Hilariously inappropriate tweet-spam

So, I just said on The Twitter:

16% support for FF, apparently. Goodness, what do we need for 0%, Bertie caught eating a baby?

Often, when you post something containing certain keywords (such as 'iPad'), you will almost immediately get a spam reply from an evil robot. Within seconds of posting this one, I got:

@rsynnott The only way I  made it through breast feeding was with this: [spam link redacted]

Oops. I'm, ah, not sure that my tweet was quite what the spammer was thinking of.

The latest weird search terms

As you no doubt know, I occasionally like to look at what innocent members of the general public are searching for when they happen upon this 'ere blog. Let us start.

Kevin Myers - By far the most common term used to find my blog of late. He's a very naughty boy who didn't do the research before trying to write about evolution in the Irish Independent.

Dictator of the month - Sadly, I'm only the second site listed for this on Google.

Baby otter - I had a picture of one here once. They're cute; far, far cuter than Kevin Myers or most dictators.

New keyboard design - Dell have an especially awful one.

Flash aaaa - A very sensible reaction.

Erlang game - Hello, Mike.

Nun jokes - Nuns are no joke.

Bachelor penguin - As with dictator of the month, I'm most disappointed not to be the first hit for this; I'm third. 

rickroll proxy erlang - Your guess is as good as mine.

iphone quick question in ibject life cycle - I like searches like this. They're asking Google if they can ask a quick question. How polite! Also, what's an ibject?

pictures of archimedes plutonium - My blog, for all your mad scientist photo needs!

robert synnott of maryhill - Sorry, no. I'm amused that there's someone who goes around referring to himself as 'Robert of Maryhill', though; very feudal.

why is rocket fuel so expensive - It isn't.

"paye anytime" shit - It's actually surprisingly non-awful for a government computer service.

"stephen green" "christian voice" gay .pdf - I expect noted mad person Stephen Green would resent being called gay, and/or an Adobe document format.

abfab ssh - Sorry, no. Would Queer as Folk telnet do?

bad dell keyboard design - It's enormously gratifying to discover that someone on the Internet agrees with me.

brian cowen has hacked fine gaels website - Google is a search engine, not a place for your bizarre conspiracy theories. Like Cowen could hack a website. He probably doesn't even know what a website is.

crowsfoot robert synnott - A quick Google tells me that a 25 year old Robert Synnott in some place in Canada was in an accident in a pickup truck. I assure you this wasn't me.

irradiated pet milk - What?!

is fake wrestling fun? - I can't imagine so.

jerry seinfeld insignificant piece of dust - The most amazing rant ever, from the Baby Shower episode.

komik politik - I suspect that this was an editorial cartoon in Pravda. If you read it, you were shot.

macs scare me - Another case of telling one's darkest secrets to Google, I think.

mp3 players nostalgia - Have they actually been around long enough to be nostalgic about?

my brain is going to fast - Kids, don't do drugs. Or if you must, stay off Google while doing them.

permasingle - I may actually have coined a word.

pic of a mean looking nun - Eep.

potato flavoured ice cream - Ugh.

priest conversation vulgar - Just about anything Ratzinger says.

radioactive snack foods - Uranios!

real cheerleading spreading - Much better than that fake cheerleading.

vulgar corporate jokes - Why did the filing clerk cross the office? To use the bathroom.

where do people on the dole get the money from to buy fags - Er, the dole, I would imagine.

world of warcraft christian blog - Ooh, two of the most annoying things on Earth in one! Three, if you count World of Warcraft.

yes prime minister, but what is it exactly that lesbians do it in bed - Sir Humphrey gets X-rated.

Politicians need to pay a bit more attention to their websites

You know how it is. You spend vast amounts of money on your political campaign, and vast amounts of time from your unpaid volunteers, and then you come to your website, and, well, it's only a website, right? Those computer-y people are all the same. No reason to spend much time or effort on it.

This is the only conclusion I can come to from the general state of political websites.

I'd like to take a couple of examples. First, Sarah Palin's distasteful target website which was taken down in the wake of the shooting of Gabrielle Griffords, presumably due to it being in rather poor taste to show an image of Griffords' congressional district in a rifle scope while listing her for replacement:

The website itself is done in Ruby on Rails, living on an Amazon EC2 machine, with the images also served from that machine. Now, the nature of this website, really, as far as I can see, is a shock site. It is intended to be passed around supporters to gawk at how great it is, and around civilised people to marvel at how awful Sarah Palin is. This means that it should expect serious traffic spikes, and that it should ideally be able to deal with this.

Of course, when the Griffords story hit, this was not the case. Within minutes the site slowed to a crawl, showed various Rails errors and nginx gateway errors, and then had its DNS records deleted. And why? Surely a large part of the reason was that it was a _dynamic_ site used for a purpose which could quite happily have been served by a static site. If it had simply been a series of HTML pages, with the images served from S3 or a CDN, then it would not have gone down remotely as easily. The site has no real dynamic content (unless Sarah logs in from her Blackberry to add new targets now and again) and would be far more easily scalable if it was static.

The second is Fine Gael's website. Now, Fine Gael is no stranger to website controversy, but they've perhaps hit a new low today; their new site has been hacked, apparently through an XSS exploit.

And then there was the US Republican Party website which had the amusing security issue where one could have a Flash version of Michael Steele gesture happily at pornography...

Politicians, your websites are not mere afterthoughts. You want to at least consider putting in a bit of effort into them, and maybe not farming them out to the lowest bidder. Otherwise, you end up looking very silly.

Google Texting (beta)

So, Google has admitted to two separate texting bugs in Android which can lead to SMS messages going to the wrong person (one opens an unexpected conversation when you select a conversation; the other just flat-out sends the message to the wrong person).

So, what happens next? I think that this could be the crisis to test Google's whole update model.

You see, currently, Android updates have to be, in almost all cases, implemented and authorised by both the phone manufacturer and the telecom. This frequently takes a long time, or does not happen at all; there are a lot of people stuck on Android 1.6 or 2.1.

Clearly, this sort of thing is more important than an OS update that adds more feature; it's a fix for a major flaw. If Google can't force manufacturers and telecoms to fix it in a timely fashion, they're going to seriously harm the reputation of their platform.

What happens next will also be an interesting dry-run for the inevitable day when a serious, critical security flaw is found in Android. Google really needs to be able to deal with this sort of thing without having to wait three months for Vodafone or whoever to approve their updates.

Reputation management in a digital age

Today, a US Representative, a US federal judge, and a number of others were shot in Arizona. The representative is in a critical condition in hospital, the others are dead. A person has been arrested in relation to the shooting.

There was, as you may remember, a bit of a fuss made a while ago about a bizarre tweet by Sarah Palin, in relation to the healthcare reform in the US, containing the phrase "Don't Retreat, Instead - RELOAD!" Palin's political action committee also produced a map of the US with target symbols over various Congressional districts, and a list of Democratic party representatives corresponding  to those districts, which can, at time of writing, be seen here. In addition, a site called takebackthe20.com was launched, with a similar map (the symbols looking a bit more sniper-rifle-y), and a separate page listing the representatives concerned. Gabrielle Giffords, the representative who was shot, featured on both lists.

I don't think that anyone is seriously claiming that Palin is responsible for the shootings, or even that it's terribly likely that the assassin was motivated by rhetoric from Palin and Giffords other opponents; however, it's clear, at least to me, that the maps, in particular, are in exceptionally poor taste; were in poor taste before the shooting and are pretty much horrific now.

The interesting thing is that they all may have briefly been removed. The Twitter posting was inaccessible to most for a period, as was the map in the Facebook posting. These are now accessible again. The takebackthe20 site remains inaccessible, and it is being claimed in the wonderful world of Twitter that it simply went down under load, and that it was not deliberately removed.

That may be half-true. I was keeping an eye on it as the story unfolded. At first, it was available, but periodically giving an nginx 500 error, which likely indicates that the underlying Ruby on Rails app was having capacity. Then it went into an interesting state where the front page, with the map with targets, was accessible, but the page listing the names of the representatives was replaced with a Ruby on Rails page missing error (a 404). This is interesting because, while a site may very well go down under load, it will not generally get into a state where part of it is available but other parts are giving a page missing error (as distinct from a 500 error or other error indicating failure to produce the page).

Currently, the site is unavailable for DNS reasons; the DNS servers that the domain is pointed at appear to have no record for it.

I'm reasonably convinced that, whatever about the Tweet and the other map, the takebackthe20 site _was_ modified to remove the offending page before going down entirely; this is not simply a capacity issue. I wonder, when it comes back, or if it comes back, will the page be restored?

UPDATE: The site is still running at IP address 184.73.247.82; it's just that there's no DNS record. You can see it by sending "Host: takebackthe20.com" in a request to that address, or changing your hosts file.

Terrifying Facebook ad of the day

 

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