Archive for the “Web/Tech” Category

UPDATE: There is no YouTube virus.

From CrunchGear:

[UPDATE: Spoke with Google/YouTube and apparently anti-spyware software from Computer Associates had been returning false positives, identifying certain files contained within YouTube embed codes as malware. The specific YouTube issue is apparently being corrected by Computer Associates and wasn’t actually harmful in the first place. If you’ve got CA software, you might want to check for any updates.]

From: http://www.crunchgear.com/2008/12/02/actnsswift-virus-affecting-embedded-youtube-vids/

Apparently some sort of relatively aggressive virus is affecting certain embedded YouTube videos. Some are saying it affects IE and Firefox users, while others say it’s only going after IE. The virus is called Actns/Swif.T and seems to contain a redirect to a phishing website embedded within a SWF file.

The site apparently installs Antivirus 2009, which is malware. We’ll pull our most recent YouTube embeds, but be careful because this one appears to have just broken out today. If you find yourself being automatically redirected or experience other weird pop-ups, especially for something called Antivirus 2009, don’t click on anything.

We’re doing the same.

While it’s nice that the News Sentinel decided to do a story about Kim and John Richards and Kim’s battle with breast cancer, I have decided today to block Fort Wayne Newspapers from accessing my blog. I did the original story “Support your local coffee shop” 4 days earlier. The News Sentinel, not unlike Pat White use this blog for show prep. Do I care, not really. And in this case, it’s for a good cause.

When Matt Kelty’s plea deal was announced, both WANE TV and Indiana’s News Center gave us attribution and provided a link after copying some of our content. Kevin Leininger did a story on the same subject using content from this site, but instead only stated “from a local blog”.

I’ll most likely do it tomorrow. I suppose a redirect is what I’ll use, I just need an idea of where to send them. Any ideas?

Off to cover Sarah Palin - AWB

Hoosier Access announced a new project today.

Please take a look at www.hoosierliberalsuncovered.com and let them know what you think. This is sure to spice things up as we head into the final election stretch! Hoosier Liberals Uncovered (HLU) is a wiki dedicated to adding to the public record information about liberal individuals and organizations in Indiana.

Our own Tom Henry even has a page on the site.

AWB

This is interesting, and I don’t recall if I posted it when I found it several weeks ago. The Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy has AWB listed in a homework assignment in a class called, The 21st Century Digital Information Fluency Project.

Blog Evaluation Assessment

Starting with Joyce Valenza’s ideas for evaluating blogs, here’s a way to measure students’ skills at online evaluation. Besides the question categories, all that’s needed is a blog to evaluate and rubrics by which to measure proficiency.

1. Joyce’s original questions:

Who is the blogger? With so many blogs offering spotty or nonexistent “about” pages, this may be a clue in itself.

What sorts of materials is the blogger reading or citing?

Does this blogger have influence? Is the blog well-established? Who and how many people link to the blog? Who is commenting? Does this blog appear to be part of a community? (The best blogs are likely to be hubs for folks who share interests with the blogger.) Tools like Technorati http://technorati.com and Blogpulse http://blogpulse.com can help learners assess the influence of a blog.

Is this content covered in any depth, with any authority?

How sophisticated is the language, the spelling?

Is this blog alive? It there a substantial archive? How current are the posts?

At what point in a story’s lifetime did a post appear? Examining a story’s date may offer clues as to the reliability of a blog entry.

Is the site upfront about its bias? Does it recognize/discuss other points of view? (For certain information tasks–an essay or debate–bias may be especially useful. Students need to recognize it.)

If the blogger is not a traditional “expert,” is this a first-hand view that would also be valuable for research? Is it a unique perspective?

2. Select a blog and evaluate it yourself.

Below are some suggestions that can serve as evaluation test cases. Blogs often change daily, so these may not be as interesting or appropriate to evaluate as they were on Dec. 7, 2006–the day we first examined them. Feel free to substitute others that are related to your subject matter. Search for content or related key concepts in Technorati, Google Blog Search, Blogpulse, etc. If the content isn’t important, search for “conspiracy theory” and you’re sure to find some interesting posts (which you must approve before turning students loose on them!). Keep in mind the rubrics below as you search for answers to evaluate the blog you select.

The Grapefruit Blog

Bad Astronomy

Angry White Boy

Yo! Check out My Blogs

Too funny. You can read the rest here.

AWB

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.

BTW, what the hell happened to Roach?

Someone from Micro$oft visited today and I noticed they weren’t using IE8, which is in BETA.

I’m in a fund raiser golf outing for the Fort Wayne Children’s Zoo today, but the site will automatically be updated throughout the day.

Fore! - AWB

Scott at Hoosier Pundit doesn’t get it. Let’s help him out.

AWB