Piracy: are we being conned? : The Age with a cynical take on pro-music-biz anti-piracy “reports”. “The quality of data and analysis is very weak as its political objective is so clear. It does not use actual ABS data but data taken from Europe. It’s an elemental statistical error, it’s fudging with numbers to come out with a figure which is ‘kinda sorta’ plausible.”
(tags: piracy filesharing copyright australia the-age newspapers ifpi acta)Our 256,000 (and counting) atheists, agnostics, humanists and non-religious – The Irish Times : “The ‘non-religious’ are the largest group in the State after Catholics, according to the [2006] census.” Doubtless higher in this year’s, too…
(tags: humanism atheism religion census ireland)Dr. Neal Krawetz explains perceptual hashing : ie. TinEye and other “images like this one” search engines. nice explanation
(tags: algorithm images analysis programming dct hashing perceptual-hash tineye via:hn image)
Author: dailylinks
Telehack: May the command line live forever : ‘Connected to TELEHACK port 13 / It is 8:16 am on Saturday, April 30, 2011 in Mountain View, California, USA. There are 10 local users. There are 24139 hosts on the network.’ via Waxy
(tags: via:waxy simulation history telnet arpanet networking unix bbs)
irishindoleaks : ‘leaking the indo’s offline wikileaks coverage online where it belongs’ – scans of each article
(tags: irish-independent ireland politics wikileaks newspapers scans)
_Tim Robinson: Connemara_ : a new documentary, based on the work of Tim Robinson, the great Connemara map-maker. showing this Sunday at 1pm at the IFI in Dublin
(tags: ifi films ireland connemara tim-robinson mapping nature)bump2babe – The Consumer Guide to Maternity Services in Ireland : wow, they’ve done a really good job on the statistics collation here
(tags: statistics birth childbirth ireland health maternity)GTA4 Google Map : wow, very impressive — as far as I can tell, it really _is_ using GMaps infrastructure to some degree
(tags: google-maps google maps gta4 grand-theft-auto via:nelson games)
Gunnar Kreitz, _Spotify – Behind The Scenes_ : the innards of Spotify’s client, server fleet, and P2P layer, from the dev team themselves. good stuff
(tags: spotify streaming servers networking music mp3 dns p2p)
Kill Screen – Profile: Bennett Foddy : The author of cult web-games QWOP and GIRP is a member of Cut Copy! crazy
(tags: games interview cut-copy music via:infovore web qwop girp)“Treasure Map” – Threadless.com : great tee
(tags: tee-shirts threadless apparel clothing)
Today in nose-leech news — it’s a species! : ‘The T. rex leech uses its teeth to saw into the tissues of mammals’ orifices, including eyes, urethras, rectums, and vaginas.’ OH JESUS
(tags: nose nose-leech leeches nature horror omgwtf via:jwz nightmare parasites)The Secrets of Building Realtime Big Data Systems : great slides, via HN. recommends a canonical Hadoop long-term store and a quick, realtime, separate datastore for “not yet processed by Hadoop” data
(tags: hadoop big-data data scalability datamining realtime slides presentations)
Javascript PC Emulator : truly incredible — quite fast (about 386 speeds) under Chrome, even! from the HN comments: ‘I just forkbombed my browser. Nothing is sacred anymore.’ more comments at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2555349
(tags: browser javascript linux emulation fabrice-bellard hacks amazing cool google-chrome x86)Graham Linehan and Osama Bin Laden : a master-stroke of Twitter-based media hoaxing, very funny. particularly like the assist from @Mike_FTW!
(tags: funny twitter graham-linehan osama-bin-laden news media)The Hargreaves Report : ‘The publication of Digital Opportunity follows a six-month independent review of IP and Growth, led by Professor Ian Hargreaves. He was asked to consider how the national and international IP system can best work to promote innovation and growth.’ Some fantastic recommendations here. I hope this provides clear direction to similar Irish efforts…
(tags: ip law hargreaves uk patents copyright)Netflix Beats BitTorrent’s Bandwidth : ‘For perhaps the first time in the internet’s history, the largest percentage of the net’s traffic is content that is paid for.’ A great demo of how *good*, legit, for-pay services, can beat out less usable, dodgy, but free ones (via Waxy)
(tags: via:waxy piracy bandwidth bittorrent internet netflix filesharing)The MongoDB NoSQL Database Blog – MongoDB live at Craigslist : ‘>MongoDB is now live at Craigslist, where it is being used to archive [10TB] of [old posts]’. iiiinteresting
(tags: mongodb nosql craigslist systems)Worldtime Buddy : easy timezone conversion — bookmarkable URLs, sensible levels of AJAX/JS, nicely done
(tags: timezones time conversion javascript world)How to make WIFI work at tech conferences : a success story from JSConf. great tips, I’m sure some will be practical at smaller scales ;)
(tags: wifi 802.11b 802.11n networking 802.11g conferences jsconf wireless)
TwitPic assert ownership over images posted to it, signs licensing deal with sleb-photos agency : scummy. don’t use TwitPic if they are planning to monetize your photos, even if it’s currently just for a “small number of celebrities”. (via my dad)
(tags: twitpic ip privacy copyright via:dad photography)Cool, but obscure unix tools : these are great – some new ones on me!
(tags: cli linux terminal unix tools command-line)
Charanjit Singh on how he invented acid house … by mistake : An interview (of sorts)! ‘Cast your mind to the acid house scene and your immediate thought probably doesn’t involve an ageing Bollywood session musician. Yet the softly spoken Indian man who greets me at the door of his friend’s suburban Acton home on a sunny Sunday morning is credited with creating what some have labelled the first ever acid house record.’
(tags: acid-house music via:xxjfg guardian interviews history india bollywood ragas)
Indian Street Graphics – a set on Flickr : a great collection (via Bruce Sterling)
(tags: via:bruces art culture design flickr india)
TextAid – Google Chrome extension : “It’s All Text” for Chrome. annoyingly, Chrome blocks forking of processes by extensions, so a daemon process (provided) needs to be running separately, but otherwise it works nicely. Particularly nice is that the daemon is just written in dependency-hell-free perl rather than Node.JS ;)
(tags: text editing chrome extensions add-ons browsers web)Chrome to get HTTPS public key pinning : ‘Starting with Chrome 13, we’ll have HTTPS pins for most Google properties. This means that certificate chains for, say, https://www.google.com, must include a whitelisted public key. It’s a fatal error otherwise.’ good anti-MITM protection
(tags: https ssl http web security mitm sniffing chrome)
Online censorship now bordering on the ridiculous in Turkey – Reporters Without Borders : ‘access to websites containing words on the list would in theory be suspended and it would be impossible to create new ones containing them. However, it is not clear how and to what extent the directive will be implemented in practice. The TIB could decide to suppress or block pages for just one blacklisted word. … The list, which borders on the ridiculous, includes words such as “etek” (skirt), “baldiz” (sister-in-law) and “hayvan” (animals). It poses serious problems for access to online information. If words such as “free” and “pic” are censored, countless references to freedom and everyday photos will be eliminated from the Turkish Internet.’ Incredible (via Danny)
(tags: via:mala repression internet turkey censorship filtering false-positives)
Yahoo Sells Delicious To YouTube Founders : ‘Q: Will AVOS maintain the Delicious service with all of its functionality A: Yes, that’s the plan. There may be a time of adjustment as AVOS re-launches Delicious, but the company’s intention is to add new features and grow the service overall.’
(tags: avos yahoo delicious acquisitions)Linux Profiling tools and techniques : great tips for system-level and app-level profiling on Linux from Padraig
(tags: profiling optimization linux cache valgrind)
SmugMug’s Don MacAskill on last week’s EBS outage : comme il faut
(tags: EBS outages aws smugmug)LRB · James Meek · In the Sorting Office : ‘The postwoman is paid a pittance to deliver corporate mail. She hasn’t done her job well, yet so few people have complained about missed deliveries that she hasn’t been found out. Across the world, postal services are being altered like this: optimised to deliver the maximum amount of unwanted mail at the minimum cost to businesses. In the internet age private citizens are sending less mail than they used to, but that’s only part of the story of postal decline. The price of driving down the cost of bulk mailing for a handful of big organisations is being paid for by the replacement of decently paid postmen with casual labour and the erosion of daily deliveries.’ (via Tony Finch)
(tags: via:fanf post mail postal-service holland dutch postmen work jobs business politics lrb)Amazon EC2 outage: summary and lessons learned : Rightscale CTO on last week’s outage; pretty detailed, good round-up of useful commentary from around the web, too
(tags: ebs ec2 aws cloud availability slas rightscale amazon)Dropbox dedupe feature allows materialization of any file, if you know its hash : ‘allows users to exploit Dropbox’s file hashing scheme to copy files into their account without actually having them. Dropship will save the hashes of a file in JSON format. Anyone can then take these hashes and load the original file into their Dropbox account using Dropship.’ heh. that sounds very familiar, I seem to recall thinking about this problem on several occasions… ;) Dropbox certainly didn’t like it, going by this account
(tags: security filesharing dropbox online-backup online-storage p2p hashes sha dmca)Hacker News comments thread on the Dropbox dedupe bug : some good discussion on workarounds
(tags: dropbox hashes p2p filesharing tech security sha)DuoSecurity : well-packaged, well-designed, two-factor auth for SSH from Dug Song. free for small-scale use, too, it looks like. awesome! I’ve signed up (via Nelson)
(tags: via:nelson security authentication authorization two-factor-auth openssh ssh dug-song)
Dylan Collins asks: has Ireland peaked as an Internet hub? : based on Twitter’s surprise move passing over Dublin for London, and how to fix it: “launch the Internet Visa, an aggressive program that allows all Irish Internet companies to recruit from anywhere in the world. Reduce the red tape (combine all permit and visa documentation), guarantee a turnaround time measured in days (a small number) and avoid all the mistakes the UK has made with its Startup Visa initiative. Bring the talent from everywhere outside the EU to Ireland. Ireland doesn’t scale organically. So it needs to in-source. We need to be honest about our shortcomings and tackle them with something which will make HR Directors smile. Imagine a country with all the existing advantages of Ireland plus the ability to hire anyone in the world you wanted. Who in their right mind wouldn’t establish their European base there?” He’s dead right, this is a massive problem for the Irish tech industry right now
(tags: ireland bureaucracy red-tape twitter tech business visas work government dylan-collins)Bug 647959 – Add Honest Achmed’s root certificate to Mozilla : ‘Honest Achmed is at least more honest than Comodo.’ lol
(tags: comodo security security-theatre ssl tls certificates funny trust firefox)
demerphq on “perl’s regexps are slow” : His classic response to the Russ Cox DFA-over-NFA regular expressions paper. ‘A general purpose regex engine like that required for perl has to be able to do a lot, and has to balance considerations ranging from memory footprint of a compiled object, construction time, flexibility, rich feature-sets, the ability to accomodate huge character sets, and of course most importantly matching performance. And it turns out that while DFA engines have a very good worst case match time, they dont actually have too many other redeeming features. Construction can be extremely slow, the memory footprint vast, all kinds of trickery is involved to do unicode or capturing properly and they aren’t suitable for patterns with backreferences.’ — Also interesting to note that he mentions an approach I’ve used in several SpamAssassin speedup add-ons, too ;)
(tags: performance perl regular-expressions perlmonks demerphq regexps dfa nfa state-machines)
brandnewretro | scans from the past : a mate of mine, scanning Irish cultural artifacts from Ireland in the ’70s and ’80s. fanzines!
(tags: fanzines irish ireland history 1980s 1970s dundalk culture scans)Pound : ‘a reverse proxy, load balancer and HTTPS front-end for Web server(s). Pound was developed to enable distributing the load among several Web-servers and to allow for a convenient SSL wrapper for those Web servers that do not offer it natively. Pound is distributed under the GPL’
(tags: https ssl http proxy web pound reverse-proxy)What is Facebook’s architecture? – Quora : nicely detailed summary
(tags: quora architecture facebook http web websites)How Little Sleep Can You Get Away With? : ‘after just a few days, the four- and six-hour group reported that, yes, they were slightly sleepy. But they insisted they had adjusted to their new state. Even 14 days into the study, they said sleepiness was not affecting them. In fact, their performance had tanked. In other words, the sleep-deprived among us are lousy judges of our own sleep needs. We are not nearly as sharp as we think we are.’
(tags: sleep rest brain science neuroscience)
Permanent TSB’s tracker-mortgage paydown option isn’t such a good deal after all : ‘it might be in your interest if you have a tracker mortgage and are unable to get a better rate of interest on the €5,000 that you are being tempted to repay PTSB. You can get up to 4.2% from PTSB deposit accounts, 9.7% from 10-year Irish sovereign bonds, 9% from residential property. Yet PTSB is prepared to give you less than a measly 2% over a five year period on your €5,000 repayment.’
(tags: ptsb permanent-tsb finance money mortgages tracker-mortgage investment)This Bacteria is Violating Copyright | tor.com | Science fiction and fantasy | Blog posts : the Joyce estate playing their usual role. ‘are we now nearing a point where copyright law can result in the retraction of a life form?’ (via John Looney)
(tags: copyright dna bacteria james-joyce joyce-estate frivolous lawsuits copyfight craig-venter)Virgin and NTL filtering fail : ‘Virgin and NTL [in the UK] blocked [del.icio.us] for years’ due to a false positive — joshua
(tags: del.icio.us false-positives filtering uk isps virgin ntl fail via:hackernews)
Nelson Minar on map tiles : quite a lot of detail into the prevailing state of the art in how online zoomable maps store their tiles
(tags: mapping maps google-maps nelson reference tiling storage)pyflakes.vim – on-the-fly Python code checking in Vim : Vim gets a good IDE feature. ‘highlights common Python errors like misspelling a variable name on the fly. It also warns about unused imports, redefined functions, etc.’
(tags: ide vim python programming via:preddit coding)
Rumor: Google “Disgusted” With Record Labels : ‘Once again, Warner is the fly in the ointment, the same company that praises Spotify one day, renews their licenses for the rest of the world and then the next day doesn’t want to license them in the US.’
(tags: google music cloud licensing music-industry record-labels warner-music streaming)
Dublin – Europe’s Next Startup Petri Dish? – NYTimes.com : ‘Ireland’s tech scene continues to expand in spite of the woeful state of the rest of the economy with a plethora of accelerator programs, seed funds and events like Founders and the IBM smartcamp global finals happening there in the last year or two. ‘
(tags: ireland tech software startups)
Digital Rights Ireland » Garda plans to introduce web blocking in Ireland : ‘Last year we revealed that the Department of Justice was working on secret plans to introduce internet filtering in Ireland. Now, despite a complete lack of any legislation, public consultation or democratic discussion, these plans have moved to the implementation stage.’ wtf, this is just appalling lack of oversight
(tags: gardai blocking filtering ireland politics legislation oversight isps ispai alto censorship eff)Daragh O’Brien on the Gardai’s plans to force ISPs to implement IP filtering : ‘Internet blocking is ineffective. The current proposal lacks sufficient checks and balances, and may even require ISPs and telcos to break other laws to comply. It will inevitably result in innocents being tarred as offenders. Data Protection principles (such as “Adequate, Relevant, and Not Excessive” are being blatantly ignored to implement an ineffective solution. Far better is to shut down the shop by removing the images at source and invest time, energy, and resources into a more transparent effort to manage this issue.’ well said
(tags: internet filtering censorship blocking gardai isps ireland data-protection privacy)
RIM: The inmates have taken over the asylum : some notes from Blackberry’s slow circle round the toilet, as it’s hammered by iPhones and Androids. also: I can’t believe QNX is still alive
(tags: rim mobile blackberry qnx embedded phones)
Improving Linux performance by preserving Buffer Cache State : handy — a patch to rsync(1) which will not disturb the buffer cache, so that large file transfers and backups will not interfere with what’s been cached previously
(tags: performance linux caching buffer-cache rsync io cache patches backups)
ImperialViolet – Revocation doesn’t work : OCSP doesn’t work — the browser vendors have failed to implement it safely
(tags: security ssl https tls ocsp revocation crl via:fanf)L. MULLIGAN. GROCER.: Beer of the Week: Metalman Pale Ale : *excellent* Irish pale ale, brewed by ex-co-worker Grainne and her partner Tim, now on sale in my favourite pub. yay!
(tags: mulligans beer ipa pale-ale metalman coworkers)TomatoUSB : ‘an alternative Linux-based firmware for powering Broadcom-based ethernet routers. It is a modification of the famous Tomato firmware, with additional built-in support for USB port, wireless-N mode support, support for several newer router models, and various enhancements. Tomato USB supports many Broadcom-based routers from Asus, Linksys, Buffalo, Netgear and other manufacturers.’ Looks good — I’ve been a Tomato fan for many years — and jzawodny-approved
(tags: router tomato firmware linux routers wireless wifi)
Detecting Certificate Authority compromises and web browser collusion | The Tor Blog : ‘If I had to make a bet, I’d wager that an attacker was able to issue high value [SSL] certificates, probably by compromising [the USERTRUST SSL certificate authority] in some manner, this was discovered sometime before the revocation date, each certificate was revoked, the vendors notified, the patches were written, and binary builds kicked off – end users are probably still updating and thus many people are vulnerable to the failure that is the CRL and OCSP method for revocation.’ It seems addons.mozilla.org was one of the bogus certs acquired. Major ouch. Thanks to EFF/Tor et al for investigating this — SSL cert revocation is a shambles
(tags: security ssl tls certificates ca revocation crypto exploits eff tor comodo usertrust)
HBGary planned to “BLOW THE BALLS OFF OF NMAP” : ‘I would like to call it “B.E.S.T. Scanner” so people kind of get stuck calling it “the best scanner”. We can figure out what BEST means later.’ omgwtf. Is this guy 12 years old?
(tags: funny security humor anonymous scanner nmap hbgary open-source fail idiots)Ireland’s new coalition on media, IT & IP law | Lex Ferenda : ‘some first thoughts on how the just-published coalition agreement (Fine Gael and Labour) in Ireland proposes to deal with issues of interest to cyberlaw and media law.’
(tags: lex-ferenda law ireland ip content internet fair-use copyright tv)
Nuclear energy: Inside the black box : What’s going on inside the Fukushima nuclear reactor, and how it is hoped meltdown can be averted
(tags: nuclear-power meltdown disasters japan fukushima power electricity nuclear)
Backdoor legislation is no way to tackle thorny issue of copyright – The Irish Times – Fri, Mar 11, 2011 : good article by Karlin Lillington on the attempted sneaking-through of an SI to ‘deal with’ filesharing. agreed on all counts
(tags: filesharing piracy ireland law karlin-lillington legislation fianna-fail)
The Remarkable Notability Of Old Man Murray | Rock, Paper, Shotgun : wow, the *entire games industry* (basically) comes out to praise Old Man Murray — the influential satire site. I’d forgotten about their Time-To-Crate game rating system (which I still apply)
(tags: gaming humor old-man-murray games crates)
Old Man Murray Deleted From Wikipedia | Rock, Paper, Shotgun : more idiotic deletionism from Wikipedia. when will someone fork WP with a saner community?
(tags: wikipedia deletionpedia deletion gaming history old-man-murray web community asshats)The Telegraph – Calcutta (Kolkata) | Frontpage | A lesson for colony cousin : So much win in one article. (a) the Bengali equivalent of “craic” is, roughly, “phatiphati”; (b) “In Irish pubs, amid the tiddly-doo music, this is a craic”; (c) wtf Gadaffi references; (d) shared post-colonialist glee
(tags: craic funny colonialism bengali phatiphati tiddly-doo libya india cricket)O2’s page on their new “block 18+ content on mobile internet” policy : O2 UK have just instituted a mandatory block for all “18+” content, which is only removed once the customer pays a UKP1 fee via credit card (which is immediately refunded). Twitter is *full* of angry UK O2 users right now
(tags: o2 uk content credit-cards filtering censorship adult)
TechWire: Don’t do it, Enda and Eamon : Adrian Weckler with a plea for the incoming govt regarding the attempt to rush through ‘3 Strikes’ by the outgoing one: ‘Such a law will have absolutely no effect on the practice of illegal filesharing. None. Zero. It hasn’t worked in France. It hasn’t worked in Britain. And it certainly won’t work in Ireland. On the other hand, it may well send a signal to huge, jobs-creating digital IT companies that Ireland is a place that tries to legislate away personal digital freedoms.’
(tags: 3-strikes ireland adrian-weckler politics filesharing piracy filtering internet freedom)Notch on piracy: “if a pirated game is a lost sale, should bad reviews be illegal?” | PC Gamer : wish more “piracy = theft” people would think about this viewpoint. mind you, fwiw, I buy my games, and have paid for Minecraft ;)
(tags: piracy gaming games minecraft notch)
UK Government Agency wants your spam, but filters the submission address : doh (via Graham Cluley)
(tags: via:gcluley spam uk filtering anti-spam doh funny)
BikeDroid : Warren’s Android app to track DublinBike availability: ‘Use BikeDroid to locate the nearest free bike or stand to you. Get real-time status of all bike stands displayed on a map of your city.’
(tags: bikes dublinbikes apps android mobile)How to block retweets : in Twitter, obvs. This is incredibly handy, and very poorly-documented
(tags: twitter retweets annoying ui)BallotBox.ie Posts Emigrant-Vote Results : FG 63 seats, Labour 51, SF 23, Greens 10, Ind 11, FF 2. interesting to see SF’s strong showing among emigrants — something for electoral reformers to think about ;)
(tags: ireland politics voting e-voting emigration)
Dublin Bikes 2 Go! : ‘an [unofficial] mobile web application that the public can use to find ‘Dublin Bikes’ stations and information about bike availability’
(tags: bikes dublin dublinbikes cycling mobile apps iphone android)
Frank Zappa proposed EMusic in 1983 : incredlble — way ahead of his time on this one
(tags: music internet filesharing business p2p emusic mp3)
Tom Morris – Request for comment: a ‘Good API’ checklist and committee : Sane suggestions for good HTTP APIs
(tags: apis http rest open-data)Votomatic : Brilliant! “find out which political parties are compatible with you.” The app asks a few questions, you furnish survey-style responses, and it figures out which party is closest in published policy. It works quite well, determining that my optimum is Labour (correct)
(tags: policies politics ireland voting elections surveys)How a Remote Town in Romania Has Become Cybercrime Central | Magazine : the story of Ramnicu Valcea — Romania’s Silicon Valley of phishing
(tags: ramnica-valcea crime romania wired security spam phishing)U.S. Government Shuts Down 84,000 Websites, ‘By Mistake’ | TorrentFreak : DHS/ICE domain seizures suffer a serious false positive problem, resulting in the seizure and shutting down of 84,000 subdomains of a free DNS provider, replacing them with a banner accusing the site of trafficking in child porn. whoops!
(tags: dhs ice censorship internet domains dns seizure false-positives child-porn)Israeli general claims Stuxnet attacks as one of his successes : ‘Haaretz reports [on a] video that was played at a party organized for General Gabi Ashkenazi’s last day on the job. The video contained references to the successes he achieved during his stint as chief of staff, [including] the Stuxnet worm attack on Iran’s uranium enrichment facility at Natanz and and the nuclear reactor at Bushehr.’
(tags: israel iran stuxnet cyberwar via:slashdot malware)
Gerrit, Git and Jenkins : This is the future of code review. Commit directly from your git checkout to the Gerrit code-review system; change is immediately web-visible and enters the review workflow; at the same time, Jenkins checks out the proposed change and runs the test suite; once it’s approved, it automatically gets checked in. Brilliant!
(tags: git coding code-review workflows jenkins gerrit c-i testing automation)