Archive 18.3.2005 - 31.3.2005

Wordpress Website's Search Engine Spam

Seen at Netzbuch: Wordpress Website's Search Engine Spam - photomatt funds WordPress servers and the first WordPress employee through search engine spam. This is done through articles and hidden links to various high-cost search terms that then point to search engine spam pages provided by a service provider. photomatt is just the middleman - the spam bot, only he doesn't spam comments but search engine results.

In German: that's absolute crap. Such behavior is - especially for someone who suffers massively from spammers with his software - absolutely unacceptable behavior. The talk of "if the community doesn't like it, I'll stop" is bullshit - why did he even start such crap? Especially since blog software is repeatedly accused of being a search engine polluter, one should be very careful in this area with stupid ideas and not pour more oil on the fire ...

At the same time, this is another good reason for me to use GPL software: if it were a company whose actions I cannot accept, I would have to refrain from using the software. So I can continue to use the software - because the actual programmer is relatively indifferent, I can fork it anytime and go my own way with the software. The separation between the software provider and the software itself is much more open.

Let's see what comes out of the community discussion on the topic, if necessary, it's time for a fork ...

First fallout: wordpress.org has been removed from the Google index.

And since the discussion about the financing of projects keeps coming up and is used as an excuse for the behavior: sorry, but that's bullshit. You can't sanctify the means with the purpose - someone who suffers massively from spammers and indeed fights against them cannot resort to similar means. And yes, it is and remains spam: anyone who abuses search engines - and thus the searchers! - to push their ranking is a search engine spammer. Period. The comment spammers also like to excuse themselves by saying they only use open resources and don't really spam - bullshit, both.

class.jabber.php is a PHP class for programming Jabber services.

Preserve Code Formatting protects PRE and CODE blocks from wptexturize.

Schröder: Arms Deliveries to China Even Against the Will of the Bundestag

Schröder: Arms deliveries to China even against the will of the Bundestag - where would we end up if the opinion of the Bundestag mattered at all, when you can properly export weapons to a country where political opponents - if they are lucky - disappear in prison for life, people are regularly executed and human rights are generally considered a problem for other people.

The economy must hum, and if it's only the arms industry. This does not create jobs - after all, the arms industry is rationalized like no other economic sector - but it brings money to the moneybags and that's the only thing that counts. And ultimately, it is only consistent: in one's own country, employees are sacrificed for the stock price and in China then the political opponents and other inconvenient people.

What a real industrial chancellor is, he does not care about human lives or democracy.

Response from the BMWA to my fax

On the topic of software patents, I also contacted the BMWA by fax. While the BMJ sent a polite and factual - albeit, in my opinion, somewhat dreamy and detached from reality given Minister Clement's course - response, the BMWA adopts a tone that I find somewhat snippy (annoyed?):

Dear Mr. ..., thank you for your fax dated March 06, 2005, in which you address the adoption of the directive on computer-implemented inventions in the first reading.

I do not share your criticism of the procedure at all.

The purely formal adoption of a text already decided is absolutely usual, indeed mandatory, due to the linguistic diversity in the EU. This is also the view of the Member States, which had or have substantive concerns. This has nothing to do with disregarding democratic rules of the game. The directive is, by the way, by no means adopted yet.

We are certainly in agreement on the objective. I can assure you that the positive economic development of the software industry is close to my heart. However, the often-expressed claims that patent protection for software would be newly introduced or expanded are factually incorrect. Despite all criticism in detail, one should "keep the church in the village".

The German software industry has developed economically well under the existing legal framework with computer program patents. This will not change fundamentally through international harmonization. We are explicitly not taking the path in Europe that is rather progressive and, above all, hostile to small and medium-sized enterprises, as in the USA. The two legal systems differ significantly here.

Yours sincerely on behalf of

Thomas Zuleger

Well. Suspension of democratic decisions and ignoring one's own federal parliament is for Minister Clement just mandatory. Great. Really gives me confidence that we will be well represented by this minister on this issue ...

deNic out of .net application?

Reading through the report at Heise, it all sounds rather like collusion in favor of VeriSign - the biggest rip-off merchant in the domain business. Pretty absurd, the whole allocation, if indeed the company that has been accused of unfair practices in recent times (pre-registration of IDN domains without basis, wildcard A-record on .com) gets the contract. I suspect the problem with deNic was simply that it is not a US company, because Internet administration is still far too US-centric.

Friday 08.09.2000: Drips and drips - The three protocolists save their cynicism for the sequel - about the book Helmut Kohl, the power and the money from the Steidl publishing house. I'll probably have to get it.

Easier access for intelligence agencies to accounts and travel data demanded - what is a right-wing agitator against informational self-determination and data protection actually doing in the SPD? Oh yes, I forgot, Otto Orwell is also in the SPD. Strange party, calls itself "social" and has a bunch of asocial people sitting in Berlin ...

Study Certifies Windows Better Security Than Linux

Study certifies Windows as more secure than Linux - of course, if I compare the security of RedHat and Windows and find out that the company RedHat is even slower than Microsoft, then I conclude that Linux is less secure than Windows. Because it is completely unthinkable that people who operate servers either run essential packages from upstream or get their patches from elsewhere. And there are naturally no other distributions than those of a company that charges exorbitant prices for open source and otherwise behaves in business more like Microsoft. And all of this financed by Microsoft. This is certainly a very relevant study.

The fact that it is nowhere considered whether the respective errors could actually be used for attacks and whether they are relevant for the scenario at all - who cares. Let's just throw everything into one pile. The fact that Microsoft does not publish all bugs and therefore an objective assessment of open bugs in Windows is completely impossible - who cares. The fact that it is nowhere independently documented when Microsoft was first aware of a bug and therefore an assessment of the actual duration during which one was unprotected from the respective bug is not possible - who cares. The fact that Microsoft has recently introduced bugs again (I recall the LAND attack), which had been around for a long time and that this casts a pretty bad light on their development methodology - who cares.

But how they now believe that anyone could see this as an objective measurement of vulnerability and why such things are labeled under the keyword "Research", I find really ridiculous ...

The SimCam: Film and Digital Camera Simulator is a camera simulation for photography beginners: you can play around with aperture and shutter speed and take virtual photos and then see how the result looks. Relationships such as depth of field, camera shake, correct exposure, film speed, etc. become directly tangible, even without a camera. Fun idea.

Terms and conditions for blocking phone numbers published - hmm, funny idea. Let's see how practical this will be.

Yahoo 360 Degrees

Missed the all-around view. Anyone who also wants to check out the toy: theoretically, I should be able to send invites. If you think I actually should have passed you an invite and really want one to check it out: speak up. Oh yeah, you need a Yahoo ID for that. Oh, and if you want an invite even though I've never linked to your blog here or know you from anywhere: at least come up with an interesting reason why I should invite you.

BBEdit 8.1 brings Subversion support - maybe I should upgrade now, Subversion integration is quite practical.

Cat2Tag Plugin

The Cat2Tag Plugin is something that was still missing for my photo blog: a way to work with WordPress categories like Flickr tags.

The most common tags (20 pieces, can be changed to all) are offered in a small JavaScript bar and additionally there is an input field for tags in which you can simply manually enter further ones (or click on the most common ones from the list). The default category is simply listed as a word in the tag list. New tags can be created simply by using the same. Very practical.

The hierarchy of the categories is of course not displayed - but this is not really interesting with tags anyway, the hierarchy does not play a real role with tags. Similarly, the tag description (category description) is not maintained, which must then be manually edited afterwards if you want to have something meaningful there (e.g. for the feeds).

The plugin still has one problem: it does not correctly convert the sharp s "ß" when shortening umlauts from tag names. But this seems to be a problem that WordPress also has - even when manually creating categories, the "ß" is not correctly resolved. One should therefore be careful with them. And of course, umlauts are not converted to their long form but to their base form - "ä" becomes "a". This makes the tag URLs somewhat problematic, as users need to know how the tag name is converted to the URL if they want to hack the URL themselves. But this is also a general problem of internationalization.

An idea for improvement would be an additional query string rule with which URLs with tag combinations (nature+animals) could be realized.

Otherwise, however, a really nice plugin with a very practical functionality for me.

The Pheed RSS Specification is an extension for RSS that allows you to explicitly include links to photos. Could be interesting for my Fotoblog. However, WordPress has few hooks for manipulating feeds.

Around Cologne ...

... won David Kopp. Not Zabel. Not Hondo. On the contrary, Hondo completely miscalculated by focusing on Zabel and could only manage a training sprint in the main field. One might say that they forgot about cycling altogether due to all the tactics. Above all, Holzer's decision to bring Rene Haselbacher back to be prepared for a potential merger was probably just a shot in the dark - if you don't bring about the merger, you only lose a good sprinter in a chasing group.

Great for Wiesenhof to be able to field the winner in such a well-known race. And superb performance by David Kopp, who apparently had endless strength today.

SCO Uses Legal Documents from Groklaw and Tuxrocks - wow, great, the advocates of their own intellectual property steal IP from other authors for their websites without citing the source. How embarrassing is that ...

APLX Version 2: The exciting cross-platform APL

APLX is an APL2 implementation for various systems: Linux, Windows, Mac OS X. Unfortunately, it's a bit expensive - there's only a cheaper Personal version for Linux, otherwise there's only an Evaluation version for Mac. And how they solved the problem with the APL special characters is not mentioned there - presumably via combined keys or something similar. I wouldn't know if there is an APL-USB keyboard.

Somehow, I would like to play around with APL again - the language is wonderfully crazy and has a few corners that even today (except in languages like J and K of course, conditionally also in Sisal) can find their match. Specifically, the ability to process entire arrays of values at once and combine them with powerful Higher-Order functions is really exciting.

J is now also available in an OS X version, unfortunately only from 10.3 onwards. Would be another alternative, J can be considered as APL-in-ASCII (although it offers a whole range of improvements in language theory compared to APL).

PowerBook makes trouble

Funny thing, this: suddenly my PowerBook refuses to play sound. Nothing comes out. I can adjust the settings as much as I want - no external sound, no internal sound. Not even the system start gets its sound - everything is mute. Resetting Open Firmware and resetting Parameter Ram didn't help either.

I had already had strange phenomena with the sound: every time the internal sound wanted to make the system block briefly at the first attempt. As if the sound chip had some kind of problem. But that should be noticed during the hardware test of the motherboard - nothing, the test runs smoothly through. Damn. Ok, I have Apple Care for such purposes and will simply call them and then probably at some point take my PowerBook to the dealer for repair - but in the meantime I won't have a computer at home and that's annoying. Ok, I have the company Mac and I'll probably make it ready in such a way that I can simply carry it back and forth between home and work (a Mac Mini is luckily not much to carry), but it's somehow annoying when something like this happens just because of stupid sound stories. But I also don't want to give up feeding the system from iTunes on the computer ...

The Time Zone (WP Plugin) is a handy little plugin that uses the time zone in WordPress so that the somewhat silly adjustment of the time difference in the options can be omitted. Found at Perun in the comments.

Alice is now available in version 1.1 - including a Mac OS X port. Unfortunately only via the Unix path, so with X11 interface and without the native code Just-in-Time compiler, but at least you can play with the language on the Mac. As a reminder: Alice is an ML dialect with a strong focus on good support for parallelism.

DrScheme 300 Series

freshmeat.net: Project details for DrScheme: Yeeeehaaaa!!!! DrScheme is becoming Unicode-capable. Very nice. Ok, the other features sound very good too, especially the portable continuations for threads - opens up quite new possibilities for mischief in the code.

In any case, the best Scheme environment continues to evolve and is getting even better.

Basics of Wave Propagation and Antenna Construction - some information about the propagation of longwave, mediumwave, shortwave, and VHF. Reflection on atmospheric layers and wave behavior.

Revenge of the Flashcards

Well, there are days in an admin's life that hurt but are necessary: I'm currently playing around with a spam filter (DSPAM) that stores its statistics in an SQL database. The spam filter supports a variety of database drivers, including PostgreSQL and MySQL, and a few other non-client-server databases (SQLite, etc.). So, out of habit, I first reached for PostgreSQL - it was already running on the machine.

Well, it was a bit slow at the beginning and the machine was a bit overloaded, but I found a few tips on the net with which one could make PostgreSQL run faster for DSPAM. After that, the computer didn't run particularly fast, but significantly faster than before. So, let it run through the night.

Well, the next day the rude awakening: tons of blocked processes, pig-slow updates against the database, deadly performance when learning a mail: 12 minutes runtime is no exception. Ouch. The database dump is already 100 MB in size at this point. The whole thing is not particularly exciting when the system load is always between 3 and 6 ... Ok, so bite the bullet and install and configure the index card box MySQL. Then bring Exim back up and sort the waiting mails. Effect: total load explosion. Loads above 30 and then at some point the watchdog struck and booted. Oh shit. All clear, let's see what's actually in the box: yeah, only 256 MB of memory and the MySQL server got massively into paging. He can't help it if I just don't have enough memory. PostgreSQL had fewer problems with that because PostgreSQL's memory management is much more static and the server doesn't grab so much memory in the basic configuration.

Ok, Jutta swapped the memory with her Linux box and now the server has 512 MB of memory, which is enough for the purpose. And the system load with MySQL is significantly better than anything before. Ok, I could certainly also bring PostgreSQL to better performance with a larger configuration, but the problem was, according to the symptoms, the massive number of parallel updates and the multi-version transaction technique of the server - that was definitely in the way in this concrete case.

Note: MySQL is still only a glorified index card box and MyISAM is definitely the dumbest table format you can choose, but no technology is so stupid that you can't need it from time to time. If the data is completely transaction-free - because the SQL server is simply being misused as a data storage without a real business data model with great referential integrity - then you should simply not use a database whose focus is exactly the opposite. In this case, MySQL and MyISAM are simply the better choice.

It's definitely better than Berkley-DB or other in-process databases, because they can only work reliably via file locking and with the massive parallel updates that DSPAM makes (it learns - depending on the setting - with every mail and updates its statistical basis) a database on a file system basis is extremely unfavorable.

Now I'll wait for the next night and see how DSPAM struggles with the nightly mail pile and how the system looks tomorrow, when several thousand mails have been processed (yes, with only two users we consume gigantic amounts of mail traffic - primarily due to mountains of spam, mountains of administrative mails from various systems and mountains of mailing lists). Let's see if the system is still as fast tomorrow as it is today. I'm afraid that with the amount of mail I will also push the MySQL base for DSPAM to the limit of the possible ...

Update: so far, things look very good with the load, so the index card box actually has the nose ahead

Mac Mini arrived at work

Nette Butterbrotdose

Now comes the annoying setup and loading of all the data again. But I've already done the most important part. A few perversions are still outstanding (connecting my old Ergo-PS2-keyboard to the Mac via adapter and plugging in the ancient Logitech Trackman) and of course installing all those many little helpers that I have gotten used to in the last time (but I will probably use the opportunity again to take an axe to the selection).

Unfortunately, I couldn't afford an Apple display and now have a very bright BenQ that also shamelessly ignores the brightness control.

My new photo blog - and the first ladybug

My new photoblog - and the first ladybug

The first ladybug of the year. There are a few more pictures in my new photoblog (not active since 2007). By the way, it also works with WordPress, but with a few self-knitted plugins for photo management and the strip calendar (I'll put that together someday and make it downloadable). I'm already quite satisfied with the state over there. In the long run, I will probably create a mechanism that allows the photos to wander into this site here as thumbnails and then post pictures here rather rarely (at most the usual snapshots).

Why did I build something myself at all? Well, I find a number of features of Flickr quite nice, but I have a massive aversion to entrusting my content to foreign servers where I have no say in the operation or software design. Therefore, I have stolen some of the ideas from Flickr and also helped myself generously from other projects (for example, I copied the idea for the strip calendar from PixelPost) and integrated everything into WordPress. The layout was once Kubrick, but I hope it has become sufficiently different from it even for Kubrick allergics.

I had also looked at a whole range of content management systems beforehand to see how suitable they would be for something like this (you could read about the fallout from this partly here). And even toyed with the idea of doing the whole thing directly with PixelPost for a while. But the clearly superior comment features in WordPress (especially all the anti-spam techniques) eventually led me to stay with WordPress.

A few things are still on the to-do list, but in principle it is already quite usable and is therefore officially announced herewith.

My new photo blog - and the first ladybug

My new photo blog - and the first ladybug

Microsoft on patent raid - and they simply steal ideas from the IETF Working Group on IPv6, which they were once involved in. Also a patent that, under Clements' interpretation - and possibly even that of the BMJ - of the EU Patent Directive draft would also be enforceable here. And this could cause quite a few problems when using IPv6. Of course, due to prior art, one could challenge such a thing - but someone would first have to do that and be able to afford it.

Hackers re-enable PyMusique access to iTMS - Hase und Igel :-)

Kasia did a bit of research (15 minutes on Google) on Dr. William Hammesfahr, who is frequently cited in the US press in connection with the Shiavo case and is allegedly a Nobel Prize candidate, and found: Journalism is a joke. Because the good Dr. seems to claim a lot, but has nothing to show for it. Above all, no Nobel Prize nomination - only a letter from a congressman who suggested the Dr. to the Nobel Prize committee for the Nobel Peace Prize in Medicine. Quality journalism of the highest order.

PythonEggs are like .jar files for Python. Only they are based on ZIP. It's about time that Python applications can be downloaded as a single file with dependency definitions and that the installation of Python applications finally becomes easier.

Sybase stops publishing details of security vulnerabilities - and another manufacturer who doesn't understand security

Ajaxing the Rails - the latest release of Ruby on Rails also offers Ajax support. Here, the actual Ajax part is much more integrated than in other frameworks - could be interesting, as so far Ajax has been rather tricky to use in larger projects.

All Complex Ecosystems Have Parasites - Read command!

BMJ's Response to Software Patents

The BMJ has responded today - quite modern via e-mail sent PDF

• to my fax on the topic of software patents on 25.2. answered. Unfortunately, I cannot really feel reassured by the content, especially since the content of the BMJ letter, in my opinion, clearly deviates from the position of the Federal Minister for Economics and Labour, who, for example, also considers procedures for efficient data storage to be patentable - which are pure software patents.

Similarly, there is a conflict with the actual practice of the EU Patent Office: this does indeed grant non-technical patents, as can be seen from the absurd patent on the g eographic separation of data records by vehicle registration numbers, which has just failed in court (but only under current law!). Under a patent grant change as Clement envisages (and which, according to the BMJ, should not actually exist and would not happen) such a patent might be viable.

Of course, there is still no answer to my fax to Clement, which was only at the beginning of this month, it will certainly be April before an answer arrives ...

TidBITS: What You Get Is What You CSS, With Style Master 4.0 - sounds very interesting, a program with which you can edit CSS files and display them directly in connection with various websites. I must take a look at it, because manually tweaking CSS files and experimenting with them can sometimes be quite annoying. Being able to prepare something offline would be quite nice. Update: sorry, but after a first test, the thing has been kicked off the plate. Good idea, slow and unintuitive implementation.

Advanced Bash-Scripting Guide - everything you always wanted to know about Bash scripting but were afraid to ask. And a little bit more that you never would have thought to ask. And then there's the stuff you really never wanted to know, but it's in there anyway.

BFI-Banker sentenced to nearly six years in prison - there are also positive news sometimes. A model that I could warm up to. Of course, the prison sentence should be appropriate to the size of the bank: Ackermann could then be locked up until the end of his life

The Schiavo Case - A Tragedy Between Life and Death | tagesschau.de

The Schiavo Case - A Tragedy Between Life and Death:

When he [President Bush] was still governor of Texas, Bush frequently made decisions about life and death. Ruthlessly. In no case was there a stay of execution for the condemned, in no single case did the right to life guaranteed by the constitution play a role.

Well, political calculation fought out on the backs of people - nobody really cares about the actual people. Only the religious right wants to show off again and then the law is trampled on and the decision-making authority of courts and states is simply ignored.

Hastymail is a webmail program that works with very minimal browser requirements and supports an essential feature that is missing in many clients: comment threading.

Know your Enemy: Tracking Botnets is a very interesting article about botnets and how they are structured - analyzed with a Honeynet.

Found at photomatt: Nifty Corners are rounded corners that do without images. Optionally directly with HTML and some CSS or CSS and some JavaScript, which rewrites the DOM tree accordingly.

Court order against Stefan Raab - YES!

What I Find Perversion ...

... are dialer scammers who set up alleged drug info sites that only contain dialer links, of course do not contain any information about the prices (and are therefore not allowed in Germany) and then also advertise for this dialer crap with blog spam. On top of that, they hide behind an Austrian address - probably just a mailbox company.

Dialer scams make me sick. When they come together with blog spammers, I can't eat as much as I want to vomit.

This has also been noticed elsewhere a few days ago here.

Yahoo really buys Flickr

Yahoo buys Flickr - which is one of the reasons why I no longer entrust my data to central services but do everything myself (and am currently working on a site based on WordPress with a few self-knitted plugins - stay tuned). I experienced this with OneList, I went through it with eGroups. Yahoo buys it and then there are tons of transition pains when merging the accounts. And afterwards there are tons of ads on the pages, forced ads on interstitial pages and all sorts of nonsense.

Unfortunately, social software is often operated by antisocial guys ...

Black hole in the lab - weird.

Stolpe recommends: Highways for the upswing

Stolpe recommends: Highways for the upswing, yes, very big ideas:

"There must be no more delay tactics by environmental associations. The sudden discovery of hamsters to block ongoing construction projects will no longer be possible," Stolpe told the magazine "Focus".

Of course, the evil environmental associations prevent the highway enthusiasts from being able to pave the entire republic - with even more shitty roads that no one needs, while the existing roads are rotting away because no repairs are carried out (or if they are, such botch jobs occur that they have to be repeated after a short time).

The Man in Blue > Experiments > widgEditor is a WYSIWYG editor for HTML that replaces textareas in the browser and is written in JavaScript. It has an integrated fallback to normal textareas, so that browsers without JavaScript can still work with normal text. And it produces clean XHTML. And: it actually works properly for me.

Hondo came in second at Milan - San Remo. Wow. He seems to really want it this year.

ARD-Anstalten contra jW

young world from 03/18/2005 - ARD institutions against jW - what the ARD broadcasting institutions spend our GEZ fees on. Hmm. If public broadcasters take action against free press, does that then threaten cultural diversity and is that then a quite sufficient reason for a boycott call against the GEZ?