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McCarthy report withdrawn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Apparently, the McCarthy report — which would have legalised software patents in Europe — has been withdrawn from debate for this EuroParl session.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

Monday Morning Quickies

Published August 11, 2003

The Dublin Flash Mob. All went off very well, from the sounds of it. However, this picture contains some wierdness — who the hell is that guy, second from the left, who’s stolen my haircut circa 2 years ago?! Those are my sideburns, give ’em back!

(ObSoCalJoke: they tried to organise a flash mob in southern CA, but couldn’t find anywhere with a big enough parking lot for all those single-occupant SUVs. Ba-dum-tish!)

Telecoms: The Communications Workers of America union have released some figures on Verizon’s profit margins etc. Interesting to note some figures — like they charge 4 dollars for call waiting, a service which costs them 0.82 of a cent to provide — that works out at a 48,680% profit margin, which must be nice. In addition, Verizon use ‘splitters’, which result in a copper pair being unusable for DSL — just like Eircom do in rural Ireland. Interesting to note that, even after deregulation, LLU and general introduction of competition, the same problems still arise.

Science: BBC: Scientific research put under spotlight. Terrible article from the Beeb, who should know better.

Basically the article pins some of the blame for recent absurd claims of scientific breakthroughs, like the Raelian’s claims they cloned a human, on the peer review process.

What they’re missing is that, in most cases of these absurd claims, the research had not been peer reviewed — instead a press release was put out in advance. Peer review remains the most effective way to demolish bad science. However, the news media shows no sign of being willing to sit around and wait for other scientists to analyse the latest claims, before publishing them.

Spam: Salon: Meet The Spam Nazi. More on the bizarre story of the Jewish leader of a Nazi party, who now peddles ‘make penis fast’ pills.

Politics: Ian ‘Freenet’ Clarke says he’s leaving the US.

Linux: I’ve given up on blogging the SCO-v-everyone thing, it’s getting too absurd. GrokLaw is covering it much better than I could anyway. Plus: You say po-TAY-to, I say po-TAH-to.

Movies: I concur with Waider — Pirates of the Caribbean is great. Best summer blockbuster in years; Hollywood can still pull off a good big movie now and again (by using young directors it seems). Buckle those swashes! Aarrr!

Long-chain Monomers

Published August 10, 2003

PR-otaku — I’ve just got to buy Pattern Recognition, it looks amazing.

Just finished Nickled and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, by Barbara Ehrenreich; a great read, although pretty grim. (thanks mum!)

New Favourite Band

Published August 9, 2003

Music: I’ve just stumbled across Ladytron on EMusic a couple of weeks ago, and they’ve totally taken over my playlist.

They’re kind of over-cool electro stuff in the style of Air, but with much more in the way of 80s-style synth noises. Massively over-cool: it seems the name is from a tune from Roxy Music’s first album, this interview has them namechecking ‘The Andromeda Strain’ and ‘Logan’s Run’, and virtually every tune is heavily Kraftwerky.

Still, I’m hooked… one note though: IMO, the first album, 604, is much better than the difficult second. AudioGalaxy seems to have a copy of ‘ Play Girl‘ from 604 — give it a listen.

Recommended tracks: I’m With The Pilots and Discotraxx — Paco! is worth a listen too, it includes the theme tune to Are You Being Served, believe it or not. ;)

X-ray specs

Published August 7, 2003

NYT: What’s in Iraq rumor mill?

BAGHDAD As a U.S. soldier peered out of a passing tank, a young engineering student and a retired accountant contemplated one of the more common questions on the streets of Baghdad: Did the soldier’s wraparound sunglasses give him X-ray vision?

‘With those glasses, he can definitely see through women’s clothes,’ said the engineering student, Samer Hamid. ‘It makes me angry. We are afraid to take our families out on the street.’

DE Technology’s patent hits Oz

Published August 7, 2003

Nathan Cochrane writes in The Age: ‘Opponents of a Canadian company’s patent to tax online transactions believe they can stop it before it is granted by the Australian patents office.’ This is the DE Technologies patent I blogged about before, which they hope to license under some hefty terms; ‘annual licence fees of $US10,000 ($A15,324) each, plus 1.5 per cent a transaction and $0.11 cents each time a document, such as an invoice, is generated.’

At FightThePatent.co.nz, they note that the NZ government plans to amend its patent law to make it much harder to file such patents in future. They also link to another Age article which says the patent has already been granted in Oz as of ‘February of this year, according to IP Australia’.

An Aussie tech executive called Matthew Tutaki is planning to try and have it quashed. The situation can be followed on FightThePatent.co.nz. Unfortunately, in turn it seems DE Technologies are planning to fight back.

Who buys stuff from spammers?

Published August 6, 2003

Good Wired article on the subject:

A security flaw at a website operated by the purveyors of penis-enlargement pills has provided the world with a depressing answer to the question: Who in their right mind would buy something from a spammer? An order log left exposed at one of Amazing Internet Products’ websites revealed that, over a four-week period, some 6,000 people responded to e-mail ads and placed orders for the company’s Pinacle herbal supplement. Most customers ordered two bottles of the pills at a price of $50 per bottle.

And check this out for bizarre:

An investigation … last month revealed that Bournival’s mentor and business partner is Davis Wolfgang Hawke, a chess expert and former neo-Nazi leader who turned to the spam business in 1999 after it became public that his father was Jewish.

Stone circles

Published August 6, 2003

A good day for North Atlantic Skyline; Glebe stone circle, a massive wind farm in Mayo supplying 7% of Ireland’s total energy needs, and some photos from the old Marconi station in Clifden. Recommended.

filtering Mailman’s admin queue with SpamAssassin

Published August 6, 2003

Several MailMan mailing lists I run have been really painful to admin, due to spam overload combined with Mailman’s pretty crappy ‘pending messages’ admin interface, which goes like this: scroll down to each message, select ‘discard’ radio button, scroll to next, select ‘discard’ radio button, repeat until wrists hurt.

Thankfully, waider has saved my lists from oblivion. this script, given the list URL and the admin password, will log in to the admin interface, get the list of pending messages in the queue, scan each one using Mail::SpamAssassin (of course ;), and ditch the spam.

It just cleaned out 182 spams from one list, leaving all of 7 valid requests in the queue. Beautiful!

Dublin: Stefan Geens posts an IrishBroadband success story. See, it really works!

SCO suggestion

Published August 6, 2003

Derek has an interesting suggestion for IBM:

Grab a controlling interest, tell the senior management to sod off, tell the employees to clear out their cubicles, and clear up any hint of IP confusion by selling to IBM for $1 all intellectual property, and then dissolve the corporation entirely with their 50.1% voting share.

IBM has to be careful not to actually buy the company, but strictly be a majority shareholder, making decisions that are in the majority of the shareholders’ interests, even if the other 49.9% of the shareholders vehemently oppose them. :-)

Golden parachutes for senior execs? Good luck getting them from that non-existent corporation, and since IBM never actually ‘bought’ the corporation, it’s not liable for any contracts/debts/etc. SCO may have incurred. It gets all the benefit of running SCO and none of the downside.

Gotta say, I like it. ;)

Drop bears and Subgenii

Published August 5, 2003

The fearsome Drop Bear is detailed in this forwarded snippet from the forteana list.:

Drop bears are often mistaken for koalas, and to all but a trained naturalist, the differences are minor. They have even been reported to imitate the sleepy demeanor of their genetic cousins, probably as a sort of behavioural camouflage, and roughly one third of all drop bear related fatalities occur when a well-meaning tourist tries to pose with one for a souvenir photograph.

More here. Thankfully I managed to avoid these creatures while camping through Victoria last year — only just about though.

In other news: a great SFWeekly feature on Hal Robins, aka. Dr. Howland Owll of the CotSG.

SCO, etc., etc. (fwd)

Published August 5, 2003

Someday, Ben will set us up the blog, and there will be much rejoicing. In the meantime, I can only quote this one in full, as he hits it on the head:

OK, I know you find this the most boring thing ever and would prefer to find new ways of air-conditioning your chipsets, but, come on! The human drama is nigh Shakespearean.

This guy is pretty good:

http://radio.weblogs.com/0120124/

But, really, RHAT’s filing stands alone. It’s a thing of beauty, as 27-page legal filings go. They give them both barrels; failing business, FUD, insider stock dumping …

http://lwn.net/images/ns/rh-complaint.pdf

ben

Trustic is down

Published August 4, 2003

Trustic: ‘We regret to inform you that we are no longer taking registrations and will soon be closing the service. We have determined that the system as it currently is designed will not achieve the level of accuracy that we require, and an inaccurate system is worse than no system.’

‘The DNS blocklist will remain for a couple of weeks, but it has been configured to never return a match. Please reconfigure your mail servers to not query the blocklist.’

That’s a shame…

P2P and open proxies

Published August 4, 2003

Joe St. Sauver’s excellent presentation on open proxies has been updated. Interesting snippet: Morpheus 3.2 — the filesharing app — is shipping with proxy support. P2P Networks Try to Throw RIAA Off Their Trail (AtNewYork.com):

Morpheus will offer its users the option of connecting to its network via a public proxy server (define). A proxy server acts as an intermediary between two Internet users so that one user does not know the identity of the other. Morpheus won’t be hosting the proxy servers but will instead direct users to a ‘worldwide network’ of public proxies.

iMesh apparently may also include this support, too, in an upcoming version.