Mathieu's log

Until recently, as an internet gateway/router/firewall/access point, I was using LEAF Bering (Linux Embedded Appliance Firewall) on a small fan-less appliance that uses a compact flash as a hard disk. It worked quite correctly but I was not happy with the fact that LEAF cannot evolve easily. It requires very specific knowledge and I felt like I was not really controlling it.

During last week-end, I felt somewhat courageous and started building a mini system based upon Debian which is a much more standard distribution and which I know much better. A requirement was that it had to be pack on a 128MB flashcard. I took some notes so I’ll describe below the steps I followed. Hope that it will help someone.

(more…)

I came across some interesting statistics about the frequency of apparition of chinese and japanese characters in the chinese and japanese wikipedia.

The first 100 characters for Japanese:
の に る ン と は た い し を で て が な 年 ス れ ル 日 ト イリ か あ ア
す ら ラ う っ り こ も さ ク月 ッ ま 大 タ ド 本 シ く ジ よ ロ レ き 学
フ ん カ 国 テ 道 一 人 ム マ 中 市 駅 つ ィ め バ プ そ コ お け ウ オ 線
用 行 者 グ 県 メ え 部 ど デ ビ 地 サ や ニ 東 キ わ 名 チ ナ 合 上 作 出

The first 100 characters for Chinese:
的 年 一 中 人 是 有 在 大 之 不 日 以 国 月 和 行 為 上 为 了 國 其 生 用
学 地 法 文 公 子 出 第 家 成 斯 世 主 作 而 他 者 十 民 三 可 名 部 自 本
分 前 二 代 也 於 西 下 政 所 方 个 理 于 到 王 多 事 南 定 利 物 使 天 德
同 要 得 特 小 及 北 道 或 立 会 高 能 后 由 外 新 等 如 教 科 山 台 時 克

(more…)

After a few weeks of evaluation, Fantasdic has finally been accepted by the GNOME accounts team and is now in the GNOME CVS.

To retrieve the source code from the anonymous mirror repository:

cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@anoncvs.gnome.org:/cvs/gnome login
cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous@anoncvs.gnome.org:/cvs/gnome co -P fantasdic

I hope it will help Fantasdic attract more contributors, translators and above all package maintainers. As far as I know, this is the first Ruby program to be hosted on the GNOME CVS. Maybe a first step toward more adoption of that fabulous language in the GNOME community?

Spammers are everywhere. After mail spam, comment spam, wiki spam, in case you didn’t know, now there’s also referer spam.

The technique involves making repeated web site requests using a fake referer url pointing to a spam-advertised site. Sites that publicize their access logs, including referer statistics, will then also link to the spammer’s site. This benefits the spammer because of the free link, and also gives the spammer’s site improved search engine link placement due to link-counting algorithms (e.g. Google’s PageRank) that search engines use.

So what can we do ? Of course the first thing to do is not to publish the site’s statistics. So for my site FFWorld, I made the access to statistics private but gave the login and pass on the site so real people can see them and Google won’t index them. Thanks to that first recommendation, you rob spammers of the only benefit they have. This is quite enjoyable.

But the fact is referer spam is a so simple technique, which only requires one little HTTP request (without the need to wait for the server response) , that it seems that even sites which don’t publish their statistics are blindly spammed. The nuisance is real for the site’s owner because it gives a bad image of the site’s traffic and referers. Currently techniques to fight referer spam involve URL blacklists, which as this link details, is an unwinnable race. So I’m left with the joy that spammers won’t benefit from spamming my site…