Waffle

Another Saturday, another endless trek through the verdant countryside with Sidsel. This time we went south, through the northern and middle parts of Drente, where the dominant species is the potato. I spent 3 years working for a software company supplying database and decision support systems to potato farmers, during which I learned more about potatos than any non-farmer should. They have interesting mating rituals.
Seriously, Drente consists mostly of arable land with spuds, sugar beets, wheat and maize being common crops. There are many winding little paths to cycle on, and some sights to see. Our destination today was Borger, where we'd look at some henges and enjoy the forests.

(more...)

It looks like much of my incoming email for today was eaten by something or other. If I don't respond to a message you sent, it may be because I didn't get it.

And now I'm off to get annoyingly and belligerently drunk.

Being an administrator for Talk About Comics can be an exhausting experience. This morning, I awoke with a weird feeling of premonition, like a disturbance in the Force or something. I thought to myself "It's going to be one of those days when I start off motivated to do real work done, but this motivation will be defeated the moment I log on because there will be another spam attack on Talk About Comics." And Nostra-Dijkhuis was right again. There were already several complaints, both in the Trouble Ticket forum and elsewhere, about casino and other spams, following the same modus operandi as the attack that gave me so much trouble two weeks ago. Then, as now, old threads were resurrected with postings from Guests duko, bugi and wlulax_60, containing off-topic messages (variants from a small pool of standard texts) with a URL randomly inserted mid-sentence. They were once again posted from a wide range of IP addresses, in disparate ranges, but with about half of them belonging to one Internet Provider, Telefonica. When I logged on, Fearless Leader, who really has much more important things to do like paying me, hyping the Modern Tales sites and inventing new things to conquer the world with, had already deleted 120 of them. But they were still trickling in at a steady pace.

Once again, I set about neutering the spams by feeding the URLs to the Word Censor Filter, then banning the IPs from which they were posted, then deleting the messages themselves. I was frustrated to find that wildcards in the ban list didn't work the way I expected them to. But I've figured it out now. But even with wildcards for the third and fourth blocks of the IP addresses, I'm hitting the ban list often, and it really does feel like I'm banning half the internet, or at least most of Spain.
The process took hours of productive time away from me, in which I did things that were the opposite of fun. I am not a violent man, but I have some interesting ideas about how the appearance of the person behind these spams can be improved.

(more...)

Salon has a lengthy interview with Alan Moore.

Over at the Keenspace Forums, people are discussing another Great Escape. The Great Escape was the biggest webcomics crossover ever, organised by the sick mind of Damonk, and put into place by the computer-stained fingers of Damonk. It was one of the most hair-raising things I ever did as a cartoonist. I was teamed up with Glych of No Stereotypes, Scrubbo of Silly Cone V and Pam of Purple Duck Mambo. Despite Glych being overworked and Pam having trouble finding the time when real life was interfering, we completed our sub-section of the crossover story, only to find that it started breaking almost at once. The day we were supposed to launch, Keenspace, which at the time hosted all of us, went on a multi-day outage. In the months after that, Damonk's site which served as the hub for the event, was eaten by another server failure, and still hasn't been fully reconstructed. Then Glych and I both moved to Modern Tales, breaking the continuity. There has been occasional discussion of ways to make our archived material available on a central location so that everyone could read it without going "Huh?" or at least going "Huh" in any other way than we intended, but nothing ever came of it. The thing has been a constant headache since August 2001.

And yet...

Even though the consensus in our sub-group was "that was fun, let's never do it again", the idea of doing it again now seems strangely alluring. If we can Murphy-proof it while still having a story idea that is fun to do, I would probably want to take part in a Memorial Edition of the Return of the Son of The Great Escape. My big question, though, is, who'd be crazy enough to organise it? Who has Damonk's mad knowledge of the online comics world?

Three spams in a row to this weblog, from an outfit called paxilmedication.biz. All of them posted from IP address 151.37.165.231 .. They have a phone number which may or may not be genuine. It's in New South Wales, Italy.

Again, the domain name is registered with GANDI, which means they can spam the domain with impunity. If you have a domain that you need registered, avoid GANDI until they have updated their policy to ban spamming, and if you're already registered with GANDI, switch away from them and tell them their support for spammers is the reason.

The domain registration may be fraudulent. The only Krastio Atanassov I can find through Google is a linux HOWTO writer who seems to be concerned with anti-spam measures. The spammed web page itself doesn't appear to have a contact address on it (yes, I checked! The things I do in the battle against spam), which suggests that the spam may have taken place as a way to smear and discredit the real Atanassov. Considering the psychopathic behavior of spammers in the past, it is not at all unlikely that they'd go to such lengths.

(more...)

Pushed by the many spontanious fans of his character design for Grimborgsman, Reinder will soon announce that Grimborgsman will become a permanent, recurring character, or the popular Dutch cartoonist will be given a wedgie.

When Timmeryn was not asked for comment, he did not say, but probably would have, "Reinder best not make a character like that only appear for one sequence. If he does, I can see no alternative but to call in the Mafia."

Faced with these comments, Reinder replied, "Oh, bugger."

Speculation on whether this implies Grimborgsman having a romantic comedy plot featuring the Green Knight remains in debate.

I am somewhat concerned about the popularity of Bugmenot. I use it myself more and more often, and I know that my Modern Tales earnings are reasonably safe against the use of this service, but it still bothers me.

The difference between the login arrangement for Modern Tales and the registration/login for sites like The New York Times, from the user's point of view, is (or should be) that logging in to Modern Tales serves a beneficial purpose - verifying that you are a paying customer - and the nytimes login does not. We don't know why the nytimes wants your identity, but we think it has something to do with profiling your behaviour and leveraging that information with the advertisers. We don't like that or benefit from it.

However, there will be people who see the two situations as essentially the same. Hey, it's easier than remembering a password, right? And that information wants to be free, right?

People, quite rightly, are fed up with having to register for everything, remember passwords and sign in. A backlash against registrations could end up hurting fee-based sites. Or am I too pessimistic? I'd like to hear your thoughts on the matter.

Update: Adam refers me to Bugmenot's FAQ which advises pay site owners to submit their URL for automatic blocking from their database. That's good. Still, I think there's something to worry about when it comes to the hearts and minds issue.

I'm having a friendly chat with René van Densen of The Grim DotCom. If you can speak Dutch, read it, and throw peanuts at us from the sideline.

Via A Fistful of Euros:

A long and well-written article in the New York Review of Books, about the progress made by Turkey's prime minister Erdogan towards democracy and qualifying for EU membership. Short version: there's a long way to go, but the country's becoming freeer and wealthier.

What's noticeable about this is that Erdogan is an Islamist. Contrary to expectations at the time and popular belief in much of Europe, this has not stopped him from proving himself

more committed to democracy than any of the self-proclaimed "secular" leaders who misruled Turkey during the 1990s. He has secured passage of laws and constitutional amendments abolishing the death penalty and army-dominated security courts; he repealed curbs on free speech, and brought the military budget under civilian control for the first time in Turkish history. He authorized Kurdish-language broadcasting, swept aside thirty years of Turkish intransigence on the Cyprus issue, and eased Greek–Turkish tension so effectively that when he visited Athens in May, Prime Minister Costas Karamanlis proclaimed that the two countries now enjoyed "a relation of cooperation based on mutual trust."

I don't really know that much about Turkey, but it will be interesting to read this article again in December and see how things have gone since it was posted.