inportb

Almost every conversation on Omegle contains the ubiquitous “ASL” (age/sex/location) query. You might be asked if you were American (“STAR”) or if you live near the city of St Albans (“STA?”). More recently, a band of Twitter users have set out to find each other on the Web service for strangers. An instant messaging service that pairs random strangers anonymously, Omegle attracts a variety of users.

The majority of users behave as expected. Anonymity leads to abusive language and general silliness online. Advertisers have taken advantage of the unfiltered and unmoderated service using robotic and human zombies alike. Still others engage in cybersex. In a world where identity does not matter, sophomoric behavior is the norm and civility has no bearing.

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Since the introduction of Omegle Group Chat, a netizen by the name of OmLeif (presumably Leif K-Brooks of Omegle) joined my IRC channel and expressed his dissatisfaction with both the spam bots and my solution. Although he declined to discuss his plans for improving Omegle, he did promise to work on the problems. We knew that change was afoot.

When I checked my chat bot this morning, I discovered that it was being subjected to reCAPTCHA challenges. This welcome change has drastically cut down the amount of spam seen on Omegle. While it appeared that Group Chat was no longer necessary (its original purpose was to create an oasis amidst the spam) or viable, those in my IRC channel asked for more. Knowing that Group Chat still had a place, I set out to rewrite the entire framework.

The fundamental changes are:

• the bot no longer needs to maintain tens of simultaneous connections, since the spam rate is much lower
• IRC support sits at the core of the system instead of having been added on as an afterthought
• should the bot encounter a reCAPTCHA challenge, users present in the channel will be able to solve the challenge via the reCAPTCHA API

To see Group Chat in action, feel free to join #inportb on freenode. Or if you want, you might just luck out on Omegle… Have fun out there!

Omegle is a website used to communicate with random, anonymous people across the Internet. Thousands of users troll the website every day, following its slogan to “talk to strangers.” Because of the lack of moderation, there has also been a recent proliferation of spam bots and human spamvertisers, and sometimes it takes 20 wasted connections before one could have a normal conversation. Now, with the Omegle Group Chat extension, users can finally talk to multiple strangers simultaneously while avoiding spam! If you have been using Omegle lately, you might have come across this introductory message:

You have been randomly selected to join an exclusive Omegle group chat…

The fundamental rules are the same: there is no need to reveal your identity and you may leave at any time. I hope Group Chat has been an enjoyable experience for you. Since you’re here, I might as well answer some common questions:

• Group Chat is neither part of nor endorsed by Omegle
• Yes, this is a real chat room on Omegle
• Up to around 20 people are in the chat room at once
• The chat room is powered by a proxy bot written in Python
• The script uses less than 4MB of memory and less than 40MHz of processor time
• The chat lags purely because of Omegle’s AJAX interface
• Group Chat is bridged with IRC! Join #inportb on freenode for less lag

Due to the recent proliferation of spam, I have implemented a number of spam filters, both automatic and manual, designed to keep the chat clear of junk. Here’s a sampling of the cruft caught by the filters:

** STAT:        spambots/s      22.2272497218
13317 :: bot filter – hi, 18/f/new york, wanna see my nüde video? GO HERE: hxxp://……/8hMmzE
85117 :: bot filter – hi, 20/f/florida, wanna see my naked video? GO HERE: hxxp://……/8hMmzE
67937 :: bot filter – hi, 20/f/new york, wanna see my pr0n video? GO HERE: hxxp://……/8hMmzE
54294 :: bot filter – hi, 20/f/new york, wanna see my pr0n video? GO HERE: hxxp://……/8hMmzE
83998 :: bot filter – hi, 19/f/new york, wanna see my pr0n vid? GO HERE: hxxp://……/8hMmzE

Here’s some other crud that I would not dare post on any blog… and on average, the spam rate is approximately 80%. Enjoy spam-free Group Chat!

Update: there has been more work on Group Chat.

Free shipping! Only on eBay.

It is now less than an hour until 16:00 UTC, but a couple of Google Wave invitations are already being passed around on Twitter. One of these has found its way onto eBay, where the highest bid was $2000 and rising. What would you do to “be the one of the 1st to sink your teeth into the beta”?

Check here for more Google Wave merchandise, including invitations and fan gear. As for me… I’ll just wait patiently for a few more hours.

Now’s just three days before Google Wave’s beta launch, or that’s what they say. There has been quite a bit of development going on, with Google polishing the interface and third-party developers pushing out exciting gadgets using the Wave API. I myself have been playing around with a small image editing gadget known as Imagine (link to gadget), though development has slowed substantially due to classes and such. Anyhow, I have a wave embedded into this post after the break, so be sure to interact with it if you have a sandbox account. If you don’t, well, here’s a screenshot.

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As we speed into the 21st century, online social networking is becoming an increasingly popular mode of communication. Since the rise of Twitter three years ago, it has been easier than ever, especially for professionals, to take advantage of this Internet phenomenon. Celebrities and athletes are not the only ones who embrace such technology: healthcare professionals such as doctors and nurses are also beginning to open accounts on services such as Twitter and Facebook. Early this week, for example, a hysterectomy and uterine prolapse surgery was broadcast on Twitter at the Cedar Rapids St. Luke’s Hospital in a series of 126 short updates (from bottom to top):

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I used to rely almost exclusively on SSH for remote administration, but I recently added an OpenVPN server to my toolkit. I was interested in the performance of OpenVPN compared to OpenSSH, so I ran several tests using iperf:

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Recently, I rewrote from scratch a two-year-old project of mine. Imagine, a browser-based image editor, had been sitting around collecting dust, so I figured I’d delete all the legacy code (almost all of it) and create something better. I’ve also been evaluating the possibility of integrating Imagine into Google Wave.

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