Corrections

Story: Dear EPA, GO F$&# YOURSELVES!Total Replies: 15
Author Content
azerthoth

Sep 19, 2007
6:54 AM EDT
1: zareason only posted a leader to the story, like LXer does. The full story is at http://www.boingboing.net/2007/09/16/computer-recycler-th.ht...

2: Its the state of California, not the Feds that issued and are pursuing this.

Thank you to James Burgett for actually doing something usefull in the world with the stuff that no one else seems to have a handle on.

*edited to fix hyperlink -Az*
Abe

Sep 19, 2007
7:21 AM EDT
azerthoth,

It seems like your link has been mangled some how. If the link below doesn't work, copy the link text and paste in address field. Remove the space after the : (colon).

It is funny, your link seems to have exactly the same link I used.

http://www.boingboing.net/2007/09/16/computer-recycler-th.ht...

http: //www.boingboing.net/2007/09/16/computer-recycler-th.html

Sander_Marechal

Sep 19, 2007
1:35 PM EDT
Quoting:It is funny, your link seems to have exactly the same link I used.


Azeroth finished his sentence with a dot. The dot got included in the autolinked URL.
Abe

Sep 19, 2007
3:43 PM EDT
Quoting:Azeroth finished his sentence with a dot. The dot got included in the autolinked URL.
Yap, he did finish the link with a dot. I didn't see it at work but I see it at home. I use Linux at home and Windows at work. It must Windows' fault. :)

azerthoth

Sep 19, 2007
4:11 PM EDT
See what I get for trying to end a sentence correctly?
gus3

Sep 19, 2007
7:13 PM EDT
I put a space between the URL and the period, on sites that create links automagically. Or, if it's at the end of a paragraph, I just put no period at all.
thenixedreport

Sep 20, 2007
11:54 AM EDT
Weird how some systems work. I've seen things in forums where they didn't quite end the BB code for a quote, and the post gets mangled.

Anyhoo, some corrections to the corrections.

1.) Posting a leader to a story is raising awareness of the story's existence. Had I not visited ZaReason's site that day, I would not have discovered what was going on.

2.) The local state entity is ultimately a part of the EPA itself. There is of course the "national office" along with regional groups.

I stand by what I wrote. Thank you for the feedback though.
azerthoth

Sep 20, 2007
12:20 PM EDT
Yes, but is the state office enforcing national standards or the over the top, tree hugging, granola munching "environmental" laws that California is infamous for? There are many places where there are lines of demarcation that are blurry to the common man.

As the article and some simple research ( http://aftermath-technologies.blogspot.com/ ) show that in this case that it is the granolafornia laws being enforced and not federal. I believe Mr. Burgett even makes a veiled reference to your initial article in there and its being inaccurate, from the man thats facing the governmental idiocy himself.
azerthoth

Sep 20, 2007
12:41 PM EDT
A further reading of Mr Burgett's blog indicates that there is atleast one blog post in existence with some *&^&$ type characters in the titles that harpooned a conference call with the dtsc that in all honesty probably could have cleared up the whole mess. It might be polite if the unnamed blogger(s) were to apologize to Mr. Burgett for unintentionally adding to his headache.
Sander_Marechal

Sep 20, 2007
12:55 PM EDT
Quoting:Weird how some systems work. I've seen things in forums where they didn't quite end the BB code for a quote, and the post gets mangled.


It's just bad coding. It's not hard to create a good, robust forum parser. Just a lot of boring testing on edge cases and making sure you check *everything*. That's all.
Abe

Sep 20, 2007
2:21 PM EDT
Quoting:Just a lot of boring testing on edge cases and making sure you check *everything*. That's all.
There are too many oddities one will never be able to test for or catch all of them.

Best thing is to always have a link on its own line for clarity and avoid such issues.

And if you want to prevent the autolink from processing a link, just don't include the http: //www since most browsers today will add that by default so people can drag and drop or copy and paste. Like so.

boingboing.net/2007/09/16/computer-recycler-th.html

Sander_Marechal

Sep 20, 2007
3:43 PM EDT
like http:www.boingboing.net/2007/09/16/computer-recycler-th.html you mean? :-)

Quoting:There are too many oddities one will never be able to test for or catch all of them.


That's easy. Just use htmlentities() on the lot and display it as typed. That's just the thing. Most forum software checks for certain general patterns, then tries to parse them without accounting for bad input. That's wrong. They should check all the input and only parse it if it's *sure* it can handle it. If not, just display as-is. Better safe then sorry (i.e. display the BBCode/HTML as unparsed plaintext instead of allowing bad BBCode/HTML to be parsed)

I did exactly that on my blog (fully custom written by myself). I don't use BBCode for markup but plain XHTML. I check every tag, every attribute, the contents of attributes and proper XHTML nesting. I can detect some edge cases and fix those manually (e.g. <b><i>text</b></i>). If I'm not 100% sure that some piece is valid and safe, I replace the <'s and >'s with &lt;'s and &gt;'s and display it as text. Easy.
Abe

Sep 20, 2007
5:16 PM EDT
Quoting:That's easy. Just use htmlentities()...
You are missing the point Sander. I was talking about avoiding the trivial mistakes.

Forums that handle html input don't want to develop a complete browser parser just to handle all possible scenarios.



Sander_Marechal

Sep 20, 2007
9:00 PM EDT
They don't need to. But they do have to make sure that *if* they parse something, that it's parsed correctly. That's my point.
Abe

Sep 21, 2007
6:32 AM EDT
Quoting:They don't need to. But they do have to make sure that *if* they parse something, that it's parsed correctly. That's my point.


I agree and you are right, but many of the site developers chose the easy way out. They make a feature available but doesn't make sure it covers most of the cases. I don't know why, but could for many various reasons.

All what I was saying is, here is the situation and this a way to get around it.

It is a good thing that some do appreciate quality and take it seriously.

Sander_Marechal

Sep 21, 2007
5:08 PM EDT
Well, sometimes it's not just about quality. With BBCode, the worst you can get is bad layout. But when you use XHTML for formatting, like I do on my website, a bad implementation means gaping holes for all kinds of XSS attacks and what-not :-)

I can't count the amount of PHP developers that use striptags() with a whitelist of allowed tags, only to forget that any tag can have onmouseover, onclick and other javascript triggers attached as attributes.

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