Month: February 2007

Google Cloaking

The aff sites are still fram­ing my site, and the num­ber of hits and amount of band­width is cer­tainly not decreas­ing with time (details at pre­vi­ous posts, if you want to catch up on the story). I’m still not entirely sure what they’re doing, but the script they use (if you fetch the pages with a com­mand-line tool) has spe­cif­ic instruc­tions for Google and oth­er search engines, so there’s obvi­ously some reas­on for that.

As far as I can tell, this is a clas­sic cloak­ing attack, and, to quote Wiki­pe­dia as of the time I read the art­icle, “major search engines con­sider cloak­ing for decep­tion to be a viol­a­tion of their guidelines, and there­fore, they del­ist sites when decept­ive cloak­ing is repor­ted”. So I figured that was worth a try and filled out the form at Report a Spam Res­ult (for your enter­tain­ment, the search query I put in was “adul riendfinder.com”, which illus­trates the prob­lem nicely).

Has any­one else ever tried this and have it work? Any hints? I sub­mit­ted the form over a week ago, and have seen no res­ults yet. I thought I’d try with Google first since they gen­er­ally are quick at updat­ing their indices (they were cer­tainly quick­er at flush­ing the hack­ing res­ults than Yahoo).

Northern Voice Weekend

The week­end is going to be full of North­ern Voice, I can just tell. The must-dos for me are the din­ner on the Thursday even­ing (sorry, sold out), the uncon­fer­ence day on the Fri­day (I’ll be going to the ses­sion on iden­tity and pri­vacy of course, and whatever else takes my fancy once I’m there), and mod­er­at­ing a couple of ses­sions on the Sat­urday after­noon (Nancy White and Alex Water­house-Hay­ward and Dar­ren Bare­foot). Some of the ses­sions I’d like to go to clash with oth­ers as is always the case at any half-way decent con­fer­ence, but unlike lots of con­fer­ences this one should be extens­ively pod­cast. Not quite the same as being in a ses­sion, but a good second.

I hope to have more blog­ging energy after this con­fer­ence. Recently I’ve felt like I’ve spent more time on meta-issues than actu­ally blog­ging; I’ve been trawl­ing for break-ins on my site and sift­ing through access logs most days rather than craft­ing prose. With all the pass­words on my site now changed, and the latest WP installed, all I need to get back to writ­ing is a bit of inspir­a­tion. In past years North­ern Voice has sup­plied that; hope­fully this year it will again. 

Privacy in the Internet Age

Dar­ren Bare­foot has some inter­est­ing thoughts about pri­vacy in the inter­net age and the way in which today’s north amer­ic­an teen­agers are grow­ing up post­ing everything about their lives on the inter­net. Up till now, most of the dis­cus­sion I’ve read on the sub­ject has revolved around the effects on future careers of post­ing poten­tially embar­rass­ing stuff on the web. Derek Miller points out that bosses will also have embar­rass­ing stuff up on the web, although there will still be a gen­er­a­tion gap there for some years until those future bosses become bosses (assum­ing that most bosses will still con­tin­ue to be older than many of the people they employ).

We’re start­ing to dis­cern the out­lines of some likely effects of this now. For example, if I get an inter­est­ing email from someone I haven’t heard of, I’ll look them up in Google or Yahoo search, or Linked­In. I don’t neces­sar­ily ignore the email if I don’t find any inform­a­tion about the per­son, but I can see that hap­pen­ing in the future — if you don’t exist in search engines, is that going to be con­sidered weird?

Find­ing people I’ve lost touch with is get­ting easi­er every year, as long as they haven’t changed their name. I’ve man­aged to track down old friends, and oth­ers (who did change their name after mar­riage) have man­aged to track me down. Mind you, I’m rel­at­ively easy to find. 

One effect I’m won­der­ing about is on politi­cians: cur­rently politi­cians either have to be squeaky clean, or good at hid­ing things the elect­or­ate might not like to hear about. Rudy Giuliani’s per­son­al life includes three mar­riages and gay friends, all well-doc­u­mented; in pre­vi­ous years this would have made a pres­id­en­tial cam­paign basic­ally impossible. Now it just makes it more dif­fi­cult, or maybe it’s just dis­cussed more; in future years when more inform­a­tion is avail­able about every­one on the inter­net, and hid­ing these things is going to be impossible, will voters be more accepting?

One inter­est­ing aspect to this is how little inform­a­tion is avail­able about Google’s founders — and more than a little iron­ic, giv­en how easy they’ve made it to find inform­a­tion about oth­er people. An art­icle on Moth­er Jones, via Bruce Schnei­er, has more.

Northern Voice Almost Sold Out

As the title says, the North­ern­Voice con­fer­ence, to be held Feb­ru­ary 23 and 24 at the Forestry Sci­ences Centre at UBC, is almost sold out. As of Fri­day, there were only 50 spots left, and I’m sure at least some of those are now gone. So if you want to be there, now’s the time to fire up your browser and point it at the regis­tra­tion page.

Compostable Plastic

The oth­er day Tim brought home some food in a con­tain­er that claimed to be made of corn and there­fore com­postable. I was intrigued by this, since I remem­ber going to street parties and Christ­mas mar­kets in Ger­many where the dis­pos­able plates were grain-based and even edible (not that people usu­ally did eat them) but haven’t seen them here. So I looked into it a bit more.

The con­tain­er was made out of some­thing called PLA, which is made from starch. The label said not to microwave it, which had me puzzled — isn’t corn safe to microwave? What would hap­pen? Would it melt? I tried microwav­ing some water in the con­tain­er and noth­ing unto­ward happened, so I poked around on the web­site for the com­pany (Nature­Works LLC, a sub­si­di­ary of Car­gill) to find out more.

The web­site did­n’t give any details that I could find as to why not to microwave the con­tain­er, so I emailed them. And got back a rather mixed reply. Some breath­less mar­ket­ing prose (new, revolu­tion­ary, bridges the gap between nat­ur­al and syn­thet­ic products), the actu­al answer in the middle, a some­what odd para­graph about how all the tech­nic­al info they’re pre­pared to dis­close is on the web­site (if the answer to the microwave ques­tion had been there, I would­n’t have emailed them). Any­way, the answer is sup­posedly that PLA has a low melt­ing point, so the con­tain­ers might leak in the microwave. 

Next Step

So if this con­tain­er is com­postable, where can one com­post it? The store has a big bin to take them back, but what about the Van­couver com­post facil­ity? Or indeed my com­post bin? The cash­ier said “oh, just throw it in your com­post bin.” “Are you sure?” “Yes, abso­lutely”. Accord­ing to the PLA bro­chure, you need 140ºF and humid­ity between 80% and 90% for exten­ded peri­ods of time. So that rules out my com­post bin. And the Van­couver City com­post facil­ity as well, unfor­tu­nately, since they use an open win­drow pro­cess. I emailed the rel­ev­ant people in the Van­couver City engin­eer­ing depart­ment, and they poin­ted out not only would it not com­post, if I put the plastic in the yard waste bin, it might encour­age oth­er people to put unsuit­able plastic con­tain­ers in there. So it’s back to the store with the con­tain­ers; for­tu­nately it’s not a big deal since it’s one of the loc­al stores we shop at anyway. 

Hacked!

On top of being framed (and yes, they’re still there), my site was recently hacked. Some­how someone man­aged to edit a post, adding a script and a bunch of porn keywords to two posts. And man­aged thereby to elev­ate their site to the front page of Google searches on those strings, in some cases the num­ber one hit, so it’s clear why they did it. I found these while brows­ing through the search engine strings (teen porn keywords are not usu­ally searches that find my site), found the posts and stripped out the offend­ing divs. It’s not obvi­ous to me how they got in, but since the Word­Press devel­op­ment blog has been warn­ing of secur­ity exploits, I assume it’s one of them. So I upgraded to the latest ver­sion, 2.1, and would advise any­one else run­ning Word­Press to do the same. 

Between the AFF people and these hack­ers, I do some­times won­der wheth­er blog­ging is worth­while for someone like me, who does­n’t blog a lot. Sort of takes the fun out of it.