DrunkenBlog

Of a final farewell to trackback, wanting to believe, and a suitcase full of juju with nowhere to go

The Suitcase of Doom™ (amusing dragging around something all day the airline decided to put a tag on saying "heavy") and I made it home safe late yesterday evening from MacWorld 2006, which was a crazy time, and getting back to Chicago on a flight landing at 6:45am from Seattle just added to it. When I finally got to it, the Blue Line never looked so good. Sometimes you just need decompress, and trains let you do that in ways driving and flying just can't for some reason.

Much to share, but I still have some odds and ends from real life to deal with, a ton of backed up email (I sort of gave up on email while I was there, as it was too crazy during the show and the wireless at the hotel was giving the shitty Wi-Fi reception in my Powerbook little love), and a few posts I have to get out before I'll let myself yap about MacWorld at all.

However, a quick site-related thing: Trackbacks are officially gone. I mentioned this earlier and threatened they'd go the way of the dodo before, but I kept putting it off while I tried different things, because they were above the comments for a reason and there isn't really a suitable replacement...

However, the site went down while I was off doing my thing twice, once for a seriously extended period while I was off the grid traveling. I was trawling through to see if it was the guy who apparently thinks it's amusing to DDOS aspects of the site, but the logs pointed to spam. 1,340-1,800+ trackback spams per hour, from untold random zombie IP addresses, scaling upwards in frequency until the server ground down and finally tripped over itself.

Less than a day later, it all happened again, with a new range of IPs. This is without factoring in comment spam -- just trackback spam. It's also occurring on more than just this site on the server which just exacerbates the issue -- but for whatever reason DrunkenBlog gets the brunt of them by an order of magnitude.

F. That.

Dealing with it ain't where I want to be spending my time. A few quick things to note:

1. As mentioned, poorly-evolved viruses rarely realize they're killing the host. I can actually have some intellectual respect for someone doing something I hate in an optimal way, but this is just insanity.

2. I'm aware that whatever is causing my issue to escalate from cold to flu to full-on f'ing ebola may not be what everyone else is seeing, but I wouldn't be surprised if theirs starts scaling up increasingly for others eventually.

3. Trackback and comment spam is becoming increasingly more annoying on an individual message level, with what seems to be more bulk-purchasing of "just-expired" domain names and shorter domains based on niche suffixed that are guaranteed to screw things up down the line.

   "Dirk Stoop" is emailing me because I blocked the domain "dir.st" which snags his email address, and on and on. A lot of this stuff doesn't seem to point towards anywhere relevant and almost seems to be designed to make filtering more of a hassle, as I am 99% sure Apple Computer and Sony and NewsGator and Ranchero are not sending me trackback spam.

   Someone else pointed out it might be an easy way to spread negative buzz about a company spamming. The real fun ones right now are the ones the hundreds with random IPs and no URLs whatsoever, they're just f'ing with me. Who knows, as I just know it blows. Bad juju, man.

4. Things like Google's "rel="nofollow" tag have been miserable failures in terms of stemming trackback and comment spam. If anything, the problem has just kept growing. Various types of lookup tech can help things, but the edges will always be fuzzy with these, and as the volume goes up you're either still dealing with a sizable quantity of crap or having to be willing to lose valid things.

5. There really are no suitable replacements that I'm aware of. People keep pointing me towards places like Technorati and Bloglines and Feedster, and they'd be worth looking at moving to if:
   • I could count on the services to actually be online and working whenever I want to use the. I'm starting to think a company is Web 2.0 if their app says "Service Unavailable" every third time I want to pull them up.

   • They weren't and aren't scraping the tip of the iceberg in terms of what's actually out there and linking in and around. They miss so much right now they're really just more of an interesting addition to referrer logs and such.

   • I wouldn't be tying key aspects of the site into specific non-open services and such, as I'm not into that. I don't have anything against them, I just don't gravitate towards it, and unfortunately they have little incentive to do things in a way that it'd make me gravitate towards them.

   • Tags and such weren't inherently lame. Tags are Keywords Extreme™, and keywords should be used as an additional way to add context, not as a panacea. A decade ago everyone was having to add keywords to their site to give others a clue, and then Google comes along and figures out how to make the computer do that work for you, and Google made boatloads of cash by making keywords just "helpful" in figuring out the context, not this magic-ass Web 2.0 wand.

     There are cases where a computer isn't able to just quite yet figure out the context of things, such as images (Companies like Riya are working on it, and they incidentally get props for amusing me while telling me to use a real browser), and cases where you want to intentionally categorize things outside of what a computer would normally ever guess (I.E., if you stroll around MacWorld 2006 images within flicker, there's little way for a computer to know two people at a coffee shop is related to MacWorld), and keywords are a great addition to these types of situations.

     However, there's no way I'll ever groove into them for general blog posts or things where a computer should be smart enough to figure it out for me, I can barely remember to throw a post into one category for the archives.

     To be fair, my general laziness should be factored into how I'm arriving at my mindset, and my mindset can always be changed. That said, nothing out there right now is explaining the seriously blown up hype around tagging beyond people wanting something to hype and people naturally getting the pleasure centers of their brain stimulated by performing basic data entry. I just gravitate towards technology that:

     1. Doesn't require hype because what its value is self-explanatory. Hyped tech is like cotton candy, it tastes good and is fun but you're still hungry.

     2. Isn't a re-badging of a technology we've already incorporated and realized where it's useful and where it isn't.

     3. Enables my laziness. I say laziness because it's honest, not because laziness should be inherently derided, otherwise no one would have invented the remote control. and my ass would have to get up the minute I see a commercial starting with a mother and a daughter walking on the beach for fear I'd fall asleep soon after and the content would affect my dreams.

        Bad juju, man.

   None of the above seem applicable to tagging, but to be even fairer, the larger replacement service from these, um, services, is basically equivalent to google's link: function except defaulting to sorting via date instead of relevancy, a vastly smaller sample to draw from, and less garbage because they're not worth spammer's time to really game them yet, as just making a spammer drop a bit of javascript into their site to be registered as a user when they're buying junk domain names in bulk isn't a show-stopper.

   It's also worth factoring in that I think someone killed all the puppies and kittens in my world, and that I may be getting jaded, but I swear to god in ten to twelve years keywords will be all the rage again, except they'll be called badges, and then a technology will come along to obsolete them with the tagline "We don't need no stinking badges," and it'll be all the rage.

   Puppies Extreme™, man.

6. Existing trackbacks already left on the site aren't going anywhere, but an SQL statement closed them down for future pings and no new posts will have them enabled.

7. Comments won't be going away anytime soon, because the only thing lamer than a site not allowing you to incorporate your feedback and thoughts on what is being published is one requiring you to register to do so. I'm reserving the right to move to something akin to captchas, where you have to type a little code, but I'm avoiding it as it always annoys me when I have to do it.

   Plus, someone has to catch the typos.

I'm still sad to see trackback go in a final way even if I'm a little peeved at it in general at the moment, and if someone can point me towards something that replaces what it did and does it well in an open way, I'd be all ears, but I just haven't seen a Trackback Extreme™. I will say that I had a conversation with someone where they said to me, "Trackback failed because it was too open... too much freedom inevitably leads to abuse." I think there's merit to their argument, and part of what makes these types of situations interesting is that only an idiot can't say each side has valid points, or at least they do so at their peril.

One could certainly make the argument that trackback was broken from its inception because it was taking in pushed content while not really taking abuse into account, but I personally don't believe openness has to go hand-and-hand with abuse -- it just needs to be accounted for in within the design. We don't call something secure because no one is yet knocking -- or at least sane people don't.

You assume people are going to want to ram online poker, bestiality, extreme teens and whatever other such crap (sometimes literally) is hot at the time down its throat all day, and roll in solutions learned from similar problems that have come earlier while putting in safeguards from as many future problem-scenarios as you can brainstorm, with a framework agile enough that it's not a nightmare to extend it as new issues you hadn't thought of come online.

If there's a niggler, it's that I'm thinking about it and I'm having a hard time finding examples to support my firm belief, as while tech like GPG and such depend upon openness and trust within their design, but they're more about verifying who is sending you something and who is reading and about the best you can get in regards to what they're sending is that it arrived without being tampered with -- it doesn't take into account whether you want to receive it at all.

I'm still left wondering if I'm drawing a blank because it's early in the morning, or because I'm starting with a conclusion I want to believe and then trying to ram supporting evidence into it, but hopefully someone will fill that in that blank. Otherwise it's just faith, and faith really has little place within technology.

Right then, off to breakfast.

 Posted by drunkenbatman
    January 16, 2006, at 11:36 AM