Category: english

• internet

  The Modern Net Manifest

  04.23.08 | Discuss ( 0 ) | Topics: modern net, web design, web2.0

  The Modern Net is a de-hyped, structured, functional digital net. It’s an alternative to the chaotic, user exploiting, driven by third party commercial interests digital net known as Web 2.0.

  Technology-independence

  The content spheres and the standards compliance ensure that technology is not needlessly made obsolescent by the digital net. The lifespan of devices is set by the accessibility, productivity and enviromental needs, not the commercial and luxury interests.

  Productivism

  The consumers are promoters. The digital production is funded on the basis of the producer’s earned respect and the economy is a direct relation between consumers/promoters and producers. The quality of products and contributions becomes the main producer’s advertisement. The intrusion of digital product advertisements into media is replaced by an increased accessibility to horizontal platforms for valuing and downloading products and funding projects.

  Ecology and accessibility

  The upper edge of the digital net fits the capabilities of affordable and enviroment-friendly devices. The net architectures are not built upon structures with poor accessibility.

  Freedom of movement

  The digital net structures are not designed to trap users inside. The paths and exits are always visible. Services are even easier to leave than to get.

  Functionality

  Individuals aren’t told by the digital net what they want to see or do. An optimized functionality allows individuals to generate what they need from the system without guidances or interferences.

  Efficiency

  The contents are published in suitable platforms and formats. Excessive complexity, burden or unrelated link paths and content are deprecated. The text prevails where text is better.

  Physical interconnection

  The digital net includes and promotes physical interconnection between individuals and within living spaces, real-world projects and social activities.

  Practicality

  The practical solutions aren’t deprecated needlessly. The problems that don’t exist aren’t fixed. Most paths and procedures are simple and straightforward.

  Structuring

  The content producers are responsible of integrating it within usable inner paths and net-wide structures. Poorly structured contents are deprecated by the access systems.

  Individuality

  Authorship recognition is encouraged. The individual efforts are not massed up into colective efforts without providing ways to properly claim, measure and show their contributions.

  Transparency

  Transparency is encouraged for claiming confidence or responsability tasks. Creating contents for non transparent purposes or creating fake structures that undermine the flow of the net is deprecated.

  Connectivity and independence

  The modern net allows for the best connectivity for digital activities yet letting sections of it to be detached, moved, adapted or reformatted easily. The services are fully compatible allowing users to switch seamlessly between them.

  Openness

  The development of the digital net and its society-wide function involves all suitable expertise fields, from art to sociology to engineering. Digital systems-and-content technicians and marketers hold no monopoly about net-wide decisions. Where user exploiting interests or previous monopolies obstruct the development of the net, alternative options are implemented.

• internet

  Fighting email spam in Thunderbird

  04.22.08 | Discuss ( 0 ) | Topics: e-mail, spam, thunderbird.org

  Fighting email spam isn’t just about saving time, it’s a social responsability. If you spend some time to render it useless you are helping to drop the risk vs. benefit relation for spammers and so, you are actually working to stop them.

  Though I don’t make an intensive use of email —I could go a few days without checking it and the sky wouldn’t fall—, I don’t like either to spend needless time with it. I use Thunderbird and its spam filter takes care of some of the dirty job, but it still misses some, so I decided to make my incoming mail folders more Zen using some ‘this is not your room’ rules.

  Thunderbird hasn’t implemented global filters (note: filter refers to the policy and rule to each condition within the filter), so the provided workaround is to use the Global Inbox, then use either filters, column sorting or searches to browse mails by account. The Global Inbox is activated at the account management, under Server settings, in the Advanced dialog. The built-in Global Inbox apparently has the annoying feature of making the already received mails in the former folders non-accessible (no wizard is offered to solve that), so you must move manually all the mails from the account folders before activating it. Don’t try to replace the Global Inbox with a redirect filter: when a mail is moved it won’t be filtered by the destination folder. I know, Thunderbird filtering is a bit clumsy. It doesn’t even allow for regular expressions, oh well…

  After turning on the Global Inbox, I renamed my ‘local folders’ to ‘classified e-mails’, just for semantic aesthetics. Also I added the Account column to the view (click the rightmost square thingie with a tiny down arrow).

  Next, I went to Preferences | Advanced | General, then to the configuration editor to tweak mail.adaptivefilters.junk_threshold to 30%. That’s the Bayesian junk control confidence threshold. The default 90% value is very conservative, but be careful during the next days until the junk control becomes better trained (I almost missed an administrative alert right after changing the threshold). Notice that you can set the junk control to ignore mail from your contacts list.

  Classifying legitimate mails is still the best way to avoid spam’s white noise (if you are using email for business probably you should be classifying mail already). I created the folders ‘10. Work’, ‘20. Contacts’, ‘30. Whitelist’, ‘40. Other senders’, ‘50. Blog comments’, ‘60. Mailing lists’, ‘70. Newsletters’, ‘80. Archive’, ‘90. Filtered Spam’ (by Sturgeon’s Law). Numbering folders allows you to sort them, in Thunderbird by default they are alphabetical. Because I’m a retro guy, I used the old BASIC line numbering.

  Now it’s time to put on the filters (they are in the Tools menu). Remember that priority matters and the filters that move mails must go after those that doesn’t.

  First, I set up a filter to send work and contact mails from the address books to folders 10 and 20 and whitelisted and other known addresses to folder 30. This will ensure that I’ll always read first mails that are legitimate —well, as long as I don’t make spammer friends.

  Then I wanted to backup the junk control filter with some keyword checking for things I know I’m not going to be emailed about, like Rolex watches, xx% off offers, penises and so on. These can be included in the same filter with several ‘match any of these’ rules (be sure to pick the right circle button option). Because there’s some risk of false positives, I made these mails go to folder 90 instead of to the junk folder so I can review them more easily or set up a different retention policy. Anyway, non English natives like me can safely assume that fangirls/boys aren’t going to praise our physical attributes in Anglosaxon.

  Blog comments (from my Wordpress blog), mailing lists, newsletters, etc., have addresses and subjects easy to match and filter. They add a lot of bulk, so keeping them apart will make it a whole lot easier to spot junk later. Some can be directly whitelisted and classified and some you may want to run them after keyword filtering.

  The last filter sent all unknown senders that were left in the inbox to folder 40 (to keep them within a closer visual space and not separated by all the sent/drafts/junk folders). Additional filters and subfolders can be added before this to organize mails that come from different accounts or use certain subjects.

  Finally, I reviewed the unknown senders to put all those that I could trust into a Whitelist address book. Spam exploits Blacklist system weaknesses but can’t do much against Whitelist systems because gaining trust is something that hardly can be automated. The address books are your Whitelist system so it’s important to do frequent keeping.

• images

  After Rain

  04.19.08 | Discuss ( 0 ) | Topics: img

  
  El castillo estaba indefenso tras la lluvia.
  The castle was defenseless after the rain.

• internet

  Wordpress Comment Spam Attack

  04.17.08 | Discuss ( 0 ) | Topics: spam, wordpress.org

  This blog has been targeted the last two days by a comment spam bot, issuing about 120 spammy comments. Comments never got on air because they went into the moderation queue, as I had set up a moderation rule during a previous ‘benign’ attack of the same kind of bot and that rule catched them all. If you receive a similar flood of comments, look at them to find a common pattern and block that pattern at Options | Discussion. This particular bot can be blocked by adding a rule against “mail.com”. You can use too the tips from Google guy Matt Cutts to increase the security of your Wordpress install (they are good for other CMSs too).

  This bot I was talking about wasn’t acting in a subtle way at all. For backlinks, getting one spam comment through is mostly enough, and one is more likely to go unnoticed that hundreds. The URLs were just random, so it could seem unskilled or pointless spam. Reading here and there, though, I’ve heard that the bot actually seems to “bomb” the anti-spam plugins so they aren’t able anymore to filter the bad comments. I don’t use spam killers since this isn’t a popular blog, I just changed some code to make it look and work different than a vanilla Wordpress install. A good idea if you don’t mind repeating it with each update is to hack comments.php and wp-comments-post.php so the form fields have different names, and also rename the later file to avoid it being hit directly; you can even leave a hidden fake comment form with default field names to chaff the simplest bots.

  I’d suggest too to fill the moderated keywords box. I’m not posting here my whole list since some words would be the last thing I’d like to be indexed for, but to stop praiser-bots you shouldn’t forget to include “impressive”, “information”, “informative” or “webpage!” Readers use those words very rarely (or maybe it’s just my blog that isn’t very impressive at all).

  These tips are very, very far from being a bullet-proof way to stop spam. Any human specifically willing to spam you is going to spam you. But bots are rarely designed to hit non-common installs, they get lesser returns for hitting pages that show signs of being fighting spam actively because anything that goes through is likely going to be manually deleted. A bot too clever could even annoy the real net gurues out there… I don’t think spammers would be very happy of discovering that a feral bot had got some net honchos get personal into tracking them.

  If you wonder, I’m not into that kind of techy knowledge (my PHP is even clumsy), but I learned about bot strategies and code evolution with artificial life simulations. You can only wonder about how often natural diversity can beat intelligent design. If you make your CMS install unique in its own way, it’s very likely to be skipped by most regular bots.

• news

  Hunger in the New Century

  04.14.08 | Discuss ( 0 ) | Topics: crisis, economics, hunger, real estate

  The fall of real estate investments is nothing compared with the shadow of hunger following the food price rises, but there may be links between them. Here in the eastern Spain local food production doesn’t look as vigorous as before since the promises of residential projects, the derivation of water to urbanized areas and the lack of the same dedicated labor as we had some decades ago have left many fields abandoned.

  Then there’s the diversified speculative businesses that targeted bioproducts suitable for being processed into fuel. Their business is speculation, that’s not going to go away with the fall of real estates, they will grab the food market until it has to be taken almost off their cold dead hands. While governs are patching and repairing the damages done to the owners of home loans, they’ll feed the food bubble until some unsustainable damage is done. This means that the economic model that created both the real estate and the food prices problems is still kicking around and there’s little to achieve by running behind them with a mop funded with public taxes.

  There’s no excuse for an economic crisis right in the XXI century. They should know better by now. The kind of failure leading to a shortage of first need products would be a serious global failure, and we can remember what that lead to in the past.

• internet

  How people talk about Iraq war

  04.10.08 | Discuss ( 1 ) | Topics: google.com, iraq

  The philologist’s idea of amusement is like this: playing with web searches and looking which words people use (Whooha, carnival of excitement!).

  Do you want to know how people talk about Iraq war? No bother with polls and brainy dudes, Google has it. See, lets ask him (or her?):

  • Iraq chaos - 412,000
  • Iraq peace - 5,400,000
  • Iraq democracy - 2,650,000
  • Iraq failure - 374,400
  • Iraq success - 1,280,000
  • Iraq mistake - 290,000
  • Iraq freedom - 5,210,000
  • Iraq invasion - 981,000
  • Iraq freeing - 835,000
  • Iraq plunder - 595,000
  • Iraq withdrawal - 640,000

  The “freedom speech” seems to be used more often by both supporters and detractors than negative words. I see some “Is Iraq a success?” but less “Is Iraq a failure?” Maybe the “freedom speech” is too strong by itself as a marketing campaign to not to be “bought”, even by those with critic opinions?

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