The Geekorium

Some times its a discomfort within the ass to read what weblog owners wrote but this internet web site is rattling user friendly ! .

giant twist comfort cs

It reminds me of this translation

I have that “Suggestions” button up there on the right because I’m hoping that people might make my never ending search for interesting stuff to write about easier. Before today my only suggestion has been (literally) “….”, which I’m not sure what to do with. I thought it a stretch to drag a post out of an ellipsis and a period.

Then today I got GOLD.

“mate your a wanker”

Not a suggestion as such. It’s entirely possible that the chap¹ misread the tab to read “Statements”, and just decided to put his 2 cents in.

I do have a comment area under each post so if it’s a particular thing I’ve said, you could leave a specific comment. Failing that, you could contact me directly and say hello. Perhaps after a chat you might come to realise that I’m not such a bad guy.

I can infer a couple of things about my eloquent visitor:

He spent 10 seconds on my site. Just long enough to write “mate your a wanker”, and pretty much nothing else as far as I can tell. I can’t see exactly how he found my site, which suggests he either bookmarked it to come back later to insult me specifically, or he came from a secure site such as Facebook or his email. What he’s doing seeing my site in his email I have no idea.

He’s from Manly, NSW but I’ve never been so don’t know what that says about him. I’ll steer clear of geographical stereotypes in this post :P. He gets a small pass from me for using Google Chrome (the browser of the gods), but he’s using Vista so he is a little backward. And if he ever comes back I’d like to know if his Vodafone plan is any good…

So that’s the post you get for your “suggestion”. I hope it satisfies. Anyone else who has an ACTUAL suggestion is very welcome to write something up there, and I’ll treat you with a lot more respect than I’ve treated this one.

Isn’t spam fun?

The Wave team have said very little about how they will address the spam problem, but from some clues and hints in the interface and what they have said, I can take a couple of guesses about how they could start to tackle it.

1. First up, Wave will ensure messages are signed and verified from the source. Currently email can be forged and made to look like a legitimate email coming from a trusted source. The Wave Protocol specifically addresses this, making it impossible for anyone to “spoof” another address without access to that user’s account.

2. Email currently makes it very easy to send millions of messages with little to no cost involved for the sender - they send and delete and don’t need to save copies of them, and the recipient is forced to deal with the accumulated data. The Wave Protocol however, requires the sender to host the wave and keep a copy for future reference. Spammers will no doubt find ways to send and then remove their waves, but if a host no longer hosts the wave, that could be a reliable indication that the sender was a spammer.

3. Finally, the few times the developers have been asked about spam they’ve mentioned a possible white-list system. White-listing involves choosing who can send you messages and blocking everyone else. People worry that this will stop legitimate communication, say from long lost friends, getting through. But already built into the interface is a “Requests” link that Wave says are “Waves for users not in your contacts list”. This could allow anyone to contact you, but you’d know at a glance that they weren’t from people you knew and trusted, and could more easily add them to your contacts, or mark them as spam.

I believe a combination of these three factors will go some way to addressing the spam problem. By tying everyone to a Wave server it’s not as economical to spam using waves. By not allowing completely anonymous communication, reported spammers can be more easily shut down, and by white-listing users we can identify potential spam at a snap. The Wave team will hopefully come up with even more solutions to implement and I’ll be interested to see how it develops.