Rubénerd!

A few weeks ago, Georgina on Twitter gave me some moral support for disabling Rubenerd.com's comment system in June 2012. So far, so good!

Spam

When I first turned comments off, I stated the primary reason was spam. I was getting hundreds of spam messages a day, and the law of diminishing returns started kicking in. Sure, I could comb through these and perhaps uncover a legitimate comment, but the time it took to do so was increasingly hard to justify.

Details, details, details

I'll admit, that was only part of the story. In his typical style which I now miss dearly, John Siracusa pointed this out which rang bells:

The main point is that you're supposed to be communicating something, and if you successfully communicate that idea, it doesn't matter so much about how you said it. That's the details. It's better to be better at communication without being strictly correct or formal or whatever than the reverse when you're correct and formal but don't communicate your idea.

Someone in the real world professed to reading my blog once, but claimed what I wrote was often wrong. When quizzed about what they meant, it was because I'd often fail to mention certain details, or that my definitions weren't entirely accurate.

And therein lies the issue. Unless you define every term in legalese with hundreds of footnotes, caveats and painstakingly outlined definitions for what "security" and "is" means, there will always, ALWAYS be ways to pick apart posts. After a while, it became tiring arguing over tiny, insignificant points when the broader issues I was hoping to foster conversations about went ignored.

In Siracsa's words, I was communicating an idea, but rather than commenting on that, some people just revelled in being picky. More power to them, their choice! Another way to put it is this joke currently spreading:

How many geeks does it take to ruin a joke?

Okay, first of all you mean nerds, not geeks. And it's not a joke, it's a riddle. Proceed.

I have a bone to pick with your humerus

The third problem is humour. While I spent my formative years living in Asia, my mum was Scottish Australian and my dad is German. Both these cultures, much like the Brits where a large part of Aussie culture derives, value self deprecating, dry and deadpan senses of humour that are lost on some people. Chalk it up to cultural differences, but I'd say something I think is clearly a joke, and there'd be people who'd misunderstand or get offended.

This doesn't happen as much on App.net or Twitter, because people on those networks presumably follow me because they like what I tweet, my sense of humour makes sense to them, and I pay them large sums of money. In a blog, people often found my posts through search engines, would read a bit, misunderstand, get angry, and post away.

So the question I set out to answer in this post: was it a good idea to turn off blog comments? Most definitely. I've noticed a drastically improved quality of life since doing this, and I have no intention of re-enabling them any time soon. John Gruber and Dave Winer were onto something.

That said, I've decided to look into alternative ways to allow people to contact me for feedback, maybe a disposable email address with the year in it or something.

Photo by me, at a café in Mount Lofty in Adelaide.

@yaakov_h, earlier this evening:

@Rubenerd_Blog Hello Mr. Blog

And in response, from @hanezawakirika:

How short is that post? XDDD [..]

This short!

Given a spam filter of mine recently past the dubious 6 millionth spam comment filtered, I've decided to do the unthinkable and disable comments entirely. Here's my logic!

It didn't used to be this way Smithers...

Back in the bad old days of blogging, we didn't have comment systems. My first site was run off a simple Perl CGI script I wrote, but even as I moved to RapidWeaver I still didn't have blog comments. I got around the problem by running a Vanilla Forums install, and linking to my posts. It worked reasonably well.

When I moved to WordPress in 2005, I suddenly had blog comments. I liked that the barrier to entry was lower than a forum; users didn't need to register for an account to post a comment, so the upshot was more people left comments. Some posts I've written, such as font smoothing on Snow Leopard and the Canadian Hinton Train disaster have spawned entire discussions with disparate people around the world.

Like so many technologies though, it didn't take the douchebags long to realise they could wreck it for the rest of us. I can't tell exactly when it started getting out of control, but in the last few years the amount of blog spam has exploded here. My combination of TanTanNoodle's Simple Spam Filter and Automattic's Akismet do as best a job as they can to stop the onslaught, but at this stage I feel as though I'm trying to stop a waterfall by holding out a sheet of newspaper.

Some statistics

• Since 2008, TanTanNoodle's SimpleSpamFilter reports that it's blocked 6,131,412 comments. That's right, more than 6 million spam comments. As I said on Twitter, this is absurd!

• Since 2005, Akismet reports that it has blocked 196,192 comments, missed 1,844, and had 22 false positives. The latter I suspect is optimistic, I'm sure plenty more legitimate ones have been lost.

• WordPress reports 3,336 legitimate blog comments.

That graphs shows why I'm not studying stats

So now I come to the inevitable question... is having comments on my blog worth it?

For the first time, I'm thinking not. With uni and family work consuming more of my time thesedays, I simply couldn't be bothered trawling through what's been caught in the hopes of finding a couple of legitimate comments. I'm tired of having my email inbox flooded with notifications of generic, bogus comments linking to dodgy websites.

Hosting sites with public facing interfaces are also harder to keep secure too, while I'm at it.

So what's the alternative? The more I think about it, the more I realise the alternative already exists, and people are using it. I get more comments from people on Twitter and the like than I ever got on my site here.

I'm also reminded of how blogging used to work, with trackbacks and the like. Before comment systems, if you wanted to comment on someone's post, you'd write a response post on your own blog and link back. Such was the promise of the early "blogosphere", a loose knit federation of writers with their own spaces. A bazaar rather than a cathedral, if you like.

So here we go!

I'm going to trial disabling the comment system on Rubenerd.com, and replacing the comment form with static, HTML links for those who want to post to Delicious, Twitter and so on, along with the permalink (URL) for this page for those who want to respond on their own blogs. Like it used to be :).

If it works for John Gruber and the like, I'm hoping it'll work for me. It'll reduce my workload, the load on my server, and the number of plugins I need to keep updated. We'll see.

Bruce Schneier just posted about the FBI taking control of botnets and disabling the infections remotely, and being giddy with excitement that I was one of the first to read it, I left a comment :D. I need a blue collared shirt.

Earlier this month, the FBI seized control of the Coreflood botnet and shut it down.

This is a big deal; it's the first time the FBI has done something like this. My guess is that we're going to see a lot more of this sort of thing in the future; it's the obvious solution for botnets.

Leaving Coreflood in place could blow up some important machine. And leaving Coreflood in place not only puts the infected computers at risk; it puts the whole Internet at risk. Minimizing the collateral damage is important, but this feels like a place where the interest of the Internet as a whole trumps the interest of those affected by shutting down Coreflood.

The problem as I see it is the slippery slope. Because next, the RIAA is going to want to remotely disable computers they feel are engaged in illegal file sharing. And the FBI is going to want to remotely disable computers they feel are encouraging terrorism. And so on. It's important to have serious legal controls on this counterattack sort of defense.

I share concerns about outsiders being able to remotely execute code on machines, but in this case if the targets are already infected with botnet software they're effectively already out of their owner's control and can't be trusted anyway. This is in contrast to the RIAA who's argument rests on the owner being complicit in the alleged crime(s).

That said, I agree with Bruce insofar as there must be strict legal rules about when such disabling can be executed. The first step may be to more specifically define what constitutes a botnet, given law enforcement and politicians barely even understand file sharing let alone Borg-esque hives of machines.

I also believe the argument that compromised machines affecting us all is a convincing one for Microsoft to allow patches of pirated copies of Windows.

This is why I still avidly read Slashdot :)

"A wind-powered car has been clocked in the US traveling downwind 2.85 times faster than the 13.5 mph wind. The definitive research by Rick Cavallaro of FasterThanTheWind.org is being funded by Google and Joby Energy.

And thoughtsatthemoment's response:

Let me know when you have a solar powered car traveling faster than light.

I'm not just fed up with suspect political lobby groups this evening, I'm also irritated with internet trolls. Firstly to set the scene, I consult iPhoneUserNews.com for my iPhone news (surprising thought it may seem) for six irrefutable reasons that are so irrefutable as to be practically carved into stone. If stone carving could be scripted and delivered through the Internet Tubes. I guess they could be pneumatic. The tubes, not the stone.

1. Its written by a down to earth, honest person with a sense of humour
2. See number 1
3. It is not covered in advertisements or saturated with JavaScript and Flash
4. See number 1 again
5. Its not a dispassionate blogging network site with hundreds of interchangeable, generic authors that merely reproduce what we had in the newspaper realm without anything new
6. Seriously, I mean it, see number 1

Thanks to Neal, I learned about the Blackra1n software and now have a jailbroken iTelephone with 3.1.2, the subject of an up and coming post. Did I say jailbroken, I meant covered in $48 iPod socks.

All this said though, lately he seems to be attracting more of his fair share of comments from people who either don't get his sense of humour, or who merely hurl uncreative four letter insults. Come on folks, if you're going to act all high and mighty by anonymously insulting someone whom you've never met and if you did meet in public you'd probably cower away from, the least you could do is come back with some insults worthy of someone above the age of six. Is that too much to ask?

I remember Jim Kloss from Whole Wheat Radio saying he likes the idea of sites like Tumblr because they don't have comments by default, so you don't have to deal with abuse. For certain blogs I can definitely see where that'd be an advantage -- particularly ones of a more intimate or personal nature. For me, the number of valuable comments from nice people far outweigh the negative ones by dull trolls, it's just you have to live with a few of the latter to get more of the former.

I reckon Neal and Joanne O'Carroll should log the IP addresses of the trolls on his iPhoneUserNews site, trace their addresses, greet them at their doors and throw potatoes or kegs full of Guinness or harps at them, or whatever it is Irish people do to get even. As long as he informed me in advance so I could get my jailbroken iPhone 3G to the scene to record the events and put them on YouTube. Not that I'm advocating people jailbreaking their iPhones. Interesting how I came to my own defence regarding jailbreaking hardware devices than physically assaulting people. Well, you know what those moronic advertisements said, you wouldn't steal a car!

On another note, Neal's also great for forgiving me for shamelessly recycling a screenshot from a blog post I wrote back in August.

In September 2007 I posted a photo I took of a Singaporean magazine where they had spelt Bill O'Reilly's name as Nill O'Reilly. I thought it was hilarious, and postulated that it was a Freudian Slip on the editor's part. I also commented on the irony of positioning him in the magazine next to a panel talking about global warming which I said I was sure he denied was happening. This didn't please someone who rudely told me to "Wise up" which I replied to. Whew!

Well the unintended saga continues! nicksmultiverse has posted another comment where he attacks my reply:

Leffy loon or no loon, you still tried to twist the actual point for this.

Bill believes in global warming.

Who gives a horse's a** about who "misspelled" anyone's name?

The fact is, GW is occurring at such speeds that are quite alarming. Enough about what/who caused it. Let's do something about it. Put aside partisan politics and change the world.

In retrospect this reply was far too long, but I figure I may as well give him another thing to complain about.

I posted this photo because I thought it was funny, that was the point of posting this image, which I have explained to you twice now.

I didn't want this image to degenerate into a tit-for-tat pedantic argument over wording (of all things), but if that's what you want, instead of linking to the articles (which curiously didn't satisfy your need for me to defend what I said) I'll quote the pertinent sections.

From Fair.org: For example, O'Reilly often touts himself as a staunch environmentalist to prove his ideological evenhandedness. But then he rails that "the greens have strangled the California economy" (5/10/01), environmentalists are "distorting and oversimplifying some very powerful issues" (5/1/01), and his stance on climate change (3/29/01) is so qualified as to be practically a non-position: "I believe there is global warming. I mean, I know that's controversial. For every scientist who says there is, there's one that says there isn't."

Too early in the decade for you? What about Media Matters in 2008: Responding to a viewer's email about whether the current global warming "scare" is "natural" or "man-made," Fox News' Bill O'Reilly asserted: "It's all guesswork." Contrary to O'Reilly's assertion, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has concluded that the Earth is warming and human activity is very likely responsible for most of that warming.

Climate change is happening, and O'Reilly isn't helping. Could I have more precisely worded what I originally wrote better? If I were writing a masters thesis, perhaps (see reason for posting photo above). At this point though a non-position is just as destructive to our environment as denial, and it certainly isn't the "belief" which you claim it is.

If you're going to ask me who gives an arse about how a major publication misspelled a name, I'd ask you who gives an arse about the exact wording on a guy's lighthearted Flickr page. And if you're going to call me out on being partisan, drop the "leftie loon". You make yourself look like a hypocrite on both counts.

In the meantime, chill out and have a laugh! We're only on this planet for a limited amount of time, and negativity doesn't help anyone. If you didn't find the photo funny, just don't post, it's that simple mate.

I really hope that's the end of this, but I get the feeling it won't be. As I've said before, I try my best to assume good intentions online when it comes to comments, but if someone accuses me of doing something I haven't, I will defend myself. I get the feeling I'll need to learn to let some things slide though!

Sam Harris, photo by Sara Allan from Skeptic.com. One of the people on my life list of people I'd love to meet. And he has a sense of humour!

It seems one of my more philosophical posts from March last year is still stirring up controversy. I commented on a BBC report that stated religious people are happier than the non-religious, then proceeded to pontificate on the reasons why our brains crave faith without evidence, and how wishing something to be true isn't evidence in it's favour.

A comment posted this afternoon to my moderation queue from Mari Thomas got the grey matter pumping again:

I commend you for realizing that holding to a belief simply because of comfort or pleasant results is not necessarily worthwhile. For our beliefs about life to be worthwhile, those beliefs must be based upon truth– evidence. Faith without a knowledge of the evidence behind it is, indeed, lacking in value.

Various religions and beliefs about God abound around the world. Beware of the weighty assumption that there is no God. This assumption permeates the mind similar to the blind acceptance of religion.

If you desire to be open-minded, I challenge you to research the records of history to see if the evidence reveals that there is or is not a God.

I am a Christian, but not simply because of what I have been taught. I believe that the historical evidence of Christ points to the truth of His claim “For God so loved the world that He gave His only Son that whoever believes in Him shall not perish but have eternal life.”

I recommend the book Evidence for Christianity by Josh McDowell. It portrays some of the evidence found by the man who set out to disprove Christianity and was against religion in general. Interesting and worthwhile material.

Rather than specifically defending my position and launching into a debate as to the authenticity of the Bible which would unravel any subsequent arguments, I thought I'd try a fresh approach:

I appreciate your comment Mari, but I would say that if you are to challenge me to look into the evidence for your particular God and faith, I would challenge you to do the same. As the author of "The End of Faith" Sam Harris said, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and the evidence provided in defence of any religion so far is either insufficient or (for want of a better word)… terrible!

I admire that you have the conviction to not believe something unless it’s true. As I do, you clearly don’t believe in any other religions because there’s insufficient or terrible evidence for them, so I know it's possible for you to visualise how others view yours.

I don’t try to convert people, but for many of those who’ve tried to call me out on my atheism before have at least conceded this point. By all means be a Christian, but I'd advise against using the reason that there's evidence for it to justify it.

I do approve of hearty philosophical discussions, but I'm starting to think I may need another blog or avenue to do it... at some point on a software blog I should talk about software ^_^. I'm not Bill Kurtis.

Another day, another person hotkinking images I have hosted on my server here. As I've said before I'll often include images from other sources on the net in my own blog posts, but I'll always upload the images to my own server instead so I'm not wasting their bandwidth... I figure it's just common courtesy.

Well as of today the writers at the above linked blog silently uploaded their own copy of the hotlinked image and changed the URL when I submitted a comment.

You do know hotlinking is a sign of the devil right? You're not possessed are you? ;)

Perhaps that's the key to tackling this problem; instead of sending polite emails that get ignored or at the other extreme blocking all outside requests to images, I should just leave friendly comments on offenders sites! Might not work every time, but it's worth a shot ^_^.

In the meantime they've made up for it with their review of Religulous. I thought it was much better than they did apparently, but they do raise good points. But that's a topic for another show or post. I'm not Bill Kurtis.

It seems I unwittingly irked a fan of Bill O'Reilly and Fox News on my Flickr profile earlier this year without realising it! It all started with this photo I uploaded in November 2007 along with the following caption.

Quote from the cable TV magazine:

"With his irreverent sensibilities, veteran journalist Nill O'Reilly breaks through the spin and rhetoric of news events to reach the crux of the matter."

They called him "NILL"! That can't possibly be a typo!

Also ironic that the article next to his is "The Sacred Balance" which details global warming, something which I'm sure Nillo denies is happening :)

I thought the addition of the smiley face at the end of the sentence and the general jovial tone of the comment was fairly obvious, but a fellow Flickr user by the name of nicksmultiverse had other ideas:

No actually see, your statement right there is wrong. They may have misspelled Bill's name, but you are a fool for "assuming" that he doesn't think Global Warming is happening.

Maybe if you lefty loons listened for a change, watched his show, instead of this "assuming" and believing by "word of mouth" you would get your facts straight. Bill DOES believe in Global Warming, but he's on the fence like most of us. (Us, the people who believe it is naturally occurring) Hence, the planets own heating and cooling and Human activity.

Wise up!

I tried to come up with a witty line to put here, but one isn't coming to me right now. Grilled cheese sandwiches.

You may be right sir, or you may be wrong, or you may be very wrong. The point though is that I think you misunderstood the tone of my comment; I'm willing to chalk up your response to this. You should also make sure you're not assuming anything about me ("lefty loon") or other people ("on the fence like most of us") when you're arguing against assumptions in the first place.

Bill O'Reilly has been caught out numerous times distorting facts and lying. You should attempt to "wise up" to this sir before you start crassly instructing others to do so. And please try to be less rude in your comments; when we keep discussion civil we can have far more fruitful conversations. Cheers :).