electro-textual

When spammers attacked our “English at the Beach” website, on both the Guestbooks and the Feedback Survey pages, we were experiencing the “New Chicago-style Web”.

“We used to call the Internet a sort of Wild West. Now it’s more like Chicago in the 1920s with Al Capone,” says Prolexic President Keith Laslop.

Writing up my research on the web usage server logs, i needed a definition of ‘botnet’. While searching, i came across an intriguing article in Wired late last year, which outlines an attack on Six Apart’s Type Pad and Live Journal blog networks.

According to the article by Scott Berinato, One Russian spammer was determined (allegedly) to take out a vigilante anti-spam crowd known as Blue Security, who employed an anti-spam (ro-)bot called “Blue Frog”.

The spammers attacked the security firm’s web site (with huge Denial of Service attacks), so the director of Blue Security re-directed his domain to a Live Journal blog site, to keep customers informed. This led to the whole of Six Apart’s blog-oporium going down as well.

The director sought help, from a big security firm called Prolexic. They put shields in place to protect the Blue Frog anti-spammers. At first it seemed that the Russian spammer had given up, but then he returned and took out Prolexic’s entire DNS server in one hit, removing their protection over many sites.

Blue Security gave up, and the director has still not emerged from hiding, five months later. The (allegedly) bad Russian spammer remains at large with his or her “Botnets” (massive networks of around 100,000 zombie machines, operated remotely).

Berinato, Scott. “Attack of the Bots”. Wired Magazine, Vol 14.11, November ‘06. wired.com/wired/archive/14.11/botnet.html 4 February 2007.

“Open Source, Language and Literacy”

It’s been an exciting couple of months for me, as i’ve been asked to write a few articles. One for the coming Journal “Australian Language and Literacy Matters”, a new project emerging from Australian Language Matters and the ARIS Resources Bulletin. ["Open Source, Language & Literacy" @ ALLM : ms word doc 180k]

Current Directions in Flexible Learning

Another for Literacy Link, the Australian Council for Adult Literacy magazine, about current happenings in the Australian Flexible Learning Community. [FlexiLearni @ LitLink : ms word doc 128k]

RSS, Blogging interview at the Knowledge Tree

.. and also we’ve got a live interview coming up with Alan Levine, the man behind cogdogblog, about the whole RSS / blogging phenomenon. 3rd June in the Learning Times.

So hard to say anything new, when you’ve got bigwigs like Stephen Downes who knows everything and wrote it all before! Hopefully see you in the Learning Times 10 am 3rd June 04, Aust Eastern Standard Time..

(Imported from original “FLL03″ blog c/- PRACE)

big shifts afoot

Big predictions, as the inquirer reports a worldwide shift from Microsoft to Open Source. This article is a comment with attitude – Charles at the Inquirer puts the case that the Redmond giant is about to get very badly stung by a growing movement, as governments and corporations everywhere weigh a zero-outlay software against another which costs hundreds.

(i should say at this point that i am not an anti-MS crusader. i like MS Word – it’s my very favourite word processor – and i’m very grateful to the Victorian Government for negotiating a deal on my behalf so i can use it at the educational place i work.)

However, as the Inquirer notes “the competition is starting to force Microsoft into a pricing war, and any moron can tell you a price war against free is not a good thing.”

Perhaps the Vic. Govt. could mention – in their negotiations – that they are
considering Open Source applications for desktops, office suites, and servers
across the state, in government and education departments. Perhaps they could pull out a “detailed return on investment study” as well. Charles
reckons the price will drop considerably.

(i would like to add that it would be so great if we could have Apple, Linux and Windows machines all connecting side by side – so people could see the differences, and use each for its best purpose.

.. and a couple of networked computers in each classroom would be great too
- this could be a good time to launch an appeal for funds – to supplement the
crusty old boxes in our adult learning lab.)

happy new year to all you out there