On Thu, Dec 30, 2004 at 11:47:38PM +0100, derek holzer wrote:

Hi IOhannes and the list,

once again, I'd like to ask if anyone has backups of the pd.iem.at WIKKI pages somewhere. The imbiciles that scrubbed the *entire* WIKKI did a pretty thorough job of overwriting all the available previous versions of pages available there. I had two different pages for workshops I taught there: "PD.Balkania" and "Open Source Multimedia Tools @ Montevideo". It would be a real shame to lose that documentation... [considering the HD of my laptop which might have held my own copies of those docs died last week!]

http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://pd.iem.at/pdwiki/

Second, I'd like to know if anyone is maintaining that site/WIKKI. If not, I'll find another place to put public PD docs in the future.

thanks, d.

derek holzer wrote:

...

Looks like the pd.iem.at WIKKI pages got hacked alongside every other WIKKI on earth over the last week [including the one set up on electric-boogaloo.goto10.org/pdzilla for me and Aymeric's recent UK workshop series].

Are there backups of the pages which are older than the ones available on the web interface? Anyone going to update the PHP/WIKKI versions to keep this from continuing into infinity?

Defacing WIKKIs is like knocking over little old ladies in the street. I just can't imagine how anyone could have fun doing it...

d.

-- derek holzer ::: http://www.umatic.nl ---Oblique Strategy # 36: "Consult other sources -promising -unpromising"

---

PD-list@iem.at mailing list UNSUBSCRIBE and account-management -> http://iem.at/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/pd-list

ix wrote:

http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://pd.iem.at/pdwiki/

Thanks! I found a backup of PD.Balkania there. The other workshop page link goes someplace wrong, but at least I've recovered one.

I will echo once again Mathieu's echo of my echo to update the WIKKI software ;-)

have a good new year's, d.

On Fri, 31 Dec 2004, derek holzer wrote:

Taking a look, I can see that almost every day for at least a week now, each page of the WIKKI gets overwritten with a new mess of Chinese URLs. Kind of pointless to rebuild anything until this gets resolved...

Some time before I heard anything about defaced wikis, I've seen that Chinese spam on a completely unrelated wiki, which used to be at http://www.ntecs.de/wiki/euruko2004/show/HomePage/ and I don't know what happened to it... Possibly it was shut down because of spam excess and that they are thinking about solving the spam problem now...

However, the only other wikis I recall visiting (and a LOT) are the C2.com wiki and the Wikipedia, which are the two biggest wikis I know, were never affected by any such problem, as far as I remember.

The software used by Wikipedia is called Mediawiki (http://wikipedia.sourceforge.net/).

The software used by C2.com's is... I don't quite know what it's called... They started the site under the name "WikiWikiWeb" way before "wiki" became a noun, for the very good reason that, for a while, it was the only wiki in existence (in 1998 there was already loads of stuff on it). I remember it said that the software is written in Smalltalk, so I guess its availability depends on the availability of a compatible Smalltalk interpreter/compiler. This would deserve some research, especially wrt: is it secure nowadays, or are they just being lucky...

A third wiki I have used extensively (but not much in the last years) is http://rubygarden.org/ruby ... I hadn't visited it for a while, and now I notice that they have a page "PreventingWikiSpam" as the first link on the first page. Maybe we'd like to read it.

I don't know which software the RubyGarden uses, but have a look at: http://raa.ruby-lang.org/search.rhtml?search=wiki That's a lot of Wiki clones!

...

PS: I don't know whether I posted this one before, but this is a photo of when I showed PureData at the Europäische Ruby Konferenz 2004 (aka: euruko 2004) held in München last October.

http://www.ruby-doc.org/EuRuKo2004Pix/PICT0021.jpg http://www.ruby-doc.org/EuRuKo2004Pix/PICT0013.jpg

I originally stumbled upon that chinese spam a few months ago, while trying to update the pages about the Konferenz, on the closed-down wiki mentioned above. Grrr.

Mathieu Bouchard -=- Montréal QC Canada -=- http://artengine.ca/matju

Johannes M Zmoelnig wrote:

anyhow, i hope that i can find a backup of the site (there should be a rather old one...)

i have put the backup that i have made in 10/2004 up again (should be fairly recent) furthermore i have restricted the wiki-page to read-only for now.

this is not at all wikiwikilike, and should be changed as soon as possible.

personally i think, that it would probably be best to use puredata.org

another option would be to protect the wikipage with a password. while this would be very simple to do, i don't like it either, because we have a powerful cms at puredata.org - so why use yet another restriction mechanism.

are there any objections to moving the pdwiki to puredata.org and restricting access to members only ? of course, pd.iem.at/pdwiki could re-direct to the new site.

mfg.asd.r IOhannes

On Mon, 3 Jan 2005, Marc Lavallée wrote:

Spammers don't have fun, they're working.

right.

Mathieu Bouchard a écrit :

...

However, the only other wikis I recall visiting (and a LOT) are the C2.com wiki and the Wikipedia, which are the two biggest wikis I know, were never affected by any such problem, as far as I remember.

Because Wikipedia has a login, permissions and reviewers.

Yeah. I wonder how to deal with the fact that having logins with manually-approved registrations is cumbersome and is a deterrent to external contribution. (similar to why web sites don't finance themselves by charging 5 cents to visitors: micropayments may be a nice concept, but so many people don't even want to bother with it.)

I say "manually-approved registrations" because automated registrations can be circumvented too easily: just make a bogus account, then login, then cause the same trouble, in very little time. in a manual system, the result/effort ratio, the delay, and the feeling of being supervised, are factors that tend to repel spammers, as they switch to simpler targets, that is, other automated systems.

It explains how to disable Google page ranking.

Eeek. In my breakneck browsing, I forgot to even skim the page.

It probably helps,

I think it helps, but long-term only, and large-scale only: that is, if enough wiki people get into such a scheme, the wikis will become less attractive to spammers, and then just wait till the spammers realize it's not worth it.

but it doesn't solve security issues.

right.

2. Implementing login systems, Captchas, etc. means losing the fight and giving up.
3. Wikis are the essence of what the internet should be for me: free, open, accessible by anybody. "

I prefer a more balanced approach. Here's a excerpt from http://zwiki.org/GeneralDiscussion200307 " One of Wiki's key strengths is radical openness. One of Zope's is fine-grained, manageable security. "

I don't know enough Zope and afaik you're the Zope expert around here. I think this could be a topic at pdmtl#8 if only you were available enough to join us in such meetings just like you were last winter.

Mathieu Bouchard -=- Montréal QC Canada -=- http://artengine.ca/matju

Hallo, Mathieu Bouchard hat gesagt: // Mathieu Bouchard wrote:

I say "manually-approved registrations" because automated registrations can be circumvented too easily:

In my experience though it doesn't happen to often. At least not on my wiki, which allows non-approved, anonymous logins, but also requires them. This alone has stopped Spam on my site.

Ciao

Frank Barknecht _ ______footils.org__

Marc Lavallée wrote:

...

However, the only other wikis I recall visiting (and a LOT) are the C2.com wiki and the Wikipedia, which are the two biggest wikis I know, were never affected by any such problem, as far as I remember.

Because Wikipedia has a login, permissions and reviewers.

actually you dont have to login to edit wikipedia pages at all. they do track the ip address of those who make changes and can temporarily block that ip from editing, but that is pretty rare.