(Things I found interesting recently.)
for your delectation, I present the NASA standard for acceptable turds in space: ‘c) The fecal collector shall accommodate a maximum BOLUS length of 330 mm (13 in).’
My favourite bit: ‘d) Quantities in excess of these amounts shall not result in an unrecoverable condition.’ I should hope not!
Thanks to James Rogers on the FoRK list for this fine source of bits…
My parents, sister, and her husband Luke, just rang to wish lá féile Padraig shona againn. Thanks guys!
But, as part of the deal, I had to promise to impart some google-juice to my Dad’s website; he’s an architectural photographer in Dublin, Ireland, who also does a nice sideline in stock photography, especially where his holiday snaps are involved. So he’s now on the sidebar ;)
IP: a Hong Kong physician reports on SARS, the ‘atypical pneumonia’ that’s in the news. It’s quite scary stuff.
Masks are worn throughout the hospital. Staff are not going home to children. Please take the warning below seriously. My impression is that even with minimal contact with an infected person people have been becoming ill.
The Guardian reports that ‘an obscure Jewish sect in New York has been gripped in awe by what it believes to be a mystical visitation by a 20lb carp that was heard shouting in Hebrew, i n what many Jews worldwide are hailing as a modern miracle.’ … ‘According to two fish-cutters at the New Square Fish Market, the carp was about to be slaughtered and made into gefilte fish for Sabbath dinner when it sudden ly began shouting apocalyptic warnings in Hebrew.’
The Hugo Chavez documentary I enthused about last month will be repeated tomorrow on Irish TV, on Network 2, at 9:25 pm. Strongly recommend seeing this, if you can.
Thanks to Brian Greene for pointing this out…
Humour:Guardian: The joke’s on Saddam: In northern Iraq, they’re laughing at Saddam Hussein. Luke Harding meets two comedians who have dared to cock a snook at the ruthless dictator – and annoyed him so much that he ordered their assassination.
The film was screened on Kurdish television; and after decades of official repression, it was a huge hit. Saddam’s vigilant agents dispatched a CD copy to Baghdad. The Iraqi president was not amused. His response, when it came, was predictable: he sent several assassins to northern Iraq to kill the entire cast. ‘Fortunately the guys were all arrested (by the Kurdish authorities),’ Hassan recalls. ‘They were found carrying a list. All our names were on it.’
Life imitates Father Ted. It seems the Irish Eurovision entry sounds very similar to the Danish entry from 2000, which, if true, is almost exactly the subject of a classic episode of cult comedy TV show Father Ted, My Lovely Horse.
Dougal: ‘So we wouldn’t be stealing the song then?’ Ted: ‘No, it’d be more like we were keeping their memory alive.’ Dougal: ‘So if we won we could give the prize money to their relatives?’ Ted: ‘Yeah, we’ll play that by ear.’
The full low-down on the episode is here. Classic…
Anyway, I’m now in sunny SoCal, set up with more bandwidth than I’ve had in over a year. In fact, I’m swimming in bandwidth. Plus a decent pair of speakers for the ol’ MP3 collection, at last (my last set are in storage and have been for 3 months)… happy happy joy joy.
Myself and my cat had a 16-hour flight, and somehow or other, he seems satisfied. Well, I suppose as long as the catfood and lots of petting is forthcoming, life is grass for this fella. Easily satisfied!
The BBC reports that trading standards officials from the UK and US have successfully shut down an Israeli/Romanian/US-based fake-degree spam operation. Or maybe they’ve just shut down 3 websites, which is all I can see in that report — that’s not going to make a whole lot of difference, so let’s hope not.
SCO sues IBM (via Slashdot) . Talk about self-immolation: sue IBM, of all companies, with an intellectual property case. One SCO claim:
‘It is not possible for Linux to rapidly reach Unix performance standards for complete enterprise functionality without the misappropriation of Unix code.’
Apart from the fact that SMP is just not a state-of-the-art thing any more; things move on! Perhaps if SCO/Novell/USL hadn’t sat on their hands for 10 years, swapping IP and suing BSDI, they’d still be in the game. Anyway, here’s what the analysts think:
‘It’s a fairly end-of-life move for the stockholders and managers of that company,’ said Jonathan Eunice, an Illuminata analyst. ‘Really what beat SCO is not any problem with what IBM did; it’s what the market decided. This is a way of salvaging value out of the SCO franchise they can’t get by winning in the marketplace.’
He said it.
The transcript of the “Who Wants To Be A Millionaire” episode at the centre of a current UK court case; the producers claim that the contestant cheated, with the aid of a coughing accomplice. Going by this transcript, it’s an open-and-shut case IMO.
and why is she spamming me?
From: “Amanda Perez” amandaperez@virginrecords.com To: 20021202123631.31AB416F1F@jmason.org
Let’s send Amanda Perez and her new video ‘Angel’ to the top of MTV’s Total Request Live!
I don’t think so. How’s about reporting her to SpamCop instead?
Wow, Virgin Records, you are in so much trouble; spamming me with this crap, using a scraped address — in fact, not even a valid address; it’s a Message-Id! That address has never existed to receive mail. Out and out spamming. Unbelievable.
Update: actually, it’s probably nothing to do with Virgin, on reflection; nothing in the headers indicates anything apart from a dialup PacBell customer. So, Virgin Records, sorry for all the shouting ;)
Remote Sendmail Header Processing Vulnerability.
Attackers may remotely exploit this vulnerability to gain ‘root’ or superuser control of any vulnerable Sendmail server. Sendmail and all other email servers are typically exposed to the Internet in order to send and receive Internet email. Vulnerable Sendmail servers will not be protected by legacy security devices such as firewalls and/or packet filters. This vulnerability is especially dangerous because the exploit can be delivered within an email message and the attacker doesn’t need any specific knowledge of the target to launch a successful attack.
Sendmail versions from 5.79 to 8.12.7 are vulnerable.
Protection mechanisms such as implementation of a non-executable stack do not offer any protection from exploitation of this vulnerability. Successful exploitation of this vulnerability does not generate any log entries.
Great…
William Gibson, talking about why he uses all-caps book titles, gives a short history lesson regarding the rendering of book titles, back in the age of the mimeograph:
Much of my earliest typewriting experience had to do with mimeography, a pre-thermocopy form of reproduction once fairly universal in the world’s offices. You typed, once, on a waxed paper ‘stencil’, clipped this over a silkscreen device with a moving pad or drum of ink behind it, and your mimeograph ran off (or silkscreened, really) as many copies of your document as you required. Owing to the physical peculiarities of the medium, though, it was unwise to underline too frequently on a mimeograph stencil: the single unbroken line was particularly prone to tear, producing leaks and smudging.
People who liked books, and frequently wrote letters, on typewriters, to other people who liked books, tended, free from the constraints of an academic stylesheet, to render titles in all-caps. People who wrote about books for publication in amateur journals (mimeo was an authentic medium of the American samisdat) rendered titles in all-caps in order to avoid stencil-tears. At various times, I was both.
It’s such a pleasure having this kind of stuff to read every day!
Returnadores: a New Life in the Old World. ‘Imported from Argentina to help save the village from a decades-long decline in population which threatened its very future, the Paez family has travelled backwards along the path of the first conquistadores and the generations of Spanish emigrants who followed them.’
Leonard notes the ‘Random word of mixed symbols with length 1 to 27’ type spammer obfuscation, suggesting it’s ‘open source spam’; I reckon it’s more ‘literate programming spam’, in that it’s self-documenting. But it certainly is very wierd. Maybe some spamtool developer has a COBOL fetish.
Anyway, just got back from a very enjoyable work trip to find my visa documents have arrived — so things are probably going to heat up ’round about Thursday, when I have my interview at the US Embassy. Once that happens, it’s full speed ahead on flights, shipping, figuring out how to transport the cat, handing over house to new tenants, etc. etc…
Bitstream Vera released as a beta. The full release, sometime next month, will use an extremely open license. To quote the FAQ:
Are derivative works allowed?
Yes!
I want to sell a software package that uses these fonts: Can I do so?
Sure. Bundle the fonts with your software and sell your software with the fonts. That is the intent of the copyright.
Hey presto — open source fonts! Good work by Jim Gettys, Bitstream and GNOME in making these available.
BlogStart:
Spam: The Register: World’s first 419 revenge killing?
Michael Lekara Wayid, 50, Nigeria’s consul in the Czech Republic, was shot dead at the embassy yesterday morning. The embassy’s 37-year-old receptionist was shot in the hand during the melee which began after a suspect opened fire after visiting the embassy to discuss an unspecified business matter yesterday morning. A 72-year-old Czech man was arrested at the scene on suspicion of murder, the BBC reports. Unconfirmed, and thus far sketchy reports, suggest the unnamed suspect was a victim of a 419 (AKA advanced fee) fraud.
Now that’s taking it a bit too far IMO ;)
GNU Radio, which (as noted on Boing Boing) has just released screenshots of a successfully-decoded HDTV signal, is a totally new way to receive (and possibly, in the future, send) radio-frequency signals. The FCC ponder the implications:
The emergence of the low-cost, generally available SDR which can be configured with … open software will present a new issue for regulators. What will be placed in the hands of the public entrepreneurs, amateurs, and even those with malicious intent will be machines which in principal can emulate, send, and receive any radio signal on any band. …
Then, with the world-wide availability of software that can even be modified if needed, any radio transmitter or receiver can be emulated. Bans on receiver types will be circumventable with ease. Mandates such as the proposed ATSC broadcast flag will be hard to enforce (and may even fail in the presence of a single web-connected noncompliant receiver). And, although not generally an issue for the Commission, it will be possible to implement proprietary systems without the benefit of any license from the patent holder. Because the software is open, as a practical matter virtually all mandated restrictions will be at risk (except for total power output which remains a classical hardware issue). …
In the GNU SDR environment, we have the makings of a powerful new technology that has the potential of solving the spectrum management problem, but we may also have other people in the world writing and distributing software with their own agenda.
Wow. That’s a brave new world. I wish I knew enough about radio tech to really get a handle on this stuff…
Lycos: AOL reports to Members on Its Efforts to Fight Spam. ‘Members Now Reporting 4.1 Million Junk E-Mails Daily To AOL’ …. ‘AOL announced that its proprietary anti-spam filtering technology is blocking up to 780 million pieces of junk mail every day from reaching member e-mail inboxes, which amounts to an average of 22 blocked spam e-mails per account daily.’
Of course, they don’t say how much mail overall arrives at AOL, but I’d hazard a guess it’s not much over 1,300 million messages per day based on those figures.
Antoin (a) has a blog, yay, and (b) mailed me to note that the film I blogged about here is actually called The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, and will be shown at SXSW.
If you’re going to SXSW, do not miss this movie.
Wierd about the name-change — Antoin theorises that it’s got one name for TV, and a snappier title for film distribution. Who knows?
SpamAssassin 2.50 released, with Bayesian goodness, auto-learning, and a 97.77% accuracy out-of-the box. Hooray!
last night RTE showed Chavez – Inside The Coup, a documentary about the 2-day coup d’etat in Venezuela in April 2002 which overthrew Hugo Chavez, and was then in turn overthrown in a popular uprising.
It was incredible. The team had amazing access to Chavez and the presidential palace while the 2-day coup and mass protests went on. The cameras are right there while Chavez is taken into custody by the generals, carries on rolling through the censorship of the media, through the street protests and shotgun-blasting riot police, and then catches the loyal-to-Chavez presidential guard retaking the palace from the inside.
Finally, it follows the negotiations to get Chavez returned from custody etc.; his cabinet are right there, on screen, talking to the generals on the phone while you watch and listen. Incredible footage, right from the thick of it.
As far as I could tell, it’s called Chavez – Inside The Coup, and is by Power Pictures, Irish lads from Galway, no less.
I’ve never seen anything like it. If you get a chance, don’t miss it.
Wired: The Civil War Inside Sony.
By rights, Sony should own the portable player business. The company’s first hit product, back in the ’50s, was the transistor radio, the tinny-sounding invention that took rock and roll out of the house and away from the parents and allowed the whole Elvis thing to happen. A quarter-century later, the Walkman enabled the kids of the ’70s to take their tapes and tune out the world. But the 21st-century Walkman doesn’t bother with tapes or CDs or minidiscs; it stores hundreds of hours of music on its own hard drive. And it sports an Apple logo. ….
Where the iPod simply lets you sync its contents with the music collection on your personal computer, Walkman users are hamstrung by laborious ‘check-in/check-out’ procedures designed to block illicit file-sharing. And a Walkman with a hard drive? Not likely, since Sony’s copy-protection mechanisms don’t allow music to be transferred from one hard drive to another – not an issue with the iPod. ‘We do not have any plans for such a product,’ says Kimura, the smile fading. ‘But we are studying it.’ ….
What’s changed since the original Walkman debuted is that Sony became the only conglomerate to be in both consumer electronics and entertainment. As a result, it’s conflicted: Sony’s electronics side needs to let customers move files around effortlessly, but its entertainment side wants to build in restraints, because it sees every customer as a potential thief.
Great interview with Ashutosh Varshney, an Indian political scientist investigating ethnic violence. From New Scientist, via Damien Morton on FoRK.
So what is the key to predicting which communities will turn violent and which will remain peaceful in times of ethnic unrest?
It comes down to how the cities or villages are structured, and the networks that people form across religious or ethnic divides. In India I have identified two types of civic network, which I call the associational and the everyday. The everyday type covers things such as Hindu and Muslim children playing together and their families and friends visiting each other or eating with each other, or taking part in festivals together. The associational type involves the two groups being members of the same trade unions, sports clubs, student unions, reading clubs, political parties or business organisations. Associational structures go beyond neighbourhood warmth, and in times of unrest they are much more robust. They can be a serious constraint on the polarising strategies of political elites. Places with strong networks of this kind are very likely to remain peaceful.
The Reg: Do webcams break when Tony Blair walks by? A very interesting point; webcams, which provide perpetual surveillance by anyone who wants to, doesn’t quite fit in with modern political image control.
Slashdot posts a story about ‘Hacking the Streamium’ — the Streamium is an ‘internet micro hi-fi’ made by Philips. The poster writes ‘the main gripes (are) that Philips controls which Internet radio stations you can listen to and that the PC-link software … only runs on Windows. I managed to fix both of these problems by reverse engineering the PC-link protocol and writing my own pc-link server in perl, which can be run on practically any OS, *and* can trick the Streamium into playing any Internet MP3 stream that you want’.
A quick look at his page notes ‘the protocol consists of fairly simple xml tags’. It sure does; I’d imagine it took all of 5 minutes with a tcpdump reversing that! In fact, it looks so easy to reverse-engineer, you’d have to wonder if the engineers at Philips weren’t hoping something like this might happen ;)
traffic-camera pictures of the London anti-war march! What would J. G. Ballard make of this? ;)
and here’s Hyde Park:
Unfortunately none similar of Dublin.
In passing — an interesting factoid found on Adam Back’s PGP Timeline page: ‘While Iraq was still a secret US ally against Iran, Iraqi exchange students (in the US) using the same literature as (Phil Zimmermann, inventor of PGP) later did, wrote a working (Public Key) cryptosystem for (the Iraqi) military – which was using poison gas against the Kurds at the time.’ Hmm, ironic!
BBC: High hopes for Everest cybercafe. ‘Tsering Gyalzen hopes the internet facility at Mount Everest base camp will open by March. Proceeds from the venture will support pollution control at the camp, which is used by climbers hoping to scale the world’s highest peak. Mr Gyalzen, a member of the Sherpa community, says launch plans for the ambitious project are in the final stage. He told the BBC he was awaiting permission from the authorities to install VSAT digital satellite and other equipment at the base camp, which is over 5,000 metres above sea level.’ How cool is that?
Mark Fletcher is the guy behind Trustic, a new system which combines aspects of DNSBLs with (what Raph reckons is) a ‘PageRank-ish trust metric’.
My take on Trustic is that it needs a way to accumulate trusted, non-spam-relaying addresses; I’m not sure how they intend to get that, apart from people setting up accounts to say ‘this is my server’.
Anyway, he also has a blog, with this very interesting (and scary) snippet:
Elance, Spammers, and the Global Economy
eLance is a web site that connects contractors with companies looking to outsource projects. Companies post projects, including detailed descriptions of the work to be done, and contractors or contract houses bid on them. … So what were many of the projects on eLance about? A quick scan revealed project titles such as: Email Address Extraction From Web Site, Ebay Email Extractor, Linux highspeed directmailer, and Bulk E-Mail and E-Mail Extraction Project. Elance is providing a way for spammers to develop new spam technologies, utilizing a cheap, skilled global work force!
Yikes. Sure enough, a search of eLance for ‘bulk mail’ reveals a seller called bulkemail01 (1-5 employees, headquartered in the USA): Bulk Mailing and Offshore Hosting Solutions: ‘ We provide bulk email soultions and offshore hosting for the advanced bulk mailer.’
And these projects — as Mark notes, the project descriptions require a login, but the prospective-seller comments do not, so I’ve reproduced some snippets here. A search for bulk mail reveals 11 open projects, including: Bulk Mail Server and Bulk Mail Service Needed Immediately, Bulk E-Mail and Targeted E-Mail Extraction Project, Distributed Bulk Emailer, and bulletproof hosting and mailing needed.
A bunch called DbInnovation, 10-13 employees, based in Hungary and Russia, comments on one project that ‘we are developing a high performance linux e-mailer. Sends through all kinds of proxies, uses several antifitering techniologies, uses random subjects and ‘from’ addresses, etc, etc, etc (LOTS of other features). Web-based control centre for it. The mailer can be run on 30-50 servers simmultaniously and controlled from one place. Every server sends LIGHT FAST – 5-7 millions daily. It is VERY complicated and POWERFULL clustered software. It was written on C and it tunes Linux kernel to make the speed as fast as possible. The sw is under redevelopment and will be ready to March.’
Hostrus, aka ‘Hosting R Us’, 6-19 employees, Toronta, Canada: comments ‘We offer reliable spam tolerant bullet proof hosting that will NEVER get shut down!! we provide reliable bullet proof hosting We can provide you with references,test IPs and provide you with a solution’.
dsln (profile ‘no longer available’): We have servers in Jakarta, Indonesia, India, Japan , Brazil, Arentina, Russia. And all of them are BULK EMAIL FRIENDLY. You server will never e SHUT DOWN due to complains. The ISP’s will take up all the heat,what soever. The line would be 2MBPS one.You will also get 16 IPs per server, which can be changed every 15 days as you want. New Pool of IPs can be given to you every 15 days. These servers can be utilised very well for the mailing, you ae looking at. … We can do these kind of mailing for you. We mail arround 8-10 Million email IDs , using several servers and can do this kind of mailing for you as well. The cost for sending 10 Million emails would be $1050.
MobileSoft (Karachi, Pakistan): ‘We can provide you the SPAM Friendly Dedicated servers with control panel , we can handle more than 50 K Complaints daily, we will provide you the ips as your requirement’.
prompt (Anmol Solutions, Argentina): ‘I can host you at 4 bullet proof places, 2 in Arg and brazil each, i can give you 2 *256 ips if you want and you will have 10 MPBS line. For each server you will be charged $250 per month and $400 setup charges, you may easyly go upto 25 servers with the same amt of bw yes u may mail u may host u may do what ever you want :)’
A couple of other sites show the same situation: here’s a project at ContractedWork.com to build a ‘Bulk Mailer using open Proxies’.
In other words, these sites provide what seems to be a good look into the heart of spamware development. Scary stuff.
BTW an open invitation: if any ‘white hats’ out there get their hands on specific spamware, I’d appreciate them dropping me a line (email addr here). The idea is to analyze the tools and get good signatures for their spam, then add those signatures to SpamAssassin.
In other news, Slashdot reports that SpamAssassin apparently blocks Crypto-Gram. Not quite the case: as Dan points out, it gets 3.2 on version 2.44, and 1.9 on the nearly-released 2.50. That’s well inside the ‘this is ham’ range. However, this comment reports that the mail has been listed in Razor, which pushes it up to 5.9…
So more correctly — Razor thinks it’s spam, not SpamAssassin ;)
Richard Dawkins: why Prince Charles is so wrong (via BB).
An interesting read, if only because Richard Dawkins misses several massive chunks of the anti-GMO argument, as several folks point out on the BB discussion board. Firstly, the profit drive is the only thing driving deployed GM products, and that’s already been shown to produce unsafe results, in the UK with BSE. Secondly, as one of the posters says, ‘Oh, yeah — Dawkins is absolutely right (in comparing GM to modifying running software): Nothing to gripe about when people tinker with your mission critical apps’.
Grand Theft Auto: Vice City has been nominated for the Designer of the Year award in London:
‘We will be highlighting the reason why it is worthy for this prize,’ (the curator) added, noting the game’s attention to detail in costuming, music and atmosphere.
‘I’ve never been so excited to just watch a video game, never mind playing it,’ said Sellers. ‘It is really great to see all the details and feel the nuances. Playing it is even better.’
I must say, I have to agree. It’s easily one of the best games I’ve ever played; insanely playable and full of amazing attention to detail. The content’s a bit strong in places, but the same can be said of Mean Streets or Scarface, and I’m sure they may have picked up an award or two themselves, along the way. It’s just (interactive) fiction.
Karlin notes this about ‘the extraordinary letter the Department of Justice sent out this week to various parties’.
According to the letter, the Department will hold a preliminary forum to ‘initiate’ a consultation process on its proposed three-year data retention bill … The forum begins at 3pm — clearly making sure no long and unruly discussions will develop! — and starts with a 20-minute address by the Minister, followed by a 20-minute address by the Dept of Communications on the 1997 EU Data Privacy Directive (which, BTW, Ireland STILL has not implemented despite being under legal threat by the EU — and note that there’s no mention of the far more crucial 2002 amended Directive, voted in last May by a spineless and ill-informed EU Parliament, which allows for up to SEVEN YEARS data retention.
Then — and this is the amazing bit — attendees get a 20 minute pep talk by An Garda Siochana (the Irish police force) ‘on the contribution of data retention in the fight against crime.’
When you pick yourself up off the floor, remind yourself that this is the Irish government’s formal initiation of a purported public discussion on data retention — brought to you by the Irish police. Amazing. You’d have thought they’d at least *pretend* to be balanced and disinterested, and perhaps ask Joe Meade, the Irish Data Protection Commissioner, to contribute as well. …
The Department of Justice itself should have nothing whatsoever to do with ANY consultation process on this proposed bill. Instead, as in the UK, an independent Dail group should hold hearings and get public input into this.
James Gleick: A Plague on E-Mail, in yesterday’s New York Times magazine. We’ve broken out of the ‘technology’ section!
One of the best tools for network administrators is an ever-evolving program called SpamAssassin, which uses a range of tests and a point system to identify spam…
It’s so cool that James Gleick likes our ‘delightful SpamAssassin irony’, too ;)
Looking for an old mate, Alan Toner, and it’s turning out to be tricky; the last mail address I had for him now bounces.
or in NY as ‘the man with no bio’?
or speaking at the Oekonux conference in Berlin on ‘Commons, Criminalization, General Intellect and the Politics of Technology and Culture – Direct Payments from Users to Producers as an Alternative to Intellectual Property Rights’?
It seems all three. He gets around!
More on SCO v IBM
LWN on the case. An excellent commentary, and features this lovely user-posted comment as well:
Not IBM, after all, but Caldera — who are now part of the SCO group. This usenet posting from 1995 backs that up, as does the Caldera-badged Linux SMP page.