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IraqBlog

Published February 9, 2003

Dear Raed — a blog from an Iraqi bloke called Salam Pax. It’s amazing to read this; a true, educated, passionate, reasonable voice from inside Iraq.

The trenches and sandbag mountains I wrote about last week are now all over Baghdad. They are not being put there by the army; they are part of the Party’s preparations for an insurgence. Each day a different area of Baghdad goes thru the motions. Party members spread in the streets of that area, build the trenches, sit in them polishing their Kalashnikovs and drink tea. The annoyance-factor of these training days depend on the zeal of the party members in that area. Until now the worst was the (14th of Ramadan) street, they stopped cars searched them and asked for ID and military cards, good thing I wasn’t going thru that street, I still have not stamped my military papers to show that I have done my reserves training.

Totally off on a tangent, but that street-name reminds me of a line from McCarthy’s Bar (extract here):

In Germany once, in the military garrison town of Erlangen, I had a few drinks with three American GIs who were planning to visit England because it would be neat to see where John Lennon and Elvis grew up’. They also wanted to know if they could use dollars, and would the street signs be in English? I tried to tell them about Elvis coming from Tennessee, but it seemed to make them want to kill me. The Twenty-eighth Rule states: Never Get Drunk with Soldiers (particularly in countries where the streets are named after dates).

SHOWDOWN in the CRISIS in the WAR in IRAQ in the GULF

Published February 8, 2003

SomethingAwful provide their own inimitable spin on how the potential war in Iraq will be fought, featuring Operation: Fifty Legions of Sardaukar (‘Imperial strategists estimate minimal casualties among the Sardaukar troops and allied forces of Baron Tony Blair and House United Kingdom’), and Operation: Winnuke (‘US_of_A(NATO) wants to send you the file Dance_Routine(Funny!).wmv.vbs’).

Spam about spamming

Published February 7, 2003

how unfortunate! I guess this spammer hit the wrong key when selecting which set of addresses to send this mail to…

Joshua,

Here is the harvested list 165 names for telecom central office installation. Put together a email promo that we can send out.

Dad

Jhai Foundation notes bus attack in Laos

Published February 7, 2003

The latest Jhai Foundation newsletter notes an attack on a bus in Laos:

Some of you may have heard about a ‘terrorist attack’ in Laos yesterday. The reports are true. Eight People on a bus and two people on motorcycles were killed after a robbery. Two of them were internationals. Their identities and nationalities have not yet been confirmed. The attackers are thought to be Lao citizens, probably Hmong, possibly still caught up in the war that ended 28 years ago here. This will not be confirmed until they are caught.

This incident took place more than 30 km North of Vang Vieng or about 100 km North of our launch site. This is a sad day in Laos.

Whoa, I think I was on that bus a year ago! As I recall, that area of Laos is still noted for occasional bandit attacks…

An

update from Lee,
New FAQ’s,
Security Issues and

If You Need a Press Visa

We are on

track and we will launch on 13 February. Lee Felsenstein arrived last

night and is whipping us into shape in his gentle, nerdish way. Ed Gaible

arrived with him and is now up a tree on a mountain above the village

of Phon Kham. All of us – about 40 people between the village and our

staff and volunteers – are working hard and our spirits are high.

A

Sad Day For Laos

Some

of you may have heard about a ‘terrorist attack’ in Laos yesterday. The

reports are true. Eight People on a bus and two people on motorcycles

were killed after a robbery. Two of them were internationals. Their identities

and nationalities have not yet been confirmed. The attackers are thought

to be Lao citizens, probably Hmong, possibly still caught up in the war

that ended 28 years ago here. This will not be confirmed until they are

caught.

This incident

took place more than 30 km North of Vang Vieng or about 100 km North of

our launch site. This is a sad day in Laos.

Security

Arrangements For The Launch

As I write, Vorasone Dengkayaphichith, our great country coordinator,

is meeting with officials in Hin Heup District and Vientiane Province

to make final arrangements for security for all people at our launch and

party on 13 February. Vor and I know many, many children in the village

of Phon Kham and the other villages and Bounthanh has nieces and nephews,

and sisters and brothers and her parents there, too. Those children will

be safe – and, I believe, we will be safe, too.

Our remote

village project is a sophisticated, appropriate high tech endeavor designed

by Lee Felsenstein and his excellent team specifically for the needs as

expressed by the villagers who are getting the system.

And this

project rests in Jhai Foundation, … which is a reconciliation organization

which, now, has worked for over five years in Laos, and nearly three,

now, on state-of-the-art IT projects. Jhai Foundation is we people in

it and our relationships – and there are hundreds of us doing something

every day – and we are located all over the world.

Reconciliation,

like peace – and like development – is the opposite of war. Reconciliation

is the process of recognizing our connection – something that always was

and always will be, something very, very valuable. Jhai – in Lao – means

the spirit and energy of connection, as well as hearts and minds working

together … and many other similar things. It is neutral. It is up to

us how we act, how we respect.

War and peace

are matters of choice. Sometimes we choose to close down and kill. For

this – I know and most Lao people know – you pay until you die. The price

is unbelievably huge. Other times we choose to open up and connect. For

this – thanks to Lao people who teach me about this daily by the way the

are and act – I know you get the chance for joy, the chance to recognize

others as just plain people … and the chance to know and like yourself.

The choice, it seems, is easy. What shall we take?

In an age

of terrorism – which breeds fear like a virus – it is best to connect.

We choose to connect, to move forward, to do what we can do – with you

  • to help some poor folks who are friends of ours connect with one another and when they want to, with us. The benefit, we hope, is unbelievably huge.

    • Come to our launch. We will dazzle you with fun!

      Join us,

      Lee Thorn chair, Jhai Foundation

      PS Please do not hesitate to consult our FAQ or to email Jesse Thorn, . If you need to talk with one of us in Laos, that can be arranged.

      New FAQ’s

      What Were The Greatest Problems To Create The Technical Solution?
      From Jhai’s perspective it has been funding and localization. We have done this on a very small budget – lower five digits in US dollars – with the help of many engineers and other technical people. The technical lead was taken by renown computer designer Lee Felsenstein.

      A team of over 20 people donated their time. This time is worth, we estimate, perhaps $0.5 million. Localization has not been easy. For example, the team had to create new Unicode mappings for existing fonts. The relation of English to Lao is anything but direct.

      Which Impact Will The Internet Access Probably Have On The Villagers?
      They believe it will give them the opportunity to have a closer relationship with their extended families and to get better prices for their products at market. It is like a road for them.

      Is A Prototype Already Working?
      We have tested all components. The Jhai PC works. We are now completing the ‘marriage’ of the software and the hardware.

      Do You Think The Jhai PC Will Help Bring Access To Remote Sites In Other Countries As Well?
      The answer is ‘yes’. We have had inquiries from 40 countries and we expect observers from about several major development funding agencies to see our launch in the village of Phon Kham on 13 February.

      We designed specifically in terms of the expressed needs of people in five villages that have no electricity, no phones or hope of cell phone connectivity, and no good roads in the rainy season. I learned years ago from the Independent Living Movement of People with Disabilities that when people design for the folks with the most challenges, the tool works for many people equally or less challenged. I suspect this principle works with the Jhai Computer and Communications System.

      How Important Is The Way Jhai Works?
      I suspect that our development efforts – using the reconciliation model we have developed based on relationships between people on opposite sides of a devastating war, also will have wide application. Jhai Foundation and the villagers of Phon Kham have gotten to know each other over five years. Each of us brings our whole selves and our whole experience to the table. We all are through with war. It is amazing what happens when people are willing to stay in the room and communicate – no matter how hard it is.

      Many technology projects fail because the application becomes focused on the technology first; that often doesn’t work. Jhai’s model focuses on people and communication, the need for the technology grows out of that. We get to the technology through communication, not the other way round.

      Press Visa Requirements
      If you plan on coming to the launch and you are press, please make arrangements for a press visa and minder immediately. Jhai may be able to help if you follow these steps:

      1. Send the following Information to
      2. Email Subject Line:
        PLEASE RUN PRESS VISA PERMISSION
      3. In the email we need the following information:
      • Full
        • name as it appears on the person’s passport
      • Country of the passport
      • Passport Number
      • Date of Arrival in Laos
      • Date of Departure from Laos
    • Explicit detailed list of any equipment (taperecorders, cameras, etc.) you are bringing.
      Including BRAND NAME and MODEL #.
    • Complete Laotian itinerary in detail. For example,
      • 10 February
        • Arrive Vientiane
          • 11 and 12 February – Travel to Phon Hong, Vientiane Province
          • 13 and 14 February – Travel to Phon Kham, Vientiane Province 13 Feb.
          • 15 February Depart Vientiane

A sextet of ales!

Published February 7, 2003

subject line of the week — sounds like the spammer’s been listening to Homer’s Vocabulary Builder tape:

Subject: < Hi Jm, I am Bella, concupiscent youngster >

Apple’s ‘Bounce To Sender’ a Bad Idea

Published February 7, 2003

Matt journals a snippet from Apple’s eNews newsletter (originally forwarded by Skip Montanaro on the spambayes list), as follows:

Delivering a One-Two Punch to Spammers

Yes, Mac OS X Mail can help you deliver a staggering blow to spammers. Simply pull down the Mail menu, choose Junk Mail, and select Automatic. The next time you receive email, Mail will move suspect email into a Junk folder.

Now you’re ready to deliver a real knockout punch to spammers by taking advantage of yet another potent spam-fighting weapon:

  1. Click on the Junk folder.
  2. Type Command-a to select all of the email in the Junk folder.

  3. Choose Bounce to Sender from the Message menu.

    Mail will return the selected messages to the senders marked User unknown, making them think your email address invalid, encouraging them to drop you from their lists, and, thus, eliminating spam at its source.

Read on for details as to why this does not work (warning: long).

GNOME 2.2

Published February 6, 2003

GNOME 2.2 includes nifty new font technology, I see; including ‘drag into ~/.fonts’ font installation, at last, thanks to Keith Packard. I especially like this:

Jim Gettys and the GNOME Foundation Board worked with Bitstream, Inc. to arrange the donation of the Vera font family to the Free Software community.

Here’s what Vera looks like; very nice. Finally, some decent free fonts — kudos to Bitstream.

And I see subpixel smoothing is now right in there, in the basic font preferences. Excellent news!

But where TF is the Metacity documentation? Maybe there’s none, in the tradition set down over generations of GNOME hacks^Wapplications. (Pet peeve: every command in the default PATH should have a manual page IMO.)

The ‘documentation’ and ‘home page’ links I can find all lead to a directory of tarballs. Great. The best result Google can find, after the aforementioned tarballs, is a blog posting complaining about Metacity. Hmm — scary — I really don’t like the implication that the only way to do my own key-binding prefs, is to run a batch of 15 gconftool commands every time I log in… ah shaggit, I’ll use sawfish ;)

(PS: yes, I’m still on GNOME 1. That’s what happens when you’re stuck on the wrong end of dial-up.)

Crypto: The Crypto Gardening Guide and Planting Tips by Peter Gutmann. Excellent advice on how crypto designers should design protocols so that they can actually get implemented. Also, as a corollary; good tips on common crypto gotchas for implementors to watch out for. Some bonus funnies, too:

Note: PGP adopts each and every bleeding-edge technology that turns up, so it doesn’t figure in the above timeline. Looking at this the other way, if you want your design adopted quickly, present it as the solution for an attack on PGP.

A little bit more introduction on some of the items would be worthwhile though. I don’t have a clue what OAEP is for example ;)

Auth cookies in SMTP

Published February 4, 2003

Jeremy describes a way to kill off ‘joe-jobs’ — the practice of forging somebody’s address on spam, generally used to get around ‘does this user exist’ spam-filters, also used to ‘punish’ folks the spammer doesn’t like. Anyway, JZ’s suggestion is this:

One of the ideas tossed about was to implement a system that would make it easy for any MTA (Mail Transfer Agent–the programs that deliver e-mail on the Internet) to verify that a message that claims to be from somebody@yahoo.com really is from a yahoo.com user.

This is technically doable. And it might be a good idea. Especially, as I argued, if one of the other big players (AOL or MSN/Hotmail) jumps on board and uses the same technique. If either one began to do the same, I expect that a domino effect would follow. Boom. Instant adoption.

But then he doesn’t say how to do this in a way that a spammer can’t forge. Dammit. ;)

Anyway, on with the message.

… However, one interesting objection was raised during the debate…

Wouldn’t that just cause spammers to prey on domains that are less equipped to ‘swallow a few million bounces per hour without breaking a sweat’? (To paraphrase a co-worker.)

Yep, it would — until those domains also instituted similar systems. Anyway, those domains are victims now anyway; I would say only about 50% of my spam comes from forged Yahoo!, Hotmail or other domains — the rest uses domains of small ISPs, and the occasional joe-job.

But back to the system. I would guess what Jeremy’s talking about is pretty similar to the system Pedro Melo describes in the comments. It consists of 2 components:

  • a header added by the MTA at relay time — X-Originator-Signature.
    • This contains ‘an internal identifier for the person who sent it …, a timestamp, and a MD5 of those two fields and a third secret passphrase I keep.’

  • a CGI script on a web server, which validates a pasted X-Originator-Signature header against what hashing those values with the secret passphrase produces, and responds ‘yea’ or ‘nay’.

A nifty idea. Jeremy, was that what you were thinking?

SOAP and firewalls

Published February 4, 2003

Taking a look at the referrers, I came across Mark O’Neill’s weblog, which lists taint.org on the blogroll; Mark’s the CTO of Vordel. They have a product called VordelSecure, which seems to be a SOAP firewall proxy, in the same way the Wonderwall product I wrote for Iona was a proxy for CORBA:

When a firewall examines a SOAP request received over HTTP, it might conclude that this is valid HTTP traffic and let it pass. Firewalls tend to be all-or-nothing when it comes to SOAP. A SOAP-level firewall should be capable of:

  1. Identifying if the incoming SOAP request is targeted at a Web service which is intended to be available

  2. Identifying if the content of the SOAP message is valid. This is analogous to what happens at the Network Layer, where IP packet contents are examined. However, at the Application Layer it requires data that the Web service expects.

Cool!

I hear Wonderwall is still around, but rewritten from the ground up. Sorry about that to whoever had to rewrite it ;)

FTC to hold spam summit

Published February 4, 2003

FTC to Hold Three Day Public Spam Workshop. ‘The Federal Trade Commission will host a three-day ‘Spam Forum’ Wednesday, April 30 through Friday, May 2, to address the proliferation of unsolicited commercial e-mail and to explore the technical, legal, and financial issues associated with it. The forum will be held at the Federal Trade Commission, 601 New Jersey Avenue, N.W., Washington, D.C. It will be open to the public and preregistration is not required.

A Federal Register notice to be issued shortly says, ‘To explore the impact that spam has on consumers’ use of e-mail, e-mail marketing and the Internet industry, the Commission will convene a public forum. E-mail marketers, anti-spammers, Internet Service Providers (ISP), ISP abuse department personnel, spam filter operators, other e-mail technology professionals, consumers, consumer groups, and law enforcement officials are especially encouraged to participate.”

Anti-Americanism and Anti-Europeanism

Published February 3, 2003

In the last few weeks, there’s been a growing discussion of what’s being perceived as an ‘anti-American’ point of view in Europe; see Thomas Friedman on the subject. On the other side, The New York Review of Books carries an interesting essay on this subject: Anti-Europeanism in America. It contains this revealing summary of a December 2002 study:

Asked to choose one of four statements about American versus European approaches to diplomacy and war, 30 percent of Democratic voters but only 6 percent of Republican voters chose ‘The Europeans seem to prefer diplomatic solutions over war and that is a positive value Americans could learn from.’ By contrast only 13 percent of Democrats but 35 percent of Republicans (the largest single group) chose ‘The Europeans are too willing to seek compromise rather than to stand up for freedom even if it means war, and that is a negative thing.’

The divide was even clearer when respondents were asked to pick between two statements about ‘the way in which the war on Iraq should be conducted.’ Fifty-nine percent of Republicans as opposed to just 33 percent of Democrats chose ‘The US must remain in control of all operations and prevent its European allies from limiting the States’ room to maneuver.’ By contrast, 55 percent of Democrats and just 34 percent of Republicans chose ‘It is imperative that the United States allies itself with European countries, even if it limits its ability to make its own decisions.’

It seems a hypothesis worth investigating that actually it’s Republicans who are from Mars and Democrats who are from Venus.

Cannabis Economics

Published February 2, 2003

and now, on a lighter note, The Observer reports that the ‘cannabis economy’ in the UK is worth 11 billion UKP a year:

A major new study is being used to advise well known household and high-street companies about the gains and losses they face as cannabis smoking becomes commonplace. Research has revealed that Britain’s ‘cannabis economy’ is worth 5 billion a year in sales alone. Now it has been discovered that a further 6bn of consumer expenditure each year is closely linked to the growing cannabis-users’ market.

‘Young people between 15 and 30 are very trend-conscious and aspirational,’ said Andy Davidson, who commissioned the study for The Research Business International, trend analysts who tracked the spending habits of young people for six months.The study found that cannabis users spend an average of UKP 20 on products that accompany their drug use each time they smoke.

Because smoking cannabis heightens appetite, users are providing a UKP 120 million weekly windfall to a string of takeaway food suppliers, such as Domino and Pizza Hut, and manufacturers of ‘munchie’ products such as Mars bars and Haribo jellies.

The explosion of Columbia

Published February 2, 2003

as everyone knows by now, the space shuttle Columbia has exploded on re-entry over Texas. It’s an extremely sad occasion, and a terrible thing to happen.

Lots of people look on space exploration, and the astronauts who do it, as something mundane. No way — it takes a certain kind of bravery and heroism to do this. Every astronaut (from what I’ve read) is clearly aware of the odds that the vehicles they use have a large likelihood of suddenly exploding beneath their feet — and is therefore taking a huge risk on behalf of humanity, and the expansion of human knowledge. They should be viewed as heroes, as a result.

I just hope the ISS project, and manned spaceflight in general, continues…

Some off-beat news links you may not have seen:

Durian fruit

Published January 30, 2003

CNN: A box of durian, sprinkled with carpet deodorizer, sparked an aviation alert in Australia on Thursday (via monkeybum):

When they finally found the source of the smell, it was a box of durian, a large, spiny tropical fruit renowned for its fetid aroma. While many people in Southeast Asia consider the durian a delicacy, it is banned from Singapore’s subway and some restaurants in the region because of its overpowering smell.

‘This wasn’t a safety issue, this was gross issue — no one wants to fly in an airplane that smells like that,’ (Virgin Blue boss Brett Godfrey) said. He compared the smell of the gourmet fruit to ‘something you’d find in your outdoor dunny’ adding that ‘it just is the most pungent, disgusting smell.’

No shit — durian really stinks. I’ve tried to cultivate the taste for it, but failed miserably. Worse, for 3 hours in the passenger seat from Khao Sok to Surat Thani in Thailand, I was stuck with a selection of ’em by my feet — no escape!

The nearest thing to their odor is really pungent, cheesy socks. ‘foetid’ is the word for it.

7.5% of Euro households have broadband

Published January 30, 2003

SiliconRepublic: Ireland second last in Europe for broadband. But I think regular readers will know that ;) ‘Ireland’s already shaky claim to the title European digital hub was looking even more risible than usual today, following the latest internet penetration survey, which shows us to be languishing in second last place out of 16 European countries in terms of broadband internet penetration. ‘

The usual story — with quotes from IO’s Dave Long — and that’s not surprising. I should imagine things will improve a lot this year, now that the ComReg seems a little more on the job, and eircom have halved their prices.

But the really interesting thing is this: ‘Among the survey’s other findings were that 7.5pc (12 million) of all European households now subscribed to a broadband internet service. 6.3 million customers signed up for broadband for the first time in 2002 — an increase of 55pc over 2001. … It further predicted that a further 7.2 million European homes will acquire broadband for the first time this year, bringing the total to 19.1 million or 11.9pc of total households.’

That’s excellent news, and wipes out the FUD put about by some telcos (guess which ones) that there just isn’t demand in the current market. Clearly there is strong demand throughout the rest of Europe — and there really isn’t much difference between there and here. In fact, if anything, I reckon there would be more demand here, based on the take-up of other high-tech accessories like mobile phones and games consoles.

Latency and DSL

Published January 30, 2003

‘It’s the Latency, Stupid!’, a fantastic article explaining why latency is sometimes more important than simple bandwidth.

This was found via Karl Jeacle’s comments on eircom’s DSL, which are very illuminating in themselves — although probably not too interesting for non-Irish folks ;). But the relevant part is the explanation of why they enabled interleaving on eircom’s DSL network (summary: to get more reach, as far as I can see).

TWiki

Published January 30, 2003

Interesting story of how Inktomi replicated knowledge across multiple, separated geographical offices, while doing it in an efficient, cross-platform, reliable and accessible way: first of all, they use TWiki, and second, it’s set up as a DistributedTWiki.

more Watchcam

Published January 29, 2003

I found a load of snaps from my Casio Watch Camera that I hadn’t uploaded yet. I’d uploaded them, but forgot to add them to CVS ;) Here’s a nice one — a ca. 19th century hygrometer made in the Mason family’s opticians shop in Essex Bridge, Dublin, found in the museum at Collins Barracks:

The Onion comes through

Published January 29, 2003

U.N. Orders Wonka To Submit To Chocolate Factory Inspections:

UNITED NATIONS — Responding to pressure from the international community, the U.N. ordered enigmatic candy maker William ‘Willy’ Wonka to submit to chocolate-factory inspections Monday. ‘For years, Wonka has hidden the ominous doings of his research and development facility from the outside world,’ U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan said. ‘Given the reports of child disappearances, technological advances in glass-elevator transport, and Wonka-run Oompa-Loompa forced-labor camps, the time has come to put an end to three decades of secrecy in the Wonka Empire.’

We Are Made For Higher Timings

Published January 28, 2003

a memorable mistranslation found in a guesthouse at Annapurna Base Camp :

Photo of a memorably-mistranslated poster

Help! I’m being underclocked! ;) Perhaps that explained the shortness of breath and dizziness…

(I did some scanning of the hundreds of photos from last year’s trip about a month ago, but haven’t had a chance to fix ’em all up yet. And I’m not uploading anything until I get to CA and some decent bandwidth.)

Monkey sense (fwd)

Published January 28, 2003

A funny letter from New Scientist regarding the use of monkeys to collect specimens in the field, which was pioneered by John Corner in Singapore.

The botanist noticed that local fruit-pickers trained monkeys to collect fruit, and reasoned that a monkey could similarly be trained to collect flowers, leaves and nuts for his own work. The result was the collection of hundreds of otherwise inaccessible specimens — and this gem:

Travelling with mule and monkey on a narrow path in the uplands, he spied a new and unrecognised flower on a liana hanging from the path, down a near-vertical cliff face too steep for him to climb down. So he instructed the monkey to descend and collect the flower. But the monkey just looked at him questioningly with its head on one side.

‘Go down!’ repeated the eminent botanist. At which the monkey gave an eloquent shrug, took hold of the liana and pulled it up hand over hand to collect the flower. No human being, said Corner, had ever, before or since, made him feel so much of a fool.

Bank of America ATMs are net-connected!

Published January 26, 2003

Boing Boing notes that the SQL Slammer worm ’caused service outages at tens of thousands of Bank of America ATMs and wreaked havoc at Continental Airlines. Apparently, customers at most of the #3 American bank’s 13,000 automatic teller machines were unable to process transactions for a period of time.’

Does anyone else find it very scary to contemplate an ATM network connected to the internet, with a sufficiently open set of firewalls that a semi-documented Microsoftish SQL protocol can traverse as far as the ATM servers? Sure, it probably took a few hops, compromising a couple of SQL servers along the way, but each of the firewalls in question must have had that MS-SQL port open for those servers. Yikes.

Someone should teach those guys about network compartmentalization for security; something like an ATM network, where security is hugely essential, should never have a direct IP-based connection to the internet, no matter how many firewalls and gateways are in place.

Spam: NACS: Spam Detection. Great, Catherine’s new email system at UCI uses SpamAssassin. Nothing like getting bug reports from your SO ;)

On the other side, though, they’ve written an excellent set of pages on how to detect and act on the SpamAssassin markup in various MUAs.

deny udp any any eq 1434

Published January 25, 2003

it looks like the the latest internet worm is making the rounds, and this one’s a biggie. It’s been dubbed ‘SQLSlammer’, since it hammers on the Microsoft SQL ports, attempting to exploit yet another commonly-unpatched 7-month-old MS vulnerability. The best bit: it uses UDP broadcasts to do this, so the traffic load is massive compared to previous worms, so there’s lots and lots of backbone hosage as a result. Coverage:

Quick fix: update those router filters to deny all traffic, both UDP and TCP, on port 1434. (you shouldn’t need to update the firewall filters of course, because nobody’s stupid enough to allow access to open-internet MS SQL traffic, right? ;)

Kim Jong Il, Giant Robot

Published January 24, 2003

Kim Jong Il Unfolds Into Giant Robot (Onion). Met up with Paddy Benson last night for a few drinks, and he let me into the secret that The Onion is, once again, officially funny:

‘If we add Kim Jong Il’s transformation into a giant robot to his already defiant isolationist stance and his country’s known nuclear capability, the diplomatic terrain definitely becomes more rocky,’ U.S. envoy James Kelly said. ‘Kim has made it clear that, if sufficiently threatened, he will not hesitate to use nuclear weapons or his arm-mounted HyperBazooka.’

‘We are also forced to consider the possibility that Kim may attempt to robo-meld with other members of the Axis of Evil, forming a MegaMecha-Optima-Robosoldier. Kim would make a powerful right arm — or even a torso — for such a mechanism.’

Wotcher Paddy!

Matt Blaze vs master keys

Published January 23, 2003

Matt Blaze has posted a very neat exploit against ‘weaknesses in most master-keyed lock systems, such as those used by offices, schools, and businesses as well as by some residential facilities (particularly apartment complexes, dormitories, and condominiums). These weaknesses allow anyone with access to the key to a single lock to create easily the master key that opens every lock in the entire system. Creating such a key requires no special skill, leaves behind no evidence, and does not require engaging in recognizably suspicious behavior. The only materials required are a metal file and a small number of blank keys, which are often easy to obtain.’

‘The vulnerability was discovered by applying the techniques of cryptanalysis, ordinarily used to break secret codes, to the analysis of mechanical lock design.’

Paper here.

Tardis-noise inventor dies

Published January 21, 2003

Daphne Oram, one of the pioneers of electronic music, has died. (BBC)

Almost un-noticed by the wider world, one of the pioneers of electronic music has died. Without Daphne Oram, we may never had known what the Tardis sounded like. Electronic music – as much a part of today’s life as whistling a tune to yourself – grew up amid milk bottles, gravel, keys, and yards of magnetic tape and wires. These were the sort of tools typically scattered around the BBC’s Radiophonic Workshop in the 1950s and 60s, when they were used to generate wonderful and ethereal sounds for the airwaves. The mother of this great legacy was Daphne Oram. Aged 18, and armed with a passionate interest in sound, music and electronics, she started work at the BBC in 1943 as a sound engineer.

Lotsa SpamConf linkage and commentary

Published January 21, 2003

Another good trip report, from ‘babbage’ at perl.org.

  • Again, and interestingly, quite a few folks agreed with one of SA’s core tenets; no single approach (stats, RBLs, rules, distributed hashes) can filter effectively on its own, as spammers will soon figure out a way to subvert that technique. However, if you combine several techniques, they cannot all be subverted at once, so your effectiveness in the face of active attacks is much better.

  • Also interesting to note how everyone working with learning-based approaches commented on how hard it was to persuade ‘normal people’ to keep a corpus. Let’s hope SA’s auto-training will work well enough to avoid that problem.

  • in passing — babbage noted the old canard about Hotmail selling their user database to spammers. That must really piss the Hotmail folks off ;) I think it’s much more likely that, with Moore’s Law and the modern internet, a dictionary attack *will* find your account eventually.

  • Good tip on the legal angle from John Praed of The Internet Law Group: if a spam misuses the name of a trademarked product like ‘Viagra’, get a copy to Pfizer pronto. Trademark holders have a particular desire to follow up on infringements like this, as an undefended trademark loses its TM status otherwise.

  • David Berlind, ZDNet executive editor: ‘They don’t want to be involved (in developing an SMTPng)’. He might say that, but I bet their folks working on sending out their bulk-mailed email newsletters might disagree ;). Legit bulk mail senders have to be involved for it to work, and they will want to be involved, too.

  • Brightmail have a patent on spam honeypots? Must take a look for this sometime.

  • the plural of ‘corpus’ is ‘corpora’ ;)

Great report, overall.

It’s interesting to see that Infoworld notes that reps from AOL, Yahoo! and MS were all present.

Since the conf, Paul Graham has a new paper up about ‘Better Bayesian Filtering’, and lists some new tokenization techniques he’s using:

  • keep dollar signs, exclamation and most punctuation intact (we do that!)

  • prepend header names to header-mined tokens (us too!)

  • case is preserved (ditto!)

  • keep ‘degenerate’ tokens; ‘Subject:FREE!!!’ degenerates to ‘Subject:free’, to ‘FREE!!!’, and ‘free’. (ditto! well, partly. We use degeneration of tokens, but we keep the degenerate tokens in a separate, prefixed namespace from the non-degenerate ones, as he contemplates in footnote 7. It’s worth noting that case-sensitivity didn’t work well compared to the database bloat it produced; each token needs to be duplicated into the case-insensitive namespace, but that doubled the database size, and the hit-rate didn’t go up nearly enough to make it worthwhile.)

Most of these were also discovered and verified experimentally by SpamBayes, too, BTW.

When we were working on SpamAssassin‘s Bayesian-ish implementation, we took a scientific approach, and used suggestions from the SpamBayes folks and from the SpamAssassin community on tokenizer and stats-combining techniques. We then tested these experimentally on a test corpus, and posted the results. In almost all cases, our results matched up with the SpamBayes folks’ results, which is very nice, in a scientific sense.

(PS: update on the Fly UI story — ‘apis’ is not French, it’s Latin. oops! Thanks Craig…)

Trip Report from the SpamConf

Published January 20, 2003

Kaitlin Duck Sherwood writes a trip report. Good tidbits:

  • many big players in the mail-sending side want to see an SMTPng; a new protocol which is spam-resistant.

  • Jon Praed of the Internet Law Group said that ‘better spam filters make his job easier: the more contortions that a spammer goes through to make sure that the messages go through, the easier it is to convince a judge that the spammer knew it was wrong.’ Excellent!

Toilet Flies

Published January 20, 2003

Andrew McGlinchey writes about a Fly UI: ‘I have seen one of the finest instances of user interface design ever, and I saw it in the men’s room at Schipol airport in Amsterdam. In each of the urinals, there is a little printed blue fly. It looks a lot like a real fly, but it’s definitely iconic – you’re not supposed to believe it’s a real fly. It’s printed near the drain, and slightly to the left.’

I’ve heard of this one before, and yes, it is an aiming-improvement UI. It started in France around the turn of the century, if I recall correctly. One important fact: it’s not a fly — it’s a bee. You see, it’s also a visual pun — the french for ‘bee’ is ‘apis’, geddit?

(I’d have commented on the blog, itself, but it’s one of those ‘create an account to comment’ places — too much trouble!)

He’s also spot-on about why tea is big in Ireland: ‘The climate is cool, grey and damp. Steady doses of warm drink with a nice gentle caffeine push really keeps you going.’ Hey, works in the Himalayas too ;)

UL alert: ‘out-of-office’ autoreplies help burglars

Published January 15, 2003

BoingBoing, back in December, forwarded this snippet: ‘A report issued by UK-based Infrastructure Forum (‘TIF’) says spam-savvy thieves are using info from ‘out of office’ email autoresponders and cross-referencing it with publicly available personal data to target empty homes.’

Criminals are buying huge lists of email addresses over the internet and sending mass-mailings in the hope of receiving ‘out of office’ auto-responses from workers away on holiday.

By cross-reference such replies with publicly available information from online directories such as 192.com or bt.com, the burglars can often discover the name, address and telephone number of the person on holiday. Tif is advising users to warn their staff to be careful of the information they put in their ‘out of office’ messages.

“You wouldn’t go on holiday with a note pinned to your door saying who you were, how long you were away for and when you were coming back, so why would you put this in an email?” said David Roberts, chief executive at Tif. (via VNUNet)

My take on this? Bullshit.

I mean, how many house burglars (a) have the know-how to set up a fast internet connection, get hold of an addresses CD, and send a spam; and then (b) how often does a Reply-To address on a spam stay active once it’s sent — assuming it ever worked in the first place — before the ISP whacks their account? I would guess 6 hours at the most, and most spam runs wouldn’t even be halfway through by that stage (from what I hear).

Self-promoting bullshit of the highest order I reckon.

Six Degrees Tested

Published January 13, 2003

Steppe by Step (Guardian). “I started wondering if (the ‘six degrees of separation’ theory) was true today. … So 35 years on from the original experiment, I decided to test out the urban myth on a world stage: how many steps would it really take to get to someone on the other side of the planet?”

The London-based “city girl” author, Lucy Leveugle, makes it in 9 steps (hey, the world has expanded!) to Purev-Ochir Gungaa, a nomadic herdsman in the middle of the steppes of Outer Mongolia. Amazing.

wierd referrers

Published January 13, 2003

308 referrer hits from www.xxxstoryarchive.com, 282 from amateur-porn.us, 282 from nude-lesbians.us, etc. Somehow I doubt it. All the hits are 404s, looking for e.g.

nn.nn.nn.nn – – [12/Jan/2003:18:52:13 +0000] GET /pics54754-96 HTTP/1.1 404 284 http://www.celebrity-nude-pics.com/ “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; .NET CLR 1.0.3705)”

Hits from hosts at AT&T WorldNet Services and an SBC PPPoX pool. They’re all MSIE 6 on Windows, and it’s been going on for a month or so.

Theory: sounds like MSIE’s download-to-‘view’-offline functionality has bugs; when it hits a 404, maybe it requeues that request but then sends it to entirely the wrong IP.

Alternative theory: it’s a pathetically underpowered DDoS. ouch!

Anyone else seen this?

Still Moving

Published January 13, 2003

Who knew relocating with a cat could be so tricky? Well, actually, I did. He hates travel. I’m considering just putting him in a crate and handing him off to a courier to do it.

Paul Graham’s Spam Conference seems to be doing great; they’ve moved to a bigger room, and are expecting 480 (!!) attendees.

I still can’t make it due to all this movage, but thankfully there’s a few SpamAssassin folks going, so we’ll still be able to snarf some good tricks with any luck.

In other news, the public mass-check submission run for SpamAssassin 2.50 is about to start; with the new with-bayes and with-net-tests dimensions in the matrix, it’s going to be the biggest run yet. Should be fun.