Simon Willison's Weblog: tom-coates

Getting married and going travelling

2010-06-21T23:01:00+00:00

It’s been a busy month. On Saturday the 5th of June I married the wonderful Natalie Downe in a beautiful ceremony at Roedean School in Brighton. The reception had owls, cheese, a ferret, a golden eagle, amazing Turkish food, Jewish chair dancing and lovely guests. It was the happiest day of my life.

The official wedding photos were taken by Drew McLellan, and there’s a Flickr group pool as well. The day after the wedding Natalie’s sister Louise took some fun photos of us running around Brighton in our wedding clothes.

Thanks to everyone who helped out with the preparations, and also to everyone who came along to share the special day with us. And a big thanks to Tom Coates, my best man.

Yesterday afternoon, we set out on our honeymoon. I’m writing this from the beach in Nice, on the south coast of France. Tomorrow we take the ferry to Corsica for a week in relative luxury. After that, we’re backpacking around Europe, then Africa, then the rest of the world. We’ve given up our flat and put our stuff in to storage, and the plan is to keep on travelling until we get fed up or run out of money. We expect to be gone for at least 18 months.

Since we’re both web developers, we’re lucky to be able to take some of our work with us. I’ll still be doing some work for the Guardian and Natalie is available for freelance work. If you have something you think we can help you with, drop us a line.

Naturally we’ll be blogging, tweeting and Flickring our adventures. You can follow our updates at http://sparkabout.net/.

Tags: brighton, cheese, natalie-downe, tom-coates, travel, recovered, natbat, sparkabout, wedding, personal-news

plasticbag.org: My last day at Yahoo!

2010-05-15T10:14:00+00:00

plasticbag.org: My last day at Yahoo!

Tom Coates on four years at Yahoo!

Tags: fireeagle, tom-coates, yahoo, recovered

Red Dust

2009-09-23T14:20:46+00:00

Red Dust

Tom Coates used Flickr’s new Galleries feature (which lets you build a curated collection of up to 18 photos from other Flickr users and add your commentary) to construct a stunning compilation of photos of the Sydney dust storms.

Tags: duststorms, flickr, photography, sydney, tom-coates

I can't believe it's all over!

2007-06-18T22:16:27+00:00

I can't believe it's all over!

Hack Day London rocked.

Tags: hackday, hackdaylondon, tom-coates

A Hack for Europe!

2007-04-18T23:24:45+00:00

A Hack for Europe!

Signups are now open for Hack Day Europe, on June 16th and 17th. You need to apply for an invitation.

Tags: bbc, bbcbackstage, hackday, tom-coates, yahoo

Social whitelisting with OpenID... (plasticbag.org)

2007-01-26T01:00:50+00:00

Social whitelisting with OpenID... (plasticbag.org)

Tom’s write-up of the social whitelisting idea. Lots of sceptics in the comments.

Via plasticbag.org - a weblog by Tom Coates

Tags: openid, social-whitelisting, spam, tom-coates

On Space Art in Sebastopol...

2007-01-22T22:44:36+00:00

On Space Art in Sebastopol...

Awesome. Our giant mosaic space invaders are going to show up on Google Earth!

Tags: art, foocamp, google, google-earth, tom-coates

Social whitelisting with OpenID

2007-01-22T03:01:02+00:00

A key feature of OpenID is that it provides a globally unique identifier for every user, no matter what site or service they are using on the Web.

This gives us a powerful tool to fight comment spam. If someone has logged in with an OpenID and we are confident that they are not a spammer (remember, spammers can create OpenIDs too) we can add them to a whitelist, allowing their comments to skip any moderation step or spam guard that we might have in place.

This weblog has a comment spam detection system based on simple heuristics. Comments are assigned a score; if the score exceeds a certain level the comment is placed in a queue for moderation. As of today, one of the heuristics is "does the comment author have an OpenID that is on the whitelist". I've populated my whitelist with the OpenIDs of people who have posted two or more useful comments and do not appear to be using an anonymous provider. I'll be adding to it regularly in the future.

Here comes the social part: I'm sharing my whitelist. If you run your own OpenID-enabled weblog you are welcome to include my whitelist in your comment spam heuristics. If you publish your own whitelist, I will happily do the same.

Social whitelisting benefits from being de-centralised, just like OpenID. If I find that you have whitelisted a spammer, I can unsubscribe from your whitelist. There's no central authority or point of failure.

Long-time readers may be feeling a strong sense of deja-vu. Way back in September 2003, I proposed shared comment blacklists as a solution to weblog comment spam. The idea was simple: every time you delete a spam comment, you add the link it was advertising to a public blacklist. Other blogs could then subscribe to your blacklist and block any new comments advertising the same site.

The blacklisting idea was flawed from the very start. It was a classic example of Marcus J. Ranum's number one dumbest idea in computer security: Default Permit. Spam blacklists assume that if we don't know a link is bad, it's good. Spammers can create new bad links far faster than we can blacklist them.

Here's Ranum's suggested alternative:

The opposite of "Default Permit" is "Default Deny" and it is a really good idea. It takes dedication, thought, and understanding to implement a "Default Deny" policy, which is why it is so seldom done. It's not that much harder to do than "Default Permit" but you'll sleep much better at night.

Social whitelisting uses Default Deny. As such, I believe it has a much higher chance of making a useful impact on the comment spam problem.

Update: I should have mentioned that this idea developed over a number of discussions with Tom Coates, which totally slipped my mind when I was writing it up at 3am.

Tags: commentspam, moderation, openid, tom-coates, whitelisting

Managing Social Software

2003-10-19T04:51:12+00:00

Moderation is a topic that goes hand in hand with online communities, but despite being a highly complex matter it is rarely given the coverage it deserves. That's all set to change now thanks to Tom Coates' excellent new blog, Everything in Moderation. The site's topic is "creative ways to manage online communities and user-generated content", and the content posted so far easily lives up to that claim. Of particular interest are the introductory post, the definitions of the four principle types of moderation and a fascinating entry about using stealth moderation tactics to deter abusive posters. Definitely one for the blogroll (at least once it starts pinging blo.gs).

Tags: moderation, tom-coates