Colony Collapse

Madamab is back from her vacation to Aruba and she’s been doing a lot of thinking. Go take a look-see.

When I was at the Butterfly Farm in Aruba, I asked the owner about what’s happening to the bees. He said that the bees are dying from a massive dust mite infection, as well as a bizarre virus that causes bees to act like individual insects, and not members of a hive. When this virus infects a bee, it eventually causes “colony collapse,” as the bees separate from each other and fail to build hives, make honey or do anything that helps them cross-pollinate, which is their primary function in the evolutionary chain. We both stated our belief that humankind was having its own type of “colony collapse” disorder, as we seem to fail to realize that as a species, we’re all in this together. Sure, we can keep smugly congratulating ourselves that OUR location is the best, and that all others are clearly inferior; or we can realize that  we are all on track to becoming inhabitants of a toxic, dying planet, desperately scrabbling with each other for that last drop of clean water and air. All our differences, red and blue, black and white, will come to naught in the end. Ain’t that a kick in the head?

Bye Bye Blogger

Well, well, well. The squeaky wheel gets the grease. Magically, my posting privileges at Blogger are back. Blogger sent me this email:

Hi there,
On behalf of the Blogger Team, I want to apologize for the recent trouble you’ve had with your locked blog. Automated spam detection is not yet a perfect science, and although we are constantly working to improve our tools, it appears that our filters have caused some Blogger accounts to mistakenly be blocked from creating new posts.

While we are still investigating, we believe this may have been caused by mass spam e-mails mentioning the “Just Say No Deal” network of blogs, which in turn caused our system to classify the blog addresses mentioned in the e-mails as spam.

Regardless, we have restored posting rights to your blog, and it is very important to us that Blogger remain a tool for political debate and free expression.

So once again, we apologize for the inconvenience, and thank you for your patience as we looked into the problem.

Sincerely,
The Blogger Team

Automated spam detection is not yet a perfect science

Huh. Well, don’t you think your system should be able to tell a blog with nearly 700 posts and that’s been around for oh, say, THREE YEARS, from a “spam” blog???? Let’s work on that, shall we? And in the absence of that sort of flagging on YOUR end, how’s about a little benefit of the doubt for the next set of bloggers that get caught in your “automated spam detection” maze?

“…we believe this may have been caused by mass spam e-mails mentioning the “Just Say No Deal” network of blogs, which in turn caused our system to classify the blog addresses mentioned in the e-mails as spam…”

Sorry, but no. Not buying it. Whenever the JSND coalition sends out an email, it does not list all of the blogs, but merely directs people to the web site where we are all listed. If there was any spamming going on, it wasn’t from Just Say No Deal.

And furthermore, how many flags does it take for a blog to get shut down? One? Five? Twenty? A hundred?

In the meantime, I’m happily settled in over at WordPress. Loving the new blog smell.

More on the Blogger Lock Out

Simon Owens reports on the Blogger shut-down. He gives us a balanced article (and I don’t just say that because I’m quoted in it).