Half-Elf on Tech

Thoughts From a Professional Lesbian

Author: Ipstenu (Mika Epstein)

  • How do people on the internet know who you are?

    This came up when someone on a bulletin board I frequent sounded a little freaked when the moderators said that they monitor people by their IP address. The problem this board was having was pretty simple, actually. People would sign up with multiple accounts for various reasons, and then over the course of time, reply to themselves. The moderators were complaining that they couldn’t understand why someone would want to have multiple IDs, and one or two of the users were complaining that the moderators knew their IP address.

    Stepping back for a moment, I realize that I’m pretty young, but for my entire life there have been computers. The first home computers showed up around the same time I did, and I really have to take a moment to consider life without the personal computer. Back when I was in elementary school, my grandmother had a DEC terminal hooked up over a phone cradle/modem to her company server to do the books over the weekends, and when I wanted French toast, I’d use the computer to balance books and she’d cook. Personally I think it’s a small miracle nothing went wrong.

    When I was in high school, my friends and I had found the magic of on-line gaming. Text only stuff, or sometimes dialup to a bulletin board system and news groups. None of us actually had our own accounts, and email was a mythical monster we all wanted but didn’t have. Shortly there after came things like Hotmail (back before it was Microsoft Hotmail) and college, which gave us all our own email addresses and virtual identities. Those college IDs had access to a tool I rarely see used now, finger. Via a UNIX terminal (accessed mostly by telnet), we could ‘finger’ a username and find out who the person was, where they lived, and if they’d updated it, what they were interested in. This was nothing compared to what homepages and domain names give us now, but then it was the best thing. We were people. We had identities. We had communities.

    Not far into college, I started to wonder how safe it was to have personal information like that all over the net. My father was working in risk analysis and assessment, so I suspect it’s only natural my thoughts drifted that way. It was at that point I started researching how my identity was maintained and who had access to it.

    How do people know who I am? Bizarrely enough, the first image that comes to mind when I think about this is an old “George Burns and Gracie Allen” radio sketch. Their accountant has come over to drink and commiserate with George and says that Gracie had just been by to do her taxes. He tells George that when he (the accountant) asked Gracie for proof of identification, she opened her compact, looked in the mirror and says ‘Yes, it’s me all right.’ Were it only that easy. In the ‘real world’ I carry IDs with me to say that I am who I say I am. At work, I have a badge with electronic access and a picture ID, to let me into rooms.

    It doesn’t translate all that clearly to the virtual world, however. Microsoft, at one point, had a Passport application that let you use one ID all across their myriad of networks. This has fizzled. Yahoo! had a Yahoo! Wallet feature that is still in use, though even websites that use Yahoo! to sell their wares hardly use it, it seems. The concept of a single point of contact for peoples’ money is unpopular to many people, and this should be surprising. Everywhere you look, people warn you about identity, and I see the lack of faith anyone has in submitting their personal information to one location as a heart warming experience. At last! People are aware!

    And yet, as evidenced by my experience on the bulletin board in the beginning of this tale, that’s not the case.

    People didn’t like Microsoft Passport for the same reason I don’t have Quicken learn all my passwords for my bank accounts. They make me use an additional password to access my other passwords. It’s easier for me to just keep a spreadsheet of all my passwords and use that, then memorize a third (or fiftieth) password. Realistically, this makes sense. Either you have one password (or password schema) for all your accounts, which makes them easier to hack, or you have a thousand different ones and struggle to remember them all. There’s no easy win.

    So on that bulletin board as mentioned above, you have an ID and a password. On the best systems, the moderators have no idea of your password (YaBB’s Gold version, which is a CGI board, actually saved passwords in clear-text!). And yet anyone who’s visited an online community knows that there’s a certain amount of people on the internet who have fun making your life stink. They like to post rude things that have nothing to do with the topic at hand, they insult you, they use language that makes the paint peal. Even if you don’t mind a bit of foulness, these are the people you look at in wonder. How on earth did they get out of elementary school?

    It’s the duty of the moderators to school those people in proper net etiquette. I’m not going to delve into what is and isn’t good posting, but my short comment on that is that it pays more to be as thoughtful of and respectful to your fellow posters as you would to someone you were talking to face to face. Listen to what they say and reply in an easy to understand manner. There’s a time and place for l33t speak, and you’ll know when it is (if you have no idea what that is, go to http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A787917 and keep in mind some kid in England turned in a one page essay written like that, the f00).

    How you’re known on the internet is how the moderators can contact you and reprimand you for your wrong doings. Sounds fair, right? So how do they know? That’s surprisingly simple.

    1. Your ID
    People use IDs they can easily redeemer. I have the same account name at Yahoo, Hotmail and Gmail. If I was logged in as, let’s pretend, HintOfTheWeek_111, and I was making trouble, the moderator would likely run a quick Google on that ID and see if you were known elsewhere. When I had a hacker attack a board I moderate, doing that lead me to two notices right away. The first said that he’d done the attack before. The second included how to fix it. Very helpful.

    2. Your email address
    Most boards make you show an email address, at least to the moderators, when you sign up. This is, again, for accountability. They can use that email address and Google it as well, or they can just email you and chastise you. That’s my preferred method, by the way. A private ‘Hey, idiot’ always seemed more polite then being publicly brought to task on the boards where everyone can see it. Mind you, a lot of people sign up with freebie accounts, and never check them, which is why you end up looking at …

    3. Your IP address
    Every time you post to a bulletin board, every time you make an ID/Password on a website, check your web email (Gmail, yahoo, hotmail), every IRC session, online game, etc you log on to, your IP address is recorded. That’s the way the world works, and it’s the only way places have of holding people accountable for their actions. And if that scares you just a little, well good! You’re paying attention. Information is power, and you’re trusting the moderators to use that power wisely.

    On most bulletin boards, moderators would rather ban you from posting using your ID or your email address. The IP address is tricky. While, technically, it’d very easy to implement, it comes with some major drawbacks. Banning someone by ID or email means they can just make a new ID with a different email. Given how easy it is to make new email addresses, you can see how this is a problem for the moderators. The reason the IP banning is viewed as a last resort is that it causes a lot of damage to innocent bystanders. This has to do with how IP addresses are used, as well as what happens when people use dial-up and proxy servers.

    If you use dial-up, your IP address is going to change every time you connect to the internet. That makes it near impossible to ban you. If you use a proxy server (like the Northern people do at work), everyone shows up using the same IP address. You can verify this by getting a couple people around you to go to http://www.whatismyip.com/ and compare.

    This means if I, as a moderator, ban an IP used by a dial-up user, everyone else who uses that IP gets banned. And in all likelihood, the person I wanted to ban is on a new IP address and doesn’t care at all. If I ban an IP used by a proxy, everyone else who uses that proxy gets banned. In a way, it’s a no-win situation. The only solution for board moderators is constant vigilance. If two different user IDs with the same IP starts posting things that look way too similar, and are upsetting people the same way, then it’s probably the same person.

    What does all this mean for you? Now you know how you’re monitored, and in theory how to beat it. But that’s not enough. If the fact that the people who write viruses like Sasser can get caught isn’t enough of a hint, I’ll spell it out. Even if you’re using obfuscating tactics, you can get caught. To date, there’s no 100% fool-proof way of hiding who you are on-line. If you use a proxy server that used by a known troublemaker, you may find yourself unceremoniously banned. If you’re the bad person using the proxy, a court order can make them cough up your real IP address.

    Admittedly, there a many legitimate reasons to have two IDs on one bulletin board. There are many understandable reasons to use a proxy server. I’m not proposing a solution, but I feel that everyone should be aware of the reality of internet usage. In the age of heightened security concerns and identity theft, it’s important to know how some people are getting to know all about you.

    Before you get all scared, the amount of damage that can be done with your IP address, provided you’ve implemented the latest and greatest security patches from Macintosh, Microsoft or whatever other OS you might have, is minimal. They still need passwords and IDs to your computer, among other things. So if you’re essentially a decent person and you don’t knowingly break any laws, don’t panic about logging onto a bulletin board.

    On the flip side, assume that someone knows where you’re logging in from. It’s just safest.

    Helpful Links:
    What an IP address is
    Yahoo!’s explanation of IP addresses and privacy
    Determine what the rest of the world sees as your IP address
    What is ‘l33t’ speak?
    Home Computer Security

    PS: There’s a fairly humorous link I was given once, and it never fails to make me laugh. It’s a 1940’s style intro to posting on the internet: http://albinoblacksheep.com/flash/posting.php

  • Bugged

    While many Windows XP users are stressing over the major upgrade of SP2, Mac users got a tiny security patch, a small 10.3.6 upgrade, and a taste of our first, real virus. For years I got to brag about how my Mac would never get a virus and how I was safe because I didn’t have the flaws of Windows, or Outlook, or what have you. Then, right around Halloween, came the Opener malware script. It’s not a virus, but I’ll save that rant for another day. Opener has existed for Unix for years and since OS X is a Unix based operating system, it makes some small sense that Opener was adapted to a Mac platform. The benefit is that it’s a known entity and not all that hard to remove.

    Malware is software that does bad (mal) things. Opener is a shell script (similar to DOS) that attacks the root of your computer. Instead of emailing everyone you know, or deleting your user directory, Opener attacks your firewall, installs remote access software, plunks down a password decoder app (John the Ripper, of all things) and proceeds to take over your Macintosh. Pretty hefty for a first virus. Symantec calls it SH.Renepo.B, and their write up of it covers all its evilness in great detail.

    The blessing is that Opener has to be installed, either by hand or by another executable, and the safest way to prevent it from happening is to not install software you don’t get off a CD, lock your computer when you walk away, and use secure passwords. If you’re into filesharing, be it Limewire, Kazza or BitTorrent, be very careful. One of the ways this is distributed is in a PKG or DMG file, wrapped around the actually program you’re trying to install.

    None of this would have been possible if Macintosh hadn’t gone to OS X, the Unix based operating system.

    I hailed OS X as a fantastic leap forward for Macintosh. One of Mac’s many problems is the lack of software available. Sure, they have some of the best, native, handwriting recognition software ever (Newton 1.0 not withstanding) in Inkwell, and Microsoft 2004 is fantastic, but truly a fifth of the programs available for Windows can be found for Mac. By breaking Macintosh into the Unix world, suddenly Mac aficionados found themselves immersed in the open source world of Unix.

    Upgrading from System 9 to OS X was no mean feat and as with all upgrades, it’s not the sort of thing you should do on a whim. System 9 and OS X are as different as 95 and XP, just as System 7 to System 8 was giant Macintosh leap. The main problem everyone saw with OS X is that the majority of the software used had to be rewritten. To a degree, this backfired on Macintosh, as the prohibitive cost of upgrading hardware and software daunted a fair number of users. Apple built in a safety catch called Classic Mode, which let you run some (but not all) software via an emulator. I removed mine from my Mac after a year, having rarely used it.

    The other secret blessing was that Mac had been urging coders to move to a setup called ‘Cocoa.’ Cocoa apps had a fancier look and feel than the generic old school (classic) Mac, and a very different underlying structure. Microsoft, Adobe, and just about every major software company except Quark had jumped onto the Cocoa bandwagon, and many Mac users were pleasantly surprised at how much of their software simply worked natively on OS X.

    That was a very long digression to the heart of this tip, which is how to upgrade to Mac OS X.

    A lot of people are still on OS 8 or 9, and having been there, I tell you that you really need to upgrade. The actual upgrade process is not painless, and having heard the horror stories of XP SP2, I think they’re rather comparable. Unless you want to take your Mac to the Apple Store, you have to purchase the CD, and it’s not going to have the latest and greatest security patches. If you don’t have high speed internet, the upgrade will take a very long time (3 days on a 14.4 modem based on an upgrade I did last month).

    The first thing you have to know is that you must not, under any circumstances, simply throw in the CD and let it boot to the CD by holding down the magic C key. If your Mac didn’t come with OS X, the odds are that this will not work because your firmware is out of date. For most Mac users, this ‘firmware’ concept was new and unwelcome. I can count the times I’d ever done it on a Macintosh on one hand, and I’ve supported a lot of Macs.

    Apple.com has a great chart on which computers need an upgrade and where to get it. Surprisingly enough, the very new PowerMac G5s need an upgrade, while some iBooks from 2001 don’t at all. My rule of thumb is always to check if I need a firmware, as there’s no real way to know unless you memorize the list. If you happen to have OS X 10.0 or 10.1, you may have managed to upgrade without the firmware, and you’ll need to do it now to proceed. The catch here is that you have to apply these firmware bits with System 9. If you’ve already nuked your classic set up, you may be out of luck. Apple suggests that you start from System 9.2.2 at the lowest, though I’ve found you can upgrade from 9.1 in a pinch.

    Before you upgrade, remember to write down (or print) your internet settings. Yeah, I know it goes without saying, but having seen people call their ISP for tech support on getting a Mac set up at 3 AM, well, best to be safe. If you’re on dialup, go to Control Panels from the Apple menu, and then choose Remote Access from the submenu that appears. That’s where your ID, dial-up number, and password are kept. If you’re on DSL, check with your ISP, though I’ve found that my Macs auto-detect the setup very nicely.

    The next trick is actually upgrading. No matter what they tell you, don’t insert the CD and reboot, holding down the C key. While that might work for a new Mac, bought within the last two years, if your Mac is seriously older, you’re better off inserting the CD and clicking restart button from within the CD window that pops up. There are a few reasons for this, but the simplest one is that not all CD drives are created equal, and not all will reboot to the CD correctly. If you don’t start it from the CD, you may find yourself on a grey screen with a rainbow colored beach-ball, and a panic attack. Don’t worry, just reboot (unplug if you have to) and run it the other way.

    Once you get the upgrade started, go out for coffee. It takes a long time. Mac says 30-60 minutes. I say double it. After the whole thing was done, I still had about an hour or two of software updates, which was really frustrating. Even when I bought a new Mac from the store and asked them to run the latest updates, I found that I had a couple left when I got home. I chalk it up to bad timing, but it was really annoying. The software update feature’s been around since System 8, but I find it useful. I have mine set to check once a week (Thursdays, 7pm) and to download the update in the background. It slows my net imperceptibly, although I am on DSL, and when I tell it to install, it slashes the time for that considerably.

    Once everything is upgraded and done and configured, the actual ‘work’ takes less than an hour. Mac imports all your documents to their ‘new’ place, and if it didn’t, you still have access to the old sections. Most people I know did an ‘update’, leaving their old system files intact. I was the sort who backed up my documents and software, and did a full wipe the hard drive reinstall when I bumped to OS X 10.2. After all, I wanted the pure Macintosh feeling. The downside to that is you automatically loose Classic Mode, and any way of accessing the old Mac software. I didn’t find it a great loss.

    Mac has their own site all about why you should upgrade as well as one on why you should switch from Windows. I don’t think everyone should use a Macintosh, but I do think everyone who uses a Mac and can switch to OS X should. Mac’s aren’t for everyone, and while Mac pitches a hundred stories about people who love their Macs, I’m sure there are a hundred people who love their PCs. I’m not trying to start a flame war. I think people should keep an open mind. If all you want is email, word processing, and the web, a Macintosh may not be a bad idea.

    How to Upgrade: Switch to Mac

  • Hotlinking

    There are two questions I need to spell out for folks before I get into the code bits, and I’ll try to keep this as light-tech as possible. If you run a website, or have a free site, or just want to post your pictures on the web, you need to know this. If you have your own domain, you need to know this. If you post pictures to a bulletin board, you need to know this. Basically, if you use the internet at all, read this. I’ll let you know when you need to stop reading.

    Things everyone should know
    Things every webmaster should know
    Things every ISP should know

    Things everyone should know

    Bandwidth

    Bandwidth means, for computer users, the data transfer rate, or how much data can be transferred in a given time period. The easiest example here is how you access the net. If you use a modem for dial up (and I feel for you), then you use 14.4, 28.8, 33.6 or 54 kilobytes (kb) per second. To give you an idea how small a kb it, one letter (that is ‘a’ for example) is a kb, roughly. That’s not an exact science, but it’ll give you a rough idea. At 14.4, your email downloads at roughly 14 letters a second. Which is why dial-up sucks. In the world of computers, bigger bandwidth is better. The more bandwidth, the faster you can download the preview of the new Batman movie.

    In addition to speed, bandwidth also means how much data you can transfer in a given time period. This website has an allocation of 30 gigabytes of data per month, and we average about 5. My other website has the same allocation and averages 18. If I go over my data transfer for a given month, I can either pay out the nose for extra bandwidth, or I can let the site be shut down till the next month. The reason this is important to know, is if you run a website, every time a page loads, you use bandwidth. On a site like Yahoo! GeoCities, you get 3 GB/month. Yeah, you think that’s great, but it really sucks if you want to post things like a blog and people click here a lot. This aspect of bandwidth is the reason why most sites I design are low on the graphics. More graphics means more data transfered means more bandwidth used. In the case of data transfer allocation, bigger sites does not equal better, though bigger bandwidth is king.

    Then again, the bigger your site, the longer it takes to download, and the less time it takes for people on 56k to get pissed and tell you that you suck. Finding a webdesign that’s a balance between your dream design and speed is why people like me have jobs.

    In summation: Bandwidth controls how fast you can view the net from your home, as well as how much data a website can share with the world each month. Having more bandwidth is better all the time, but forcing users to use more bandwidth with image heavy sites and poorly coded web pages is not cool.

    Hotlinking

    Hotlinking is putting a link to someone else’s webpage’s graphic on your site. This is also called bandwidth theft. Directly linking to a website’s files (images, video, etc.) means that when someone accesses your website, they draw bandwidth from another. If you use an >IMG< tag to show a picture from someone else's page on your blog, forum post, or website, that's hotlinking. You're stealing their bandwidth. There is a case in which this sort of 'theft' is ethically permissible, though some webhosts don't like it. If you have multiple Yahoo! sites, and one is low on bandwidth, you can shuttle some of your content to the other site, and thus split up the bandwidth. This isn't always a good idea, as if it's against the Terms of Service on your host, they can kill you. Which is why you should always back up your websites on your on computer. If you own your own domains (like I do) and have multiple 'subdomains,' then it's okay to share an image. ipstenu.org is considered a different website that ipstenu.org/blog, so I have to tell my server it's okay to share between the two. But that's code geeky. What the common websurfer needs to know is this: direct linking to a picture, movie file, or any other content on someone else's site, unless it's a simple URL link to that site, is bad form, ethically asinine, and impolite. It’s akin to stealing electricity from your neighbor by plugging into their outlets.

    In summation: Hotlinking is stealing bandwidth from someone else’s website, and is considered to be unethical.

    Things every webmaster should know

    Now that you’ve gotten this far, we’re going into heavy geekitude. I have actually once had my site nearly shut down because someone was hotlinking to an image, and I had to figure out how to prevent it. This is the knowledge I share with you.

    Hotlink Prevention for Apache

    Apache is the de facto webserver for Unix. I don’t like IIS (Windows webserver) and so few people use Netscape’s webserver, I won’t even consider that anymore. Pretty much, I use Apache and if you don’t, I haven’t a clue how to help you.

    On Apache (and in theory this works on IIS, but as I said, I don’t use it), there is a file in the root of your html folder called .htaccess. This is an Apache directives file, or a config file, that controls how Apache handles the folders in the same folder as the .htaccess file. Your website has a folder, usually called public_html. Inside that folder you have things like a file named index.shtml and a folder named cgi-bin. Below is an example of what my webserver’s root public_html folder might look like.

        .htaccess    blog      index.shtml    images      cgi-bin   robots.txt
    folder1      folder2   foldern

    The .htaccess folder controls how the subfolders (blog, cgi-bin, folder1, folder2, and foldern) are handled. If I look at my .htaccess file, and you can open it up in your text editor of choice, I see this at the very bottom:

        RewriteEngine on
    RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
    RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^https://ipstenu.org/.*$      [NC]
    RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://ipstenu.org/.*$      [NC]
    RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^https://ipstenu.org.*$      [NC]
    RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://ipstenu.org.*$      [NC]
    RewriteRule .*\.(jpg|jpeg|gif|png|bmp)$ - [F,NC]

    This means that I’m telling Apache to turn on the mod ‘RewriteEngine’ and to only permit my webpage (the HTTP_REFERER) to access the images. The images I list are in the ‘RewriteRule.’ I could use variables like ‘jp?g’, but I know what the file extensions are for the files on my server, and I cheat that way. If I wanted to be really mean, and didn’t worry so much about my bandwidth, I’d change the last line to RewriteRule .*\.(jpg|jpeg|gif|png|bmp)$ images/nohotlink.gif [L] so that when you try and link to /images/jojo.jpg, you’d get some witty image about how hotlinking is wrong.

    I actually do that on my other server, but the gif I use is 2k so it’s not something I worry about. It also makes it easy for me to later go back and see who’s been hitting that particular GIF and find the mean people. Yes, I have been known to send nasty notes to them.

    Keep in mind, as with any .htaccess rewrites, you may block some legitimate traffic (such as users behind proxies or privacy firewalls) using these techniques.

    Now here’s the big problem. Not all ISPs let you use the Rewrite mod! Half the reason I switched to my current provider was hotlinking (the other was SQL). The rewrite mod (module, don’t you know?) “provides a rule-based rewriting engine to rewrite requested URLs on the fly.” It’s totally magic, and I secretly adore it. It’s complex as fuck, though, and I still don’t really get all that it does. I do know that it works.

    Things ever ISP should know

    You’re a fucking bastard if you don’t let your users use mod_rewrite.

    Was that harsh? Sorry, I mean to say ‘You don’t give a rats ass about bandwidth if you don’t let your users use this.’ I’m well aware there are security ‘concerns’ about what mean people can do with it, but let’s face it, if someone’s smart enough to figure out everything you can do with mod_rewrite, then you’re in trouble anyway. There is a performance hit as every request is checked against the rewrite rules, so if you’re running an image intensive site, this can suck. But the trade off between performance and bandwidth are, to me, minimal.

    Look, if a user have a website with images, and some dickhead out there is hotlinking to that user’s images, then you, the ISP, have to handle the bandwidth crisis, and the pissy user asking you why he can’t use this feature to stop the dickheads?

    And speaking of security, I can’t find any hack for it. So if the fear is ‘really smart, but really evil people utilizing my server for nefarious purposes,’ I think that should be pretty low on the list. I’d put ‘spammer’ and ‘virus distributor’ ahead of it.

    Hotlinking can act like a DDoS attack, and if there’s ever a way to prevent it, by G-d, do it! The mod takes five fucking minutes to install.

    SimpleNet, I’m looking at you.

  • CMS: What is it and why do I care?

    CMS. Content Content Management System.

    A website where the admin, as a user or as a group of users, are able to control the content.

    If you’re anything like me, you read that and said ‘Yeah, and your point is?’ I’ve been poking around CMS style websites for the better part of a year, and it wasn’t until last week that I dipped more than my toe into them. Part of that had to do with the age old square peg/round hole syndrome. The rest was fear. But I’m here to tell you that CMS isn’t anything to fear! In fact, I’ve decided that for one specific instance, it’s perfect.

    The final decision, I blame on my web-host and my office. They sent me an email about a new tool for my website. Fantastico!, a tool that can install ‘programs’ to your website. By program, they mean blogs, portals/CMS, support tools (for your users), forums, eCommerce tools, image galleries, and ‘other scripts.’ I laughed a little, because I’d already managed to install a blog (MT, which isn’t offered by Fantastic), forums and a gallery. I had already mocked up a static style website but as I was about to click away, I saw the list for these portals/CMS thingies.

    My head spun and started to hurt a little but right away I recognized PHP-Nuke and Post-Nuke. Now, you should know that to look at those web pages is painful. They’re NOT formatted for people like me. They’re a cluster-fuck of information, scattered in an organizational mishmash that makes your desk look neat and tidy. Yes, they’re that bad.

    Why in the name of G-d would I want to use it? That’s best answered by showing you two examples of websites.

    Example One: The Traditional, Static, Informational Website

    There’s only one main admin to this site, me. I take the burden of collecting articles, images, summaries and any related information posted anywhere on the net and compiling it into something that makes sense. The site’s been up since 1997, and there are around 400 individual static SHTML pages to the site. I use a blog to keep track of updates, but for the most part, when I add a new page, I do it manually. Sometimes other people email me things I’ve missed, and I update that as well. It’s a once-a-week updated site, with a mass email that goes out every Thursday.

    Example Two: The Collaborative Website

    There’s still only one admin to this site, but the information comes from up to ten people, all of whom keep ‘journals’ of their personal activities and post public ‘news’ about the site. While I still retain the right of final inclusion on the site (should it stay or should it go is all my call!), most of the time I’m just going to tweak a format change. This means, with 10 people, I could get up to 50 request for new information a day. One option was to run a blog, where there are static links on the site for the ‘general’ information, and then a blog for each person and one for the group as a whole. The other was to have a 100%, updated by me and me alone, static page where they email in their new data and I upload it.

    Yeah, Example Two is starting to may your head hurt, isn’t it.

    I tried Drupal, which installed fast and had the best documentation, didn’t give me enough flexibility. Geeklog didn’t install well and the documentation was very geeky. PHP-Nuke has no documentation, and Fantastico! goobered the install a little. phpWebSite, for some reason, didn’t work at all, though it looked very nice. Post-Nuke was similar to PHP-Nuke. Siteframe had one idiot error I couldn’t solve. Xoops … well, there was no reason for me to try it, because I went back to PHP-Nuke.

    Why PHP-Nuke if it had no documentation of value and the install was goobered? Because when I ran a Google search on my error, I found the solution on the second hit. Really, that was it. Once I had the meat of the site up, I figured I’d better try it out.

    My head hurts today, thinking about the hoops and ladders I jumped around getting it to look right. Step one, I decided, was figuring out what I wanted from the site.

    1. To be able to have my users log in and post information.
    2. To be able to organize that information by Subject.
    3. To have an archive that worked by Subject.
    4. To have individual journals so each user could share their own information

    Doesn’t sound too hard, and all that was included in the basic PHP-Nuke Package. On to Step two. Make it pretty. PHP-Nuke uses a concept called ‘Themes.’ Each theme controls the basic layout of the page, the colors and the images. After staring at one for a while and making tiny changes, I figured it out and was done. Not too shabby. The problems I had with the layout was not the theme, in the end, but the ‘Modules’ and ‘Blocks.’ Unlike Themes, the concept of Modules and Blocks was less idiot-friendly. Blocks are like Building Blocks; you place a block in one of three positions ‘Left,’ ‘Right,’ and ‘Main.’ Okay, not too bad. You place ‘Modules’ inside blocks, and you can place multiple if you want. I wanted everything that was a menu block to be on the left side. Done. Now ‘Modules’ themselves were painful.

    Modules are all the special frippy website tools. The FAQ is a module. The Categories are a module. The News is a module. The Topics are a module. Once I understood that, I had to ask what the difference was between a Category and a Topic. In the end, I wasn’t really sure. Ipstenit (my test subject) bitched that in her head, they’re synonyms. I happen to agree, but as I argued ‘It’s not my motherfucking terminology, help me rename them!’ She wondered why the fuck I’d want to use a craptastic system like that.

    The benefits. Once I could get it up, I was sure it’d be pretty and useful! I think it is. At least, Ipstenit was able to use it without too much hand holding, and most of the problems we solved by copious documentation.

    Anyway, my Topic/Category solution was such: Topics are ‘Subtopics’ and Categories are ‘Main Topics’. Our current topics are ‘Actors,’ ‘Characters,’ and ‘Episodes.’ The Categories are ‘Cast (Season One)’ and ‘Episodes (Season One).’ If you click on a link for ‘Cast (Season One)’ you get a list of all cast (characters and actors) for the season. If you click on the link for ‘Actors,’ all you see are the last 10 Actor posts. It’s not perfect, but it works. What we really need is Subcategories, but those don’t exist code-wise yet.

    So in the end, what’s my advice?

    DO NOT install any Portal/CMS software unless you’re a coder or at least very comfortable with SQL and PHP. And if you are a coder, have the least code-friendly person you know test it and try not to get irritated when they ask you questions. It’s freakishly complicated stuff, mostly poorly documented, and if you’re really new at all this, you’re going to tear your hair out.

    90% of my problems came in making it something my non-techie users could understand. Once I broke that barrier, the 10% left were cosmetic. In that 90% was a lot more coding than I should have had to do, in my opinion. The archival options were for month only (January 2004, February 2004 etc) and I found I wanted more than it offered. On the flip side, setting up a theme was as easy as designing a web-page and uploading the required files. Also, adding in new modules was a snap! It’s a lot of give and take.

    IF you need a lot of people to be able to add information to your website, it can be very useful. By no means is it a catch all solution, and even now I’m wondering if I could have found a better one. It’s been a good learning experience, and there’s a lot more about coding that I now understand. It’s not for the timid or the code-shy, that’s for fucking sure.

  • 0.0.0.0

    An online friend of mine had a minor rant on a public chat channel we’re both on, about Verisign and their new ploy. It seems that they’ve goofed a little with the net and DNS, in a way that’s upsetting to most webmasters.

    By the way, before you think I’m this smart, I had to look up a lot of this, and my net-friend was VERY patient with explaining it to me.

    DNS is Domain Name System and is a distributed Internet directory service. DNS is used mostly to translate between domain names and IP addresses, and to control Internet email delivery. Most Internet services rely on DNS to work, and if DNS fails, web sites cannot be located and email delivery stalls. Basically it’s the numerical ‘address’ of your domain name. A DNS server holds a record of all those addresses and says ‘numerical address equals foo.com’ when you try to go to foo.com, and passes you to the server at the correct address.

    Example: Ipstenu.org has a numerical address (or IP address) of 64.91.224.2, so technically http://64.91.224.2 should take you there. Now if you clicked on that link, you know it doesn’t. That’s becuase that address is shared with a ton of other domains. Think of it as an apartment building, and 64.91.224.2 is the street address. Some people own their own homes, so their numerical address is the same as their domain name. I’m not one of them.

    Okay, so now we know what DNS is and why it’s a nice thing.

    So what happens if you go to a URL that doesn’t exist? Say http://swerqwrwrwere.org/? I’m at my office, so I get a fancy error page telling me “A DNS lookup error occurred. The host was not found.”

    “A DNS lookup error occurred. The host was not found.” simply means that the web server you’re trying to access does not exist, at least with the name that you typed. Check for a typo (computers are picky; the name must be exactly correct). This error might also mean that the site that you were using yesterday is no longer around; maybe the owner didn’t pay the bill. And sometimes sites simply “drop off” the Internet for a while.

    If I was at home, it’d be my browser beeping saying ‘Can not access site!’ In a way I like the office errors better. I get the error right away and bam, I know what’s up

    What about http://swerqwrwrwere.com? It should be the same thing, except that thanks to Verisign, it’s not anymore.

    Who’s Verisign? Well, they’re like the post office, to use my apartment/house metaphor above. They control the address numbers and what they translate too, for the most part. In the case of the house, it’s a direct relationship. Address number blah equals foo.com, end of story. In the apartment side, it says 64.91.224.2 is really Liquidweb, and hands the request to them, and it’s Liquidweb who sees your asking for http://ipstenu.org/blog, and passes the right data back to you. It’s an extra step.

    Verisign is not the only ‘post office’ around, but they’re the biggest.

    On September 15th, Verisign made a teeny change. Normally, when you go to a site that’s down or doesn’t exist, you get the DNS ‘whoops!’ error. As of the 15th, Verisign made a change that said ‘all fake .com and .net addresses point to THIS address, instead of nothing at all.’ This means that http://swerqwrwrwere.com and http://swerqwrwrwere.net now point to http://sitefinder.verisign.com/lpc?url=swerqwrwrwere.com &host=swerqwrwrwere.com and http://sitefinder.verisign.com/lpc?url=swerqwrwrwere.net &host=swerqwrwrwere.net instead.

    See that first part of the line: http://sitefinder.verisign.com

    Now if you go to a .com and .net domain that doesn’t exist, you get served up Site Finder, instead of an error message.

    Problem One: Ethics
    It’s not illegal, but it borders on unethical, since now Verisign has turned domain name typos into an advertising opportunity. Okay, so in the past typing Yahooo.com took you to a page someone else owned, but that was the point. They owned the typoed domain name, so you were really going to a legit website. Irritating as it was, it was right. Back to the address metaphor, just because 1235 Clark and 1235 Clerk street are similar and you went to the wrong one doesn’t make it the fault of the company that 1235 Clark is a restaurant and 1235 Clerk is a strip club. You should have read better.

    Problem Two: Net Traffic
    Currently, I can’t actually get to http://sitefinder.verisign.com from the office. Oh, sure, I can tell it exists, but I can’t reach it. Why? It’s too busy serving up pages for every URL that doesn’t exist. And you can bet some geeks are ‘erroring’ in their typing to slam the fuckers. This causes traffic on the net that really isn’t needed. This acts like a Denial of Service (DOS) attack on the DNS root servers. There are less than 20 in the world, and hammering them is a bad idea.

    Problem Three: Ownership
    Does Verisign actually own the domain name http://swerqwrwrwere.com or http://swerqwrwrwere.net ? No. So how come THEY get to decide where those names point to? They’re not the only fish in the sea, though yes they’re the biggest. The little fish must be pissed. This doesn’t actually infringe on the rights of the other, smaller, DNS hosts, and they can refuse to server up any pages from http://sitefinder.verisign.com (which I hope they do).

    Problem Four: Email
    One of the ways to avoid Spam is for an email server to check the URL of the sent email against the IP address. Does ‘1235 Clerk Street’ equal ‘Scarlett’s Gentleman’s Club’? Yes, okay, that’s legit. No, and the email is rejected. This ‘no’ error is commonly called a 550 error. What Verisign’s doing is effectively erasing the 550 error, by saying ‘1245 Clerk Street’ is a real place because when I go there, it says http://sitefinder.verisign.com … and now that spam email gets delivered because your email server thinks it’s legit.

    Going back to Verisign the post office, they host DNS servers, the big database of ‘address = company.’ The DNS servers hold that huge list, and when you request one not on it’s list, it passes you down it’s child servers until it finds a match. If there’s no match, it errors 550 and stores that for faster response later.

    It’s pretty complex.

    The summary is this: Verisign is making your typo into an advertising venue that increases lag time on the net and possibly can cause more spam to get through your filters. The only known cure is to block http://sitefinder.verisign.com on your personal blacklist.

    For More Information:
    VeriSign Hijacks Unused Domains
    All your Web typos are belong to us
    Inventor Says Search Service Won’t Break DNS
    Verisign’s post about the change