Shocking World Cup

Posted by Syazwan Hakim on July 7, 2010

“Tragically, in the knockout stage, the English were hammered 4-1 by Germany. It was painful to watch.”

Syazwan Hakim shares his take on the 2010 FIFA World Cup. Syazwan is the Biggest Football Fan at Stampede.

The FIFA World Cup, arguably the most globally-celebrated event on this planet, had begun in South Africa on June 11, 2010 and will end this coming July 11. It is an event worth 4-years of wait. Only this time, it is chocked-full of shocking outcomes.

Since the very first game till last night’s semi-final (at time of writing), the event is marred by surprises and controversies. Big talents in football didn’t play half as good as they did in club level. Names such as Christiano Ronaldo, Lionel Messy, Wayne Rooney, Frank Lampard and Kaka are well known across the globe. But their appearance on the field is simply disappointing compared to their colourful club track record.

What Happened to the Superstars?

Christiano Ronaldo, the most valuable footballer on Earth – he’s worth €94 million euros – only scored one goal in 2010 World Cup. And it only happened during the Portuguese 7-nil rampage against Korea DPR. It’s almost like wearing the captain armband wasn’t motivation enough to play well for one’s own country. It was a totally different Ronaldo, a far-flung from the Real Madrid star with plenty of skills, trick and astoundingly fast acceleration. For the most expensive player in the world, South Africa didn’t see much from him.

Same goes to Lionel Messi, winner of the Best Player of The Year award. Nobody expected a footballer like him, with 34 goals for Barcelona under his belt, to not even score one goal for Argentina in this World Cup. As predicted, the opposing team’s defense marked Messi so tight that he couldn’t formulate a goal. But that’s a given – if you don’t keep Messi on a leash, he will demolish your team.

The Favourites’ Early Flight Home

Favourite teams such as England, France, Brazil, and Argentina, coming to South Africa expecting to be crowned as the World Cup Champion are just too weak. I can say that France is the worst team in 2010 World Cup. Contrary to the glorious era of Zidane, The French started with such poor performance. They only managed to get a 0-0 draw against Uruguay, then lost 0-2 to Mexico before ending their World Cup campaign by losing 1-2 to South Africa. They also sent home Nicholas Anelka just after tournament day 9 because of some spats between him and the head coach, Raymond Domenech. It gets worse after that. The remaining French squad protested by not attending their training. As the result of the protest, their skipper, Patrice Evra was ultimately dropped from the last game against South Africa and his armband was stripped.

Another favourite team everyone thought has the goods was England. Unfortunately, the star-studded English team was just lucky to survive in Group Stage. Poor performance by Capello’s lads nearly cost them an early exit, but with draw against USA and Algeria and a lucky goal by Jermain Defoe against Slovenia, they earned a sad place into the next round. Tragically, in the knockout stage, they were hammered 4-1 by Germany. It was painful to watch.

Germany once again displayed their real capabilities by showing the way out to Argentina in the most humiliating way, beating the Argentine 4-nil. Excellent performance by Thomas Müller and Mesut Ozil made it terribly difficult for Argentina defense system the entire match. Losing only once to Serbia during group stage,the Germans are now the favourite team to win this World Cup. Up to this moment, they have already scored 13 goals. That’s enough to show how deadly their attack form can get.

The Ghanaian

One team that caught my attention was Ghana. No one expected them to advance from group stage, let alone quarter-final. They nearly made it to semi-final, but Uruguay striker, Luis Suarez denied their chance with a game-saving handball few minutes before the game expired. Suarez was red-carded and penalty given to Ghana. It was an extremely bad luck for their penalty taker, Asamoah Gyan, who only managed to hit the crossbar despite scoring twice from the same spot. The game ended with 1-1 and extended to penalty shootout. Uruguay won 4-2.

Referees

Like any other football tournaments around the world, the World Cup is not free from judging controversies. The most famous controversy involving referees happened in England’s game against Germany. Referee Jorge Larrionda denied Frank Lampard’s 38-minute shot eventhough the video replay had clearly shown that the ball crossed the goal line for approximately 1 yard. Some people claimed that the disallowed goal changed the entire element of that game. If England were not denied of the goal, they probably would have fared better, in spirit and form, during the second half. This incident will ultimately ignite debates over goal-line technology since FIFA president Sepp Blatter has steadfastly refused to consider the possibility of goal-line technology.

Another refereeing controversy surrounded Luis Fabiano’s goal for Brazil against Ivory Coast. After the match, Luis Fabiano himself admitted that he handled the ball in the build-up to his second goal. Mexico also suffered a partial referee decision during their match against Argentina. Referee, Roberto Rosetti awarded Argentina a goal despite Carlos Tevez clearly being offside. Consequentially, both referees Jorge Larrionda and Roberto Rosetti were sent home.

The Final Two

Now, at this very moment, all eyes are set on Germany, Spain, Uruguay and the Netherlands. The Dutch already booked their ticket into the final match after they beat Uruguay 3-2. They will face either Spain or Germany this July 11th at Soccer City Stadium, Johannesburg.

(photo by gitfo)

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Kicking Off the Finals

Posted by Shaiful Borhan on July 1, 2010

“I was a France supporter back in ’98 and Zizou was and is my favourite player.”

Shaiful takes a break from the webby stuff to talk about the greatest sporting event on the planet. Shaiful Borhan is the Web Analyst and Developer at Stampede.

It’s down to the last eight in the FIFA World Cup 2010. In less than 2 weeks someone will be crowned the champion of the world. It has been a different viewing experience for me because this time I was pretty much a neutral fan. Being a neutral fan, the only thing I expect from the matches that I watched is good end-to-end football.

Quick background check, I’m not an all-time neutral though. I was a France supporter back in ’98 and Zizou was and is my favourite player. After he retired however, I tried but wasn’t able to really feel the excitement supporting the Blues anymore. Yes I’m talking about the excitement of WC ’98, Euro 2000, his injury in WC ’02 that saw the French team failed to go through and how he came out of retirement to bring them all the way to the finale of WC ’06 (and not to forget the iconic headbutt).

Back to 2010, I have to admit the team that caught my attention the most is Germany and the instrumental match they played against the English is my favourite match of the tournament so far. Not mainly because it’s a high-profile encounter, what impressed me a lot was the brilliant display of fluid playing by the German team of fresh faces with little international experience. Such a contrast than the line-up back then when the rest of the team were veterans in the likes of Kahn, Klinsmann and company.

Undeniably the match of the QF is Argentina vs. Germany. It is a historical clash, took place once in 1990 and recently four years ago and got very physical. Well this is the match I will look forward to in the QF. Somehow it felt like the finale came early with this one. I reckon it’s going to be good end-to-end football.

(photo by Grant Johnson)

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Spam Prevention Alternatives to CAPTCHA

Posted by Shaiful Borhan on June 5, 2010

Shaiful discusses about alternative ways to combat spam in web forms and why CAPTCHA is his least favourite. Shaiful Borhan is the Web Analyst and Developer at Stampede.

One of the rules in today’s web is if you have forms on your website, you need to have some kind of spam prevention measure implemented. Here I will talk us through the several methods that can be used and why CAPTCHA isn’t one.

Why not CAPTCHA?

Well, spam prevention wise CAPTCHA challenge works. But the main problem is it considerably lowers the user experience by requiring extra effort and time to read the garbled image that may deter the user from completing the form altogether. To overcome that, they came out with the audio version of CAPTCHA which seriously, is even more troublesome. On top of that, having a CAPTCHA image certainly cripples the aesthetics of a well-designed form. With all these shortcomings however, CAPTCHA might be the best method to counter manual spammers (humans) because they would get too annoyed to do the CAPTCHA challenge.

Apart from image CAPTCHA, we could use a different version of challenge question method. One of the popular approaches is to present users with simple arithmetic operations e.g. “What is 4 + 2?”  As with CAPTCHA, it is also randomized each time the form reloads. Another variant is to use questions that requires textual answers such as “What animal meows?”. It should be noted that questions like these should be made simplistic as it introduces language barriers between the users and the system and to prevent the user from taking extra efforts.

Alternative “Are You Human?” Tests

The methods described above require user input in order to distinguish humans from spambots. This additional step can be eliminated by using a little bit of programming logic to validate the form submission on the server side.

Spambots usually love to fill out every field on the form. We can take advantage of this behaviour to trap the bots by setting up a field that is hidden from the user’s view, assuming it would not be filled by a legitimate human user. This field has to be a normal type=“text” with a tempting name like ‘email’ or ‘website’ except it has a CSS “display:none” property. The idea is to flag the form submission as spam if this field was filled. To cater screen reader users without CSS support, adequate label should be applied telling them to leave this field blank. Additionally, bots also have the tendency to post links and irrelevant keywords in textarea fields. A carefully crafted regex validation on these fields would help prevent faulty form submissions substantially.

Another advanced approach is to attach a unique, dynamically-generated token as a hidden field on your form and then check its validity upon submission. These tokens can be produced using session IDs or simply timestamps. The idea behind this method is to ensure the user viewing the form is essentially the same user submitting it. The timestamp method can be used to calculate the time elapsed between the page being viewed and submitted.

Modern Day Solutions

In order to stay concurrent with the advancement of spambots, the measures taken to combat spammers have also been taken a step further by using a collaborative, distributed and intelligent approach as can be seen in Akismet and Project Honey Pot. The Akismet service is fairly popular because it comes natively with Wordpress, arguably the most used blogging platform in the world. What it actually does is it runs numerous tests on the form submission data against its own huge collection of black/white list and returns the status with a thumbs up or thumbs down. The filter works by combining information about spam captured on all participating sites, and then using those spam rules to block future spam.

All in all, there will not be a silver bullet for solving web form spamming. Spambots will always become smarter and we quite surely couldn’t stop manual spamming. Nevertheless, with modern services like Akismet and Project Honey Pot the prospects certainly look promising.

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