Category Archives: Trust

PAD 5/7/2013 – Key Takeaway

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Give your newer sisters and brothers-in-WordPress one piece of advice based on your experiences blogging.

If you’re a new blogger, what’s one question you’d like to ask other bloggers?

The best advice I can give is to be honest but have control over what you say. Honesty is the best policy, as the old adage is fond of saying and it keeps blogging simple as you don’t need to remember any lies you’ve written in order to keep your blog internally consistent. However, honesty has it’s limits, and that has more to do with sharing and privacy. Depending on why you blog, sometimes you may find yourself wanting to write about something private. I think that assigning posts passwords is a great feature to WordPress and makes sharing securable.

Some things are worth talking about, writing about. Some things you share aren’t really meant for your coworkers of your employer and then the best policy here is to slap a password on the posts and keep them private from wandering eyes.

There are a lot of great reasons too, to blog independently from WordPress.com. Having control over your content, not having to worry about quotas or paying for extra services all make self-hosting with WordPress.org really worth it in the long run, especially with the right hosting provider. I’ve found a lot of the plugins that enrich the self-hosted option of WordPress.org makes the product really shine. Here are some things to look into if you think blogging may be for you:

1. Fixing your .htaccess file on your blog. This can be configured to restrict your blog from foreign browsers. I’ve decided to ban entire countries from reading my blog mostly because I don’t agree with their politics, and in the case of China, I’ve gotten quite tired of comment spam. By limiting incoming traffic from browsers using this file, you can preclude them from ever being a problem. Just because the Internet is global doesn’t mean that you should feel forced to respect that globality.

2. Blacklist & IP Filter – These two plugins help identify unwanted IP addresses that are unwanted on your blog and the plugin IP Filter helps you block those with more configurability than you can get with .htaccess.

3. Akismet and Jetpack really help protect and extend your blog. Every blog I host has these two plugins and once you get them configured properly they add so many wonderful features to your blog that it’s difficult to imagine using the blogs without them.

4. PhotoDropper – This plugin makes searching for and inserting pictures in your blog posts a cakewalk. It takes care of searching for the terms you want, only shows you Creative Commons licensed imagery so you don’t accidentally run afoul of image copyright holders and automatically includes credit lines to your posts to help respect the people who are sharing the imagery you are using on your blog. It’s about as turnkey as I’ve been able to find when it comes to finding and crediting blog pictures that I use to enrich my blog posts.

Beyond plugins it’s also worth it to mention AgileTortiose’s iOS app Drafts. This app makes writing anything, journal entires, emails, and blog posts a snap. You can update on any connected device until you are ready and the destination selector feature makes pushing your updates out to various service a snap. I journal with DayOne and I post to WordPress using Poster. Drafts has options for these other apps and a dizzying array of more just for the tapping.

C2E2: Creating Comics with Comixology

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While sitting in listening to the Comixology staff hawk their Submit technology, which is quite nice to see especially for independent comic book creators there was a point raised at the end of the panel by one of the attendees. That some people are hesitant to engage with digital comic books because they perceive their purchases not as licensing but rather as chattel. When I buy an issue of Comic X for $1.99 in paper, I have that comic and I can put it somewhere safe and always go back and enjoy it. What then for the digital comics? What if Comixology collapses? This touches more than just comics and the real discussion is actually cloud escrow. Cloud services could collapse at any time taking their content with them, right down the drain. Evernote, Dropbox, Comixology, and even Google itself could founder and collapse leaving behind a smoking corpse and no way for customers to retain the data they consider as theirs.

The industry has perhaps accidentally selected this as a possibility by only conducting business in a cloud infrastructure way, it’s a thin veil on digital rights management — a way for content creators to secure their goods for sale (DRM) without driving away their customers, that veil works quite well. Except for when things utterly fail. What happens when fail comes to call?

When this fear pops up in other, more serious business discussions there is usually a section devoted to source code escrow services from escrow surety companies. So is there room for cloud escrow services in today’s world? Would that be enough to help keep people feel safer so that they would presumably give digital comic books a chance?

I can’t deny that this could be a great niche for a middleman company to step up and offer a kind of data presence insurance. The cloud products you buy are safe, permanently so, not by the companies that fail, but by the escrow service that vouchsafes the data in question.

What’s to keep the escrow service safe? This may be a irreducible hall-of-mirrors. There may be no way for people to feel absolutely safe until content is delivered in an open non-DRM format. I seriously doubt that DRM will go anywhere soon, so this may all have to be sidelined as an argument for some other time.

What started out as a blog post about escrow services has apparently turned into a railing against DRM. There may be no way out of the argument over DRM. It all comes down to “Who do you trust?” And “Can you?”.

PAD 4/13/2013 – Charitable

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PAD 4/13/2013

Daily Prompt: Charitable
by michelle w.
You’ve inherited $5 million, with instructions that you must give it all away — but you can choose any organizations you like to be the beneficiaries. Where does the money go?

The money would not go to any charitable organization. I find the notion of charitable organizations to be inherently wasteful with overhead. Everyone gets a cut of the money and when the funds get to the people with the need, after everyone has their piece of the action there isn’t much left. I’ve thought of this before, and the best thing I can think of is to better lives and keep them that way with an eye to permanence. To that end, the best destination for money like this is to create trusts for people, lock the principal money off and only allow those whom I bestow with the benefits access to the interest earned from the principal fund. This as a permanent thing wouldn’t be wise either, so I would put a 30 year timing lock on the principal, after 30 years the entire principal becomes available to the beneficiary, hopefully by then they have enough wisdom to not squander it.

Plus a construct like this helps fend off the law of found money. If all you get is a constant trickle then the law may not notice you and you likely won’t suffer for the gift. That’s the double-edged sword of giving. The law of found money punishes everyone.

Voting

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Guns, guns, gunsWatching gun nuts trying to use logic, even their own warped logic and watching their points being used against them is both highly entertaining and deeply upsetting. I saw the clip on the Daily Show where John Oliver talks to that gun nut and demonstrates this very point. The way he looked, the way he dismissed everything single-mindedly reminds me of my gun-loving family members. Nothing matters so much as keeping the Second Amendment from being violated. I don’t think they have basic human empathy and I think it works much like how conservatives change their minds when their children come out as gay, when it comes to gay marriage. Perhaps, and I don’t actively wish this on anyone, but there is a part of me that wonders if these gun nuts would be so intensely resistant to gun control if someone they loved died in a massacre where a background check would have revealed that a mentally ill shooter bought one gun online and the other at a gun show. Their dead child would still be alive if they had learned to compromise on at least background checks. Alas, it’s too late for their dead imaginary child.

Unless of course those people happen to be any of the thousands who have lost loved ones to gun violence and gun massacres.

The shame comes when a change of heart that comes after such an imaginary event that might come to pass comes too late for everyone else. That’s why America is upset with the Senate. That’s why our government has let us down. We don’t have the time for them to lose their loved ones for them to wake up in time to keep our loved ones from dying. The people are suffering, and Congress would rather ignore the will of the people. That’s a clear case of a government that has ceased representing the people and are, to borrow a word from the gun nuts, a tyranny.

photo by: paljoakim

IP Filter Plugin – Blacklist Page

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Barricade SignsI came across two great plugins – WP-Blacklister and IP Filter for WordPress. The first lists all the IP addresses for all the spam comments that a blog gets. The spam is identified by Akismet, I grab the IP addresses and then put them into TextWrangler. I sort the lines, find the really obnoxious networks, the ones with the same three octets over and over again, so something like 5.5.5.1 and 5.5.5.2, and 5.5.5.3, these, depending on how they resolve in an IP lookup get a block, either 5.5.5.* or 5.5.*.* or 5.*.*.*. From the left to the right there you block off more and more of the network. The more *’s in the block, the more stations are simply thrown off.

And then there is IP Filter plugin, I assemble a list of naughty IP’s and then fill in the details for this plugin. If an incoming IP address matches any of my blocks, they get no content and a short blurb stating that their network was either a source of spam, malware, or otherwise is unwanted traffic. I applied this list to all my blogs and I had spam comment rates which were about 30 per hour go to zero.

I will be creating a new page on my blog that lists these bad networks and IP addresses. Feel free to get this plugin and enter these blocks for yourself if you wish. I’ll be updating it as I find more spam or Limit Logon Attempt Plugin lockouts.

There is a wee part of me that is toying around with blocking the 141.218 subnet. We’ll see. 🙂

photo by: The Tire Zoo

Limit Login Attempts Plugin

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IMG_0025I recently added to my WordPress blog security now that blogs like these are being targeted by botnets. I’ve found a great plugin called “Limit Login Attempts” which allows me to set lockout values to people who try to guess what the ‘admin’ account password is.

First, lets just say that the level of entropy in my admin accounts is so high that there isn’t enough time left in the Universe to try every combination – but that being said, my values for this plugin would make this a non-issue. I give people 4 attempts to try the ‘admin’ account, after that they are locked out for 1440 minutes, a day. If they lockout twice, the lockout penalty goes to 720 hours, or a month. There is 4320 hour span until retries are reset, that’s 6 months.

Of course, the filter also captures the IP address, so I’m going to look into getting a IP blacklist plugin and adding these captured IP addresses to that blacklist. They’ll never be allowed to my blog. This line of reasoning led me to think about an immune system for the Internet. If an IP does something wrong, it is blacklisted and that fact is then sent to every other site and they blacklist it as well. One false move and you are suddenly banished from the network. I think this would radically change how people behave online. There would definitely be a lot of noise raised when people are suddenly unable to communicate with any host whatsoever because their systems were filthy, compromised, or malevolent. That would add a certain value of responsibility. It would only be a little bit more to establish a site like Digg where people vote on the malevolence of comment traffic, putting trolls right along with botnets and black-hats, out in the cold, banished where they all belong.

I can smell an RFC forming. 🙂

photo by: katerha

The Troll Takes The Toll

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I’ve held true to the concept that all outsider groups need to pay an admission in order to enter mainstream society. Germans, Japanese, the worthless Irish… They all needed to pay to play. From “No *** need apply” to forced internment camps all the way to dying of malaria while building a canal. Each group gets the short end of the pointy stick before they are admitted. A group that doesn’t pay never really earns it. Sometimes the payment is made in lives, sometimes it’s violent and is paid with blood, but always it is paid.

What about gay equality? Not just marriage, but that is a part of it. All are equal under the law. At least that’s the goal. But what I want to know is what is the price for this goal? I mean, did we bleed enough in the Halocaust (gays got it just like the Jews), how about the Stonewall Riots? We have adorable parades where we dress up and entertain everybody with our harmless antics, but is that payment enough? How much to be taken seriously. How much is that respect, in the window, the one with the consequential tail?

Perhaps this is the first time when we can pay using a more refined and evolved currency. Not being segregated, special bus seats, separate but equal *amenities*… Something classier, more stylish, more bitchy? Here’s a capital idea, come out of the closet. Announce your true self to everyone and damn the torpedoes of bigotry and ignorance, full speed ahead! If everyone came out who was gay, gay wouldn’t be so much of a big deal. Perhaps we could be as plain and uninteresting as to lose the word gay altogether and we can hand it back to Christmas where it belongs. There is nothing special about us, were plain folk who do plain things. We’re just picky about dangly bits.

These red equality symbols have a great meaning and I’m plugging in more meaning than probably was intended, so, deal with it. The extended meaning is this, once you pull the skin off anyone, no matter if they are a man, a woman, an Asian, a black, or a gay man or lesbian you have the exact same thing each and every time. A bloody screaming mess that looks indistinguishable from any other bloody screaming mess. Deep down, skinless, aren’t we all the same? Aren’t we all bloody screaming messes? So with that inspiration, what is different about getting any service rendered that other people can take advantage of? Think of it this way, with our skins on we don’t make such a mess, we don’t scream in agony, and we’re just like everyone else. Its better if you just let us lead our lives — skin-on.

This comparison is at the heart of the sadness and ineffable ignorance that is bigotry. Why does it bother bigots so much? It bothers bigots because they are in a fight-to-the-death battle with their mirrors. What is gay marriage to you? Why is it so important that we have to fight over it, that we have to have the highest court in the land decide on it? Look in the mirror and see your enemy. That which you hate you see when you look in the mirror. Once the bigots understand their fight is with a mirror, everything else becomes thoughtlessly simple, obvious in fact. Embarrassingly so.

feedHopper To The Rescue

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My abandonment of Google Reader is complete now. I have found an app that is independent of Google Reader, it’s called feedHopper and it’s available on the iOS App Store. It means that I’ll only be able to handle my RSS feeds on my iPad, but that’s okay, since that was where I wanted them to be anyways. The app is quite handy, you can set up Google Reader as a sync service, hoover in your feeds and then disconnect. Kicking Google Reader to the curb as it were. It comes feature complete with lots of sharing options including my beloved Pocket service.

I don’t think I’ll ever go back to Google Reader. I’m happy with what I’ve got. I recommend this app to anyone who used to use Google Reader. Now it’s time to dump all the apps that only work with Google Reader. In a way, Google dropping reader put a bunch of iOS devs out of business. Poof. Like that. That’s what happens when you hitch your horse to Google. You’ll need a 55 gallon drum of lubrication for what is coming. HA HA Dangly Bits.

Google Reader RIP

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Google just announced that their RSS Service, Google Reader is slated to be shutdown on July 1st, 2013. This upsets me greatly but I’m not really surprised. There was never any real traction for the service and they let the web component of it languish in the past. There was some noise that they were going to integrate the social features into Google Plus. Good luck with that.

What does this mean for the majority of users out there? Nothing really. I would say that if Google is going to pull the plug, essentially pull the rug out from under their customers by surprise like this, is that you get exactly what you pay for. Google Reader was great, and it was free and now it’s a dead service walking.

I can’t really see Google Plus succeeding against Facebook. That’s the battle to come. So they are reorganizing their infrastructure and pointing it to failtown. Okay. I would say that if you use any other Google product, like Picasa or Blogger, that you should migrate to something else like Flickr or WordPress as soon as you can, because if they kill Reader, who’s to say what’s next? The only thing I am planning to use now is Google Mail, which may be the last refuge for these scoundrels. It’s best to leave of your own volition than to be unceremoniously tossed out on your ass by surprise.

Friday Flashback – March 8th

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2004 – I got my IRS return back from the Feds, $1700, a part of that went to GenCon. Boy, were those the days. Since GenCon went to Indianapolis, and I don’t travel through Indiana unless driven by a myrddraal, that won’t be happening again. Some funny Andy-abuses-popsong-lyrics humor and the almost daily work issues, which at this point are at the focus where irritation and cliché meet. Moving along…

2006 – The big thing on this day was Project Runway was concluded. The most important bit from this show happened this year, “Where’s Andre?” Yes. Where.

2007 – Owning an American Made Car made the headlines on this day. Getting screwed over by General Motors makes 2013 a laugh-fest. We saved GM, Quist-ler, and Ford. Oh hooray. $1200 for replacement bearings and fourth set of brakes. It’s one of the reasons why I’ll never own another American made piece of shit car again. American auto companies can fail – hah – or not. wry smile The start of my debt was this awful car, one small little golden brick of it at least.

2009 – The beginning of the end for my odd benign cyst that was on my leg for years and years and years. This was when that whole thing started on the path to the end. Now I’m delightfully symmetrical and ever so daintily scarred. In the movies? Watchmen. Those were the days.

2010 – Wireless carriers still mattered. Sprint was good for highways, Verizon was slow but everywhere and AT&T was shit. This also was when AT&T bought Centennial wireless. So, whatever. Little did these carriers know but they were on the path to becoming commodity carriers. Nobody cares about their products or their employees, just their towers. In other news, I was hopeful that La Palma would break off, hit the ocean and several hours later erase New York City with a megatsunami. Alas, my hopes were for naught. New York City still exists. Blah. I started to blog and lauded how I could link dump automatically on Twitter and Facebook. Yeah, social networks as whores, take it bitches. It was at this point I realized that Apple Sales are whores. If you approach them and jingle money at them, they’ll do anything for you, but after the sale? You’re full of Santorum and the beer goggles have worn off. I also wished for Fax Machines to disappear. I didn’t get my wish.

2011 – A bit of Sage love as an email brought me great joy. I still thought Daniel Tosh was pretty neat, before the rape jokes and general wretchedness set in. WMU rolled out the Bronco Transit Mobile GPS and I thought it was neat, then I stopped using the system. I started thinking about how awkward it must be for Christians when Easter isn’t a fixed date but based off a calculation on the moon after the vernal equinox, lulz. Extra special work-fun and I started talking about AES–256 and how smart people look it up and take advantage of it.

2013 – Reality TV and Contest TV kind of suck. I decided to make a change to what I do at home, after dinner and cleanup are done. A very old friend and I shared a special moment, but they have no idea because it was just a dream. My daily tarot card readings pretty much jive with my horoscopes and so, I do my best to not go all “Hulk Angry/Hulk Smash”. I dealt with work issues, did things I’m not proud of, found FBackup which was okay, and generally felt that the day was best forgotten. I laughed heartily at the foibles of folken, they don’t, so I do, and it doesn’t matter. Well, it matters to me, which is why I do it. What is it? Ah, yes. Work stuff… you’ll never be knowing. Trust Issues. Dangly Bits. LOL.