terriko

Short version:

I'd like some help figuring out why RSS feeds that include iPython notebook contents (or more specifically, the CSS from iPython notebooks) are showing up as really messed up in the PythonPython blog aggregator. See the Python summer of code aggregator and search for a MNE-Python post to see an example of what's going wrong.

Bigger context:

One of the things we ask of Python's Google Summer of Code students is regular blog posts. This is a way of encouraging them to be public about their discoveries and share their process and thoughts with the wider Python community. It's also very helpful to me as an org admin, since it makes it easier for me to share and promote the students' work. It also helps me keep track of everyone's projects without burning myself out trying to keep up with a huge number of mailing lists for each "sub-org" under the Python umbrella. Python sponsors not only students to work on the language itself, but also for projects that make heavy use of Python. In 2014, we have around 20 sub-orgs, so that's a lot of mailing lists!

One of the tools I use is PythonPython, software often used for making free software "planets" or blog aggregators. It's easy to use and run, and while it's old, it doesn't require me to install and run an entire larger framework which I would then have to keep up to date. It's basically making a static page using a shell script run by a cron job. From a security perspective, all I have to worry about is that my students will post something terrible that then gets aggregated, but I'd have to worry about that no matter what blogroll software I used.

But for some reason, this year we've had some problems with some feeds, and it *looks* like the problem is specifically that PlanetPlanet can't handle iPython notebook formatted stuff in a blog post. This is pretty awkward, as iPython notebook is an awesome tool that I think we should be encouraging students to use for experimenting in Python, and it really irks me that it's not working. It looks like Chrome and Firefox parse the feed reasonably, which makes me think that somehow PlanetPlanet is the thing that's losing a <style> tag somewhere. The blogs in question seem to be on blogger, so it's also possible that it's google that's munging the stylesheet in a way that planetplanet doesn't parse.

I don't suppose this bug sounds familiar to anyone? I did some quick googling, but unfortunately the terms are all sufficiently popular when used together that I didn't find any reference to this bug. I was hoping for a quick fix from someone else, but I don't mind hacking PlanetPlanet myself if that's what it takes.

Anyone got a suggestion of where to start on a fix?

Edit: Just because I saw someone linking this on twitter, I'll update in the main post: tried Mary's suggestion of Planet Venus (see comments below) out on Monday and it seems to have done the trick, so hurrah!

My former hackerspace, in fundraising for the new space, offered up a reward tier that let you name one of the rooms, which was a pretty fun perk. "My" room is going to be #16 on this map, the larger of the two electronics labs:



Being the sort of person I am, I named it the "Pink Fluffy Unicorn Dancing on Rainbows Laboratory" thanks to this earwormy video. (Original song here, punk version here.)



They can call it PFUDOR labs for short or something. I actually proposed it as a joke when the campaign first was getting set up, but it got so many laughs that I decided it was actually kind of fun to have a name that really didn't take itself too seriously.

A few days after I made the official declaration, I got an email from an adult male friend there, bemoaning my choice of names in a gentle, joking, but also a little bit sincere way.

He is a friend and I don't want to mock his words in public, but I saw the email and thought THIS IS HOW I KNOW I HAVE CHOSEN THE RIGHT NAME. If this even a little hurts the manhood of even someone who knows me and my sense of humour, then you know that the anti-girly sentiment often prevalent in hacklabs is going to be rankled by this for as long as the space lasts. So now not only do I get to earworm my friends, but I run the risk of affronting people who haven't quite dealt with their own minor misogyny? And maybe give the hacklab an excuse to fill a space with rainbows, with all the connotations thereof? That actually kind of sounds like a bigger social win than I was intending, but maybe, just maybe, it'll combine with the already excellent people at Quelab to help keep the space as friendly and fun as it can be.

So next up I'm going to be buying a friend's pony patterns, a bunch of stuff from adafruit, some fabric, and I'll be making a hilarious e-textile pony with glowing rainbow neopixels to go in the space. Because I am not very subtle. ;)

I maintain a couple of blogs outside of this one, and the most popular one I'm involved with gets a lot of spam. There seemed to be a particular uptick about a month back, and I went to look into it.

What I discovered is that quite a lot of our spam (around 80%) was coming from one company called IPTelligent LLC. There's no easy way for me to tell if they are a legit company who simply have the worst IT staff in the history of IT staffs and all of their machines are compromised, or if they are, in fact, evil jerks who are repeatedly attempting to pollute the internet with really terrible spam. Given a short websearch, it seems pretty likely that IPTelligent is intentionally evil. I suppose one could argue that the level of incompetence displayed by someone who not only runs that many compromised machines but also serves up malware consistently is a form of evil even if it wasn't intentional. Whatever.

Either way, they are responsible for a rather large percentage of the spam we were receiving, and not responsible for any legit visits that we could see.

Since this particular blog uses Wordpress, solving the problem was pretty simple. Wordpress has built in lists for blocking comments, but they simply send to the moderation queue, as does popular plugin Akismet. Since we were seeing hundreds of messages per day from IPTelligent, I needed something that banned them more completely so our moderators wouldn't even see the messages and have to scan through them. Thankfully, there are lots of plugins for this. I settled on one called wp-ban that seems to be working well for my needs.

Once that's installed, the settings are under Settings->Ban. At the top of my list, I now have

# IPTelligent owns these ips, and they seem to be a spam company
96.47.225.*
173.44.37.*
96.47.224.*

Which covers the majority of the IP that were hitting us with spam. A glance at a more specific list of IPTelligent IPs suggests that those lines are good enough right now, although it's possible that they'll buy more IP blocks eventually. (We also have a longer list of other ips that appear to be compromised and were causing problems, but they look more like temporary compromises than intentional, long-term malice so I'm not listing those IPs here).

Of course, it would be better if someone took the company to court for this. I am not a lawyer, but it seems to me that the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act must cover at least some portion of their activities. I mean, the things they charged Aaron Swartz with under that act seem less sketchy than what IPTelligent is doing. But court cases take time and money, and banning them right now is pretty easy, so I figured I'd share the short-term solution in case it's useful to anyone who'd like to get a little less spam right away. (We are indeed getting ~80% less spam since the bans went into place.)

For the record, here's the company info as I get from the whois database right now:

OrgName:        IPTelligent LLC
OrgId:          IPTEL-1
Address:        2115 NW 22nd Street
Address:        #C110
City:           Miami
StateProv:      FL
PostalCode:     33142
Country:        US
RegDate:        2009-03-31
Updated:        2012-07-16
Ref:            http://whois.arin.net/rest/org/IPTEL-1

ReferralServer: rwhois://rwhois.iptelligent.com:4321

OrgNOCHandle: NOC3572-ARIN
OrgNOCName:   Network Operations Center
OrgNOCPhone:  +1-888-638-5893
OrgNOCEmail:  sysop@iptelligent.com
OrgNOCRef:    http://whois.arin.net/rest/poc/NOC3572-ARIN