Grasshead

Salvor — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 04:53:36 +0000

Grasshead, originally uploaded by rocky!.

grashaus 1

Salvor — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 04:45:59 +0000

Stroke my hair for good luck, originally uploaded by NelMan.

Sniðugt wordpress twitter dæmi

Salvor — Wed, 06 May 2009 17:35:52 +0000

Þetta er frá ma.tt og lýsir sniðugu þema í wordpress, svona hópörbloggi sem er eins og twitter.

Pretty trees wallpaper

Salvor — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 21:42:44 +0000

Pretty trees wallpaper, originally uploaded by Sof Johns.

The Letter Writer

Salvor — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 03:44:31 +0000

The Letter Writer, originally uploaded by rita banerji.

Prófun

Salvor — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 14:07:06 +0000

http://wiki.cetis.ac.uk/OER_Programme_Scoping_session

Hér er um leiki

Video Gaming Trends

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: marketing advertising)

Presentation Dissemination

Salvor — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 21:41:00 +0000

How and why do academics disseminate their presentations?

Ustream session

Salvor — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 16:29:56 +0000

I am now trying to embed the ustream into my wordpress blog.

Video streaming by Ustream

Getting ready for the Connectivism course

Salvor — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 02:54:34 +0000

My thoughts about sex industry spam

Even a connectivism course for educators is not without sex industry spam, that I found out when I started browsing the google group for the course, by looking into http://groups.google.ca/group/connectivism

I believe in open educational environments and open knowledge. But these environments are more vulnerable because of the openness to those who deliberately try to get a message through using all possible means. We all have had our shares of email spam, blog spam and spam in all environments where spammers believe they can reach some audience. A great majority of spam is trying to get us to buy products and services. Many of the products and services promoted by spammers are sex industry sevices and pornography. This is terrible bad for us who are using open tools in educational settings and perhaps with students as part of school assignments.

I noticed that even before the connectivism course has started that the google groups have been spammed by several pornography related posts. When I checked the google groups forum on the top was message with the title “Natalie Portman Nice Butt ” and the message was a videolink with the text “Natalie walking around the house hot pants”.

Here is a screenshot of how the google group forum looked:

I also had a very bad experience when I tried to click on the link dekita.org/kitchen (screenshot below). I do believe this is existing educational site connected to the course but somehow I was directed to a totally different website, a website obviously with pornography trying to download something to my computer. Fortunately Chrome browser warned my about this content.

What I think has happened is a educator in dekita.org/kitchen created a page and someone with bad intentions was able to change the link location so when you click at the link you end up at some sexual services website. I noticed discussion thread about pornography links and apparently the forum settings have been changed so members can not add pages but this page has not been deleted, perhaps because the link has not been checked and oneone has noticed that the link address has been edited and is redirecting users to pornographic site.

Situations like this are very difficult for unexperienced users who think they are in a trusted educational setting. For all users this is noise, something that distracts attention.

Here above is the screenshot of the phishing weblink.

There is no easy answer about how to solve this problem. When we are building societies and collaborative environments which are open and build upon trust we can not be sure all use the environment as we intend. Some might use it to promote goods or to deliberately destroy the environment.

What shall we do?
Shut all doors and go back to closed environments and only let in users who we have screened?

Perhaps not… making it difficult to participate will mean that much less activity is in a group.

I work a lot in Wikipedia, both in the Commons picture database (commons.wikimedia.org) and in the Icelandic and English text based wikipedia. I have tried to make the Wikipedia community there aware of how vulnerable the community is to intruders deliberately trying to use these very popular and trusted sources for promoting pornography and how the sex industry has started to infilter wikipedia, mainly because there does not seem to be many rules about how to handle sex industry promotion there. There are rules and guidelines about how to write articles like NPV and concensus about meaning but there is not much when the content is not text but pictures.

As I had expected I was not greeted with joy by my fellow wikipedians.

Here are two of the debates I started:

Pornography and Sex Industry related pictures in the Commons

Who is Amanda Adams?

We might not go in the right direction on roads paved with good intentions but in a world where the roads are made up of links we could get totally lost if the links are provided by persons or bots with bad intentions.

Salvör