Category: Technology

A couple of weeks ago I was reading a post by Will Griffiths on the ChemSpider Open Chemistry Web blog about how the DOI citation system of journal article lookups might be improved. The DOI system basically assigns each research paper a unique number depending, with an embedded publisher tag. Enter a DOI into a look up box (e.g. the DOI lookup on Sciencebase, foot of that page) and it almost instantaneously takes you to the paper in question. I use the DOI system for references in Sciencebase posts all the time.

There are a few cons that counteract its various pros, for instance, not all publishers use it and among those that do there are some who do not implement the DOI for their papers until they are in print, as opposed to online. Despite that it is very useful and commonly used. Having read Griffiths’ post about OpenURL a non-proprietary DOI alternative, I thought maybe it would be even more powerful if the concept were taken back another step the author level and I came up with the concept of a PaperID, which I blogged about on Chemspy.com. PaperID, I reasoned could be a unique identification tag for a reasearch paper, created by the author using a central open system (akin to the InChI code for labelling individual compounds). I’m still working out the ins and outs of this concept and while a few correspondents have spotted potentially fatal flaws others see it as a possible way forward.

Meanwhile, CrossRef, the association behind the publisher linking network, has just announced a beta version of a plugin for bloggers that can look up and insert DOI-enabled citations in a blog post. I’ve not investigated the plugin in detail yet, but you can download from a Crossref page at Sourceforge.net. the Crossref plugin apparently allows bloggers to add a widget to search CrossRef metadata using citations or partial citations. The results of the search, with multiple hits, are displayed and you then either click on a hit to go to the DOI, or click on an icon next to the hit to insert the citation into their blog entry. I presume they’re using plugin and widget in the accepted WordPress glossary sense of those words as the plugin is available only for WordPress users at the moment with a MoveableType port coming soon.

According to Geoffrey Bilder, CrossRef’s Director of Strategic Initiatives, “CrossRef is helping jumpstart the process of citing the formal literature from blogs. While there is a growing trend in scientific and academic blogging toward referring to formally published literature, until now there were few guidelines and very few tools to make that process easy.” Well that reference to a jumpstart sounds like marketing-speak to me, as Sciencebase and dozens of other science blogs have been using DOI for years.

Whether or not I will get around to installing what amounts to yet another WordPress plugin I haven’t decided. I may give it a go, but if it works as well as is promised you will hopefully not see the join. Meanwhile, let me have your thoughts on the usefulness of DOI and the potential of OpenURL and PaperID in the usual place below.

Currently, the only truly effective way consumers can stop the collection of their personal data when shopping is not to use the internet, to be paid and to pay for everything in cash, and to hide their money in their mattress.

More seriously, most of us will continue to use web services despite privacy concerns. You can try to opt-out of marketing schemes or reconfigure your web browser to reject advances from sites that offer cookies or install spying applications. However, most such rejections will prevent you from trading on most e-commerce sites altogether. So, cookies will crumble, there’s no two ways about it if you want to shop online or use web 2.0 interactive sites. You can, of course, use software to delete those cookies as soon as you’re finished your interaction with the site and so gain a little privacy and prevent the sites tracking where you went after you left when you visit a second time. But, either way, they’re going to get lots of useful information while the cookie lasts.

There is no single solution to preventing the increasing erosion of personal privacy on the Web, says Madan Lal Bhasin of the Business School SungKyunKwan University in Seoul, South Korea. Writing in the latest issue of the International Journal of Internet Marketing and Advertising (2008, vol 4, pp 213-240) he describes how new e-commerce technology has increased the ability of online retailers and others to collect, monitor, target and sell personal information about their customers to third parties.

Countless companies across the globe are doing just that in ways that were not dreamed of before the advent of the Web. Moreover, the emergence of so-called social media web 2.0 sites, such as MySpace and Facebook has led to a new generation of privacy issues that go beyond those seen with conventional e-commerce websites.

As such, online consumer and web user privacy is becoming an ever keener focal point among cyber activists as well as among governments and regulators. That said, when it is the governments themselves losing and abusing the personal data of millions of taxpayers (see recent UK news), then the notion of any government protecting one’s privacy becomes absurd. Nevertheless, in the long-term, finding a balance between absolute personal privacy and the smooth operation of commerce and social sites in cyberspace poses a significant challenge.

Bhasin and colleagues point out that are grave dangers for corporations that collect and use personal information, ignoring privacy legislative and regulatory warning signs. Indeed, such abuse could prove to be very costly not only in terms of putative fines from regulators but also through loss of business among customers increasingly aware of their privacy rights. In the worst-case scenario it is not beyond the realms of possibility that a company abusing standard privacy etiquette to the extreme could collapse should word spread and users boycott the site or mount retaliatory attacks of their own against the company’s web servers. Regardless, many companies can and do repeatedly flout the complex rules and regulations that govern privacy in the US, Europe, and elsewhere.

Technology that protects consumer privacy must work without stifling e-commerce. It must somehow be foolproof and be entirely transparent to end-users. Unfortunately, no such technology yet achieves this. There are countless personal software products, such as anti-spyware programs, cookie cutters, anonymous proxies, and other solutions, such as Firefox plugins like NoScript (which blocks all scripting on a website) and AdBlockPlus (which blocks advertisements). These can reduce the chances of private data being sucked from an individual’s web browsing habits.

However, there are hundreds of such programs each with a slightly different purpose. The field is heavily fragmented and many users are not only unaware of these programs they are also generally unaware of the existence of spyware and cookies. An additional problem arises when novice users having heard rumour of spyware, download tools without taking advice. There are well-known legitimate tools available. There are many instances of malware surrogates of those tools that often rank higher in the search engine results pages and so are more prominent. Installation of such rogue programs can result in deeper privacy compromises than the user hoped to avert.

Similarly, software that encrypts, deletes history files or shields your computer from apparently benevolent, but potentially malicious, applications is available but many users are again unaware of the issues intrinsic to using cyberspace and so do not use such programs. Rogue versions of every kind of protective software exist to exploit the novice user.

Legitimate e-commerce and web 2.0 sites have transparent privacy policies. These sites and others may also use online seals of trustworthiness and browser certificates that demonstrate credibility. However, such statements and badges are only useful if the companies that display them adhere to the underlying principles. Any company could wear a badge of honour, and yet even large, well-known companies do not necessarily comply fully with their own privacy policies and they allow trust certificates to expire. something many users simply ignore without realising the implications.

“Unfortunately, there is no ‘single’ solution to stop the erosion of privacy in cyberspace – no single law that can be proposed or single technology that can be invented to stop the profilers and spies in their tracks,” Bhasin re-asserts. He concludes that, “The battle of privacy, of course, must be fought on three fronts – legal, political and technological – and each new assault must be vigilantly resisted as it occurs.” Whether or not individuals will ever have the weaponry to win the battle is a different matter, we can try, but I suspect the only truly private approach is that bundle of cash stuffed in your mattress.

I usually ignore the comment spam folders on this website as per my own advice. Occasionally, however, I will scan them quickly. I do so if a regular reader has commented and has emailed to say that their comment is yet to appear. Legitimate words do sometimes get caught in the Akismet netting. I can then add the individual to the filter whitelist and approve the comment.

Spam comments usually come in one of a few limited types. The first is the straightforward nonsense list of random lewd keywords, Rx ingredients, and messages pertaining to the impossible enhancement of various organs, and it is not to Messrs Hammnond nor Henry Willis and his Sons to which I am referring here. The second type is the bizarre one-word message saying: “Cool!”, “Nice,” “Sorry,” and “Interesting”. When you first see this kind of message, they may give a blogger a little ego boost (about 0.000003154%). But, after the 10,376th you begin to doubt their sincerity, especially as they are usually accompanied by links to lewd keywords, Rx ingredients and the enhancement of various…you know the rest.

Anyway, there is another kind of comment spam and that is the kind that resembles a genuine comment but then lets itself down with a stupid link to a dumb site. It’s usually a brief sentence or phrase. Sometimes it will be an entirely random string of words, presumably scraped from an online text, but occasionally it will seem to actually be attempting to engage in a conversation via a blog’s comments.

You might see phrases like: “Hi Guys! What Your Site Powered By?” and a link to some expensive software, “My brother Tom’s been working real hard all year, but he’s struggling to make ends meet. How do you think he could improve his credit rating?” and a link to a credit card site, or perhaps “Let’s keep in touch we can help each other with sites,” and a link to some unknown web hosting company. Even bizarre queries such as “What effects did katrina on mississippi?” with an insurance link appear every now and then.

Of course, at this stage in blogging history, most bloggers recognise these messages as detrimental to their sites as, once again, they will have the enhancing, Rx and lewd keyword links built in. But, it’s the unusual style in which some are written that intrigues me. I don’t think it says anything much about the psychology of spammers, especially those that are nothing but spewing bots, nor about anything deep taking place in English lessons. They are intriguing in how sophisticated might be the phrasing let down by a slip of syntax or grammatical integrity.

For instance, a recent commenter was able to construct the following quite complex sentence: “Your website is beautifully decorated and easily navigated.” and yet they blew it with their second line: “I have enjoyed visiting the site today and visit again,” which unfortunately doesn’t parse. Similarly, “Some nice article here. thanks for it.” Not only starts a “sentence” with a lower case “t” but there is a serious mismatch between the quantities discussed.

Admittedly, some of the less exact grammar comes from spam originating in parts of the world where the native tongue may not be English. Personally, I would be useless at spamming in Portuguese, Mandarin, Hindi, or any of a few dozen other languages. I could probably scrape through with a spam in French, German, Italian, or Spanish, although I’d have to have an international lewd word dictionary to hand to do so.

In the following comment spam, there is almost subtle use of the word “seldom”, but it lies in stark contrast to the quality of grammar in the rest of the phrase: “This is really fresh idea of the design of the site! I seldom met such in Internet. Good Work dude!”

An easy target is this comment, which appears repeatedly: “I’d prefer reading in my native language, because my knowledge of your languange is no so well. But it was interesting! Look for some my links”. Yes, if that one had escaped Akismet and I’d approved it I can just imagine readers dashing off to look for those links, which, you guessed it, pointed to some great insurance deals on organ enhancement drugs.