Charles on… anything that comes along

Upon a time, when I worked on Business magazine, reading the Wall Street Journal was de rigeur (my, what a lot of italics). But I gradually twigged that it was fantastically right-wing; a zealot for the wildest shores of capitalism.

Now, Mediamatters has caught it using wayyy outdated numbers to “prove” the point it wants to prove.

A June 21 Wall Street Journaleditorial (subscription required) cited outdated statistics to claim that proposed legislation to limit fossil fuel emissions ’seems entirely untethered to real science.’ To bolster its claim that natural forces are responsible for a recent rise in global temperatures, the Journal offered a 15-year-old chart from the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). More recent IPCC reports refute this chart’s findings.

Realclimate also has a go over precisely the same piece - and actually, does it much, much better than Mediamatters, which just points out that the WSJ data and arguments are old.

Realclimate tears the article apart piece by twitching piece, pointing out the myths, pointing to the realities: without the CO2 increase, we should actually be experiencing global cooling at present; CO2 concentration in the atmosphere “is now much higher than any time during the past 650,000 years (which is as far back as reliable ice core data exist)”.

Honestly, it is crap of the WSJ to decide on the story and then distort the facts to fit it.

(Via Media Matters for America.)

These posts might be related (the database thinks..):
• The Onion Infograph on global warming (19 November 2004; score: 91.06%)
• Business Week wakes up to global warming (6 August 2004; score: 77.86%)
• Ah, welcome onto my patch, Melanie: La Phillips finds nutso group opposing global warming (20 October 2004; score: 62.83%)

I didn’t ask him, but other people have: what does the inventor of this thing that’s reckoned to be sucking up the internet’s resources think of Microsoft Research’s Avalanche project?

Not a lot, as you’ll read.

These posts might be related (the database thinks..):
• Why does Microsoft have research departments? (22 June 2005; score: 44.28%)
• It's only possible once a year: Borat, and then the Eurovision judging (12 May 2007; score: 35.83%)
• Media Center PCs: is the demand there? (4 January 2005; score: 33.34%)

This is going to sound soooo ungrateful. Or incorrect. But anyway.

The new version of Wordpress uses the blitzed.org system to detect open proxies; you can do a lookup against it to see if the IP address of a would-be comment is of a machine that’s actually being used by a comment spammer, who can bounce pretty much anything off it.

I back-enabled this functionality by hacking around in Wordpress 1.2. Then I thought I’d test the 536 “bad” IP addresses I’ve collected over the past howeverlong to see how many are listed by blitzed as open proxies.

(As it’s all just PHP code, I used Jonathan Deutsch’s excellent HyperEdit program - which will do live PHP parsing on OSX - to check the list. It’s great, great software: it was one of the first programs to use Webkit to do live HTML previews. Except this does PHP too, which I think is unique.)

Result: 57 of my “bad IP” list are on blitzed already. In old money, that’s about one-tenth. So 500-odd aren’t.

Now, quite possibly many of those 500-odd bad-commenting IP addresses belong to sites owned and operated by real spammers.

But even with a generous margin, that still suggests there’s lot of open proxies that blitzed isn’t seeing, because it isn’t getting alerted, or doesn’t have the mechanisms to deal with submissions. (My own attempts at manual input, when I got an obvious open proxy attempt from Africa, weren’t taken. Apparently I need to be more machine-like.)

Now, blitzed.org does do a sterling job, providing its service free, even to folk like me, and so deserves praise. Even so, it’s perplexing that there can be so much spam about and that so little of it is crossing their radar.

If I felt really confident about it then I’d probably remove my big .htaccess blocking list. But presently I don’t, which is a pity.

These posts might be related (the database thinks..):
• Briefly: if you get any odd behaviour with commenting.. (18 June 2005; score: 53.97%)
• Having words with Word (13 September 2004; score: 27.11%)
• Please, don't send me your Office-beta-created documents (26 July 2006; score: 25.14%)