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Links for 2010-05-06

Published May 6, 2010

Links for 2010-05-05

Published May 5, 2010

Travel Insurance that works, even with ash clouds about?

Published May 5, 2010

Lazyweb request. In a few weeks I'll be taking a flight, along with the wife and kids, for some holidays.

The trip was booked before the whole ash-cloud thing and I used Ace Travel Insurance, a typical low-cost travel insurance agency, winding up with an 'ACE Travel Single Trip Travel HealthCover+ Insurance Policy'.

Looking at the policy doc now, it expressly excludes cover for 'a Public Conveyance being cancelled or curtailed because of adverse weather, industrial action, or mechanical breakdown or derangement' if 'an aircraft, sea vessel or train is withdrawn from service on the orders of the recognised regulatory authority in any country' -- which is exactly what's been happening in Ireland in the face of the Eyjafjallajoekull ash cloud.

That's pretty useless, isn't it? I'm considering booking another additional policy to cover the 'ash case'. Anyone got any tips on single-trip policies that don't use a similar exclusion?

Links for 2010-05-02

Published May 2, 2010

Links for 2010-04-30

Published April 30, 2010

Links for 2010-04-29

Published April 29, 2010

Links for 2010-04-27

Published April 27, 2010

  • "Child pornography is great", according to one EU music-business lobbyist : it's the perfect 'gateway' to allow anti-filesharing filtering of the internet. 'Start with child porn, which everybody agrees is revolting, and find some politicians who want to appear like they are doing something. Never mind that the blocking as such is ridiculously easy to circumvent in less than 10 seconds. The purpose at this stage is only to get the politicians and the general public to accept the principle that censorship in the form of ”filters” is okay. Once that principle has been established, it is easy to extend it to other areas, such as illegal file sharing. And once censorship of the Internet has been accepted in principle, they can start looking at ways to make it more technically difficult to circumvent.' Via TJ McIntyre
    (tags: via:tjmcintyre ifpi filesharing child-porn filtering internet johan-schluter anti-piracy-group sweden denmark eu)

Links for 2010-04-26

Published April 26, 2010

Links for 2010-04-22

Published April 22, 2010

Links for 2010-04-21

Published April 21, 2010

Links for 2010-04-20

Published April 20, 2010

what Colmcille really said

Published April 20, 2010

Mr. Justice Peter Charleton, in the course of his judgement on EMI Records & Ors -v- Eircom Ltd is quoted as having said the following:

' There is fundamental right to copyright in Irish Law. This has existed as part of Irish legal tradition since the time of Saint Colmcille. He is often quoted for his aphorism: le gach bó a buinín agus le gach leabhar a chóip (to each cow its calf and to every book its copy).'

As many have already noted, Colmcille didn't say that at all; his opponent did. If anything, Colmcille invented copyleft.

Manus O’Donnell's account:

Do inneis Finden a sceila art us don righ, ass ed adubhairt ris: “Do scrib C.C. mo leabhur gan fhis damh fen,”ar se, “aderim corub lim fen mac mo leabhur.”

“Aderim-se,” ar C.C., “nach mesde lebhur Findein ar scrib me ass, nach coir na neiche diadha do bi sa lebhur ud do muchadh no a bacudh dim fein no do duine eli a scribhadh no a leghadh no a siludh fan a cinedachaib; fos aderim ma do bi tarba dam-sa ina scribhadh, corb ail lium a chur a tarba do no poiplechaibh, gan dighbail Fhindein no a lebhair do techt ass, cor cedaigthe dam a scribudh.”

Is ansin ruc Diarmaid an breth oirrdearc .i. “le gach boin a boinin” .i. laugh “le gach lebhur a leabrán.”

Or, translated to English by A. O’ Kelleher and G. Schoepperle:

Finnen first told [High King Diarmaid] his story and he said “Colmcille hath copied my book without my knowing,” saith he “and I contend that the son of the book belongs to me.”

“I contend,” saith Colmcille, “that the book of Finnen is none the worse for my copying it, and it is not right that the divine words in that book should perish, or that I or any other should be hindered from writing them or reading them or spreading them among the tribes. And further I declare that it was right for me to copy it, seeing there was profit to me from doing in this wise, and seeing it was my desire to give the profit thereof to all peoples, with no harm therefore to Finnen or his book.”

Then it was that Diarmaid gave the famous judgement: “To every cow her young cow, that is, her calf, and to every book its transcript. And therefore to Finnen belongeth the book thou hast written, O Colmcille.”

Soon thereafter, of course, 3000 died in the Battle of the Book at Cooldrumman, bringing a rather literal meaning to the modern term "copyfight". 'Colmcille and the Battle of the Book: Technology, Law and Access to Knowledge in 6th Century Ireland' is recommended for more background.

Links for 2010-04-16

Published April 16, 2010

Links for 2010-04-14

Published April 14, 2010

Links for 2010-04-05

Published April 5, 2010

Links for 2010-03-31

Published March 31, 2010

Links for 2010-03-30

Published March 30, 2010

Links for 2010-03-26

Published March 26, 2010

Guinness vs independent breweries

Published March 26, 2010

Guinness' latest product, Guinness Black Lager, gets a panning in the Irish Times today.

I'm not a fan of Guinness. It's a good beer, but monotonous when it's the only thing available. This, from the old Dublin Brewing Company website, makes some interesting allegations as to why that may be the case:

In 1996 the Dublin Brewing Company was set up in Smithfield, in the old James Crean soap factory. As the only other brewery in Dublin to Guiness, Dublin Brewing Company represented a small but real challenge to the Guinness monopoly. Initially [Guinness'] reaction was "it won't work because, Irish people were brand loyal" and wouldn't change to anything new." However by November 1997 Guinness could see an increasing threat from a number of new microbreweries which were opening up around Ireland; it built its own microbrewery called St. James's Gate Beers. In the words of their Weekly News No: 44 "the four unique and distinctive draught beers are designed to meet perceived demand amongst ale and lager drinkers over the age of 28 for a wider choice of tastier draught beers."

The project team had spent 18 months conducting exhaustive R & D into the Irish drinking palette before the launch. This research included taking samples of Beckett's and D'Arcy's from public houses in Temple Bar and returning it to their citadel of brewing science for further analysis. Just exactly how do those "Fun Lovin Brewers" in Smithfield make beer? The code word for this return to basic brewing was affectionately known among company staff as "Operation Wolf".

The Dublin Brewing Company, amongst other small breweries was going to be lambs for slaughter. Of course, when you have a virtual monopoly on tap space in most bars, it's no problem launching no less than four beers in twenty pubs in Dublin overnight. Luckily drinkers in this country know what they want, and if they want a real beer they support the increasing number of microbreweries in Ireland, not a monopoly brewer masquerading as a small producer. The attempt at what was called "full taste" beers turned out to be a disaster. By October 1998 the operation was quietly closed down. However, now that St. James Gate is no more (£3-5m expenditure), we have its latest treat, Breo, being launched with the usual bravado Guinness display on these occasions - 10/15 kegs of beer free for every publican that takes it in. The pub gets the higher number of kegs if they take something else out. As the only other brewery in town, the Dublin Brewing Company is back on the firing line. The Dublin Brewing Company would like to dedicate D'Arcy's Dublin Stout to the memory of those old Dublin breweries.

Sadly, whether due to Guinness' tactics or not, the DBC appears to be no more. There are a few microbreweries around Ireland, but generally, the pub taps in this country are dominated by low-quality lagers, and Guinness. At least Paulaner is becoming widely available on tap, imported by Heineken...

Links for 2010-03-25

Published March 25, 2010

Links for 2010-03-18

Published March 18, 2010

spamass-milter != SpamAssassin

Published March 18, 2010

Just heading this one off before it gets too much further...

A couple of weeks ago, a researcher found a bug in the spamass-milter project, an open-source milter to integrate SpamAssassin filtering into an MTA. Here's the exploit details.

This H-Online story covered it:

Security vulnerability in SpamAssassin filter module

The SpamAssassin Milter plug-in which plugs in to Milter and calls SpamAssassin, contains a security vulnerability which can be exploited by attackers using a crafted email to inject and execute code on a mail server. The SpamAssassin Milter plug-in is frequently used to run SpamAssassin on Postfix servers.

(I think this is the source article on Heise.de.)

That was more-or-less accurate -- but the problem is the "chinese whispers" effect, where a news story on another site builds on misreadings of another news article. eSecurityPlanet:

Security Flaw Found in SpamAssassin Plug-in

The SpamAssassin Milter plug-in has been found to contain a security vulnerability. [...]

sigh.

To clarify: spamass-milter is not a part of SpamAssassin. it's a third-party product which allows sendmail/postfix users to integrate spamassassin into their message flows as a milter.

Links for 2010-03-16

Published March 16, 2010

Links for 2010-03-08

Published March 8, 2010

Links for 2010-03-01

Published March 1, 2010

Links for 2010-02-24

Published February 24, 2010

  • Phishing in Irish : someone has gone to the trouble of translating the 'Hang Seng Bank' phish to Gaeilge. I would surmise that some phisher has a table of CCTLD-to-language mappings and is pasting their text into Google Translate before spamming their .ie address list. If only they knew how few people can read it!
    (tags: irish gaeilge funny languages translation)

Links for 2010-02-19

Published February 19, 2010

Links for 2010-02-12

Published February 12, 2010

Links for 2010-02-05

Published February 5, 2010

Links for 2010-02-03

Published February 3, 2010

Links for 2010-02-02

Published February 2, 2010

Links for 2010-01-28

Published January 28, 2010

Links for 2010-01-26

Published January 26, 2010

Links for 2010-01-22

Published January 22, 2010

Links for 2010-01-21

Published January 21, 2010

Links for 2010-01-20

Published January 20, 2010

Links for 2010-01-14

Published January 14, 2010

Links for 2010-01-12

Published January 12, 2010

Links for 2010-01-11

Published January 11, 2010

Links for 2010-01-06

Published January 6, 2010

  • Una "UnaRocks" Mullally on the state of Irish blogs : 'I think that ‘first wave’ of Irish blogging was over a long time ago, probably around the time Blogorrah hit the dirt, but in spite of time and an increase of participants and bigger audience there seems to be no real drive to improve content. People will always read something good – online or offline – and until that something good (hopefully in plural) starts to emerge and while good bloggers log off indefinitely, Irish blogging, for what it’s worth, is in a state of disarray.'
    (tags: irish irishblogs ireland writing blogosphere blogging unarocks)

SAY2K10 Doh

Published January 4, 2010

Happy new year! Or maybe not. Doh.

Over a year ago, Lee Maguire noticed that a contributed SpamAssassin rule, FH_DATE_PAST_20XX, was naively written -- simply to match any date in the year 2010 or later -- and would start to false-positive on all mail in 14 months. We made the trivial fix to avoid this (for at least 10 years, by which point the rule would have obsoleted itself through normal means), and I committed it to SVN.

Problem solved, right? Nope. I'd committed to trunk, but in a moment of inattention had forgotten to backport the fix to the stable release branch, 3.2.x, as well. Nobody else noticed the mistake, and several months later, boom:

Bugger.

Annoyingly, the GA had assigned this rule 3.5 points in the 3.2.0 rescoring run. This meant that the effective default threshold had been lowered from 5.0 points to 1.5, which produced a 2% false positive rate during the first 13 hours of the new year.

After that point, the fix was pushed to the sa-update channel, and anyone who runs sa-update regularly (as they should!) was brought back to normal filtering behaviour.

The rule is superfluous anyway, since it overlaps with a better-written "eval" rule, DATE_IN_FUTURE_96_XX. Accordingly, most likely scenario is that it'll be removed.

Personally, I see a few lessons from this:

  • Obviously, I need to pay more attention. This is easier said than done though, since SpamAssassin has nothing to do with my day job anymore; it's a spare-time thing nowadays, and that's a rare resource, unfortunately. :( But still, a chastening result, and I'm very sorry for my part in this screwup.

  • We need more active committers on Apache SpamAssassin. If we'd had more eyes, the fact that I'd forgotten to backport the fix might have been spotted. we're definitely in a better situation now in this regard than we were 6 months ago, so that's good.

  • IMO, this is a good demonstration of how too many simple rules are risky; without careful vetting and moderation, it's easy for a bad one to slip past. Perhaps we need to move more towards a DNSBL/network-rule driven approach, although this has its downsides too. Still thinking about this.

  • It'd be good to fix the GA so that it wouldn't assign such high points to simple rules like this, without some indication that a human has vetted them and believes them trustworthy.

Daryl posted a good comment on /.:

Clearly we dropped the ball on this one. As far as I know it's our first big rule screw up in the project's 10 years. If you're going to screw up you might as well do it well.

+1 to that!

And to everyone who had to clean up the fallout and spend a holiday recovering lost mails from spam folders... sorry :(

Sup Rocks

Published December 18, 2009

For the past 2 years or so, I've been using GMail to handle my main mail feed for jmason.org. I'm an absolute convert to its "river of threads"/search-based workflow.

Since starting at Amazon, I've had to start dealing with a heavy volume of work mail. Previously jobs have either had low mail volumes, or used Google Apps hosting for their mail, but Amazon's volumes are high and -- obviously -- they're not using Google. ;) For a while, I tried using Thunderbird, but it just didn't really cut it; I could never keep track of mails I wanted archived, or remember which folder they were in, etc. -- the same old problems that GMail solved.

Enter Sup. It's a console-based *nix email client, with a Mutt-like curses interface, which offers something closely approximating the GMail experience:


Sup is a console-based email client for people with a lot of email. It supports tagging, very fast full-text search, automatic contact-list management, custom code insertion via a hook system, and more. If you're the type of person who treats email as an extension of your long-term memory, Sup is for you.

Inbox Zero is a daily occurrence for my work email now; I can simply archive pretty much everything, and reliably know the excellent full-text search support will allow me to find it again in an instant when I need it. The new-user guide is well worth a read to get an idea of its featureset and UI.

Setting it up

The process of getting it set up is quite hairy; here are some instructions for Ubuntu, which thoroughly failed to work for me on 9.04. I had a similarly tricky time using some Ruby packages on the Red Hat work desktop, but eventually avoided it by just building vanilla Ruby from source, then using that to install "gem" and from that, "sudo gem install sup". Much easier...

Next step is to get the mail. From some reading, it appears the most reliable way to deal with a MS Exchange 2007 server is to use offlineimap to sync it to a local set of maildirs, then add those as Sup "sources" using sup-add, one by one. This is very well supported in Sup, and works well. Offlineimap is very easy to install on Ubuntu, and can easily be built from source if that's not an option. My config is pretty much a vanilla copy of the minimal config.

There's a good Sup hook to run "offlineimap" every poll interval, and rescan synced sources that contain new mail. It works well.

Sup has an interesting approach to mail storage -- it doesn't. Instead, it stores pointers to the messages' locations in their source storage. This is a great idea, since bugs in Sup therefore cannot lose your mail -- just your metadata about your mail. However, it means that if the source changes in a way which moves or removes messages, you need to tell Sup to rescan (using "sup-sync"), but that's no big deal in practice; in the more usual case, if new mail arrives, it's automatically rescanned.

I have just under 7000 mail messages in my Sup index, and rescans are speedy and searches super-fast. It's very nicely done.

Outbound mail is delivered using /usr/sbin/sendmail by default, which should be working on any decent *nix desktop anyway ;)

Recommended Hooks

The Hooks wiki page has a few good hooks that you should install:

  • ~/.sup/hooks/before-poll.rb: the above-mentioned offlineimap poll hook
  • ~/.sup/hooks/mime-decode.rb: 'uses w3m to translate all HTML attachments that don't have a text/html alternative.' Well worth installing.
  • ~/.sup/hooks/before-add-message.rb: essential to filter out cron noise and the like so it doesn't hit the inbox; unfortunately Sup doesn't (yet) support GMail's "filter messages like this" UI.

Bad Points

  • Long URIs: unfortunately, very long URIs are broken by Sup's renderer, and it doesn't offer a native way to "activate" URIs and have them displayed in the browser; instead one has to cut and paste them. This is pretty lame. I've hacked up a perl script that will reconstruct the full URLs from the broken rendering, when the text is piped to it, but that's a horrible hack.

  • Index Corruption: I've had the misfortune (once, in the month since I started) of corrupting my search index, causing Ruby exception stack traces when I attempted to run "sup-sync" to scan new mail. The only fix appeared to be to restore my index from a "sup-dump" backup. Thankfully all seems fine now, but it was a definite reminder of the product's beta status.

  • Calendaring: still as painful as it's ever been with UNIX command line email.

  • HTML: A good-quality, email-oriented, native HTML renderer would be awesome.

  • MIME: Sup again takes the traditional approach from UNIX command line clients of delegating to the mailcap file and its rules; unfortunately my RHEL5 desktop is too crappy to have a good mailcap setup. So I've had to write this from scratch to deal with the usual .docs and .xls's etc., flying about.

  • Inconsistent Key Mapping: Given that it shares so much UI with GMail in other respects, it's a little annoying that Sup doesn't have the same key mapping. Not a big deal, as it took only a couple of hours to get the hang of Sup's, though.

Overall

If you're happy enough to spend a day or two getting the damn thing installed, and aren't afraid of a little dalliance with the bleeding edge, I strongly recommend it. It's definitely the best *NIX mail reader at the moment.

Links for 2009-12-15

Published December 15, 2009

Links for 2009-12-09

Published December 9, 2009

Links for 2009-11-25

Published November 25, 2009