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Priorities

Published April 16, 2003

Good to see the US troops in Baghdad were kept busy keeping an eye on the important stuff — like surrounding the Oil Ministry building with 50 tanks and snipers, while the largest collection of antiquities in the Middle East got trashed. That’s keeping your priorities straight!

The imposing building in the Al-Mustarisiya quarter is guarded by around 50 US tanks which block every entrance, while sharpshooters are positioned on the roof and in the windows.

The curious onlooker is clearly unwelcome. Any motorist who drifts within a few metres of the main entrance is told to leave immediately.

Residents noted that the irrigation ministry, just next door, was torched.

(Sydney Morning Herald) (more in attached mail).

Iraqwar.ru Redux

Published April 16, 2003

Did Russians Use Blog To Aid Iraq? Some slightly paranoid theories, IMO. Interesting to note, though, that Stratfor reckons it was written by GRU (or ex-GRU) staff.

The bottom line of the article, more or less, is that it was written by some ex-GRU people who possibly wanted to help the Iraqis, who indirectly received the intelligence from folks still employed by the agency.

Interesting snippet:

Denisov said ‘a high-level source’ told him that sensitive information being promulgated in the Russian media, Iraqwar.ru included, was one … item on the agenda during Bush national security advisor Condoleezza Rice’s meeting the day before at the Kremlin with Russian President Vladimir V. Putin.

For reference: email usability

Published April 15, 2003

I was clearing out my mail last night, and came across a message that referenced a mail I sent a few years back; it’s a selection of feature requests I made at the start of development of Evolution, the GNOME mail reader/contact manager/Outlook clone. (Not sure if any got implemented BTW ;)

Since I still think some of these are killer ideas that would really improve email readers, and since the only copy is sitting in a mailing list archive, I’ll take a local copy here by posting it.

Worth noting that the reason it came up was a quick mail exchange with Kaitlin ‘Duck’ Sherwood, who’s the queen of email usability, and will be working on the OSAF’s Chandler PIM (and mail) application. Not only had she read the CHI’96 paper in question, she noted it as a ‘profound influence’! Cool — and bodes well for Chandler!

Kaitlin also replied with some excellent plans for folder-overview presentation; I can’t wait to see the results in Chandler, personally. If you want an idea of this stuff, her page on the Perfect Email Client lives here.

Quick top tip: filtering or colorizing messages based how you’re addressed in the headers is immediately beneficial. Quoting Ducky:

My pet view also color-codes messages based on how you were addressed.
  • to me and only me
  • to me and other people
  • cc me and only me
  • cc me and other people
  • bcc me
    • Most people who have implemented the above techniques (you can do it
    with either Outlook or Eudora, though it’s somewhat painful to set up) tell me they’ve saved between 25% and 50% of their prior email time.

She’s right, too!

‘And if she back with new coalition of da willing you better know fi run fast’

Published April 14, 2003

SomethingAwful: Livin’ In A Dictator’s Paradise. Possibly the funniest thing I’ve read in weeks:

Those of you who follow the minor news related to the recent war in Iraq might have noticed a story about the CIA broadcasting an insulting rap song about Saddam Hussein on their radio airplane. While this may seem like a fairly good idea if you’re say drunk or waging a war against a rival gangsta rapper when you’re fighting a real war it seems a little silly. Oh how wrong I was! Set to the tune of ‘Gangsta’s Paradise’ this rap is roughly two minutes of distilled pathos, no doubt swaying the thoughts of many Iraqis against their brutal dictator and earning the United States a reputation for intelligence. Think about it, one day you’re strapped to a mattress spring with a car battery hooked up to your testicles being shocked for mispronouncing ‘Tikrit’. The next day you’re listening to the radio and on comes this ‘awesome’ rap song about Saddam with lines like ‘My days are finished and I will die – all I need is chili fries’ and ‘Everybody in the house say we hate you’.

That’s about when you say goodbye to your family, strap some dynamite to your chest, and sprint to the nearest Marine Corps checkpoint. What a fucking travesty. There is so much wrong with this whole concept, let alone the cringe inducing execution, that it’s hard to know where to start a rant about it. The whole thing reeks of the clumsy hipster appeal of something like ‘Poochy’ from the ‘The Simpsons’ only ten times worse because instead of a stodgy corporate think-tank it was done by the government. Asking them to create anything that’s in touch with the youth market is sort of like going to a retirement home and asking a bunch of septuagenarians with Alzheimer’s disease to pen a film script about teens coming of age in the ghetto.

Helpfully, Zack provides some suggested new tunes to cover for the next conflict with Syria… read on…

Amazing photo of London by night

Published April 12, 2003

Wow. An incredible shot up at Astronomy Pic of the Day, taken by an unnamed astronaut on-board the ISS with a digital camera. Hyde Park, Regent’s Park, and the M25 are all very clearly visible.

So I guess that means the Great Wall is no longer the only man-made structure visible from space then ;)

Reasons Not To Buy Dell Laptops, pt. XVII

Published April 11, 2003

While trying to figure out why my loaner laptop is SO SLOW, I found this on the Linux Dell laptop temperature-control i8k driver website:

No credits to DELL Computer who has always refused to give support on Linux or provide any useful information on the I8K buttons and their buggy BIOS.

Makes you wonder if there are any laptop manufacturers with a concept of open hardware support.

(BTW, current theories on the woeful speed are (a) 128megs of RAM just isn’t enough to use GNOME or KDE on linux these days, and (b) a 4200rpm disk with feck-all cache can’t handle any hard work.)

Other bad news: my heavy-lifting desktop PC’s arrived and won’t power on. yikes.

But — on a brighter note: the sun’s come out; I saw an eagle yesterday; and it rained last night, and all the birds are twittering in the trees, catching worms etc. In the meantime, the lazy cat sits on the balcony and watches idly, even when one lands on the railing less than 3 feet away. I suppose catfood is a lot easier to get hold of. ;)

‘Crows shall feed on Gordon Brown’s pancreas’

Published April 11, 2003

Ben Hammersley links to these two works of comedic genius: Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf’s new column in the Grauniad:

Earlier in the week I watched as joyous Iraqis celebrated our triumph by pulling down – with the help of defecting American soldiers – Baghdad’s only statue of actor Robert Donat as Mr Chips. I understand it was quite a good film, but we have no need of your imperialist icons now. Saddam has freed us from your oppressive rule, so we are saying goodbye to your Mr Chips. Ha! I have made myself laugh! I will not gloat further over this thrilling but predictable defeat which vindicates me so completely.

Also, a blog here. Brilliant.

Tim Bray on Drugs

Published April 11, 2003

Tim Bray’s weblog is a great read; I’ve added it to my daily list. Today, he’s provided a fantastic article about the drugs problem in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside.

Dublin has historically had a serious of up-and-down swings with a heroin problem; at one stage, it was one of the worst in Europe. It improved quite a lot during the 90’s, but it’s going downhill again, apparently; maybe the legislators need to read this article.

(The big problem as far as I can see is that treatment centres are horrifically underfunded, it being a lot easier, and — while not cheaper — at least already budgeted for, to ship the junkies off to prison. Business as usual. Of course, while they’re there, they’re (a) off the streets (out of sight, out of mind), and (b) learning all the latest criminal techniques, and getting well hooked on all the cheap heroin in there.)

(BTW did you know that one reason heroin is massively popular in prisons, is due to drug-testing? Apparently, marijuana can be detected a month after use, whereas heroin is undetectable 48 hours afterwards. So prison drug-testing regimes indirectly encourage heroin use. Oops!)

Linux: Linux Journal: report from LinuxWorld Ireland. Sounds like a great talk from maddog and Michael Meeks. And if you look carefully at the photo on that article page, you can see Proinnsias in the background!

Mind you, I would probably have just done my ‘incomprehensible question about software patents’ schtick with the IBM guy again…

What with this and GUADEC coming to Dublin, I’m missing all the good piss-ups^Wevents it seems ;)

Z/Yen and RSA UK: purveyors of clueless FUD, as expected

Published April 10, 2003

BoingBoing and /. get to work on that Z/Yen/RSA press release:

But the amazing thing is what Z/Yen and its client, RSA conclude: that the 25% of the people who deliberately associated with the network were ‘malicious,’ and that the 71% who sent email were sending spam. This is such a transparently, deliberately (heh) stupid conclusion, it boggles the mind: how can ‘deliberate’ equate to ‘malicious?’ How can ‘sending email’ equate to ‘sending spam?’

So in other words, there were 2 honeypot access points, left open for 2 weeks in the City of London.

25% of the people who connected to the APs, did so deliberately (whatever that means — see below).

Then, 71% of those people sent mail. Not spam: no ‘make money fast’, no ‘URGENT ASSISTANCE’ etc.; they just hit the ‘Send / Receive’ button in Outlook.

But obviously Z/Yen and RSA felt the need to spice things up a bit, so:

  • s/accessed WLAN deliberately/accessed WLAN maliciously/

  • s/sent mail/sent SPAM/

  • s/read slashdot/ate babies/

OK, I made that last one up. But I would not be surprised.

Some more digging reveals that the report in question is now up on the RSA UK website (it wasn’t yesterday), and can be downloaded here (PDF) . It’s 5 slim pages written by Phil Cracknell, of CISSP (Cracknell Information Systems Security Partnership), who has a history of spreading WiFUD, it seems. The report leads with

The many wireless security surveys … do not actually show how real the threat of wireless hacking is. Less dramatically, they do not show the threat of someone using your network for non-malicious use (theft of service).

Sheesh. He forgot to mention the bit about operating a wireless network without switching on any security features.

Also, there’s no explanation of what the difference is between a ‘deliberate’ and ‘accidental’ connection. As far as I can tell, an ‘accidental’ connection is one where the user disconnected reasonably quickly; there’s no indication that any of the connections were caused by anything other than Windows XP’s ability to associate with any network it can find within range.

It then goes on to scare-monger about the use of ‘exterior chalk markings’, noting that ‘you will be found and your networks will be used/attacked’.

So, in other words, the paper says:

  • if you run an open WiFi AP, people will use it to send/receive mail, and possibly surf the web.

  • this is Bad

  • people may draw nerdy things with chalk on the pavement outside, which will Make It Worse

And there’s two things to pick up from it:

  • this Phil Cracknell guy is really short of clients

  • It’s amazing how scare-mongering a 200-word report can become, when it’s bad to start with, and then filtered through 3 layers of PR gibbons and crappy journos who don’t have a clue what it’s on about

One good thing to come out of it: the term WiFUD, perfect for the next Phil Cracknell escapade.

Aeronautics.RU

Published April 9, 2003

Joe Haslam (hi Joe!) mailed about Aeronautics.RU, wondering if it’s a fake. I’m pretty sure not, and John Sutherland at The Guardian concurs, noting that it was big in the City of London:

You don’t factor news into your model, but intelligence. There is a surfeit of war news, but reliable intelligence is hard to come by. The canny (stock market) trader in these parlous days has a first port of call – GRU (Glavnoye Razvedyvatelnoye Upravleniye), the espionage arm of the Russian military.

GRU is the most sophisticated agency of its kind in the world. And, since Glasnost, the most transparent. GRU has thousands of agents worldwide (especially in countries such as Iraq, where Russia has traditional trade links). Intelligence has always been a top priority for Ivan. The number of agents operated by the GRU during the Soviet era was six times the number of agents operated by the KGB.

Russia, superpower that it was, still has spy satellites, state-of-the-art interception technology and (unlike the CIA) men on the ground. The beauty of GRU is that it does not (like the CIA) report directly to the leadership but to the Russian ministry of defence. In its wisdom, it makes its analyses publicly available. These are digested as daily bulletins on www.iraqwar.ru.

… and syndicated onto Aeronautics.RU as well. Sadly, since the Russians closed up their Baghdad embassy and got out of Iraq, just in time it seems, all the reports have dried up. Ah well.

The reporting was incredibly detailed, and modulo a big chip on their shoulder about US imperialism, pretty informative.

Joe also points to another Aeronautics.RU article, ‘how military communications are intercepted’. Venik, the author, notes that the US is using SINCGARS ‘frequency-hopping’ radios, which use a daily-broadcast shared secret as an initial vector for the algorithm which determines what frequencies to ‘hop’ through, throughout the day.

However, security afforded by frequency-hopping methods is very dependant on the strict adherence to protocols for operating such radios. The US troops and other operators of frequency-hopping radio sets frequently disregard these protocols. An example would be an artillery unit passing digital traffic in the frequency-hopping mode, which would enable an unauthorized listener to determine the frequency-hopping algorithm and eavesdrop on the transmission. (jm: sounds like a known-plaintext attack; similar attacks were used by the Allies on German use of Enigma during WWII.)

Even when proper protocols for using frequency-hopping radios are being adhered to interception and decryption of these signals is still possible. The frequency-hopping interceptors are special advanced reconnaissance wideband receivers capable of simultaneously tracking a large number of frequency-hopping encrypted transmissions even in high background noise environments.

It then details some seriously specialized equipment for breaking frequency-hopping radio transmissions, which can ‘process the complete 30 to 80 MHz ground-to-ground VHF band within a 2.5 ms time slot’.

So judging by all of that, the chances of finding one of those ‘FH-1 frequency-hopping interceptors’, ‘manufactured by VIDEOTON-MECHLABOR Manufacturing and Development Ltd of Hungary’, sitting in the Russian embassy in Iraq about 2 weeks ago, would have been pretty high I’d bet. ;)

He doesn’t detail why encryption the system uses, or how that is supposedly being broken. But I don’t doubt it was, personally. Given the ‘artillery unit’ hole noted above, there were probably quite a few ways to get hold of the day’s key, given enough time and thought; and from what I’ve read, it can only be very tricky to use good crypto, and keep it secure, in a battlefield environment. And those Russians have had plenty of time to think about US military systems after all. ;)

RSA, Z/Yen report open WiFi hot-spots used to send spam

Published April 9, 2003

Well, this is bad news. It seems one of the biggest bugbears for open Wifi hot-spots, ‘what if it’s used to spam’, may now be happening on a wide scale…

Unauthorized WLAN Connections Used to Send Spam (2 April 2003)

Data gathered from a wireless LAN (WLAN) honeypot showed that nearly 75% of intentional unauthorized connections made were used to send spam. (newsfactor.com)

The honeypots were set up in the City of London for 2 weeks, as default, open WLANs. This is the nearest I can come to a source. Both RSA Security UK and Z/Yen don’t list it on their press releases pages.

My thoughts: it could be the Jeem or Rewt spam-relaying trojans searching for open nets automatically, from infected machines. Strikes me that there wouldn’t be too many spammers war-driving around London, in person.

Thanks to Tony Earnshaw for forwarding it on from SANS NewsBytes…

Military dialect and ‘clearing’ (fwd)

Published April 9, 2003

“There’s even dialects of ‘english’ military jargon. An ex-general giving analysis on Sky (TV) commented that during the last Gulf War, confusion was caused because when a US commander said they’d ‘cleared’ a town they meant they’d gone past it, but when a british commanders said he’d ‘cleared’ a town he meant he’d dealt with most pockets of enemey and there was no signifigant resitence left in it and it was now ‘safe’ for occupation.

The two confusions caused american comanders to wonder what a british comander was still doing in a town he’d said he’d ‘cleared’, and british troops wondering who the hell was shooting at them out of towns the americans had said they’d ‘cleared’.” (via Barbara Barrett on the forteana list)

Artprice/artlist: winners of the address-scraping spammer speed record

Published April 8, 2003

Wow. A spammer has already scraped my blog and caught that one-use cdt_comment_go address I posted a week or so ago. That has to be a record. Ah well, Bayes and the SBL are catching it nicely…

The spammer in question is artprice.com, aka. artlist.com, aka a bunch of unrepentant spammers who’ve been out-and-out spamming for years, from France. Nothing worse than a full-time spamhaus. My consolation is that if they do this after August, I can prosecute them for it, since France is in the EU ;)

Just for reference, if anyone finds this on a Google search: the address was a one-use disposable job, for comments on a survey, posted once, and never used for sign-ups or even to send a single mail message. This is 100% spam, through and through.

Spamming my HTTP referrer logs, pt. 2

Published April 4, 2003

I’ve been getting a very wierd attack on my sites recently, including this blog, the SpamAssassin websites, and http://jmason.org/ , whereby some luser is sending lots of requests, using made-up URLs in the referral field. Initially, I thought it was some kind of underpowered retaliation for SpamAssassin, but if that’s the case, they need to bone up a bit more on how these things work ;)

Alternatively, it could be an attempt to gain Googlejuice, by getting links from public referrer logs (my ones are).

Up ’til about a month ago, it was all porn sites. Recently, though, it’s been a selection of real domains that sound like they were put together by combining dictionary words or something.

All the attempts have come from IP address 216.127.68.58, owned by Everyone’s Internet, Inc. in Houston, TX:

216.127.68.58 – – [31/Mar/2003:00:01:53 +0100] “GET / HTTP/1.1” 200 72143 “http://www.aircheckfactory.com” “User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.0)”

Here’s the domains in question:

  • AIRCHECKFACTORY.COM
  • ALTOTECHNOLOGY.COM
  • BAIDYANATHINDIA.COM
  • NXTCENTURY.COM
  • TIMEART.NET
  • WOTEVA.COM

Perhaps they’re recent lapsed domains which the spammer has picked up. Otherwise, what’s the connection between Baidyanath (a manufacturer of Ayurvedic products in India, thx Suresh) and ‘woteva’ (which sounds like ‘whatever’ in a UK english accent)?

I’ve whois’d them all, and they all seem to share two things: the name ‘Robert Woodley’ (or its initials), and the number (772) 594-2421. Area code 772 is — guess where — Florida. They should just cut to the chase and put ‘The Spammer State’ on their numberplates.

The pages on those sites are automatically-generated using what looks like USENET postings and google image search results, with a link to Commission Junction.

None of the names are in ROKSO, it seems. Do they ring a bell with anyone reading?

Habeas Suing (Alleged) Spammers

Published April 4, 2003

Habeas: Avalend, Intermark Media, BigDogSecrets.com, Clickbank, and Keynetics Sued for Using Counterfeit Habeas Trademark to get Unwanted Email Through, Trademark Infringement, and Breach of Contract.

The first suit, against Avalend and Intermark Media, alleges infringement of the Habeas trademark, including infringing use of the Habeas trademark in email in order to help ensure its delivery. The second lawsuit, against Heller, Stuchinski, Clickbank and Keynetics, includes a breach of contract claim against Heller, based on the signing of a Habeas license and then using the Habeas trademark in email which did not comply with the Habeas license. The companies advertised in Heller’s email are named as co-defendants.

Sweet. Sounds like the first two are alleged to have out-and-out forged the mark without a license, and the latter three are alleged to have gained a license and breached it. Habeas’ business model relies on successful enforcement, and actively being a threat against spammers who attempt to abuse their mark. I hope this goes well for them.

BTW, for folks who cannot countenance the idea of paying for a mark to send bulk mail: Habeas’ model is just like that of Underwriters Laboratories, which performs (physical) product safety testing, and provides a mark to certify that a product has passed those tests — and can therefore be judged ‘safer’ than products that do not have the mark. In Habeas’ case, instead of a product’s safety, they vouch for a mail’s non-spamminess.

It’s not a ‘mail protection racket’ — it’s a way for you to send a mail saying ‘this trustworthy agency has vouched that this is not spam’. And if I trust Habeas, it allows me to extend that trust to you, even if I’ve never heard of you before.

‘Calibrate Me, Dick’

Published April 4, 2003

The Guardian notes the latest bizarre phraseology to emerge from the White House — Calibrate me, Dick:

From Donald Rumsfeld – the man who brought you known unknowns and unknown unknowns – comes a phrase so disorienting in its weirdness that even seasoned Rumsfeldologists have been taken aback by its increasingly frequent use at Pentagon briefings. Uttered one way, it sounds combative like Dirty Harry; uttered another, camp like Austin Powers.

In fact, it appears to be just a hi-tech, precision-guided version of ‘correct me if I’m wrong’, the Dick in question being General Richard Myers, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff. Worryingly, ‘Calibrate me’ is also the name of a song by the scary indie rock group Atombombpocketknife: could Rumsfeld be a fan?

Typical recent usage: ‘The Republican Guard has – calibrate me, Dick – they pulled south in the north and they went north in the southern portion of the country.’

Context in which it almost certainly did not occur, circa 2002: ‘Calibrate me, Dick, but I really don’t think we’re going to need all that much heavy infantry to take Baghdad, are we?’

Portuguese TV Journalists Beaten Up By US Military Police

Published April 4, 2003

Reporters From Portuguese Television Tortured By US Military Police (Indymedia):

Two Western journalists have arrived safely back in Kuwait City after being arrested, beaten up and deprived of food and water in Iraq — by members of the US Army’s military police. ….

Despite possessing the proper ‘Unilateral Journalist’ accreditation issued by the Coalition Forces Central Command, both journalists were detained. …

Castro and Silva entered Iraq 10 days ago. They had been to Umm Qasr and Basra and were traveling to Najaf when they were stopped by the military police. According to Castro, their accredited identification was checked and they were given the all clear to proceed. ‘Suddenly, for no reason, the situation changed,’ Castro told Arab News. ‘We were ordered down on the ground by the soldiers. They stepped on our hands and backs and handcuffed us.

‘We were put in our own car. The soldiers used our satellite phones to call their families at home. I begged them to allow me to use my own phone to call my family, but they refused. When I protested, they pushed me to the ground and kicked me in the ribs and legs.’ ….

After being held for four days, they were transported to the 101st Airborne Division to be escorted out of Iraq.

linky goodness from th’ oul’ sod

Published April 2, 2003

So it looks like Sarah Carey, a good friend of me mate Lean, has a blog, and it’s a great one too! Excellent. Added to the Irish blogroll on the right.

In other news, Simon Boyle got in touch to mention that the Saddam’s top tips for tourists interview in the Fermanagh-based Impartial Reporter was actually written by an contemporary of ours at TCD by the name of Maria Rolston. Apparently she’s good mates with my mate Wooder, too. Simon notes:

She’s the intrepid impartial reporter who wrote the story (and who’s had it reprinted minus attribution all over the world now). Oh the joys of being a first year reporter on a small local paper…

While we’re talking about small local papers, might as well note – tangentially – that Ireland’s local press has a long history of bizarre stories. One favourite, in particular, has gone down in journo legend (and Ulysses): the 19th-century editorial from The Skibbereen Eagle, which solemnly told Lord Palmerston that it had ‘got (its) eye both upon him and on the Emperor of Russia.’ Classic.

IP company hoist by own petard

Published April 2, 2003

Forbes: A Patent On Porn. It seems Acacia Research, an intellectual-property ‘shell’ company, has a bunch of crappy software patents on streaming media (to go with their patent on the ‘V-Chip’, remember that?).

Things haven’t been going too good recently. Apparently, they decided to ‘monetize’ these streaming-media patents — in other words get all Sopranos on a bunch of small players, namely 700 porn site operators, sending some legal threats to ‘pay up — 1-2% of gross — or get sued’ their way.

What happened? Did the pr0nsters roll over and cough up? Not a hope.

Eight firms (of 700) agreed to Acacia’s terms. But 40 didn’t, and Acacia promptly slapped them with lawsuits. Rather than buckling, though, several of the porno sites joined together and stood their ground. Now Acacia is in the fight of its life and may even face a shareholder revolt as a result.

Read on for the rest…

Comment links back again

Published April 1, 2003

the (discuss) links are back, and about time too, things were getting quiet. Anyway, it’s a unified comments forum now. All posts go into one forum, instead of creating a new forum for each weblog posting. Having comments pages for each story just didn’t work for a small-scale blog — and it was impossible to see if there was any new posts for all those individual forums.

1.4 gigabits per second

Published April 1, 2003

Take a look at the BitTorrent bandwidth graphs if you get a chance. The BitTorrent release of Red Hat 9 resulted in a nice smooth ramp up to 1.4 gigabits per second of download traffic, which has been trailing off slowly over the following 20 hours… wow.

Interconnect speed cheat-sheet

Published March 31, 2003

posting this so the googlebrain will pick it up next time I need to find it — Padraig Brady’s interconnect speed cheat sheet. It lists a whole stack of interconnect protocols, from 802.11b, 10Mb/s LAN, to SPP parallel port, to 8mm DAT tape, along with their effective transfer rates in megabytes per second. (I never realised Bluetooth was only as fast as SPP parallel ports — 0.1MB/s. That sucks.)

Saddam Hussein’s top tips for tourists

Published March 31, 2003

Newsflash! Irish local newspapers come through with bizarre-ness yet again:

Fermanagh man Tom Daly (72) is a former schoolteacher and lecturer who spent 15 years working in the Middle East. In an interview with the paper Mr Daly told how in 1988 he arrived in Baghdad and was on his way to the city of Basra …

‘All these taxi drivers were coming down to me offering to take my bags and drive me down to Basra for 60 quid and I wasn’t sure what to do. Then a man in a long dark coat came over to me, put his hand up and said: ‘Don’t listen to them. Take a taxi (sic), it will cost you £10’. I thought this was a much better idea and was glad of the help. All the taxi drivers had also backed away so I asked some of them afterwards: ‘Who was that man?’

They said: ‘That was Mr Saddam Hussein’.’

Tune in next week, when Saddam helps out with some tricky carpet-buying negotiations…

SpamAssassin Needs Your Help!

Published March 28, 2003

while thinking about the CDT’s report on spammer address-scraping techniques again, it occurred to me that one finding is very significant; high-traffic websites probably get much more spam than low-traffic ones.

Now, I’ve got spamtraps up on pretty much all my sites, using a variety of methods:

  • plain mailto links, with instructions to human users not to use them (don’t mail that one either, obviously ;)
  • hidden mailto links in the page’s <head> block (browsers will not display text elements outside the <body> block)
  • hidden mailto links in a <!– HTML comment –>
  • empty mailto links in the text (ie. <a href="mailto:foo></a>)
  • mod_rewrite pages, which are displayed to spam-scraping bots instead of the real thing

But all my sites are small-time, really. ;) So — anyone out there in the blogosphere care to help out the SpamAssassin project, by feeding us trapped spam? It’d be simply a matter of adding a mailto: link, hidden in a comment on a prominent page of your high-traffic website. Gimme a mail to this address if you do.

(warning: that address will expire in 6 months. if you’re reading this after Aug 2003, use the addr on this page instead.)

The spam trapped in such a way is fed into a number of spamtrap-fed network systems, like Razor, DCC, Pyzor, and the Blitzed OPM blacklist. It’s also used during the SpamAssassin score-regeneration process.

Regular expressions win again

Published March 28, 2003

Rael: secrets of the XML gods:

In response to Tim Bray’s dirty little habit of parsing XML with regular expressions, Jon Udell writes: ‘If the XML gods are resorting to Perl and Python hackery to shred documents, are we just spinning our wheels? I don’t think so. But this is, perhaps, an unusual case. … I can, however, make excellent use of the text stream underlying XML abstractions. So, which way to regard a document becomes a kind of Necker cube puzzle. The bad news: it’s confusing. The good news: it’s useful.’

…. I just co-authored a book, 1/4 of which relied heavily on the availability of not only an XML parser, but a SOAP stack. Faced with the reality that more than a handful of readers wouldn’t have either at their disposal, I wrote a hack sure to turn the stomach of any XML purist while turning many a hacker frown upside-down… ‘NoXML, Another SOAP::Lite Alternative’ for the Google Web API. ‘… NoXML is a drop-in alternative to SOAP::Lite. As its name suggests, this home-brewed module doesn’t make use of an XML parser of any kind, relying instead on some dead-simple regular expressions and other bits of programmatic magic. ‘ Elegant? Depends on your definition. Pure? As the driven beach sand. Work? You betcha!

And I thought it was just me. ;)

Kim Jong Il’s IM logs

Published March 28, 2003

Craig links to the livejournal of Kim Jong Il, featuring IM logs with GWB — very funny.

Forteana: on a totally unrelated note — The Lab @ ABC.net.au notes:

An Australian neuroscientist claims he can conjure up the mysterious Australian outback phenomenon of the Min Min lights, now that he has worked out what causes them.

Fantastic description of how, exactly, he did this, by using a temperature inversion, and landscape features, to simulate it. Very interesting, and it makes a lot of sense. Another wierd ‘floating lights’ phenomenon explained… (link via the forteana list, of course).

The article also discusses the fata morgana__ phenomenon, in which landforms that are beyond the horizon appear to float above it in an inverted form. This is interesting, as it explains the Chinese legend of the Blessed Isles, which says that there’s a group of islands that appears infrequently floating above the sea, shaped like mushrooms (if I recall correctly, can’t find much about it online).

BBC: ‘more truth out of Baghdad than the Pentagon at the moment’

Published March 28, 2003

BBC news chiefs have met to discuss the increasing problem of misinformation coming out of Iraq as staff concern grows at the series of premature claims and counter claims by military sources. ‘By last Sunday the southern Iraqi seaport of Umm Qasr had been reported ‘taken’ nine times’ … ‘We’re getting more truth out of Baghdad than the Pentagon at the moment’.

Network Solutions the weakest link, again

Published March 27, 2003

Yahoo: al-Jazeera website redirected: 

The hacker was able to gain control of the domain name by asking domain
seller Network Solutions for the account password on official al-Jazeera
stationery, said an industry source speaking on condition of anonymity.

A spokesman for Network Solutions' parent company declined to comment on
how the hacker was able to hijack the domain name, but said the company
had fixed the problem and was trying to track the impostor down.

'We followed our procedures, in this particular instance someone was able
to get around those procedures,' said Brian O'Shaughnessy, a spokesman
for Internet security firm VeriSign.

rottenflesh: freshmeat gets parodied

Published March 26, 2003

Rottenflesh.net, a piss-take of Freshmeat.net (found via Sweetcode).

About: openJ-GNU is a web secure server that quickly generates backgrounds. It uses mv for menubars. openJ-GNU generates user-interfaces.

Changes: openJ-GNU 3.24.7 enhances robustness for sites that also use newGeekNr. It also was rewritten in Tcl and patches a remote root bug in configuration. One of the developers was sacked. It also compiles.

The Problem with Anti-spam Challenge-Response Systems

Published March 25, 2003

A great summary of the issues surrounding challenge-response anti-spam systems, from Kee Hinckley on the ASRG list. Summary: they’ll work fine for one-person-to-one-person email, but anything beyond that — and there is lots beyond that, in current email use — gets hairier and hairier. Read on for the message.

Robin Cook’s viewpoint

Published March 24, 2003

Robin Cook, who resigned from the UK cabinet last week:

… If you take a response to 9/11 as being a driving force of the American approach to international affairs, I would strongly argue that one of the greatest assets that came out of that was the extraordinarily rich and powerfully diverse coalition against international terrorism.’

That coalition, according to Cook, has now been shattered on the altar of pre-emptive diplomacy. America has long planned to attack Iraq and splits in the UN, Nato and in the European Union were a price worth paying.

‘Now, I’m not an American politician but if I was I would be inveighing against the extent to which the Bush administration had allowed that terrific asset to disintegrate,’ Cook said.

‘Instead the US is left embarking on military action from a position of diplomatic weakness, unable to get any major international organisation to agree with it. We are heading for a very serious risk of a big gulf between the Western and Islamic world. That seems to me to have thrown away a powerful asset for the US which relates to its number one security concern.’

Also, some history (thanks to Dan Brickley for forwarding this): Ireland as the pivot of a league of nations, written by Michael Collins in 1921, shortly after Ireland’s declaration of independence from the UK:

Into such a League might not America be willing to enter? By doing so America would be on the way to secure the world ideal of free, equal, and friendly nations on which her aspirations are so firmly fixed. Ireland’s inclusion as a free member of this League would have a powerful influence in consolidating the whole body, for Ireland is herself a mother country with world-wide influences, and it is scarcely to be doubted that were she a free partner in the League as sketched the Irish in America would surely wish America to be associated in such a combination. In that League the Irish in Ireland would be joined with the Irish in America, and they would both share in a common internationality with the people of America, England, and the other free nations of the League. Through the link of Ireland a co-operation and understanding would arise between England and America, and would render unnecessary those safeguards which England wishes to impose upon Ireland and which by preserving an element of restraint might render less satisfactory the new relations between the two countries.

It’s incredible to consider how much has changed in world politics since those words were written 82 years ago.

And finally, some humour: Power Phillips Home Page:

Powers Phillips, P.C., is a small law firm located in downtown Denver, Colorado within convenient walking distance of over fifty bars and a couple of doughnut shops. Powers Phillips also maintains a small satellite office-in-exile on the cow-covered hillsides near Carbondale, Colorado, where it puts out to pasture some of its aging attorneys.

The firm is composed of lawyers from the two major strains of the legal profession, those who litigate and those who wouldn’t be caught dead in a courtroom.

Litigation lawyers are the type who will lie, cheat and steal to win a case and who can’t complete a sentence without the words ‘I object’ or ‘I demand another extension on that filing deadline.’ Many people believe that litigation lawyers are the reason all lawyers are held in such low esteem by the public. Powers Phillips, P.C. is pleased to report that only three of its lawyers, Trish Bangert, Tom McMahon, and Tamara Vincelette are litigation lawyers, and only one of them is a man.

And it gets worse from there on.

The Perils of ‘Raw’ News

Published March 24, 2003

Mark Lawson in today’s Guardian:

This time, digital satellite viewers can even use their red interactive buttons to call the shots of the shots: zapping between battle zones and international capitals like a James Bond baddie watching the world come down on 30 TV screens in his underground bunker… We belong to a generation which has largely ceased to be surprised by television, but think about this: those who wanted to were able to watch an enemy operation live from the banks of the Tigris. This weekend’s pictures have widened the eyes like nothing since the moon landings, though with rather greater moral complications. The essential problem is that in seeming to know everything, we know nothing. There are wise old journalists who will tell you that the word ‘raw’ is usually a warning. It is unwise to eat raw meat or smell raw sewage and it may be equally foolish to consume raw news coverage.

Forwarded by Tim Chapman on the forteana list.

Kind of irrelevant to me, seeing as I’m now based in the US, and the concept of unbiased, unfiltered TV news doesn’t really seem to exist over here.

Instead, the war coverage consists of an endless array of human interest stories with the troops and whizz-bang explosion footage. There’s absolutely no interpretation, apart from what it might imply for relatives of the US servicemen involved — that’s it. As far as I can see, there is no real liberal news, or a balancing viewpoint, on TV over here.

In about 3 hours of news on TV, I think I saw one opposing viewpoint, 5 minutes with ex-senator George McGovern. That was it.

I’m finding this to be a serious culture shock. Thankfully, I’ve got the web to read and listen to the European stuff instead, so I’m doing that instead. The old Barlow line about the internet and censorship springs to mind…

precision mincemeat manufacture

Published March 21, 2003

IraqBodyCount.net on the JDAM bomb:

The B-2 bomber carries sixteen 2’000 lb. JDAM bombs. If all goes 100% as planned (the bomb does not fall outside of its specified margin of error of 13 meters, and the GPS guidance system is not foiled by a $50 radio jammer kit, easily purchased), then here is what one such bomb does :
  • everyone within a 120 meter radius is killed;
  • to be safe from serious shrapnel damage, a person must be at least 365
    • meters away;

  • to be really safe from all effects of fragmentation, a person must be 1000 meters away, according to Admiral Stufflebeem.

    The B-2s will be used upon targets within Baghdad.

    -Prof Marc W. Herold, IBC Project Consultant

Sounds like the perfect weapon for use in tight city streets. :(

blogging Dengue fever

Published March 21, 2003

Thank ghod this is one experience of SE Asia I missed. I came across this blog through some random blog-hopping last night; it’s two farang tourists blogging their backpacking trip through the region. All great fun until they both catch Dengue fever:

Dengue is commonly called ‘break bone fever’, and I found out why at about 2 AM on the train. I woke up with a 102 fever, in the most intense pain I can recall having in years. Everything hurt, but especially my back and legs. Harper later described the sensation as one of having someone scrape your bones with a knife, and that sounds about right.

Jesus. I am so thankful I missed out on that particular aspect (a mild bout of food poisoning with a fever of 104 was all I had to put up with!)

Dengue fever is endemic to many parts of the region, even Bangkok , the capital city of Thailand. It gets a lot less attention than malaria, since it’s not fatal in the vast majority of cases (unless you get the rarer haemorrhagic version), but it is excruciating by all accounts, and I’ve met quite a few travellers who’ve met someone who caught it. Unfortunately there’s not much you can do to avoid it but slather on the DEET, cover up, and hope for the best.

On a lighter note…

Published March 19, 2003

Well, despite the covert bugging of the European Council offices of 3 major EU delegations, the apparatus of some states, at least, is bringing a smile to my face. The German federal secret service, the Bundesnachrichendienstes (BND), has just published Topf Secret, their official cookbook. Really. The Guardian notes:

The book consists of recipes sent in from around the world by German spies in the field. Thus, there are two recipes from Iraq, several from central Africa, the Philippines and Scotland.

Again, more questions than answers. The Germans have spies in Scotland? Do they really eat haggis? (‘Attention: fill only 2/3 of the stomach since the oat flour will expand. If the stomach is too full it can explode while cooking!’) Do the two recipes from Iraq – for fattousch and tabouleh – have to be so boring (use only crunchy lettuce leaves for the fattousch)? Why are there German agents in Iraq? What are they doing in the US as well, and do they like that nation’s recipe for pumpkin pie?

The Beeb via the ‘net

Published March 18, 2003

wow, the Beeb fed 29,200 simultaneous RealMedia streams at one point today; that breaks down to 18,400 listeners in the UK, 12,800 elsewhere in the world.

Since getting back to bandwidth, I’ve been listening to a lot of Radio 4, waking up to the Today programme in particular. Definitely recommended; nothing like a few clipped RP tones to fill you in on all the details.

Also recommended: the Beeb’s live streams collection, featuring all the FM and digital-radio stations streamed with excellent quality. Who needs Napster when you’ve got internet radio ;)