July 20, 2023

Italian translation of “Things to do with RSS” is ready

Simone Carletti of RSS World has done a very nice thing and is maintaining an Italian translated copy of the wiki article Things you can do with RSS. He’ll be keeping it up-to-date as new additions to the wiki are added. Thanks, Simone!

Le cose che si possono fare con l’RSS

Diaweblog.com - re-post to a weblog from IRC

Diaweblog.com allows people to create blogs from selected IRC channel logs. An IRC bot is activated to scan the logs and to re-post to a weblog whatever message follows a simple b, or b:. Right now, Diaweblog is in beta so it isn’t ready to open new weblogs, but you can partipate in the ten active weblogs that are open right now.

http://www.diaweblog.com/

Gelf Magazine report on Google News’ selection of sources

David Goldenberg of Gelf Magazine has an interesting report about how Google News chooses sources to get its news from. Satire sites like Axis of Logic and Unconfirmed Sources are finding their way into Google News. Problems of misinterpretation obviously arise when they’re presented by Google in the same manner as straight news. Even when Google News applies the satire tag to the news sources, it isn’t always accurate — Goldenberg cites the case of Wonkette which is labelled as satire, yet a similar site like Gawker doesn’t carry such a label.

Some of the reasons why Google News excludes some sites are obvious (foul language, extremist political views), but the criteria for site selection is obfuscated. However, it is clear that reader input into Google News has something to do with it. Goldenberg cites a few cases where Google News has listed or de-listed sites because of emails from readers. So that may be why satire sites and fake-news sites are included at all — because people like them. While Google News arranges their scraped content by algorithm, inclusion is still a popularity contest.

Does Google News Have a Sense of Humor?

Proposed DDOS attack on phishing websites

Here’s an interesting discussion on Slashdot that proposes that DDOS attacks be initiated against identified phishing sites. One of the proposers says that an orchestrated DDOS will survive longer than the Makelovenotspam initiative last year because phishers are not always technical. Also, phishing sites are easier to identify with no chance of a mistake, unlike spam servers which are often shared with legitimate users or are compromised.

SpamSlayer - should we DDOS spammers?