09.23.06
Posted in Personal, Things on the Web at 10:06 am by Moody
In order to protect email addresses from being harvested, I have added the Caesarmail plugin, which dynamically converts all email addresses using “random-offset Caesar ciphers”. This prevents spambots from collecting usable email addresses from pages/comments. Spammers aren’t likely to take the time to decipher encrypted email addresses.
Q: What’s a Caesar cipher?
A: A basic character-shift method for encoding/obfuscating text. [More]
Here is an example of the ROT13 method: Urer vf na rknzcyr bs gur EBG13 zrgubq.
ROT13 is a Caesar cipher where the characters of the alphabet are rotated 13 places (e –> r, a –> n). ROT13 is often used because the same step that encodes the selected text also decodes the text. The nice thing about the Caesarmail plugin is that the offset is “randomly generated with each page view”.
Though simple and ultimately easy to decode, the Caesar cipher method can be useful at frustrating the casual viewer. Try this if you’d like [decoded text after the cut]:
. CDYWR MNBANENA MWJ , WXRCJDCLWDY BDXDPRKVJ , HCRERCRBWNBWR NBJL , BUJANVDW XW , NWRW OX NDUJE CXA J QCRF ANQYRL AJBNJL J . ANQYRLNM XC CUDLROORM NAXV NUCCRU J PWRQCNVXB BR NANQ .
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09.22.06
Posted in Personal, Things on the Web at 10:51 pm by Moody
First thing: Thanks to you who commented to my test [now deleted]. I wanted to make sure I had not inadvertently gotten blocked the handful of people who might conceivably comment here. If you were blocked from posting a comment and you don’t know my email address, please email me here (provided email address good for one week, courtesy of Spambox).
Now for the recommendations….
But first, a little story.
Once upon a time (it was not actually a dark and stormy night, but it could have been), I moved from my “apartment” at LiveJournal to this, my “home” here at BlueHost, where I had them set up a WordPress blog for me. Once I was up and running — in virtually no time at all, actually — I posted a few things. All was well and good in my personal corner (niche?) of the blogosphere. But I began to worry anyway… because that’s what I do, m’kay.
Specifically, I began to worry about “comment spam“, also called “link spam”. Although I had not received any, I knew it was only a matter of time. So, I installed Akismet.
You have better things to do with your life than deal with the underbelly of the internet. Automattic Kismet (Akismet for short) is a collaborative effort to make comment and trackback spam a non-issue and restore innocence to blogging, so you never have to worry about spam again.
WordPress made installing the Akismet filter easy as (memorizing the first four digits of) Ï€. And, in the course of time, it began to catch spam. At first there were just a few. Then, there were a few more, and a few more. And then, there were a lot more. At last count, Akismet has caught 1050 spam comments to this blog. Top hits: ringtones, viagra (and other assorted pharmaceuticals), gambling. Not that I wanted to know; but Akismet saves all the spam in a database for a period of days before automatically deleting them. I did not have a single false positive, and I trusted the filter. It started bothering me, though, that the spam comments were getting so close to me, infiltrating my precious allotted hard drive space, wasting my even more precious bandwidth. I didn’t want to see the spam anymore, jailed by Akismet or not. I wanted it stopped before it reached me at all.
Enter Bad Behavior:
[A] set of PHP scripts which prevents spambots from accessing your site by analyzing their actual HTTP requests and comparing them to profiles from known spambots. It goes far beyond User-Agent and Referer, however. Bad Behavior is available for several PHP-based software packages, and also can be integrated in seconds into any PHP script.
There are a lot of plugins for WordPress, a number of them dedicated to stopping spam. Out of the many I looked at, Bad Behavior struck me as being particularly effective. So, I installed it. Quickly and easily, too, using Fetch. Once I fired up the plugin, I didn’t have too long to wait. Within an hour Bad Behavior had caught ~20 “spambots” (see the Web Robots FAQ for more info) trying to accomplish their nefarious ends. Since yesterday, it has caught 77 spambots. And nothing has gotten through even to Akismet. Needless to say, I am quite pleased with Bad Behavior and hope someday to donate some currency to its creator, Michael Hampton (who also happens to run a recommended site, Homeland Stupidity).
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09.17.06
Posted in Personal at 10:00 pm by Moody
There are many issues where I am, in the face of whatever it is that’s annoying me (like an angry pimple) or grating on me (like a stiff piece of broken plastic being dragged edge-on down a dirty chalkboard), a quite tolerant person. I can put up with a lot. Often enough I smile when I want to strangle, kindly defer when I want to shout down, reasonably articulate my objection in a mild manner when I want to crush and burn, etc. I do my best to see the other side of an issue, even when we’re talking things I’ve very strong opinions about (like abortion rights, GLBT rights, and human rights), even when it gives me a freakin’ headache. It’s the way we remain civilized in the best sense of the word.
Normally, I am utterly opposed to the “death penalty”. But there are times when I feel I need to make an exception. There are times when the annoyance is ratcheted up to psychic migraine status and I start hearing Cannibal Corpse’s “The Time to Kill is Now” (lyrics after the break) flailing about in my head like the Angel of Death, weapon set to ANNIHILATE. Images appear in my mind from my Fallout 2 days….
I know it’s wrong to kill… and yet…
The spammer should die. Spammers should die. Blot on the Internet, bane of decency, chokers of bandwidth and wasters of precious time, leeches and parasites wrapped in capitalistic (even nationalistic) masturbatory fantasies, worthless punters and prats, peddlers of the foulest garbage, greedy hucksters of deception; there’s no good spammer but a dead spammer.
80% of spam received by Internet users in North America and Europe can be traced via aliases and addresses, redirects, hosting locations of sites and domains, to a hard-core group of around 200 known spam operations (”spam gangs”), almost all of whom are listed in the ROKSO database. These spam operations consist of an estimated 500-600 professional spammers with ever-changing aliases and domains. The vast majority of those listed here operate illegally and move from network to network (and country to country) seeking out “spam-friendly” Internet Service Providers (”ISPs”) known for lax enforcing of anti-spam policies. [Source]
These criminals see nothing wrong with what they do to me or you. In fact, they don’t care about anyone but themselves — and what’s there to care for in them? Nothing! Nothing whatsoever! When I look at the spam I receive every day — via email or caught by my blog’s filter — I feel violently angry. I am not amused at all by their efforts. I don’t find any of it ingenious. I don’t think for an instant that they are using any sort of a viable business model. They are simply wastrels, deadbeats, assholes, no account shitheels. I don’t care what they have to say about themselves or their efforts. It is perfectly clear that their one real motivation is to make money as easily as possible, regardless of consequences. I can hear Daffy Duck saying, “Consequences, schmonsequences, as long as I’m rich”. (Or was that the BushCo chorus?) Point is, they’ve not one redeemable feature or characteristic to them. They serve no good purpose.
So, — they ought to die. Spammers should be rounded up and killed en masse. They should be used as extras in movies where people die violently, only it should be real when they die. Butcher them, I say, and then feed them to dieased dogs on a radioactive island somewhere. Use them as armor for vehicles in Iraq (doesn’t matter whose vehicles). Experiment on them with new medications or try out radical new medical procedures on them. Supply bloodthirsty, sociopathic, psychopathic mental patients with genuine, unwilling victims. Use them in place of cadavers to teach premed students about the body. Make car crash tests more fun.
But only after they’ve had everything taken from them. Whatever is of monetary value should be taken and auctioned off to help feed the hungry, clothe the poor, make shelters for the homeless. Whatever spammers have feelings for should be publicly stripped from their lives. And as they are reduced to nothing, before the blade falls or the bullet flies or the psychopath begins to chew and rip and rend, they should be publicly humiliated and ridiculed and shamed. As a culture, we should learn to focus all the badness in us — all the ill will, hatred, detestation, dislike, distaste, abhorrence, abomination, execration, aversion, hostility, ill feeling, enmity, animosity, antipathy, revulsion, disgust, contempt, and odium — on them. What an orgy of catharsis and purgation that would be!
We totally should do it. Just as soon as we’re done with molesters and rapists and those who lead us into war for no good reason.
.
Hey, I can fantasize, Twenty-first Century style, can’t I?
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09.16.06
Posted in Personal at 9:00 pm by Moody
Google “my mother died” and you will get over 500,000 hits. Google “my mother is dying” and the number drops to a little over 15,000. I think I understand why that is. It’s the finality of the former that prompts people to talk. It’s the grief. It’s the need to say something about her death that makes a person speak. While she’s still alive there’s only the moment of her death approaching, like a sky darkening with an oncoming storm when the first drops have yet to fall and the air is beginning to smell vaguely of rain, — while she’s still alive, there’s only anticipation, and breath, and quiet anticipation.
Tonight, the day after her 83rd birthday, I spoke with my mom on the phone for awhile, hearing her labored breath and fatigue as well as her joy at talking with me. She was very up front with me: she’s not doing well; her health is sliding downhill faster, now. They have her on both methadone and morphine to ease the pain. (It won’t be long.) My mother’s bones are as fragile as a bird’s, her spine is curving from the exclamation point of the young to the interrogative mark of the elderly. Her organs, especially her heart, are being compressed and distressed. “Sometimes I find myself thinking, I just want this over with! I don’t want to wait any longer!” she said to me. Sometimes, though, she wants to stay long enough to hear the voices of all her children one more time. Just one more day with familial voices softly, implicitly entreating her to love each moment more.
Tonight, I thanked her. “I know that you always tried”, I said, and she did. She tried. She loves me now just as she did when I was born, and however she mismanaged things or misunderstood me, her heart’s love was, and is, genuine. I made her cry with my words. They were words she needed to hear at the end of her days. She said, “After I’m gone, I’m going to give all you children a hug every morning”. Genuine love. (It won’t be long.)
Some part of me feels, totally irrationally, that someday I’ll look back on this whole “my mom is dying” thing and think how glad I am that she didn’t, that she’ll live forever. But when I look into my own thoughts, I know that she’ll soon be gone, permanently gone, irretrievably gone. My mother will have died, will have entered the silence only broken by those left behind. She will exist as a dynamic collection of memories in my brain and in the brains of others. My memories of her will be unique and wholly my own, and nobody will ever be able to read them or comprehend them in their totality. When my mother dies, I will never feel her warm hands on my cheeks again, never again feel her breath brush the short hairs of my neck as she hugs me, never look into her pale eyes that saw me as me. But I will remember, and I will feel her hands and her breath in the emotions I’ve wrapped them in. In my memories I will always know that my mother did live, concretely, as a real person who gave birth to me, fixed food for me, tucked me into bed, nursed my wounds and smiled at my laughter, fought with me, made up with me, rallied for me, … and on and on, loved me.
My mother is dying. She will soon be gone. I, however, will carry her love on. She taught me to carry it forward, even when she failed me. Even when she failed me, I say, but I have forgiven her her shortcomings. She has been, like me, like all of us, just another person in the world, as prone to minor and major follies and foibles and tragic flaws as anyone else. Unlike anyone else, though, she gave me life and she loved me endlessly as her child. Even when the meaning amounted to different things, she wanted the best for me. Well, she was the best for me; from her I learned that love matters most, that kindness is better than its lack, that in the end there is no one whose story you know completely save your own — so who are you to lay judgment on anybody’s doorstep? She didn’t mean you had to love or even like everyone, let alone those who did terrible things. She meant that you ought to at least understand that people all have lives you can’t really know, and what they do is caused or created in them for reasons you’ll never fathom or even see.
I’ll do my best to remember what she tried to teach me, try to grow on what I learned from her. That’s how I’ll honor her now and after she’s gone. (It won’t be long.)
.
But oh… how this hurts.
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09.09.06
Posted in Personal at 1:27 am by Moody
This strange creature I am…. Every day another gambit, another stumble, another folly, another stroke of genius or spasm of the idiot savant in me. Yesterday: melancholy, death metal, and smiles for Jung. Today: vitriol, treacle, and a joke concerning a man and a bar. Tomorrow: …? I have no plans; my outlook is a façade of mother-of-pearl. And I notice again that my belly is a little more round, now. My hair is a bit thinner and has receded farther (I do not say “retreated”, as my hair is not afraid) up my skull. My eyes are just as blue, and for all the same reasons — reasons both scientific and superstitious — and express with delicacy my unspoken thoughts. Blue eyes as blue as the sea, as the sky, as Billie Holiday’s veins or Nina Simone’s light. My longing is intact in fleshed out paradigm, but it is suffering from pixelation — a numb penumbra of platitudinous plasticity. Every day, I hope to get by. Every day, my hope gets a little bit broader, a little more vague. Every day I feel a little more everyday, but my heart remembers Borges and worries its feathers as absently it contemplates. The night’s still solace remains terrific to me.
Hmm…
Let’s go, you and I should. There is a place in me I’ve been dying for you to know. It is where the river Sane plunges smoothly into a void. The opening to the void is shaped like the lips of a courtesan saying, “Ahhhh…” — run in reverse. It is the very moment, formed into the likeness of a place out of time, when I simultaneously fall fast adream and awake, eyes wide open. I am never sure on which side of the equation I am, on which side I exist. But I am sure Borges was right when he said,
A man sets out to draw the world. As the years go by, he peoples a space with images of provinces, kingdoms, mountains, bays, ships, islands, fishes, rooms, instruments, stars, horses, and individuals. A short time before he dies, he discovers that the patient labyrinth of lines traces the lineaments of his own face.
I have known this for a very long time, now. I discovered it shortly before I died my first time. Don’t ask me when that was; I was a different person, then, and the time was a different time. Some lessons transcend particular timelines to become eternal. Such lessons reside at nodes, at nexus, as nuance resides in the educated meaning of some sentence, beyond the frail claim of the dictionary proper.
I have known it, and, too, that it means nothing more or less than what I import to it or from it. Here and now I am thinking of fractal forms, of self-repeating replicators reproducing ceaselessly. In the end, they recreate the face of all faces. That is where you get closest to the anthropomorphic “God” of our species, and see yourself therein like some grand secret. That there is infinitely more beyond it is — inconvenient, for some, hateful, for others, a relief for a few and an inebriating fire of profoundest pleasure for fewer still. But once you have fallen into that courtesan’s mouth (like a candied cherry or a peeled grape) and been sucked into the void, there is nothing to deny… or, well, nothing is undeniable and everything is everything.
In such a state of mind (“Æternum servans sub pectore vulnus” — Virgil) and weary from the labors of some given/unnamed day, I lay me down by my love’s softly, slowly, undulating side, to feel her stir somewhere in the warm depths of her own deep night. She presses back into me and sighs out her breath and I feel as if I understand in this moment why it is that I remain “I” against the familiar dread pull of all entropic reason.
The night’s still solace remains terrific to me, and I am terrified by my failure to be negated, but my mind glows in the redolent embers of love’s bare mythologies and strives to live on. As I light another Kool cigarette and take another swallow of malt liquor, arch my back and stretch my toes, the sheer inertia of my animal sense of Dasein overwhelms my wounded pride with a cosmic lust for encompassing existence wholly by being consciously encompassed by it. To completely and absolutely (not to say utterly) recognize the whole along with one’s part in the whole, one’s place and role in it, is to forget for a time the stinging barb of the ineluctable modality of one’s unassuageable existential vagabondage.
And so I go.
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