Fon today announced they’ve done a deal with BT to encourage their 3 million+ users to share their wifi with others. Could lead to a large increase in the number of hotspots, but when I tried the accompanying BT website, I was unable to find my own or any nearby Fon hotspots. Hopefully just a launch-day glitch.
I’ve had one of the free fon routers since February and it’s worked flawlessly. If haven’t got one, go get one!
A few people have emailed me recently disappointed by the level of spam postings on pastebin.com. I’ve never really understood why spammers bother, but as they are bothering in increasing numbers it was time to take some action.
Last night I built in some spam filtering which has caught hundreds of posts since going live. I also added a “report spam” link which has flagged over 500 posts in past 20 hours. By iteratively tweaking the spam filter to identify the legimately flagged posts, I’ve been able to quickly delete a lot of older spam posts.
Hopefully this will make pastebin look like a well tended garden rather than a run-down wasteland! Comments welcome…
Yesterday Geograph got its 500,000th photo – the archive now contains over half a million, freely reusable, geographical and geolocated images!
Rather serendipitously, the image that tipped the balance was of a milepost marker, taken by Martin Bodman.
Remember, all the photos are licenced with a Creative Commons by-sa-2.0 licence, making an astonishly useful resource which we hope will become a lasting archive.
Here’s to the next milestone – one million images! We should hit that sometime before December 2008…