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The lethal preview & submit
Imagine you have written an post. Taken time to check links, wording, context, language etc and perhaps even the facts! To have a look at the results you click "preview". However it perhaps took a while to complete so the server decided you have timed out or your connection fails, but you quickly get back with a new IP. However this makes soylentnews.org to go apeshit and claim "This resource is no longer valid. Please return to the beginning and try again." but if you go back your text is *gone*. Now you can rescue things with /dev/mem or fake webserver (hard with SSL). But any way you deal with it. You are in a world of PAIN. This is detrimental to the motivation to send posts to any site. Yes external editors is possibility and also an integration pain.
So my suggestion is to make sure that even if it takes hours to complete a post or if the IP changes. You still get your submitted post displayed which makes saving it way easier. Or even better cache any submissions for 2 days because the cookie usually reveals which user it is regardless of timeout and IP. So that they are under no circumstances is any submitted text LOST.
In the meantime a good advice to fellow submitters is to click in the text box "select all" and "copy". Then paste it all into a text file before hitting any button on the web page whatsoever. And keep the file as a backup because you can't really be sure where submissions go.
Track who is buying US politicians with "Greenhouse" browser
Nicholas Rubin, a 16-year-old programmer from Seattle, has created a browser add-on that makes it incredibly easy to see the influence of money in US politics. Rubin calls the add-on Greenhouse, and it does something so brilliantly simple that once you use it you'll wonder why news sites didn't think of this themselves.
Greenhouse pulls in campaign contribution data for every Senator and Representative, including the total amount of money received and a breakdown by industry and size of donation. It then combines this with a parser that finds the names of Senators and Representatives in the current page and highlights them. Hover your mouse over the highlighted names and it displays their top campaign contributors.
In this sense, Greenhouse adds another layer to the news, showing you the story behind the story. In politics, as in many other things, if you want to know the why behind the what, you need to follow the money. And somewhat depressingly, in politics it seems that it's money all the way down.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/08/track-whos-buying-politicians-with-greenhouse-browser-add-on/
If you want to participate or just follow along, you can install Greenhouse for Firefox, Chrome, and Safari over at http://allaregreen.us/ Grab the add-on and then follow @allaregreen on Twitter.
Video Game Sexism
My sister came down from London from Aberdeen for the week to visit friends and family. I met up with her and my other half and we went to the pub and out for sushi. My sis is great - she cosplays and reads comics and watches more films in a week than I have time for in a year.
While chatting about some sexist questions she was asked in a job interview ("Are you planning on having children any time in the next year?") the conversation came around to sexism in video games. She related to me the story of a gaming couple she knows, husband and wife. One day he logged on to the multiplayer rooms of a fairly reputable and well known first-person shooter using her gamer tag.
On his own account, this guy was a well respected and experience player. His wife's account had a tag that marked itself out as the property of a female and had showed no prior experience. The result? A tidal wave of verbal abuse through the voice chat even before the guy did anything in game or even opened his own mouth. People left matches he joined. Lobbies he entered mysteriously emptied themselves. As an experience player, he knew how his fellow male players acted and moved around, but a woman in the same situation was made as welcome as a leper.
Made me think of my own experiences in World of Warcraft. I never played PvP and many people wondered why I pretended to be a woman in my guild. I had empirically discovered what a recent study (posted somewhere on this site) found out - in co-op play, nice boys are taken advantage of and abused, while nice girls are treated respectfully and politely. My own gaming experience went from frustration of trying to find a raid group that needed healers, often turned down for free spaces in case someone better came along, to being made a guild's primary raid group main tank, leapfrogging a number of other players who were waiting for the spot.
Who knows, maybe I was just a better tank than a healer and this is all just anecdotal, but it seems there's a big difference in perception and attitude between male and female players depending on whether the situation is competitive or co-operative.
exec update
some recent goings on with the exec bot that generally lurks in #Soylent channel on irc.sylnt.us:
- sed supports regex through use of preg_replace (FoobarBazbot's awk script no longer running under exec)
- reserved alias for logging script
- disabled ping script for auto-restart cos it was a disaster (i think i fixed the problem by disabling the ping until connection is established but not going to bother testing for now)
- implemented support for bucket_append messages, which allows creating lists from multiple concurrent processes without fouling each other (needed for users.php which builds lists of channels, nicks and nickserv accounts using list, who and whois irc commands)
- refined the weather script a little as a result of some feedback (thanks to those involved)
- put weather and time functions into lib files to make them accessible from a new welcome script that can (if enabled) show weather and local time on joining a channel (if your nick/location is registered using ~weather-add or ~time-add)
- created switches.php in an attempt to make enabling/disabling features on a per channel basis a little more uniform (used by sed and welcome scripts)
- script created to add suggestions to the wiki, using ~suggest (appends to a section of an article, with bullet formatting)
- added stats aliases ~first, ~last, ~find-first, ~find-last and ~count that make use of cached chat logs
- added interface for adding/editing/deleting ~define sources
- added ~killall admin command to terminate all scripts/programs running under the bot process
- admin setting to ignore/unignore nicks added
- added script start timestamp template for the exec.txt file
hoping to eventually get the nickserv account checking stuff in users.php to a point where i can use it to fix up the player authentication in irciv cos i really wanna get back into that
haf fun :D
===
https://github.com/crutchy-/test
http://wiki.soylentnews.org/wiki/IRC:exec
Remember The First Time
Do you remember the first time you did a sudo'd "rm -rf /*" and nuked an OS? I did it today at the age of 33 on a Mac OS X 10.4 system heading for recycling. After all, it's not the kind of thing you just do on a whim, unless you're in the employ of certain groups within Russia and China. Maybe next time I do a reinstall, I'll do some messing around first because this was fascinating.
It occurred to the fellow tech I shared this experience with that neither of us had ever actually done it before and had never seen what happens. He had been assured by one of the older guys in our company that this entire enterprise couldn't possibly work and that the operating system would stop the process before it removed anything essential. Personally, I'd heard of this accidentally being done on exactly this version of Mac OS X and that the aftermath was as reported to be as severe as it gets, so we were both interested to see what would actually happen.
While Terminal did it's thing, we settled down to watch what was happening with a Finder window and Activity Monitor. The occasional message popped up about things that couldn't be deleted - symlinks to network devices and the like - and we made comments about the rate of hard drive reads and writes, the erratically rising free hard drive space report and the fact no error messages or problems seemed to be occurring. I say "seemed", it may have been that all sorts of shit was hitting the cpu cooling fan throughout this process but the error reporting systems would have been deleted roughly the same time as the rest of the OS, so perhaps it just couldn't tell us how badly wrong everything really was.
About 20 minutes later and almost everything had been deleted while the system itself was still running. What the remains were capable of was fascinating. I tried to look at what was left over in Terminal, but the ls command had been deleted. So had shutdown. And virtually everything else actually. Activity Monitor didn't seem to give two hoots that the copy stored on the hard drive had been erased, it just kept on faithfully reporting what was going on and didn't skip a beat. The wireless network connection was maintained. Finder kept on showing us what was around.
Issuing commands to an OS that only now exists as whatever was in the RAM at the time to browse around the area of the hard drive it was duplicated from just a minutes ago gave us quite an eerie feeling. I wish we'd had more time to play around with it, but we were at a client's office and I'd unplugged the mouse to use on another system for a few minutes while this was all going on and, oddly enough, it wasn't recognized again when I plugged it back in...
Simple proof against Basilisk nonsense
I didn't pay much attention to this so please excuse me but the garbage processor spat this out today:
Despite accepting all the flawed assumptions such "AI" would itself/themselves be committing the same "criminal" acts of postponement by wasting resources on such a scenario instead of better AI.
Hopefully that's not an example of cryptomnesia.
Anything more intelligent than even me (intended as a low reference point) would have far more interesting things to do than retarded human sadism, the same goes for any $deity worth the title :)
Well that's already too much attention wasted on an idiotic distraction (doesn't matter if it's genuine idiocy or staged).
utf-8 regression testing
cf: http://dev.soylentnews.org/comments.pl?sid=1115&cid=27307
See: http://www.w3.org/2004/04/uri-rel-test.html
All of the following were entered using <a href="...">>...</a>
Test 101: http://www.w%33.org/
Should be: http://www.w3.org/
Test 111: http://r%c3%a4ksm%c3%b6rg%c3%a5s.josefsson.org/
Should be: http://räksmörgås.josefsson.org/
Test 112: http://%e7%b4%8d%e8%b1%86.w3.mag.keio.ac.jp/
Should be: http://�豆.w3.mag.keio.ac.jp/
Lameness filter encountered.
Your comment violated the "postercomment" compression filter. Try less whitespace and/or less repetition.
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Did you read this?
Security flaw when logging in to soylentnews.org
It seems that when you load soylentnews using https-encryption and then fill out the login form and click Login. You get directed after login to using the standard protocol http which features no encryption or authentication whatsoever. If you don't lock at your address bar, this is easy to miss!
This means the association between user-id and IP is spilled to any party that captures your network packets. Perhaps the password too? It also opens up for any man-in-the-middle spoofings.
It would be really nice if starting with https, left you in https mode.
