I know many of you did not like the Captcha program I was using, and yesterday for some reason, it broke. I took that off and installed reCaptcha and it worked for normal visitors, however a ton of spam got past it. After getting over 100 spams per hour I poked around and found Mollom, which uses a unique approach to spam. From their web site:
Mollom is a web service that analyzes the quality of content posted to websites. This includes comments, contact-form messages, blogs, forum posts, etc. Mollom specifically tries to determine whether this content is unwanted - i.e. “spam” - or desirable - i.e. “ham.” Websites that allow visitors to contribute or post comments are constantly being flooded with inappropriate, distracting or even illegal commercial messages, many of which are uploaded by automatic “spambots.” Mollom screens all contributions before they are posted to participating websites.
Websites using Mollom send data they want checked to mollom.com, and Mollom replies with either a spam or ham classification. If Mollom is not certain, it will return an “unsure,” typically prompting websites to ask Mollom’s CAPTCHA server for an audio or visual CAPTCHA challenge to present to the user.
So unless you’re like Roach and put fifteen links in your comments, you may never see a Captcha. Now you’re all ham, the rest are spam.
Yesterday I drove to Seymour, Indiana for a town hall meeting by 9th district Congressman Dumbocrat Baron Hill at the Seymour City Hall. Scott Fluhr, the Harrison County Republican Chair was also in attendance. The crowd was overwhelming, as you can see below.
Yesterday, I blogged about Baron Hill’s efforts to muzzle any Hoosier that wanted to record his upcoming town hall event in Seymour.
Baron’s restrictions were so absurd that they even drew a rare (and very pointed) press release from the 9th District Republican Chairman.
Here’s the Baron’s original press release
(Washington, DC) -
WHO: Congressman Baron Hill and interested members of the community.
WHAT: Congressman Baron Hill will give a brief update of legislative action in Congress, and then open it up to questions from the audience.
WHEN: Thursday, August 7, 2008, 6:00 – 7:00 p.m. (EDT).
WHERE: Seymour City Hall
Room 301
309 N. Chestnut St.
Seymour, IN.
*Press encouraged to attend this event. Only accredited media will be permitted to record the event .
Just what the hell is “accredited media”? As Scott reported late Wednesday, Baron’s office decided later in the day to remove the “accredited media” portion. Well, nothing like a blogger to dampen the event.
I had planned on a Jimmy Olsen type of entrance, complete with a Fedora with a little piece of paper tucked in the headband that said “PRESS”, but in my hurried rush to get out of town I left it behind. Hill actually had a local cop sitting in the back of the room but I “doubt” he was there to quash any attempt by bloggers to record the event as he was obviously only interested in getting some sleep.
Hill spoke for about 15 minutes, most of it on his plan to save the United States from the grips of evil foreign oil. Sound familiar? Seems to be the new democrat theme these days. On a poster board he had his list of fait accompli. Among them:
HR 2264 - Giving the Justic Department the power to bring legal action against countries who engage in market manipulation of oil.
How the United States take legal action against another country? Okay Saudi Arabia, increase your production of oil because we know you keep it low to inflate the prices so you can keep buying those Bentleys. Quit it, or we’ll sue you!
I asked Hill just how the United States would take legal action against a foreign country. His response (paraphrased), “ugh, well that’s to protect us from <evil> corporations that try to manipulate the market, not countries”.
You would think that Congressman Hill would know what HR 2264 really was, since he did vote on it.
HR 2264 Summary
No Oil Producing and Exporting Cartels Act of 2007 or NOPEC - Amends the Sherman Act to declare it to be illegal and a violation of the Act for any foreign state or instrumentality thereof to act collectively or in combination with any other foreign state or any other person, whether by cartel or any other association or form of cooperation or joint action, to limit the production or distribution of oil, natural gas, or any other petroleum product (petroleum), to set or maintain the price of petroleum, or to otherwise take any action in restraint of trade for petroleum, when such action has a direct, substantial, and reasonably foreseeable effect on the market, supply, price, or distribution of petroleum in the United States.
Denies a foreign state engaged in such conduct sovereign immunity from the jurisdiction or judgments of U.S. courts in any action brought to enforce this Act.
States that no U.S. court shall decline, based on the act of state doctrine, to make a determination on the merits in an action brought under this Act.
Authorizes the Attorney General to bring an action in U.S. district court to enforce this Act.
Makes an exception to the jurisdictional immunity of a foreign state in an action brought under this Act.
Okay Baron, whatever you say.
His speech fairly monotonous, (see the cop sleeping?), so I won’t bore you with it here. Hoosier Pundit should have the entire audio online later today.
I waited until close to the end to start filming and used my digital camera as I don’t have a real video camera. When I pulled it out one of Hill’s staffers approached me and asked if I was “accredited media”. That’s when I whipped out this.
The congressional aide then left me alone and went to the back of the room. I think the barcode is for dog biscuits. If any bloggers want one of these let me know, we’ll gladly print one with your picture on it. Then simply take it to Staples, get it laminated and buy a lanyard. Bingo! Your accredited.
Earlier in the day I contacted 3rd district Congressman Mark Souder’s (R) office and inquired about “accredited media”. I got this response from Derek Pillie, District Director:
Our office doesn’t have a list of “accredited media” or anything like that. I think each office has latitude to develop their own criteria if they want. More to the point, I know for certain that in the almost eight years I’ve been working for Mark that we’ve never had a policy of pre-screening or preventing anyone from recording what is said at a public event. In fact we couldn’t find a single example of it.
Democrats like Baron Hill can’t be transparent. He’s no different than Nancy Pelosi not allowing cameras on the House floor. Once I did start filming Hill got nervous and called an end to the meeting. You can see him clenching his jaw in this video, and now he seems distracted by me.
A number of web sites that use SiteMeter tracking code to monitor the number of visitors to their site are reporting that the code is causing Internet Explorer browsers to crash when users visit their sites.
I haven’t spent time testing a lot of sites, but the Gawker Media sites all seem to be affected. These include Gawker, Valleywag, Gizmodo and Lifehacker, among others.
The problem appears to be affecting IE 5.5, 6.0 and 7.0. Internet surfers using IE to access a site that has SiteMeter tracking it receive a message saying the site cannot be loaded and “operation aborted.” The issue seems to have begun late afternoon Friday.
SiteMeter has not responded to a request for comment and so far has posted no announcement to its web site addressing the issue. But SiteMeter’s blog has a few posts published earlier this week referencing its move to a new platform and changes to its tracking code.
A number of sites are reporting that once they remove the SiteMeter code, the problem disappears and their page loads fine in IE.
IMHO, Sitemeter doesn’t add much value to a blog other than the referrer pages where you can see who’s visiting. Beyond that it mostly serves the ego of the author. Same for other statistical programs. They’re all off until I discuss alternatives with my geeks.
Ah, just found this in case you’re having trouble with other sites and a possible fix for your own blog:
To fix click on the menu Tools -> Internet Options. Click on the tab Security. Click on the icon Restricted Sites. Click on the button Sites. Type the text ‘*.sitemeter.com’ (without quotes). Click the Add button.
That will fix the problem on the client side.
Technically this is not a IE7 bug, but rather a problem on the server side. There is an embedded a tag for <SCRIPT HREF=”http://foo.sitemeter.com/foo.js” > inside a block element (such as <TABLE>). That’s a no-no per the standard and results in undefined behavior. In this case when the IE7 sends the TCP SYN packet to fetch the .js script, sitemeter.com is responding with TCP RST packet to abort, and IE7’s renderer bails out of the table format sequence. Ka-blooey.
To fix on the server side you need to move the script tag down to the bottom of the HTML, just before the </BODY> tag.
Brin currently holds the position of President of Technology at Google and has a net worth estimated at $18.5 billion as of March 9, 2007, making him the 26th richest person in the world and the 5th richest person in the United States, together with Larry Page. He is also the fourth-youngest billionaire in the world.
According to the 2006 edition of Forbes, Page had an estimated net worth of $18.5 Billion, placing him at rank 26 on Forbes’s list of the richest persons in the world, together with Brin.[10] Page and Brin recently purchased a pre-owned Qantas Boeing 767 airliner for their business and personal needs.
Google has catapulted itself to the top of the ranks of web hosts with the most malware, courtesy of its blogging website Blogger, according to security vendor Sophos.
“During June, two percent of all the web-hosted malware we found was on that site,” Sophos security researcher Paul Ducklin said.
I had planned on a Jimmy Olsen type of entrance, complete with a Fedora with a little piece of paper tucked in the headband that said “PRESS”, but in my hurried rush to get out of town I left it behind. Hill actually had a local cop sitting in the back of the room but I “doubt” he was there to quash any attempt by bloggers to record the event as he was obviously only interested in getting some sleep.
Hill spoke for about 15 minutes, most of it on his plan to save the United States from the grips of evil foreign oil. Sound familiar? Seems to be the new democrat theme these days. On a poster board he had his list of fait accompli. Among them:
Google has catapulted itself to the top of the ranks of web hosts with the most malware, courtesy of its blogging website Blogger, according to security vendor Sophos.
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