Every now and then I try a comment spam precaution and it backfires on me. So let me amend myprevious remarks: it turns out that refusing comments from people thatare on the XBL is a bad idea.

It's a superficially attractive idea, which is why I implemented itway back when; the XBL is (theoretically) listing addresses ofcompromised machines and open proxies, and I have seen comment spamattempts from XBL -listed IP addresses. But the XBL itself containswarnings against this sort of usage

In ExploitingPolymorphicWSGI , I talked about how I use the flexibilityof WSGI to run DWiki as either a CGI or a SCGI server by using a smallfrontend CGI program. Because there are some subtle bits to how thisworks, I thought I would write down how the CGI frontend works.

The overall logic is:

• try to talk to an existing SCGI daemon.
• otherwise, check the load and try to start a daemon if the load isbetween a minimum and a maximum, and then talk to it.
• otherwise, if

Every so often, I will hear someone say that Bram Cohen clearly wroteBitTorrent to facilitate piracy (despite any of his claims to thecontrary) because it was deliberately designed to frustrate attemptsto monitor its traffic. This claim irritates me partly because it isclearly wrong, almost blatantly so.

(Disclaimer: I am talking here about classic BitTorrent, as it wasbefore ISPs started whacking things with hammers and people startedreacting.)

There are two important things in a BitTorrent transfer: the peers, thecollection of machines

My minimum technical requirements forreal web spiders are deliberately quite black and white. But there arealso a number of more fuzzy things that I expect from responsible webspiders. Bear in mind that these aren't hard and fast rules and I can'tgive precise numbers and so on.

(As before, this only applies to what I'm calling 'real' or 'legitimate' web spiders ; I can't expectany particular behavior from malicious web spiders.)

Disclaimers in place, here'