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:CreateAccount
• 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

OLPC Papua New Guinea (Difference between revisions)

Quozl, cf. your changes in teh Revision as of 00:02, 18 June 2013 (edit) SvenAERTS (Talk | contribs) ← Older edit Current revision as of 00:00, 1 March 2014 (edit) (undo) Quozl (Talk | contribs) (remove categories that this page does not provide authoritative information on)

How can we get projects to track how many laptops are stolen? I thought by putting it under every country welcome page where there's been a larger deployment. Many people want info on this. Thy--SvenAERTS 01:03, 1 March 2014 (UTC)

Your method obviously doesn't work, so try another method. The reason your method won't work is that deployments do not continue to use this Wiki. Many people may want such information, but the Wiki is not the place to ask for it. Look for research papers on Google Scholar. Or contact the deployment teams or government departments. Once you do find accurate information, host it on a subpage of your user page, until there is general interest. --Quozl 01:26, 1 March 2014 (UTC)

OLPC_research link to original article

Hi Q, I agree, I just went down for a coffee whilst the original article was loading and I just came to the same conclusion and wanted to make the edit too :) Enjoy the winter, from summery Belgium :) --SvenAERTS 11:15, 27 July 2016 (UTC)

License on The Conversation articles is usually Creative Commons, and if so allows copy and paste with attribution. Check the license. If allowed, you could copy the text into a subpage of OLPC_research. Disclosure: I'm a financial supporter of The Conversation but had no input into the article. --Quozl 11:36, 27 July 2016 (UTC)