Tranching Reality

Interesting. When you concatenate “Word” and “press,” you get “WordPress.” You can type “wordpress.” But you can’t get a capital ‘W’ and a lowercase ‘p’. It appears that WordPress censors this for you, except in the title that appears in the window frame. I titled this post with a lowercase ‘p’ and a capital ‘W’, but it only appears that way in the window frame. Weird.

My commenting policy is up. It’s linked to the right, under “Pages.”

I’ll repeat it here:

1. I reserve the right to delete comments or ban people for any reason whatsoever. Don’t take it personally.
2. Don’t be obscene. My interpretation of the word obscene is quite liberal. No porn, no racism, no bigotry, etc. Respect me and respect everyone else reading the blog.
3. Don’t be a dick. Use common sense. Play nice, and others will play nice with you.
4. Don’t be annoying. If you force me to pay attention to you, I will. And I’ll make it so that I never have to do it again.
5. Make your point. Please don’t ramble. If you have a point to make, make it. If you want to back it up with your case, do so, but please try to be clear and brief.
6. Don’t copy your content into my comments. If you have your own blog, wonderful. If you’d like to make others aware of your related content, leave a link. If I think that it’s interesting, I’ll be more apt to link to it in one of my own posts.

Use common sense, and you should be OK.

Yesterday, a commenter named “exuvia” left some comments on my post “Eating Meat,” and my “Who Am I?” page. I thought that the comments were a little odd, so I Googled the IP address. One of the hits that I got was through www.projecthoneypot.org, which associated the IP address with a mail server and a dictionary attacker. In and of itself, this information doesn’t mean anything. It may be that it was used for that purpose before “exuvia” had the address. Or it may just be that “exuvia” shares the IP with multiple customers at the same ISP.

However: when a link is added with the comments, that sends up a red flag for me. You can set up a wordpress blog to send you the IP address and email address of anyone who comments on it. In the interest of being cautious, I deleted the comments, and wrote this comment:

By the way, I think that “exuvia” commenter was running a phishing attack. If you looked at that blog, please don’t comment on it. You would reveal your IP address and email address to that person.

The IP address of the commenter came up as an Ecuadoran IP address that is associated with several attacks. It looked fishy (or phishy, I guess), and I don’t trust this person with my readers.

After seeing that, “exuvia” contacted me. Apparently, he or she was quite upset about my choice of actions, and explained his or her case quite eloquently, which was a departure from the comments that were left on the post (they wandered and didn’t make much sense to me). This person considered it a matter of personal honor that I made my choice of actions: “In the interest of personal honour – yours and mine – I would like for you to clarify to both me and your readers.”

I edited the comment to explain what I found, and to explain my actions:

I expected “exuvia” to just see that and move on, but he or she took umbrage to this comment. I’m not going to apologize for erring on the side of caution, though. I do want to clarify that just because the IP address in question is from Ecuador, does not mean I think sources of traffic from Ecuador to be suspect. Such a conclusion would be ridiculous. The important piece of information is that according to http://www.projecthoneypot.org, the address in question was associated with attacks:

“The Project Honey Pot system has detected behavior from the IP address consistent with that of a mail server and dictionary attacker. Below we’ve reported some other data associated with this IP. This interrelated data helps map spammers’ networks and aids in law enforcement efforts. If you know something about this IP, please leave a comment.”

I did not leave a comment, or pursue this with any authorities. All this means is that administrators who have the Project Honeypot software installed have detected this address in association with a mail server or dictionary attacker. I decided to err on the side of caution.

If it truly is the case that I have erred, then “exuvia” has my apologies. As I said before, however, I will not apologize for being cautious.

I have also added other explanations above. Again: if it truly is the case that I have erred, then “exuvia” has my apologies. I still have no real way of knowing this, though, and I have to trust that this person means well. So again, I won’t apologize for being cautious. Am I overly cautious? Perhaps.

I do want to say one last thing. If your personal honor is damaged by someone not trusting you on the Internet, you need to reconsider how you view your personal interactions online. It is very difficult to obtain information about someone enough that I can trust them. I can’t see your face. I don’t know where you really are. I can’t hear your voice. All I have from you is some words and a couple identifiers that don’t mean much. It’s not personal to me. In the future, I’ll seriously consider being less aggressive about censoring my blog comments. “Exuvia,” I never banned you from comment, and you are welcome to comment in the future.

I’ll write a page with my commenting policy very soon. I would also remind my readers that almost any blog that you comment on requires you to leave identifying information, so be cautious.

Fall semester is finally over and I have almost all of my shopping done. My finals were a bit grueling, but I think that I came out ok. Most importantly, however: my application is in.

The deadline for my application has passed and it is currently sitting there, waiting to be reviewed. It is almost completely out of my hands at this point, and I get to watch it sit there until spring while I develop an ulcer. I say “almost” because I suppose that I can make sure that all the information is available, like transcripts and scores. Other than that, there really isn’t anything to do but wait.

In the meantime, I’ve decided to busy myself with preparation for some of the research that I want to do (assuming that I’m accepted). I’m planning on just one course in the spring, so I don’t have as much of an impact on work as I did in the fall. I’m really interested in image analysis and shape analysis, especially when it comes to medical imaging. It would be difficult to try to communicate more information than that, so I’ll leave it there.

I’m also catching up on a little blogging right now, as you can see. You’ll probably see me rant about something here in the near future, since I’m taking the 24th through the 5th off.