Archive for October, 2010
the field between BioSci and Education, seen on my way to a meeting with some great profs to plan out a couple of course blog sites.
one of the ducks coming to check me out as I ditch a jacket on the ride to campus. won’t be long before they all head south.
I’m reading The Whale and the Reactor, from the Beyond McLuhan reading list. Some really interesting stuff (including coincidentally reading the passage describing Stewart Brand’s The Whole Earth Catalog at the exact moment that Brian Lamb was listening to him speak in person).
Part 2 of the book delves into reform and revolution, primarily describing movements in the 1960s and 70s. It got me thinking about parallels to contemporary educational reform movements, specifically about the purpose of the reform movements themselves. Perhaps more on that later, but for now, this gem by Langdon Winner:
…To avoid the cynicism and gloom toward which their thinking carried them, it was necessary to perform a high-wire act along slender threads of hope.
The appropriate technology movement in industrialized countries set out to walk the same tightrope. Stemming from the decline of radical politics and from an obvious next step in the critique of technological society, its true purpose was not to produce energy from renewable resources, but to generate the hope of social renewal from the winds of despair.
Emphasis mine. So, is the real goal of educational reform movements really to change things, or is it to give us hope?
one of the railway bridges crossing the bow river between silver springs and bowness. I took the long route home, down along the river before climbing back up the BFH.
After being mesmerized by the film shot from a streetcar along Market Street in San Francisco before The Big One, here’s some footage shot shortly after the earthquake and fire that devastated the city. Via Jason Kottke, who Viad devour.
I’ve been battling sploggers on UCalgaryBlogs continually. I just finished marking about 50 users/blogs as spam – that’s since yesterday afternoon. I could easily stop the problem outright by requiring people to use an @ucalgary.ca email address to create a site, but that goes against the possibility of anonymity, and many (most!) students don’t use their campus email addresses.
I currently run Bad Behavior, as well as ReCaptcha. They stop the automated splog creation scripts, but there seem to be a LOT of people employed around the world to manually enter forms in order to get around captcha and anti-spam/splog techniques.
In looking through the WordPress.org forum on multisite (nee WPMU) issues, I found a new post called “Splog Spammer Final Solution?” It sounded a little like overkill, but when I thought about it, almost all splogs created on UCalgaryBlogs have come from a handful of countries. Countries where it’s not very likely that students and faculty will be creating new sites from. So I decided to try it out.
The forum post links to a page containing lists of IP addresses and blocks belonging to countries where splog/spam activity is off the charts. All you do is copy some text, drop it into your .htaccess file, and hey presto. No more sites created from those countries.
Initially, I just banned all access from those countries. But that felt like a pretty slimy thing to do. So I stepped back and am now only blocking access to the site creation form wp-signup.php from those countries. If anyone affiliated with the university needs to blog while traveling the world, they’re free to do so, but they’ll need to have created the blog site from outside the Spam Zones. They should be able to access their sites, post content, etc… from anywhere.
I just tested the new splog-blocking technique, and it appears to be working. I’m really curious to see if it makes a dent on new splog creation.
The wp-signup.php script is blocked in Spam Zones:
But the rest of the service is available as usual:
The .htaccess file for UCalgaryBlogs now contains this at the bottom (after the WordPress stuff):
# block the fracking evil splog spammers
<Files wp-signup.php>
order allow,deny
(the contents of the various country block files go here)
#
allow from all
</Files>
Update: Duh. Instead of trying to blacklist IP addresses and blocks of suspected spammers, it makes more sense to whitelist IP addresses and blocks that are likely to be used by valid users trying to create sites. I’ve modified the .htaccess file to deny access to wp-signup.php to everyone but those accessing from IP addresses that don’t smell suspicious…
from the basement of the library block building, where I got to visit some of the more marginalized books on campus.
I’m guilty of a few of these ridiculous car trips – driving the 1.5km to the local grocery store when I don’t feel like schlepping there on the bike. I’m going to try cutting that down a bit…
From Google’s CEO: ‘The Laws Are Written by Lobbyists’ – Derek Thompson – Technology – The Atlantic:
“Google policy is to get right up to the creepy line and not cross it,” he said. Google implants, he added, probably crosses that line.
At the same time, Schmidt envisions a future where we embrace a larger role for machines and technology. “With your permission you give us more information about you, about your friends, and we can improve the quality of our searches,” he said. “We don’t need you to type at all. We know where you are. We know where you’ve been. We can more or less now what you’re thinking about.”
John Gruber’s take is good.
So, we have the largest, most invasive piece of technology ever designed. And it’s run by a guy who openly says he wants to use it to know everything about you, to get inside your head. To profit from leveraging that information to sell you to advertisers.
Why aren’t more people pissed off at Google? Oh. Right. They give us shiny new free baubles on a pretty regular basis. All is forgiven.
Evan captures a frame of the autumn landscape in our neighbourhood, trying out his new camera.