Comment spam and nofollow

AOL Journals hasn't been hit by comment spam yet as far as I know, butI'm sure it's just a matter of time. We're somewhat protectedbecause we don't allow anonymous comments, but commentspammers can get around that once they put some effort into it.
So AOL Journals plans to support the initiative to make at least one form ofcomment spam ineffective -- the rel="nofollow" attribute. The idea is that this would be honored by search engines such asGoogle, and would mean that these links wouldn't count towardsincreasing the page rank of the target. So, this form of spamwould be rendered useless immediately. Of course, other formswould still persist, but I say it's better to light a candle than cursethe darkness. Or at least do both in parallel.

Comments

The problem with creation date metadata in PDF documents

Last night Rachel Maddow talked about an apparently fake NSA document "leaked" to her organization. There's a lot of info there, I suggest you listen to the whole thing:

http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow/watch/maddow-to-news-orgs-heads-up-for-hoaxes-985491523709

There's a lot to unpack there but it looks like somebody tried to fool MSNBC into running with a fake accusation based on faked NSA documents, apparently based on cloning the document the Intercept published back on 6/5/2017, which to all appearances was itself a real NSA document in PDF form.

I think the main thrust of this story is chilling and really important to get straight -- some person or persons unknown is sending forged PDFs to news organization(s), apparently trying to get them to run stories based on forged documents. And I completely agree with Maddow that she was right to send up a "signal flare" to all the news organizations to look out for forgeries. Really, really, really import…

Personal Web Discovery (aka Webfinger)

There's a particular discovery problem for open and distributed protocols such as OpenID, OAuth, Portable Contacts, Activity Streams, and OpenSocial. It seems like a trivial problem, but it's one of the stumbling blocks that slows mass adoption. We need to fix it. So first, I'm going to name it:

The Personal Web Discovery Problem: Given a person, how do I find out what services that person uses?
This does sound trivial, doesn't it? And it is easy as long as you're service-centric; if you're building on top of social network X, there is no discovery problem, or at least only a trivial one that can be solved with proprietary APIs. But what if you want to build on top of X,Y, and Z? Well, you write code to make the user log in to each one so you can call those proprietary APIs... which means the user has to tell you their identity (and probably password) on each one... and the user has already clicked the Back button because this is complicated and annoying.

…

The hill outside Google HQ, about a 270 degree panorama.

Abstractioneer by John Panzer

Search This Blog