I miss you × I know it when I see it

A short episode in the YouTube vs. users series:

1. Too much transparency, it is none of my business who claimed the copyright for a now deleted video, unless I uploaded it.
2. Not enough transparency, I need a notification if a video in one of my playlists is deleted.

Background, a triple strike on Björk in In principio (pt. 1: 1970-1999): Human Behaviour v=KDbPYoaAiyc is now v=36Srr08PN_Y, I miss you v=IKSoBJ8WirE is now v=ybDX_5hQ6So (non-adult version), and Hunter v=CyM5wow-hUk is now v=DnW77jmr-Xg.  There are lots of I miss you versions on YouTube, but I cannot tell if one of them is the wannabe-adult version for a playlist about YouTube's Community Guidelines. Or in other words, I removed I miss you from the Guidelines playlist, because there is still another "uncensored" (age-restricted) Pagan Poetry video by Björk in it, and I replaced it in the 1970-1999 playlist.

While at it, the deleted Declare Independence v=4z7NN4n8CTY in In principio (pt. 2: 2000-2019) is a major loss, I'm not going to find and fix all posts here, where I embedded this master piece. IMNSHO this is a bug, YouTube could simply redirect its URL to the still existing identical v=4P5xSntVWQE. Don't let them do that to you … Raise your flag:

Just for the records, the (apparently) deleted account issue (2) has nothing to do with the leaked copyright strike issue (1), only the platform (YouTube) and the effect (deleted video) are similar.

Hey you, you're losing, you're losing your…

To some degree tumblr worked for me as an ersatz-Google+ or actually ersatz-Buzz: I could like some Instagram-posts automagically copied to tumblr. YouTube's "share on tumblr" feature also worked, same idea as "share on blogger". The opposite direction—share something found on tumblr elsewhere—might be tricky if you don't accept any "tumblr as a platform" spam. Or it is like SoundCloud, their default <embed>-code for sharing is horrible, with some radical manual modifications it is good enough, TBD.

Still having fun with my YouTube playlists:

"Vitamin C" on Toxic Waste	"Your Mind" on Rewind 2018
"DAF Mussolini" on Klapperstrauss	"KMFDM Mussolini" on I know it when I see it

YouTube Got Talent (pt. 2)

Next musician in need of some serious WikiLove, she's not even one of those women in red at the moment, and a registered #GirlsGotGroove hashtag does not help on YouTube, if nobody uses it. Unregistered used hashtags also don't work on YouTube, both cases yield a small error message for #foobar immediately followed by any ordinary search results for foobar without #.

After some religious debates with myself I finally kicked Sina's drum covers as not good enough from the In principio (pt. 1) + (pt. 2) playlists, and then upgraded some original tracks incl. Deep Purple's Child In Time in the Religiously Incorrect + Toxic Waste playlists to Sina's 201x versions. Maybe some purists scream, but as you could have read in this blog there was a hard timeout in February from my PoV, so (quote) fuck it (unquote), and I've posted the source of this quote in March.

Back to April, all fine, Google+ died as planned, but without its exorcist as eye-witness, and maybe one protective spell three months ago with Deep Purple's April worked. Standard question, what could possibly go wrong? Answer: (1) Spells sometimes work. (2) If they work they sometimes backfire. Putting that together, for a time-limited protective spell, back could be in time and hit the target instead of the caster. Which might be exactly what happened, if an also convoluted explanation involving an obscure toxic forum since about November doesn't suffice. Meanwhile it's May, let's forget the Deep Purple April 2019, it's history like Google+.

I collected lots of Karma-points for the possible spell-disaster on another Emma, a bad case of woman in red fixed in record time by some enthusiasts, thanks: On Wikipedia wikilinks are shown in blue if the article exists, or in red if it does not yet exist. Meanwhile somebody uploaded the 19 images extracted from one video on WikiMedia Commons, and sadly the somebody was me: I broke a three years old WikiMedia log-in strike for this business, and on the same day I found that enwiki offers an image upload request page for these cases, tested, works.

If you missed major parts of the drama, you might wonder what happened to the Topic, VEVO, and Vloggery channels, it's explained on enwiki Emma Blackery. Of course unrelated to the five years old drama, YouTube always finds the worst points in time for changes related to this musician. Admittedly losing YouTube Heros, Rewind 2018, and Google+ to one singing Slytherin and her allies must have been hard for Alphabet, and hopefully she doesn't plan to kill Blogger just because she could. Back to music, she released the studio version of Cute Without You in April is the cruellest month:

The Google+ black list

Now that's against my rules as of (roughly) 1983 to 2018, or isn't it? Sometimes enwiki manages to surprise me, and I'm not talking about the major obstacles when not logged-in users try to add a perfectly valid film title on a biography. Admittedly Fuck  is exactly what vandals would try to write, and there's an edit filter trying to forbid it. I'm not telling you how to bypass the filter, if you don't know this you might be up to no good, and I hate vandals armed with a mobile phone and social media rumours.

JFTR, the complete title is Fuck Slaves, and I needed it to explain two different awards in one year, where the second award was related to an arguably notable film, i.e., one wikilink was required for my second good article  quest, and one statement about two awards needed both titles.

Google+ also tried to surprise me with its second "sexually explicit"  strike in a "privately shared"  (unlisted) collection. The content was a perfectly harmless review of The Juliette Society, only the domain of the publisher has an X before its BIZ. Exactly the same X before a CRIT as in the first strike for a perfectly harmless 2006 interview originally posted here (on blogspot), now again posted here (by me as embedded scribd-PDF, there's certainly no X in scribd.)

Chilling effects, I dare not post it here at the moment, Blogger could also hate the X, I only know that this is not about the content. Lame excuse, after buying the first part of the trilogy I should anyway read it before linking more reviews.

After testing the title link, this playlist is as the name says toxic. I stick to the now usual layout and added two videos here.

YouTube Got Talent

Transparency Report 2018

Nobody is going to delete my Chilling Effects parody:

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Background, 9 to 5: Days in Porn is a notable  (enwiki terminology) documentary, and typically available on YouTube in mutilated versions to bypass the ContentID filters. The issue is copyright, not the four-letter word in the title. The MOV trailer is of course also not free, but intended to be shared as promo for the movie. Nobody including popular browsers knows what a MOV used to be, therefore I converted it to MP4 and uploaded it to YouTube as historic clip with credits and other related info.

The movie site also offers some bonus clips as FLV, and today that's worse than MOV. Therefore I converted one of the bonus clips to MP4, uploaded it to YouTube, and tagged it as NSFW, because less than one of the 44 seconds in this clip is NSFW. Wild guess, Deleted Scene in the title Deleted Scene: Sasha & Roxy Girls Talk wasn't helpful for the appeal, or YouTube uses a bot to reject appeals.

G+ backup strategy

My attempt to (ab)use WAYBACK as the place to backup my G+ experiments failed, only plain text content with public pictures works as expected. Vimeo or YouTube videos or playlists don't make it, shared photos or albums on Google Photos don't make it (403), and an unlisted (shared by link) G+ collection also doesn't work. Some historic sources in the Mismade Girl collection now got their first WAYBACK backup, better than nothing.

Two video + playlist collections on G+ can die (2 of 6), the content is available on YouTube. The Buzz collection is old news and can also die together with G+. Same procedure as for the nice Google Buzz when G+ killed it:
Actually I could now delete the last two remaining files in Google Drive, the vintage 2011 Buzz PDF is irrelevant, and I copied the very relevant 23C3 video to Google Photos. 50% (2+1 of 6) done by doing nothing, not counting "talk about it" here, that's the way (I like it).

The Archive 2018 collection consists of six posts with zero followers (after killing the auto-follow bit for both archives), SEO for YT stuff (2), SEO for other YT videos (1), WikiMedia battles (1 won, 1 lost), and if wannabe-"agents"  and other sharks don't grok why aspirant celebreties must have at least one CC0, CC-BY or CC-BY-SA photo for WikiMedia it's not my fault: CC-BY-NC-ND is not good enough. Two posts were public copies of unlisted posts: 2018 done.

The Archive 2019 collection isn't closed yet, but after it's clear that Google will delete G+ (instead of only freezing G+) I'll limit further posts to some ephemeral art  intended to die in April. The nine existing posts are SEO for playlists (7), videos (1), and how I figured out YouTube channel art and the G+ idea of hashtags: 2019 done, nothing to do for 5 of 6 collections.

The 34 posts in the remaining unlisted collection can be separated in three parts:

1. Stuff already posted here under the new tag FoG (now split from IPOAD.)
2. Stuff already covered on enwiki, commons, or WikiData.
3. Various historic 2006…2018 videos + interviews not yet covered elsewhere.

Testing my copy from G+ to Blogger is easy theory below, it turned out to be not at all easy, G+ has no share on blogger feature (or already lost it while shutting down), and if the news source only offers share on FB or twitter some HTML 3.2 table layout is a PITA:

Art Tavana (2016-05-26) in LA Weekly	Samantha Grasso (2018-07-15) in TheDailyDot
	Sasha Grey (2018-04-19) in a Topic Monologue

purl.net/xyzzy

Reviving this dead blog was possibly maybe a bad idea, but I'm still terrified to get a Twitter account to replace G+ in April, maybe Blogger is goodbad enough. At least it still works, and apart from Gmail I'm not aware of any other still working Google product. #GirlsGotGroove could be an argument for Twitter, "registering" hashtags is about as much fun as playing with WikiData.

The old websites are now all gone, R.I.P.: 2004, 2010, 2012. For the required legalese I trusted that "click on banner + click on imprint" covered your privacy also for this blog, i.e., there is no such thing as privacy on Google products, and if you allow third party cookies SoundCloud.com (example) will track you on any page with an SC iframe (=technical term for an embedded object, ignoring images + applets.)

SC politely asked to put that info into any affected privacy policy, so consider it done here for this blog until I get a static blogger page for some remotely legal legalese. I still don't do analytics or monetisation or cookies, not here, not on YouTube, nowhere, period. BTW, get an AdBlock, and disallow JavaScript on all sites complaining about it, c.f. chrome://settings/content/javascript.

DynDNS killed xyzzy.webhop.info some years ago, IIRC it was a redirect to my Google Apps account. Meanwhile Google also killed the target, good riddance.

DynDNS also killed xn--80akhbyknj4f.boldlygoingnowhere.org and xn--xyzzy.boldlygoingnowhere.org belonging to my i18n-fun pages here. That's sad, but the fun factor was possibly maybe limited to some folks I (virtually) met in IETF WGs. All is well if it ends well, SPF is a proper RFC now, the technically dubious (or ethically too ambitious) Sender-ID is dead, and I even produced a silly RFC to balance the IAB appeal.

I know it when I see it

Playlist I know it when I see it, how dare you, YouTube, censoring Björk is, broadly construed, blasphemous:

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Playlist Viral Videos, some kind of I love it not limited to music or heroines:

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Experimental playlist Extreme Uplifting, omitting Perfect as not enough noise:

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AOB: My subscriptions are public at the moment, with Semper Video as oldest, oddly I never subscribed to Semper Censeo. Update: The hardwired 425×344 looks like shit on my VAIO, width="96%" failed miserably, how about 800×450, mobile untested?

Commons

At some point in time Blogger added a Google+ tracking script to this blog, and I've not yet figured out how to get rid of this spyware. If you have a browser extension blocking wannabe-social tracking sites such as ShareMeNot this won't affect you. While at it and FWIW I have replaced the CC-BY-SA 3.0 license for this blog by 4.0, removed the dead Google Reader links, and fixed some other minor blog template rot issues.
Recently Google Sites somehow managed to clobber embedded Google Docs videos with non-existing YouTube content. Just embedding the video again can fix this. Just for fun I try this also here—for the complete story see its page on my Google site:

Upgraded 2019 (almost 5y later) to <iframe allow="" sandbox="allow-scripts allow-same-origin" referrerpolicy="origin" …>. I'm not updating older iframes in this blog if there are any.
Fun observation, blogger gave up on <p>…</p> and now firmly demands <div>…<br /><br /></div> for a simple paragraph: HTML 3.2 rulez, and I know it by heart (in its XHTML 1.0 transitional incarnation), now singing nah pop, no style. I strictly roots..

Some hours later, the docs.google video doesn't play, neither here nor on sites.google, revert doesn't help, view the video on WAYBACK or Google Photos (sic-K).

Go, Duck, go

Reader redesign: Terrible decision, or worst decision? and another article discuss the next step of what will be known as the demise of Google: Now they have crippled Google Reader. It even doesn't work anymore in Chrome.

What used to be a single click Like or Share in Reader is now gone, and the new Reader UI is a disaster, as one of the creators of the original UI states. In theory I could join the G+ beta tests, but as it happens I'm not interested to risk my Google account including Blogger and Gmail with an acknowledgement of the G+ beta test ToS.

Check out Duck Duck Go lite while it's still a free no-nonsense search engine. And do not waste time with Google APIs or services, sadly they will be gone or munged until no-good before you begin to grok what they were about.

Customised Search Engines

More than four years ago I explained the secrets of LP and AH in a Google CSE query parameter cof=FORID:0%3BAH:center%3BLP:0. The percent-encoded hex. %3B is a semicolon separating FORID:0, AH:center, and LP:0 in this example going back to Google's ancient free site search.

This undocumented cruft is now seriously dead, or rather, AH:center and LP:0 now have no visible effect. Maybe the cof= parameter was removed while some new CSE features were introduced since June, see an entry on the Custom Search Blog — I've no idea what the Element might be, and the officially deprecated features didn't mention any undocumented cruft, but there, it's dead, and the new layout for CSE search results hosted by Google works fine for the xyzzy CSE. Fortunately I modified it to work on the CSE layout test page some months ago, and as it happens that is now apparently good enough for new search result pages without AH:center and LP:0.

I'll remove any remaining obsolete cof= parameters where I find them, it might be hidden in obscure places such as the template for this blog, persistent URL (PURL) redirections, rel="search" link relations in the header of my web pages, and a tiny CSE googlet (PURL of XML source).

BTW, if you were always looking for an IETF-related search engine test the xyzzy CSE as shown near the bottom of all web pages for this blog. I still update this CSE when I find new promising sites, one of the last additions was a site tracking link relation registration requests. I added it after the registration of link relation rel="canonical" on the corresponding IETF expert review mailing list.

And if you were always looking for a REXX-related search engine check out my second (and last) REXX CSE — I rarely use it, but fix it when I stumble over broken links on my KEXX page. For a recipe to convert CSEs given by their cx= ID to OpenSearch Description Documents see another four years old entry on this blog, or just adopt one of the OSDDs on my googlet page.

Google mail security

Inspired by an Heisec article about the fine art of stealing insecure cookies I've upgraded the mailx googlet to use https for its Google mail mobile redirection. The settings allow to configure http instead of https.

A new entry in my googlet zoo is firxt.mobile for the firxt mobile OpenSearch portal. Often mobile also means accessible over slow connections and no nonsense. The googlet should work everywhere, check it out. Hint, what you see as "use this URL" within the googlet contains apparently a configuration number. Just in case this number can be stored in the googlet settings, maybe it helps when you delete your cookie.

Hamburg-Web

An attempt to add this blog to HH-web.de finally worked, while I was at it I created a HH-web search googlet and learned some new CSS tricks.

For years I used hreflang="de" in links to German sites on English pages or vice versa, without visible effect, and likely no effect at all. Now I found a way to do something with it:

:link[hreflang]:hover:after {
     content: " " attr(hreflang); font-weight: 100;  
     vertical-align: super; font-size: xx-small;   }

This construct matches links with a hreflang, and displays the value as small as possible at the end of the link while the mouse hovers over it. Test it with the HH-web link above.

Another nice CSS feature is :target, not displaying the ugly blogger dashboard is one thing, but now I can also get it back when I need it with an invisible link in the upper left corner of this blog.

Googlet gallery

After a year one of my googlets is apparently used by some folks, great, it encouraged me to work on the whole set, add some settings such as the help language on the PDA LEO googlets, and create a gallery.

New entries are googlets for the German and English Heise whois for older browsers without OpenSearch support. For a different preview see googlemodules. No, I've not given up on the command line rxwhois client, but allegedly some users don't like command lines... ;-)

Another new entry is a MetaWikiHelp googlet, the Wikipedia help often is not good enough when working on other MediaWikis with different features and rules.

Custom search googlet

Transforming Google CSEs into OpenSearch descriptions is simple, even when Firefox needs some proprietary <moz:SearchForm> magic to get it right.

For older browsers not supporting OpenSearch each CSE has its own default gadget for uses on iGoogle, blogger, and elsewhere. I created a smaller configurable tiny CSE variant, to use it edit the cx-number, e.g., 001904119753490578822%25:zvsejdqm-pw for the xyzzy-CSE.

CSEs hosted by Google have one issue, creators cannot easily publish the source for users wanting to know what the CSE really does. Here's a snapshot of the sites currently covered by the xyzzy-CSE:

alvestrand.no, arkko.com, ecma-international.org, gmane.org/gmane.ietf.* (ditto org.w3c.*), iab.org, iana.org, icann.org, icir.org, iesg.org, ietf.org (excl. lists), imc.org, irtf.org, isc.org, isi.edu, isoc.org, itscj.ipsj.or.jp/ISO-IR, jabber.org, langtag.net, omniplex.blogspot.com (this blog), openspf.org, postel.org, rfc-editor.org, rfc-ignorant.org, rsa.com/rsalabs, standardstrack.com, unicode.org, w3.org, xml.resource.org, xmpp.org, and my own xyzzy mirrors (plus googlets).

Fresh opensearch & google gadgets

New Opensearch descriptions:

1. Google Code custom search
2. en×de translations by LEO
3. es×de translations by LEO
4. fr×de translations by LEO

New googlets:

5. About Flash googlet (version, links, search)
6. Atomic clock googlet (JAVA applet of the PTB)
7. Tiny map search googlet (local search)

The tiny map location can be set, default 53.55, 9.99.

OpenSearch descriptions for Google CSEs

It's quite simple to create opensearch descriptions for any existing Google CSE. Here's an example using the mozillaZine KB CSE:

This CSE is identified by cx=003258325049489668794:ru2dpahviq8. The &cx=-parameter is used in links and anything else related to this CSE. The left hand side 003258325049489668794 is related to the Google account and the up to 5000 annotations (e.g. sites and URL patterns) associated with this account. The right hand side ru2dpahviq8 is related to the actual CSE context including details of its layout, references to the associated annotations also known as background labels, etc.

It's not my CSE, I can ignore most technical details only relevant for the CSE creator. One detail is probably important, this CSE uses FORID:1 unlike my own CSEs with FORID:0. The value is visible in the monstrous URL of search results, it's a part of the &cof= parameter.

Most other layout details noted in &cof= are set by Google on the fly based on the CSE definition a.k.a. context. For my own CSEs I force LP:0 and AH:center with &cof=FORID%3A0%3BLP%3A0%3BAH%3Acenter, but that's arguably pointless, opensearch only works with Firefox 2, IE7, or better, and these browsers have no issues with the default LP:1 logo position and AH:left aligned header on result pages.

CSEs refuse to return &output=xml or &output=xml-no-dtd results, therefore the opensearch description needs only one type="text/html" template. Just in case I added...

<SyndicationRight> limited </SyndicationRight>
<Attribution> Google CSE by Jason Kersey </Attribution>

...anyway, after all the search results are Google results. In this case results filtered and rearranged as defined by the CSE creator Jason Kersey. With up to three searched sites in a CSE Google allegedly also shows its supplemental results.

Putting it all together I arrived at this mozillazine opensearch description. I've no clue how and where Firefox or IE7 might use the Tags or Description, most likely these details are irrelevant for search results on ordinary type="text/html" pages. The validator wants a Query example as specified by opensearch.org, just for fun I picked about%3Aconfig.

One last detail, the icon, fortunately kb.mozillazine.org has a type="image/vnd.microsoft.icon" 16×16 favicon needing less than 10 KB, so this should work as is (http:-URL instead of data:-URL) for Firefox. It's tricky to get the icon right with *.googlepages.com, the Google Page Creator won't let you have your own favicon.ico. Just use another name.

One way to use opensearch descriptions is to add a link in the header of (X)HTML pages. The title in the link should match the ShortName in the description, otherwise browsers won't know if the corresponding search is already installed. I've done that here in my blogger-template:

<link rel="search" href="xyzzy.a9.xml" type="application/opensearchdescription+xml" title="xyzzy" />

Another way is the window.external.AddSearchProvider function, Firefox 2 users can then simply click on the link to copy an opensearch description to their browser. I haven't tested IE7, maybe it uses the same method, i.e. "copy description". Last step, test this OpenSearch description with Firefox 2 or better.

For another example see my googlets page.

sitemap.cmd 0.3

FWIW I've added the schema magic to sitemap.cmd (0.3), adjusting the documentation of the REXX ftpsynch wannabe-content management system.

Apart from being a bit longer and overwriting siteold.xml the new version now passes XML schema validation. Caveat, don't use its buggy text/html output at the moment.

Unrelated, Google's page creator rewrites an uploaded sitemap 0.90 automagically into a sitemap 0.84 removing all <lastmod> elements. Or rather it did that last week for e.g. this sitemap, maybe it's one of the experimental features.

LP Logo Position, AH Align Header

Some troubles with Google's custom search engines (CSE):

• The watermark "branding" fails miserably with Javascript 1.1. The code doesn't check this old version resulting in garbage with browsers still using it. I always disable JS 1.1, but I can't ask visitors of pages using my "xyzzy" CSE to disable JS 1.1 before, they wouldn't know what it is. Now I use the ordinary "branding" with one of Google's six CSE logos.
• The default position of the search form on the result page is "left" set by AH:left. Fans of the old free site search form know this "Align Header"  parameter, it's (kind of) documented on my lab page. It's also straight forward to modify it, add ;AH:center to the cof=FORID:0 parameter, where 0 might be something else depending on the used form.
• The free site search result pages show my logo immediately above the search form. The used parameters L: for the logo URL and S: for the site URL are still the same for CSEs, it's only not more necessary to specify all these odd values as part of the cof= parameter, Google inserts them on the fly. Unfortunately it also uses some CSS magic (style sheets) to get this right, failing miserably with browsers not supporting CSS. After some experiments I found the culprit: There's a new LP:1 "Logo Position" , this has to be disabled by LP:0 to get the desired effect.

Putting it all together I ended up with this form input:

 <input type="hidden" name="cof" value="FORID:0;AH:center;LP:0" /> 

For an example see this form, I'll update the other forms later. Of course I'll need my own "googlet" for this CSE. But the normal "add to Google" CSE gadget is anyway far too big for my taste.