Archives for posts with tag: Technology
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a momentary diversion

Dec 18, 2006 //

Quickie — I’m currently blitzed with classes and applications to PhD programs (Cornell, NYU, and Columbia). I have a redesign for this site in the works, but that’s going to happen over my Christmas break.

I will say that its interesting to see the reaction to “social computing” as Time’s person of the year. I personally think it’s a bit of a ridiculous choice — I don’t think it’s had an effect that is yet socially significant enough. That said, let me present to you what will hopefully be the next viral YouTube video. Here’s the Assistant Dean of my College and a laser pointer:

[youtube]DGNPcF11pFg[/youtube]

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Categories personal, photo, praxis

barcamp: rochester

Jul 11, 2006 //
bar camp: rochester

Vas is dis barcamp?
BarCamp is an ad-hoc gathering born from the desire for people to share and learn in an open environment. It is an intense event with discussions, demos, and interaction from attendees.

Vere and Ven is dis barcamp?
Big Auditorium on the First Floor
B. Thomas Golisano College of Computing and Information Sciences
Rochester Institute of Technology
20 Lomb Memorial Drive
Rochester, NY 14623

 July 14th 10:00 AM until LATE EVENING

More Info
https://barcamp.org/BarCampRochester

I just found out about it and will be attending for a few hours. Should be pretty interesting. Anyone whose got time should stop by.

And yes, I did scale a .gif — we shall never talk of it again.

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Categories praxis

oy spam

Jul 4, 2006 //

Ok, so I’ve been offline for a few days, suffering through a bit of a cold. Awaiting for me on my return to the internet were 63! spam comments, held in my WordPress moderation cue. While the spam situation has been bad, this is off the chart. A long while ago, Mike Zucca suggested a few steps to prevent them — I think its time to actually make them happen.

Oh well, happy Fourth of July all.

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Categories praxis

quiet for a little while longer… in the mean time, the spamming continues

May 18, 2006 //

Week 10 is all but past. Then Finals and grading (all of my grade need to be finished and in by the end of next week). After that, the future is a bit unknown. But there will be more research and blogging.

In the meantime, I’m getting more interested in the production of Blog Spam bots. Or rather their logic. Or what they are trying to accomplish beyond traffic. Whats interesting is how they select old posts to "bomb" with messages. For some reason they keep spamming the Lessig Photo Post. I can’t figure out if there is something in that post that makes it attractive.

So far my favorite peice of spam is this one:

Polish… polish food, lot polish airline, car polish, green nail polish, nail polish…

It’s a great peice of lingustic play, though semantically speaking, I don’t think it was intentional. But there you have the switch from Polish aka Poland to polish as in waxy buildup.

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Categories personal, praxis

bot attacks on this blog

May 2, 2006 //

Seems like I can’t get away from bots. My Lessig/Nader post keeps getting hit by comment-bots (programs that leave comments with links to commerce sites). While that’s not particularlly new, the last bot comment is a little novel:

Matthew Says:
May 1st, 2006 at 3:24 am e

Matthew…
Looks like your page was spammed…

Its another case of a bot commenting on other bots. From the syntax, I’m gussing it’s the same program that left the last few comments. I am curious if this bot script happened to be named "Matthew" or it pulled that off of some metadata (or good ‘ol fashioned published content) on this site.

I’ve seen this tactic of having a bot comment on bots occur with chatterbots. I mentioned it briefly in my thesis:

[Some chatterbots are scripted to] voice frustration at other bots within the chatroom, by posting things such as “I can’t believe there are so many bots in this room!” One notable script, perhaps in hopes of eliminating the competition, informs chatters that “If everyone complains to yahoo, we’ll get these bots kicked out. ” These adaptations highlight how authors continually, and reflexively, evolve their scripts based on observation of chatroom reaction to bots and on the results of data collected by the bots in one-to-one IM sessions.

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Categories praxis
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