by R.I. Pienaar | Nov 27, 2003 | Usefull Things
The Gallery team recently released the latest version of their product and I must say it is rather nice. They have done some nice work, from the release notes the following ones are in my mind the most important:
- New image frame styles
- Cleaner, easier to follow Config Wizard
- Nineteen different looks for your gallery
The new themes look a lot nicer than before, take a look at my Gallery for a example of it.
I really wish you could have per album themes that would make it perfect for a multi user hosting system like I am using it for, but I guess things happen in small steps. If you use gallery, it is time for a upgrade!
by R.I. Pienaar | Nov 26, 2003 | Front Page
If you are a Google watcher in even the slightest sense of the word you will have seen the absolute up-roar going on at present over the changes in its search result policy. This change affects many sites and is one of the things Google is trying to do to cope with various poison tactics that is being employed by dodgy webmasters.
Lots of theories have seen the light, a good write up can be found here
On Friday, 21st November, Google decided to tighten the “filter”. All hell broke loose as tens of thousands of sites disappeared from positions they had held (in some cases) for years. We noticed some of our client sites plummeting for their major key phrase from being #1 to total invisibility. Yet this was only in highly competitive areas, not for their secondary phrases. These sites were, in most cases, not highly optimized, had not sought reciprocal links but had achieved their rankings through being on the web for 4 or 5 years. The bad news was that their company name and domain included the key phrase, sites (including directories) linking to those sites included the key phrase in their links and Google interpreted this as over-optimization and down they plunged. In many areas all the top 20 ranking sites disappeared, including industry leaders, to be replaced by educational sites, news review sites, government sites, major shopping portals or directories. Something major had happened – but what?
by R.I. Pienaar | Nov 24, 2003 | Front Page
We all know how frustrating Spam is, currently i am subjected to spam on the following mediums:
- E-Mail – In the order of 4500 per month
- Pop-ups, Pop-unders, Spyware and other malware. Thanks to the Mozilla Adblocker and its pop-up blocking this is not a big problem anymore either.
- Blog comments, luckily not by my own blog yet but soon it will no doubt since I recently enabled comment posting ability, about 3 a week currently on other blogs I host
- Referer log spams, 10 a week
- SMS Spam used to be a problem for me, but now thanks to TPS that is not a problem now anymore, but TPS is voluntary and if the UK didn’t have strong laws protecting people this would still be a problem.
- Snail mail spam, less of a problem now than before since my new living arrangements has a old lady who goes through my post and only gives stuff to me that is addressed to me, but in previous places I used to get about 15 to 20 snail mail spam articles a week.
- Telemarketing calls on my mobile used to be a problem but also solved by TPS and I do not answer my land line so I won’t know about that one.
- Instant Messaging spam on IRC and other IM systems, not a huge problem for me but others are feeling it badly.
- Direct abuse of Microsoft’s pathetic Messenger service, this pretty much happens the moment you put a machine outside a firewall, thankfully you can disable this “service” and thankfully in XP SP2 it will be disabled by default.
- Physical annoyance by sales people, charity beggars and other such types, I have my “get the fuck out of my way” look down pretty well so they run circles around me now.
As far as e-mail spam goes I keep track of time spent checking email for spam using iScan. This year I checked 311 611 emails for spam and spent 13 700 seconds of system time to do so. Of the 311 611 emails I checked 41 470 of them were tagged as spam. Of the 12 Gb of email I processed this year 300 Mb was spam tagged. Those are large figures and I am running a pretty small system for only a handfull of people, I would hate to imagine the impact that spam has on large ISPs.
So given all of this it does not surprise me at all to read stories such as the one about a ongoing war between a blog hosting company in the Netherlands and a spamming outfit in the states, people threatening anthrax attacks on spammers and the various name-and-shame tactics that anti-spammers are deploying to make the lives of spammers hell. I can sympathize with them and understand their rage.
Our only hope will be legislation and strong legal prosecution, there is no clear way to protect us from a technological point of view from attacks on all these fronts, the protocols we use such as SMTP and HTTP are all too weak and easy to abuse from a meta data point of view. The current spam laws leaves much to be desired, the people who are heading up government initiatives are clueless on a level I never thought possible so the future is looking pretty bleak. It seems that anyone with a desire to remain freely contactable will have to suffer as a result.
by R.I. Pienaar | Nov 22, 2003 | Code
Ever since I started using Sharpreader I have been missing out on some feeds I used to read. Newzcrawler has the ability to read NNTP and show it in the same style interface as RSS feeds which is really nice for reading mailing lists via gmane.org‘s SMTP to NNTP service.
At the moment I read FreeBSD Stable, FreeBSD Security Announce, NT Bugtraq and Bugtraq through this gmane.org so you can understand that it was rather traumatic to loose this ability.
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by R.I. Pienaar | Nov 21, 2003 | Front Page
There is an amazing collection of ideas of what the Victorian internet would have been like over at www.b3ta.com.
