Artikel - 20.1.2005 - 4.2.2005

Outrage over Deutsche Bank

Outrage over Deutsche Bank - well, now they're all outraged again, the politicians. And in the next round they'll demand relief for business at the expense of workers, because the wonderful economy would invest all that money - as you can see so clearly with Deutsche Bank.

It would be nice if politicians had even rudimentary learning ability and understood that they're simply being screwed by business right now. Large corporations have no interest in investing and stabilizing the economy when they can just squeeze society instead. You can see it in Ackermann's behavior in the Esser trial, you can see it in Deutsche Bank's conduct, you can see it in GM's extortion of Opel locations in Germany, in the fat salary increase of the global Daimler failure, and in Siemens' approach in the mobile phone division.

Corporations have no interest in their own market - they'll simply abandon it if necessary. Only short-term improvements to shareholder value matter - so the manager can reward himself with fat raises and nice severance packages because of his supposedly brilliant success. If the whole thing goes down the drain - doesn't matter. Quickly sell off the company to a foreign corporation and disappear. Even the dumbest manager always finds a job somewhere.

Entrepreneurial risk is now only borne by smaller medium-sized enterprises, where the boss still notices when his company goes down the drain. But they're just as naive as politicians and crawl up to the industry bigwigs instead of standing up for themselves.

Trackback Thinking

A Whole Lotta Nothing: No one can have nice things! - Matt is disabling trackbacks on his site. Interesting is his observation that a few test trackbacks came through first, and only after these were still there 8 hours later did the big wave arrive. This aligns with the experiences of others - the spambots are probably still semi-automated at the moment.

At Phil Ringnalda there are more thoughts on trackbacks and whether they're even relevant anymore - and whether the way they're usually used even makes sense. His main point is the fact that many trackbacks are rather pointless - they simply point to a post that ultimately just contains a classic "me too" and points back to the origin. He would prefer context-based pings - you've written something on a topic that's being discussed elsewhere? A manual trackback to that post connects these two sites. This topic-based trackbacking was also the main idea behind the Internet Topic Exchange - basically just a trackback address and an attached wiki. It got off the ground to some extent, but it never really caught on widely. Similarly, LazyWeb - a post with a problem, a trackback to LazyWeb and maybe someone finds a solution - never really took off. Okay, it's running, but you would have expected more response.

These connections are exactly the sort of thing that's not so easy to do with Pingback - Pingback is based on bidirectional linking, whereas trackback would be interesting in these examples precisely because of its decoupling from actual links.

On the other hand, I constantly see poker spam on TopicExchange topics - and with that, such a system eventually just dies, unless enough gardeners are found to pull out the weeds.

That's enough from the self-referential techno-babble corner for now.

First Fallout of rel="nofollow"

Rogers Cadenhead made some comments about Wikipedia marking all external links with rel="nofollow". I find it particularly unfortunate that Wikipedia typically only links to external sources that actually have subject matter quality - or at least are considered to have such quality by the Wikipedia author. Precisely a link monster like Wikipedia has improved the positioning of other pages through its links - which surely would have been particularly helpful for information websites about obscure topics. After all, who else would link to them?

Pledge association names?

BVB pledges rights to club name - and I wonder who's more stupid: the football club that pledges its name, or the insurer who's dumb enough to accept something so pointless as collateral...

Completely crazy: the sherry enema

Woman Kills Husband with Sherry Enema. Yep, that means exactly what it says: an enema with sherry. On an alcoholic — because he couldn't swallow.

When you read something like this, you understand why Americans need all these nice warning labels on products. A clear case for Wonko.

AOL aims to secure surfing with new Netscape browser

AOL aims to secure surfing with new Netscape browser - wobei es wohl weniger um securing als insecuring geht: Netscape 8 will identify sites known to be trusted, such as banks, online services and online stores, with a green check mark. These sites by default will be displayed using the IE rendering engine, with most browser technologies enabled to maximize compatibility. The trusted sites list will come from organizations such as Truste, sources said. . Was für eine grossartige Idee. Irgendjemand ausserhalb meines Rechners definiert eine Liste von Sites auf denen das Viren- und Trojanerloch automatisch aktiviert wird. Super Idee. Ganz toll. Ich bin ja auch sowas von scharf darauf jemand anderen bestimmen zu lassen welche Rendering-Engine benutzt wird.

Just a Test for Quotation Marks

Quotation marks – and other special characters – are important … said Gerrit.

fast small web servers

lighttpd is a small, fast web server with a quite impressive feature set and the clear goal of being faster and more resource-efficient than Apache. CGI, FastCGI, and PHP (via FastCGI) are also supported, making it suitable for dynamic pages as well. Maybe I should take a closer look at it.

leahhttpd is another small web server with a focus on low resource usage and high performance. Here too, there's quite an impressive feature spectrum.

boa is the grandfather of web servers with a performance and resource focus. However, it only offers CGI as an option for dynamic content. So it's better suited for serving purely static content.

Of all three, lighttpd looks the most interesting, among other things because of its good support for interfaces for dynamic content. Especially since the server already has a built-in FastCGI load balancer, making it designed for larger loads right out of the box. And the focus on FastCGI instead of built-in modules offers additional possibilities for security - the FastCGI process can run under a different (restricted) user.

Strange Business Ideas at Providers

As much as I like Hetzner as a provider, sometimes they come up with weird ideas. Now you can also get additional IPs for your entry server (their starter package). However, these cost a monthly fee per IP - which is actually pretty strange, since IP addresses aren't supposed to be sold according to RIPE - but okay, whatever. I'd be willing to pay a moderate amount for an additional IP.

But the idea that my 250 GB free volume only applies to the main IP and every started GB on the additional IPs has to be paid for, even if there's still plenty of free volume on the main IP - sorry, but that's just plain stupid. That way you end up paying double and triple for the additional IPs. No way. A second IP address for test installations or an isolated chroot jail with isolated software setup isn't that important to me.

In fairness, it should be mentioned that the next larger root server solution from Hetzner does have IPs as needed without a monthly fee. But how the free volume is distributed there, I don't know - it's not clear from their websites anyway.

Well, up until now Hetzner has always surprised me by eventually just dropping strange and absurd ideas and replacing them with sensible solutions (like the long overdue emergency boot system that's now available, or the option for hardware upgrades on the entry server). I'm not giving up hope on the additional IPs either.

The Almighty Fantasies of Interior Ministers

junge welt from 01.02.2005 - The data collectors flip out - yeah, great idea. According to Beckstein, Schünemann and Schily, administrative offenses and anti-nuclear demonstrations should lead to genetic profiling. And onwards into the police state, so that we can nicely keep deviant opinions and the lumpenproletariat under control. Because then we'd all be so terribly safe.

Who actually protects us effectively from crazy politicians?

Heise.de down due to DDOS

Der Schockwellenreiter has the press release from Heise about it. Something like that is really awful and I'm keeping my fingers crossed for the Heise technicians that they get it under control as soon as possible. As a sysadmin, you always suffer along with something like this.

Huh? Media numbers in January ...

Actually, I don't usually mention these things, since they're kind of trivial. But I was a bit surprised today:

8210 visitors 15413 visits 73858 page views 1.96 GB traffic

That's significantly more than I usually get. Strange. And that's not even including the first week of the month, when the whole thing was still running on PyDS. By the way, I'm also getting more comments than usual. Strange. I'm not writing any better than I normally do...

IBM drags Intel into SCO case

GROKLAW has reported that IBM is pulling Intel into the proceedings against SCO with a subpoena and wants to force them to testify. Interesting - because as far as I know, Intel hasn't been part of the discussion so far as to whether they could have anything to do with it. The fact that IBM is bringing them in by means of a subpoena certainly suggests that IBM believes Intel knows something that Intel is unwilling to disclose voluntarily.

Nuclear Elephant: DSPAM

Nuclear Elephant: DSPAM is a Bayesian spam filter. However, it's one that doesn't just run for a single user, but typically for an entire group of users. I have it running on simon.bofh.ms to scan all the mailboxes there - it integrates well and has a whole range of interesting features. On one hand, there's the web interface for managing the spam filter, and on the other hand, there's the quite pragmatic method for reporting false detections to the filter. Also nice is the quite broad support for databases (MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite, and several db* types). Overall, it makes a really well-rounded impression - the only downside is the lack of translation for the interface.

Whether it actually filters well, I of course can't say yet due to lack of volume - the emails first need to accumulate and be trained. User reports are, however - typical for Bayesian spam filters - quite positive.

Away with Trackback

Isotopp is pondering trackback spam on the occasion of spam day and presents several approaches. One of them uses a counter-check of the trackback URL against the IP of the submitting computer - if the computer has a different IP than the server advertised in the trackback, it would probably be spam. I've written down my own comments on this - and explained why I'd rather be rid of trackback today than tomorrow. Completely. And yes, that's a complete 180-degree turn on my part regarding trackback.

The IP test approach once again comes from the perspective of pure server-based blogs. But there's unfortunately a large heap of trackback-capable software installations that don't need to run (and often don't run) on the server where the blog pages are located - all tools that produce static output, for example. Large installations are Radio Userland blogs. Smaller PyDS blogs. Or also Blosxom variants in offline mode (provided there are now trackback-capable versions - but since they're typical hacker tools, they definitely exist).

Then there are the various tools that aren't trackback-capable, where users then use an external trackback agent to submit trackbacks.

And last but not least, there are also the various Blogger/MetaWeblogAPI clients that submit the trackback themselves because, for example, only MoveableType in the MetaWeblogAPI allows triggering trackbacks, but other APIs don't.

Because of this, the IP approach is either only to be seen as a filter that lets through some of the trackbacks, or it's a prevention of trackbacks from the users mentioned above. And the latter would be extremely unpleasant.

Actually, the problem is quite simple: Trackback is a sick protocol that was stitched together with a hot needle, without the developer giving even a moment's thought to the whole thing. And therefore belongs, in my opinion, on the garbage heap of API history. The fact that I support it here is simply because WordPress implemented it by default. Once the manual moderation effort becomes too high, trackback will be completely removed here.

Sorry, but on the trackback point the MoveableType makers really showed a closeness to Microsoft behavior: pushed through a completely inadequate pseudo-standard via market dominance - without giving even a thought to the security implications. Why do you think RFCs always have a corresponding section on security problems as mandatory? Unfortunately, all the blog developers faithfully followed along (yes, me too - at Python Desktop Server) and now we're stuck with this silly protocol. And its - completely predictable - problems.

Better to develop and push a better alternative now - for example PingBack. With PingBack, it's defined that the page that wants to execute a PingBack to another page must really contain this link there exactly as it is - in the API, two URLs are always transmitted, its own and the foreign URL. The own URL must point to the foreign URL in the source, only then will the foreign server accept the PingBack.

For spammers this is pretty absurd to handle - they would have to rebuild the page before every spam or ensure through appropriate server mechanisms that the spammed weblogs then present a page during testing that contains this link. Of course that's quite doable - but the effort is significantly higher and due to the necessary server technology, this is no longer feasible with foreign open proxies and/or dial-up access.

Because of this, the right approach would simply be to switch the link protocol. Away with Trackback. You can't plug the trackback hole. PS: anyone who looks at my trackback in Isotopp's post will immediately see the second problem with trackback: apart from the huge security problem, the character set support of trackbacks is simply a complete disaster. The original author of the pseudo-standard didn't think for a minute about possible problems here either. And then some people still wonder why TypeKey from the MoveableType people isn't so well accepted - sorry, but people who make such lousy standards won't be getting my login management either ...

Orange Data Mining

Another link for the number crunchers: Orange is a data mining library with Python integration and—at least judging by the screenshots—an interesting GUI.

SSH on Mobile

MidpSSH | SSH and Telnet client for MIDP / J2ME devices was recommended to me in the comments on an older post. I installed it on my phone and have to say, I'm impressed. Regardless of how silly the idea is to operate an SSH shell via a phone, it works. And with the macros, it could even be useful for some special cases.

Ok, it doesn't make a lot of sense for our server fleet - most of our servers aren't directly accessible from outside. And switching to the next server is quite annoying with mobile text input. But usually I only need access to the front servers to trigger actions from there - and where these are still missing, you could certainly set up scripts on the front servers.

WordPress Related Entries plugin

わさび » Archives » WordPress Related Entries plugin - a very nice little plugin that searches for related articles using MySQL's full-text index. Of course, this is only a fairly simple algorithm and the quality of results is nowhere near Google's level, but I installed it anyway. When you go to the detail page of a post (e.g., by clicking on the title), a list of up to 5 matching other articles is displayed.

I also expect this to give somewhat better positioning for various older posts - without having to remember to manually set a link to them every time (hey, most of the time I've forgotten about them myself!). And maybe it will also help people who come via search engines to find what they're looking for.

Besides, it's cool, and cool is good

darcs - Distributed Versioning

darcs is one of many version control systems vying to succeed CVS. Specifically, darcs belongs to the class of distributed version control systems and is thus naturally superior to Subversion with its centralist approach (at least if you want to manage a distributed project and can't just get by with the central repository). Normally I wouldn't say much about something like this — after all, there are currently more version control projects than there were editors in the 80s. But seriously now: who can ignore a version control system that is written in a functional programming language with lazy evaluation (yes, exactly, this thing is in Haskell — so much for the claim that Haskell is unsuitable for practical projects) and describes itself as being based on a "theory of patches" with roots in quantum mechanics? And the programmers even use literate programming — yes, that somewhat forgotten method by Knuth of combining documentation and code in a single source file and developing a program from a documentation-centric perspective. Simply cool.

"Bild" violates human dignity

BILDblog » "Bild" violates human dignity - and even gets this legally confirmed. Unfortunately just one of many cases. And I don't believe this will put an end to the smut journalism in Bild - they get stopped far too rarely for that.

Music industry warns heise online over report on copying software

Music industry warns heise online over copying software report - I hope Heise's lawyers have a lot of fun when they (hopefully!) tear apart the music industry in court. I definitely trust Heise's lawyers much more than Waldorf and Stettler ...

Stupid Spambot at Work

Right now a pretty stupidly constructed spambot is hammering away at my comment function and clogging up my moderation queue - nothing gets through from it because it's so stupid that it posts everything in plain text, loads of links and typical spam words. So it gets caught by the most basic filters. Nonetheless, something like this can of course have fallout - namely comments from others that end up in moderation (e.g. because the number of links is too high) could be overlooked by me in the mess of hundreds of spam comments and accidentally deleted along with it. If that happens, it's not personal. I just don't feel like scrutinizing carefully when dealing with several hundred spam comments to make sure I'm really only deleting spam...

Update: After taking a closer look at it, I've put it in /dev/null for now - the moderation queue is no longer burdened by it and legitimate moderated comments won't accidentally get deleted. What struck me during the closer examination: a large number of very widely scattered IP addresses are being used. Sounds very much like a botnet, especially since the IP addresses, based on spot checks, appear to all be dynamic dialup addresses. So our friends with remotely controlled Windows machines are once again the horse that spam rides on here. Great. Thanks, Microsoft...

DNA Analysis in the Bundestag

DNA Analysis in the Bundestag [raben.horst] - and so we continue building the police state. Never mind that the Constitutional Court restricted the use of DNA samples to particularly serious crimes. Never mind that genetic fingerprinting - and still compulsory - offers far more possibilities than conventional fingerprints. As long as the hardliners get their surveillance and control obsession confirmed.

Bundestag's Legal Committee votes against software patents

Legal Affairs Committee of the Bundestag votes against software patents - will someone in government finally wake up? Or will the Bundestag's position - like the EU Parliament's position before it - be trampled underfoot?

SCO vs. Linux: SCO Finds IBM's Code Demands Unreasonable

SCO vs. Linux: SCO finds IBM's code demands unreasonable. Amusing - crying for code themselves, but unable to hand over their own. And if they would actually be so blocked by the release of their own code - how do they want to sift through the vastly larger amounts of code from IBM? It's remarkable that the SCO people aren't embarrassed about this whole mess...

Constitutional Court Lifts Ban on Tuition Fees

Constitutional Court lifts ban on tuition fees. Welcome to a two-tier society when it comes to education. No, 500 euros per semester is not a socially acceptable fee. But that's the agenda anyway - those at the bottom are not supposed to have a chance to move up. It's all about elite universities and tuition fees creating an elite - the financial elite. And so after all these decades we've drawn a final line under equal educational opportunities - fittingly in the year when international studies confirm that we don't have much to boast about when it comes to equal opportunity in education anyway.

A nation of poets and thinkers? Not at all. A nation of sheep and fools seems more fitting...

WP-Questionnaire Plugin

Ok, I've finished the plugin for Wordpress 1.5. Simple thing - a plugin and a small management page where you can set up various questions. To install you download the plugin and simply copy the files to the locations specified in the readme.txt and activate the plugin. Then you just add a few questions in the management section under Questionnaire and you're done. When commenting, a more or less silly question is asked, which should be satisfied with as short an answer as possible (we don't want to annoy the commenters too much). If the answer is correct, the comment - provided no other anti-spam methods kick in first - is released immediately. If the answer is wrong, the comment goes into moderation and must be approved by the admin.

You can of course also build a secret IQ test for your commenters with this and instead of simple questions put small riddles in there - only those who solve them are allowed to comment immediately.

I've activated the plugin on my site, let's see if it has any effects on the commenting behavior of people here. You can share your opinions here about what you think of such an anti-spam methodology.

A fairly interesting possible attack on any captcha solution can be found incidentally in the comments to Eric Meyer's WP-Gatekeeper: you can simply collect and save the comment forms. Additionally, you need a site where you can use these - for example, a site for free porn videos. There you present the captchas to the users of these sites and take their answers. You then send this answer to the saved form and the comment is done. Of course you can also take countermeasures against this - probably best would be an encoded timecode in the form and rejection of a timecode that's too old, since the answers from the porn viewers probably won't come immediately. Interesting approach, the whole thing.

Update: the plugin still has two bugs. For one, it also catches trackbacks (which of course never have the necessary variables) and it can currently still be circumvented pretty easily if you know what to look for in the form - you just need to solve one captcha and then you can spam other comments by changing the comment ID. The latter is actually a bug in many captcha solutions - you fall for it too easily, forgetting to bind the captchas to some form of serial number or similar so that a form can only be used once in that form...

So I'll be making an update to the plugin in the near future.

Update 2: the problem with trackbacks and pingbacks should now be solved. The problem with replay is still in there. I still need to think about that a bit. My previous solution approaches don't really appeal to me for that.

Update 3: I've now switched it off here again. I haven't gotten any comment spam so far and without a compelling reason, even a simple question to answer is pretty annoying...

From my search engine referrers

The really nice thing about my Zeitgeist is that it also shows me the absurd little things. So I would like to let anyone know who searched for naked pictures of Bill Gates that I don't possess any such pictures and don't intend to have them here on the blog. You have to draw the line somewhere.

The Government's Rip-off Aid for Electricity Producers

Large consumers are to be relieved of electricity costs at the expense of private households. And this is not some backbencher demanding this – rather these are demands from the government to a regulatory authority in the energy sector to be established. Great – another piece of evidence that all these wonderful regulations are only about allowing companies to cut themselves the largest possible pieces of the cake at consumers' expense. Politically sanctioned rip-off. An excellent example of Clement-style special democracy.

As the Schockwellenreiter already correctly asks: is it any wonder when the members of parliament are paid by energy suppliers?

First appearance as CDU general - and failed

Debut as CDU General: Kauder shocks Red-Green with Nazi comparison. At least one stops wondering why the JU invites Hohmann as a keynote speaker - the tree simply doesn't fall far from the apple here. The Union has been playing with the right-wing fringe time and again since Kohl.

Protests against the situation in Saxony only exist because a few seats didn't go to their own ultra-rightists there. So no real difference of opinion, but pure turf warfare...

Eric's Archived Thoughts: WP-Gatekeeper

Eric's Archived Thoughts: WP-Gatekeeper is a very interesting approach to comment spam: it simply asks one of many pre-configured questions that a human can answer very easily, but a spam bot cannot. Similar forms are already being used in various blogs, but here it's nicely worked out (although in my view it could also be completely realized as a plugin). The basic idea is essentially that of a CAPTCHA - but a textual CAPTCHA. A human can easily answer the question what is 1+1 - a spam bot won't get anywhere with that. Sure, spammers can create databases of questions and answers. But if everyone sets up their own collection of questions, it won't get them far. For comment spam, it should be a very usable solution.

Unfortunately, there's no such simple solution for trackbacks...

Update: since I find the idea somewhat amusing, I'm currently writing a corresponding plugin. So it's possible that my comments might behave a bit strangely tonight.

FDP's Presentation on Education Policy

FDP: "In Germany, the wrong people are having children" - I was also sitting there pretty flabbergasted at the garbage that Bahr spouted. I just hadn't quite figured out how to verbally attack it. Ralf took that off my hands. Go read it.

Internet Explorer Still Vulnerable After Patch

Internet Explorer still vulnerable after patch - which is embarrassing enough in itself. But the Heise editorial recommendation:

In principle, ActiveX is always a gateway for malware and should be disabled if necessary. However, some websites will then no longer function correctly.

is somehow peculiar: I've never really noticed ActiveX as a barrier to visiting any websites. Well, I'm a Mac and Linux user - if websites only worked with ActiveX, I would have noticed it, since it's conceptually impossible for me to run it (not even in IE, because of the wrong processor architecture).

Sure, there are a few Microsoft products that rely on ActiveX - but you really can't claim that it's become widespread out there on the web. So I'd say: disable ActiveX at least for the Internet zone. It has no value there. And in the trusted zones - which I already consider a pretty big euphemism for IE - only enable it if it's really necessary (for example, because an intranet solution unfortunately uses ActiveX). Or install a proper browser for surfing the web. That's the better solution anyway ...

Young Union invites former CDU politician Hohmann

Young Union invites ex-CDU politician Hohmann - and thereby makes itself (yet again) a laughingstock of the nation. How stupid can you actually be to stage such an action as criticism of the party leader? Sure, the Young Union hasn't overtaken the federal party on the far right for the first time - but then the CDU must surely be asked the question of how it actually intends to actively combat strengthening right-wing extremism if it recruits its people from such political newcomers ...

MIDI Bagpipe Roundup

MIDI Bagpipe Roundup - if anyone still wants to give me a pointless and overpriced gift: I'd love one of these electronic bagpipes. If only to drive the neighbors crazy.

MT-Blacklist -> Hijacked comments.cgi

MT-Blacklist -> Hijacked comments.cgi - anyone using Moveable Type should disable the comment script. The email verification that checks whether the sender address input doesn't contain junk is broken - which allows you to sneak in additional recipient addresses by separating them from the actual sender address with a line feed. And with that you can happily use MT to spam other people.

A real beginner mistake - the email validation is done with a regex that doesn't match the end of the string and uses dotall - so it only goes up to a possible line feed and ignores everything after it. Really stupid.

Vole Monogamy

Hotel Falckenstein: Wühlmaus-Monogamie - a highly recommended comment on the state of gender equality. And on secret paternity tests. And on voles.

DNA debate: Müntefering stands behind Schily

DNA debate: Müntefering backs Schily and only incompetence personified (some call her the Federal Minister of Justice, yes, the very one who took away our right to private copying and wants to impose stupid software patents on us) stands against it. That's really alarming...

IT&W Reconstructs Mac Video

IT&W reconstructs Mac video - I would link directly, but their server got hammered...

RSS 1.1 and Postal's Law

The RSS 1.1: RDF Site Summary (DRAFT) contains a passage that I only noticed today ( through this posting). This fits well with the topic of developer arrogance. Because here again a developer has easily strayed from the path of reason. Of course, it's important that a standard is cleanly defined and that producers of formats adhere to these standards. It's also okay to require that a consumer of this format checks it and provides messages when deviations occur (though few users can make sense of their aggregator's messages anyway). But it's completely unrealistic to believe that aggregator users are satisfied when their aggregator just spits out an error message and no content. That's just as stupid as the same approach with XHTML - where some browsers actually implement it and don't go into Quirks Mode for broken XHTML, but simply deliver the XML parser error. Sorry, but that's complete nonsense. Every communication protocol has two ends - the producer and the consumer. And Postal's Law - be conservative in what you produce and liberal in what you accept - is simply the most sensible way to approach such communication protocols that transport content intended for humans. Requiring that consumer applications not display existing content due to format errors is simply unrealistic.

Public Prosecutor will not investigate NPD

State prosecutors will not investigate the NPD.

What the NPD wants is not parliamentary democracy, but an ethnic-oriented leadership state with clear parallels to the Nazi regime of the 'Third Reich'.

Rainer Stock, Saxon Constitutional Protection President, from: "Leipziger Volkszeitung"

Thinking Forth

Thinking Forth is now available online. My first Forth book - it really fascinated me with the language back then. Especially because it was much more suitable for the computers that were accessible to me at the time than most other programming languages.

Build me money making website please

Rent A Coder - Build me money making website please - let me quote:

I would like someone to build me a good website that will make me around $1000 a week or more. The website should be useful and not have any popups. I would like you to design the whole entire website. The content as well. Would like the website to have a lot of traffic as well.

Sorry, but if I could build a website that brings in $1000 per week - then I'd just sell it to some idiot like that. Makes sense. Sure. And pigs can fly.

(Found at Paul Tomblin)

heise online - High fine for student organization due to hyperlinks

High fine for student organization over hyperlinks - so students get used to societal censorship early on. Besides, it's really annoying when these students indulge in the luxury of having a political opinion. And so one learns very early that you only have to accept elected representatives and their actions when it suits you.

But silencing the victims of educational institutions has a tradition - school expulsions for expressing one's own political opinion I still remember from my school days (not from my school - we were fortunate to have a principal with a brain who actually used it).

The fact that in this case the lawsuit also comes from a fellow student who doesn't like the political opinions expressed by the AStA - and that the reaction is a lawsuit instead of a discussion - fits the picture perfectly. After all, the formation of one's own political opinion and engagement with general political topics only distracts from being bred into a specialized idiot in the education factory...

WordPress and rel="nofollow"

On the WordPress hackers list, as expected, there's a heated discussion about rel="nofollow". The trigger: Matt has built rel="nofollow" into WordPress. Part of it is a filter that could be easily disabled. But another part is hardcoded directly into the code (for example, every author link in comments is permanently tagged with rel="nofollow"). And Matt doesn't want to build in an option, but rather force everyone, so to speak, to implement this feature.

What really bothers me about the whole thing is the absurd reasoning. Sorry, but what happens to links in my system is something essential for me as a site operator — nobody tells me what to do there. Okay, fine, I can patch my software — but the attitude toward users on this point is pretty shitty.

The ct and the Trojan Horse

You look at the front cover in the current ct and what do you see? A woman at a computer, an email with a nice Trojan horse on it. And she wants to open the gift right away by double-clicking. And with what? With good reason - because the graphic designer conveniently gave the woman a Claris Emailer Outlook Express on Mac OS Classic instead of Windows. Tsetsetse, the professional trade press, they simply did poor research

(With which I join the ranks of spiteful and unnecessary "It wouldn't have happened with Mac OS X" commentators)

MDR.DE: NPD refuses minute of silence for Nazi and war victims

NPD refuses minute of silence for NS and war victims - how much longer do we have to put up with this right-wing filth in the Saxon state parliament? Can't this farce please be ended as soon as possible? Given such absurd behavior, I find it incomprehensible how the other parties can accept this and apparently even partially support it. I'm thinking of occasions where NPD representatives have actually received votes from other parties).

nofollow no do

Shockwave Rider doesn't particularly like rel="nofollow" and it's come up in various other blogs too. The open letter from the S9Y developers to Google on the subject is also interesting.

I'm not particularly enthusiastic about it either - simply because it's the wrong approach. You can't repair a broken system by telling curious people to look away. Comment spammers won't be deterred one bit by the whole thing.

I can only agree with Phil Ringnalda that rel="nofollow" is something like the monster disclaimer of people on the web. Ultimately just as strange as the link distancing that many have on their websites - if you're distancing yourself, why link at all? If you're generally distancing yourself from your commenters, why have a comment function in the first place?

In any case, I won't be using rel="nofollow" - at least not by means of a large bucket that pours over everything just because it's a comment or trackback. Comment spam is addressed differently. If necessary, by putting everything in a moderation queue that then has to be cleared of spam using appropriate means - the same techniques used for email spam apply here. That's a far more worthwhile field of activity.

Because Greed is Hot...

Deutsche Welle asks in light of the new GVL fee schedules: Goodbye, web radio? I certainly see the need for compensating artists. But what service is the GVL doing for artists when it destroys part of their market by raising fees? Especially the small web radios are known for often playing rarely heard artists.

What also bothers me about this: the fee increase comes without any form of improvement or expansion - quite the opposite, conditions are being restricted, the price raised. Paying more for less service.

So the GVL shouldn't be surprised at negative criticism, because that's normally what you call cartel abuse, price gouging, or rip-off.

The Pope and the Rubber Bags

The Pope still lives in his dream world: "Chastity helps prevent the spread of AIDS" - which is of course a pretty absurd position when you look at the problems in regions like Africa. There, large parts of the population cannot even engage in the sexual intercourse for procreation that the Catholic Church actually endorses without getting infected...

The Pope's stance on this issue is simply irresponsible. Especially in developing countries, the Church often has far too much influence and should be aware that people there are dying because of their nonsensical statements. You cannot counter the problems of overpopulation in such regions and the danger of AIDS infection with silly references to chastity - only education campaigns and, specifically, the promotion of condom use help.