User talk:Quozl

Defending

The Wiki has recently been attacked at an increasing rate:

• many accounts created per day, roughly 100, despite captcha and e-mail verification,
• many new user pages used for link spam, roughly 20 a day,
• many new pages used for link spam, roughly 10 a day.

At this point removed rights from the unauthenticated user group as a temporary measure. --Quozl 06:45, 9 August 2013 (UTC)

# Prevent changes by not logged in users
$wgGroupPermissions['*']['createtalk'] = false; # create discussion pages
$wgGroupPermissions['*']['createpage'] = false; # create pages
$wgGroupPermissions['*']['edit'] = false; # edit pages
$wgGroupPermissions['*']['writeapi'] = false; # use the write API

• effect visible in Special:ListGroupRights,
• this sadly restricts use of the Wiki to identified users,
• this has not prevented link spam from already created users, which at a hundred per day for a long time turned out to be about 4781 accounts, which have now been removed,
• an unwelcome side-effect of removing these accounts is that accounts that had been registered but never used for any contributions will have been removed as well; these users must register again,

At this point disabled account creation on wiki.laptop.org as a temporary measure. --Quozl 06:23, 9 August 2013 (UTC)

# Prevent new user registrations except by sysops
$wgGroupPermissions['*']['createaccount'] = false;

• effect visible in Special:Userlogin on unauthenticated browser,
• according to Special:RecentChanges this has stopped new account creation by robots,
• a better solution is needed, since legitimate new users have been blocked,
• Andrew McMillan has suggested an additional verification field on Userlogin.php but after editing the file no change is seen,
• in the meanwhile a workaround is for a Sysop to create a requested account manually with Special:Userlogin - create account
• we still get two to three link spam a day from already created users, we would need a way to delete the users that are in the automated attack database.

discussion

• See http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/mediawiki-l/2013-May/041280.html (and followup by the author) for a recently suggested control method.
• Note also that with the 1.15 version of Mediawiki and its corresponding OpenID extension version, the method we used to use at Sugar Labs wiki (to require new users to use OpenID) should work. It prevented all new account spam for over 2 years. See my comment here, https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=51331#c2
• (In April 2013, there was a bad day--maybe Google's Recaptcha was down. See http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/devel/2013-April/037171.html )

Thanks for catching and addressing this. So we should

• update the login page message to tell people how to create an account.
• update to 1.15, installing openID.

--Sj talk 20:56, 20 August 2013 (UTC)

Thanks. I have adjusted MediaWiki:Loginprompt. Yes, an update to 1.15 would help, but I don't feel I have the resources to commit to that myself. --Quozl 23:22, 20 August 2013 (UTC)

Black Antenna

Hi Quozl, I stumbled upon your excellent article about motion detection and while reading it, I started to wonder how you got your antenna black on your XO? If it was painted, what type of paint do you think fits best for this type of material?

• apologies for the delay, it was a prototype antenna, one of several sent to me for characterisation. Different plastics were used, and colour was not important for these prototypes. Paint may change the behaviour of the antenna.

Build system files and your "Quozl/fs-update-skip-unused-blocks"

Hey, thanks for improving Build system#Files produced by the build system.

I was looking for an explanation of "zhashfs", and the only thing I found is User:Quozl/fs-update-skip-unused-blocks, lots of stuff there. Maybe zhashfs could be a redirect to some section in some firmware update page.

It sounds like zdextract could be another way to produce a bootable file system image for an external USB drive or SD card. Is it worth documenting it or should people stick with .tree.tar.lzma ? I can't try it, I don't have an XO-1.5.

Cheers, -- skierpage 23:14, 7 November 2011 (UTC)

Everything is possible, but not everything is recommended. You should get an XO-1.5. Meanwhile, you could try taking a .zd2 file, unpacking it with zdextract, mounting the two partitions as loopback filesystems, then replacing the XO-1.5 kernel with an XO-1 kernel, and this should work mostly. --Quozl 23:34, 7 November 2011 (UTC)

OLPC_Philippines Edit War, 2011

I had noticed the edit war had resumed, and had begun to review edit histories, and made a restoring edit with a request to have the participants communicate via the talk page. --Quozl 23:02, 14 November 2011 (UTC)

Hi James,

I'm Charles Chen/ Ideasman. I just wanted to clarify the changes I undone recently is to prevent efforts done to remove my group PCOLPC and my name in the credits for the Mindoro in the OLPC PH wiki page. It appears the person who did this wants to deny me and my group my 15 minutes of fame online. Also any record that we exist at all. I had already contacted him and asked what was his motivations for doing this but got no reply. --User:Ideasman

I do not wish to decide this issue myself, as there are more important things for me to do for OLPC, however I will watch for edits that are made without a summary entered, and ask that the talk page associated with the page be used, rather than my talk page or their talk page. --Quozl 23:02, 14 November 2011 (UTC)

I can't agree with you more. I wish we can spend our time and effort working on OLPC deployments than doing this. However if I did not undo the change made people would not know we exist. Moving forward I will use the the talk page for the wiki page if this continues. Hopefully it will stop. --User:Ideasman

"People" would still know you exist when they check the history, or when they search using the Wiki or Google. If the dispute has gone on this long it still needs a resolution, and just reverting changes isn't a resolution. Again, I don't wish to discuss it in my talk page, I'd like it to be discussed in the talk page where the dispute exists, between the parties who are in dispute. Involving others who are not part of the dispute might not always help.

I've reorganised the pages significantly, because there was a lot of redundant and conflicting information. Please try to keep the pages to their named purpose. I think you are listed on the donor list for the pilot, or that might be a spelling error in the transliteration. --Quozl

Foreign aid is not associated with internal education budgets

I don't know if my writing is sarcastic or not. I think it is relevant data to the EU olpc community that will hopefully help bring arguments to get XO's deployed here in the EU. I do understand the 1,6 billion € for a complete School Sector Reform Plan is for more and needs more than just delivering XO's to Nepal's kids. This phrase could be added. I was interested in putting forward some ball-mark figures to get some points of reference. I assume it would be interesting to others as well. I did some math work and preferred to share them here so others didn't have to waste time on that again. I think think the informative weight of the data outweighs the riks of people seeing this only as a sarcastic paragraph, and then again a kind of sarcasm that can only be interpreted as negative. Maybe read it again? As I did? Maybe it can be moved to the discussion page of the relevant countries involved? I mean this is their tax payers money. Don't they have a right to know? I think it will help further XO-implementations in Europe; this 1,6 billion € can't be reclaimed from Nepal or anything, is it? --SvenAERTS 02:00, 21 January 2014 (UTC)

The data does not seem relevant, since it is relating to foreign aid rather than education funding within a country. Aid money is spent in agreement between the donor governments and the recipient governments. This agreement is outside the scope of education funding within the donor government. Foreign aid and education are different departments. I don't think it is of interest to others, but let's wait and see what these others say. --Quozl 03:55, 21 January 2014 (UTC)

What do you mean by 'This Wiki is for ... learning topics only? Thy --SvenAERTS 02:00, 21 January 2014 (UTC)

Learning in this context relates to how the OLPC XO is used in education, with the audience for learning content being teachers and students. --Quozl 03:55, 21 January 2014 (UTC)

I thought this wiki was also to allow the olpc community to organise itself? I assume this does not fall under This Wiki is for ... learning topics only? Also how does it align with OLPC being a community project? I can imagine this wiki was first used in a quite closed and small ICT hardware/software community. I think you are on the OLPC pay roll / someone with the authority to take official OLPC decisions, right? Do you have instructions to keep this wiki for documenting technical and learning topics only? Do you / OLPC have a problem with the wiki.laptop.org evolve and be also for the olpc community contributing non technical and learning topics? Is there a better place? --SvenAERTS 02:00, 21 January 2014 (UTC)

Yes, members of the community have used the Wiki to organise themselves. This isn't happening so much now. I am a technical contractor to OLPC, and have administrative access to the Wiki, and see every change. Nobody else at OLPC uses the Wiki at the moment. The Wiki contains the technical documentation for OLPC. Apart from what Martin and others have told me, I have no specific instructions regarding the Wiki, so I act in accordance with my perception of OLPC's business needs. Whenever your edits may hinder OLPC, I am obliged to act to protect OLPC. --Quozl 03:55, 21 January 2014 (UTC)

"I don't mind if country organisations use the Wiki, but you don't represent these countries, and one person working alone yields unreliable content. " Can you expand on what is a country organisation? Like an olpc community of a country? What criteria does it take to set that up? Thy --SvenAERTS 02:00, 21 January 2014 (UTC)

Once I see edits by four different people, I would say there is an organisation of some sort. Your edits alone do not constitute an organisation. Beyond that, I cannot advise. --Quozl 03:55, 21 January 2014 (UTC)

"Please also take backups of any important content contributed to this Wiki." Do I have to understand you're about to remove just about every of my contributions? Are my contributions that much out of line? --SvenAERTS 02:00, 21 January 2014 (UTC)

No, but I cannot predict how long this service will remain available. I have backups of all the essential technical documentation, necessary for my work, but I'm not making backups of your private edits to country pages. If you are relying on this Wiki to be available, then you may be upset if it goes away. --Quozl 03:55, 21 January 2014 (UTC).