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I rolled back some spam from
Adrien? (94.179.251.118) on How to get started
Carol? (94.179.251.118) on Community
Carol? (94.179.251.118) on About
Melan? (94.179.251.118) on HowTo
Thanks!
According to the logs, you missed one: (infinity,1)-categories of (infinity,1)-sheaves also got hit by that IP. Tim reverted one change on that page, I just reverted the second.
(As a note to anyone else reading this: it's useful to use the "see changes" to spot just what the spammers have done)
@all Spam on blob homology. (bottom of page). from (74.55.175.27) at 06:00:36. (my time I presume)
Thanks to you all for taking care of that.
Can we see a particular reason why there might be this unusual high amount of spam now? Is this related to Andrew’s switching off of the IP block recently? (which, by the way, has been and is a huge alleviation for me)
I have cleaned up that entry.
@Andrew Does my message give you enough to track this down quickly or would other observations/information help you?
Tim, that’s plenty, thanks.
Urs, look at the dates. Eric’s original message was from April! Tim’s report is a single instance and is the only one (as of this morning) from that IP.
I am always suspicious of Anonymous Coward, and so I check quite a lot of them for spam, but there has not been that much lately. (I hope I am not ‘speaking too soon’!)
Urs, look at the dates.
Oh dear. ;-)
I spoke too soon:
FAQ
Revised on October 16, 2010 05:29:59 by Anonymous Coward (74.55.175.27)
The same links but not all together.
I have deleted the four items, but please check as someone is obviously playing silly b….rs (as they say)!
(Edi: Found some more on Home Page. Time 5.57 but otherwise the same site.)
Just checked the logs. You caught them all as of this morning. Any more from that IP and I’ll block it.
These things do seem to go in waves; they seem to do about three or four pages in a go. Or maybe they do three or four and then I get fed up and block the IP.
Spam sighted
http://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/Sandbox+%3E+SVG
bottom of page:
October 29, 2010 06:58:55 by Anonymous Coward (204.152.215.132)
Yes, I’m a suspicious b*****d!!! and I do not like spammers!
I got rid of it.
Spam hit again: Revised on October 29, 2010 11:02:06 by Anonymous Coward (112.202.99.198)
Same place. I will delete the spam.
Thanks.
I’m beginning to get a bit fed up of the ’foxy propaganda’ people (that was the second lot again, not sure about the first lot).
Please check:
http://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/diff/closed+category
There has been a post from Archimedes!!!! The change is to the Eilenberg Kelly article details. The link does not seem to go to anywhere useful, but I’m not sure. (It might infringe copyright so ?????????)
The link looks like it goes to a file-sharing service, but I’m not going to click on the ’request download ticket’ button, because I don’t trust the link. I would remove this, firstly because I don’t think we should be linking to file-sharing sites of dubious origin (or copyright-grey areas generally) and second people may walk into something malicious in good faith, thinking it is ’nLab endorsed’.
I’ve rolled the page back.
That is a very useful link at a legitimate site, which didn’t try to put anything more on my computer that the nLab itself does. It’s certainly not spam in any sense of the term, even the overly broad ‘anything off-topic’ sense. Therefore, I will discuss it in a different thread.
Ok - good idea.
An old spammer is back! blob homology also FAQ. They aren’t very inventive.
Revised on November 6, 2010 04:56:14 by Anonymous Coward (174.37.16.81)
and Revised on November 6, 2010 06:16:02 by Anonymous Coward (174.37.16.81)
Spam ahoy!
Revised on November 12, 2010 06:27:00 by Anonymous Coward (74.55.175.27)
Same places as usual FAQ and Blob.
I have deleted the FAQ instance but have, for the moment, left the other. The spammer is getting more ingenious. fort worth occurs three times but once with a lead in phrase!
I have not found any other hits, but Andrew or Toby may be able to do a search. The Blob attack is at 05.57.
I’ve reverted the one at Blob, and have added that IP to the barred list.
According to the database, the only hits by that IP today were blob homology and FAQ.
@ Tim
When the last edit was spam, you can remove it easily by these steps:
Here I’m assuming that only the last edit was spam, but there is an easy generalisation to the case where the last edits were spam.
I notice that you sometimes include extra spaces and blank lines introduced by the spammer, so you’re probably finding and deleting it by hand, so hopefully this will help.
Toby: You answered a question that I had wanted to ask! Thanks.
Spam on home page and on SVG sandbox. Note that on the second of these there are at least 3 links that have been added. (I have left it there for the moment.) Note the sources of the two attacks have different numbers. Have either attacked previously?
Neither IP has been seen previously.
I wonder if anyone can think of a legitimate reason that the words “fort worth” should be in the nLab? If not, maybe we should add the phrase to our list of “bad words”! (I’m not all that serious)
A superficial search finds several universities in Fort Worth, but no research institutions that do mathematics.
I think that it would be a good idea to put the list of forbidden words on the wiki somewhere. Spambots won’t read it, but it could be handy for humans trying to diagnose their problems. (I remember when I was unable to write ‘specialise’ because it contains ‘cialis’, but Jacques fixed that for me.)
Spam attack on the nlab. All pages have been taken over by a page showing a girl plus a list of shopping links. it looks like a student project test page, but there does not seem to be any indication of the provenance.
The personal webs seem to have been attacked too. It looks as though the entire Instiki installation has been taken over.
Aaaaggghhhh!!!! Horrifying.
The Azimouth site is hosted on, I think, the same machine but is not hit. I have e-mailed Jacques but as it is Sunday it may be some time before he sees any messages.
here is a reply from Jacques: On Nov 28, 2010, at 11:44 AM, Jacques Distler wrote:
[tin-can:~/instiki] distler% nslookup ncatlab.org
Non-authoritative answer: Name: ncatlab.org Address: 64.74.223.42
[tin-can:~/instiki] distler% nslookup 64.74.223.42 ** server can’t find 42.223.74.64.in-addr.arpa.: NXDOMAIN
Something tells me that’s not your normal IP address.
Looks like DNS hijacking, to me. Actually, I take that back.
Looks more like you forgot to pay your hosting fees.
Jacques
Never attribute to malice something that can be explained by mere incompetence.
Further discussion at:
http://www.math.ntnu.no/~stacey/Mathforge/nForum/comments.php?DiscussionID=2204
Thanks. I was worried more by ’student exuberance’ than by malice. I had noticed that the date was the anniversary!!! All’s well…
Personal sidetrack: I hear that Norway is warmed than Wales at present. In mid-Wales, we have had -18 degrees!! Snow in November etc. Look at the BBC news website if you want more info. The North East of the UK has been badly hit.
Parts of Norway, maybe. We’re hovering around the -15 mark, it was -18 when we woke up this morning. Too cold to go out and enjoy the local skating rink (a school floods its playground). And for those who wonder about such things, it is officially a cold day in Hell.
Google, maybe?
It seems that the old 204.152.215.132 is renewing his/her attacks (in FAQ and in blob homology, both from Anonymous Coward (204.152.215.132)). Deleted both.
Well spotted. That’s the second and third from this IP so time to block it, I deem.
New spam on homepage. I have left it there for the moment.
Proper link: HomePage. Really, “I want to sell my diamond” and “attract women”?? Not a good look. I’m rolling it back. The IP address is 173.208.45.178
@David Sorry about the link! I was going fast!
@ Tim
Your link works now!
I can not connect to the nlab now. It returns The connection to the server was reset while the page was loading.
It works now for me.
Originally I did not want to have email public within nForum (when it lists members), to avoid spam, but today I wanted to change that nForum account preference. So I went to my account and checked the box for email publicity. But it failed:
A fatal, non-recoverable error has occurred
Technical information (for support personel): Error Message An error occurred while attempting to update the global identity data. Affected Elements
UserManager.SaveIdentity();The error occurred on or near: You have an error in your SQL syntax; check the manual that corresponds to >your MySQL server version for the right syntax to use near ’=” WHERE UserID = ’10” at line 1
For additional support documentation, visit the Lussumo Documentation website at: lussumo.com/docs
Fixed. Thanks for the bug report.
Incidentally, your email should only be visible to other registered users of the nForum, not to the whole wide world.
your email should only be visible to other registered users of the nForum, not to the whole wide world
Good! But I changed now to visible, the preference. Now it saved without en error message. But when I list “members” it still lists my name with email “secret” unlike for Toby and Urs.
I also see Zoran’s address as secret.
I see your address both in the “members list” and on your account page (and this is when I’m logged in as me, not as administrator, so I have no special privileges). Maybe the page has been cached in your browsers?
Well, on the account page I see the email address. I reloaded the members page and still nothing there. Edit: now I entered this new entry and looked into members page again, and it clearly enlarged the number of my nForum comments from 1875 to 1876 so it is not from the cache (still no email there).
Zoran - I can see your email fine.
Does it behave any differently if you click on your name at the top of a message as opposed to clicking on the Account tab?
It is possible that I’m misremembering the settings I chose. It may be that only members of the steering committee or the “librarians” are able to see people’s email addresses in the members list. The “members list” is handled by an extension so it has a separate set of permissions to the account tab. I agree that it makes only a little difference to have them visible in the account tab but not in the members list (security by obscurity, bleugh) so next time I’m changing some settings I’ll make those more consistent.
(Note this is a bit conjectural - I need to log in as the administrator to check the actual value of these settings)
How do I see the membership list? By clicking on names above posts I see that I am a “Browser”, Zoran and Tim are “Researcher”s, and Andrew is a “Steering Committee”.
I that why I can’t find the membership list?
EDIT: From Zoran’s response just below, I as a “Browser” class member do not have a blue “Members” tab at the top of my pages. “Researcher”s such a Zoran DO have such a button.
There is a blue button on the top of this page saying “members”.
I also see Zoran’s address if I click on his name, but not on the member list (which is not cached, by the same evidence as Zoran cited); the same goes for Andrew and Tim. In Rod’s case, I see no address either way; in my case, I see an address either way. (This is logged in as me, which does have special priveleges, but since I see some things and not others, that probably doesn’t matter.)
Tim, wrong thread!
(Actually, most of this discussion has been on the wrong thread - this one is titled “Spam” but is now about how public ones email address is.)
New spam at filtered topological space. Not one that I have seen before. I have deleted it.
I noted pdf books the other day. It does nothing, but is strange.
The same person spammed at Boman’s theorem.
Well spotted. Who needs a spam filter when you’re around?
We haven’t seen the IP that did “filtered topological space” and “Boman’s theorem” before. I’ll check the logs tomorrow to see if they hit any others. “pdf books” is just weird, I blanked it and renamed it to spam 5.
pdf books looks like somebody testing instiki’s slideshow feature (which we don’t use). Why should it be spam? It just ought to have been named slideshow sandbox or something.
I know that somebody actually looked at the slideshow version, since it was available to me via the cache bug.
Borderline, I guess. I checked the IP and it doesn’t resolve to anything which raises flags in my book (and bizarre confused metaphors). The syntax might have been copied from somewhere, rather than done deliberately (the spammers seem to know that we use Markdown, for example). I don’t think that we want the nLab to be used as an instiki testing ground: they can go to the instiki instiki for that if they want. It’s one thing for regular contributors to try out features, but another for random people. So whilst not officially spam or linking anywhere, I don’t like it. But I don’t feel strongly enough that if you want to rename it “slideshow sandbox” then I’ll move it back or anything.
I did that, and I restored the redirect from the old name, in case the Coward returns, but I left spam 5 itself unredirected so we can use it again.
I agree that we are the wrong place for testing, unless by a user of our Lab (who hasn’t noticed this discussion) who wants to use slideshows here. The source probably was all copy-and-pasted, except the word “set theory”; other than that, it’s just a template. If the Coward later comes along and put in a list of PDF books on set theory and other relevant topics, then we can see whether it works as a slideshow (I’m guessing not but could be surprised), doesn’t violate the policy against linking to illegal material (which could go either way), and gets properly linked from online resources etc. Conversely, if they (the same IP or what seems to be the same person) adds links to general file-sharing sites or something, then we can move it back to spam 5.
It’s only been a day, after all, so we don’t really know what the Coward intends or intended to do.
Well spotted. I’ll block this IP when I’m next logged in to the server.
More topologizing filterRevised on January 26, 2011 09:27:25 by Anonymous Coward (178.94.75.122) plus another in Sandbox I suspect. Yep!
one chudson? wanted to sell you "keen shoes" at ETCS. Buried, now.
Well caught. This is the zbsports again, but from a new IP address. Maybe I should look in to whether or not it is possible to add zbsports to the “banned words” file. Can anyone think of a legitimate use of zbsports? Is there some category that I’m unaware of?
Even if there is, the spam filter won’t catch that. It won’t even catch links to its article at ZbSp orts (note space).
Spam ahoy! There was spam on Sandbox>SVG. It was signed! I removed it.
We’ve seen that IP a couple of times before. I’ll add it to the block list next time I’m on the server.
The previous edit (#30) was also spam; I reverted that too.
SPAM AT CAFE: http://golem.ph.utexas.edu/category/2009/01/nlab_general_discussion.html#c036999
IN THE SAME TIME THE CAFE DOES NOT LET ME POST THE REMARK THAT THIS IS A SPAM AS MY PREVIEW DOES NOT DO JAVASCRIPT. SO WHAT ? IF I CAN PREVIEW SUBMITION BOXES THAT IS ENOUGH FOR ME. SPAMMERS CAN POST WHILE BROWSERS NOT SET TO JAVASCRIPT CAN NOT, DESPITE THE FACT THAT THE FORMS WORK NICELY.
Hi Zoran - are you using the new Firefox4 RC? Using it I had problems with math.stackexchange saying I had javascript turned off when it was turned on, also mathoverflow wouldn’t let me log in with OpenID. I can post a comment to the cafe ok though.
Spam again at blob homology. I have removed it.
Why does “blob homology” keep getting spam? I can understand pages like the HomePage and the FAQ, but blob homology???
Spam on the Sandbox>SVG. Removed!
You also need JavaScript to post to the Lab. So if the Cafe complains but the Lab lets you post, then there’s a bug somewhere.
IMHO (as a native English (not Anglo-American) speaker) : as we talk of the nLab as if it were a place, ’in’ seems a perfectly appropriate term to use. Even if, to use the image from the homepage, we think of this as our lab book, you make an entry in the Lab book, not ’on’ it. (I humbly suggest, Zoran, that you tell the wikipedia maintainers that they do not know what they are on about. (You could probably put it in a stronger form, keeping it, of course, ’decent’ ’load of rubbish’ seems a suitable term!:-)) (By the way is anyone going to write a stub for blablabla?)
I tend to say “on”; I’m not sure exactly why. I certainly see that “in” has a claim to be just as correct.
Thanks, both!
This paragraph got eaten up by the feature we discussed before (just giving an example)
An affine morphism of schemes is a relative version of the affine scheme: given a scheme , the canonical morphism is affine iff is an affine scheme. By the basics of spectra, every morphism of affine schemes corresponds to a morphism of rings. The affine morphism of general schemes is the one which is locally of that form:
Can I suggest that we transfer any further discussion to a different thread, and reserve this one for reporting and commenting on Spam.
Spam on the Sandbox>SVG. Removed! (someone thinks that putting the links in the middle of text is going to hide it from us! I found three spam links by hand. Perhaps someone can check through electronically for others (and possibly elsewhere in other entries.)
Josh http://golem.ph.utexas.edu/category/2010/10/an_invitation.html#comments is a SPAM. Please remove.
There was new spam on philosophy. I deleted it.
Strange empty entry appeared Towards an enumerative geometry of the moduli space of curves. %09
The other day, an anonymous coward started an entry Motivation for Sheaves and typed in one word ’cohomology’ and then left. Cohomology is not spam, but I think we should not leave the entry like that as it may lead to others doing the same thing.
Cohomology is not spam
I think this should be our “quote of the day”! If Urs had been writing the script for Monty Python then I suspect that it might have gone:
Egg, chips, and cohomology. Egg, cohomology, and cohomology. Cohomology, cohomology, and cohomology.
Or more like:
Egg, chips in a cohesive (oo,1)-topos. Egg, cohesive (oo,1)-topos in a cohesive (oo,1)-topos, cohesive (oo,1)-topos and cohesive (oo,1)-topos in a cohesive (oo,1)-topos
, and Oxford commas :P
Ah! The esoteric depths of English grammar (or is this grammar here?)
That’s motivation for sheaves. I changed its name to motivation for sheaves > history, replaced its contents with < [[motivation for sheaves]], and added [[!redirects motivation for sheaves]] to motivation for sheaves, cohomology and higher stacks. (Somebody still needs to clear the cache bug; I can’t do it from here. But that will take care of itself after a while, so not important.)