Frequent drinking cuts heart attack risk (New Scientist). ‘ Half an alcoholic drink every other day, be it wine, whisky or beer, can reduce the risk of heart attacks by a third, a new study shows. The 12-year study published in The New England Journal of Medicine found that the frequency of drinking was the key to lowering the risk of heart disease, rather than the amount, the type of alcohol, or whether or not it was drunk with food.’
Category: Uncategorized
Well, looks like it’s been announced; McAfee and NAI are buying Deersoft. I wish I could comment properly, but I’m in mid-packing right now and things are a total hectic mess :(
New Scientist: Turing tests filter spam email. “Simple tests designed to distinguish computers from humans are increasingly being used to clamp down on unsolicited, or ‘spam’, email advertising.”
The article notes that Yahoo! has imposed such a test to block automated account-signup-then-spam bots. (Thankfully — that might discourage some of the more automated 419 spammers.)
Sorry ’bout the lack of blogging — very busy ’round here, what with a new SpamAssassin release in the pipeline and a move to the US in the offing…
This morning (we living lately in the garret,) I rose, put on my suit with great skirts, having not lately worn any other, clothes but them. Went to Mr. Gunning’s chapel at Exeter House, where he made a very good sermon.
Anyway, still recovering from the holidays. Hope you all had a good one..
Yahoo!: Deadline Passes for European Digital Copyright Law. ‘A deadline for adopting a new EU law on copyright protection has passed with just two member countries signing up, dealing a blow to media and software companies beset by unauthorized duplication of their works across the Internet.’ The two countries are Greece and Denmark, which is odd, considering I thought Ireland had do so too.
Other actors in the private sector, such as Internet service providers, have weighed in heavily on the issue, opposing laws that could ultimately hurt consumer rights.
Yay ISPs!
BBC: An Irish republican song, A Nation Once Again, has been voted the world’s top tune according to a BBC World Service poll. ‘Following a late surge in votes, the Irish sing along crossed the finishing line ahead of a patriotic Hindi song, Vande Mataram.’
‘The poll had to deal with people trying to influence the vote through fan sites and spamming.’ No shit. The funniest thing about this poll was the way it suddenly stopped being about ‘the world’s top 10 tunes’ and suddenly became ‘how many ‘net users can each country mobilize to vote for a patriotic song’.
Still, I’m impressed the clicky fingers of the Irish net population (pop. 6 million) managed to beat those of India (pop. 1 billion)!
Guardian: DrugScope, the drug charity, says that an ‘intensive media campaign against the drug ecstasy has led to an increase in cocaine use among young people’. whoops.
‘Studies show the reason they no longer use ecstasy is because of the scare stories,’ said a spokesman for the charity. ‘They haven’t seen similar stories about cocaine and their belief is that cocaine is the safer drug. The reality is that cocaine, especially crack cocaine, is a much more harmful drug – it kills more people each year and more people have dependency on it.’
They also add a few UL-busting facts:
DrugScope’s guide argues that there are no recorded examples of heroin ever being cut with ground glass … no drug is instantly addictive and that addiction generally takes several months to develop … physical withdrawal from heroin is like a bad bout of flu, not a near-death experience.
Aaron’s trip to CA comes to a end in a big bang of serious meeting-up.
I read his blog using the rss2mail mail-based news aggregator he wrote (I live in e-mail, especially while I’m still on the wrong side of dialup), and I think this is the most homepage-link-laden blog entry I’ve ever read. 45 links, count ’em! Wow, I hope he can keep all those name-to-face mappings clear ;)
In other news: it seems that football (proper football, played with feet, ie. soccer) is bad for you: the World Cup penalty shoot-out caused a surge in heart attacks for England fans (New Scientist). Ban Football Now!
Son of Star Wars leaves drivers stranded (Guardian). Interesting collision between military and civvie radio technology.
The upgrading of the security and surveillance systems at (RAF Fylingdales base in Yorkshire, which is planned to be used as a UK base for new US ‘Star Wars’ projects) … is knocking out the electrical systems of expensive cars. … High power radar pulses trigger the immobilising devices of many makes of cars and motorcycles – BMW, Mercedes and Jeep among them. Many have had to be towed out of range of the base before they can be restarted.
Wing Commander Chris Knapman, of RAF Fylingdales, said it was not up to the base to resolve the problem. ‘We have had the frequencies we use for a very long time,’ he said. ‘They are allocated to commercial, military and government users, and the allocation is very tightly controlled. As far as we are concerned, the radars are working on frequencies which are well known, and most car manufacturers take that into account.’
A spokesman for Jeep said: ‘The problem is that the government gives manufacturers such a narrow band to operate in – so the radio wave (sic) we use for our key fob is severely restricted.’
AOL patents instant messaging (/.). ‘Specifically, any technology that provides ‘a network that allows multiple users to see when other users are present and then to communicate with them’ is covered.’
The CNet story which /. references points out that the patent was filed in 1997 — but that’s still 6 years after I wrote a similar perl script on the Maths Department UNIX machines in TCD. There’s a myriad of similar apps, of the same vintage, too.
The thing I find amazing is this, however — the AOL patent actually
cites prior art in its References section, namely the
xhtalk README file, dated 1992. There’s nothing different between
xhtalk and AOL Instant Messenger apart from the protocol and the look
and feel, and those aren’t key to the patent.
The US patent office really needs to start reading the patent applications before granting them.
ho ho, looks like Saddam Hussein also benefited from Crypto AG’s NSA back door ;)
Danny reports “the always excellent c’t magazine analyses the hypotheticals of the Dutch IP-surveillance scandal:
According to anonymous sources within the Dutch intelligence community, all tapping equipment of the Dutch intelligence services and half the tapping equipment of the national police force, is insecure and is leaking information to Israel. …”
Yikes. You’d think they’d have learnt from Ireland’s mistakes…. this article (update: moved to here) reports that massive back-door use by a third-party government occurred before in similar circumstances, during the Anglo-Irish negotiations of 1985.
For those of you who don’t know, these discussions were between the Republic of Ireland and the UK, and took place in London.
In order to allow the negotiating team to contact their government and civil service securely, a million-pound cryptographic system had been bought in order to secure the link between the Irish Embassy in London and the government in Dublin.
Unfortunately, this equipment was thoroughly compromised.
It turns out that the Swiss company from which the equipment was bought, namely Crypto AG, had cooperated with the NSA and the BND (the NSA’s German equivalent), to allow them to decipher the traffic trivially. (Judging from the snippet from another article below, sounds like this was done using a known-plaintext attack).
The NSA routinely monitored and deciphered the Irish diplomatic messages. All it took then was for the UK’s NSA equivalent, GCHQ, to pull some strings, and the UK government had a distinct advantage in the negotiations from then on.
Another source for details on Crypto AG’s breakage is Der Spiegel, issue 36/96, pages 206-207. Here’s some snippets:
The secret man (sic) have obviously a great interest to direct the trading of encryption devices into ordered tracks. … A former employee of Crypto AG reported that he had to coordinate his developments with “people from Bad Godesberg”. This was the residence of the “central office for encryption affairs” of the BND, and the service instructed Crypto AG what algorithms to use to create the codes.
Members of the American secret service National Security Agency (NSA) also visited the Crypto AG often. The memorandum of the secret workshop of the Crypto AG in August 1975 on the occasion of the demonstration of a new prototype of an encryption device mentions as a participant the cryptographer of the NSA, Nora Mackebee. …
Depending on the projected usage area the manipulation on the cryptographic devices were more or less subtle, said Polzer. Some buyers only got simplified code technology according to the motto “for these customers that is sufficient, they don’t not need such a good stuff.”
In more delicate cases the specialists reached deeper into the cryptographic trick box: The machines prepared in this way enriched the encrypted text with “auxiliary informations” that allowed all who knew this addition to reconstruct the original key. The result was the same: What looked like inpenetrateable secret code to the users of the Crypto-machines, who acted in good faith, was readable with not more than a finger exercise for the informed listener.
So what’s the bottom line? Use GPG! ;)
thanks to blogs, wifi and the web, bullshitting a keynote at a conference isn’t quite as easy to pull off as it used to be! From Dan Gillmor’s keynote at Supernova, via BoingBoing:
At PCForum, Joe Nacchio, the CEO of Qwest was on-stage, doing a Q and A. Joe was whining about how hard it is to run a phone company these days. Dan (Gillmor) blogged, “Joe’s whining.” A few moments later, he got an email from someone who wasn’t at the conference, someone in Florida, with a link to a page that showed that Joe took $300MM out of the company and has another $4MM to go — gutting the company as he goes.
Esther Dyson described this as the turning point. The mood turned ugly. The room was full of people reading the blog and everyone stopped being willing to cut Joe any slack.
Check out The World’s Top Ten — Nationalist Marching Songs, that is, as far as I can see — featuring:
-
Vande Mataram and Rakkamma Kaiya Thattu (India)
-
Dil Dil Pakistan (guess where)
-
A Nation Once Again (Ireland)
India’s winning.
Just in case they get cleaned out as vote-rigging, here’s what it looks like right now:
more geek politics: A first-hand account of Day One of the Johansen trial in Norway, from Politech. I really hope this goes well.
from Slashdot: Cisco patents ‘Intrusion detection signature analysis using regular expressions and logical operators’.
That is so, so sad. Filed January 15, 1999. There’s got to be a stack of prior art.
A google search throws up this trivial example first off —
the use of snoop | egrep 'PATTERN1|PATTERN2|PATTERN3'. More
searching reveals Lance
Spitzner’s page on Intrusion Detection for Checkpoint FW-1, which
looks like it was originally written in 1997. The alert.sh script
there uses grep(1) plentifully.
If you’re wondering what happens to non-US-resident programmers when they run afoul of the US’s ludicrous copyright laws (namely the DMCA), take a look at Danny O’Brien’s blog entry from the Elcomsoft trial, covering Dmitry Sklyarov’s evidence.
18 megaton thermonuclear warhead, Item # 1791560632. “this is that perfect something for the person who has everything.” Disappointingly though, “THE THERMO NUCLEAR WARHEAD HAS BEEN REMOVED,AND IS IN NO WAY INCLUDED IN THE SALE”. Misleading advertising!
BBC – the Great Smog of 1952 recalled. “Fifty years ago, a choking cloud enveloped much of London and the Home Counties – a toxic fog which killed at least 4,000 people. Here, Barbara Fewster, 74, recalls the Great Smog of 1952.” A very Ballardian tale of this environmental disaster:
After a long time we arrived at Kew Bridge – that’s at least 10 miles from Hampstead – when my fiancé called out to me, ‘I’ve lost you, where have you got to?’ I must have veered off out of range of the sidelights.
At that point, a milk float passed by and my fiancé told me to get in so we could follow its taillights. He put his foot down. Well, then the milkman disappeared and we could hear the float bouncing over the grass on Kew Green. All I could do was get out of the car and continue walking. We later came across a car that had overtaken us earlier on in the journey – it was up a tree, crashed, and no sign of the occupant.
‘Spam’ Likely to Clutter E-Mail for Some Time, says Jupiter Research (via Reuters).
“It’s getting easier to send spam messages. You can buy a CD-ROM with millions of e-mail addresses for next to nothing and send it out for next to nothing,” said Jared Blank, senior analyst at Jupiter.
“Spammers are clever people and there is clearly an arms race between spammers and people trying to prevent spam that just constantly escalates,” said Forrester analyst Jim Nail. “Having simple lists of spammers and domains — that’s not enough because spammers change domains or addresses to stay ahead.”
So, good news: I have a job. Bad news: well, I think that side is obvious ;)
The mother of all package tours: With the world expecting an attack on Iraq any time now, no one in their right mind would take a holiday there – would they? You’d be suprised, says Johann Hari (Guardian).
A fascinating article, from so many angles — First, the tourists:
I met Julie and Phil. They seemed an almost comically suburban couple: polite, a little posh, all golf jumpers and floral smocks. But then Phil mentioned that his last holiday had been to North Korea. “Yeah, I’ve been twice since they opened the borders to tourists. I’m a bit of a celebrity there now. People come up to me in the streets and say, ‘Why have you come to our country twice?’.” …
Then there was Hannah. How to explain her? A frightfully well-spoken Englishwoman in her early 50s. When we first met, she dispensed with the small talk to say: “I think Saddam is a great man and the USA is a great big global bully. My theory is that he should be given Kuwait. It’s perfectly logical if you look at the map.” “I think he’s rather handsome too,” she went on. “Every woman does really. I’d rather like to inspect his weapon of mass destruction myself.”
And the politics:
Talking politics in Iraq is like a magic-eye picture, where you have to let your brain go out of focus, not your eyes. One very distinguished old man in a Mosul souk welcomed me warmly and told me how much he had loved visiting London in the 1970s. After much oblique prodding, he said warmly, “I admire British democracy and freedom.” He held my gaze. “I very much admire them.”
… As we wandered around, looking at the grim exhibits, one of the soldiers on duty guarding the museum told me that three of his brothers died in that war. Everybody in the country lost somebody – yet it is almost impossible to get anybody to talk about it. They speak in a small number of bloodless stock-phrases.
After more than 10 such encounters, it suddenly hit me that the people of Iraq are not even allowed to grieve their huge numbers of dead in their own way. They are permitted only a regulation measure of state-approved grief, which must be expressed in Saddam’s language: that of martyrdom and heroism, rather than wailing agony about the futility of a war which slaughtered more than a million people yet left the borders unchanged and achieved nothing.
Thanks to Ben Walsh for the forwardy goodness.
“I am Mr Brunce Anthony, the bill exchange director at the NATIONAL WESTMINSTER BANK PLC.” Yes, it’s a 419 from that well-known third-world country, the UK.
(PS: Brunce?! what kind of name is that?! Everyone knows only Americans have that kind of ludicrous given name ;)
Danny O’Brien: Help stop the flood of spam, in the Sunday Times. Great article:
We have had enough of the filth pouring into our mailboxes. Danny O?Brien launches a Doors campaign to clean up e-mail and puts forward a six-point plan involving government, industry and you the reader
DOORS SIX-POINT ACTION PLAN
SOFTWARE MAKERS must improve antispam software, and fast. Filtering spam is good, but only masks the problem. Spam-spotting software must report what and who it has found back to the ISPs, so they can block further spams.
Interesting!
Man uses cell phone to take photo up schoolgirl’s skirt. You knew it was inevitable.
Police said Hamano was riding behind the girl on an escalator at JR Kashiwa Station when he took out his mobile phone, held it underneath the girl’s skirt and took a photo. The girl was alerted to his presence by the noise emitted by the phone camera’s shutter. She turned around to catch Hamano with his hands between her legs.
(via 0xdeadbeef, from MDN’s “waiwai” section)
Guardian: Courage under fire. No matter what you think about what’s going on in Israel and Palestine, Caoimhe, and the other international observers, require your support:
Friday was a very close call. Caoimhe was shot in the left thigh as she stood in between a firing IDF tank and three young boys in the street. I spoke to her on the phone shortly after the attack as she lay in her hospital bed. She explained that she had been trying to persuade the IDF, after they shot dead a nine-year-old boy, to stop shooting at the children. They had told her to get out of their way or they would shoot her. It was while she was clearing the children off the streets that she was shot. She is sure she was a direct target; the tank was close by, the soldier pointed his gun at her and fired, and continued to do so as she crawled to an alleyway for shelter.
I asked an IDF spokesman for his explanation. ‘We are in the middle of a war and we cannot be responsible for the safety of anyone who has not been coordinated by the IDF to be in the occupied territories right now. While we do not want innocent Palestinians to suffer, or internationals to get hurt, we are trying to ensure the safety of the Israelis and we will not tolerate internationals interfering with IDF operations. It is not the job of internationals to stand in the line of fire, unless they are the son of God, but he hasn’t come yet.’
A great tale of systems wierdness, via 0xdeadbeef:
‘We’re having a problem sending email out of the department.’ ‘What’s the problem?’ I asked. ‘We can’t send mail more than 500 miles,’ the chairman explained.
WSJ: If TiVo Thinks You Are Gay, Here’s How to Set It Straight: when a learning “personalisation” algorithm gets it massively wrong.
PS: I think it was Mimi Smartypants who noted that she occasionally misses the odd TV program, just so TiVo doesn’t get the wrong idea.
PPS: Joe McNally, who fwded this, notes that IMDB’s learner has gone a bit haywire recently, too: “If you liked ‘Iris’,” it told me the other week, “you’ll also enjoy ‘Planet of the Apes’.” Click further, and apparently you’ll also also enjoy ‘Pearl Harbour’, ‘Donnie Darko’ and ‘Bend It Like Beckham’. Sounds like a game of What Links?
PPPS: all irrelevant in Europe — TiVo’s west-pond-only.
According to the Minister for Communications, Marine and Natural Resources, Mr. D. Ahern, Ireland will “transpose into Irish law the requirements of European Parliament and Council Directive 2002/58/EC concerning the processing of personal data and the protection of privacy in the electronic communications sector” before the end of 2003.
It will be nice to be able to point to the law, eventually — for what that’s worth. Since most spammers are USian, relaying via other countries, actually acting on the law will not be quite so simple. But it will be an improvement.
Hashish ‘fell on to back of army lorry’. “Spain’s defence ministry is still at a loss to explain how three-quarters of a tonne of hashish had turned up in an army truck. … ‘Anybody could have put the toxic substance there,’ said the defence minister”. Don’t worry minister, I’m sure the customs officials haven’t heard that one before…
Fantastic ending:
But now both he and the armed services are being ruthlessly lampooned by, among others, The Puppet Show News … Mr Trillo, a member of the strict Opus Dei Catholic lay order, is routinely portrayed as a uniformed pothead whose favourite pastime is getting stoned with the mascot of the Spanish Legion, a little white goat called Blanquita.
As both he and Blanquita mourned the lost Eurofighter by lighting up a giant joint at the weekend, the defence minister declared: “It’s the only way to fly.”
Sliced liver, anyone? “The first public autopsy in Britain for 170 years brought back vivid memories of medical school – and an acute sense of hunger – for the Guardian’s junior doctor Michael Foxton.”
“The process of dismemberment is a deeply weird and dysphoric experience, and it is a dangerous border to cross. I remember the first time I had to do it, as a medical student in an operating theatre. It was a man with stomach cancer, who I had been talking to on the ward the morning before his operation. When the surgeon brought his knife down to make the first cut on his belly, it was everything I could do to stop myself reaching out and grabbing his hand to stop him. Doctors have to cross that line. We have to separate the thinking, smiling, family man from the clinical material. If I hadn’t done that I couldn’t possibly cut a hole and force a huge chest drain tube a centimetre across into a writhing patient on a respiratory ward at three in the morning, without going mad.”
now that’s a great name tag:
I just dug up this classic piece of lunacy from the Montauk UFO contingent. Highly recommended if you like reading this kind of wierdness…
DA: Hmmm. Who do these aliens eat?
AC: They specifically like young human children, that haven’t been contaminated like adults. Well, there is a gentleman out giving a lot of information from a source he gets it from, and he says that there is an incredible number of children snatched in this country.
DA: Over 200,000 each year.
AC: And that these children are the main entree for dinner.
yum yum!
Blather: I See Dead People, by Mick Cunningham and Dave Walsh. “It’s Halloween, it’s Trinity College in Dublin, and we’re in a packed lecture hall … for an evening of public lectures entitled “Over Their Dead Bodies… The Secrets That Dead Bodies Tell”. And dead bodies speak volumes. ”
I went along to this — it was fantastic stuff, although extremely gory at times. Worth reading, and be thankful they don’t have copies of Dr. Harbison’s slides.
WSJ: For Bulk E-Mailer, Pestering Millions Offers Path to Profit.
I’m just trying to make a living like everyone else, says Ms. Betterly. … (she) quickly discovered that she could make a profit if she got as few as 100 responses for every 10 million messages sent for a client, and she figures her income will be $200,000 this year.
And she’s based in Tampa, Florida. What is it about Florida?!