07.19.08
Posted in Science, Society and Culture, Things on the Web at 9:03 am by Moody
How I wish I could claim to be surprised by the number of ignorant and stupid comments I see on “teh intarnets”–but I can’t. The ridiculously virulent form of foolishness that can reduce otherwise decent people to a manic and bellicose condition of trollishness is so widespread around here that I am more surprised when I run across an actually thoughtful, calm, intelligent (and intelligible) comment. It makes me frakkin’ sad and a wee bit pissed.
Lately, I have almost despaired over the miasma gathered about the issues of climate change and evolution. If it isn’t flat out ignorance of the facts of either subject (or both), it’s a pathetically malnourished capacity for understanding that conjures something very like it. Or it’s a pissy form of apathy. In any case, when it is not some form of apathy, there seems to be a rather fundamental dislike of genuine science on the one side, and an Ann Coulter-like support for the usual dissentient pundits on the other. Not suprisingly, those who automatically scoff at evolution or climate change typically accuse people like me of being the real fanatics, resorting to all manner of hyperbolic descriptions to describe us as, essentially, sickeningly insane and steeped in our own stratagems. They then go on, typically, to portray us as terrorists or amoral freaks whose agenda includes destroying the world that decent, moral, god-fearing, country-loving folks made or whatever. Or they simply say that we are obviously stupid. Not that both sides don’t have their low points; there’s plenty of pots and kettles, stones and glass houses, motes and planks, etc.; all the usual wanker stuff. But seriously, there are a number of strong distinctions between sides here, readily and accurately characterized by the presence of qualities such as insightfulness, integrity, honesty and forthrightness on the side of those who support the sciences, and an absence of one or more of these on the other. Take a look at the freepers and people like Michael Crichton if you’re not sure what I’m going on about. From one end of the spectrum to the other, their voices add up to a deafening, mind numbing wall of sound. It gets so that it’s very difficult for the lay person to get any idea at all of what’s simply true and what’s merely truthy.
This is a tactic of theirs, just so you know. If they can get you to stop before you start poking about, reading up, learning the facts, then they win. This is why their arguments usually devolve into ad hominem attacks or pulp fiction conspiracy theories. If they can get you to believe that what people like me are saying is equivalent to what people like them are saying–if they can so level the playing field–then they’ve all but won. They have the goal in sight once you stop looking for the truth beyond the post or comment. They have only a few steps to go in their endeavor if they can get you to think that in the end it’s all just arguments, smoke and mirrors, trivial or pointless. If you buy their shtick, you’ll walk away thinking that it’s all just a matter of opinion or, in some cases, that it’s a matter of shady politics or villainous social engineering that you should distrust out of hand.
It would appear that their shtick is potent. The sad thing is, I see a lot of people parroting the disinformation back like it’s a weaponized retort aimed at killing the bothersome dissidents who would overthrow a righteous America or patriotic “God” or some such thing.
But if you want the truth, here it is. Two issues (that are really kind of just one issue) here addressed in one rambling paragraph. OK? Listen…
First off, I don’t hate America or “God” (I am simply opposed to nationalism and theocracy as I am delusion and fanaticism). I am not a member of some occult cabal, and there is no camarilla speaking in Al Gore’s, Barack Obama’s or Henry Waxman’s ear. Richard Dawkins, PZ Myers, Sam Harris and the like do not want to eat your children or destroy morality. Secondly, that being said, a) please understand now that the world is in fact already beginning to feel the effects of global warming, a phenomenon that a great deal of evidence points to as having a man-made driver as its primary source, and know, too, that b) the theory of evolution is a robust, well-tested and open-ended attempt to explain the mechanisms of evolution–which is a real phenomenon in the world and not something that Darwin, Wallace, Huxley and many, many more esteemed scientists invented in order to supplant “God”. As for atheism (or secular humanism): it is not a religion, it is a philosophical viewpoint. Similarly, there is no “Church of Global Warming”. Finally, the scientific method is beautiful and trustworthy, and the dividends of scientific exploration are fruitful and exceedingly valuable to you, me, and everyone.
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01.28.07
Posted in Personal, Things on the Web at 3:02 pm by Moody
I love it when something that is really useful is also easy to install, and Snap (Snap Preview Anywhere) is both. It comes as a WordPress plugin (which I installed in a couple minutes, thanks to Ajay D’Souza’s good work), a TypePad widget, and can also be installed on Blogger.com or googlepages.com accounts. It’s also fairly configurable in other ways.
What is Snap Preview Anywhere?
Snap Preview Anywhere enables anyone visiting your site to get a glimpse of what other sites you’re linking to, without having to leave your site. By rolling over any link, the user gets a visual preview of the site without having to go there, thus eliminating wasted “trips” to linked sites.
And as you can see for yourself, I’ve enabled my blog with Snap. I hope you will find it to be a useful addition here, and on your own blog.
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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 .
Read the rest of this entry »
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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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08.09.06
Posted in Personal, Things on the Web at 9:08 pm by Moody
![[image]](http://verywide.net/blog/wp-content/images/misc_others/stumbleupon_logo.png "StumbleUpon")
My StumbleUpon page. I spend a lot of time there lately, as StumbleUpon one-ups del.icio.us in a number of ways (not that the folks behind the latter site aren’t beginning to catch on). It offers the user a chance to “journal” as well as tag and review links stumbled upon. It offers many views of a user’s list of sites (”Tag Cloud”, “Pages I Like”, “Discoveries”, and more). It allows you to add (and drop, of course) friends, leave comments or reviews, and so on. You can even write a little bio for yourself and have a user pic. There’s also the nifty toolbar extension for users of Firefox/Mozilla (both of which you should have). With the toolbar extension, you can cruise about the Web seeing sites you may not have ever run across otherwise, and of course you can tailor your stumbling to suit you.
Anyway, I hope to stumble into you there.
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04.30.06
Posted in Politics, Things on the Web at 2:28 pm by Moody
Saving the Internet
Yes, it’s that time again: it’s time to save the Internet from nefarious schemers (most of them Republicans) and their rotten plots (most of them serving giant businesses) to take over the last, great, free (as in freedom, not beer) medium. But before you complete the eye-roll you just started, you might want to consider exactly what’s up this time around, because this time the threat looks pretty serious. We’re not talking about email postage stamps, all right?
According to the folks over at MoveOn.org,
Congress is now pushing a law that would end the free and open Internet as we know it. Internet providers like AT&T and Verizon are lobbying Congress hard to gut Network Neutrality, the Internet’s First Amendment. Net Neutrality prevents AT&T from choosing which websites open most easily for you based on which site pays AT&T more. So Amazon doesn’t have to outbid Barnes & Noble for the right to work more properly on your computer.
In an email I received from MoveOn, they informed me that my representative, Hilda Solis, stood up for Network Neutrality “every step of the way”, and they encouraged me to blog about it. So I am. Kudos to her and all the others who stood up and voted for me and you and our rights. Apologies to those of you whose scoundrelly reps attempted unceremoniously to bend you over and spank you….
Anyway, I recognize an important issue when I see one, and this one has the potential to impact all users of the ‘Net. Like much of US policy, it starts here but its effects won’t stay here, because people nearly the whole world over access servers right here in the United States. So this could become everybody’s problem in future, given the size and power of the corporations interested in controlling the ‘Net for profit.
If you’d like to see how your representative voted on the Markey Amendment (which “[contains] enforceable Net Neutrality provisions”) and the COPE act (”the Communications Opportunity Promotion and Enhancement Act of 2006, or the COPE Act for short — which marks a dismal overhaul to federal laws concerning media, internet, and telephones in the United States” [source]), the Save the Internet.com Coalition has provided a page that tallies the vote counts for both. The results of the first round were not pretty, and split along partisan lines as you might expect, with Dems for protecting the Internet and Repubs for selling our souls, one ‘Net connection at a time. But the fight is not over.
Please — I urge you to get involved. Understand what the threats could be, learn if your representative is on the committee, sign the MoveOn Petition.
More resources for you to peruse are:
- Statement: SavetheInternet.com Coalition (MoveOn, Gun Owners of America, etc.) after yesterday’s vote.
- Article: “Panel Vote Shows Rift Over ‘Net Neutrality’” Los Angeles Times, April 27, 2006.
- COPE: All about the nasty little Communications Opportunity Promotion and Enhancement Act of 2006.
Don’t let corporations gain control of the Internet. Don’t let your government ignore you and sell you out. Don’t just sit there: blog, concerned ‘netizen, blog!
Thank you.
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