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(Untitled)

Published November 13, 2002

Some folks reckon that mailservers should have reverse DNS — in other words, that the SMTP server should have a fully-valid forward-to-reverse mapping for its address, to cut down on spam and forgeries. All well and good.

Some other folks reckon that filtering on it is therefore a good way to cut down on spam.

It’s a nice idea, apart from 2 things:

  • filtering based on this suffers the same problem some DNSBLs have: a false positive hurts the user, rather than the person who is at fault; also the user is virtually powerless to fix it.

  • the correlation between spam and missing reverse DNS is no longer as strong as it used to be, as far as I can tell; spammers know they should pick a relay or proxy with a reverse DNS entry to get through filters, and as it becomes a requirement for relaying in general, more hosts have this anyway (regardless of exploitability or not).

recommended: Leaky Abstractions

Published November 13, 2002

Joel on Software now features a great new article on what he calls “Leaky Abstractions”. Some snippets:

  • Even though network libraries like NFS and SMB let you treat files on remote machines “as if” they were local, sometimes the connection becomes very slow or goes down, and the file stops acting like it was local, and as a programmer you have to write code to deal with this. The abstraction of “remote file is the same as local file” leaks. …

(jm: the ‘transparent does not always mean good’ problem)

  • Something as simple as iterating over a large two-dimensional array can have radically different performance if you do it horizontally rather than vertically, depending on the “grain of the wood” — one direction may result in vastly more page faults than the other direction, and page faults are slow. Even assembly programmers are supposed to be allowed to pretend that they have a big flat address space, but virtual memory means it’s really just an abstraction, which leaks when there’s a page fault and certain memory fetches take way more many nanoseconds than other memory fetches.

(jm: the ‘why objects are not always the way to do it’ problem)

And finally, he ends with a killer:

Ten years ago, we might have imagined that new programming paradigms would have made programming easier by now. Indeed, the abstractions we’ve created over the years do allow us to deal with new orders of complexity in software development that we didn’t have to deal with ten or fifteen years ago, like GUI programming and network programming. And while these great tools, like modern OO forms-based languages, let us get a lot of work done incredibly quickly, suddenly one day we need to figure out a problem where the abstraction leaked, and it takes 2 weeks. And when you need to hire a programmer to do mostly VB programming, it’s not good enough to hire a VB programmer, because they will get completely stuck in tar every time the VB abstraction leaks.

Well said! Read the article!

ICAP

Published November 13, 2002

ICAP-server, an (imaginatively-named) daemon which implements ICAP. This seems to be a transcoding proxy server; in other words, it will convert HTML content on the fly, while you browse.

ICAP itself seems to be a protocol for rewriting HTTP responses; in other words, it allows a proxy server to include a small snippet of ICAP client code, and call out to an ICAP server to do the rewriting. Nifty.

Sounds like this could be very handy for low-bandwidth situations; use ICAP to “downshift” web pages into low-bandwidth versions. For example, banner ads can be trimmed out, heavy images converted to small, low-quality JPEGs, etc. One to watch (or help out with).

Ericsson used to have a commercial product which did something similar, but I can’t find it now…

Trinity College, home of the Jedi

Published November 12, 2002

Trinity College, Dublin is currently embroiled in a minor kerfuffle with Lucasfilm over “an uncanny resemblance between the 18th-century Long Room Library at Trinity, and the “Jedi Archives” in the latest episode of the “Star Wars” epic.” (Reuters)

The resemblance really is uncanny — I noticed it myself on watching the movie, but assumed there must have been a hundred similar libraries around the world. Sounds like Trinity think there’s only one after all. Given that it’s Trinity, maybe they’re right.

Compare: the Jedi archives vs. the Long Room.

the Anti-Telemarketing EGBG Counter-Script

Published November 12, 2002

the Anti-Telemarketing EGBG Counter-Script:

Telemarketers make use of a telescript – a guideline for a telephone conversation. This script creates an imbalance in the conversation between the marketer and the consumer. It is this imbalance, most of all, that makes telemarketing successful. The EGBG Counterscript attempts to redress that balance.

Half of the coolness here is the excellent, form/script-based design. Well suitable for printing out and sticking to the wall beside the ‘phone…

The Da Ming Hun Yi Tu

Published November 12, 2002

I’ve been reading an article in Edge Magazine, How To Get Rich, by Jared Diamond (author of Guns, Germs and Steel). He investigates more deeply into the differences between cultures, and the effect this has had on their history and dominance, as he did in GG+S; this time with economic might in mind.

For example, he notes that the Chinese, in the middle ages, were a sea-faring nation of astounding skill, exploring most of the coasts of Asia and Africa for trade. They were on the verge of rounding the Cape of Good Hope (and, in the words of Diamond, “colonising Europe” ;) when a new emperor with an anti-Navy bias took power, and recalled them. Since the entirety of China’s empire was ruled solely by one power, the emperor, that was that. (Compare with Columbus, who could “shop around” the many superpowers of Europe until his trip across the Atlantic was funded.)

Then, this morning, a pertinent link arrived via Kyle Moffat of forteana: an ancient Chinese map of Africa is now on show in Cape Town (BBC).

The Chinese map, covering more than 17 square metres, was produced in silk. It is thought to be a copy of a map sculpted into rock 20 or 30 years earlier. …

The Da Ming Hun Yi Tu, or Amalgamated Map of the Great Ming Empire, is a unique snapshot of history. Created in China in 1389, and clearly showing the shape of Africa, more than 100 years before Western explorers and map-makers reached the continent.

BTW, worth noting that I came across the Diamond article from a link in Clay Shirky’s guest-blog at Boing Boing. Clay, as usual, is throwing up lots of reading material, which I just don’t have time to read ;) so I’m syncing it all to my Palm with Sitescooper. Come on Xerox, where’s that electronic paper!?

The top 100 PageRanked CGI scripts

Published November 11, 2002

similar to the much-discussed-elsewhere http search trick, which figures out the top 100 websites according to PageRank, here’s the top 100 CGI scripts according to PageRank. They’re incomplete, since only scripts with “cgi-bin” in the URL will show up, but hey ho. The top ten:

And the winner is:

boo.

more Googlism

Published November 5, 2002

let’s ask Googlism some hard questions.

Googlism, what is the web?

  • the web is like canada

  • the web is dedicated to breathing life into women’s

  • the web is crippling

  • the web is ruined and i ruined it self

OK, what about the internet?

  • the internet is falling

  • the internet is not printed on paper

  • the internet is like is like a penis

  • the internet is no substitute

And Ireland?

  • ireland is dedicated entirely to development aid

  • ireland is at an end

  • ireland is again the “dirty man” of europe when it comes to

  • ireland is not disneyland

  • ireland is british (what?!)

  • ireland is looking for a german inhouse translator

Right. That’s quite enough I think…

more on vehicular travel

Published November 5, 2002

rOD links to Massholes, an incredible gripe site for residents of Massachusetts to bitch about shitty driving, for example:

Dear Masshole Driver,

WHAT on earth makes you think that making a right hand turn from the left hand lane is a good idea??? Really, I’d like to know.

Signed, The-nice-person-you-totally-cut-off-and-almost-killed

Incredible stuff. Sounds like they could do with the cool innovation recently introduced here — the “dob-a-dangerous-driver” line (1).

Let’s say you’re doing what a friend of mine did a few months ago: crossing the road, with your kid in a buggy, at a pedestrian crossing, with the lights in your favour — then a speeding driver breaks the lights at top speed and nearly totals the pair of you.

This great innovation then allows you to whip out your mobile phone (hey, this is europe, everyone has one (2)), and immediately report the car’s registration number — and 2 weeks later he receives a fine! Hey presto, instant justice. (3)

And in the last week, they’ve introduced penalty points for bad driving; 12 points and you lose your license. Things can only get better — for the pedestrians that is, at least. ;)

(1: no, it’s not really called that BTW)

(2: except me, that is — I’m so far ahead of the bleeding edge I’ve given them up)

(3: well, I’m exagerrating, I think there was more witness and due process involved, but it’s pretty close.)

(4: errno==EDANGLE: dangling footnote found)

(Untitled)

Published November 5, 2002

ThinkGeek sent me a voucher for 30 bucks. Thanks ThinkGeek (or Sourceforge, I’m not sure which)! So here’s what I got:

Mousetrap For Your Fridge Or File Cabinet!

When is the last time you played with your marbles? Welp, dust off your old marble collection (or use the included marbles) and set them on a journey they’ll never forget.

You design the marble’s treacherous path down the steep slope of your fridge or file cabinet (or any metal surface, as these things are magnetic). You have at your arsenal a combination of chutes, funnels, catapults, spinners and sheer drop offs to arrange according to your mood and tastes.

Give your marble the gift of extreme sports, all in the comfort of your own home or office. Because happy marbles breed happy times…

Too cool. Thanks ThinkGeek/Sourceforge!

(On the other hand, BTW, their chosen shipper for Europe happily charges an extra 6 euros for “import duty”. but hey, the toy was free.)

BBC front page for Ireland Offline

Published November 4, 2002

man, this is sweet! BBC front page coverage for Ireland Offline…

“Eircom has cited congestion of the network and not enough demand as the arguments against unmetered (internet access),” said Mr (Dave) Long (IO chairman).

BT-owned ESAT is just one of the telecom operators challenging Eircom to offer a wholesale unmetered product.

“There is huge pent-up demand and our ears are sore from listening to our own customers. For Eircom to say there is no demand is condescending and naive,” said (Una) McGirr (of ESAT BT).

Maybe what Eircom mean, is that there’s not enough demand to outweigh the unfeasibly large revenues they make from metered internet calls…

the ever-tricky ‘getting semen from a gorilla’ problem

Published October 31, 2002

(ish!): The management of Sydney’s Taronga Zoo has mooted “manual stimulation” of Kibabu the gorilla, in order to grab some monkey semen for artificial insemination.

“I believe it’s done in Europe”, they say (maybe they’re harking back to the days of Weimar Berlin). Zookeepers, being the ones who’d get their hands dirty (so to speak), are — understandably — not too keen.

It now looks like something called “electro-ejaculation” will be used instead… sounds painful. (Link from forteana.)

Googlisms

Published October 30, 2002

My googlism: apparently I’m a tool to autoretrieve news from popular, or am I scheduled to be tried on those charges in december? yikes.

Cod fishing ban needed in Europe

Published October 29, 2002

the EU’s scientific advisors have stated that cod stocks in Europe are at their lowest ever levels, and will collapse without action. grim! More at New Scientist.

Telia.com blocked by AOL for two weeks

Published October 25, 2002

Things are getting crazy in the fight against spam: it seems AOL blocked access (for two weeks) to its mailserver from Telia.com, one of Sweden’s biggest ISPs (if not the biggest), due to spam.

Attached is an unauthorized translation of an article in the Swedish IDG paper Computer Sweden (web edition, Oct 24), provided by Claes Tullbrink.

Until a (previous) article was published, noting this ban, AOL had not succeeded in contacting Telia to talk about it. Amazing stuff.

Blog Is Good

Published October 25, 2002

blog is a Good Word — official. From Bayesian analysis of my mail spool, blog shows up 1525 times in non-spam mail, and never in spam.

Damn those foibles

Published October 25, 2002

Over on Boing Boing, Danny O’Brien notes

People who know me well enough, or google well enough, to uncover out my weirder behaviours will know that I can’t drive. It’s not some high-falutin’ statement about the environment. I’m just not very good at remembering which pedal does what.

Well, it’s good to hear there’s one more out there; me neither. It’s become a bit of a worry recently, since I may be moving to LA, which is notoriously one of the most ped-unfriendly places in the world (Antarctica excepted).

But why, you ask? I don’t know — but I think it’s a combo of these factors:

  • owning a car in Ireland is phenomenally expensive: due to bizarre traits of the insurance biz over here, it costs about $100-$140 a week to drive a car. That’s quite a luxury. For that price, you might as well just take cabs everywhere and let someone else do the hard work.

  • I live more-or-less in Dublin city centre, so walking and cycling does the trick nicely.

  • Dublin’s got good public transport for when the weather’s bad (see also cabs above).

  • er, laziness.

I guess it may be something I’ll have to sort out, at some stage, maybe. Eventually. (Damn that laziness!)

(Untitled)

Published October 24, 2002

Bernie Goldbach is currently blogging live from the floor of OPEN_HOUSE_001, Media Lab Europe’s inaugural conference.

I’m impressed — by the technology, that is ;) . He’s blogging via email from a Nokia 9210i Communicator, to a Radio weblog, then via XML-RPC to the Kirbycom New Media Cuts Movable Type blog. cool!

Anyway, that’s enough of that — gotta get back to work!

IEDR spams all .ie Postmaster addresses

Published October 24, 2002

Nice one! The IE Domain Registry (IEDR) has just sent out a ‘free newsletter‘ to all postmaster addresses in the entire .ie top-level domain. Yes, every one.

And did they follow the best practices for legit mailing list operators, like

  • (a) never mailing without a previous sign-up, or even

  • (b) setting up the list to use verified opt-in (“reply to confirm that you want to receive further mail”), instead of opt-out (“reply if you do not want to receive further mail”)?

Of course not:

YOU WILL BE RECEIVING this free bi-monthly ezine because you are one of our 31,000+ .ie domain name holders, an Irish journalist, with an Irish government body or have a legitimate interest in matters relating to the Domain Name System (DNS) in all Ireland, concerning .ie domain names. This publication is delivered by email and will serve as an official channel of the IEDR to deliver notices and announcements.

If you do not wish to receive Inside.ie, you can unsubscribe by clicking on the link below.

Not my emphasis, BTW. But don’t worry — their mail host was already listed in the DNS blacklists as a Confirmed Spam Source by the time I received it, so I don’t think we’ll be actually receiving many more of them ;)

For more information on the hi-larious antics of our national registrar, take a look at IEWatch.

Cat Herding

Published October 23, 2002

Danny at Oblomovka bought a Roomba, and finds it extra useful for scaring cats.

Still, we did our final moving cash splurge today, and bought a Roomba. And, what do you know, it’s actually pretty good: both at cleaning and removing the bejesus out of nearby cats. It backed Dyson into the corner of our living room within minutes – she kept tottering backwards for about ten yards, like she was facing the Feline Terminator.

In a similar vein: I can vouch that, if Lego Mindstorms is good for anything, it’s scaring cats with its Otherworldly Silicon Intelligence. I think most cats eventually figure out that if there’s a string or stick linking a menacing object and a human, odds are that the human is controlling the object somehow. As a result, a robot really freaks them out.

But with Lego Mindstorms, they do get their revenge eventually, by eating the smaller bricks next time you build a ‘bot.

So like, a third of the rootservers went down and we didn’t even notice. (fwd)

Published October 23, 2002

wow, seven to nine of the thirteen DNS root servers were flood-attacked on Monday, and nobody noticed. That’s cool.

… experts said the attack, which started about 4:45 p.m. EDT Monday, transmitted data to each targeted root server 30 to 40 times normal amounts. One said that just one additional failure would have disrupted e-mails and Web browsing across parts of the Internet.

Why giraffes stink

Published October 21, 2002

Giraffes smell so bad for the same reason tourists do: to repel parasites.

(Explanation: in Laos, we heard a funny story about a tourist on the bus who noticed that no locals wanted to sit beside him. He got talking to a local kid and asked why this was, and the kid let him in on the secret: the locals reckon tourists stink of insect repellent. And they’re right) (Link)

I AM PRINCESS LEIA ORGANA

Published October 17, 2002

I quite like David Chess’ log — it boasts this quite good 419 piss-take:

FROM:PRNCSS. L ORGANA
DEAR friend.
I AM PRINCESS LEIA ORGANA ONLY SURVIVOR
OF THE ROYALFAMILY OF ALDERAN (ALDRN).
I AM MOVED TO WRITE YOU THIS LETTER,
THIS WAS IN CONFIDENCE CONSIDERING MY
PRESENT CIRCUMSTANCE AND SITUATION.
I WAS FALSLEY IMPRISONED UPON THE
IMPERIAL BATTLESTATION (“DEATH STAR”)
WHEN MY PLANET WAS HIDEOUSLY DESTROYED
AND ENDED BY THE BVERY BAD SITH LORD
VADER.

Thanks to Cam for the linky goodness.

more local UNIX history

Published October 14, 2002

History of www.maths.tcd.ie. Thanks to Dave Malone for sending me the URL, while chatting about the timeline — and about how Peter Flynn beat all of us to the coveted “first in Ireland” spot.

But then, being an SGML guru, and marking up a huge quantity of ancient gaelic texts, I don’t think anyone could possibly hold it against him ;) Check this out from the Annals Of The Four Masters:

Every plain in Ireland abounded with flowers and shamrocks in the time of Fiacha. These flowers, moreover, were found full of wine, so that the wine was squeezed into bright vessels. Wherefore, the cognomen, Fiacha Fin Scothach, continued to be applied to him.

Iraq

Published October 14, 2002

things are getting scary. Two stories of note:

Guardian: US plans military rule and occupation of Iraq.

The US has plans to establish an American-led military administration in Iraq, similar to the postwar occupation of Germany and Japan, which could last for several years after the fall of Saddam Hussein, it emerged yesterday.

The occupation of the country would need an estimated 75,000 troops, at an annual cost of up to $16bn, and would almost certainly include British and other allied soldiers. It would be run by a senior American officer, perhaps General Tommy Franks, who would lead the assault on Iraq, and whose role would be modelled on that of General Douglas MacArthur in postwar Japan. ….

The Iraqi project, outlined by Mr Bush’s senior adviser on the Middle East, Zalmay Khalilzad, would involve running the entire country until a democratic Iraqi government was deemed ready.

New Yorker:

The vision laid out in the Bush document is a vision of what used to be called, when we believed it to be the Soviet ambition, world domination. It’s a vision of a world in which it is American policy to prevent the emergence of any rival power, whatever it stands for — a world policed and controlled by American military might.

This goes much further than the notion of America as the policeman of the world. It’s the notion of America as both the policeman and the legislator of the world, and it’s where the Bush vision goes seriously, even chillingly, wrong. A police force had better be embedded in and guided by a structure of law and consent. There’s a name for the kind of regime in which the cops rule, answering only to themselves. It’s called a police state.

Worth quoting this snippet too:

For example, as a way of enhancing “national security,” it promises to press “other countries” to adopt “lower marginal tax rates” and “pro-growth legal and regulatory policies” — your doctor’s names for tax cuts for the rich and environmental laxity. And it exalts economic relationships as more fundamental than political and social ones (a mental habit that orthodox conservative ideologues share with their orthodox Marxist counterparts), as in this passage praising free trade as a “moral principle”: “If you can make something that others value, you should be able to sell it to them. If others make something that you value, you should be able to buy it. This is real freedom, the freedom for a person — or a nation — to make a living.” (As distinct, presumably, from the secondary, not quite real freedoms of thought, conscience, and expression.)

those goddamn Irish, and some meta-spam commentary

Published October 14, 2002

Mimi Smartypants graces us with some fake Irish prejudice (to go with the Belgian one). “They are drunk all the time and they eat lots of potatoes, at least if you go by the jokes, which is the only way to form one’s fake prejudices.”

Actually, no, that’s about right. Only in Ireland can you find the bonus carbohydrate meal: a meal just isn’t a meal unless it contains potatoes, so anything that comes with rice (let’s say) will usually have a serving of spuds on top. Nowadays you might have to go off the beaten track a little to get this, but it’s still there, if you look. I’m a fake Irishman, clearly, since I don’t really like spuds all that much — but a few of my mates could talk for hours about some especially tasty potatoes they’ve eaten recently. It’s quite bizarre.

She also refers to an existing “fake Belgian prejudice”. Well, in my experience, anti-Belgian prejudice generally runs quickly into the difficult issue of Audrey Hepburn, and ends right there. She’s just non-bigotable.

Also from Mimi, linked by defective yeti: some fantastic meta-spam commentary.

[Here’s] a very weird subject line for spam: Watch Me Film Myself Masturbating. Whoa. That’s pretty removed from the subject/object consciousness. Can’t I just watch you masturbating? I have to watch “the making of” you masturbating?

If I could fit that onto one line, it’d go right into the SpamAssassin Bugzilla quips file, where we save the most stupid spam hooks — but I can’t, and it might come off wrong on its own.

Er, so to speak.

when a broadcast packet really was a broadcast

Published October 14, 2002

some history: my broadcast, by Jordan Hubbard (ucbvax!jkh), 2 Apr 1987. It seems the default configuration for Suns back then was that “everyone” really meant everyone — resulting in some fun when Jordan ran rwall (remote write to all) to the broadcast netgroup. Some good snippets in retrospect:

Since rwall is an RPC service, and RPC doesn’t seem to give a damn who you are as long as you’re root (which is trivial to be, on a work- station), I have to wonder what other RPC services are open holes. We’ve managed to do some interesting, unauthorized, things with the YP service here at Berkeley, I wonder what the implications of this are. …

(An) alternative (to getting rid of rwall) would be to tighten up all the IMP gateways to forward packets only from trusted hosts. I don’t like that at all, from a standpoint of reduced convenience and productivity.

Fast-forward to 15 years later: RPC services are almost all firewalled off due to insecurity, and packet filters on gateways — ie. firewalls — are standard kit. The internet has changed a lot since then.

Lemon juice ‘could stop AIDS’

Published October 14, 2002

As BoingBoing has noted already, a Melbourne scientist has proposed that lemon juice could fight HIV effectively, with bonus spermicidal action too:

According to Mr Short, lemons could be used as a contraceptive by soaking a piece of cotton wool in the juice and inserting it into the vagina before sex. “We can show in the lab that lemon juice is very effective in immobilising human sperm and also very effective in killing HIV,” he said.

but:

Julian Meldrum, international editor of Aidsmap, told BBC News Online that the principle behind the theory seemed like good science. … However, he said: “There is not yet enough evidence that this will be safe and effective in practice. … We also need to examine whether it is safe to put what is quite a strong acid into contact with mucus membranes which are quite delicate.”

Ouch. Mr. Short said that some female researchers in his lab have noted that the application of lemon juice didn’t hurt. Yeah right — maybe it didn’t quite hurt per se, but I bet it stung like hell!

Top history tidbit:

The practice of using lemon juice to prevent pregnancy was commonly used in medieval times, including by the legendary lothario Casanova, but has been forgotten by modern medicine.

When tidying goes bad

Published October 10, 2002

Rod pointed out that my RSS feed was borked. oops, WebMake and HTML::Parser had “tidied” it. Who knew that RDF was case-sensitive? Not I.

Ah well… now fixed.

MAPS gets the TCR treatment, a public corpus, and a wedding

Published October 10, 2002

Found on Paul Graham’s site: “according to a recent study, the MAPS RBL, probably the best known blacklist, catches only 24% of spam, with 34% false positives. It would take a conscious effort to write a content-based filter with performance that bad.”

The “recent study” is by David Nelson at Giga Information Group, sometime last year.

For the sake of it, I’ve checked out how the MAPS figures stack up using TCR, Ion Androutsopoulos‘ metric for measuring spam filter performance. TCR is a very nice single-figure metric, which takes into account the “inconvenience factor” of misfiled mails, based on a “lambda” setting indicating what action is taken when a mail is classified. For MAPS, I’m assuming a lambda of 9, the guideline figure for systems which bounce mail back to the sender, instead of 1 for simple tagging, or 999 for outright deletion with no notification.

So: using a lambda of 9, MAPS gets a TCR of 0.0912, a Spam Recall of 24%, and a Spam Precision of 17%. It’s worth noting that the baseline figure for TCR is 1.0, which represents no filtering whatsoever: ie. all the spam comes right into your mailbox.

In other words, using MAPS is more inconvenient all-round than not filtering your mail at all, if these figures are to be believed ;)

More spam: I’ve just assembled a totally-public corpus of spam and non-spam mail, to allow spamfilter developers to compare and contrast results using the same data. Let’s hope it proves useful.

Not spam: finally, I’m off to Chester for a wedding tomorrow morning; my good mates Kitty and Gerry are tying the knot, in Chester Zoo, no less. Let’s hope this horrible cold I’ve had all week dies down before Saturday…

and now I am the Master

Published October 9, 2002

holy shit, Advogato reckons I’m at Master level! Well, that’s nice, but I’m not entirely convinced yet. Not that I’m complaining ;)

Er, um, fundamentally

Published October 9, 2002

The Guardian: Word of the week: “basically”:

“Perhaps you are one of those strong individuals who manages to resist the use of meaningless adverbs, but others will have recognised, guiltily, one of their own favourite words appearing as a verbal tic in a widely broadcast statement this week. On Friday, “shoe bomber” Richard Reid, accused of attempting to blow up a flight from Paris to Miami, introduced a slice of South London syntax into the Boston court where he is being tried. Questioned by the judge about his intentions, he declared: “Basically, I got on to the plane with a bomb. Basically, I tried to ignite it. Basically, yeah, I intended to damage the plane.” …

Gold rush follows Nazi grail

Published October 7, 2002

A gold urn made for a Nazi party leader has been discovered in a Bavarian lake, prompting a scramble by treasure hunters determined to get their hands on the Third Reich’s long-lost riches. However, getting at any gold that might be down there, may not be so easy:

Toplitz is a byword for everything dangerous in Alpine lakes. After 30ft there is no light, and below 100ft, the water is almost freezing. At 348ft, the bottom comes into view. There is no life at the bottom of the lake because there is not enough oxygen to sustain it.

348ft, fact fans, is 116 metres. Yikes, that’s some serious diving…

The Walled Garden of EdenFaster

Published October 7, 2002

Bringing the net to Eden (Guardian). “In the village of Kirkby Stephen, in the Eden Valley, on the border between Cumbria and the Yorkshire Dales, getting on to the internet is a major effort. With phone lines shared between remote farmhouses, and mobile phones a cruel fantasy, an internet connection here can drop as low as 12Kbps (…) But all of this is about to change. EdenFaster, a local community organisation, is about to supply broadband internet connections to the entire valley, bringing 10,000 people, 500 businesses and 50 schools online with an internet connection 20 times faster than ADSL for half the price. They’re doing it on their own because of a perceived lack of demand by telecoms companies. They’re doing it wirelessly, and they’re one of the leaders in the new revolution in ways to deliver the internet in the UK.”