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Self-plagiarised Horoscopes

Published December 4, 2003

Funny: Mick @ P45 has a good entry today on plagiarism. He notes that an academic pal once wrote a program to test for plagiarism by his students:

It uses a fairly rough and ready 'brute force' approach. Nonetheless, it can identify significant strings that have been regurgitated from Text A in Text B.

Anyway, he decided just for fun to fire the program at the website's astrology predictions for the previous 18 months or so. The program churned away, and duly spat out the results. And - well heavens above - hadn't the astrologer been copying and pasting very large chunks of his own predictions, apparently at random and nothing to do with 'Uranus being in the ascendent' or other such drivel that horoscopes concern themselves with.

Seldom-Asked Questions About Japan

Published December 4, 2003

Japan: This is fantastic; full of odd little facts about Japan. Here's one I really like:

  1. '(How do you explain) the frequency of Japanese people (usually women) running or jogging for no apparent reason. In the travel agency, 'let me get you a copy' and she runs away. In my office a woman runs to the bathroom (can be explained) and then runs back to her desk (huh?). Most of the teachers I work with wait for the bell in the teacher's room, and then practically sprint to their classes. Do you know why all this running is going on? Fitness? Service? An Edo-era leftover?'--Question submitted by Ben Schwartz
  2. I once teasingly asked a female with whom I worked why she always did a sort of feigned jog to and from the copier, especially since her jog was slower than her walk. The humour wasn't lost on her, but she explained that many Japanese do this at work because the appearance of urgency is important in more traditional office environments. You don't have to truly run around frantically, but just offer the gesture.--Answer kindly submitted by Lou C.

Another good one -- it seems Bob the Builder had to have a finger added for the Japanese market, in order to not look like a yakuza.

Seldom-Asked Questions About Japan

Published December 4, 2003

This is fantastic; full of odd little facts about Japan. Here's one I really like:

  1. '(How do you explain) the frequency of Japanese people (usually women) running or jogging for no apparent reason. In the travel agency, 'let me get you a copy' and she runs away. In my office a woman runs to the bathroom (can be explained) and then runs back to her desk (huh?). Most of the teachers I work with wait for the bell in the teacher's room, and then practically sprint to their classes. Do you know why all this running is going on? Fitness? Service? An Edo-era leftover?'--Question submitted by Ben Schwartz
  2. I once teasingly asked a female with whom I worked why she always did a sort of feigned jog to and from the copier, especially since her jog was slower than her walk. The humour wasn't lost on her, but she explained that many Japanese do this at work because the appearance of urgency is important in more traditional office environments. You don't have to truly run around frantically, but just offer the gesture.--Answer kindly submitted by Lou C.

Another good one -- it seems Bob the Builder had to have a finger added for the Japanese market, in order to not look like a yakuza.

Canadian Pharmacy FUD debunked

Published December 2, 2003

Health: Canadian Pharmacy FUD debunked: ''After nearly a year of sharp warnings about the dangers of prescription drugs from Canada,' the Philadelphia Inquirer reports, 'U.S. Food and Drug Administration officials cannot produce a single U.S. consumer who was killed or injured by inferior medications from Canada.' Neither can its Canadian counterpart.'

Potentially objectionable xscreensaver

Published December 2, 2003

Humour: xscreensaver, the default (and greatest) screensaver on most free UNIX distros, may contain R-rated content, as this mail to the Fedora discussion list notes.

Much to my surprise, I stumbled across it drawing an 'erect penis' when I returned from lunch today. So I did some investigating: 

    $ strings /usr/X11R6/lib/xscreensaver/glsnake | grep penis
    erect penis
    flaccid penis

Potentially objectionable xscreensaver

Published December 2, 2003

xscreensaver, the default (and greatest) screensaver on most free UNIX distros, may contain R-rated content, as this mail to the Fedora discussion list notes.

Much to my surprise, I stumbled across it drawing an 'erect penis' when I returned from lunch today. So I did some investigating: 

$ strings /usr/X11R6/lib/xscreensaver/glsnake | grep penis
erect penis
flaccid penis

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

Date: Tue, 02 Dec 2003 13:45:35 -0500
From: Sean Millichamp (spam-protected)
To: (spam-protected)
Subject: Potentially objectionable xscreensaver module (GLSnake)

I just wanted to let everyone know that the xscreensaver module "GLSnake" has two object displays that some folks might feel is inappropriate or objectionable.

Much to my surprise, I stumbled across it drawing an "erect penis" when I returned from lunch today. So I did some investigating:

$ strings /usr/X11R6/lib/xscreensaver/glsnake | grep penis erect penis
flaccid penis

$ rpm -q xscreensaver
xscreensaver-4.14-2

Some folks who are planning on (or have) installed Fedora Core at home or in conservative office settings might want to check and make sure glsnake isn't enabled by default.

If I end up deploying Fedora Core 1 to any desktops at my clients I will clearly have to sanitize or remove this module in some fashion.

I hope that the heads-up helps someone...

Sean

  • --


fedora-list mailing list
(spam-protected)
To unsubscribe: http://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list

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Using Bugzilla for commercial code

Published December 2, 2003

Software: How Funcom Squashed Bugs With Bugzilla (GamaSutra, free reg required).

There's some differences between the commercial and free-software development styles; writing games is probably one of the most extreme of the commercial development environments, with extremely aggressive schedules and a single, long-term product development arc building up to one really big release.

A really good way to use bugzilla is to track development -- essentially, using it to track work instead of bugs. In other words, when work is planned, a bug is created to track that work's progress and provide a forum for discussion of the work's design, implementation details, etc.

This article gives a great overview of the additions Funcom have made to Bugzilla to do this, including time estimates, MS Project integration.

Post-Thanksgiving bits

Published December 1, 2003

Quickies: I like Thanksgiving! A holiday based around a roast fowl and some booze; can't go too far wrong with that. Thumbs up.

FrodoPalm -- run C=64 games on your Palm handheld. Insanely cool. (via /.) I wonder what the controls are like, though -- that can totally kill a game's playability.

Escape From Woomera -- nice press-grabbing idea, but I can't imagine that the game will be too hot, though. (via Boing Boing)

The Bearer of This Card is a Genuine and Authorized Tsar, via Blather Shitegeist.

ABC.net.au: push for 'open source' biotech. I was just thinking about this last week; interesting to see this happening.

'Biotechnology, the way it is right now, is needed in the developing world like a screen door on a submarine,' said Jefferson. 'What it really needs is what good science can do in biology, in biotechnology. And that means a different agenda and a different group of innovators.'

'He added such tools could also help us understand and improve agricultural management systems such as organic approaches. An example of this would be the development of new 'bioindicator' plant varieties that would tell farmers about their soil nitrogen levels.'

Fantastic idea. I hope this takes off...

‘Nepalese Nose-Leech’ hits the Beeb

Published November 26, 2003

Health: via Forteana, BBC: Invasion of the Bodysnatchers. It seems the Beeb is producing a new TV series about parasites, and the PR blitz starts here (and also in The Sun).

Interestingly, halfway through the BBC article, there's this:

Soon after travel writer, Broughton Coburn, returned from Nepal he began to experience regular, inexplicable nosebleeds. They continued for three weeks until an embarrassing encounter in a teashop made him realise that something was seriously wrong.

As he was being served, the waiter took one look at him and fled in horror. Broughton chased him down the street urging him to tell him what was wrong. But the boy would only point, wordlessly, at his nose.

Broughton returned home and sat in trepidation in front of a mirror. His patience was rewarded when a brown worm-like creature emerged from his right nostril and looked around.

'I swear it had two beady eyes on it. And it came out two or three inches, looked around and then retracted. I thought it was a dream, a vision of some sort.'

In shock, Broughton rushed off to his doctor who tried to remove the mysterious creature. But it wasn't going to give up its home easily.

'He had this thing pulled out eight or ten inches and I'm looking at it cross-eyed down the end of my nose, and he's looking at it, he has a look of absolute horror on his face. And the thing came off. And there was this leech.'

This is the same story (modulo minor differences) as this oft-posted story, 'A True Story from the Himalayas', which is captioned

This is a supposedly true story I received from an associate. I have no additional evidence as to its veracity but it makes a good tale. -- Editor'.

No better way to announce an urban legend!

So is the Beeb printing a UL? Or did an author called Broughton Coburn really pick up a nose-leech in Nepal shortly after arriving with the Peace Corps, and before becoming a successful travel writer? It could be, I suppose...

Update: it's looking more and more likely, given:

This Hong Kong Medical Journal report on the removal of a large leech from a woman's nose:

The woman said that one month before her symptoms developed, she swam and washed her face in a stream while hiking. Doctors checked other members of her hiking group and found another leech in the nose of a man who washed his face in the stream, the journal said.

And this NY Times interview with a leech researcher, who notes:

"There are all sorts of things out there like Dinobdella ferox, which means the terrifying and ferocious leech," Dr. Siddall said. "It lives in eastern Bengal, and it will literally crawl up your nose and lodge in the back of your throat."

Back to the Broughton Coburn account. An Amazon reviewer comment notes that this story appeared in Travelers' Tales Nepal, a book by Rajenda S. Khadka. In addition, Broughton Coburn has a website nowadays, so someone could always ask! Finally, this copy of the full account has some more research.

While on the subject of Nepal, here's an incredible cautionary tale -- don't do the non-tourist treks in Nepal without a guide, if you value your life:

A wall of furiously churning brown water was racing toward us. Behind it the lodge by the river where we had lunch an hour earlier was disintegrating. The water level had increased another ten feet and was annihilating everything in its path.

yikes. Lots more great travel stories, including almost swimming in shit, diarrhoea in a west African minefield, and strangling muggers in Peru on that site, BTW. And he can write!

Ireland: Knick Knack Paddy Hack -- 'Paul Clerkin and Mick Cunningham explain how their crazy-ass website p45.net suckered the (Irish) media.'

Giant Mekong catfish becoming extinct

Published November 26, 2003

Environment: Long-time taint.org readers (yeah, right) may recall last year's encounter with the pla beuk, the Mekong giant catfish. (hey, it made for a good story in the end!)

Well, it seems the pla beuk now listed as 'critically endangered'. 2Bangkok points to this Yahoo! story:

More data, including Hogan's, have shown that its numbers fell by at least 80 percent over the last 13 years, a 'pretty massive decline' that prompted the critically endangered classification in the group's latest list released Nov. 18, Pollock said.

It seems recent dam-building and dredging may be to blame:

The river had mostly remained isolated due to wars and geography, but dams recently built along it in China and work on the upper Mekong River to clear navigation channels for large boats are threatening the catfish and other species, said Chainarong Sretthachau, director of the Southeast Asia Rivers Network.

Great article on e-voting issues

Published November 24, 2003

E-Voting: Do not miss this fantastic round-up on the e-voting situation in the US. It contains these amazing quotes from the leaked Diebold memos:

''Over (the past three years) I have become increasingly concerned about the apparent lack of concern over the practice of writing contracts to provide products and services which do not exist and then attempting to build these items on an unreasonable timetable with no written plan, little to no time for testing, and minimal resources. It also seems to be an accepted practice to exaggerate our progress and functionality to our customers and ourselves then make excuses at delivery time when these products and services do not meet expectations.' (Source: 'Resignation', announce.w3archive/200110/msg00001.html, dated 5 October 2001)

'It does not matter whether we get anything certified or not, if we can't even get the foundation of Global stable. This company is a mess! We should stop development on all new, and old products and concentrate on making them stable instead of showing vaporware. Selling a new account will only load more crap on an already over burdened entity. ... You are taxing the development team beyond what they can handle. ... Why is it so hard to get things right! I have never been at any other company that has been so miss managed (sic).' (Source: 'Fw: Battery Status & Charging---and too much bull!!', announce.w3archive/200110/msg00002.html, dated 20 October 2001)'

I'm speechless. At least the NEDAP system planned for Ireland isn't this bad -- or is it? We can't tell.

Support the calls for a Voter-Verifiable Paper Audit Trail. There's no other way to continue to have a trustworthy democratic system with widespread use of e-voting in place.

Debunking Offshore Spam

Published November 24, 2003

Spam: Since the CAN-SPAM act passed Congress, there's been quite a few comments raised against it -- unsurprising, as it does still have quite a few shortcomings.

However, one of the negative comments needs to be debunked -- namely the old favourite, 'most spam comes from countries outside the US'. In April, Declan McCullagh even quoted the CTO of Brightmail to this effect.

This is not true.

What's happening here is that it appears a lot of spam is coming via non-US servers, if do simplistic analysis of the IP addresses that are connecting to your mail servers. But look a little deeper -- some testing will reveal that those IPs are compromised hosts, running proxies or trojans to relay spam from their genuine origin.

Capturing relays in foreign countries is good sense for a spammer, because the network-abuse staff of a foreign ISP will be slower to react to complaints if they don't speak the complainant's language; in addition, some offshore ISPs seem to tolerate much more than US/European ISPs would. For example, in a few cases, US-based spammers are installing servers in offshore colocation facilities to operate their spam runs, and generally getting away with it -- much more than they would in the US or Europe. In some cases, there's serious abuse occurring -- here's a ROKSO report indicating Chinese servers being used to operate a massive SMTP AUTH username/password cracking operation against hosts across the world.

Once you get beyond these origin-obfuscation methods, and follow the spam to the source (which is hard work BTW!), you find yourself back in the US. The Spamhaus.org front page 'top 10 worst spam countries' list still features the US at number 1.

Now, what about if a spam law passes, and the spammers do move offshore?

I would say that a good 80% of the spamming population will, after a few prosecutions, find themselves unwilling to leave their home country and move to a foreign place in order to continue spamming. After all, wholesale relocation to a foreign society is hard work. So IMO, they'll move on to other pursuits and leave the email spam racket.

However, it is possible that the most motivated spammers themselves will pack up their bags and physically leave the US. This is where concentrating on the spam bureaus themselves becomes a dead end, and concentrating on their customers, the companies using the bureaus, is useful. Read the CAUCE FAQ:

Because most spam advertises goods or services offered by US-based entities (for example, get-rich-quick schemes and quack medical remedies being sold out of someone's basement), we advocate anti-spam laws in which the focus is not where the email came from but on whose behalf the spam was sent. If the law applies to the advertiser -- the entity profiting from the activity -- it doesn't matter where the spam originates.

The FAQ also raises this very good point:

Second, the reach of US law outside the borders of the US is tenuous at best, however that fact does not negate the need for or effectiveness of laws against those in the US. It can be very difficult to bring a murderer to justice in the US if they escape abroad, but no one could seriously argue that this fact means domestic murder laws are unnecessary or irrelevent. Spam isn't comparable to murder, but if our judicial system means anything, the same principles of justice must apply.

Dead right.

New Federal Anti-Spam Law Passed

Published November 22, 2003

Spam: Federal Anti-Spam Law Passes Congress (Anne Mitchell):

This source also said that the bill in its ultimate (and by now presumably passed) version was significantly tighter and more pro-consumer than the version which passed the senate and went to the house earlier this month. That's good. On the other hand, it still doesn't go nearly as far as the CA law did in many ways.

Still, one must be pragmatic - it doesn't really matter if it's better or worse than the CA law, right now, because it is (will be) the law. If we have to have a Federal law, and if it has to pre-empt the states, then this one at least has some positive aspects to it.

New Federal Anti-Spam Law Passed

Published November 22, 2003

Federal Anti-Spam Law Passes Congress (Anne Mitchell):

This source also said that the bill in its ultimate (and by now presumably passed) version was significantly tighter and more pro-consumer than the version which passed the senate and went to the house earlier this month. That's good. On the other hand, it still doesn't go nearly as far as the CA law did in many ways.

Still, one must be pragmatic - it doesn't really matter if it's better or worse than the CA law, right now, because it is (will be) the law. If we have to have a Federal law, and if it has to pre-empt the states, then this one at least has some positive aspects to it.

Small arms and radioactive waste

Published November 22, 2003

Politics: Hey, Sarge, Why Are They Shooting At Us with American Guns? (Three-Toed Sloth).

An interesting article, with one central thesis that had never occurred to me before; why should exports of guns, automatic weapons, and landmines be as free and easy as they are now?

In recent weeks, small arms have brought down several U.S. helicopters in Iraq, killing dozens of soldiers. Given the historically unprecedented military strength of the American armed forces, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to be flooding the world with weapons that could someday be used in guerilla warfare -- arguably the only kind of war that an enemy can successfully wage against the U.S. military.

Sanchez cited Afghanistan as a perfect example of this phenomenon. 'No sale of weapons is ever completely safe,' he said, 'as yesterday's allies become today's terrorists.'

Environment: excerpts from Markers to Deter Inadvertent Human Intrusion into the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (via NTK). Eek! Check this out...

XmlStarlet, and lots of stuff

Published November 21, 2003

XML: XmlStarlet: 'a set of command line utilities (tools) which can be used to transform, query, validate, and edit XML documents and files using simple set of shell commands in similar way it is done for plain text files using UNIX grep, sed, awk, diff, patch, join, etc commands.' Sheer genius!

SCOvEveryone: Humorix: 'PROVO, UTAH -- Nearly two hundred humor writers, fake news reporters, and tongue-in-cheek columnists descended on SCO's headquarters yesterday to protest the company's continued slide into unreality.'

'Humor writers have very active imagination. But none of us -- absolutely none of us -- could ever have imagined the kind of ludicrous and inconceivable things that SCO has decided to pursue,' explained a reporter for the New York Times, the world's leading source of spurious news. 'You simply can't make this stuff up... a fact which represents a great hardship on humorists everywhere.'

(thanks Ben!)

Ireland: some beautiful pics of Dublin in Autumn from Diego Doval.

Books: Hari Kunzru rejects the John Llewellyn Rhys award, since it is sponsored by two notoriously anti-immigrant newspapers, the Daily Mail and the Mail on Sunday:

both 'pursue an editorial policy of vilifying and demonising refugees and asylum-seekers ... As the child of an immigrant, I am only too aware of the poisonous effect of the Mail's editorial line. The atmosphere of prejudice it fosters translates into violence, and I have no wish to profit from it. ... The Impressionist is a novel about the absurdity of a world in which race is the main determinant of a person's identity. My hope is that one day the sponsors of the John Llewellyn Rhys prize will join with the judges in appreciating this.'

Well said! (via Oblomovka)

Health: University of Chicago healthcare 'stories of shame'. A shockingly widespread situation in the US, as far as I can tell. For non-USians wondering what all the fuss is about, have a read of this and it'll become clear. At the same time, the US government spends more per capita on healthcare than Sweden does. Figure that one out...

Orwell on Tea

Published November 21, 2003

Drink: George Orwell: A Nice Cup of Tea (Evening Standard, 12 January 1946)

If you look up 'tea' in the first cookery book that comes to hand you will probably find that it is unmentioned; or at most you will find a few lines of sketchy instructions which give no ruling on several of the most important points. This is curious, not only because tea is one of the main stays of civilization in this country, as well as in Eire, Australia and New Zealand, but because the best manner of making it is the subject of violent disputes.

(thanks Leon!)

Power failure — Unix v Windows war as usual

Published November 21, 2003

OSes: /.: NERC Releases Interim Report on Aug 14th Blackout. 'part of the blame for the big fizzle of 2003 lies with a failing SCADA system, GE's XA/21 power management system. 'Not only did the software that controls audible and visual alarms stop working at 2:14 p.m. EDT, but about a half hour later, two servers supporting the emergency system failed, too.' According to the product specs, it is a Unix system with X Windows.''

However, further reading through the comments throws up this gem, which notes that the 'software that controls audible and visual alarms' and the 'two servers' noted above were all Windows systems. The comment author ties this to Blaster worm activity causing DDOSes on the monitoring networks.

Interesting!

DVDRentals.ie, and a Russian ‘The Running Man’

Published November 20, 2003

Ireland: A while back, I posted 'Room for an Irish Netflix', which plugged the idea of opening a version of the Netflix concept for Ireland. Well, over on the taint.org QT forum, JCorbett says: ' DVDRentals.ie is what you're looking for!'

Sure enough, it looks pretty good -- 20 eurons a month, and a reasonable selection (considering they just started).

But it limits how many DVDs you can get out in a month to 8. IMO, that's unnecessary -- nobody can watch DVDs and turn them around through the postal system that quickly!

Also, the browsing interface is lousy -- I'd suggest licensing some kind of metadata from IMDb or similar, so people can get third-party reviews, comments, 'my favourite action movie' lists, that kind of thing.

Can't tell much more, as the FAQ page doesn't work on Mozilla/Firebird for some damn reason.

Sick: Anger as contestants hungry for money go begging on TV (Irish Indo) (via forteana):

A reality television show in which 12 young Russian contestants have to scrounge, beg and even steal to win a pension for life, is being filmed in Berlin.

In a city already struggling with bankruptcy and large numbers of asylum-seekers, police and residents have been quick to condemn Golod, Russian for 'hunger'. The contestants live in a container without money or food to survive; none of them speaks German. 'Golod' is proving a huge hit with Moscow television viewers, thousands of whom tune in at nine each evening to find out how Karina, Anastasia and 10 other photogenic contestants are faring on the mean streets of a foreign city.

Spam: Latest Pew Internet report on spam. Pew Internet surveys are very good. This one notes that '25% of America's email users say they are using email less because of spam. Within that group, most say that spam has reduced their overall use of email in a big way.'

Mafia: A mafia hacker tells his story to Wired (Simson Garfinkel via FoRK).

Terriblismophile

Published November 20, 2003

Green: WorldChanging.com brings a new word:

The Renaissance Italians had a term, 'terriblisma,' by which they meant the strange, gratified awe one feels when beholding dreadful disasters and acts of God from afar. The term may be six hundred years old, but the sentiment could not be more contemporary. In fact, terriblisma is a quite native 21st Century aesthetic.

So there it is -- I'm a terriblismophile. (That's probably not a valid word, combining Italian and Greek, but hey...) Judging by this entry, marathon-running blogger Maciej Ceglowski may just be one too.

One of the things on my to-do list has been to see a live volcano; still haven't managed it yet. Then, possibly, a tornado. I've also been meaning to type in and post a couple of snippets from Mike Davis' Ecology of Fear (and judging from that book, a tornado in SoCal may not be out of the question). Also, the surreality of the wild fires was pretty enjoyable from my comfy well-out-of-danger's-way vantage point. No question -- I'm a terriblismophile.

How to link without PageRank

Published November 19, 2003

Spam: Given the latest spammer trick, clone blogs, there's been some discussion of how one can link to another site, without actually conferring Google PageRank to them.

Here's a good way -- instead of using the traditional href: 

    link

use a Javascript link, like so: 

    link

This works, as long as the viewer uses Javascript, and it won't be handled by Google as giving PageRank points. Perfect for use in referrer log listings, for example.

The blues lives

Published November 17, 2003

Music: Delta Force (The Observer) -- you couldn't make this up:

'I ask T-Model if I can hear him play. 'Let's go,' he says and we get into his big blue 1979 Lincoln Continental and drive across the railroad tracks to a corner house in a part of Water Valley I have never seen before. An old man with one eye and no teeth is in a wheelchair on a rotting front porch, trying to attach a prosthetic leg to his stump.

'Hey Pete!' yells T-Model. 'Y'all got any elec-quickery up in there? We fixin' to play a little music.' 'Hey bluesman, you come on. We got electric,' says Pete and then his leg falls off with a clatter. 'I ain't never gonna get used to this damn fool leg.'

A question for the Florida DMA

Published November 17, 2003

Spam: DMA meeting to address spam (South Florida Biz Journal):

The DMA recently announced its support for e-mail self-regulatory guidelines, including:

.... 4. Marketers should not acquire e-mail addresses surreptitiously through automated mechanisms without the consumer/customer's informed consent.

So, my question is: how exactly does a consumer provide 'informed consent' to having their e-mail addresses acquired 'surreptitiously through automated mechanisms'?

Various Monday Morning quickies

Published November 17, 2003

Anthems: The Chechen Nation Anthem. This has got to be the scariest anthem I've ever heard, what with the she-wolves whelping and what not.

Spam: MAPILab.com: Microsoft Outlook 2003 Spam Filter: Under the hood. Exhaustive!

Wired News: U.K. Plans to Extradite Spammers. Can't see how this'll work, given that spamming just isn't seen by prosecutors as a high-cost crime. (Found via SpammerHunters.com).

Food: Blooper proves bum deal for Sharwoods (Guardian): 'When Sharwoods launched its latest product range earlier this month, it promised the 'deliciously rich' sauces based on a traditional northern Indian method of cooking would 'change the way consumers make curry'. What it failed to foresee was that 'bundh' in Punjabi has an altogether less savoury meaning

  • the nearest English translation being, to put it bluntly, 'arse'.'

(Thanks Lean!)

Plus, a bonus: a brief history of advertising mistranslations, some doubtless ULs.

Patents: MS Office 2003 XML Reference Schema Patent License (via patents at aful dot org):

Microsoft may have patents and/or patent applications that are necessary for you to license in order to make, sell, or distribute software programs that read or write files that comply with the Microsoft specifications for the Office Schemas.

Audio Lunchbox

Published November 16, 2003

Music: Audio Lunchbox -- let's just quote the key parts of the FAQ:

  • Audio Lunchbox is the premiere digital download destination for the best new independent music.
  • ALL of the music on Audio Lunchbox is DRM-free. There are no technology imposed usage restrictions on the files you download. You can listen to the files you download however you like as long as it's for your own personal use.
  • Every track on Audio Lunchbox is available in two formats: MP3 and Ogg Vorbis.
  • Browsers known to work with our service include Internet Explorer, Netscape, Mozilla, Opera, Safari, Galeon, Epiphany and Konqueror.
  • Anyone in the world can download tracks from us.

Good answers!

The music isn't quite there yet -- all I can find is current LA favourites, Death Cab for Cutie, but I can wait. For now, it'll go alongside Epitonic as a good source of decent MP3s; and I hope the selection builds up well...

Longhorn memory requirements

Published November 16, 2003

OSes: Eek! The WinSuperSite Longhorn preview notes:

First, it's a dog on any system with less than 512 MB of RAM, so consider that a base amount (up from 256 in Windows XP).

Mind you, it's not slated for release until 2006, so 512 MB of memory is probably a reasonable minimum that far in the future ;)

2 Great Spam White Papers

Published November 16, 2003

Spam: Taughannock Networks has a couple of very good spam whitepapers up on their site.

Technical approaches to spam is recommended if you'd like a good overview of the current state of various filtering techniques; An overview of e-postage is also generally correct, although I still think there's some room for Hashcash to prove useful -- after all, we do plan to add it to SpamAssassin (eventually!).

WorldChanging.com

Published November 16, 2003

Environment: WorldChanging.com. Bruce Sterling writes:

'Worldchanging' is very much the same work the Viridian movement has been doing since 1998, only now (thanks God!) it's being done by a relatively organized team of capable activists instead of by some wacky novelist in his spare time! So go make them famous. Do it now.'

The Viridian movement is Bruce's baby, best summed up, I reckon, as 'electronic green'.

Anyway, WorldChanging.com is a full-blown MovableType weblog, RDF and all, frequently updated and smartly written. Sign up!

The Next Thing After the Hummer

Published November 15, 2003

Vehicles: Gulf War Vehicles Hit L.A. Freeways (LALA Times):

'The Humvee ambulance is to the SUV what the standard Humvee was to the jeep. The taller canopy allows for an entire extended family of 8-10 persons to sit comfortably. So it conserves energy even if it gets just under 6 miles per gallon. As with the Humvee, bottled bubbly water fits snugly in the racks on the back of the vehicle. Beach blankets and umbrellas can also be attached to the vehicle's shell for easy extraction and use.

The Abrams' hybrid tank weighs in at a sturdy three tons and gets just over two miles per gallon. The treads have been scaled back, the barrel has been removed and the turret has been smoothed out. The front window has been expanded and the plexi-glass top hatch doubles as a door and sun roof. Crash tests show the Abrams to be first-rate.'

Related:
New Humvee Spans Two Lanes of Traffic.

On Copy Protection and DRM

Published November 15, 2003

Security: Dan Bricklin writes:

As I pointed out in 'Copy Protection Robs The Future', the only reason I have a copy (of VisiCalc) that can still work is that someone kept a 'bootleg' uncopyprotected copy around. The original disks may not have worked on a Longhorn machine. Just copying the files from the original 5 1/4" floppy to a 3 1/2" one that would fit in today's machines certainly would result in a non-working copy, because of copy protection. We will regret 'Digital Restriction/Rights Management' in the future.

Here's the essay he mentions: Copy Protection Robs The Future:

Copy protection, like poor environment and chemical instability before it for books and works of art, looks to be a major impediment to preserving our cultural heritage. Works that are copy protected are less likely to survive into the future. The formal and informal world of archivists and preservers will be unable to do their job of moving what they keep from one media to another newer one, nor will they be able to ensure survival and appreciation through wide dissemination, even when it is legal to do so.

Tying in nicely with The Long Now Foundation and the importance of the public domain.

MS loses to Linux in Thailand

Published November 15, 2003

Linux: MS loses to Linux in Thailand Struggle (LinuxInsider):

The people's PC project, formally known as the ICT PC Project, revolutionized the Thai PC market, and its effect is being felt around the region. The Ministry of ICT aims to sell 700,000 PCs and 300,000 notebooks in the first year of the project. To make the PCs affordable, the government has insisted that computer makers offer the machines at fire-sale prices -- $250 for PCs and $400 for notebooks, including the software.

The government did invite Microsoft to participate in the project, but the company initially refused to lower its prices. Microsoft has a long-standing policy of charging the same prices throughout the world, which could help explain the widespread piracy in developing markets like Thailand, where the average annual income is about $7,000. Charging Thai consumers nearly $600 for Windows/Office is the equivalent of charging U.S. consumers $3,000.

... Microsoft's newly appointed regional general manager, Andrew McBean, no doubt having consulted Redmond, offered to supply the ICT PC Program with the Windows/Office package for a mere $37 -- a price cut of 85 percent.

Looks like the Linux-based machines are popular, too:

The rock-bottom prices -- and easy financing terms -- generated enormous interest in the ICT PCs. An estimated 35,000 people showed up at a Bangkok convention center where the machines were launched. Some people even camped overnight to sign up for the program. By August of this year, Thai consumers had snapped up 300,000 ICT PCs.

Guinness IS good for you, again

Published November 14, 2003

Beer: Irish Independent: Now ads can't say it but you always knew it -- Guinness IS
good for you:

One pint of Guinness a day can reduce the risk of blood clots that cause heart attacks, according to new research presented at the annual meeting of the American Heart Association in Orlando, Florida.

... Scientists investigating the health benefits of drinking beer found that stouts like Guinness worked much better than lager. They said dark beers were packed with anti-oxidant compounds called flavonoids which help reduce damage to the lining of the arteries. ... For maximum benefit a person would need to drink just over one pint of Guinness a day.

My grandfather was 'prescribed' a bottle of Guinness per day by his GP, to lower cholesterol and blood pressure. Mind you, that was in '70s Ireland ;)

(Don’t) Give Peas A Chance

Published November 14, 2003

History: This year's archives are open, revealing lots of goodies from WWII. Here's a good one via the BBC: 1940 'peas bomb plot' on palace:

German saboteurs claimed they were planning to attack wartime Britain using exploding cans of processed peas, according to secret files. The MI5 documents show that three men who landed on the southern coast of Ireland in 1940 were found with four bombs hidden inside cans labelled 'French peas'.

.... The three agents were landed by dinghy near Cork, but their exploits were shortlived. Their tactic, of asking the first person they met if they could be taken to the IRA, did not work.

The man took them to the police instead.

... The files show a close relationship between the Irish and British authorites, despite Irish neutrality. MI5 knew of the arrests and saw transcripts of the interrogations almost immediately.

Perforce and Half-Life – together at last!

Published November 14, 2003

Software: I'm a huge fan of Perforce, the best SCM system I've ever used; it thoroughly kicks the ass of ClearCase, CVS, RCS et al.

I'm also a fan of Half-Life, one of the few first-person-shooter games on the PC platform to provide a reasonably good plotline.

However, until now, they've remained separate; how do you reconcile source-code management and blasting alien invaders? Presenting P4HL:

Does SCM ever start to seem flat and two-dimensional? Have you ever felt the urge to browse depot history while beating up on your friends with a crowbar? Then check out P4HL, a fully 3D depot browsing interface built on the Half-Life engine.

Guinness IS good for you, again

Published November 13, 2003

Irish Independent: Now ads can't say it but you always knew it -- Guinness IS
good for you:

One pint of Guinness a day can reduce the risk of blood clots that cause heart attacks, according to new research presented at the annual meeting of the American Heart Association in Orlando, Florida.

... Scientists investigating the health benefits of drinking beer found that stouts like Guinness worked much better than lager. They said dark beers were packed with anti-oxidant compounds called flavonoids which help reduce damage to the lining of the arteries. ... For maximum benefit a person would need to drink just over one pint of Guinness a day.

My grandfather was 'prescribed' a bottle of Guinness per day by his GP, to lower cholesterol and blood pressure. Mind you, that was in '70s Ireland ;)

Exploding Monitors pt. II

Published November 12, 2003

Hardware: This weblog is jinxed!!

That's the only explanation I can come up with. The day before yesterday, I blogged about exploding monitors and various halt-and-catch-fire software instructions. Last night, my monitor made a popping noise, emitted a faint burning-plastic smell, and shrank the display into a thin stripe down the middle of the screen.

Great. It's dead as a doornail -- I'm working from Catherine's iBook for now. Quite a step down from the lovely 21-inch CRT. Argh :(

BTW, needless to say, I wasn't running any scary apps -- not even Freedom: First Resistance -- the only possible display-hosing culprits were Firebird, KDE, ExMH or gvim ;)

Great article on Spamhaus.org

Published November 10, 2003

Spam: Great NYT article; well worth a read.

'For the spammers to actually manufacture and release a worldwide virus specifically to attack you, you're probably making quite some impact on them,' Mr. Linford said.

SCO madness continues

Published November 9, 2003

SCOvEveryone: I haven't a clue what's going on here:

... SCO would probably provide customers with financial incentives and discounts to migrate to SCO Unix, other vendors' Unix, and what he referred to as 'other proprietary operating systems' but probably Windows.

SCO madness continues

Published November 9, 2003

I haven't a clue what's going on here:

... SCO would probably provide customers with financial incentives and discounts to migrate to SCO Unix, other vendors' Unix, and what he referred to as 'other proprietary operating systems' but probably Windows.

Shock Horror — Do-Not-Call’s Gaping Loophole Exploited

Published November 8, 2003

Spam: So in the past 2 weeks, I've been called 3 times to 'take part in a survey'. That's compared to prior history before the do-not-call law took effect, which was absolutely no survey calls before on this number -- but plenty of telemarketing calls.

Of course, I'm sure these surveys are all companies keen to get my considered opinion, rather than phone-spam scum exploiting one of the blindingly obvious loopholes in the federal do-not-call list legislation. Sure.

BTW, that loophole seems to be there due to an oversight issue -- it seems the FTC doesn't have jurisdiction over telephone surveyors. However, this page notes that the FTC staff are prepared to prosecute callers who attempt to subvert the act:

For example, if a survey call asks a consumer if he or she would be interested in purchasing a type of service or merchandise, and that information then is used to contact the consumer to encourage such purchases, the survey call is considered telemarketing and subject to the Do Not Call restrictions.

Which is all well and good, but I'm not going to hang around for 10 minutes of 'what long-distance company do you use?' in order to differentiate 'good' surveys from 'bad' ones; I'll just hang up straight away.

Sport: Ben forwards this story -- the US baseball team has failed to qualify for the next Olympics. Yes, baseball. And no, I didn't know that other countries had genuine baseball teams.

Shock Horror — Do-Not-Call’s Gaping Loophole Exploited

Published November 8, 2003

So in the past 2 weeks, I've been called 3 times to 'take part in a survey'. That's compared to prior history before the do-not-call law took effect, which was absolutely no survey calls before on this number -- but plenty of telemarketing calls.

Of course, I'm sure these surveys are all companies keen to get my considered opinion, rather than phone-spam scum exploiting one of the blindingly obvious loopholes in the federal do-not-call list legislation. Sure.

BTW, that loophole seems to be there due to an oversight issue -- it seems the FTC doesn't have jurisdiction over telephone surveyors. However, this page notes that the FTC staff are prepared to prosecute callers who attempt to subvert the act:

For example, if a survey call asks a consumer if he or she would be interested in purchasing a type of service or merchandise, and that information then is used to contact the consumer to encourage such purchases, the survey call is considered telemarketing and subject to the Do Not Call restrictions.

Which is all well and good, but I'm not going to hang around for 10 minutes of 'what long-distance company do you use?' in order to differentiate 'good' surveys from 'bad' ones; I'll just hang up straight away.

Sport: Ben forwards this story -- the US baseball team has failed to qualify for the next Olympics. Yes, baseball. And no, I didn't know that other countries had genuine baseball teams.

Clay Shirky on Complex Software Systems

Published November 8, 2003

Software: Shirky on the Semantic Web. Great snippet:

it turns out that people can share data without having to share a worldview, so we got the meta-data without needing the ontology. Exhibit A in this regard is the weblog world. In a recent paper discussing the Semantic Web and weblogs, Matt Rothenberg details the invention and rapid spread of 'RSS autodiscovery', where an existing HTML tag was pressed into service as a way of automatically pointing to a weblog's syndication feed.

About this process, which went from suggestion to implementation in mere days, Rothenberg says:

Granted, RSS autodiscovery was a relatively simplistic technical standard compared to the types of standards required for the environment of pervasive meta-data stipulated by the semantic web, but its adoption demonstrates an environment in which new technical standards for publishing can go from prototype to widespread utility extremely quickly. ...

This, of course, is the standard Hail Mary play for anyone whose

technology is caught on the wrong side of complexity. People pushing such technologies often make the 'gateway drug' claim that rapid adoption of simple technologies is a precursor to later adoption of much more complex ones. Lotus claimed that simple internet email would eventually leave people clamoring for the more sophisticated features of CC:Mail (RIP), PointCast (also RIP) tried to label email a 'push' technology so they would look like a next-generation tool rather than a dead-end, and so on.
Here Rothenberg follows the script to a tee, labeling RSS autodiscovery
'simplistic' without entertaining the idea that simplicity may be a requirement of rapid and broad diffusion. The real lesson of RSS autodiscovery is that developers can create valuable meta-data without needing any of the trappings of the Semantic Web. Were the whole effort to be shelved tomorrow, successes like RSS autodiscovery would not be affected in the slightest.

Another good line: 'There is a list of technologies that are actually political philosophy masquerading as code, a list that includes Xanadu, Freenet, and now the Semantic Web.'

Belkin’s Brain-damage, and Bye-bye Public Domain

Published November 7, 2003

Spam: The Reg reports that a Belkin Router software upgrade hijacks HTTP connections to spam the browser with ads. Here's a screenshot of the ad page. Here's a USENET post bemoaning the situation, and the followup from a Belkin PM.

This is amazing; a working piece of network infrastructure has been effectively modified to:

  • replace the expected HTTP responses with spam 'for your convenience'
  • do this once every 8 hours until told to stop
  • report serial numbers, IP addresses and software revisions back 'home' as part of this

And, of course, web browsing is not the only thing that runs over port 80.

So, it's a router that inserts spam into your packets, whether you want it or not, due to a software upgrade; and if you want the bugfixes in that upgrade, you get the spam whether you want it or not. And, that spam could break quite a bit of legitimate port 80 traffic, such as automated download tools that aren't a full web browser, for example. And the spam is unannounced on the download page, or in the change log. I'd hope that's pretty serious under consumer-protection law... it certainly should be.

Copyright: In case there was any doubt that Sonny Bono and Jack Valenti wanted to remove the legal concept of the public domain, check this quote from the Congressional record:

(Mary Bono): Actually, Sonny wanted the term of copyright protection to last forever. I am informed by staff that such a change would violate the Constitution. I invite all of you to work with me to strengthen our copyright laws in all of the ways available to us. As you know, there is also Jack Valenti's proposal for term to last forever less one day. Perhaps the Committee may look at that next Congress.

Wow. More via an Eldred-related site.

Real-time DNS blocklist accuracy figures

Published November 7, 2003

Spam: DNS blocklists are the oldest means of spam-blocking, and are still exceedingly useful; nowadays, many of these are fully automated systems, using proxy-detection algorithms and sensing patterns in mailer behaviour indicative of spam.

A few months back on the ASRG list, there was a discussion of DNSBL accuracy; I posted some SpamAssassin figures, based on our 'mass-check' tests, but noted that they were computed using current DNSBL contents against a corpus of saved mail, so due to the time delta, were not 100% representative.

These figures are a lot better. Since August, I've been collecting real-time DNSBL hit data on my mail, as it is delivered at my SpamAssassin installation. In other words, it's live accuracy data -- it's using just what the DNSBLs had listed at scan time.

(DNS blocklist accuracy figures continued...)

Note, however, that it's still incomplete:

  • some DNSBLs were not measured; these are just the default DNSBL list in SpamAssassin 2.60, excluding RCVD_IN_NJABL_DIALUP (which I had to remove because I can't parse out accurate data).
  • it's only 1 person's hand-classified mail.
  • SpamAssassin tests more than just the 'delivering' SMTP relay; it'll also look backwards through the headers, at earlier relays, to catch spam sent via mailing lists. This is different from what's used with most traditional DNSBL-supporting systems.

But the results should still be quite useful.

The time period covered:

  • Thu, 21 Aug 2003 17:11:30 -0700 (PDT)
  • Sat, 25 Oct 2003 23:11:52 -0700 (PDT)

Recap of the fields:

  • SPAM% = percentage of messages hit that were spam
  • HAM% = percentage of messages hit that were spam
  • S/O = Spam/Overall = Bayesian probability of spam
  • RANK = artificial ranking figure, ignore this!
  • SCORE = default SpamAssassin 2.60 score
  • NAME = name of test. Figuring out the exactly DNSBL should be pretty obvious ;) 

OVERALL%   SPAM%     HAM%     S/O    RANK   SCORE  NAME
21839     1993    19846    0.091   0.00    0.00  (all messages)
100.000   9.1259  90.8741    0.091   0.00    0.00  (all messages as %)
5.989  59.0567   0.6601    0.989   1.00    2.25  RCVD_IN_BL_SPAMCOP_NET
3.869  37.7822   0.4636    0.988   0.96    1.10  RCVD_IN_DSBL
0.751   8.2288   0.0000    1.000   0.95    4.30  RCVD_IN_OPM_HTTP
1.964  20.2709   0.1260    0.994   0.95    1.10  RCVD_IN_NJABL_PROXY
0.659   7.1751   0.0050    0.999   0.95    0.64  RCVD_IN_NJABL_SPAM
0.614   0.0000   0.6752    0.000   0.94   -0.10  RCVD_IN_BSP_OTHER
0.050   0.5519   0.0000    1.000   0.94    4.30  RCVD_IN_OPM_SOCKS
0.027   0.3011   0.0000    1.000   0.94    4.30  RCVD_IN_OPM_WINGATE
0.119   0.0000   0.1310    0.000   0.94   -4.30  RCVD_IN_BSP_TRUSTED
0.939   9.7341   0.0554    0.994   0.94    4.30  RCVD_IN_OPM
1.081  10.9383   0.0907    0.992   0.93    1.52  RCVD_IN_SORBS_SOCKS
1.062  10.7376   0.0907    0.992   0.93    1.27  RCVD_IN_SBL
0.229   2.4084   0.0101    0.996   0.93    1.10  RCVD_IN_SORBS_MISC
0.618   6.3221   0.0453    0.993   0.93    1.10  RCVD_IN_SORBS_HTTP
0.595   5.9709   0.0554    0.991   0.92    4.30  RCVD_IN_OPM_HTTP_POST
0.078   0.7526   0.0101    0.987   0.90    2.60  RCVD_IN_SORBS_ZOMBIE
0.815   7.5263   0.1411    0.982   0.89    1.39  DNS_FROM_RFCI_DSN
3.594  24.8369   1.4613    0.944   0.81    2.55  RCVD_IN_DYNABLOCK
1.685  11.4400   0.7054    0.942   0.78    0.10  RCVD_IN_RFCI
0.380   2.4586   0.1713    0.935   0.75    1.31  RCVD_IN_NJABL_RELAY
6.182  33.9689   3.3911    0.909   0.73    0.10  RCVD_IN_NJABL
10.422  44.4054   7.0090    0.864   0.63    0.10  RCVD_IN_SORBS
0.037   0.1505   0.0252    0.857   0.54    2.80  RCVD_IN_SORBS_WEB
2.344   4.1144   2.1667    0.655   0.17    0.00  RCVD_IN_SORBS_SPAM

Super-absorbent diaper danger

Published November 6, 2003

Blogs: Mimi Smartypants, very funny woman that she is, has become a very funny doting mother:

Similarly, recently she finally fell asleep in my arms and I soon caught the faint scent of urine, but I stuffed that thought way down deep into my brain, where the Syrup Of Denial runs thick and sticky, because I just could not deal with the possibility of waking her up during the diaper change. So my daughter slept in her own urine all night, or at least she slept through the bit that was not sucked up by the scarily absorbent diapers they make nowdays. (Seriously, what the hell is in there? I keep having nightmares that the superabsorbent gel will actually start to absorb moisture out of the baby itself and there will just be a dried-up husk in the crib in the morning.)

My new .sig awaits

Published November 5, 2003

Open Source: The FREE, 0% APR, Better Sex, No Effort Diet: Howard Strauss, Princeton's manager of technology strategy and outreach (no less!) takes aim at free software in their 'Syllabus' magazine. He launches a few ad hominems while he's at it:

These folks are some of the same great people who are supposed to be working for you anyway, plus a smattering of teenagers too young to work at Redmond, hackers, virus creators, and a menagerie of others with whom you will feel great pride in entrusting your IT infrastructure.

Given that Princeton's OIT uses SpamAssassin, I guess that means he reckons I, and the other developers, are 'teenagers too young to work at Redmond', or 'virus creators'. Thanks muchly, Princeton!

It sounds like a joke, but I actually think he's serious. My recommendation: he needs to take a job in the software-development side of
such companies as 'Microsoft, IBM, Sun, or even Blackboard' to see how well the commercial software development methodology really works. Hint: from the outside, you don't hear the half of it ;)

Oh -- regarding 'teenagers too young to work at Redmond': this /. comment is worth noting.

Room for an Irish Netflix

Published November 5, 2003

Net: So it seems Kerry Packer has announced a Netflix-like service in Australia, Homescreen.

In essence, you pay a flat fee per month, log on to a website, select a whole batch of DVDs, and they post the first 3 out to you. You can keep them as long as you like, then post them back in pre-paid envelopes; once they arrive at the nearest depot, they post out the next 3 on your list.

This works very well -- in the form of Netflix at least. I can vouch for the coolness of this; pretty much everyone I know who has a DVD player has joined Netflix. It's just great having 3 DVDs on-hand for whenever you feel like watching one.

Of course, it requires that the serivce have a decent selection of goods, including some good 'classics'. From the sounds of things, Homescreen may be failing on this point.

Also, it requires a reliable postal service. But if they can do it in the US, they can certainly do it in Australia or any European country ;)

And I'd bet Ireland has a whole huge DVD-player installed base, given the oft-quoted factoid that there are more PlayStations per capita in Ireland than any other country outside of Japan.

Irish entrepreneurs -- get cracking! ;)

The self-aggrandization prize goes to Craig Venter

Published November 5, 2003

Science: I'm the human genome, says 'Darth Venter' of genetics (Observer).

Craig Venter, the controversial geneticist who led private industry's decoding of the human genome, has revealed a startling secret. The genome - unravelled two years ago - is his.

To the surprise of scientists, Venter has admitted that much of the DNA used by his company, Celera Genomics, as part of this decoding effort came from his cells. The news has annoyed his colleagues, who claim that Venter subverted the careful, anonymous selection process they had established for their DNA donors.

I missed this story when it came out, but it's a biggie. Instead of mapping the genome of a scientifically-chosen representative, we have the genome of an egomaniac CEO, who spent the entire project self-aggrandizing and attention-seeking.

Just as well the publicly-funded, international Human Genome Project was around to keep them honest for the most part...

Some more choice quotes:

'It doesn't surprise me. It sounds like Craig,' said Nobel laureate James Watson, co-discoverer of the structure of DNA.

As to his reasons for his actions, Venter was unequivocal. 'How could one not want to know about one's own genome?' he said. Neither was he fazed about accusations of egocentricity. 'I've been accused of that so many times, I've got over it,' he said.

Celera's science board was not so understanding. 'Any genome intended to be a landmark should be kept anonymous. It should be a map of all of us, not of one, and I am disappointed if it is linked to a person,' said board member Arthur Caplan.

He added that the drive to sequence the human genome was an opportunity for personal glory as well as scientific discovery. Venter's action emphasised the first motive.

Herring Fart Chat

Published November 5, 2003

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1

Science: Fish farting may not just be hot air (New Scientist):

Biologists have linked a mysterious, underwater farting sound to bubbles coming out of a herring's anus. No fish had been known to emit sound from its anus nor to be capable of producing such a high-pitched noise.

... Three observations persuaded the researchers that the FRT is most likely produced for communication: Firstly, when more herring are in a tank, the researchers record more FRTs per fish. Secondly, the herring are only noisy after dark, indicating that the sounds might allow the fish to locate one another when they cannot be seen. Thirdly, the biologists know that herrings can hear sounds of this frequency, while most fish cannot. This would allow them to communicate by FRT without alerting predators to their presence.

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Comment: Exmh CVS

iD8DBQE/qThjQTcbUG5Y7woRAgEOAKDBmfaPgFrrGwTIndzQXJpQvoJGQwCcDyMa qkAWXoutn5Ki64fTK05emHA=
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Jody — still going strong

Published November 5, 2003

Spam: I just got another Jody spam; 40 points this time, and featuring the very latest in spam fashion, a .biz URL.

It's amazing! The 'Jody' fake testimonial crops up in 9060 results on the web and 78600 results on USENET. The oldest spam Google Groups has with this text was posted back on 26th May 1998, which makes it 5 and a half years old by now. (Check it out for some classic period ASCII art, misspellings, and LOTS OF SHOUTING!!!!)

Last time I posted about it, Ben actually tracked down a 'Mitchell Wolf M.D., Chicago, Illinois' -- Jody's supposed spouse. Presumably he's retired on the the 'USD 147,200.00 every 45 days' that Jody was amassing from her 'hobby', though. ;)

Sampler Victorious

Published November 4, 2003

Ireland: The best programme on Irish TV, by far, is Sampler. It's a great magazine series covering Ireland's underground scenes, with several nice scoops, including being the only set of film cameras around for the police brutality that made the May 6th 2001 Dublin 'Reclaim the Streets' protest infamous. Great soundtrack, too.

Naturally, it's also had a long and illustrious history of no support from RTE, who just seem to hate the whole idea and would prefer they just had a nice, non-controversial chat show instead.

Well, Sampler just won 'Best Special Interest Programme' at the Irish Film and Television Awards. Nice one! (Not that you'd know it from the IFTA website, which hasn't updated the awards pages in 2 years. -- update: Simon points out I'm looking at the wrong site: the real one is here.)

Disclaimer: Luke, the producer, is a good mate of mine. But it's still
a great programme. ;)

Go take a look! Episodes 2 to 5 are online in full, in RealVideo format -- and encoded at a pretty decent bitrate.

Justin the Scoopist

Published November 4, 2003

Timeliness: w00t! I blog about Jason Salavon, and 4 days later Boing Boing and plasticbag.org both pick up on it. (and rightly so.)

It gets better -- then there's this posting about the EVACS e-voting system, and a week later, Wired News cover it!

... OK, I'm totally exagerrating the latter one. Obviously Wired News go into a lot more detail and do a bit more research. ;) In fact, it's a very good article; here's a killer quote from Software Improvement's Matt Quinn, the lead engineer on EVACS:

Quinn ... says he is 'gob smacked' by what he sees happening among U.S. electronic voting machine makers, whom he says have too much control over the democratic process.

It has been widely reported that Ohio-based Diebold Election Systems, one of the biggest U.S. voting-machine makers, purposely disabled some of the security features in its software. According to reports the move left a backdoor in the system through which someone could enter and manipulate data. In addition, Walden O'Dell, Diebold Election System's chief executive, is a leading fundraiser for the Republican Party. He stated recently that he was 'committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year.''

'The only possible motive I can see for disabling some of the security mechanisms and features in their system is to be able to rig elections,' Quinn said. 'It is, at best, bad programming; at worst, the system has been designed to rig an election.'

'I can't imagine what it must be like to be an American in the midst of this and watching what's going on,' Quinn added. 'Democracy is for the voters, not for the companies making the machines.... I would really like to think that when it finally seeps in to the collective American psyche that their sacred Democracy has been so blatantly abused, they will get mad.'

But he says that the security of voting systems in the U.S. shouldn't concern Americans alone.

'After all, we've all got a stake in who's in the White House these days. I'm actually prone to think that the rest of the world should get a vote in your elections since, quite frankly, the U.S. policy affects the rest of the world so heavily.'

At Home with the Fuhrer

Published November 3, 2003

Bizarre: Given some historical context, it's funny how absolutely insane this sounds: Guardian: At Home with the Fuhrer.

My discovery was an article headlined 'Hitler's Mountain Home' - a breathless, three-page Hello!-style tour around Haus Wachenfeld, Hitler's chalet in the Bavarian Alps. In it, the author, the improbably named Ignatius Phayre, tells us that 'it is over 12 years since Herr Hitler fixed on the site of his one and only home. It had to be close to the Austrian border'. It was originally little more than a shed, but he was able to develop it 'as his famous book Mein Kampf became a bestseller of astonishing power'.

The great dictator, it seems, was quite the interiors wizard: 'The colour scheme throughout this bright, airy chalet is light jade green. The Führer is his own decorator, designer and furnisher, as well as architect... has a passion about cut flowers in his home.'

And he is seldom alone in his mountain hideaway, as he 'delights in the society of brilliant foreigners, especially painters, musicians and singers. As host, he is a droll raconteur... '

Oh, and look who's practising his archery in the garden: 'It is strange to watch the burly Field-Marshal Göering, as chief of the most formidable airforce in Europe, taking a turn with the bow-and-arrow at straw targets of 25 yards range.'

And on it gushes, all accompanied by various photos of Hitler and friends admiring the view, examining plans for the house, and one delightful shot of Adolf relaxing on a deckchair with 'one of his pedigree alsatians beside him'.

Next time you read an over-excited 'inside the home of' article, bear in mind that the subject might be a psychopathic dictator bent on world domination and mass murder.

(The article then descends into a convoluted mess of copyright claims and counterclaims, BTW, in case you're interested. But the bizarre stuff is what got me ;)

Sampler Victorious

Published November 3, 2003

The best programme on Irish TV, by far, is Sampler. It's a great magazine series covering Ireland's underground scenes, with several nice scoops, including being the only set of film cameras around for the police brutality that made the May 6th 2001 Dublin 'Reclaim the Streets' protest infamous. Great soundtrack, too.

Naturally, it's also had a long and illustrious history of no support from RTE, who just seem to hate the whole idea and would prefer they just had a nice, non-controversial chat show instead.

Well, Sampler just won 'Best Special Interest Programme' at the Irish Film and Television Awards. Nice one! (Not that you'd know it from the IFTA website, which hasn't updated the awards pages in 2 years. -- update: Simon points out I'm looking at the wrong site: the real one is here.)

Disclaimer: Luke, the producer, is a good mate of mine. But it's still
a great programme. ;)

Go take a look! Episodes 2 to 5 are online in full, in RealVideo format -- and encoded at a pretty decent bitrate.

Needs more thought

Published November 3, 2003

Politics: Nelson Mandela banned from visiting the US. oops! But they've fixed it:

The good news is that the United States government has removed Nelson Mandela, Tokyo Sexwale and Sidney Mufamadi from its list of global terrorists. The bad news is that the removal is only for the next 10 years. ....

'To make an exception for those who struggled against apartheid would require congress to change the law, and that would be a very lengthy process,' (Virginia Farris, the public affairs spokesperson for the US embassy in Pretoria) said.

Via Wendy M. Grossman, who reckons myself and the other SpamAssassin guys are Mrs. Beeton. ;)

Ho hum

Published November 2, 2003

Spam: I just received a spam containing this (HTML tags made readable by translating angles to round brackets):

Subject: Re: ZR, the master walked

(BODY bgColor=#ffffff) (font color=white) hellgrammite vocabularian distaff cardamom curvilinear pyhrric whizzing fruition canvasback maritime calcareous byline peddle cautionary smooch detain deadwood thrash centaur hurd coruscate confession bloom damsel gallon downtown morphine respirator psycho consolidate nee boycott (/font) Ban(/neve)ned C(/elmsford)D Gov(/validate)ernment d(/staccato)on't wan(/goat)t m(/embank)e t(/trident)o s(/logjam)ell i(/constantine)t. Se(/falloff)e N(/judson)ow - (then a link, finally!!) (font color=white)neuroses aghast mazurka ribose architectural tranquillity heterosexual custom coquette mauritius downgrade croydon mechanist devious nh lange circumscribe infancy drool between foppish momentous doug induce (/font)

What a mess. Regardless, SpamAssassin gave it a 17.4 and autolearned it as spam ;)

Spam load and Hallowe’en

Published November 1, 2003

Spam: The volume of spam continues to rise inexorably. Brightmail are now estimating that 54% of all mail messages are spam.

Nowadays, my personal mail account is getting about 70 a day, rising to over 200 a day at the weekends. It's getting tiresome; pretty much all of it gets marked as spam and diverted, but I still have to wade through it 'just in case', and to build the corpus. I guess I need to extend my .procmailrc to divert high-scoring spams somewhere I can check even less frequently ;)

That's not the really annoying thing, though. I use tagged addressing when I publish my email address, most of the time. It works very well to identify spam sources overall, and divert 'dead' addresses that are getting spam, into the spamtraps. That's the plus.

But the curse of writing spam filters is that you need a good archive of spam; and one of our SpamAssassin corpus guidelines is to attempt to trim out duplicate spams where possible. Many spammers will wind up sending more-or-less identical spam messages, modulo random subject lines, hash-busters, etc., and with (let's say) 8 tagged addresses in their lists, I'll get 8 copies of that spam, and have to pay a little bit of attention to trim it down to 1 copy for the corpus.

Damn spam-filter development! All this corpus building is hard work ;)

BTW, note how spam load rises at the weekends; (Tim Hunter, Paul Terry and Alan Judge of eircom.net also noted this in their paper presented at LISA '03 yesterday ;). There's a good reason -- spammers attempt to deliver their spam while abuse staff are not at their desk. Same thing applies in the network security world; many of those attacks have taken place over a US holiday weekend.

Hallowe'en: best too-late idea for a hallowe'en costume: 'Top Gun GWB' in his flight suit. In the end, I played half of the 'Dr. Frankenstein and Monster' pair (I was the monster, as C really is a scientist, and computer 'science' doesn't count). Best costume seen: a very impressive onnagata kabuki player.

Spam load and Hallowe’en

Published November 1, 2003

The volume of spam continues to rise inexorably. Brightmail are now estimating that 54% of all mail messages are spam.

Nowadays, my personal mail account is getting about 70 a day, rising to over 200 a day at the weekends. It's getting tiresome; pretty much all of it gets marked as spam and diverted, but I still have to wade through it 'just in case', and to build the corpus. I guess I need to extend my .procmailrc to divert high-scoring spams somewhere I can check even less frequently ;)

That's not the really annoying thing, though. I use tagged addressing when I publish my email address, most of the time. It works very well to identify spam sources overall, and divert 'dead' addresses that are getting spam, into the spamtraps. That's the plus.

But the curse of writing spam filters is that you need a good archive of spam; and one of our SpamAssassin corpus guidelines is to attempt to trim out duplicate spams where possible. Many spammers will wind up sending more-or-less identical spam messages, modulo random subject lines, hash-busters, etc., and with (let's say) 8 tagged addresses in their lists, I'll get 8 copies of that spam, and have to pay a little bit of attention to trim it down to 1 copy for the corpus.

Damn spam-filter development! All this corpus building is hard work ;)

BTW, note how spam load rises at the weekends; (Tim Hunter, Paul Terry and Alan Judge of eircom.net also noted this in their paper presented at LISA '03 yesterday ;). There's a good reason -- spammers attempt to deliver their spam while abuse staff are not at their desk. Same thing applies in the network security world; many of those attacks have taken place over a US holiday weekend.

Hallowe'en: best too-late idea for a hallowe'en costume: 'Top Gun GWB' in his flight suit. In the end, I played half of the 'Dr. Frankenstein and Monster' pair (I was the monster, as C really is a scientist, and computer 'science' doesn't count). Best costume seen: a very impressive onnagata kabuki player.

Tim Bray on Dublin

Published October 31, 2003

Ireland: 'The weather is bloody this time of year, the traffic is worse, but it's a fine town.' Agreed!

So I met up with SpamAssassin Dan, SpamAssassin Theo, and POPFile author John Graham-Cumming yesterday, down in San Diego -- much spam stuff was discussed.

Great to meet up -- not so great to miss the last train back to Irvine to my own inability to correctly read a timetable, and have to drag Dan and Theo out that way. oops, sorry guys! Not so smart, but at least we got to carry on the discussion for an hour or two more...

IBM attempting to patent the ‘wallet’

Published October 30, 2003

Patents: New Scientist reports that IBM have applied for a patent on "an electronic password 'wallet' that securely stores all your passwords, with overall access via a single password. The wallet pops up on screen whenever you are asked for a password. You enter the master password and the wallet then answers the online request by pasting in the appropriate password for that site."

This should be familiar to anyone who's used Mozilla's Form Manager feature, which fits the patent claims perfectly. That page notes that the Mozilla feature was created in 1999, just under 3 years before the patent application. Let's hope the USPTO remember to do a Google search this time!

Statistical Art

Published October 29, 2003

Art: Jason Salavon: Selected projects, 1997 - 2003.

Salavon operates by taking data from various sources (DVDs of late-night talk shows, homes for sale in various states, MTV's 10 Greatest Music Videos of All Time, Playboy centerfolds, etc.), then statistically combining them and converting that into another image, movie, or whatever.

The results are excellent. Check out Homes for Sale and Every Playboy Centerfold, The Decades (normalized).

I remember somebody asking me what I thought 'computer art' (sic) should be like, after I dissed yet another lame pixellated Photoshop/Flash thingy. Now I have something to point at ;) I'm well impressed.

Patents and Innovation, via slashdot

Published October 29, 2003

Patents: Slashdot gets a lot of stick for cluelessness. Now and again, though, you find well-presented arguments you won't read elsewhere. Try these:

An excellent summary of James Burke's book, The Day the Universe Changed; I haven't read it, but it sounds good. Reportedly, there's a section covering a period in British history when patent law was extended to cover 100 years; 'Like copyright today a person could not extend on a process developed on the day of their birth - they and their children (and even many of their grandchildren) would be dead long before the patent expired.'

Meanwhile, Germany refused to respect these terms, and their industry flourished -- 'a backwards agrarian society became an industrial powerhouse that far exceeded the capabilities of the British industry they 'stole' from, within a working lifetime.'

Details of how Lowell, Massachusetts became an industrial-era milling powerhouse through the US 'stealing' British patents: 'an English immigrant, Samuel Slater ... had worked his way up from apprentice to overseer in an English factory using the Arkwright system. Drawn by American bounties for the introduction of textile technology, he passed as a farmer and sailed for America with details of the Arkwright water frame committed to memory.'

Games: GameChronicles on the GTA:VC - Scarface connection. A nice summary of all (or at least, most) of the Scarface homages in the game.

Freedroid

Published October 29, 2003

Games: Commodore 64 old-timers may remember Andrew Braybrook's classic Paradroid, easily one of the best games for that platform, and a classic by any standards. Here's a copy of the Zzap! 64 review from 1986. Many thumbs up, and the bottom line was that Paradroid ranked as 'THE classic shoot-em-up'.

Paradroid trivia: in the days before .plan files, Zzap! 64 published a development diary by AB! Here's the birth of one of the game's key mechanisms, the 'transfer game':

Tuesday May 21: An average morning's contemplation until ...ZAP WHIZ POW ! An idea for a game within the main one, fighting for control of a new robot. Instead of just a graphical sequence showing the takeover of a new robot, why not have to play for it, you against the robot's brain? Base it on logic circuits and use some existing routines. A whole new game segment in a small space!

Cool.

The authors' company, Graftgold, has a website, detailing its history. Sadly, it maps the decline of the 80's-style small games company, and ends on this note: 'I would recommend the games industry to anyone wanting an exciting career buts its certainly not an easy ride. Most publishers we worked with either went bust, sold out or simply did not publish the game to our expections despite tight contracts. The trouble is the developer does their bit first then the publisher can choose the level to do their bit. Unless you can get real commitment by way of big advances you cannot rely on a publisher.'

Shame. Anyway. I'm not the only Paradroid fan out there -- it seems a bunch of fellow enthusiasts have come up with FreeDroid, a homage to Paradroid which seems to be evolving into an RPG! It's quite impressive -- the gameplay is virtually identical to the original. Fedora Linux users can install it using apt-get install freedroid.

BTW, related: here's two attempts at a canon for computer gamers, at costik.com and the Ludologist (of which I've played 121). What I find interesting about them is how clearly one is American and Apple-II-based and the other European and Commodore-64/Amiga-based. Stay tuned for the third, Spectrum-based canon. ;)

More on the ACT EVACS E-Voting System

Published October 28, 2003

Voting: Nathan Cochrane mailed in some great tidbits about the ACT EVACS e-voting system. (thanks!)

First off, this Debian-news posting notes some snippets from an Age article by Nathan; Here's some longer excerpts. It features some great quotes: 'the only platform that provided robustness and voter confidence was GNU Debian Linux, with all source code released under the General Public License (GPL).'

And this one:

'Classical voting systems, notably the Australian paper ballot, are designed precisely on such anti-trust grounds,' Jones said. 'We simply assume from the start that each and every participant in the system is a partisan with a vested interest in doing everything possible to help his or her favorite candidates.'

He said paper and pencil voting systems, such as that first used in Victoria in 1858, meet this test. Electronic voting does not.

This letter to LWN notes: 'You might be interested to know that some of the work on this project is being done by 'big name' open source people, including Andrew Tridgell (aka Mr Samba), Dave Gibson (orionoco wireless LAN driver), Martin Pool (apache), and Rusty Russell (netfilter and other gross kernel hacks)', and links to the code's CVS repository!

It seems those guys performed the work on behalf of a Canberra open-source consultancy group, Software Improvements; Here's the product brochure.

This posting to iRights gives a few more details.

It all looks like an excellent job all 'round, as far as I can see.

On Pay-Per-Mail

Published October 27, 2003

Spam: Lee Maguire on pay-per-mail schemes. A great read -- recommended to anyone who has given thought to this system.

It's usually the fear of the odd overlooked gem that has rendered anti-spam techniques impotent. A salutation from a long lost friend with the subject 'Hi', an important business mail sent out-of-hours from the kid's computer, that domain renewal reminder. Most people would apply no charge on the things they want to read, and a bajillion dollars on spam. And if there's mail you don't want to read but have to? Chances are you're being paid to read them already - get back to work.

SoCal: an amazing satellite picture of the wild fires, courtesy of NASA's Earth Observatory.

More on the ACT EVACS E-Voting System

Published October 27, 2003

Nathan Cochrane mailed in some great tidbits about the ACT EVACS e-voting system. (thanks!)

First off, this Debian-news posting notes some snippets from an Age article by Nathan; Here's some longer excerpts. It features some great quotes: 'the only platform that provided robustness and voter confidence was GNU Debian Linux, with all source code released under the General Public License (GPL).'

And this one:

'Classical voting systems, notably the Australian paper ballot, are designed precisely on such anti-trust grounds,' Jones said. 'We simply assume from the start that each and every participant in the system is a partisan with a vested interest in doing everything possible to help his or her favorite candidates.'

He said paper and pencil voting systems, such as that first used in Victoria in 1858, meet this test. Electronic voting does not.

This letter to LWN notes: 'You might be interested to know that some of the work on this project is being done by 'big name' open source people, including Andrew Tridgell (aka Mr Samba), Dave Gibson (orionoco wireless LAN driver), Martin Pool (apache), and Rusty Russell (netfilter and other gross kernel hacks)', and links to the code's CVS repository!

It seems those guys performed the work on behalf of a Canberra open-source consultancy group, Software Improvements; Here's the product brochure.

This posting to iRights gives a few more details.

It all looks like an excellent job all 'round, as far as I can see.

More pics of the wild fires, and going for a SONGS

Published October 27, 2003

SoCal: some great pictures from Derek Balling down in San Diego. Check out those skies!

Nukes: Great! The OC Weekly reports 'the much-maligned San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station (SONGS) has finally gotten some recognition -- but probably not the kind it wants: it now ranks (third) among the U.S. facilities most likely to suffer a meltdown, according to the Union of Concerned Scientists, a scientific group that monitors nuclear safety.'

A serious meltdown at SONGS would result in a massive release of radioactivity that could immediately kill more than 100,000 people in South County and northern San Diego County and ultimately cause hundreds of thousands of cases of cancer and genetic defects.

That's 15 miles away from me, fact fans. Mind you, having grown up directly west of Sellafield's discharge pipes, I'm used to a bit of radioactivity ;)

It’s the end of the world as we know it…

Published October 27, 2003

SoCal: Wild fires are raging throughout Southern California.

Last night, I was reading J. G. Ballard's Millenium People (thanks Lean, it's great!) outside on the balcony, when the Santa Ana winds whipped up suddenly, blowing hot and dry and laden with ash -- then the coyotes started howling.

It felt very much like the end of the world... freaky stuff.

Everything is covered in ash; the air smells of wood smoke; the sun is a minute cent-at-arm's-length red disc; everything is lit in a very odd reddish-orange tint. And the nearest fire is 30 or so miles away. I'd hate to see what they're like up close...

Somehow I missed all this in Australia... I hear Sydney was like this for a week over Christmas that year.

Some links:

It’s the end of the world as we know it…

Published October 27, 2003

Wild fires are raging throughout Southern California.

Last night, I was reading J. G. Ballard's Millenium People (thanks Lean, it's great!) outside on the balcony, when the Santa Ana winds whipped up suddenly, blowing hot and dry and laden with ash -- then the coyotes started howling.

It felt very much like the end of the world... freaky stuff.

Everything is covered in ash; the air smells of wood smoke; the sun is a minute cent-at-arm's-length red disc; everything is lit in a very odd reddish-orange tint. And the nearest fire is 30 or so miles away. I'd hate to see what they're like up close...

Somehow I missed all this in Australia... I hear Sydney was like this for a week over Christmas that year.

Some links:

On the reliability of e-voting machines

Published October 23, 2003

Tech: Diebold tech support:

'I have been waiting for someone to give me an explanation as to why Precinct 216 gave Al Gore a minus 16022 when it was uploaded. Will someone please explain this so that I have the information to give the auditor instead of standing here "looking dumb".'

Wonderful.

Worst album covers ever

Published October 23, 2003

Funny: C sends along a few classic album covers taken from this site. Here's my favourites:

There's plenty more...

Worst album covers ever

Published October 23, 2003

C sends along a few classic album covers taken from this site. Here's my favourites:

There's plenty more...

Tentacle Porn has a long and illustrious history

Published October 23, 2003

Japan: The Guardian: Melbourne row over art 'porn':

'Police in Australia have investigated pornography claims against an art gallery which exhibited a painting drawn from a 19th-century woodcut by the Japanese artist Hokusai.

The painting, The Dream of the Fisherman's Wife, is by an Australian, David Laity, and is valued at £5,400. It is being shown in a Melbourne gallery. Like the 1814 original, it depicts a woman copulating with an octopus.

Katsushika Hokusai was an influential Japanese painter and woodcut designer in the 18th and 19th centuries -- more info and pictures here. (There's a great exhibition of his work on at the Chester Beatty Library in Dublin right now, which is where I caught it.)

He coined the term 'Manga' to describe a collection of sketches. Who knew he also came up with the totally bizarre 'tentacle porn' subgenre of anime?

E-Voting: ACT’s open-source e-voting system

Published October 22, 2003

Voting: I've pointed to this before, but I use taint.org partly as a searchable database of annotated bookmarks, so -- for reference -- here's the Australian Capital Territory's EVACS system, an entire, open-source e-voting system:

EVACS is the computer system that provides for electronic voting and electronic counting for ACT Legislative Assembly elections. It provides for counting according to the Hare-Clark electoral system rules set out in the Electoral Act 1992.

EVACS was written using Linux open source software to ensure appropriate transparency. A copy of the source code is available in a zip file (127 kb). The source code for the casual vacancy module is in a separate file (38 kb). For more information contact Software Improvements.

Still not perfect -- it uses electronic ballot stations, instead of paper ballots -- but it does support paper ballots. And it's open source; note the keyword above -- 'appropriate transparency'. They said it, not me ;)

Tentacle Porn has a long and illustrious history

Published October 22, 2003

The Guardian: Melbourne row over art 'porn':

'Police in Australia have investigated pornography claims against an art gallery which exhibited a painting drawn from a 19th-century woodcut by the Japanese artist Hokusai.

The painting, The Dream of the Fisherman's Wife, is by an Australian, David Laity, and is valued at £5,400. It is being shown in a Melbourne gallery. Like the 1814 original, it depicts a woman copulating with an octopus.

Katsushika Hokusai was an influential Japanese painter and woodcut designer in the 18th and 19th centuries -- more info and pictures here. (There's a great exhibition of his work on at the Chester Beatty Library in Dublin right now, which is where I caught it.)

He coined the term 'Manga' to describe a collection of sketches. Who knew he also came up with the totally bizarre 'tentacle porn' subgenre of anime?

SF film tip: ‘The Revolution Will Not Be Televised’

Published October 22, 2003

Movies: Inhabitants of San Francisco! Or people nearby who fancy watching a great documentary! According to the SFGate.com Morning Fix, the Castro theater will be showing the amazing documentary The Revolution Will Not Be Televised between Oct 24-30.

I've blogged this before, but quick recap: it's an incredible movie documenting what happened in the Venezuelan Presidential Palace on April 11th 2002, when President Hugo Chavez was briefly deposed by a coup d'etat. It covers the entire period, and amazingly has pretty-much full access to everything that Chavez, his cabinet, and his loyal soldiers did and said. A sample:

'On the day of the coup, we only began realising what was actually going on when the state TV signal was cut. Up until then, people had been shot and there was a terrible sense of confusion, but still the reality of what was taking place hadn't exactly sunk in. Then later that night, the media started saying that Chavez had fled to Cuba and that he had resigned, when in fact he was in the palace -- and so were we. It became clear then that something very calculated and sinister was unfolding.'

Really, it's well worth watching. Due to its comments on the actions, and spin, of the current US administration, Harry Knowles reckons it'll never get a public release in the US outside a film festival (and I'd agree) -- so you're going to have to watch it in a lefty theater or nothing.

(BTW the website needs some work though -- it uses the horrible 'reinventing the scrollbar' DHTML trick, urgh.)

On ‘Intellectual Property’

Published October 22, 2003

Patents: One thing that gets pretty confusing when one investigates the whole patents/open-source/copyright protection field, is the nature of the term Intellectual Property.

What's called 'IP' consists of three parts: copyright, patents, and trademarks. This extract from Harvard's 'Intellectual Property in Cyberspace' series notes:

In the eighteenth century, lawyers and politicians were more likely to refer to patents and copyrights as 'monopolies' than they were to refer to them as forms of 'property.' ... Thomas Jefferson was the most prominent adherent of this view, but many others shared his attitude to varying degrees. ....

Another, more general manifestation of the same trend has been the growing power of the phrase 'intellectual property.' Before the Second World War, use of the phrase as shorthand for copyrights, patents, trademarks, and related entitlements was rare. Since that time, it has become steadily more common. n105 Today, it is the standard way for lawyers and law teachers to refer to the field.

Why does the popularity of the term matter? The answer ... is that legal discourse has power. Specifically, the use of the term 'property' to describe copyrights, patents, trademarks, etc. conveys the impression that they are fundamentally 'like' interests in land or tangible personal property -- and should be protected with the same generous panoply of remedies. ....

Regrettably, the pleas by Cohen and a few others that judges jettison the concept of 'property' and frankly confront the public policy implications of protecting certain kinds of information fell largely on deaf ears. The 'propertization' of the field continued -- and is now well-nigh complete.

It's common to read commentary by outsiders -- journalists especially -- who conflate all three forms of 'IP', and therefore assuming that all three should be considered as 'equal' to physical property. In other words, they fall into this trap.

In reality, a trademark should have much more protection than a patent; copyright over 'bits' is not the same thing as physical ownership of atoms; the concept of the public domain is a whole lot different between 'things' and 'bits'; there's a difference.

To this end, this disclaimer from the UN World Summit on the Information Society is very significant; they've recognised these issues.

This working group has come to recognize that the term 'intellectual property rights' carries bias and encourages simplistic overgeneralization. Therefore this working group does not carry the name IPR. In particular, this group does not endorse the legal school of thought, which advocates that productions of the mind shall be treated in a similar way as real estate property. This legal doctrine implicitly backs the concept that copyrights should last for ever.

Nice work! (thanks to Russell McOrmond and Seth Johnson for noting it.)

Meld for graphical merging

Published October 22, 2003

Software: Great LWN weekly edition last Friday; not only is there a very nice article about SpamAssassin, debunking the 'open spam filtering rules considered harmful' myth, but there's a great tool tip: Meld, a new graphical merging tool.

Basically, when you have two pieces of text, and want to merge them together into one, you need a merge tool. This is a tricky job; most people just get the tool to stick them all in one file, CVS-style, and try to figure it out visually. It's fraught with problems.

Hence the idea of using a GUI to ease the task. There have been other graphical merge tools before; I know of the proprietary one bundled with ClearCase, and tkdiff. However, both of these just aren't very good -- it's quite simply too hard to figure out exactly what direction which piece of text came from.

Looks like meld is a fantastic effort to fix this; take a look at the screenshots. The key is the approach they've taken of having a drawable area in the middle between the two differing texts; this is used for lines and graphical indications of what came from where. It really seems to work, from what I can see.

Dodgy computer games studies

Published October 21, 2003

Science: A lab rat writes up a report on his participation in two psychology studies on 'Video Game Violence' and 'Violence In the Media.'

Sadly, it seems clear that the video-game violence study will return biased results due to flawed test conditions.

Of the three games played, the most violent -- a first-person shooter -- was modified, either through incompetence or deliberate tweaking, to use frustrating control settings and a high level of difficulty; whereas the least violent -- a sim game -- was set up with all the defaults and automatic help enabled.

In my experience, frustration, in any task, has a direct correlation with anger levels. So a frustrating game, violent or not, will probably give more aggressive responses in a violence measurement -- hence the FPS game above will almost definitely be cited as 'inciting violent emotions'.

Bad scientists! No doctorate!

PS: hmm, I wonder if the paper will document the exact configuration
of the games?

Linux: Happy birthday, KDE! I love it. Most recent discovery: the excellent support for printing in KDE 3.1 using the kprinter GUI.

Control your life support via the Internet!

Published October 20, 2003

Security: Romania Emerges As Nexus of Cybercrime (AP). Contains this glorious nightmare scenario:

BUCHAREST, Romania - It was nearly 70 degrees below zero outside, but the e-mail on a computer at the South Pole Research Center sent a different kind of chill through the scientists inside.

'I've hacked into the server. Pay me off or I'll sell the station's data to another country and tell the world how vulnerable you are,' the message warned.

Proving it was no hoax, the message included scientific data showing the extortionist had roamed freely around the server, which controlled the 50 researchers' life-support systems.

One question: why was an internet-connected computer controlling the life support systems? eeek.

Control your life support via the Internet!

Published October 20, 2003

Romania Emerges As Nexus of Cybercrime (AP). Contains this glorious nightmare scenario:

BUCHAREST, Romania - It was nearly 70 degrees below zero outside, but the e-mail on a computer at the South Pole Research Center sent a different kind of chill through the scientists inside.

'I've hacked into the server. Pay me off or I'll sell the station's data to another country and tell the world how vulnerable you are,' the message warned.

Proving it was no hoax, the message included scientific data showing the extortionist had roamed freely around the server, which controlled the 50 researchers' life-support systems.

One question: why was an internet-connected computer controlling the life support systems? eeek.

Compare and Contrast

Published October 20, 2003

Politics: Eli Lilly wants it both ways. First off pro-free-market:

Not many U.S. companies would put 'maintenance of free market' at the top of their worry list, but the pharmaceutical industry has genuine reasons for concern.

But then, anti-free-market!:

Starting immediately, if a Canadian wholesaler tries to order more Lilly product than Lilly's estimate of what is appropriate for Canadian use, 'they will not be able to have it,' Smith said.