Monthly Archives: April 2008

Counter-Vandalism

Posted on by
1

Today most of my tasks are in the “wait” phase, so I had some free time. Of course it’s a Sunday, so there wasn’t a lot to do. So I fell back on an old hobby: patrolling Wikipedia for vandalism. I’d say that 80% of edits are constructive, 10% are well-intentioned but misguided, and 10% are egregious vandalism. (Replacing a whole article with the word “poop,” for example.)

I’d like to point out that the deck is really stacked against vandals, though.

One of the most useful things is the Recent Changes page. Unsurprisingly, it shows the most recent changes to articles. Tweak the settings a bit, and I can view only changes by users who aren’t logged in, which probably accounts for 95% of vandalism. I can quickly click “diff” to view a summary of changes between the edit and the version before it, which makes vandalism quite evident. “hist” takes me to a history of all the changes, which is also useful. After that comes the change in length: (+1) indicates that the page was made one byte longer, for example. Huge differences are in bold; lengthy tirades inserted into the middle of an article, or outright “deletion” of articles, are super-easy to spot. (It’s worth remembering that all it shows is the net change of the edit: if you replace good text with obscene text of the exact same length, it’ll show a net change of “0,” so the size of the change shouldn’t be anything other than an occasional red flag that something’s up.) I get the user’s name (only IPs in the view I keep), followed by a link to their Talk page.

For example, I noticed a significant addition to the article on Jean Carne. Some guy kept inserting some sort of ramblings about her. Here’s a diff (obscene text). On the left is the “before,” and on the right is the “after.” The section in green is what got added, which clearly doesn’t belong.

Wikipedia allows logged-in users to include their own JavaScript, etc. into the pages they see, so I’ve got some mods to insert an “undo” option for me.

So it’s worth noticing that all of this took me maybe five seconds. That’s probably too high a number. I spotted a huge number of added content, saw the diff, noticed it was nonsense, and undid it.

But that’s only half the job. The next stage is to leave a note on the user’s talk page, explaining that you undid their edits. There’s a Wikipedia policy page on how to proceed, with a handful of useful templates. The basic premise is that they escalate from, “Your test worked and we undid it for you; next time please experiment in the Sandbox,” gradually growing in sternness until it gives a last warning: vandalize again and you’ll be banned. (Here’s an example, showing a guy who, frankly, got more warnings than he deserved.) You’ll note that, aside from vandalism earlier this month, it all happened in a short period–20:21 and he got his first warning, and by 20:39 he had been banned. What’s most awesome about this is that most of the time was him: we can’t warn someone again before they vandalize again.

However, I’m not an admin on Wikipedia, which means that I can’t actually ban anyone. But I don’t need to. There’s a handy page called Administrator Intervention against Vandalism, often referred to as WP:AIV for short. The use of a quick template allows me to identify a user or IP that’s actively vandalizing. My contributions rarely stay on the list for more than 30 seconds, after which time they’ve been acted on. I’ve never encountered a backlog, because there’s always an admin or twelve processing the list.

Another useful tool in our arsenal is the ability to view contributions by user. A fun bit of JavaScript allows me to simply hover over an IP / username and view their changes. So if I catch you vandalizing once, I’m going to go through your past edits. Most of the time your past vandalism was caught already, but periodically I’ll catch something.

There are two things worth noting:

  • It’s often under 30 seconds to go from a user vandalizing a page to their edits having been reverted and a warning left.
  • People patrol new edits pretty closely. I caught a guy today changing dates. They were subtle changes, but that doesn’t mean that no one caught it. Just as with people trying to trash pages, I had his edits undone in a matter of seconds.

There’s really something pretty satisfying with someone working up some sort of elaborate vandalism, only to undo it with a single click.

Richardson

Posted on by
Reply

The LA Times has an interesting article in which Bill Richardson suggests that he had intended to back Hillary, but between her overzealous TV ads and a bunch of unceasing, rude calls suggesting that he “owed” her the endorsement because he was on Bill Clinton’s cabinet, he decided otherwise. The Clinton camp, of course, has called his loyalty to President Clinton into question, but Richardson was unphased:

“I was loyal,” Richardson said during an extended conversation over breakfast this week at the governor’s mansion in Santa Fe. “But I don’t think that loyalty is transferable to his wife… You don’t transfer loyalty to a dynasty.”

The Clinton camp, though, is still fuming:

Days later, just when interest in the endorsement seemed to wane, former President Clinton exploded in a rant about Richardson at the state Democratic Party convention in San Jose.

Computing

Posted on by
5

It looks as if we’re actually being charged $500 to take our school laptops with us (after paying $1,200 for the “Technology Fee,”) which has me scouting out prices: can $500 buy something better than this?

In the process, I came across this: a tri-core computer.

If you’re confused…. Me too!

Group Collaboration

Posted on by
3

A huge amount of the stuff I do here involves working, online, with other people. I’m surprised at how technology really isn’t where I expect it. Here are some things I do often, and how technology helps me–or fails me.

  • Communicating with persistent groups. I’ve got a board of people who are taking over the club I run here. It’s one group of people, and it’s a “persistent group” — it’s always the same people. I created a mailing list on my server allowing group discussions: we e-mail one address and it goes to everyone. It works great, but we all go to the same school, and thus use the same e-mail service. Why can’t I create a mailing list for all of us? I really shouldn’t be reliant on us e-mailing a “special” address on a server in Texas so that nine of us in Massachusetts each get a copy. A good mailserver for big groups, e.g. schools or companies, ought to let its users create these groups on the fly.
  • Collaborative document editing. This one has two solutions I use:
    • MS Word + Track Changes: Two problems with this one… The first is that most people don’t know how to use it, and trying to communicate how to do it just adds one more thing to go wrong. The second is that “Track changes” doesn’t deal with concurrent edits: if I take a document and work on it, and you take it at the same time and work on it, there’s nothing to even try to merge our changes.
    • MediaWiki: I use the same software that powers Wikipedia to keep notes and lists for myself, as well as to enable better groupwork. We can each track who’s changing what, and it kind of supports concurrent editing, although if we edit the same section, one of us will still get an edit conflict.

    The thing is, the concept of, “You work on Part A, I’ll do Part B, and then we’ll integrate them and make it flow” is very common. It’s kind of disappointing that it takes quirky web apps to do this effectively. I’m not sure this one is a failure of solutions: I can think of numerous things that do it. The problem is just that no one uses them, no one knows how to use them, and none of them have very good name recognition.

  • Calendaring. Exchange supports this in theory, but no one uses it, and I’m still quite disappointed that no one has made a competitor. Google Calendar integrates with GMail nicely, but that doesn’t help for people who don’t use GMail… I want to be able to say, “I want to meet with these 5 people” and have the computer find times that work for each of us within certain constraints. I’ve invented what I call “shotgun scheduling,” which seems to work fairly well. I identify about five times that work well for me and sound like they would be good for other people, and then list them and ask each person to tell me which of them they can do. It eliminates the, “Well I have soccer practice from 2 to 3 on Wednesdays…” headaches. But this is something that technology could solve very easily, and one of the things I want most.
  • Group voting. Again, this is something that Exchange supports but that isn’t used too much. I think we should change the time on one of our events, but I don’t want to do it without running it by the rest of the group. But it’s a pain to send out an e-mail to all of them and then wade through all the responses. (With nine people it’s not a big deal. Imagine if there were 200.) Some things aren’t meant to be discussed, so much as given a quick thumbs-up or thumbs-down. A good e-mail service should support this, and make the results a web-based thing hosted on the server, not an e-mail based thing.
  • Group document repository. SharePoint (?) does this, but it hasn’t been rolled out to students. For an arbitrary “group” of people, I want to be able to upload, edit, and collaborate on documents.
  • Task/project management. Not a to-do list, but a system that supports tiers (i.e., subtasks), deadlines, priorities, statuses, “next steps,” and assignment of tasks. The ability to link a given entry on it to an e-mail thread or whatnot would rock, as would integration with the calendar solution. Out of 50 million task management solutions, I have a big list on my whiteboard. Nothing I’ve found works quite as well. Everything is either too complicated (I don’t want a Gantt chart of my homework) or too simplistic (I don’t want a single-level checklist for managing my more involved projects).
  • Contact sharing. This one has the technology there 100%, but the usage has fallen short. I’d love to be able to automatically retrieve contact information from various contacts and send it to my phone. vCard and such does this, and Outlook will sync right to my Treo. But not many people use this.

I think there are two conclusions to draw from all of this. One is that, in some places, technology is still lacking for some reason. Nothing I do is anything that millions of groups and teams across the planet don’t do, so it’s shocking in a way that technology is still absent in some places.

But at the same time, in some cases, technology is ahead of people. I think organizations essentially need to require that people use the tools. When a manager tries to schedule a meeting and finds that people don’t keep a calendar on the computer, he needs to address the issue with them. When I try to pull down contact information for my coworker and can’t find it, that should be an issue I bring up with him with a, “I can’t believe you’re neglecting your duties” tone. Some of these features have great importance, but we get stuck in a sort of catch 22: no one uses them because, well, no one uses them. It’s the classic network effect: as long as people don’t maintain a group calendar, no one has reason to use a group calendar.

Priorities

Posted on by
2

I find this image interesting for so many reasons.

The most obvious, and least interesting, one is that the laptop is engulfed in flames. It’s a Dell, and you may recall that stretch when a bad batch of batteries kept spontaneously combusting.

One of the bigger issues is the thought process. “Oh crap, my laptop is on fire. I’d better…”

I would think, “…try to extinguish it,” although, “remove the book practically on top of the flaming laptop” is valid too, as is, “…call 911 and get out of here!”

But instead, this guy thought, “…grab a camera!” I guess I’m glad he did, but it certainly wouldn’t be my reaction.

But above all else, what I find most interesting here is that he has a huge onion on his desk. I could see an apple, a nice snack for later in the day. Or maybe a pear. Or grapes. But this guy has an onion. A huge onion. Why? I refuse to believe that he intends to munch on it later in the day as a snack. It might be a decent ingredient in something else, except that he doesn’t seem to have anything else in terms of food. Just an onion. Why?!

Digital Radio

Posted on by
1

There are a few different technologies commonly used in two-way radio. One is digital voice, a la Motorola ASTRO / Project 25’s CAI (IMBE), which is a 9600bps (9.6kbps) digital stream. Another interesting technology is trunking: a city might have 12 talkgroups (think “virtual channels”), but only 4 frequencies. One frequency is designated as a “control channel,” which is a digital stream announcing system status. When you want to transmit, your radio will go out to the controller and get assigned one of the frequencies, and the system will then announce that you’re transmitting on one of them, and all radios in your group will switch over and listen. This allows much greater spectrum utilization: rather than needing a new frequency for every group that might want their own channel, you just need to license enough frequencies for however many simultaneous conversations you expect.

I’ve been thinking that it’d be interesting to merge the two technologies. Technologies like Speex will let you process audio at exceptionally low bitrates, seemingly as low as 3.4kbps. (And they have some neat technology, like variable bit-rate encoding and even further drops in data transfer in between words, dropping quite low for when it’s just background noise.) So I think it’d be neat to start a “data network” at 32 kbps, which could be done with relatively low bandwidth. You could keep one frequency, and yet fit as many as 7 or 8 simultaneous conversations on it. (And you can take its VBR support one step further, and have it scale to fit system capacity: on a system with minimal activity, allow 8-16 kbps, but when the system is starting to fill up, drop down to 4 kbps.) HE-AAC (also known as AACPlus) looks promising too, although it’s a proprietary technology.

And since it’s now a 100% data network, you can do what I’ve always thought mobile radio systems, especially those used by public safety agencies, ought to do: put a GPS unit in each radio, and have them embed GPS coordinates in each transmission, as well as periodically announcing their coordinates in the background.

The net result is insanely efficient (radio) bandwidth usage. For example, Boston PD has 16 frequencies licensed, but it’s rare for more than 2 or 3 to be in use at any given moment. They could get more efficient by switching to a trunking system, maybe with 5 frequencies (plus a control channel). Of course with an established system, there’s really no incentive to, but I digress. But if they could get entirely usable digital audio at 3-8 kbps, they could actually move to a single frequency and support multiple, simultaneous conversations.

Another neat side-effect is that linking the systems would get quite easy: the entire system, with multiple conversations, could even fit over a single dial-up modem link. And you can have better “emergency” support, although most trunking systems seem to do it anyway: public safety radios carry an “orange button,” which will signal an emergency to the radio system. Analog systems do this by basically making the radios “obnoxious”–they’ll just keep transmitting a distress signal over and over, increasing the odds that they get through. With an all-digital system, they can just send packets indicating an emergency, and have the network make way for them, going so far as to terminate existing conversations if needed.

Oh, and another novel benefit is power management. If I’m on a handheld radio and I’m standing twenty feet away from the tower, I can dial my power down as low as it goes and still make it in fine. But if I’m a few miles away, I need to be using the highest power I can to make sure I’m making it. Of course, no one in the field fiddles with power settings. (In fact, most radios don’t make this something the user can do.) But if you just exchange a bit of signal strength info in the data flowing between radios, you can make this automatic. As I talk to the tower, it’ll be periodically confirming that it’s hearing me. But when it does that, rather than just using a boolean, “Yup, got it,” it can send me signal strength data, and my radio can dial down power until it’s at a, “I’m still getting 100% of your packets but I wouldn’t go any lower in power…” point. The net result is longer battery life. (And potentially, less interference to distant users of the same frequency.) As a really obscure benefit, if you’re transmitting this information, and also embedding GPS coordinates in your transmissions, the system could silently log all of this and generate coverage maps, which would get more and more detailed over time.

Oh Dear

Posted on by
Reply

I’m shocked to report that the Westboro Baptist Church has apparently had a lien filed against its properties in an attempt to satisfy the $5 million judgment against them when they picketed the funeral of a (presumably straight) soldier killed in Iraq. These are also the people who have gone around with “Thank God for IEDs” (Improvised Explosive Devices, the roadside bombs that keep killing our troops in Iraq), “Thank God for Katrina” (referring to the hurricane that devastated New Orleans), and even the group that praised God for killing firefighters on 9/11. Why are they excited about all of these horrific events? Because they’re apparently God taking vengeance on America for its tolerance of homosexuals. (In other news, America is tolerant of homosexuals?)

By the way, I should disclaim that, although they’re the Westboro Baptist Church, the actual Baptist Church has been careful to distance itself from them.

I’m not familiar with the case, but I do have to admit that, on the surface, it seems as if the First Amendment ought to have protected them. But, well, this is one group I’m not too sad to see go under.

She Ate All the Gherkins

Posted on by
1

The UK’s Mark Steel has a particularly humorous piece on Hillary’s problems with accidentally mis-speaking and making strange claims, because she says so many words:

Her next round of soft-focus adverts will probably feature her soothingly saying, “My fellow Americans, I drank a pint of walrus milk once for a bet. I speak fluent Eskimo. I once ate all the gherkins in Belgium. My brother’s got a yak in his loft. I fell asleep on a night bus once and woke up in Munich, and had to get a lift back on a camel. I used to live on an iceberg. I’ve got a waffle-maker that works underwater.”

Okay, so maybe it’s overly critical of her. But I can’t help but chuckle as I read it.

A Little Competition ;)

Posted on by
2

Colored Amp

Okay, so I much prefer Andrew’s. But I woke up this morning and Kyle’s guitar amp was the first thing I saw. “That’d make a good photo,” I thought.

I don’t know what to make of it, though. I always envisioned it as something that would be a good picture at a concert, lit by various stage lighting. In this case, it was lit by light coming in through the window, and the shot would essentially have been black and white.

So I wonder what to make of my modifications. If I told you that I set up two slave flashes, one with a blue gel over it, and one with a red filter over it, and positioned them on opposite sides of the amp, you’d think I was a really advanced photographer, going to great lengths to create a good shot. But I’m a college student with no external flash, much less two radio slaves with colored gels I can slip in. So I used Photoshop to add in some colored lighting effects, and dialed the opacity down to make it more subtle. I also applied some very “broad” sharpening, because the “Jay” was initially thrown too far out of focus. It’s still not nearly as good as I’d like, but the outline’s better.

So the net result, I think, is that it conceivably looks like a shot taken at a concert, or something else interesting, versus something taken of my roommate’s guitar amp on the floor on a sunny morning. But part of me thinks it’s “wrong” to go that far in Photoshop.