Reilly Grant

Today it showed up on Slashdot that Facebook Chat is now available using your favorite XMPP/Jabber client.  This is great news.  Finally people will be able to use Facebook Chat without having to deal with the (admittedly clever but still annoying) web-based chat application.  I’m all in favor of making my friends more available, I miss them out here in CA.  The question is, what does this mean for Facebook Chat as a generic instant messaging service? (continue reading…)

Somehow the spammers have figured out a way to post spam comments to this blog without getting an email notification sent to me.  (Since all comments have to be approved before they appear on the site.)  I’m not sure this is a win for them, since I didn’t even notice there were any comments to moderate until a few days ago.  This is probably a Wordpress bug and I’ll be upgrading to the latest version soon.

The funny part about all this was the different kinds of spam comments I was getting.  For those who don’t know how this works, the reason that spammers try to post comments on blogs is to affect search engine rankings.  If they can get many sites to include mentions of their product or even better, a link to their webpage, it increases their search ranking.  To this end most “link spam” you’ll see will include a long list of search terms (drugs, porn or both) and if the site allows HTML tags in comments these terms will be links.  Clicking through the over 250 bogus postings I found a breed that was much more clever.  Instead of random terms and links (which can easily be flagged by automatic filters) the comment body was one of a number of variations on, “Hi, first I want to say nice blog. I don’t always agree with your posts but it’s always a nice read. Keep up the great work.”  That’s right, my comment spam was complementing me.  Some other entertaining ones included, “Just got my new iPhone and this blog looks great on it.” and “Sory, delete plz. ”  How are these link spam?  Well, somebody figured out that Wordpress lets you specify a website and email address as the author information for the comment.  They still get their rank boosting link and all they have to come up with is a reasonable sounding comment and they’re more likely to get approved.  I must say, the tactic almost worked.  While the comments that say nothing but “VIAGRA VIAGRA VIAGRA” are easy to filter out, each of these required careful reading and a check against the posting they were replying to to tell the difference between a new loyal reader and clever spambot.

If any of you spammers are reading this: Good job, nice try, now GO AWAY!

Head for the hills, the sky is falling!  Or at least, we’re running out of IPv4 address space.  In English, that means that if things continue at the present rate in 2 years there will be no more unassigned Internet addresses available.  That is, unless the world’s infrastructure switches over to the new version of the Internet Protocol, IPv6.  IPv6 uses 128-bit addresses instead of 32-bit addresses, so there are literally a billion billion billion times as many addresses available.  Pretty much one for every speck of dust on the planet, not to mention the universe.  So, while only 10% of the IPv4 address space is left, IPv6 is less than 0.01% depleted.  (Much, much less than that, but more zeros make for an awful headline.) (continue reading…)

For years now we’ve known that DNS is broken.  Thankfully, a solution is on the way.  DNSSEC provides a layer of security on top of the existing DNS architecture allowing clients to verify that the DNS information they receive has not been tampered with.  In the next few years we should see (hopefully) widespread adoption of this standard.  With DNSSEC in place we can trust DNS, and this leads to an interesting corollary.  We might not need SSL certification authorities anymore.

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Those who know me are familiar with my general dislike for Facebook.  The same reasoning applies to Twitter as well.  The fundamental problem with social networking sites is that they are closed communities.  Sure, almost everybody is in them, but that doesn’t change the fact that you have to have an account with a particular provider to participate.  This isn’t a problem when there is a monopoly, but what if there are two popular services? (continue reading…)

If you haven’t been, you should watch the keynotes from the, currently in progress, Google I/O conference. Keynote 1 covered a lot of features that have been added in HTML 5 and allow much more dynamic and interactive web applications. In keeping with it’s motto, Google has done an excellent job pushing browser makers to adopt these features as standards which are also being implemented by the other major browser manufacturers.

In keynote 2 the key announcement is Google Wave, the next generation of email.  Those who know me know that I hate Facebook and social networking/forum sites in general because they tie you into a particular site for all your communication and since you use more than one, it just becomes inefficient.  I prefer established standards for email and messaging like SMTP and XMPP (Jabber).  Not only are the capabilities of Wave amazing, just watch the demo, but this new system will be open and vendor-neutral.  So, I can run my own open-source Wave server and communicate with all the other Wave users out there.  FANTASTIC!  How do they do this?  Not only is Wave a Google Apps webapp, it is also an API for embedding content in other sites and a protocol for communication between Wave systems (based on XMPP).

So, big round of applause for Google.  Update: And there’s a command line client, woot!

Back when I started this blog I commented a bit on what I thought I would do with it. Would it be a venue for my random thoughts, reviews of things I was interested in, or just one more rehash of the day’s news.  Blogs will probably be the most historically interesting things to come out of the Internet. Despite what traditional media says about them, they are akin to the diaries and journals which have been instrumental in understanding people’s lives from history.

Anyways, enough philosophy from me, go read this series of comics from Ozy and Millie exploring the topic.

As part of the Saul Gorn Memorial Lecture Series yesterday I was lucky enough to hear a talk by Peter Lee on his work at CMU on Claytronics.  The goal of this project is to develop the technology to build small scale robots capable of organizing themselves into any shape.  A sort of “programmable matter”.  A mock tv advertizement gives a good artists impression of where this work will eventually lead.

This is amazing work on a number of levels.  From the materials and engineering side, I am amazed at the progress that’s been made in actually building these things.  At this point they have a prototype material which is remarkably close to a working system.  On the software side this technology requires a programming paradigm completely different from traditional robotics.  With so many individual actors the computation and communication required to manage them centrally becomes impractical.  Instead, they have developed a logic programming language called Meld which allows the programmer to express the behavior of an individual element in terms of it’s local environment in a declaritive style.

This work sounds like something out of science fiction, like the universal constructors out of books like Diamond Age.  But, they’re actually building it!  I find that just astounding.  If this sort of thing interests you, go check out some of their simulation videos and maybe even read the papers.  Some day I’m going to have these things on my desk, or maybe they’ll be my desk.