Some changes to the administrative interface for Breadcrumb NavXT may affect it’s ability to work in some versions of WordPress MU. In particular, WPMU 2.7 users are need to check if the SVN Trunk version works as intended. Monday the translators will be notified of the changes to the translations. The real release will happen after next Wednesday.
-John Havlik
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Here’s the scoop, due to classes, the release of Breadcrumb NavXT 3.2.0 did not make it in March. This past week Tom and I have been working on various parts of the administrative interface. All proposed core changes have been made, and all that remains is some administrative interface related features. These include importing/exporting options and the ability to reset the options to defaults. More on the importing and exporting on release, which looks like will be next Friday.
-John Havlik
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Something caught one’s eye today, there was a new comment the seemed far too familiar. The chosen name for the commenter may have been a complete give away. However, one has seen people with legitimate comments use their website name as their alias. It did not take much effort to find where the comment’s body came from, they were one’s own words from a comment placed earlier on post–over a month ago. Differentiating between simple, and misguided plagiarism and spam required looking at, or in this case only the URI of, the site linked to as the commenter’s “website” (some World of Warcraft gold selling site).
This seems to be the “holy grail” of comment spam, producing “relevant” comments while linking to what ever site they are promoting. Spam Karma 2 even thought it was valid–SK2 is losing it’s effectiveness. While in this case the site was not relevant, the body of the comment was relevant to the discussion. It took plagiarism to accomplish it, but for people already breaking laws what’s another broken law (plagiarism is a form or copyright violation/theft).
To protect against this new breed of spam a few things could be done to resolve the issue. The first is, in the case of SK2, the comment author website URI needs to be checked against a distributed blacklist as all other URIs in the comment body are (SK2 probably already does this, but the site was not on the list yet). Secondly, comments should be checked for an “originality” percentage. Basically, this would compare it against other comments for the post, and then under the potential matches, find how close it is to them. This would prevent direct sentence, paragraph and comment plagiarism/lifting. Ultimately, making code behave as a human is the goal. If all else fails, improving the ability to find the person behind the spam so that justice may be brought to him (or her) would suffice.
-John Havlik
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A super sneak peak of the features of WP Trainer, will be updated as development progresses.
[wpt-activity]
This data is from a GPX file, however the actual points were cached and loaded from the cache. There are still a few bugs with the way encoded polylines are rendered at the moment.
-John Havlik
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With the almost complete allocation of previously available IP4 addresses, ICANN released IP address block from previously reserved ranges to private ISPs. Unfortunately for these ISPs and their customers (one in particular), in the past these IP blocks were heavily used by malicious individuals who spoofed their IP addresses. This resulted in many servers that simply refuse connections to the entire block. What block is this? It’s the 173.x.x.x block.
For a year now, Mediacom has assigned IPs under the 173.18.x.x block. Thanks to that, one’s IP address is in this range. There are sites one literally can not visit due to having a legitimate IP address in the 173.x.x.x range, instead one gets a nice “network timeout error”. In the past it was the Weblogs.us forums (now down for everyone as phpBB committed suicide), now it’s other sites. Sure one can use a webproxy, and have, but that is more trouble than it’s worth. It would be nice if these servers would at least keep current with their IP block blacklists. Even better, new blacklists not containing known to be good IP blocks because of their prior illegitimate use would be a welcomed change.
-John Havlik
[end of transmission, stay tuned]