DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

After a few more nights of futzing with it, I settled on a solution to my phasing problem. Pictured is the current recording setup: two AKG C1000S mics centered above the middle of the dulcimer’s soundboard in a “coincident pair” arrangement.

It’s a compromise. I can get a better tone with different mic placement, but this is the only way I could get a phase-coherent signal. It seemed like a sensible compromise because tone is subjective, and transparent to the listener. In contrast, the phase problem would be apparent just by walking around the room.

So, yesterday I recorded approximately 500 notes*, or about half of my song. In sight: the end!

^*On a recent horrific commute, I held off brain death by a few minutes by counting the number of eighth notes in my song. This activity would be stupefyingly boring for most people, but I’d been stuck in traffic for five hours. Stupefyingly boring was a huge improvement. You could have re-leveled the blades of your planer with my EKG at that moment.

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posted to channel: Music
updated: 2005-02-22 04:33:26

In a presentation at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, researchers announced compelling new evidence that human industrial activity is responsible for global warming.

The Chronicle’s Science Editor, David Perlman, who is such a legend that he has journalism awards named after him, summarized the findings in a piece headlined New global warming evidence presented Scientists say their observations prove industry is to blame:

But records show that for the past 50 years or so, the warming trend has sped up — due, researchers said, to the atmospheric burden of greenhouse gases produced by everything industrial, from power plants burning fossil fuels to gas-guzzling cars — and the effects are clear.

“We were stunned by the similarities between the observations that have been recorded at sea worldwide and the models that climatologists made,” said Tim Barnett of the University of California’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography. “The debate is over, at least for rational people. And for those who insist that the uncertainties remain too great, their argument is no longer tenable. We’ve nailed it.”

The Bush administration responded immediately by re-queuing its broken record: “The science of global climate change is uncertain,” said Bill Holbrook, spokesman for the White House Council on Environmental Quality.

I could have predicted this round of denials. Just two months ago, the U.S. delegation at the U.N.-sponsored International Conference on Global Warming “executed perhaps its most astonishing act of denial:”

Besides blocking all efforts to conduct substantive discussions, the U.S. allied itself with none other than Saudi Arabia in obstructing efforts to create a system of payments to help poor, low-lying island nations cope with the cost of mitigating damage related to global warming, such as rising sea levels, land erosion and increased storm damage.

A quote from Paula Dobriansky, the head of the U.S. delegation, illustrates just how far up its collective ass the Bush administration’s head is:

“Science tells us that we cannot say with any certainty what constitutes a dangerous level of warming, and therefore what level must be avoided.”

Most kids learn by age three not to touch the stove. They don’t know how hot it is. They can’t say with certainty what constitutes a dangerous level of heat. But they manage their uncertainty much more effectively than Bill Holbrook, Paula Dobriansky or George W. Bush.

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posted to channel: Conservation
updated: 2005-02-19 18:49:50

Prior to implementing the HTTP_REFERER blacklist described previously, I investigated the source of the faked HTTP requests. If they were all coming from the same place, I could simply block access from that address.

But the attacks are distributed: they come from many IP addresses on many networks. Here’s an example, showing the request count and source address for all hits to this site containing the work pokerin the past week:

nsa /var/log/httpd : cat debris_access_log | 
grep poker | awk '{print $1}' | sort | 
uniq -c | sort -rn | head
     91 65.165.84.11
     27 68.22.118.212
     20 12.172.137.13
     14 195.30.153.194
     13 38.223.231.8
     13 212.211.130.248
     12 203.199.92.158
     11 65.88.84.205
     10 168.11.16.22
      9 82.148.70.171

Just to confirm that the methodology above isn’t whacked, here are the faked REFERERs from the top IP address:

nsa /var/log/httpd : grep 65.165.84.11 debris_access_log | 
awk '{print $11}' | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn | head
      8 "http://www.nutzu.com/poker-hands.html"
      8 "http://www.nutzu.com/free-texas-hold-em.html"
      7 "http://www.nutzu.com/internet-poker.html"
      7 "http://www.nutzu.com/free-online-poker.html"
      6 "http://www.nutzu.com/world-series-of-poker.html"
      6 "http://www.nutzu.com/strip-poker.html"
      5 "http://www.nutzu.com/poker-tournament.html"
      4 "http://www.nutzu.com/texas-holdem-poker.html"
      4 "http://www.nutzu.com/rules-of-poker.html"
      4 "http://www.nutzu.com/poker-tables.html"

How could the referer spammers be operating from so many different networks? Here's my best guess: all those IP addresses represent Wintel machines that have been hijacked by viruses and trojan horses, and they're running distributed REFERER attacks without the knowledge of their owners. The machines are probably sending tons of spam email, too.

So when I previously said "this is all Google's fault," what I really meant is "this is all Microsoft's fault."

(In Microsoft's defense, they've only been working on making Windows more secure for two years... I'm sure they'll have some meaningful progress to report RSN.)

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posted to channel: Web
updated: 2005-02-19 07:30:28

Like most webmasters, I keep track of the websites that link to this one. In the jargon of my people this is called “referer logging,” which is short for “HTTP_REFERER logging,” which I include for the benefit of GoogleBot.

Starting a few months ago, my referer logs became worthless; they were filled with sites that couldn’t possibly be linking to mine: paris-hilton-video.blogspot.com, www.texas-holdem-poker-downloads-4u.info, viagra.hosting4u.gb.com. In other words, even though those sites did not contain links to debris.com, my logs looked as if hundreds of people per day were clicking through from there to here.

Why would anyone bother to fake clickthroughs? Because some websites automatically display the URLs other readers have clicked through from. The gambling and porn site owners are hoping debris.com will automatically display, and link to, their URLs.

It’s all Google’s fault. Google’s PageRank system counts inbound links as relevance votes: the more sites link to website X, the more relevant website X must be. So, if a million weblogs link to paris-hilton-viagra-holdem-poker.org, then paris-hilton-viagra-holdem-poker.org will show up high in Google’s search results for any search on related terms.

So, some unknown fuckwit, or collective of fuckwits, operates software that hammers on my site (and countless others, I’m sure), with the page requests faked to make it look as if readers are clicking through from various gambling and porn and pharmaceutical sites, in a lame attempt to raise their PageRank scores.

There are numerous problems with this strategy:

1. My site doesn’t display referers, so no benefit has ever been realized by the spammers.
2. 90% of the spamvertised URLs get shut down within a day anyway, e.g. last night’s variation, http://www.nutzu.com/internet-poker.html, so even if my site did automatically display referers, the referers would have been shut down before Google’s spiders would have counted the links as valuable PageRank votes.

The fact that the strategy is a failure doesn’t make it any less of a hassle for me. My ISP recently began charging me surplus-bandwidth fees, because all the sites I host are serving more data than I projected or paid for. Yet a measurable percentage of the bytes served by this site were not actually being seen by humans. I’m paying for the traffic generated by the referer-spammers’ software robots.

Preventing this abuse requires daily maintenance, because the spamvertised URLs change frequently. A few general keywords like poker, holdem, and viagra trap most new attacks; these are trapped hourly by a scheduled script that scans recent logs and updates the blacklist with matching domains. Every second or third day, I manually examine the logs in search of new attacks that don’t happen to match any of the keywords I’ve already defined.

So now when these robot scripts pound on my site, instead of serving up 15-20k of glorious debris.com content, the software engine that generates these pages returns a brief error message.

Frankly, the bandwidth savings are miniscule compared to the amount consumed by people abusing the MP3s and graphics. But they’re next in line.

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posted to channel: Colophon
updated: 2005-02-18 23:43:16

The good folks at WorkingForChange point out a new propaganda effort by the federal government, which is not only unethical but possibly illegal:

DISH Network has just announced that under the guise of public interest programming it is adding to its broadcast lineup a 24/7 channel produced by the U.S. Department of Defense that previously was aimed only at U.S. military personnel.

Under U.S. law, the federal government is banned from producing propaganda aimed at influencing the American people. Despite this ban, the television channel which is one hundred percent controlled by the Pentagon, will beam highly produced daily news programs promoting the interests of the Pentagon and paid for by U.S. tax payers into millions of American homes.

Let us not forget that the Pentagon insistently and consistently lied to the American people about the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. As a result of this “successful” military public relations campaign, we are now bogged down in a ferociously expensive and increasingly deadly occupation that fans the flames of terrorism in the Middle East.

If you think this is a bad idea, sign the petition.

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posted to channel: Politics
updated: 2005-02-16 05:47:03