Google Cloaking

 Technology  1 Response »
Feb 222007
 

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

 Conference, Vancouver  No Responses »
Feb 212007
 

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

 Identity and Privacy  2 Responses »
Feb 152007
 

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.

Compostable Plastic

 General  3 Responses »
Feb 112007
 

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!

 WordPress  2 Responses »
Feb 082007
 

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.

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