Is Flickr under attack by spam?

Posted on February 17, 2007 by Donncha O Caoimh

Has anyone else noticed an increase of spam comments on Flickr lately? I noticed my first spam comment there only last week, complained about it, and the comment and user were both deleted shortly afterwards. I thought nothing more of it.

This morning I got an unwelcome shock when I checked my Flickr comments through Bloglines. More spam comments. There’s a screenshot below. When I clicked through to the photos in question both comments had been deleted but later on another spam comment appeared and I now suspect any comment left by users with usernames starting with “a” with a mixture of upper and lower case characters and digits. Maybe it’s time they invested in an Akismet license for Flickr.com? Thanks Lloyd for the reminder!

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Voting in the blog awards is easy

Posted on February 14, 2007 by Donncha O Caoimh

How to vote in the Irish Blog Awards in three easy steps:

Visit the voting page at http://www.awards.ie/vote/
Enter your name and email address.
Scroll down to “Best Photo Blog” and select “In Photos” from the drop down list.
In “Best Contribution to the Irish Bloggersphere” select “Donncha O’Caoimh”
In “Best Technology Blog/Blogger” select “Donncha O’Caoimh” again.

There, no confusion. No wondering who all those people and blogs are. Hope that helped and thanks for voting!

PS. Thank you to Damien Mulley, the brains behind the awards, and to the sponsors of the above categories: Pixenate, First Partners, and Bitbuzz!

PPS. Damien will enter everyone who votes into a draw for a copy of “Vista Home Premium”. That of course might not be to everyone’s tastes, but you can always give it away to your worst enemy if you win..

Who wins Irish Linkbaiter of the Year?

Posted on February 10, 2007 by Donncha O Caoimh

A number of Irish blogs and sites attracted a great many links and attention over the past 12 months but I think I can safely say that the Irish Blog Awards deserves the much coveted “Irish Linkbaiter of the Year Award”. If Damien didn’t delete his own blog from nominations he’d certainly be up for a gong or two!

Not to be left out, I’ve linked to the Awards site too, and I noticed that I’ve been nominated in three categories:

This blog is nominated in the best technology blog category.
I’m nominated in the “Best Contribution to the Irish Bloggersphere” category
Finally, In Photos has been nominated in the best photoblog category.

I voted a few days back and I remember nominating In Photos (hey, why leave things to chance?), but thanks to whoever nominated me in the other categories. Now all that remains is for everyone to vote for me! Go on, you know you want to!

I won’t make it to the awards ceremony this year either but Ryan will be on hand to take a few photos. I look forward to seeing his brilliant black and white shots of the event. My reason for not attending are the same as last year, but thankfully, this year it’s under much happier circumstances!

The voting page doesn’t link to the participating blogs and personalities, but Jason Roe came up with the goods and has linked to them all. Fire up your browser and open them tabs! Ah yes, the Red Cardinal has done the same.

Meanwhile, in typical Rebel Cork style, the Gamma Goblin is holding his own alternative blog awards where, “I’m gonna have my own awards and give ye all nothin! I’m gonna print up flyer’s and stuff, and have cake, and pop… and then maybe a raffle. None of you cretins will get any of the tickets, I’ll keep all the tickets, that way I will definitely win the spot prize’s, which will consist of, a collection of items, and a pile of things.” Go on GG, blow your own bugle, you’ll enjoy it!

We are live from BarCamp South East!

Posted on January 20, 2007 by Donncha O Caoimh

Here I am blogging away at BarCamp South East. It’s been a great day so far. My talk was scheduled for 10:50am which was a relief to get out of the way. Feedback has been positive too and horrors of horrors, I actually enjoyed the talk! Video and podcasts will be online eventually and I’ll update this post when they’re available. Elly left Bernie’s dictaphone on the seat next to me, Joe and Conor had video cameras so I’m sure you’ll get to hear or watch me talk about WordPress one way or another if you’re interested!

Thank you all for the comments on yesterday’s post. I’m hopeful that things will return to normal sooner or later on inphotos.org!

Now, I’m off to look around and mingle with the rest of the attendees!

Just spotted on Lifehacker, is How to manage kids in the home office, a topic brushed upon in my talk.

I’m sitting in the Drupal talk now by Alan Burke and Stephane Corlosquet on the laptop. John Handelaar is showing off his voter site written in Drupal. It’s a great presentation on the power of Drupal and it’s plugins.

Ken McGuire has a review of the day, and apart from everything else, and it was great to talk to Justin Mason finally.

Great day. I think everyone’s looking forward to the next one in May!

Conor O’Neill has posted videos of my talk on his blog. I could embed them here, but he went to all the trouble of uploading them, so go visit his blog and check them out. There are bits there about scaling WPMU by hashing blog_ids and partitioning databases, as well as how to get past the 32,000 file limit of ext2/ext3 in the blogs.dir files directory. Also, if you work from home I discuss my experiences doing the same, and communicating within a virtual company.

Bernie has posted the first podcast of my talk. He’s posting the second half tomorrow about working from home and in a virtual company.

The second part of Bernie’s podcast is online today! In this part I talk about working from home and balancing work and home life. Should be of interest to everyone working from home!

Spurned by Google, ignored by all

Posted on January 19, 2007 by Donncha O Caoimh

Something strange happened on Monday to my photoblog, In Photos.org. It disappeared off Google’s radar and traffic has dropped like a stone since.

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Is RSA encryption broken?

Posted on January 14, 2007 by Donncha O Caoimh

First spotted on the ILUG mailing list, it appears that a young 16 year old student has cracked the RSA encryption system and won 1st prize at the BT Young Scientist Competition 2007.

If it’s true then Internet commerce could be in for a rough time, but some previous winners have proven to be less than remarkable when seen against the cold light of day. This comment from the winner, Abdusalam Abubakar, seems to indicate that the method used might not be that effective either. Check out this ILUG thread for further discussion. Can it be true he wrote it in Visual Basic?

“It was great, unbelievable. I didn’t think I was going to win anything. I didn’t want to be optimistic,” he told The Irish Times last night. Abdusalam, whose name translates into “man of peace”, based his initial work on partially successful attacks on the world’s most widely-used encryption system, RSA, mounted by two mathematicians. He decided to take the best aspects of both and generalise a new approach, which he believes has the potential to tackle at least some less complex coding systems.

The strangest invoice ever

Posted on January 5, 2007 by Donncha O Caoimh

Just moments ago I received the following in an email. Searching for the companies mentioned doesn’t return anything useful or suspicious so I thought I’d post it here in case anyone else got it too.

**Electronic Invoice** Date: January 5, 2007

To: From:

Massimo Ferranti AllWebCo

Delfo Italiana Srl 180 Juniper Avenue

Via Varese 9 Satsuma, AL 36572

Muggio, MI 20053 Italy

Item Description Rate Amount
———————————————————————–
Annual Hosting denav.com $599.40/year $599.40
————————————————————————
Tax (0%) 0.00
- Balance Due when rendered – Total $599.40

Total Paid $599.40
Balance Due $ 0.00

********************************************
AllWebCo
To change the credit card we bill for your account:

https://plus40.safe-order.net/allwebco/cc_change.shtml

–=============–
To pay through PayPal:

http://allwebco.com/paypal-payment.htm

–=============–
To pay by electronic check, please use the following secure url:

http://www.allwebco.com/icheckpay.shtml

–=============–
Please make any checks payable to AllWebCo, and mail to:
AllWebCo
180 Juniper Ave.
Satsuma, AL. 36572
–=============–
If you have any questions regarding your billing, please
email Billing@AllWebCo.com

********************************************

Moments later I received a thank you email in response to payment of the invoice. The mind boggles.

Hi,

Thank you!

We have received your new billing information and have renewed the annual
hosting for denav.com.

Total cost $599.40.

Have a wonderful day,

Kendra
AllWebCo

Irish Blog Awards on March 3rd

Posted on January 3, 2007 by Donncha O Caoimh

The second Irish Blog Awards will take place on the 3rd of March in Dublin. Damien wants to know if you’re going so leave a comment on his post if you’re interested. I have yet to make up my mind but there’s already a number of comments left and it will probably be even bigger than last year!

If your company is looking for exposure in the blogging community, there are a number of sponsorship slots still left to fill. More details on the page linked above.

Holy Shmoly!

Look what I found today!

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