National Geographic has an article about the indonesian island of flores where the 18,000 year old fossilised remains of a pygmy race of 1 meter tall people. I thought I’d keep readers up to date as one of my first posts to this blog was about this very subject. (I can confirm that there are currently around 30 irregular readers of this blog, some of them aren’t even friends of mine!)
Anyway the Flores tourist authority has stated that the number of visitors has increased by 21% in 2005 over this period last year. The main attraction seems to be the site where the remains were unearthed. So if you want to play hunt the hobbit on an Indonesian island here’s a map courtesy of indo.com
I seriously doubt it however!
iBill or “Internet Billing” is a secure online payments provider that promises to simplify the process of payments processing for small businesses that don’t want the hassle of setting up their own merchant account or deploying their own online credit-card payment system. Sounds like a good idea & it is. However, iBill charge an absolutely staggering 30% of gross sales for this service. 20% processing charge and an additional 10% for “reserves”. “That’s amoral” I hear you say.. NO, this is amoral. It turns out that iBill haven’t been paying their customers for months. With a wait of around 4 months for customers to find a new payment processor iBill can afford to make empty promises for quite a while, god knows where the money is going. According to the NYTimes article the company is currently under investigation by the US Dept of Justice & a class action lawsuit by disgruntled clients is reportedly on the way.
Interestingly enough I asked around & several friends thought that iBill was associated with Apple in some shape or form. the lower case i is very reminiscent of Apple’s product nomenclature. Apple take note!
Categories
Combating Referrer SPAM
Kuro5hin has a neat article today about mechanisms for combating Referrer Spam. This kind of Spamming involves hitting websites while facking the referrer info in the HTTP request. Often referrer information is publically or privately available through webserver log analyser packages such as webalizer. However, even if you’re not worried about pollution of your weblogs and published usage stats Referrer Spammers have an irritating habit of DDoSing your site into oblivion while they taint your logs. Charming people I’m sure.
One of their suggested methods for blocking these wonderful folks involves blocking their URLs using your .htaccess file. I use the following voodoo with my movable type weblog and it’s very effective.
SetEnvIfNoCase Referer ".*(credit|texas-hold-em|holdem|viagra|sex|more-naughty-words).*" BadReferrer
order deny,allow
deny from env=BadReferrer
The process of maintaining up-to-the-minute blacklists in your .htaccess files can be automated using the catchily titled Referrer SPAM FUCKER 3000. Quality code that does exactly what it says on the tin 😉
Hasta la vista texas-hold-em. Just trying to plant a few seeds here and help reclaim the internet from these Grade A 1u53r5
I got thinking about the implications of IM-Bots when I worked for the TSSG research group in Ireland. IM-Bots are pseudo-intelligent automated IM buddys that responds to queries using greater or lesser degrees of Natural Language Parsing (NLP) and knowledge inference. One of the most famous is the Alice-Bot which uses Artificial Intelligence Markup Language (AIML) to associate semantics (like running a program) with parsed syntax. I’ve written a paper about using IM-Bots as virtual shopping assistants which is available here