TeledyN - here comes everybody - Comments

Trudeau To Run?

mrG — Wed, 10 Jan 2007 09:39:25 -0500

Here ya go, the news you'd all been waiting for: Justin Trudeau is back. Maybe.

the 35-year-old son of former prime minister Pierre Trudeau is considering a run in the riding of Outremont, which is held by Liberal MP Jean Lapierre. Lapierre has said he will not run in the next election.
[ Justin Trudeau eyeing Liberal run in Montreal? ]

Justin is officially not-confirming the speculation, although he's said to have 'hinted' at a post-Christmas announcement to this effect. Ah, politics ...

To understand the future of learning

TimmyG — Thu, 15 Dec 2005 06:36:35 -0500

To understand the future of learning (and the role of technology therein), we have to look beyond schools to other arenas of technology innovation, disruption, and adoption/adaptation in society -- including to video games. Amen. Yet, most games (including so-called 'educational games') to date have been produced in the absence of any coherent theory of learning or underlying body of research.

TimmyG

And this week's Canadian Casher

mrG — Mon, 12 Sep 2005 09:57:59 -0400

And this week's Canadian Casher Top-Payout Pick of the Banks Award goes to ...

Dear Valued Royal Bank Of Canada Customer:

We recently have determined that different computers have logged into your Royal Bank Of Canada bank account, and multiple password failures were present before the logons. We now need you to log into your account and verify your account activity. If this is not completed by August 25, 2005 we will be forced to suspend your account indefinitely, as it may have been used for fraudulent purposes. We thank you for your cooperation in this manner.

I'll bet you do. Really. Fortunately, I'm not an RBC banking customer, haven't been since they handed my bank account over to the FRO, and apart from the mortgage that I can't afford to move out of there, I especially wouldn't ever again since they bought huge shares to prop up the now-forgotten SCO lawsuit against Linux. Serves 'em right, I say, poetic justice.

I'm not even sure if this is

mrG — Tue, 06 Sep 2005 16:22:42 -0400

I'm not even sure if this is relevent, it just strikes me as apropos, a shred of the story of why stories in the modern sense fail to satisfy. First day of school, the children brought home the catalogs of fundraiser books held out to parents to be purchased in the name of 'literacy' and going through the titles it just seems that something is missing. Far from fostering a 'literacy', there's so much that seems more a fostering of a certain mainstream nihilism, and it's from that where I stumble over these words about Platonov as just another instance ...

The powerful can't tell stories: boasts are the opposite of stories, and any story however mild has to be fearless and the powerful today live nervously. A story refers life to an alternative and more final judge who is far away. Maybe the judge is located in the future, or in the past that is still attentive, or maybe somewhere over the hill, where the day's luck has changed (the poor have to refer often to bad or good luck) so that the last have become first. Story-time (the time within a story) is not linear. The living and the dead meet as listeners and judges within this time, and the greater the number of listeners felt to be there, the more intimate the story becomes to each listener.

Stories are one way of sharing the belief that justice is imminent. And for such a belief, children, women and men will fight at a given moment with astounding ferocity. This is why tyrants fear storytelling: all stories somehow refer to the story of their fall.
[ That have not been asked:
ten dispatches about endurance in face of walls
by John Berger ]

Just for the record, if you found

mrG — Wed, 17 Aug 2005 11:47:50 -0400

Just for the record, if you found this item, you've no doubt noticed the lack of TrackBack on TeledyN. Turns out, TB was just another ill-thought-out 'innovation' which may have an operant definition as

in'-nova-tion - n - that which spontaneously and spectacularly self-implodes

Trackback, as implemented in MT and emulated by everyone else, was nothing more than a free no-restrictions, no-filter, no-authorization-required means to blast whatever message you like into whatever page you wished within the TB universe. And they did, in droves.

in the parlance of computer security, TrackBack was a self-inflicted trojan infection, a broadcast advertised 'back-door' free-for-all invitation for spam.

and we're surprised it didn't work out?

In one afternoon, I cleared over 500 trackback postings from across hundreds of items here on TeledyN, and that was just one day. Each day there was more. I switched to Drupal where there was a content spam filter, but it was Bayesian and pattern based, which are trvially aesy ot deefeat, and to make matters worse, the source, title and link of the TB (or comment) posts were granted access bypassing all filters.

I hunted around for solutions. "Oh, TB spam won't happen" was the head-in-the-sand response I got from developers. They aren't laughing anymore, but I did learn not to bother geeks with Reality. My favourite was, "Use WordPress", ie that kit famous for spamming itself in a bid to jam AdSense, but even there, in two questions I met the same head-in-the-sand response because, no, it really didn't deal with TB spam, not completely.

Others recommended holding-tanks, also the strategy of MT for comment posts, but those just take too much time to be worth the bother because I don't want to sift through 500 un-informative "you have a comment" emails (itself overrun by spam) looking for the one or two posts that are legitimate and relevent comments. Drupal was especially bad there as the list of held messages lets you

edit or approve the message without seeing what post it amends
delete it without reading it
pass it to the Bayesian where God only knows what effect the random prose will have on legit posts

a bug in the early drupal spam filter 'delete this' function also inadvertently deleted all the comments and trackbacks on the entire site, the sudden flash of which made losing those future comments that much easier to endure.

So, in a widely quoted article, I just switched it off; throwing the baby out with the cesswater, true, and I do miss what was good about the process, including the TB self-discovery side-effect self-referential cross-linking within this site, but when the publishing process consumes more time than the actual prose composition, well, something has to give.

It is so very nice to be vindicated

mrG — Tue, 31 May 2005 01:35:57 -0400

It is so very nice to be vindicated, even when I expect all of you already knew this, it is still so very nice to open up the blogdex and discover this very clear and unequivocable motive for the file-share traders set before the hungry fans, intentionally, by the studio production crew.

I suppose it also provides a pretty credible explanation for why someone with a handicam would be sitting in the audience during a preview screening in the first place. I mean, c'mon folks, does Hollywood really think the authors of articles like that are going to plunk down several hundred movie passes just so they can come off as such an expert witness to the fine art of easter-egging? And even if some editor was fool enough to provide them with the passes, are we expected to believe it was a sharp eye on the fly that pulled gems like this snap here from the depths of a random celluloid frame?

It's not malicious or even profiteering

mrG — Tue, 17 May 2005 23:18:37 -0400

It's not malicious or even profiteering, because there's no bonus or payback to be made. I will wager it's nothing more than a massive "You gotta see this!" sentiment from a dominant demographic who, to a not-insignificant percent, list their official census religion as "Jedi" -- and I really seriously doubt it will put the least dent in the massive payback these faithful will hand to George Lucas in tithe, not that he really needs every last penny, but all conjectures aside, I'll tell you this much: it's today only 11pm on May 17th and just moments ago I count a sudden flood of no less than two hundred distinct bootlegged camcorder dubbed copies of Star Wars Episode III. Mostly in French.

And no, I'm not downloading it. Maybe next year, for purposes of study or to snap frames for the kids to tape up, but likely not, we'll be so sick of it by then. Ten years from now, ask me again. For today, no. I'll pass on the 200+ massive node-swarm offers. I stood in line a whole in San Francisco in 1976 (?) smokin' and playin' chess in the street to see the Episode 4 premier once, intentionally dragging my girlfriend to the matinee because, hey, it's a horse opera -- this film is not complete without a large view in a room full of screaming kids.

You see, as with that first one, as with each installment ever since, it's the event that I want to experience. The frames are only the shadows, just the catalyst.

As for the Jedi Adepts furiously clamouring on that swarm, I'll further wager every last one of them has hopes and dreams of buying a ticket this weekend or next, with plans to sit there, smug among friends or family, already knowing a host of fine razor's edge details too cool to let slip by.

Besides, heck, we already know how it ends.

It's called "Fotolog" not "FotoBlog

a stranger — Sat, 30 Apr 2005 02:33:39 -0400

It's called "Fotolog" not "FotoBlog."

In some email brainstorming exchanges

mrG — Thu, 21 Apr 2005 12:24:42 -0400

In some email brainstorming exchanges with Alabama's vid-vendor upstart Movie Gallery, I'd mentioned good old MediaVillage.net and thought I'd drop in at their site to see what's gone down since June 2003. A lot, it seems, including, apparently, the requirement for artists to secure their own sponsors, but also, mostly, a lot of links. A lot of them. 404's and errors all over the place, and those leading to those nasty MSIIS pages famous for the missing WMD.

Here's a failed business idea that I believe suffered from narrow thinking but was otherwise a great idea for budding film makers: mediavillage.net, which suffers considerably by impeccably bad (and I mean really really bad) web design not to mention being instantly confusable with gaudy mediavillage.com, seeks to provide the Flickr.com for the digital film-maker. The technical idea is (IMHO) sound, to leverage P2P file-trading in distributing the work of lesser known and up-coming artists, and even their promotion of Creative Commons is a positive vibration, but the business idea of using vendor-lockin distribution software and then making those artists do all the funding legwork is effectively having to work for the store for the rights to have their work held there as the primary customer draw?

So I'll append that and forgive the last clause about the sales-lead load-sharing aspects pending a clarification that I can't get anymore because the FAQ page is another of those 404s, and for that reason I'll double underline and highliner ink what I said about bad design, and reiterate my earlier comments about how, before I'd put my creativity at the disposal of someone else's marketing machine, I'd want to have at least a few assurances they have my interests at heart, at least enough to do what eFolkMusic or DMusic or any of the other MP3 sites do in attempting to throw at least a little traffic my way. Archive.org is forgiven because they don't leverage my work for their own gain, they are only in it to actually have my work, like the way WikiPedia wants every encyclopedic fact, but when a site is there wanting artists to provide the draw that builds the peopled paths to their vendoring, hey, shouldn't it be only fair to tip a hat once and a while.

Or at the very least, not thwart nearly every click with a null failed transaction.

Anyway, good to see it's still there, for as they say, where there's life ...

Not only is there money in them hills ...

mrG — Thu, 31 Mar 2005 09:29:17 -0500

Not only is there money in the ad-phishing industry, but there actually is an ad-phishing industry! And they're luring in some pretty surprising partners in their google-spamming schemes.

Just for fun, I thought it only fair to test my own blogware provider and it seems that Drupal.org just isn't with it with the ad-awareness as the only mention of asbestos is this post using the term in the hum-drum domain-appropriate sense of a flame-war retardant.

Which is probably to be expected since Drupal.org hasn't seen any need to get into adverts of any sort on their product-support portal pages, and that's probably because all of the core developers are making their bread money actually using drupal, a radical and heretical thought in itself.

Metadata misinformation in Gnutellaspace

mrG — Sat, 05 Mar 2005 11:47:06 -0500

Metadata misinformation in Gnutellaspace is driving me crazy! What is it that goes through the minds of these p2p people, what could they possibly be thinking? Somebody please tell me. It's insane, absurd, either a deliberate act to devalue the network (unlikely) or just plain old-fashioned abject stupidity.

I mean, do they think they are cool or what? Consider this list:

Tammy Wynette - Satin Sheets.mp3 Loretta Lynn - Satin Sheets.mp3 Dolly Parton - Satin Sheets.mp3 Pruett, Jeanne - Satin Sheets - Classic Country 1970-1974 disk 2.mp3 Skeeter Davis - Satin Sheets.mp3 Kitty Wells - Satin Sheets.mp3

these are all the same recording -- heck, I even found one labelled Skeeter Davis and Patsy Cline!

I did indeed locate a true Loretta Lynn version, and it's wonderful, and I've since located the real Tammy Wynette, Dolly Parton versions, but those in the list above were not and of them. Ok, not knowing much better, I might believe the reverbed twelve-string intro in D might belong to Donna Fargo, Loretta Lynn is not very likely, Dolly Parton absolutely note, and it most certainly isn't even reminiscent of a dual-tracked Skeeter Davis.

And yes, I checked the ID3 tags; found no correlations to the filenames ... or to the realities.

Why do they do this? I can see renaming files to correct the metadata or to normalize your filename notations, but why take all the time and bother to rip a CD or duplicate an MP3 and then change the name of the artist? Especially when the name of the album is included! Is there any method to their madness?

It's bad enough all the indie artists I catch releasing MP3s into the network with fab filename titles like track05.mp3, but you'd think the fans could do better, just a little. After all, why do we share files if not to spread the word around? It's in this vein that I've got a new wishlist item to graft into the file-trading tools and extended on bitzi: Collaborative tagging should also include tag-devaluations, so if I know a file is mis-named, there should be some way to flag it as a tentative title.

Exo-tagging Bit-Images

Exo'-tagging: v - Assigning tags to content outside of your own personal experience; your best guess on how other people would class this object.

Here's an idea for Bitzi: Imagine an exo-tagging game of it where file-trading players audition a track, then submit their best guess on what their randomly assigned collaborator player might say about this particular bit-image. Notice the essential difference between this and what we do now with ID3 or Bitcollider tagging: By exploiting a desire to win at a game, exo-tagging cleverly anneals to the most general taxonomy -- back at the game, and the reason why players choose better tags: when their bitcollider submission arrives, it's paired with another report on this same image, and if there's a match, both accounts gain a point ... and so does the tag.

Of course, cool prizes every month ...

Mind you, looking at this particular track, there isn't even a clear majority! Donna and Patsy may have a clear lead, but Jeanne is not far behind if at all; there's some circumstantial evidence in Axehappy's tab-file being attributed to Patsy Cline, but we haven't located any Greatest Hits with this particular track, and there's real compelling evidence the track is indeed the original chart-topper by Alabama's Jeanne Pruett.

Credit where credit is due, at

mrG — Fri, 04 Mar 2005 17:06:21 -0500

Credit where credit is due, at five minutes to five pm, in comes their snappy response, sent, not surprisingly, as an HTML email:

Dear Sir or Madam,

Thank you for your feedback. We appreciate the time you have taken to
write us.

I am sorry to read of your concerns with the redesign of Online
Banking. Our goal with the redesign was to provide a sharper, cleaner
new look with improved performance and a more customer-friendly
interface.

All your CIBC accounts are now displayed on the first screen when you
sign on. This saves you time - you can access all your accounts on one
page. The available funds as well as balances (for each account) or
balances owing (for credit products) are shown. The accounts are
grouped according to category - deposits, investments, and credit
products.

You can also associate your Online Banking accounts with your
Investor's Edge or Imperial Investor's Service accounts, so that you
can easily navigate between the sites without needing to sign on
separately.

The News and Announcements area (on the top right of your screen)
contains items that CIBC posts from time to time. These items are
informational or directional in nature - for example, tips on
safeguarding your personal information.

We thank you for your suggestion to add further accessibility options
for visually impaired users. Your comments are valuable to us as we
monitor customer demand and evaluate the feasibility of various
enhancements to our service.

Your feedback is valuable to CIBC and has been noted for consideration
of future enhancements.

Thank you for visiting www.cibc.com.

Sincerely,
Rivkie

Oh it's sharp and clear alright Rivkie -- it's so sharp and clear that it is 100% invisible ... and that's why every forbidden browser cannot get at all those nifty personal financial services, or even see that they exist, or even that there actually is a top right to this screen. Because in your business savvy wisdom, in the name of clarity and convenience, you've placed them all behind a brick wall. Apparently intentionally.

But thank you for caring, anyway.

A mod_rewrite defense

mrG — Wed, 08 Dec 2004 16:26:44 -0500

A mod_rewrite defense against comment-spam found on Drupal.org, posted by candygenius ...

They are using indexers to find the comment links. I blocked the indexers as well as the originating spammer and cut down on the spam 99%. This block in .htaccess got rid of the latest and most persistent one I have seen.
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} 12\.163\.72\.13 [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} (Fetch\ API\ Request) [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} (Microsoft\ Scheduled\ Cache\ Content\ Download\ Service) [NC,OR]
RewriteRule .* - [F]
Doesn't stop Google or anyone legitimate from indexing.

That code didn't work for me directly, but once I removed the NC, in each line, it worked just fine.

The same basic technique is applicable to a whole range of abuse-thwarting Apache rewrite rules; I picked up a list at Dive Into Mark to detect and defeat all sorts of suspect referrers and User-Agents with no business being in your site (spambots/spybots/offline downloaders) -- the list was probably overkill, banning long since forgotten offenders (I expect they evolve like flu virii) but still instructive enough to use as a template for blocking today's versions.

We're not snobs here at Waypath,

Waypath Weblog — Tue, 27 Jul 2004 09:38:06 -0400

Trackback from Waypath Weblog:

We're not snobs here at Waypath, and we're not shy to give kudos to other amitious metablog projects when we find them: Findory recently launched Findory Blogory, a personalized weblog aggregator that learns about your interests as you read articles......

We're not snobs here at Waypath,

Waypath Weblog — Tue, 15 Jun 2004 12:53:55 -0400

Trackback from Waypath Weblog:

We're not snobs here at Waypath, and we're not shy to give kudos to other amitious metablog projects when we find them: Findory recently launched Findory Blogory, a personalized weblog aggregator that learns about your interests as you read articles......