software services

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SCALE 7x Keynote

March 17, 2009 in software services by bkuhn | No comments

Many people have been commenting on and/or asking about my keynote, When Software Is A Services, Is Only the “Network Luddite” Free? from Scale 7x in late February. There is finally a downloadable H264/MPEG-4 AAC version (114MB) available. Also, please note that the keynote is substantially similar to my Plone Conference Keynote, which was released as a podcast, if you want an audio-only version.

I’m working with the SCALE 7x organizers to see if I can get the video and audio of the keynote in a freer format. However, since the mp4 file linked above does play in vlc, I figured it’s worth getting it out to folks who are looking for it now.

There was also an article in Ars Technica that covered my keynote.

blogspam.net

January 9, 2009 in software services by evan | 1 comment

I was alerted by MJ Ray about this great new service for managing blog spam. BlogSpam.net is a gratis service for determining if comments on a blog page are spam or not. It was created by hacker Steve Kemp, announced on his blog on December 30th (“When the light is green, the trap is clean.”). It’s implemented with Free Software,  and as far as I can tell it complies with the Open Software Service Definition. It doesn’t seem to have any persistent data on the server side, so the Open Data requirements of the OSSD are met by default.

I’ve installed the blogspam WordPress plugin on controlyourself.ca and openmicroblogging.org, and it’s already caught about half a dozen spammy comments. It seems to be working really well, which I’m happy about.

I hope that as the software and the service matures, it continues to be aligned in goals with the Franklin Street Statement. I think there’s a great opportunity, with a shared service, to do distributed spam detection, either with Bayesian spam filtering or a fuzzy checksum service like DCC or Vipul’s Razor. If this happens, it’s going to be pretty important to make that accumulated data freely available.

I’m looking forward to the growth of this project, increased sophistication of the checks, and more plugins for other Free Software Web projects. And I hope we can get it installed here at autonomo.us, too!