Category Archives: Software

New Blog Anti-Spam Tools

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Recently I’ve added a three new tools to my anti-spam arsenal. A few weeks back Rich gave me a heads up that he’d gotten the time to modify the WP 2.0 Akismet plugin to allow you to simply ban spamming IP addresses to your blog based on what Akismet classifies as spam.

Basically you get a top-10 of comments ordered by IP address and URL allowing you to quickly dispatch (and ban in the case of IP addresses) those evil posts. It works rather nicely, I must say.

This evening I’ve just added the Did You Pass Maths plugin from Aussie Steven Herod which is kind of a numeric captcha plugin for comments.

But this won’t stop trackback spam which seems to come in bursts, so I’ve also added the Trackback Validator Plugin from the Computer Security Lab at Rice University which visits the referrers of trackbacks received to ensure that there is really a link to you from that site in that page.

It’s not infallible as spammers can still configure a fake blog with links to your site, but they believe that when that happens it is no longer completely a spam trackback as it does originate from a real posting somewhere – just that you may disagree with the content and agenda behind it.

So, we’ll see what happens!

OpenRAW – Fighting to Preserve Digital Photographs

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I’ve been using my Nikon D-100 for a while and occasionally I use RAW mode when I’m taking photos of things like Donna’s paintings which will have prints made of them for sale because they’re lossless and retain much more information from the CCD than other image formats. The rest of the time I shoot in JPEG as they’re holiday snaps and it just works.

However, RAW formats are proprietary – each vendor will have many different versions as their cameras evolve and they want to add all that new shiny information into them. These undocumented formats then need to be reverse engineered by the open source community to make them usable outside of proprietary information silos – for instance Dave Coffins dcraw program supports over 208 cameras so far – but because the formats are completely undocumented there’s no guarantee of a complete implementation!

So, this brings us to OpenRAW billing themselves as “Digital Image Preservation Through Open Documentation”. Why should we worry ? Well, how about this :

Photographers will find their older images inaccessible, as future software versions lose support for older cameras. In the worst cases, entire brands may disappear, as has already happened with Contax.

and

In some cases manufacturers have even encrypted the data within newer RAW files. Intentionally or not this encryption has placed full access to the images stored in these files out of reach of the photographers that took them. Unless, of course, they limit themselves to tools sold by the camera manufacturer.

So it’s the same issue as it is for proprietary document formats, once the vendor moves on and looses interest in the older formats you may find that you have problems properly accessing (or even accessing at all) the contents of those proprietary files. Simply put, the photographer does not fully own his photograph in this format.

OpenRAW argue (correctly, in my opinion) that camera makers will not consent to use a single, standardised, RAW format, but their solution is pretty simple:

We want camera manufacturers to publicly document their RAW image formats — past, present, and future.

Personally I’ve got to agree, can you imagine being an archivist 100 years from now trying to access RAW photos made by a company that may not exist & written by people who are dead when you have no access to the source code or documentation ?

US Wants to Remove More Rights, Expand DMCA

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It would appear a coalition of the repressive wish to expand the remit of US Copyright law, including the DMCA, to make it even harder to do research, play media on any OS but those you have to payed Microsoft/Apple for, or defend yourself against damaging software they put on silver circles they claim to be (but are not) Compact Discs.

Jessica Litman, who teaches copyright law at Wayne State University, views the DMCA expansion as more than just a minor change. “If Sony had decided to stand on its rights and either McAfee or Norton Antivirus had tried to remove the rootkit from my hard drive, we’d all be violating this expanded definition,” Litman said.

Even the current wording of the DMCA has alarmed security researchers. Ed Felten, the Princeton professor, told the Copyright Office last month that he and a colleague were the first to uncover the so-called “rootkit” on some Sony BMG Music Entertainment CDs–but delayed publishing their findings for fear of being sued under the DMCA.

..and how do they propose to get this through ? Fear of course! That resurgent American political tool.

During a speech in November, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales endorsed the idea and said at the time that he would send Congress draft legislation. Such changes are necessary because new technology is “encouraging large-scale criminal enterprises to get involved in intellectual-property theft,” Gonzales said, adding that proceeds from the illicit businesses are used, “quite frankly, to fund terrorism activities.”

Ed: my emphasis added

Partial PHP5 Fix to Rich Boakes “Most Wanted” Plugin

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Figured out that if you replace:

MostWanted::mostwanted();

with

$m = new MostWanted();
$m->mostwanted();

It gets rid of the annoying PHP-5 error:

Fatal error: Non-static method MostWanted::mostwanted() cannot be called statically in [...]

The only downside is that for me it lists the top-5 twice, for some reason. Oh, that and when I left a comment with the fix for Rich I managed to miss the leading $ in the second line (which is present above).

NB: I’m using this as the widget version, caveat emptor.

Upgraded to PHP5

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I’ve taken the plunge and upgraded Apache to use PHP5 (with mod-fcgid) and so far the only casualty has been Rich Boakes’s Most Wanted plugin (so if anyone has any PHP5 foo to spare, could they point it in Rich’s direction please ?)

The only other issue was with wp-cache 2.0 which needed this little tweak by Kelson to fix the “odd blank screen bug” properly.

Now if only I could figure out how to get stattraq to play nicely with wp-cache all would be good..