Archive for the ‘Administrative Cruft’ Category

You’ve probably noticed that we changed the look and feel of the site. Please note that we also changed the feed URL in the process. So, if you’re still subscribed to the old feed URL (“index.xml”), please update your subscription settings to the new URL.

The lifecycle of a blog-entry is, apparently, as follows:

- We write stuff on this here newfangled blog
- People either read it or they don’t
- People either choose to comment or they don’t
- A long time goes by
- Google picks up the entry
- Spammers heap their filth on the entry like seagull droppings on a new hat

Since this seems to only impact older entries – which folks rarely comment on anyway – from now on I’ll be disabling comments for the key offenders of spam entries (about 90 percent of spam comes from about 2 percent of entries.) Sorry to those rare folks who feel the sudden urge to comment on stuff from 2 years ago – but time waits for no one.

So, I apologize that I haven’t blogged in a week or so; it seems like at the end of the year, it’s always the case that I get pinned down with work. Needless to say, I’ve been busting my hump trying to get a bunch of stuff done. Anyway, sorry about the disappearance.

So, we here at the curve are looking to “embrace the future.” Always a noble goal, right? More specifically, we’re planning on offering some neato whiz-bang audio content – look for that in the coming weeks. Of course, in order to harness the full power of audio, we’ll need to offer a syndication option that supports it. So the upshot of the deal is that now we’re supporting RSS 2.0. Those of you using the RDF or RSS 1.0 feed probably won’t notice the difference, although you can always get the new groovy extra features by subscribing to the new feed (I recommend doing it, since the new index contains all sorts of information the old one didn’t.)

…and then I blog about it, notice the date sometime in the middle of writing the entry, and ultimately delete the whole thing.

OK, so there was some fiery banter over the weekend (half of which got lost
because of the server restore) about my picking on SPI – or more specifically my
picking on Caleb’s comments to the press – about the potential for significant
malware that utilizes RSS (at least in the near-term).  Anyway, I thought
I’d follow up on that and pass along a link that SPI sent around to a whitepaper
that they’ve put together that further outlines their position on this. 
The whitepaper, "Feed
Injection in Web 2.0" makes for an interesting read, but I’m still not
getting it entirely.  As far as I can tell, the point of the paper seems to
be:

• You can download content that’s created by a potentially dangerous person
• That content can get rendered by your reader and potentially execute
  scripts
• Sometimes readers don’t implement security the right way

It seems to me like the first two bullets are sort of the point of
syndication: somebody creates content for others to view – that content might
include client-side functionality (scripts.)  The third bullet – while both
true and interesting – is also equally true of web content, flash, email, and
all sorts of other communication methods. So why is it unique to RSS?

Anyway, not to stir back up the bee’s nest, but I’m still not convinced that
there’s anything unique to RSS that makes it more dangerous than other
protocols/communication vectors; I don’t think it’s more likely to facilitate
malware, I don’t think it’s more likely to engender end-user attacks, and I
don’t think it’s likely that it’ll be a common attack vector in general. 
But that’s just my two cents…

First of all, in case you haven’t noticed, our site has been down the past
few days…  The deal was, they needed to restore the server from backup
tape (last Friday’s apparently), so a few entries, comments, and so on got lost
in the shuffle.  Sorry about that.  In any event, things should be in
order now.  Sorry about the hassle.

Please wait for a site operator to respond.
Chat Information: All operators are currently assisting others. Thanks for your patience. An operator will be with you shortly.
Chat Information: You are now chatting with ‘Ulises A.’

Ulises A.: Thank you for contacting iPower Live Chat. How can I help you?

Ed Moyle: Hi. Host51 is down

Ulises A.: Hello
Ulises A.: I’ll be happy to assist you.
Ulises A.: I have checked your issue and regarding your issue the server on which you are hosted is having some issues and the system admins are working on the server to get it resolved.
Please be assured that this will be resolved as soon as possible. We apologize for the inconvenience faced by you regarding this matter.
I apologize but right now I am having no ETA for the same. But please be assured that it is been looked into and will be resolved very soon.
Thanks for your understanding and patience regarding this matter.

Ed Moyle: ok… it seems to go down alot
Ed Moyle: I’ll just wait for it to come back up then

Ulises A.: Is there anything else I can help you with?

Ed Moyle: nope
Ed Moyle: thanks

Ulises A.: You are most welcome
Ulises A.: Thank you for contacting iPower Live Chat.
Ulises A.: Enjoy your day.
Ulises A.: Good-bye.

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My apologies. I was deleting the hundreds of spam comments this afternoon, and during that some legitimate comments accidentally got deleted and I can’t figure out why. And I can’t figure out how to undelete them (or if they can be undeleted.) Apologies to anyone who had comments deleted, and I promise to do my best to not have this happen again.

Now that we’ve updated the version of Moveable type to the most recent version, the time has come to once again selectively experiment with the comment functionality on this, our humble blog. Provided that the signal-to-noise ratio stays relatively high, they’ll stay on… Looking forward to the feedback (hopefully without the barrage of spam this time around.)