Perri Nelson's Website 

Delusions of adequacy

I don't know about the rest of you, but I know that in the grand scheme of things my blog isn't very important. I try to write as though it is, but I know it's not.

My blog sees very little traffic. The average weekly traffic varies from about 40 hits per day to 90 hits per day. That's not a lot of readers, especially when you consider that about 20% of the hits are from repeat visitors. The vast majority of the hits to my site are people that come in from a search engine, and never visit again.

I have a lot of inbound links to my blog. If you skip the trackbacks to my regular open trackback posts and the inbound links from the blogrolls I participate in though you'll probably find that I actually have very few links to my regular content.

I don't know for certain, but I'd bet that the same holds true for most of the blogosphere.

Even so, we hear a lot, at least on blogs, about the powerful influence of the "new media". Bloggers write about having their site linked on major news media sites, as though it's a recognition of their importance. There are national bloggers conventions. A few of the larger sites actually hold their own conventions.

Somehow I think that we all have inflated opinions of ourselves and the importance and worth of our blogs. There are literally tens or even hundreds of millions of blogs out there. The Internet and the advent of multiple free blogging platforms gives everyone the opportunity to publish their opinions and to play at journalism.

The world population hovers somewhere around six billion.  So based upon a rather optimistic estimate of my weekly traffic I'm reaching somewhere around 0.00000135% of the worlds population on a daily basis. That's a statistically insignificant sampling.

To think otherwise speaks to delusions of adequacy. Even so, a journey of a thousand miles begins with but a single step, so I'm going to keep writing.

It was "big news" in Seattle the last couple of days. Well, maybe not "big" news. The city has reduced its greenhouse gas emissions to 8% below 1990 levels. Of course the Seattle PI asks "is it enough". Naturally I ask enough for what?

Even if all of the nations that signed the Kyoto Protocol (including the U.S.) were to fully implement it, it would only reduce the projected rate of warming by 0.07 Celsius in the next 50 years. Of course Seattle's reduction "isn't enough".

Sometimes I think that the "greens" suffer from a combination of delusions of grandeur — "mankind is destroying the planet", and delusions of adequacy (Hey, we beat Kyoto by 8%, aren't we great).

It's just a drop in the bucket folks. It's more feel-good politics that ignores the greenhouse contributions of our "elites" and of China.

Someday soon we've got to get over ourselves.

This linkfest is for the 31th of October, 2007. That's All-Saints or All-Hallows Eve folks. You know the day. The one we call Halloween. Link up, just please don't send me candy.

If you have something interesting you'd like to share, feel free to link it here and leave a trackback.

Just remember the trackback policy.

For the best exposure, go to the blogger's oasis and use the linkfest chooser to choose the posts you'd like to hook up with.

Wednesday Hero - Lance Cpl. Nicholas R. Anderson

Marine Lance Cpl. Nicholas R. Anderson
21 years old from Sauk City, Wisconsin
1st Battalion, 3rd Marine Regiment, 3rd Marine Division, III Marine Expeditionary Force
March 13, 2006

USMC

This message was forwarded to me in email, and I was asked to share it with my contacts. Even though it's essentially a chain letter, I've decided to place it here, because I wholeheartedly agree with the sentiments expressed.

As I reflect on this photograph, I see once again that not all the brave leave the "home of the brave" to enter battle; some are required now to be the brave of the home

It is said a picture is worth a thousand words but it leaves me speechless and tears in my eyes.

Would You Send This Please

Would You Send This Please

We have a long list of good friends whose husbands are deploying to Iraq next month. One of the wives sent me this. We feel compelled to send it on. Your prayers are deeply appreciated. These guys deserve our love, our hugs and most powerfully, our prayers.

Prayer Request:

I understand that life in Iraq is very difficult to bear right now. Our troops need our prayers for strength, endurance and safety.

Send this on after a short prayer; please don't break it:

"Lord, hold our troops in your loving hands. Protect them as they protect us. Bless them and their families for the selfless acts they perform for us in our time of need... Amen."

When you receive this, please stop for a moment and say a prayer for our troops around the world.

There's nothing attached; just send this to all in your address book. Do not let it stop with you, please -- of all the gifts you could give a US Soldier, Sailor, Airman, or Marine deployed in harm's way, prayer is the very best!!!

Questions

How long does fioricet show up in blood work? Has anyone had a baby while taking hydrocodone? Does oxycontin show up in a drug test?

Can you overdose a dog with valium? Will tramadol hcl test positive in drug testing? What is the street value of oxycodone? What is valium used for? What does valium look like?

When was xanax created? How long does 1mg of xanax stay in your system? How long does hydrocodone stay in your system? How long is percocet in your system?

AKismet's been busy this morning. Those are just a few of the questions posed by spammers in several hundred trackback pings to my site this morning.

Somehow I think there's a heavy load on their servers. AKismet has missed quite a few spam pings at NW Bloggers today. I've deleted half a dozen or more, including some that actually look like legitimate trackbacks, until you actually follow their link. Then the spammers try to install malware on your machine by exploiting browser holes (which I've patched).

I haven't had that problem here today, although every now and then some junk does get past the spam filters. I think that part of the difference may be in how I handle things when AKismet errors out. If any failure of any kind in the AKismet handler on my site occurs, I hold the trackback ping for later perusal.

Every piece of SPAM, every AKismet failure, and every legitimate ping ends up coming through my e-mail. That's a huge volume of mail on a daily and sometimes hourly basis. Why bother?

Well, sometimes things just don't work out the way you want them to. This morning, I had several hundred messages in my inbox from my spam filtering process, and not a single "regular" trackback message among the lot. The volume was lighter than usual but there were some unusual messages there.

Every trackback that's been posted on my site this morning showed up in the spam filter's "exception" mail. The exception messages was that the server had returned an invalid reply. Even most of the exception mail was spam, but there were eight legitimate trackbacks in there.

That's why I bother.

I've set up the mail from my spam filter so that I only have to read a tiny bit of each message. If it's spam, I can usually tell by the user agent string. If that doesn't work, I can look for keywords. I read my mail with the mouse hovering over the delete button, and I delete thousands of notices of spam daily.

The false positives and the exceptions take a little more time. Even there I can resurrect a trackback with a single button click, as long as I'm logged into my site. The code to resurrect a valid trackback or comment on my site runs it through AKismet again to report it as "ham". This works to improve AKismet's ability to differentiate between spam and legitimate traffic.

It also tells me that AKismet may be working smoothly again.

Still, look at those questions posed by the spammers. What do you think they imply?

I filtered out all of the pornography sites and the ads for viagra, cialis and levitra that passed through my spam filter on their way to the bit bucket. Probably about half of the spam this morning was for that sort of stuff. The other half was for prescription pain killers, anti-depressants, prescription weight loss pills and valium.

Later today, I'm sure that I'll be tossing notices of gibberish (literal gibberish, not just figurative gibberish) into the circular file along with car insurance advertising and ads for car dealerships.

I'm beginning to believe that there are three or four main classes of spammers out there. There are the ones trying to sell people prescription medications without a prescription, hoping to pull in drug abusers and addicts for a quick, illegal buck. There are the pornographers hoping to pull in unsuspecting idiots that think with their genitals so that they can get them hooked on perversion and eventually pull them into their pay sites (just like with drugs, the first one's free). There are people running semi-legitimate businesses that simply don't have a clue about ethical advertising techniques. And there are malicious hackers.

The first two, the drug peddlers and the pornographers are bothersome enough. It's a shame that our culture has sunk so low that we even have to deal with their garbage on a daily basis. People wouldn't be worried about how long a drug is detectable in your system if they didn't know that there was a consequence for having it show up.

But obviously, if you know how long it's detectable you can plan ahead for your drug tests (yep, I recognize that one it's a drug). I wonder how many businesses that proudly display the signs and placards declaring themselves to be "drug free" are really composed of employees that simply found ways to cheat the tests.

And let's not even get into the sordid details of the pornography that  is thrown at us everywhere. It's not just on the Internet, sit-coms on network television border on the pornographic. Walk down the streets of major cities long enough, and you'll be walking over the leaflets distributed by the porn mongers. In Las Vegas, you're lucky if you can go a hundred yards on the strip without treading upon it.

Modern music teaches young girls how to dress like whores (well, the music videos do). Youth culture expects slutty behavior from girls and thuggish, rude and abusive behavior from boys. It's become the norm in our society for just about everyone to engage in casual sex with strangers. No commitments, just mutual orgasms without consequence. Why our 42nd president even made it clear... it's not sex unless it's genitalia to genitalia. Boys get out the cigars there's a legitimate use for tobacco again!

The first three classes of spammers (drug peddlers, smut mongers, and spamming businessmen) I listed all have one thing in common. They're all looking for free advertising. They want as many eyes seeing their ads as they can get and they want them at the lowest possible rate — free.

They're bandwidth thieves. They're an annoyance. And I'm thankful that spam filters work as well as they do. I'm also thankful that so few of them are actually creative enough to worm their way past the filters.

The fourth class of spammer is the one I'd truly like to do something about. These are the hackers. These are the truly evil people that probe at the fringes of the API's that we uses as bloggers. They try to analyze and probe the comment forms on our blogs. They try to compromise our sites so that they can turn them into their own distribution agents.

They provide spammers with bot nets to spew their perversion and their "free advertisements" at us. They try to automate the process of adding comments to blogs where trackbacks aren't available so that they can feed the bot nets with compromised targets. After all, if you can post hundreds of comments using automation you don't need to hire someone in a modern day Internet sweat shop to post them one at a time.

Worst of all, they try to compromise our systems. Some of them will try to add extra garbage to the querystring parameters that identify posts in the hope that they can exploit a buffer over-run or underrun and gain access to the site. If they're not looking for those vulnerabilities they try SQL injection attacks because most blogging platforms use either SQL Server or MySQL to store content. If that works, they can gain access to the database itself.

They try dictionary attacks on login forms. Eventually they may manage to compromise a site owner's account, and then they have free reign to modify the page templates and inject their own tools and widgets onto pages, or even worse, steal the site from its owner and use it for their own nefarious purposes.

I've seen evidence of these attacks on a daily basis on my site. Last week, someone actually managed to hack into my site and modified my main page template. They did a poor job of modification and the site began spewing errors.

I caught them early enough that I was able to undo what they had done and changed my passwords and some other site settings but it was a wake up call.

It was also a crime. But, as we all know that won't stop the spammers and the hackers. They're ALL thieves. They should be treated as thieves.

If we can catch them.