This post is for people who have been or will be given author privileges. It’s also an open thread to discuss whatever you like.
Those given author privileges at The Blackboard know that I protect the “admin” side of the blog using .htaccess. This means that after I grant someone author privileges, I need to figure out their IP address and add that to the list of IPs permitted access files in the “wp-admin” folder. All IPs not on this list are denied access by the server.
Adding the IPs to the list involves a small amount of effort but I’ve wanted to reduce the effort further. I’ve always promised authors I would make it easier to figure out their current IP addresses and now I have.
What I’ve done is:
- Added code to detect and display your IP on the login page. This displays below the login; I’ve blotted out my IP.
- Added code that will check whether you are in the list of banned IPs at project honeypot and inform me when a suspected spammer visits the login page. Spammers hit the login roughly twice a day. Now that I am informed, I can take action and block them. I currently do this manually
If you have been granted author privileges and you get an “internal error” or “bounce” page after correctly entering your username and password combination, use the back button to get your IP address, email me and let me know you had a problem. I’ll add your new IP address. (To those wondering: In the past the author and I resorted to hoping the IP on their email to me matched the IP used when accessing the blog or to my reading the IP off their most recent comment. BTW: I need to add my own IPs to the .htaccess file from time to time, but I never have any trouble figuring that out.)
For bloggers who might be thinking they’d like to figure out how to identify spammers and subsequently block them: Once this bit of code has been running a few weeks, I’m going to try to turn it into a plugin that not only identifies spammers hitting the login page, but blocks them in .htaccess automatically. That way, I won’t have to do it manually; neither would those who use the plugin.
Whether I can or can’t create a plugin will depend on whether WordPress has sufficiently useful hooks. I’m not sure it does.
For those wanting the conversation to return to climate change: this should be the final “blogging about blogging” type post for a while. 🙂
Camping this weekend
Down on the farm
Alcohol and bandages
May serve to keep me warm
Andrew
A plug-in that vets IP addresses before granting access to the wp-admin folder: seems unnecessary.
Instead, challenging the guest poster to solve a simple addition problem would be a much more secure approach.
Also, friendlier. Trust me!
feabqtcqy–
Watch out or I’ll start forcing you to learn your times tables.
BTW: I think I found my “hook”. Likely, I’ll be able to create a plugin that monitors who hits the login page, checks if they are listed as spammers or mail harvesters and automatically adds them to a site wide .htaccess block.
I don’t want anything to automatically block an IP unless they are a confirmed spammer. But really, there is no reason for people who aren’t authors to visit the login page. And nearly all the bad ‘bots do visit it!
I am rather interested in the rate at which CO2 is converted into organic carbon, and then sinks in oceans.
One of the things that has always puzzled me is why people have assumed that atmospheric/surface ocean concentrations are in some sort of equilibrium, as opposed to a steady state.
Looking at the marine biosphere I was always under the impression that photosynthetic organisms fixed CO2, releasing O2. On death or after being eaten and digested, a large fraction of the organic matter falls as ‘snow’. This falls, at about 75 meters per day.
http://www.aslo.org/lo/toc/vol_33/issue_3/0339.pdf
as it falls, it is pounced on by microorganism, who convert it into daughter cells and CO2, consuming oxygen.
Pretty soon all the O2 is gone, and the ocean becomes hypoxic.
The microorganisms then make it into daughter cells and methane and CO2.
Now we know that CO2 is being fixed at higher rates over the last decade and that O2 is disappearing from the ocean mixed layer more quickly than previously.
http://www2.mbari.org/~coletti/dropbox/Optode/Argo_Optode_Sensor_article.pdf
The simple model is that surface CO2 is converted to (CH2O), denuding the surface of CO2 and super-saturating it with O2. (CH2O) begins it fall to the bottom, as excreta and as dead organisms.
Much of the mass is intercepted and is converted firstly to CO2 and then CH4. The O2 and CO2 gradients should oppose each other. Where there is no oxygen, we should have high CO2 and vise versa.
If we accept that CO2 is removed from the surface waters by photsynthetic organisms and that O2 and biological organic matter are the products. Then we must accept that hypoxia indicates oxidation of biological organic carbon, and the production of CO2/CH4.
Thus, one cannot use an equilibrium model to estimate the partition of CO2 from the atmosphere into the oceans. Further, we cannot speak of transfer rates of atmospheric CO2 into the surface and thin into deep long term sequestration pools.
Finally, when we model the transfer of CO2 from the atmosphere we must account for the biotic mobilization of CO2 at the surface, its rapid movement into the depths where it can be remobilized upwards as CO2/CH4 or downward, into a true sink, in the form of mineralized organic carbon.
So instead of just thinking of the 150 GtC in the marine muddy sediments, we should also ask where the 20-30 million GtC of marine kerogen came from and its effect on atmospheric sculpting.
why people have assumed that atmospheric/surface ocean concentrations are in some sort of equilibrium, as opposed to a steady state.
In chemistry and physics (and in climate science), an “equilibrium” is generally a dynamic steady state, in which fluxes in each direction balance each other out.
DocMartyn,
Nice to see that you haven’t changed your mind, even after I showed you that this hypothesis is factually incorrect. Most of the ocean NEVER becomes hypoxic at any depth. The minimum oxygen concentration is somewhere in the water column, but far above the sea floor (in some places minimum oxygen concentration is less than 500 meters from the surface). Oxygen concentration increases with depth below the minimum concentration. Nearly all the ‘rain’ of organic carbon is oxidized to CO2 long before reaching the ocean floor.
When do we find out if we have been granted author privileges, or if we will be blocked as spammers? I am afraid I will fall into the latter category, with Bruce, illya, and the long-eared rodentt (sic).
SteveF,
The Texas crutch worked as advertised. I hope this isn’t my last post. Put in a good word with lucia for me. I would be willing to stick to recipes.
Lucia, could I ask why you are using wordpress.org instead of the hosted service? Which seems a lot easier. I guess you will still get attempted hacks, but given strong passwords changed frequently…? And anyway, is .org any more secure?
Michel–
I”m using a hosted service. WordPress can be used at wordpress.org or self-hosted. I do the latter.
org is less trouble, but it has fewer options for editing comments, moderating comments or laying in things like the betting script. That’s why I self-host. But it means that, to some extent, I’m the one who has to watch for ‘bots. Mind you, Dreamhost actually blocks a lot of them. The difficulty is no one can block them all.
The hacks aren’t all trying to break into wordpress. They are trying to do a range of things:
1) Leave comments containing links to increase their google rank.
2) Hack into word press to inject links into blog posts.
3) Harvest email addresses so they can sell them to email spammers.
4) Hijack accounts so they can use them to send spam email.
etc.
I’m sure the do that at .org accounts– but in that case, WordPress.org is the one who watches out for the load issues.
Don Montfort
People who want to write guests posts request, then I send them an author log-in. If you are one, you know. When they post, you see “guest” in blue in the corner of the post.
To write a guest post, you need to be able to access
rankexploits.com/musings/wp-admin (broken link to dissuade bots from visiting.)
the /wp-admin is a ‘directory’ or ‘folder’. When you visit that, you see the panel that lets you enter blog posts. Depending on your level, you can moderate comments and generally wreck mayhem. I’m pretty sure realclimate.com/wp-admin is where the guy who broke into Real Climate pre-climategate got into!
The .htaccess file prevents nearly everyone from getting in my wp-admin area. That is, you can’t get into any address that starts:
rankexploits.com/musings/wp-admin/anything-else….
But that block doesn’t prevent you from getting into
rankexploits.com/musings/anything_other_than_wp-admin
Meanwhile, I have a separate block that keeps a small list of spammers off of ‘rankexploits.com’ entirely. If you were blocked by that, you’d know it. You would see a “forbidden” page. It’s unmistakable.
Actually, I screwed up htaccess for 3 minutes this morning and everyone was forbidden for 3 minutes. That included me. I should have taken a screen shot for you! 🙂
Don Monfort,
“The Texas crutch worked as advertised. I hope this isn’t my last post. Put in a good word with lucia for me. I would be willing to stick to recipes.”
I think that was SteveE not SteveF. I never have used the Texas crutch.
I thought that this link would serve as the basis for an interesting guest post:
http://sites.google.com/site/climateadj/ocean_variance
It’s basically some pretty pictures I generated of annual ocean temperature variances by latitude and depth, with comparisons between ARGO and the models.
#83672,
Lucia, Are you and Michel determined to confuse the rest of us?
I think you are talking about WordPress.com? WordPress.org is where one downloads the open-source version of WP, it’s not a hosting venue.
http://en.support.wordpress.com/com-vs-org/
Thanks, lucia. You keep a nice blog here. (But could you ban the posters with only one letter in their last names? They are confusing me:)
SteveF,
What are you guys from Burma or someplace? What’s with the one letter surnames?
Anyway, this is what I am talking about. The ‘stall’, and how to beat it. It works:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/craig-goldwyn/physicist-cracks-bbq-mystery_b_987719.html?view=print&comm_ref=false
The first useful article ever, in the huffpost.
The ‘stall’, and how to beat it. It works: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/….._ref=false
.
OK, that’s one great article!
Chuckles–
I think I’ll wait a year, return, edit my comment to say “.com” and then insert an inline comment asking you what you are talking about.
Oh… no.. wait…. Someone else is accused of that sort of thing.
The straight answer is: You’re right. I always get confused about which is .com and which is .org. But I self host.
Don Monfort,
I use SteveF simply because that is what I started using here at the Blackboard years ago. My name is Steve Fitzpatrick, which is what I use if I comment at other sites. I am from the States… never even been to Burma, though I have been pretty close a few times (Thailand).
The openness of this thread serves as an excuse for me to plug Razib Khan, one of the best bloggers/essayists out there. If your tastes run to genetics, history, anthropology, and human biodiversity.
Today’s short post at GNXP is Australia on Fire.
I doubt Pielke Sr. would be surprised by this notion.
Chuckles,
A blog? which?
J Ferg, A wise man once said ‘Terseness is not enough’.
i.e. Er, you lost me, what’s the question?
🙂
Lucia:
LOL. That was a hilarious thread, made even more humorous by the enfeebled attempts of JMurphy and hengistmcstone to defend Cook’s behavior.
I thought this was hilarious (I’ve cut comment out of thread that are related, thought I retained the temporal order, and I reformatted slightly…see the link for the original order and formatting):
Take home message, if you defend the indefensible for too long, after a while you start looking like a total fool. Even without help.
Chuckles,
You mentioned you have a blog? How may I find it?
I fear i might have become infected with bugs’ bug – not quite enough words to convey the thought.
J Ferg, Ah, I follow. So far I’ve resisted the temptation to inflict my confused rantings and ramblings on the general public, on the basis that many have suggested it would fall under the ‘cruel and unusual punishment’ clauses.
What I do have is lots of servers and computers, and several decades of fiddling with such animals. And lots of fair weather friends and family who are more than happy to host stuff like blogs, e-commerce, galleries, local govt sites etc. on them, as long as it doesn’t cost any money, and there’s a sort of ‘lifetime support’ guarantee…
So my blogging contributions could be considered as ‘pushing the wind through the trombones’, rather than ‘playing in the first violins’
Other than that, my blog contribs are pithy comments here and there, and occasional wacko trivia and humour to obscure British sites
🙂
Carrick–
Some of these people need to read the ‘rule book’ called “torts law”.
In some states, distorting what is said while using accurate quotes may be subject to a tort called “false light”. Whether what some editor at SkS is doing could amount to this is an open question. Even if it does, it’s unlikely someone– especially a pseudonymn would sue.
But you could scroll down here:
http://books.google.com/books?id=TlEoKJOyi0kC&pg=PA354&lpg=PA354&dq=%22false+light%22+out+of+context+quote&source=bl&ots=2DgxPVSFzT&sig=yG5_H6rudoo0NOeLFBLqXd8EZ30&hl=en&ei=Fl-YTqDMEKijsQKJyLzvBA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CBoQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false
To find “false light by distortion”.
Or read this:
http://www.rcfp.org/newsitems/index.php?i=6441
It seems to me that editing old comments and post, changing the surrounding quotes and the main blog post to make a particular commenter look bad while making the editor look good, strikes me as a distortion. Someone could get angry, and if they are litigious, a lawsuit could ensue in some American states. I have no idea what laws in Australia permit.
Even if a case was thrown out of court, someone lodging a suit would be mighty inconvenient.
Lucia says – “Some of these people need to read the ‘rule book’ called “torts lawâ€.”
Now we know why the Rabbit exists. Some legal beagle told him how to avoid the pack.
Lucia, in my opinion once you’re started worrying about the legal consequences of your actions, you’ve likely gone well past the thin gray line demarcating ethical vs unethical behavior.
Truthfully it says almost as much about the blog that its denizens are so willing to go forth and defend this type of behavior as the original actions of the editor himself.
Carrick–
Oh. Somethings turn out to be torts and you wouldn’t have thought it. Certainly, in the past, some illegal activities were things we are horrified to consider illegal. (Example: Criticizing the King of England might have been illegal way back. Americans think it’s nuts to suggest one should not be able to criticize a king, government, csar, strongman, what have you. )
But quite often, things that are torts are also things that anyone ought to know is a “no-no”. Editing comments to make someone’s argument look cuckoo and yourself look good is one of those things. It’s hard to understand how any third party can defend that sort of behavior.
Lucia,
“It’s hard to understand how any third party can defend that sort of behavior.”
I think it is easy to understand; it falls under the “ends justify the means” rubric so commonly used by those 100% convinced they are completely right and anyone who disagrees with them completely wrong (and selfish, evil, stupid, corrupt, etc.). IMO, Skeptical Science and their minions make perfect examples of those who hold this POV, and it shows in their behavior. Like I said once before, they jumped the shark a long time ago.
It’s revealing that Cook didn’t instead simply annotate or footnote the old posts and comments along the lines of ” further study has revealed…” or “Commenter Ferguson is wrong for a couple of more reasons, or he turns out to be correct see ref.”
Had he done this, he would have added credibility to his site that few alarmist sites can muster. It might have been even better had he set up two archives, one with annotation and one as was.
As it is, his site cannot be thought of anything other than a propaganda outlet.
Isn’t it also the case that some sites edit comments in real time? Does RealClimate do that? And isn’t it the case that such edits sometimes curtail or make silly what might otherwise have been a cogent point?
One American has learned that the rest of world is not as horrified as we think they should be.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-15246247
j ferguson,
One problem he has is that he wants something that isn’t quite a wiki, isn’t quite a blog and isn’t quite a web site.
Wiki software would archive old changes and let people debate in the background. It wouldn’t permit live comments that display below each post. This is suitable if you don’t really want to post content that is unreviewed by the wiki-process. It also makes everything traceable (though confusing to the those who aren’t of the wiki-editing persuasion.)
A static web site would just be articles, but would have no comments at all. It also wouldn’t archive. Likely, it would get very little traffic because the ability to comment draws traffic since people like to debate or comment on the main post.
Blog software permits comments. The software lets the editor modify things whenever he wants– but really, once people have commented, you ought to do the sensible thing and recognize that you can’t just change the article above the comments in a way that makes the comments no longer match the content. Or, if you change the article you ought to flag the date of the change in the article and the comments so people know. Or… well… you ought to do something.
Mind you, it’s likely that every single blog author who has written a long time, has at one time or another done something someone might say makes no sense. If it’s not a habit, they likely even forgot they did it.
For example: If someone asked me if I have ever deleted a not-obviously-spam comment years after it was posted, I’d say I don’t remember ever doing so. But…. maybe, if I wracked my brain, it would turn out someone emailed me, asked me to delete something they wrong, and I did. Don’t know. Deleted is deleted. On the other hand, if I find an obviously spam comment in a post advertising some sort of pharmaceutical…. I delete it! I’ve also know for sure that once, my dreamhost account had an injection attack and every post on this blog and my knitting blog has a link inserted. In fact, every html and txt file at dreamhost had a link inserted. I deleted those.
(I found out when one of my blog visitors told me his pc was alerting him to the possibility my blog wasn’t safe!)
But what Cook seems to be doing doesn’t fall under deleting links that were injected by spammers and doesn’t seem to be deleting stuff after someone asked him to delete a post.
J ferguson,
I believe the correct answers are yes, yes, and yes. I wonder if these guys (and gals) never read Orwell, or if they just didn’t understand his message.
It’s quite common in certain circles, very much the approved technique for ‘narrative’ and ‘message’.
A good example from earlier today here –
http://www.newssniffer.co.uk/articles/445492/diff/0/1
Note the message and narrative being ‘aligned’. 12 versions in a day.
Re: SteveF (Oct 14 12:06),
I think the most important effect of aggressive moderation of comments at RealClimate (and probably other blogs) is more subtle.
If you have a attaboy! to add to a discussion there, you can type it out in the comments-submission box and hit “submit”, in the knowledge it’s likely to pass moderation promptly.
On the other hand, if you have something critical to contribute — pointing out an error or an ellipsis, say — you’ll think twice before putting in the effort to compose a comment. Cogent dissents often fail moderation. Many of those that pass, do so with hours or days of delay. They’re then inserted into the thread according to the original time stamp, where they often go un-noticed. Moderators sometimes also snip dissenting comments, or embellish them with snarky inline commentary.
Interestingly, many nitwit dissenting comments seem to zip through RC’s moderation.
When I’ve been interested in having a serious discussion on a scientific issue, this anti-intellectual process has acted as a repellent.
Bug or feature?
Terrific job documenting the revisionist bias at SkS. Any direct evidence it’s Mike’s hand?
This is another exchange (from late September) that now seems laughable, given the new context (the October crisis):
http://rankexploits.com/musings/2011/skeptical-science-digitization-problems/#comment-82105
Here, defenders of SkS (JMurphy, Robert, dana1981) try to clarify to real skeptics what their mission is. They couldn’t bring themselves to admit that their job is to simply defend the consensus, damn the facts.
What I really want to know is what the journalists who use these services think of the journalistic integrity at SkS. Which of the MSM is going to be first to admit they find it disturbing?
AMac (Comment #83761),
I don’t bother with trying to comment at Real Climate either. As you note, the few comments I have posted tend to be in moderation for hours, no matter how polite and on topic they are. The stated prohibitions against personal attacks are never applied to their mindless minions, so any reasoned dissenting comment that does pass moderation is subjected to abuse… to which you can’t reply in kind. It just isn’t worth the hassle, and I don’t think that is an accident.
.
All protestations to the contrary, theirs is a global warming advocacy site, pure and simple. I do not doubt that the bloggers are sincere in their desire to bring about draconian reductions in fossil fuel use. I just don’t think they can (or want to!) entertain any doubt about the need for immediate draconian action. They don’t want anyone else entertaining that doubt either, and they do what they can with moderation to make sure that does not happen in comments.
bender, yes that is the exemplar for how Skeptical Science functions. And you forgot Tom Curtis, he made a number of wrong-headed posts on this blog and on the referenced thread skeptical science. And like most of that group doesn’t know what he’s talking about, and has such a weak grasp of the science issues, most substantive comments frankly went over his head.
We saw a lot of hand-waving and excuse making, but even Robert couldn’t quite get himself to admit that the bias in HadCRUT may not matter, and the method used by GISTEMP may actually be introducing more positive bias than the small negative bias in the HadCRUT method.
After I had pointed them to the appropriate references, I did not see a single one of them admit that not only does the NCDC reconstruction use infilling (one of the many erroneous criticisms put forward by these “highly educated purveyors of climate truth”), but that the NCDC method is technically superior (“empirical orthogonal functions + optimal interpolation”) to the heuristic-based 1200-km average performed by GISTEMP.
I did make a couple of comments on their blog, but recognized it would be a wasted effort, if not for any other reason, from the simple fact that I have no guarantee that anything I wrote would survive John Cook’s edits, nor that it would survive in a form that in an intellectually honest fashion retained the original context of my comments.
The last I looked, they were still lying about NCDC not infilling missing regions. I have no patience for dishonesty, so my strategy was to let them talk for a long time, and really paint themselves into a corner, where it becomes impossible for them to prevaricate their way out of it.
Carrick,
Which is when they start to edit the offending comments out of existence. 😉
Lucia is cleverer than me, she took a screen shot of her comment.
As far as I can see, none of them ever understood:
1) the significance of starting a linear trend fit with an outlying point (2000).
2) the significance of using the same baseline when presenting the data.
3) applying the same method to data and models for analysis and fitting (mean of model, but only one version of the data series? and the one that just happens to be an outlier compared to the others?))
By the way, after Robert made this claim:
I pointed out that:
Any peep from Robert to say maybe he’d overstated his case?
Nada.
SteveF:
Duh! How silly of me!!!
If they paint themselves into a corner, they just knock a hole in the wall and say that door to the bedroom was always there. Old photos get doctored to show the door was always present too, of course. The magic of the internet and the judicious knife of the righteous editor.
“Any peep from …?”
.
Thou shalt make no concessions to any skeptic. Ever. Amen.
O The weekend came and sadly went
No more slumbers in my cocoon tent
The beer’s been drank, the songs all sung
The line is empty where my underwear hung
Now it’s back to (f*in) work, so until next year
God Bless and we love ya, friends and farm so dear
Andrew
This one I have to share. I was over at Science of Doom and someone claimed Nasif Nahle as a reliable source. As I have tangled with Nasif multiple times over several years, I couldn’t let that pass. The poster then replied:
If you want a laugh, scroll down to the section on Induced emission and look at the equation in point 3.
Iav = h 1/4Ï€ [(Aul / Bul) / (gl *Blu / gu * Bul) e^hν/kT – 1 (Modest. 2003)
Besides failing to close the bracket, what he’s done is take this perfectly good equation from his reference and multiplied it by Planck’s constant for no apparent reason. But the real kicker is in the paragraph describing the equation parameters.
I must be out of my depth. I always thought that k in the kT term was the Boltzmann constant. Silly me.
DeWitt,
Ah yes, I’ve tangled with Prof Nahle too. Here, and in subsequent comments, I am trying unsuccessfully to explain why Watts/hr are not an appropriate unit for power. He wouldn’t budge.
Open thread:
Where is Atmoz? Some years ago, I jostled with him that it was highly probable to have 15 years of no warming (RSS dataset). Well, it has arrived (1997-2011) with more cooling as far as the eye can see. Anyone know the answer as to when this farce will be falsefied (18 yrs, 20 yrs, etc. of no warming)? I know Lucia has been trying to validate model predictions versus actual data, etc.
Chris:
Have a look at this post.