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I Say Risbubh

Published September 25, 2003

I keep getting this one, with a question about whether spammers can use it to get past filters:

Aoccdrnig to rceent rsceearch at an Birtsih uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht frist and lsat ltteer is at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae we do not raed ervey lteter by it slef but the wrod as a wlohe.

Firstly, it’s a crock. That text is incomprehensible! Plus, it’s not entirely truthful in its message — try this variant, which really does make the ‘rset’ a ‘toatl mses’:

Aidnroccg to rceent rrceesah at a Biitsrh usvitrneiy …

Or maybe it’s just me who has to spend about 10 times as long trying to comprehend it. (Or maybe my font’s too small. whatever…)

Secondly, every ‘trick’ that results in spammers embedding large up-front blocks of readable text in their mails, scrambling letters around like that, using l33t-sp3ak, i n s e rt i n gs p ac e s, 92384 adding lsdjfgk random foo words to viagra confuse filters, etc. etc. will do nothing but hurt them.

Bear in mind they make money from spam by making sales — if they have to increasingly obfuscate their message to get through, their would-be ‘customers’ will not be able to read the messages, their sales will go down, and spamming will become unprofitable.

Remember: if the costs of spamming goes up (through effective filters, increasing complexity to evade detection, and legislation to prosecute them), and the returns go down, the spamming becomes unprofitable and more spammers will give up.

Good news on software patents

Published September 25, 2003

Great news from the European Parliament — the good amendments have been passed and it looks a lot better. James Heald of FFII is quoted as saying ‘the directive text as amended by the European Parliament clearly excludes software patents. It hangs together incredibly cohesively.’

Congratulations to our MEPs who grasped the highly technical nuances of the issue, and voted the right way, and to the groups who advised them so well. No congrats to me who went on holidays just before this vote. ;)

Now, all that remains is to ensure that the Council of Ministers also do the right thing; unfortunately FFII note that ‘in the past, the Council of Ministers has left patent policy decisions to its patent policy working party, which consists of patent law experts who are also sitting on the administrative council of the European Patent Office (EPO). This group has been one of the most determined promoters of unlimited patentability, including program claims, in Europe.’ Not encouraging.

Meta: still catching up and getting through the jetlag…

Back

Published September 23, 2003

Back from a great week-and-a-half in Ireland. Lots of fun (and Guinness) was had, Luke and Lean were successfully married, Ireland is officially the most beautiful country in the world, weather was amazing, got to meet up with virtually everyone, and I’m now back at the computer catching up.

Of course, some git has joe-jobbed both myself and a mailing list I’m on, so there’s thousands of bounce messages as a result and the server is slow as a wet week. Argh. But at least the SoBig onslaught has died down a bit.

Interestingly, I reported some spam to SpamCop a week or two before the joe-job. I wonder if the two really are connected — ie. report spam, and the spammers will decode the listwashing tokens from their mails, figure out your email address, and add you to their ‘enemies list’?

This is the first time I’ve reported spam to SpamCop in a long time, and the first joe-job I’ve been victim of. It seems like more than a coincidence, IMO.

On hols

Published September 11, 2003

I’m in Ireland for my friends’ wedding for the next week and a half, so blogging will be infrequent. ;)

Ireland or Iraq?

Published September 9, 2003

In this article by Salam Pax, about how he got into weblogging, he says:

While the world was moving on to high-speed internet, we were being told it was overrated.

Heh, sounds like an Eircom quote ;)

Leni Riefenstahl, suing 12-year-olds and FFB

Published September 9, 2003

Leni Riefenstahl dead at 101 (CNN). Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will, the 1934 Nazi propaganda film, is rightly famous — it’s technically excellent — but became a millstone around her neck for the rest of her life. To my mind, this lesson illustrates that an artist (or scientist) can never divorce the work one does from that work’s implications to society.

Music: 12-year-old sued for downloading music. ‘ ‘I got really scared. My stomach is all turning,’ Brianna said last night at the city Housing Authority apartment where she lives with her mom and her 9-year-old brother.’ Way to go, RIAA.

Spam: Paul Graham: a spam filter that fights back. Basically auto-spidering URLs found in spam messages as a form of anti-spam DDoS.

Microtution spam warning

Published September 9, 2003

Just received a mail from a bunch called ‘microtution’, looking to write a collaborative political weblog. More details here.

But hold on there — this was an out-and-out spam, sent via an open proxy, using a spam tool, with faked headers, to a spamtrap address they scraped from one of my sites. Anyone considering helping out on this collaborative weblog might like to consider who they’re helping.

The mail was sent from 213.176.81.230, direct to my MX, from ‘Fredericka’ <promiseman@promiseman.com>, Subject ‘need help with political blog’.

Penguinitis

Published September 8, 2003

Good interview with Samba’s Tridge. He explains where the penguin mascot came from — I never knew the linux penguin was in fact a fairy penguin! All those trips bringing visitors to Phillip Island while I was in Melbourne were not wasted then. ;)

Some time later Linus was looking for a mascot for Linux, and apparently the incident at the National Aquarium helped influence him towards choosing a penguin. If you go there now you will see a little plaque commemorating the fateful day when Linus caught ‘penguinitis’ from one of the fairy penguins in the enclosure (the 6ft one, of course).

ha ha ha ha

Published September 8, 2003

ThisIsLondon: ‘David Blaine thought he was ready for anything. The US illusionist suspended in a glass box over London had prepared himself for 44 days of starvation, loneliness and boredom.

But there was one thing he had not planned for – Londoners.

… the prize for invention went to golfers who teed up with clubs on Tower Bridge and tried hitting the box with golf balls.’

Back again

Published September 8, 2003

So I’m back — I was up in Sunnyvale last week, on a work trip. Met up with Dan Kohn for the first time, which was great, and also had an impromptu SpamAssassin summit with Craig and Dan Quinlan — and got to meet the newest arrival in the Hughes family, the very cute Evan Alice.

I was hoping to meet up with a few more people, but didn’t quite organise it in the limited time there. Maybe next visit!

ObLAvBayAreaComment: Amazing how much better the drivers are up there, too. ;)

Still averaging about 68 SoBig.F virus mails, at about 100Kb each, for a total of about 7Mb per hour. That means my ‘reject’ mailbox is at 412 megs since Friday afternoon. Beats Charlie Strosser’s figures ;)

It’s all getting quietly bitbucketed, but the side-effects are still nasty. Take a look at this, for example; someone at adjv503ry3ec.ab.hsia.telus.net (142.59.69.220) has been spewing SoBig.F’s at the FoRK list, using my address, non-stop for weeks. Argh.

Patents: Richard Allen MP tackles the thorny software patents issue. It’s great being able to follow his thinking on these lines — more politicians should consider starting a weblog along these lines. True transparency.

Much better than Arlene McCarthy’s railing against ‘The Misinformation Campaign … by the Free Software Alliance’, whoever they are… I particularly like this statement from her PR:

If we were to follow the demands of these lobbyists then we would be handing over inventions to US multinationals and getting no return on our R&D investments in the field of computer implemented inventions. This will sound the death knell for our brightest and best European inventors, whilst the US and Japan will demand licence fees from European companies for the use of their patents. Without patent protection there will be no financial incentive for our most creative industries to develop genuine inventions.

… but — given that (a) software patents cannot currently be enforced in Europe, and (b) that 77% of the (currently-unenforceable) EPO software patents are registered already to non-EU companies, the only way for the US and Japan to ‘demand licence fees from European companies for the use of their patents’ would be if McCarthy’s proposed directive was passed, allowing those patents to be enforced in the EU. Oops — own goal!

VR: so I don’t lose this, Jaron Lanier’s 11 reasons why Virtual Reality has not yet become commonplace.

History: Came across the original SpamAssassin pre-release ‘try it out’ mail:

after quite of while of thinking about it, I’ve finally rewritten the spam filter I’ve been using for a while, and released it as free software.

It’s called SpamAssassin, and it’s a mail filter to identify spam using text analysis. Using its rule base, it uses a wide range of heuristic tests on mail headers and body text to identify spam, which it then tags for later filtering using the user’s own mail user-agent application.

Urban Design and Vogon Poetry

Published August 30, 2003

via Boing Boing, Stating the bleeding obvious: if you drive instead of walk, you get fat. Well, duh!

But the alternative is, if you walk or cycle instead of drive, you’ll get killed. ‘American pedestrians are roughly three times more likely to be killed by a passing car than are German pedestrians – and more than six times more likely than Dutch pedestrians. For bicyclists, Americans are twice as likely to be killed as Germans and more than three times as likely as Dutch cyclists.’

However, Irvine has some of the best cycling infrastructure (and weather) I’ve ever seen — except nobody uses it, apart from the weekender recreational cyclists.

Can’t figure out why — I guess it’s just a cultural thing; everyone drives, and people cycling or walking near some cars seems to give the drivers heart attacks. (Seriously. The other night, a driver honked and slowed to a crawl after spotting myself and Catherine walking along — on the sidewalk, 10 feet from the roadway. And not making any sudden movements, either.)

As Kasia said, s/Connecticut//:

You can do all sorts of weird things in Connecticut suburbs, from walking your cat on a leash to painting tiger stripes on your car — but strap a camera to your back and take out the two wheeler for a spin and you’re the weirdest thing since the Keebler elves.

The EU Software Patent protest makes Indymedia. interesting intersection!

But I think they could have looked into the translation issues a bit more; ‘software patents kill efficient software development’ isn’t exactly urgent enough ;) Also — is the idea of the software patents song and mime a sort of ‘stop patents through Vogon poetry‘ thing?

Baghdad Burning scraped RSS, via Sitescooper RSS feeds.

Decent C String APIs

Published August 30, 2003

meanwhile, back in C-land…

strlcpy() – a replacement for strcpy() and strncpy(), with some very nice performance figures.

I usually use snprintf() to do this, but even that has differint semantics between platforms which needs workarounds. Plus the perf numbers regarding strlcpy() are nice. Plus it’s BSD-licensed. (Found via Linux Weekly News.)

In passing, it’s worth noting that strncpy() imposes a pretty hefty performance hit (4x – 10x in tests there), due to a wierd specified behaviour; it NULs out unused parts of the buffer! ouch.

See also MS’ strsafe APIs. However, the code for that is available only on Windows, which makes it pretty much useless for most C code I’d be writing, and they note ‘performance hits’.

Vendor liability in US spam law proposal

Published August 30, 2003

Good presentation by Anne Mitchell, ex-Habeas CEO, now of ISIPP — ‘False Positives: the Baby in the Bathwater’ and ‘Putting the Responsibility for Spam where it Belongs: The Case for Vendor Liability’ (PDF, 317KiB). Note this bit:

  • In June of 2003, ISIPP’s Anne Mitchell worked closely with Senator John McCain’s office to help develop and draft legislation which would hold vendors liable for advertising in spam.

  • This legislative draft was introduced as an amendment to the Burns-Wyden CAN-SPAM Act, and adopted by committee as part of the bill. Vendor liability is now part of the Burns-Wyden bill.

  • The proposed legislation makes liable any vendor who advertises in spam which violates the general provisions of the law.

  • Exceptions are made if the vendor truly did not know, and could not have been reasonably expected to know, that their information would go out in spam.

That could be interesting.

Time Traveller Spammer caught

Published August 29, 2003

Wired: Turn Back the Spam of Time. An article about the time-travel spammer, now fingered as Robert ‘Robby’ Todino:

The anonymous e-mail offered $5,000 to any vendor capable of promptly delivering a collection of far-fetched gadgets for conducting time travel. Among the mysterious devices sought by the message’s author were an ‘Acme 5X24 series time transducing capacitor with built-in temporal displacement’ and an ‘AMD Dimensional Warp Generator module containing the GRC79 induction motor.’

He’s genuinely interested, it seems — but has a few psychological difficulties. (Thanks to Gary Stock for spotting it.)

Brehon Law, Pepys’ rival, and some really bad food

Published August 29, 2003

2 history lessons today: Dervala writes about the Brehon Laws of ancient Ireland. Dervala’s weblog has become a great source of smart reading material, and is firmly on my daily list.

History: The Electronic Telegraph: Code-breaker reveals a diarist to rival Pepys (via forteana). Not quite as saucy as old Sam, though; he was a Puritan. Shame.

mmm, brains Food: The World’s Worst Food, courtesy of Joe McNally via NTK. A bit short of the traditional brain/tongue/tripe dishes however. (Relevant: low grade meat products, urgh.)

SCOvEveryone: Economist interview with Darl McBride of SCO. Interestingly, it notes ‘in 1998, Mr McBride himself won what he calls a ‘seven-figure settlement’ by suing his employer at the time, IKON Office Solutions (who, he says, had breached contract by urging him to move to an office outside Utah).’ Nice! However, the SCO management page doesn’t mention that, for some reason… (Link)

Voight-Kampff and Plugins

Published August 29, 2003

an SF free-sheet has applied the one test that really matters to the current SF mayoral candidates:

Is a particular candidate human or an insidious replicant, possessed of physical strength and computational abilities far exceeding our own, but lacking empathy and possibly even bent on our destruction as a species?

It’s the Voight-Kampff Test. No, not the band, this one. The results are hilarious:

TW: You’re in a desert walking along in the sand when all of the sudden you look down, and you see a tortoise, Tom, it’s crawling toward you. You reach down, you flip the tortoise over on its back, Tom. The tortoise lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs trying to turn itself over, but it can’t, not without your help. But you’re not helping. Why is that, Tom?

Tom Ammiano: That’s interesting. I don’t know. I’m a republican?

(thanks Ben!)

Patents: The W3C has set up a new list to evaluate ways to work around the Eolas patent on plugins, which, after all, are part of the HTML specification.

Good. I never liked plugins anyway, always playing loud music, halting the browser while they start up, or crashing the lot with their buggy spyware code. Good riddance! Now we can get back to the sensible ‘helper application in a separate window’ paradigm ;)

Download Caps: Pay To Receive Viruses

Published August 28, 2003

Many non-US-based broadband systems impose a download cap — a limit on how much data a customer can download in one month. In some of the Irish ISPs’ cases, it’s 3Gb of data per month, with hefty per-Mb charges after that.

Well, here’s something. I filter my mail for viruses and spam on my server, and divert the viruses off to a side folder. I just checked, and that folder contains 1 gigabyte of virus data, received since SoBig.F started up last week.

Given that most users don’t have a colocated server to divert their viruses on, and therefore would have had to download that 1 gigabyte of virus mail before their virus scanner got to take a look — that’s a hefty third of the download cap gone, due to a virus.

I wonder if Eircom, Telstra down under, and the other capping ISPs, will be giving their customers refunds as a result?

(BTW, by contrast, I only received 10 megs of spam.)

McCarthy report withdrawn

Published August 28, 2003

Apparently, the McCarthy report — which would have legalised software patents in Europe — has been withdrawn from debate for this EuroParl session.

‘It’s been sent back to the committee stage to be fixed because there was too much contraversy or too many amendments requested. It will go to plenary again after JURI do some more work on it. Possibly september 22nd, probably early October.’

And you thought it couldn’t get crazier

Published August 27, 2003

This is absolute insanity. Let’s say you’re buying a car, and you’re checking out what will work out best, between an SUV and a fuel-efficient hybrid, money-wise. Let’s check the options:

Unbelievable.

But don’t worry — there’ll be plenty of gas to run the SUVs, since the US is checking the possibility of pumping oil from Iraq to Israel. (That’s assuming the entire Arab world doesn’t turn into a seething pit of ‘told you so’ hatred as a result, but hey….)

As Yoz says, ‘How To Blow Up The Middle East In One Easy Step’:

yozlet: They saved the game before they did this, right? Right?

Bilskirnir: Two US senators responsible for MPAA regulation may be up for lucrative $US1.15 million jobs as lobbyists with the same organisation:

‘It’s obscene for Tauzin and Breaux to be in the running for the MPAA, the fattest media lobbying job in Washington, while advocating in Congress on behalf of companies that control the MPAA,’ said Robert McChesney, Professor of Communications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. ‘It tends to confirm what the vast majority of Americans have suspected – relaxed media ownership rules are an X-rated exercise in power and influence.’

As Nathan points out, an analogue of non-compete agreements, for would-be politicians-turned-lobbyists, would be a good way to deal with this one.

Tech: in more calming news: Dell Patents ‘Reboot and See If That Fixes It’ Technical Support Process (BBSpot via Craig).

Wow

Published August 25, 2003

BBC to create the BBC Creative Archive. This is insanely cool. Danny O’Brien has written a fantastic overview, so read that for more details. But check out this quote:

I believe that we are about to move into a second phase of the digital revolution, a phase which will be more about public than private value; about free, not pay services; about inclusivity, not exclusion.

In particular, it will be about how public money can be combined with new digital technologies to transform everyone’s lives.

That’s BBC Director General Greg Dyke totally ‘getting it’. So cool.

Italy now opt-in-only, SoBig.F phones home

Published August 22, 2003

Heads up for all the businesses out there sending mail to European customers — the EU E-Privacy Directive is now coming into force. Italy is the latest country to implement it; so businesses mailing Italian customers or prospects may wish to make sure that they abide by these rules:

  • Companies may send direct marketing email only to customers and subscribers who have given their prior consent to receiving such, either by subscribing explicitly or by providing their details during a prior transaction, such as a purchase.

  • Forged headers and other means of disguising or concealing the sender’s identity is illegal.

  • All messages must bear opt-out details as well.

  • Apparently, in the Italian rendition, senders may also ‘collect’ addresses but must immediately give the user a clear opportunity to opt-out at that point — but as far as I know this isn’t in the core EU directive.

Similar laws will be coming in all over Europe, so USian senders should really pay attention: opt-in — it’s not just a good idea, it’s the law (in Europe at least ;).

Malware: It sounds like SoBig.F is about to call home for new code (scroll down to ‘Downloading Functionality’). This is not good. :( Block port 8998/udp.

SoBig.F, the assorted bounce messages from forged SoBig.F mails, the assorted replies from autoresponders and list admin software from forged SoBig.F mails, and (of all things) user complaints about the forged mails (argh! surely they know they’re forgeries by now!) are really driving me up the wall. As I check my mail, there’s at least 400 of these messages this morning alone.

IP: Lessig lays into USPTO director: ‘If Lois Boland said this, then she should be asked to resign.’ … ‘That someone who doesn’t understand them is at a high level of this government just shows how extreme IP policy in America has become.’

Slammer crashed nuke power plant safety systems for 5 hours

Published August 21, 2003

Slammer worm crashed nuclear power plant safety systems for 5 hours (SecurityFocus).

Humour: BBspot: SpamAssassin Unveils New HomeAssassin Product for Unwelcome Visitors.

Aside: I wonder if the team behind NPR’s Day to Day program realise how close that name is to the classic Chris Morris/Armando Ianucci UK fake news programme, The Day Today. Hopefully there’ll be less sports reports from Alan Partridge on the NPR version…

More SCO: the Vegas show in full

Published August 20, 2003

a must-read: Bruce Perens posts and then demolishes the Las Vegas slideshow comprehensively, demonstrating that one of the code snippets SCO showed did in fact date from 1973, not 1979; and the other snippet was a clean-room reimplementation based on the published specification for the Berkeley Packet Filter, and the SCO code most likely came from the BSD-licensed implementation.

That raises two points: 1. the SCO ‘pattern-recognition team’ need to go back to Google school; 2. why didn’t the SCO implementation of the BPF code maintain the legal copyright attribution text it was supposed to include, so they would have noticed this when out ‘recognising’ ‘patterns’?

I’m looking forward to this getting to court eventually…

Open source not welcome – USPTO

Published August 20, 2003

USPTO seeks to block WIPO open source meeting.

(WIPO) is not the place for discussions about ‘open source’ software (…) a senior U.S. official argued on Monday. Reviewing the original mission of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), said Lois Boland, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) acting director of international relations, it is ‘clearly limited to the protection of intellectual property. To have a meeting whose primary objective is to waive or remove those protections seems to go against the mission.’

Boland was referring to a July request by a group of scientists, academics, open-source advocates and others for a meeting at WIPO on ‘open and collaborative projects,’ including open-source software. The WIPO secretariat initially replied favorably to the idea.

Well, that’s a shame. Let’s hope WIPO reconsider, because it really would be an interesting idea to have everyone involved talking about this stuff.

Holidays

Published August 20, 2003

Did you know that George W has spent more days of his presidency on vacation than any president in recent history, and is currently in the middle of a month-long extravaganza worthy of a French public sector worker?

Don’t mind me, I’m just jealous and missing Eurohols. (factoid via the SFGate morning fix)

I am speechless yet again.

Malware: The SOBIG.F deluge continues. No, not the virus itself; the various AV scanners around the world, telling me that some machine on the internet forged a message with my address. Accordingly, here’s a set of SpamAssassin rules to catch them; write a procmail rule to detect that in the resulting X-Spam-Status header and divert.

The Irish 419 scam

Published August 19, 2003

FROM: UNIVERSAL STAKES LOTTERY, IRELAND. (forwarded by Rick Kleffel on the forteana list)

SCOvEveryone: so SCO showed some ‘evidence’ of code-copying from SCO to Linux — problem is, it’s code from UNIX v7, written around 1978/79; the code was released in BSD UNIX, rereleased by SCO/Caldera themselves under a BSD license later, and versions appear in textbooks under public domain. In other words, the SCO ‘pattern analysis’ team who found this ‘copied code’ didn’t realise that this source had been released long ago — even by their own company, no less. ho hum, good luck prosecuting based on that. next!

Blogs: Malte, one of the SpamAssassin dev team, now has a weblog too — and with a better translation of the ‘W32.Blaster caused the blackout’ theory too. ;)

Email address: (spam-protected)

Note that, all winnings must be claimed not later than one month. After this date all unclaimed funds will be null and void.

Please note in order to avoid unnecessary delays and complications, remember to quote your reference number and batch numbers in all correspondence. Furthermore, should there be any change of address do inform our agent as soon as possible. Congratulations once more and thank you for being part of our promotional program. NOTE: YOU ARE AUTOMATICALLY DISQUALIFIED IF YOU ARE BELOW 18 YEARS OF
AGE.

Sincerely yours,

James Clark.

(Lottery Coordinator)

Top Firebird tip

Published August 19, 2003

Mozilla Firebird has this feature that obviously seemed like a good idea, but unfortunately isn’t really — automatic image resizing.

Well, while surfing about looking at the next-gen Bluecurve screenshots, I came across a screenshot with a link to linuxart.com, which had a top tip:

  • type ‘about:config’
  • scroll down to browser.automatic_image_resize, double click, change to ‘false’

Hey presto!

Monday morning quickies – gifts patented

Published August 18, 2003

FFII have discovered that Amazon.com have received a patent from the EPO ‘which covers all computerised methods of automatically delivering a gift to a third party’. It seems to cover Amazon’s ‘One-Click’ ordering system, as well.

Wierd: Tiny town to reek of sex. Don’t get excited — it’s only moth pheromones. (via Peter Darben on the forteana list.)

Medical slang, including:

  • ATS: Acute Thespian Syndrome
  • Departure lounge — Geriatric ward
  • DBI: Dirtbag index (calculated by the number of tattoos on the body multiplied by number of recent missing teeth, to estimate days without a bath)
  • NFN: Normal for Norfolk
  • Pumpkin positive: When you shine a penlight into the patient’s mouth and his brain is so small his whole head lights up
  • PFO: Pissed, fell over
  • Scepticaemia: What doctors develop with experience

And — finally! — an explanation for that ER term:

  • Stat: Immediately, shortened from the Latin statim

Linux: GrokLaw on SCO and Sun’s Linux indemnification FUD. Well worth a read — especially the bit where Mr. GrokLaw finds an old SCO contract that does include indemnification terms. Indemnification, that is, with some pretty serious get-out clauses and stings in the tail.

Weather: Mont Blanc closed due to record heatwave. ‘This year, for the first time since its conquest in 1786, the heatwave has made western Europe’s highest peak too dangerous to climb. Mont Blanc is closed. The conditions have been so extreme, say glaciologists and climate experts, and the retreat of the Alps’ eternal snows and glaciers so pronounced, that the range — and its multi-billion-pound tourist industry — may never fully recover.’

Food: Cooking for the Mafia. ‘Conrad Gallagher was the highest flier in the gaudy firmament of New Ireland. A Michelin star at the age of 26, and a swank restaurant, called Peacock Alley’. Not too long afterwards, things had not gone so well — he was in the Brooklyn Detention Centre. Pretty terrifying article — a US jail is not one of the nicest places in the world…

Spam: The Howard Dean election campaign ran into a wrinkle last week — and pretty soon was apparently ‘joe-jobbed’. This one is going to get interesting, if the Dean campaign follow up, as joe-jobbing an election campaign is in violation of federal election law, and is apparently taken quite seriously.

Reminder: keep an eye on Spamvertized.Org for the latest news in political spam!

NY weblog blackout coverage

Published August 15, 2003

The NY weblogs have really come through with incredible street-level views of the blackout. Highlights:

Fantastic reading. It actually sounds like fun to me — shades of ‘no school due to bad weather’ days when I was a kid ;)

‘Who Wants to be a Millionaire’ walkthrough

Published August 15, 2003

Wow — this guy won $250,000 on WWTBAM, and blogged it up, in excruciating detail. (His ‘Phone a friend’ friend also details his experiences, too). It sounds terrifying…

Hacking: Real-life UNIX disaster recovery.

Commuting: Guardian: A Life Inside meets commuter hell. The author of ‘A Life Inside’ is a convicted felon, undergoing a gradual release from prison; recently he’s been permitted to commute to a day job outside the big house.

‘I’ve had a good run, I suppose. More than a year of almost incident-free commuting.’ — until this episode, where one of those space invaders — the type who is perfectly happy to push you out of the way to make themselves comfortable — arrives…

I leaned farther away. Soon my back was hurting. Hang on a minute, I thought. I’ve paid the same as him for this seat. I was entitled to sit up straight. So I did. Back came the elbow. I wasn’t budging. And so battle commenced.

A glance at his computer revealed little activity. He was obviously too preoccupied with trying to make me budge. I was determined to resist this blatant act of aggression. I couldn’t help thinking it would never happen in prison – not without ensuing combat. I thought about my pal Toby Turner. This laptop lout was lucky he wasn’t sitting next to him in his heyday. I could just imagine Toby’s reaction to the elbow treatment.

Paying no heed to the mass of silent bystanders, my shaven-headed friend would have been on his feet in a flash. ‘Do you know how many fuckin’ anger management courses I’ve done?’

‘Er, no,’ his startled tormentor would stutter.

‘Six fuckers!’ Toby would yell, ‘and I still ain’t passed!’

Flash Mobs hit Ballyhoo

Published August 14, 2003

The latest interweb craze, ‘Flash Mobs’, have hit Ballyhoo, according to The Ballyhoo Examiner:

‘There was about 15 of them, and they went around the shop muttering ‘carriages’ or ‘cabbages’, I’m not quite sure which’ …. Brendan says he himself would be ‘game on’ to take part in the next one, as long as it isn’t in his own employers’ this time, or a bank.

Art: Size does matter, Jamaicans decide (Guardian):

Two naked 7ft-high bronze figures – a male and a female – looking skywards on a dome-shaped fountain embossed with Bob Marley’s lyrics ‘None but ourselves can free our minds’. But according to the statue’s critics the artist is too light-skinned, the male figure is too generously endowed, and both are, well, too naked. …. Another writer ridiculed Renaissance sculptors for being not generous enough. ‘Just because Europe’s classical statues had small penises, … does not mean Jamaica must follow suit.’

SCOvEveryone: Groklaw forwards an interesting theory: Does SCO Unixware 7.1.3 contain substantial portions of SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 8 — including the GPL’d device drivers? The author writes:

It is my belief and opinion that SCO has indeed borrowed engineering concepts and methods from their association with UnitedLinux. Many of these new features and the remarkable similarity with SLES 8 did not occur until after they started to participate in UnitedLinux and since these features were available to SuSE customers before SCO’s involvement I am inclined to believe that SCO’s engineering team has been influenced or tainted by the Linux development process. I cannot say if UnixWare 7.1.3 or SLES 8 share common code; as I said I am not a source licensee. I feel these issues need to be investigated further.

Referrer Spam Again

Published August 14, 2003

More referrer spam stuff. As Mark states in the comments here, it seems that the referrer-spamming is using real browsers run by real people — no bots, no proxies.

The spammers create HTML pages which contain an IMG tag, using one of our pages in the SRC attribute. This causes the user’s browser to attempt to download the page — giving the correct referrer URL — but it’s not particularly visible to the user — since it’s a HTML page, not an image. All they’re likely to see is a ‘broken image’ icon, and more likely the image is hidden anyway using a hidden div or width=0 height=0 attributes.

Anyway, I took a look at the HTML for those sites. Interestingly, all of them use a distinctive HTML style, with a redirecting frame and some Javascript to load the following pop-up ad:

http: //pb. xxxconnex. com/pb.phtml? d=aporndomain.net &sc=EXPN &ip=9999999999 &c=preview

Where ‘aporndomain.net’ is a porn domain, not necessarily always the same one as you’re viewing, and ‘9999999999’ is a 10-digit number. This then loads a frameset containing another random popunder ad from a load of domains. It also throws a few hidden ones into the corner, loads them as pop-unders, loads a javascript timer to open new ones occasionally, etc. etc. etc. As you close ’em, new ones open, and so on. Glad I don’t run IE ;)

I would bet these guys, xxxconnex.com — or one of their customers — are the ones behind the referrer-spamming as a result. Their WHOIS info states they are:

The Cluetrain List

Published August 13, 2003

Chuq van Rospach has a great idea — instead of a do not spam list, an I am your customer, not your asset, and quit treating me like one list:

Where do-not-spam lists are useful (and ought to be mandatory) are third party sales and rentals. Any time someone buys or rents a list, that list has to be filtered against the do-not-spam list. If you’re on it, you fall out of the transfer. that would include any time that information moves from one company to another, the do-not-spam restrictions apply. (ditto, IMHO, for phone and other personal information. I’ll go further, actually. I think there ought to be a generic ‘do not sell me as an asset’ list, preventing transfer of personal information of any kind without permission. Or more correctly, a I am your customer, not your asset, and quit treating me like one list.

Great idea. Really, the resale of contact information for marketing purposes sounds fantastic to marketers — but as The Story of Nadine demonstrates, it only takes two years for the contact information to be sold (via a chain of increasingly dodgy operators) from DeliverE, a subsidiary of Excite to horse bestiality porn spam.

Involuntary Park at Porton Down

Published August 13, 2003

Amazing! Porton Down is the UK’s center for research into chemical and biological weapons, and has been since 1916. Not the nicest place you could think of — by a long shot.

Well, it turns out that the massive no-go buffer zone around Porton Down, existing for 87 years, has preserved ‘the largest remaining continuous tract of chalk downland in Britain’. ‘The farming revolution of the 20th century, the development, the tourism, have all passed it by.’ ‘The disrupters are the large-scale inputs of chemicals, the pesticides, herbicides and artificial fertilisers that are the essence of intensive farming. At Porton Down, these have never arrived.’

As a result, it’s now an amazing wildlife heritage site. Quite hard to get to see it — but good to know it’s there! Thanks to Bruce Sterling for forwarding this along the Viridian list.

Reminds me of something I heard about Chernobyl — since the area around it is heavily irradiated, and therefore a no-go area for humans, it’s become a de-facto wildlife refuge (even if half of the animal inhabitants are sterile as a result.)