mostly OK, but a few functionality or programs require the stylus or holding the phone with two hands. Not great when you are trying to make a call in the car or walking in the street holding a bag in one hand. After all, it is still a phone!
• ActiveSync 4.1/4.2 does not work as an Internet conduit (at least I have not been able to configure it) which means that you can’t receive email when you are synchronizing your phone with your PC.
• Getting Wifi to be used instead of GPRS is just too much work.

Not everything is bad though, and it is still the best phone on the market as far as I am concerned. When the O/S has not eaten all the RAM available, the sliding keyboard is of fantastic quality and the large screen makes the Cingular 8125 a great alternative to the Blackberry IMHO. Note that you need to upgrade your Exchange Server to SP2 level in order to be able to benefit from Push Email – where an out of band message is received by the phone when a new email is available for download, as opposed to having to poll the server every few minutes.

A couple of great resources I have found for that phone family are this blog and this developers forum. The latter is where I read that this ROM that ROM was a great one for this phone. Note that this process is not guaranteed to work in all cases, so be very careful.

Whilst I am at it, I have been asked by many people where my Exchange server is hosted: Mailstreet is the answer, and if you open a new account, you’ll get access to Microsoft Exchange SP2 by default (as well as a promotion doubling your storage capacity via this link).

Comment spammers ever changing strategy: now they try jokes

After numerous attempts of comment spammers to fool us with their bogus content, I have just gotten a “next generation” one. A joke – or at least an attempt thereof:

Ok, don't shoot me if I actually read this joke on this forum in the first place...

During a visit to the Mental Asylum, a visitor asked the Director what the criteria was which defined whether or not a patient should be institutionalised.

"Well," said the Director, "we fill up a bathtub, then we offer a teaspoon, a teacup and a bucket to the patient and ask him or her to empty the bathtub."

"Oh, I understand," said the visitor. "A normal person would use the bucket because it's bigger than the spoon or the teacup."

"No." said the Director, "A normal person would pull the plug." Do you want a room with or without a view?

Not even funny…

 

Thoughts on Shared Nothing Architectures

Buddy Brad Feld has a great post on Shared Nothing Architecture, as a potential solution to performance and reliability issues faced by services I use on a day to day basis: TypePad and del.icio.us (and to some extent, Bloglines - though I don't use it so much now). I had actually spotted that del.icio.us was down as well , and was about to write my own piece out of frustration, but Brad is summarizing the situation well. In the meantime, here is my backup del.icio.us.

On the heals of TypePad’s 18 hour outage this week, there’s been (and will be) a lot of continued discussion about how to build scalable and reliable online / web-based applications.  This is not a new problem (I not so fondly remember major and systemic outages in large services such as eBay and Amazon in the late 1990’s) but it’s gotten new attention as some of the emerging applications have scaled up the point as to have an interesting numbers of regular users (e.g. – it sucks if their service goes down for more than 15 minutes).  For example, as far as I can tell, del.icio.us has been down for the last four hours (“del.icio.us is down for emergency maintenance. we'll be back as soon possible.”) and on 12/15/05 Bloglines acknowledged that “Bloglines performance has sucked eggs lately.”

Tim Wolters – an extremely capable CTO – has an introduction to how he is approaching this at Collective Intellect.  He’s taking a page from Google’s playbook and developing a web service based on a “shared nothing architecture”.  On Friday, I had two different discussions about scalable architectures (e.g. “we’re going to scale up between 10x and 100x on a meaningful base in 2006 – here’s what we are planning”) and both included elements of what Tim is describing.

The ultimate Shared Nothing Architecture relies on mirrored data centers in different physical geographies that allows a system to switch over in (quasi) real-time in case of any type of failure (power, hardware, database, etc.) - and this is expensive to deploy. Del.icio.us is not there yet, but will clearly benefit from Yahoo's scalability expertise. And as to Six Apart, well, let's hope that they'll figure this out since quite a few of us users have expressed their “discontent” (and I am being soft since many of my close friends are involved with the company). These problems happen with almost every companies as they experience a rapid growth of their online presence, and often their backup solutions are just not appropriate (and remember, don't trust these backup generators).

If you need to substantiate early exits by Web 2.0 companies, beyond generating nice payoffs for company founders, look no further: scaling to tens of millions of users and gigabytes of traffic is no simple feat, and the companies facing these issues will be at risk of losing at least a portion of their momentum if they don't handle the situation properly.

Update: it appears that del.icio.us has had to rebuild their corrupted database after a... power failure - I wonder what happened to the generators...

New assault of comment spam

If you are like me, you got blasted by “friendly” comments from Alexander Kolt, Nicolas Trumen, John Reed, Peter Back, and Kelly Ronald – all praising your blog, your posts and yourself.
This new generation of comment spam is more clever than previous but for one thing - the fact that spammers are picking old posts that are not commented upon anymore. Otherwise they use legit blogs/blog posts and in a few cases, it is not even clear which web site they are “pimping”.

I found this on a security-related blog:

We have experienced a “massive attack” of SPAM on our blogging system from various hosts all pointing to two websites:
http://www.cosmicbuddha.com/blog/archives/ 001169.html (I have broken the URL intentionally)
And
http://anthony.ianniciello.net/blog/archives/ 000079.html (I have again broken the URL intentionally)

The comments contained very brief sentences and links to the above web sites.

From what it looks like it was an act of an attack against automatic blacklisting and un-moderated comments, probably not conducted by authors’ of the above blogs.

Some of the IPs that have SPAMed our Blog contained at least one port that was acting as a proxy.

In some cases legitimate but badly configured proxies, such as in the case of a Cisco proxy (Application and Content Networking System Software 5.3.3).

In other cases the proxies were what appeared to be backdoor based proxies - the server’s/computer’s intent was not to act as a proxy.

In two instances the IP from which came the attack was the firewall/router, making me believe that the infected/zombie host was on the inside of the network, rather than on the outside.

I one of the more funny instances, the host that SPAMed us was a Windows NT with IIS 4.0 without any service packs, I was sure I would never see such a machine on the Internet, but I was shown to be wrong .

In any case if we do find out a bit more on this SPAM attack, we will let you know.

One of the poor guys whose (legit) blog is used in the comments left this note:

I am the owner of the first blog you link to above and can confirm that I was in no way related to the spam attacks on your network. I am very sorry that this has happened, but have no idea why my site’s link is being used in that spam comment. I employ MT-Blacklist to control spam and my blacklist is diligently maintained, so this might have been some type of attack or probe regarding blacklisting.

Other site owners have commented on the page that was used in the spam, and if you have any further input it would be great if you could contact me.

Once again, I am very ashamed to be linked to this in any way, but have no relationship with the idiots who are spamming you.

I really don’t want to turn comments off, and forcing a TypeKey registration is not something I am keen on (I generally don't bother registering on a blog that forces me to in order to leave a comment - but I do have a TypeKey that I use when I have to), but boy is this spam thing painful.

RSS adoption - let's get rid of the technobabble first

Bill has a great post regarding the slow adoption of RSS, mentioning “a Neilsen study that reveals only 11% of blog readers use RSS and that a whooping 66% of blog readers don't even know what RSS is”, and cautions VCs who are investing in the space on their expectation of adoption”. I have a different perspective on the interpretation of these statistics.

I think that the result might vary drastically based on the question being asked, and will venture that if you asked people open questions like “How do you access/read your favorite blogs” and “How do you bookmark a blog in order to remember it”, people would respond that they get new articles/headlines in MyYahoo or some other program that shows the latest changes – without having any idea of how these “changes” got there.

And for argument sake, people are reading blogs looking at them as websites that have a few display characteristics (strange labels like Permalinks, Trackbacks, Tags, etc.). Bill cites the example of a popular political blogger who did not publicize his feed up until recently and ended up with a “Syndicate this Site (XML)” on his blog. This could actually be a question for the survey: if I show you a link (or a label) “Syndicate this Site (XML)”, what do you think will happen when you click on it ? You can only imagine the deep perplexity of the novice, presented with the option of selecting several feeds expressed in RSS 0.91, Atom, and RSS 2.0 – as everyone knows RSS 2.0 is important because of its support of enclosures, and so does Atom. Deep perplexity then turns into raw anxiety when the dude clicks on the orange XML button, and ends up staring at well formed XML (because of the lack of a default stylesheet, what was he thinking).

Isn’t there a lesson in the fact that podcast downloads have significantly increased when iTunes made them available like… tunes – something that users are familiar with ?

Just for the sake of it, how many people surfing the Internet would confess that, yes they have been using HTML and a bit of TCP/IP (and don’t need to call their lawyer) ?

"RSS" is a fundamental technology, it just has to disappear “in the fabric”. "Blog" is fine I guess – it is a website that makes it easy for people to engage in open conversations (though, provided that comments are turned on, in some cases that you have a TypeKey or enter a Catcha phase or wait for the moderation queue to be processed – whoops – here we go again).

Misere.

Bill’s last paragraph is also quite telling, especially by its generic nature:

Perhaps most importantly, I think it underscores that VCs have to be careful not overestimate near term adoption rates.  Just because something is "hot" within the incestuous and self-centered world of Silicon Valley doesn't mean that it is hot elsewhere or even destined to be hot elsewhere.

So true it hurts.

Fracking comment and trackback spam

Like anyone maintaining one or more blogs, I really, genuinely, hate trackback and comment spam. Ever since I have turned on moderation on this blog, I have been inundated by hundreds of comments and trackbacks, a large percentage with the same format – related to porn sites. Since they are coming from a large pool of different IP addresses, they can’t be blocked, etc. So I have to spend time cleaning up my trackbacks every now and then. If some of your trackbacks get deleted as well, apologies in advance, but I don’t have much time to deal with this crap with nuance and finesse.

Every now and then, I also get the random, strange, stupid (?) spam like this one, coming from an IP address in Canada. Tres bizarre.

Actually, since the number of spam messages has grown so much, I wonder if the folks at SixApart still maintain all the spam filters that they had put in place in the past, or if they removed them after implementing comment/trackback moderation.

What a pain!

Update: Anil responds in the comments that 6AP are still filtering out spam.

London Tragedy

I am in transit in Paris before hopping on a plane to Spain, and heard about the London tragedy from a friend living there who has broadcasted his entire address book to let us know that he and his wife were fine. I have many friends living in London, and hope that they are all OK, and so are their loved ones.

Our thoughts are prayers are with the families of the victims and injured.

I’d have rather stuck with yesterday’s headlines when the Brits were making fun of the Frogs for beating us to the punch for the 2012 olympic games.

 

Nigerian scammers use Google too

Seen in my referrers log today: a google search from a Nigerian IP address searching for "2005 email address of all board of directors in switzerland".

Zoli actually checked the first result for this search and finds this site listing Search phrases used by West Africans to harvest email addresses for scams.

Adding "Humor" as a category tag for that post.

Rant of the day: Going around the "bloc"...

We French have a knack for doing things differently: we drink quite a  bit of wine because it is healthy (the French paradox), we have suits and  shirts of unique colors (at least I do - the French fashion statement), etc. And that is totally fine with me.

One thing that I am not cool with though, is our inept, sometimes retarded, narrow mindedness when it comes to the French language and the sacred mission that certain institutions have entrusted themselves with in defending it - at all cost, including bringing total ridicule upon us when inventing new french words that "don't mean no nothing - nottthhhinn'!" to avoid using a well established, commonly used, English term.

The latest victim of the "Commission générale de terminologie et de néologie", aka the Neologism General Commission (check out the second meaning of neologism on this link)? Blogs!
They now have to be called "bloc notes" or "blocs". A "bloc note" is a notepad, so we are sort of missing the online nature of the phenomenon - but that is just a detail.

So now what ? Skyblog (the French equivalent of LiveJournal, with over 2M blogs blocs) is going to be renamed Skybloc ? And bloggueur/bloggueuse (the french adaptation of blogger) becomes bloqueur/bloqueuse (he/she who blocks something) ? Oooh, trackback carries a lot of potential (suivi arriere ?). And blogroll, bloc-rouleau ?

All this agitation come from the 1994 enactment of the Loi Toubon (literally translates as Allgood Law) that had a purpose of removing English words and expressions from the press and corporate vocabulary. And of course, there were (in theory) fines involved in case of non compliance - at least at that time. This led to the introduction of famous terms like marketique (marketing), courriel (email), etc.

Why am I making a fuss here ?

A) because this makes us look downright silly, which is OK in certain cases - but not here.
B) because it shows that we just don't accept that we have lost to English the position of "language of business". And as I am about to attend this week the French Technology Showcase (a great initiative that will see 40 French tech startups present to potential Silicon Valley investors and partners ), I am too often reminded that we were not equipped with the proper English training at school: too little, too late (I started learning English when I was 13, as a second language, because way back when you had to learn German as a first foreign language to have the best teachers - go figure).

Even though I understand that things have changed, and that sometimes kids can learn English in earlier grades, it is critical to grok that we *need* the new generations to be bilingual in order to give them a chance to be competitive in the global marketplace. You don't want your kids to attend all English conferences/meetings or meet interesting non-French speaking people, and completely space out on important concepts because they can't absorb the flow of English. Or can't express themselves.

Even though it feels bizarre, I am glad that my kids tell me that my English accent is funny and that (sometimes) my pronunciation really sucks. At least they won't have that problem.

Oh, yeah. And we are making a point of getting them to learn French as well. Because it is a wonderful language for literature, poetry, etc. And it is part of a cultural heritage we are proud of - just in case you were wondering.

</rant>

Coverage: Loic, BoingBoing, CNET.