Defiantone.com

My opinion hasn’t changed in the past few months. I think Bluecoat is a horribly coded web filter that does a poor job of characterizing content. Much to my surprise, they have tweaked the algorithm and I’ve seen some noticable changes. First off, they no longer categorically block websites that have the word blog in the URL. Yes, somebody out there heard the clamouring from the masses (or the screaming minorities as it may be in this case) and made some changes to the what they define as a personal page. Surprisingly, my website is no longer considered a personal page. To think about it, I think they might be right. If I write about something thats going on with me its often centered around something else going on in the world. I rarely write directly about me aside from whatever asprirations I may have in life. My website is chock full of right off the top of my head uncensored goodness - if you’re in to that kind of stuff. If you’re not, why the heck haven’t you navigated away…. at this moment 9/10 readers will have left this page to find something else. Good for them - thats the joy of the internet.

I still loathe bluecoat - and I may never stop. I’m just glad they decided to tweak the code.

We all fight spam in one form or another be it snail mail, email, or comment spam. I’ve done a fairly good job at blocking out the email spam but and I can readily ignore the snail mail by throwing it in the trash. I haven’t had good luck blocking out the comment spam.

Spammers will leave me random comments full of links to websites full of porn and prescription medication advertisements in an effort to increase their Google page rank. The spam filter catches 99% of them and leaves them for me to moderate. I have to dig through the comments in hope that there is something that isn’t spam - there seldom is.

I noticed a new plug-in for my blog YAWASP (Yet Another WordPress Anti Spam Plug-in) that alters the comment field so that bots cannot easily access it and leave comments. Hopefully it works - only time will tell. It should be absolutely invisible to you but its going to help me out immensely. I’ll be able to see that I have no new comments from one day to the next. Oh well

BlueCoat, the web filter ran by the USAF, has caused me much aggravation since my arrival at Balad. I am not the only one that is feeling pain - everyone else is affected by this poorly written web filter. Recently, I discovered a way to circumvent the filter - RSS feeds. Techically, I’m accessing the site information without breaking the terms of service because I am not accessing the site or any restricted content - including all images hosted on that server that could potentially corrupt me (I think the only reason the filter exists is to 1. save bandwidth, 2. block porn, 3. prevent idiots from downloading viruses). RSS stands for really simple syndication - really, I’m not kidding at all. Its the summarized content of a website that is delivered without all of the extra advertising, images, and themes of the full website. You get the good part of the website without all of the crap that slows down your browsing experience. RSS feeds are read and displayed by readers that can be web or desktop based.

Google - the company that does almost everything - well, they haven’t figured out how to build an electric car that runs for a 1000 miles on a single charge… yet - has a free reader that is quite simple to use. Simply register, subscribe to the websites of your choosing, and read away. The reader allows you to view all feeds or just those that have been recently updated. I’ve added a RSS link that you can see to your right - right below the Askimet spam count. Click on the link and you can easily add my feed to the reader of your choice. You’ll never miss another gripping update - ever - you can rest easily now.

So - Screw you BlueCoat - I’m going to get my news one way or another.