(Things I found interesting recently.)
So Larry Flynt, the publisher of Hustler, is running for CA governor. Yeah, ha ha very funny. But Dan Lyke points out his ad parodies gallery:
That last one even comes with a Stalin quote: 'The people who cast the votes don't decide an election; the people who count the votes do.' !!
Weblog link: he links to Robot Wisdom, which I hadn't realised had restarted.
Music: I've just stumbled across Ladytron on EMusic a couple of weeks
ago, and they've totally taken over my playlist.
They're kind of over-cool electro stuff in the style of Air, but with much more in the way of 80s-style synth noises. Massively over-cool: it seems the name is from a tune from Roxy Music's first album, this interview has them namechecking 'The Andromeda Strain' and 'Logan's Run', and virtually every tune is heavily Kraftwerky.
Still, I'm hooked... one note though: IMO, the first album, 604, is much better than the difficult second. AudioGalaxy seems to have a copy of ' Play Girl' from 604 -- give it a listen.
Recommended tracks: I'm With The Pilots and Discotraxx -- Paco! is worth a listen too, it includes the theme tune to Are You Being Served, believe it or not. ;)
I like YAML. It now has a nifty YAML in Five Minutes tutorial, and (woo!) Fit Tests.
NYT: What's in Iraq rumor mill?
BAGHDAD As a U.S. soldier peered out of a passing tank, a young engineering student and a retired accountant contemplated one of the more common questions on the streets of Baghdad: Did the soldier's wraparound sunglasses give him X-ray vision?
'With those glasses, he can definitely see through women's clothes,' said the engineering student, Samer Hamid. 'It makes me angry. We are afraid to take our families out on the street.'
Date: Thu, 07 Aug 2003 16:07:41 +0100
From: "Martin Adamson" (spam-protected)
To: (spam-protected)
Subject: What's in Iraq rumor mill? X-ray vision and air-conditioned
vests
> >From the New York Times
What's in Iraq rumor mill? X-ray vision and air-conditioned vests
John Tierney/NYT The New York Times
Thursday, August 7, 2003
BAGHDAD As a U.S. soldier peered out of a passing tank, a young engineering student and a retired accountant contemplated one of the more common questions on the streets of Baghdad: Did the soldier's wraparound sunglasses give him X-ray vision?
"With those glasses, he can definitely see through women's clothes," said the engineering student, Samer Hamid. "It makes me angry. We are afraid to take our families out on the street."
The retired accountant, Hekmet Tinber Hassan, smiled and said it was a baseless rumor, just like the widespread story that Saddam Hussein had been secretly working for America and was now at a CIA safe house. "I do not believe Saddam is in America," Hassan said. "I heard he went to Tel Aviv."
Just as truth is the first casualty of war, urban legends seem to be the first creation of a military occupation, especially when the cultural gap is as wide as it is here. After life under Saddam, people here are accustomed to conspiracy theories and ready to believe the worst about anyone in power.
Of course, Americans have been circulating their own kinds of legends, starting with the fantasies a few months ago that the occupying troops would be peacefully welcomed by a country of grateful flower-waving citizens. There have been more guns than flowers.
In the urban legends flourishing here, the soldiers triumphed thanks to Saddam's treachery and to U.S. technology. The legend about the X-ray sunglasses may have evolved from reports about the soldiers' night-vision goggles, or maybe just from the imposing Terminator image of the soldiers.
Compared with the residents, who cope with the fierce heat by staying in the shade and dressing in light clothes and sandals, the soldiers have the look of robotic aliens as they patrol in the midday sun wearing combat boots, helmets and armored vests.
Some Iraqis say the troops take special pills that keep them cool, but the most common theory is that they have portable air-conditioners - usually said to be inside the vests, but sometimes placed in the helmet or even the underwear.
"There is fluid circulating throughout the underwear," said Hamid, the engineering student. "I am not sure of the exact mechanism, but we all know the Americans have very sophisticated technology."
Aadel Delli, the owner of a food market in central Baghdad, said he did not believe the air-conditioned-uniform stories, which he attributed to popular doubts about Americans' capacity for discomfort. "Most Iraqis thought the American soldiers would be gone by now because they could never stand the summer in Iraq," he said.
Soldiers have tried dispelling the myths about their gear by letting Iraqis touch their vests and try on their glasses, but some legends will not die.
"I let a kid put on my sunglasses, and he was still convinced they had X-ray vision," said Sergeant Stephen Roach, a soldier from Lufkin, Texas "He kept saying to me, 'Turn it on, turn it on."'
When they are not peering through women's clothes, the male soldiers are said to be groping underneath the clothes during searches at checkpoints, supposedly provoking some of the attacks on soldiers. (Never mind the absence of evidence for this theory.)
Other versions of the ugly-American stories have the soldiers drinking beer inside their tanks near mosques. They have been accused in the Arab press of using pages from the Koran for toilet paper and of giving children candy packets containing pornography.
The rumors became so numerous that Al Sabah, a new daily paper run by Iraqis with financial backing from the Coalition Provisional Authority, the U.S.-run administrative organization, printed a supplement debunking them. "It will take awhile for people to reject the conspiracy theories," said its editor, Ismael Zayer. "Under Saddam, people had to depend on rumor because they could not trust the media."
Frustration seems to feed many of the rumors. Why would the builders of smart bombs and X-ray sunglasses take longer to restore power than Saddam did after the 1991 Gulf War? The Americans must be withholding electricity as revenge for the attacks on soldiers.
For all the frustration, there remains some admiration for the occupiers, as seen on teenagers like Zahra Thaer, 13, who was wearing a new pair of wraparound sunglasses. "These are the latest style," she said. Did she believe the soldiers' glasses gave them X-ray vision?
"I am not so sure about their sunglasses," she said. "But I know about the helmet. Inside each helmet is a map showing the soldier the location of every house in Iraq. My friends at school told me about it."
The New York Times
Nathan Cochrane writes in The Age: 'Opponents of a Canadian company's patent to tax online transactions believe they can stop it before it is granted by the Australian patents office.' This is the DE Technologies patent I blogged about before, which they hope to license under some hefty terms; 'annual licence fees of $US10,000 ($A15,324) each, plus 1.5 per cent a transaction and $0.11 cents each time a document, such as an invoice, is generated.'
At FightThePatent.co.nz, they note that the NZ government plans to amend its patent law to make it much harder to file such patents in future. They also link to another Age article which says the patent has already been granted in Oz as of 'February of this year, according to IP Australia'.
An Aussie tech executive called Matthew Tutaki is planning to try and have it quashed. The situation can be followed on FightThePatent.co.nz. Unfortunately, in turn it seems DE Technologies are planning to fight back.
Good Wired article on the subject:
A security flaw at a website operated by the purveyors of penis-enlargement pills has provided the world with a depressing answer to the question: Who in their right mind would buy something from a spammer? An order log left exposed at one of Amazing Internet Products' websites revealed that, over a four-week period, some 6,000 people responded to e-mail ads and placed orders for the company's Pinacle herbal supplement. Most customers ordered two bottles of the pills at a price of $50 per bottle.
And check this out for bizarre:
An investigation ... last month revealed that Bournival's mentor and business partner is Davis Wolfgang Hawke, a chess expert and former neo-Nazi leader who turned to the spam business in 1999 after it became public that his father was Jewish.
Guardian: Now which way back to the car?: 'From Exmoor to the Yorkshire Dales and the Scottish borders, naked ramblers are being spotted up and down the country. What's going on?'
A good day for North Atlantic Skyline; Glebe stone circle, a massive wind farm in Mayo supplying 7% of Ireland's total energy needs, and some photos from the old Marconi station in Clifden. Recommended.
Derek has an interesting suggestion for IBM:
Grab a controlling interest, tell the senior management to sod off, tell the employees to clear out their cubicles, and clear up any hint of IP confusion by selling to IBM for $1 all intellectual property, and then dissolve the corporation entirely with their 50.1% voting share.
IBM has to be careful not to actually buy the company, but strictly be a majority shareholder, making decisions that are in the majority of the shareholders' interests, even if the other 49.9% of the shareholders vehemently oppose them. :-)
Golden parachutes for senior execs? Good luck getting them from that non-existent corporation, and since IBM never actually 'bought' the corporation, it's not liable for any contracts/debts/etc. SCO may have incurred. It gets all the benefit of running SCO and none of the downside.
Gotta say, I like it. ;)
Someday, Ben will set us up the blog, and there will be much rejoicing. In the meantime, I can only quote this one in full, as he hits it on the head:
OK, I know you find this the most boring thing ever and would prefer to find new ways of air-conditioning your chipsets, but, come on! The human drama is nigh Shakespearean.
This guy is pretty good:
http://radio.weblogs.com/0120124/
But, really, RHAT's filing stands alone. It's a thing of beauty, as 27-page legal filings go. They give them both barrels; failing business, FUD, insider stock dumping ...
http://lwn.net/images/ns/rh-complaint.pdf
ben
Trustic: 'We regret to inform you that we are no longer taking registrations and will soon be closing the service. We have determined that the system as it currently is designed will not achieve the level of accuracy that we require, and an inaccurate system is worse than no system.'
'The DNS blocklist will remain for a couple of weeks, but it has been configured to never return a match. Please reconfigure your mail servers to not query the blocklist.'
That's a shame...
Joe St. Sauver's excellent presentation on open proxies has been updated. Interesting snippet: Morpheus 3.2 -- the filesharing app -- is shipping with proxy support. P2P Networks Try to Throw RIAA Off Their Trail (AtNewYork.com):
Morpheus will offer its users the option of connecting to its network via a public proxy server (define). A proxy server acts as an intermediary between two Internet users so that one user does not know the identity of the other. Morpheus won't be hosting the proxy servers but will instead direct users to a 'worldwide network' of public proxies.
iMesh apparently may also include this support, too, in an upcoming version.
Wired: Finding Bad Spam Delights Geeks:
When freelance Web developer Joe Stump first installed the e-mail filtering program SpamAssassin, he and a friend started a competition. Each day, the two would look through their junk e-mail and try to find the missive that SpamAssassin had assigned the highest score.
'It was always a little contest between the two of us,' says Stump. 'We were always trying to tweak and modify the settings to get it just right. I finally won the contest when I got a spam with a score of 43.'
The points system has really been popular -- as Joe Stump says -- 'geeks love numbers'. Screengrabs of the SpamAssassin website on Sky News, ABC, and now this! (thanks to Tim Schutte for the pointer.)
Linux: Wonder what the Ximian guys are blogging about? Ha ha, very funny.
Mark Pilgrim: How to install Windows in 5 hours or less.
Tim O'Reilly on parallels between OSS and the mainframe days. 'We so often trace our antecedents back simply to the Unix heritage, or the Lisp hacker heritage. But when I've talked to IBM old-timers, they make clear just how many of the social dynamics and collaborative software development paradigms of the early mainframe era resemble the open source tradition.' Interesting...
Humour: Chris recently set us up the blog -- and kicks it off with this SCO 419 parody: 'I AM MR. DARL MCBRIDE CURRENTLY SERVING AS THE PRESIDENT AND CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER OF THE SCO GROUP, FORMERLY KNOWN AS CALDERA SYSTEMS INTERNATIONAL, IN LINDON, UTAH, UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. I KNOW THIS LETTER MIGHT SURPRISE YOUR BECAUSE WE HAVE HAD NO PREVIOUS COMMUNICATIONS OR BUSINESS DEALINGS BEFORE NOW.' On the roll!
Ben mails on this Yahoo! link: 'U.S. Central Command released these digitally enhanced photographs of what former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein might look like'. As he notes, let's face it, it's crying out for the SomethingAwful Photoshop Phriday treatment. However, I'm too cheap to have an SA forum account. Anyone got one and care to suggest it?
ah, Donncha reminisces about the Commodore 64 demo scene.
I was involved too, around 1987, coding demos as 'Mantis' for XS -- a pretty little known group. I wrote 2 really great demos, Rhaphanadosis, and another name I can't quite remember ;), but they don't seemed to have survived, which is a shame...
so Athlon XP CPUs run pretty hot at full speed all the time, and my PC makes lots of noise as a result. I have a temperature-sensitive CPU fan, so reducing the CPU temp will reduce noise, too.
A while back, I came across this doc, the Athlon Powersaving HOWTO, which contains a great tip -- namely a way to put the processor in 'STPGNT Mode' (Stop Grant Mode), which disconnects it from the FSB and turns off parts of the CPU when not in use.
It works perfectly, in most respects, although the Ensoniq 5880 onboard sound chip goes crazy when it's active, as it can't deal with the changed timings from the CPU. But when I'm playing music, I can't hear the fans anyway ;)
The details -- to keep it brief, just take a look at the commands for my chipset as described here. I'm using ACPI in the kernel anyway, since I'm using software suspend-to-disk as well.
blah blah SCO v IBM blah. Never mind all that -- LWN points out some interesting share trading while all this waffles on. And the Google ads have something to say about it, too... ;)
I've been reading Crooked Timber recently; a good literate weblog. Today's interesting post, from Kieran Healy: Frustration is not a Strategy. Well worth a read for some context on today's Middle East, and the fundamental problem with those 'kill 'em all' proposals that keep cropping up from the hawks.
Blogs: Nathan Cochrane, Aussie journalist for The Age and writer of a very interesting weblog -- has won quite a lot of money on a TV gameshow! I think the term is 'goodonyamate', if I recall correctly ;)
(Pity he couldn't have fixed the BlogShares listing first though.)
NYT: Diverging Estimates of the Costs of Spam. The article points out how the analyst company estimates of the cost of spam widely diverge. That's reasonable -- in fact, that's analysts for you. Some great data in there, too.
But then we get to this glorious quote:
Peter S. Fader, a marketing professor at the Wharton School who has studied e-mail, says the research firms' estimates vastly overstate the actual cost of spam. ... He also argues that the computers and networks that are being installed to deal with spam will be a powerful resource for processing legitimate e-mail, once spam filters and economic Darwinism tame the spam epidemic.
'Spam, although it is a bad thing per se, is fostering the growth of the e-mail infrastructure,' he said.
Yeah -- in the same way that arson 'fosters the growth' of the firefighting infrastructure. Wow.
Ireland: I've just heard about the 'no fares' day of protest by CIE's unions. It seems the unions, rather than closing up shop for the day as would be traditional, decided to take a much more consumer-friendly approach; instead of shutting down the normal public transport services, they ran them for free. Genius.
RTE reported that 'tens of thousands of people' travelled for free, and Iarnrod Eireann said that 'there has been a notable rise in passenger numbers on some inter-city trains to Dublin as people take advantage of free travel.' Now that's an effective way to strike...
So for the past few weeks, I've been getting a lot less spam -- like about 1/3 to 1/4 of the normal volume -- to my jmason.org account.
I didn't have a clue why; occasionally I mused that some spam gangs must have figured out that I needed all that spam to develop SpamAssassin, and cutting down on my volume would mean that I'd have to schlep stuff out of the spamtraps (which is a bit of a chore), so they'd unsubscribed me to cause some minor hassle ;)
In reality, what had happened was that my old secondary MX -- which was secondarying for me because nobody had gotten around to updating it -- had finally been updated, and was no longer accepting mail for jmason.org. So I had only one MX, and the erstwhile backup was bouncing anything it saw, immediately.
Lots of spamtools relay spam via the secondary MX -- not sure why, we think it's working on the assumption that secondaries are less likely to have effective filters.
So basically a good 2/3 to 3/4 of my spam was being sent to a machine that immediately bounced it ;)
The upshot: if you get a lot of spam, and don't really care if you might occasionally lose real mail if your primary MXes are down, you could always set up a 'fake' secondary MX record. The spamtools will happily attempt to send spam to you via that machine (which may not even exist), and then give up after the first bounce -- missing you entirely.
Big caveat: I wouldn't suggest this for situations where your mail delivery needs to be reliable, though. Primary MXes do go down occasionally ;)
So a little more investigation shows that the massive numbers of IPs spamming my referrer logs (like 1000 different IPs every day), are not open proxies as I at first thought; I tested 130, and none had any of the well-known proxy ports open.
My current guess is that they're malware, such as those 'ad banner spyware' programs, and the makers of that software must be doing deals with spam companies to set up the spyware to periodically load URLs in order to referrer-spam for the spam bureau's customers.
In this case, all the spammed URLs are owned and registered by one porn operation, which is either operating from Switzerland (according to the tech contact info) or Los Angeles (according to the DNS info in whois). (More likely the latter.)
All the IPs doing the spam page loads, are running on Windows XP and Windows 2000 systems as far as I can see, with ports 1025 and 5000 open, so alternatively, maybe they're trojaned... but there doesn't seem to be any good evidence indicating that. (those ports are reasonably innocuous.)
Anyone got any ideas? Here's some sample access_log lines for 100 IPs, gzipped, if anyone wants to check them out.
Googlebot using open proxies? Somehow, I doubt it. An interesting snippet from the access logs again. (Some details rewritten to avoid boosting PageRank.)
220.73.165.14 - - [25/Jul/2003:04:42:14 +0100] "GET /someurl/foo HTTP/1.0" 2147483647 0 "http://www dot gay-sex-men dot net/" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1)" 220.73.165.14 - - [25/Jul/2003:09:04:17 +0100] "GET /someurl/foo HTTP/1.0" 2147483647 0 "http://www dot gay-sex-men dot net/" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.0; Windows 98; DigExt)" 220.73.165.14 - - [25/Jul/2003:09:15:28 +0100] "GET /someurl/foo HTTP/1.0" 2147483647 0 "http://www dot baitbus dot ws/" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.0; Windows 98; DigExt)" 220.73.165.14 - - [25/Jul/2003:09:18:11 +0100] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.0" 200 130 "-" "GoogleBot" 220.73.165.14 - - [25/Jul/2003:09:27:57 +0100] "GET /someurl/foo HTTP/1.0" 2147483647 0 "http://www dot blowjobs-cumshots dot net/" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows 98)" 220.73.165.14 - - [25/Jul/2003:13:18:04 +0100] "GET /someurl/foo HTTP/1.0" 2147483647 0 "http://www dot hot-legs dot info/" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows 98; Win 9x 4.90)"
Some excellent 'oddly enough' stories:
Giant dog-eating catfish dies: a story mourning the death of Kuno, a 5-foot-long catfish living in the lake at Volksgarten Park in Moenchengladbach, Germany. It's presumed he died due to a local heatwave and the resulting low water level. 'Kuno became a local celebrity in 2001 when he sprang from the waters of the lake to swallow a Dachshund puppy whole.' I had a run-in with giant catfish before; mind you, a bit nearer to their natural habitat, and with less pet ingestion involved.
Catfish are in the news it seems; this NYT editorial is relevant, if a bit depressing. 'The next time a ... delegation sets off to preach the dogma of free trade abroad, poor nations would be within their rights to thumb their noses.'
Yahoo! India: Holding severed head in place, he defied death: van driver has road accident, then: 'His head almost severed, blood oozing and eyes popping out, Balram was in a dazed state when the accident took place... He, however, kept his head attached to his body with some cloth. When no one came to help him, he drove his own vehicle for 30 km to reach a nursing home in Agra.' Now that's grit!
More sex than splendour on academy's Aztec holiday: 'When Andrew Humphrey entered a competition run by the venerable Royal Academy to win a week experiencing Aztec culture first-hand, he might have expected a genteel tour of the ruins around Mexico City, perhaps taking in the famous floating gardens of Xochimilco. Instead, he found himself tasting contemporary Mexican culture at a notorious adults-only resort with nudity, a 'sexy pool' and 'adult' shows.'
(All picked up via the forteana mailing list BTW.)
The Killer Elite (Rolling Stone):
The twenty-two-year-old driver, Cpl. Joshua Ray Person, and the vehicle team leader, twenty-eight-year-old Sgt. Brad Colbert -- both Afghan War veterans -- have already reached a profound conclusion about this campaign: that the battlefield that is Iraq is filled with 'fucking retards.'
Later on:
Captain America, the platoon commander who is almost universally disrespected by the enlisted men, seems to deal with the stress by rising to a state of jabbering incoherence. Up by the bridge there are four enemy dead scattered under the eucalyptus trees, along with piles of munitions -- RPGs, AKs and hand grenades. Captain America runs back and forth, picking up their weapons, hurling them into the nearby canal and screaming at the top of his lungs. No one knows what he's screaming about or why, but as another officer who came upon this scene later concluded, 'Whatever he was doing, he was not being in command.'
Fantastic series of articles, well worth a read. (Found on stuff.) Similar to this, here's an unauthorized weblog from a soldier on duty in Iraq -- the inside story.
Spam: Good article by Vipul on spam filtering, at MIT Tech Review:
Here's a list of three rules (created after the most important features of e-mail) that anti-spam software should strive to follow:
1) Ability to send and receive e-mail from a stranger. (Whitelisting, payment systems, and challenge/response break this rule.)
2) Ability to send and receive pseudo-anonymous e-mail. (Domain-based authentication breaks this rule.)
3) E-mail should be free. (Payment systems break this rule.)
He said it. Killing off several useful legit uses of email, just to fix spam, is no good. Looks like he's started writing his blog-like thing too, again, so I'll be adding that to my 'roll (assuming it stays updated! ;) No RSS yet though...
Great report auditing the security features of the Diebold e-voting systems. Summary: what security?
despite using relatively 'smart' smartcards, they don't actually get those cards to perform an authentication task; they're just used as 'dumb' memory cards, and there's no central online database of valid card IDs. Plus, the same write password is used for all smartcards.
So they really might as well have used formatted floppy disks ;) Duplicating cards (a card is a voting opportunity, 'vote early, vote often') would be pretty easy, from the sounds of it.
amazingly, the software does not record the 'voter serial number' that appears on the card, when a voter casts a vote. So again, duplicating the cards is trivial. Bizarre.
all that is required to extract the PIN from an administrator card is a smartcard reader; the PIN is immediately sent in the clear as soon as the card is inserted and the terminal-card protocol initiates.
for storage on the internal writable media, between voting and the final upload operation, the logs and votes are encrypted using single DES in CBC mode, with a single shared initialization vector. IMO this is not a big deal as far as I can see, as that's only stored on the hardware; and if someone can read/write to that, they can subvert the WinCE OS anyway.
Then the kicker:
the votes are then decrypted before being sent in the clear over a dialup internet connection.
The mind boggles.
The Guardian reports that fake-news genius Chris Morris is collaborating on a new show with Charlie Brooker:
This has led to persistent rumours on internet talkboards and gossip sites that the show will be based around TVGoHome's character Nathan Barley.
Barley, the star of a fictional TVGoHome docusoap, is a loathsome public school educated, Hoxton-dwelling new media type, obsessed with gadgets and extreme sports.
But given Morris's fondness for windups and spoofs, this could just as easily be a red herring.
Apparently, Morris and Brooker have collaborated before on smaller segments. Whatever it is, I'm all for it. Fact times Importance equals News!
Gross: The Indian 'fly boy' has doctors baffled. 'Doctors carried out a cystoscopy to clear the boy's urinary tract, but the treatment has failed because two more flies emerged out of his penis on Monday.' (aaargh)
So, it seems the referrer-log spamming is getting worse. The earlier attempts all used a limited set of IPs; probably the real source machines.
However, the latest crop are now relaying through open proxies. Out of a sample size of 10 random IPs, every one was a proxy listed in the OPM blacklist.
The URLs being spamvertised are all pr0n; lots of .ws and .biz hits with pretty colourful names. Take a look here, under any of the top 5 hits. They're outnumbering the legit hits by about 20 to 1.
BTW, it's now pretty clear the practice of referrer-spamming is intended to gain Googlejuice; plenty of other sites have noticed it too. It's worth noting that in my case, it won't work -- my log pages are all off-limits to the Googlebot for quite a while, but the referrer spammers haven't figured this out yet...
Some notes:
perlcoders.com, openproxies.com,
cgifactory.net, so steer clear of those sites.
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; MSN 6.1; MSNbMSFT; MSNmen-ca; MSNc00; v5m)
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SC/5.10/1.14/Telenor; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1)
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows 98; Wanadoo 5.6)
My guess is they just took a large list of legit user agents, and used that.
I've now left them a few little surprises ;)
The Field Guide To Spam, by Dr. John Graham-Cumming of POPFile; seems to be a continuation of his 'Spammer's Compendium' talk at the Spam Conference. Lots of examples of filter-evasion tricks used in spam, with a brief description, example, and categorization.
Worth noting some SpamAssassin dogma here: these may seem to be a good way to evade filters. However, since they are tricks that spam uses, and non-spam mail does not, they then make excellent spam signatures -- and the spammers effectively just give us yet another way to identify their spam. ;)
Hacking: 
Fusor.net is a community of mad
scientists amateur fusion researchers, building nuclear fusion
devices in their garages and basements. They're not quite
self-sustaining yet, but they're definitely working on it.
In the meantime, some pretty pictures of poissors, buggle jets, and fusion stars here. Thanks to Mr. FoRK for posting a link to this... amazing.
Gary Robinson points to an announcement of a new music service, BuyMusic.com -- the announcement notes 'users of the service will not necessarily have the freedom afforded customers of ... iTunes ... to transfer the music purchased to multiple computers and portable devices, or to burn it to compact discs.'
How do companies like this get funding? Surely it's obvious that people are not going to sign up for services where they are stuck with crippled DRMware, and don't actually get to own what they buy. 'Here's a car. Oh BTW -- you're only permitted to drive this within 5 miles of your home, it'll conk out if you go any further.'
I suppose it's hardly surprising, but BuyMusic.com informs me that my browser and OS are not welcome, in a surreal throwback to 1999. Ho hum, I'll stick with EMusic, thanks...
In other news, I've just signed up for a mailing list called geowanking. Official: best name ever!
A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy. Clay Shirky does a fantastic job of wrapping up pretty much every important social software site on the 'net in the last 15 years, all into one neat, tidy paper, then making a few comments that make sense. recommended...
League of Extraordinary Gentlemen spam, forwarded by Joe McNally:
From: 'Allan Quartermain' cids@sexualmarketing.com
Subject: ADV: See all of the LXG stars NAKED! - Must Be 18 Years or Older
To: ' ' zzzzzzzz@zzzzzzzz.co.uk
Joe says: 'what, ALL of them? Brrr.'
Whoa: 'This spring, Microsoft dropped the price of Windows CE and completely opened its embedded operating system to developers, allowing them for the first time to not only view and modify CE, but also sell products that incorporated the customized code.'
Really? So WinCE developers can modify and then rebuild and sell WinCE with code changes? That's a big deal. It's kind of unavoidable, though. That close to the metal is virtually impossible without source IMO.
this story has been mailed 120 times since it was posted on Yahoo! UK at 11:30 AM GMT yesterday. Which is it? Yep, it's 'masturbating may protect against prostate cancer', premiered at New Scientist. Most mailed/blogged story ever, I'd guess!
For some reason I didn't post this to the blog on Wednesday when it came out, instead posting it to another list. But talking about it with some mates last night, they noted this snippet:
The team speculates that infections caused by intercourse may increase the risk of prostate cancer. 'Had we been able to remove ejaculations associated with sexual intercourse, there should have been an even stronger protective effect of other ejaculations,' they suggest.
Interesting!
So I had to edit a Word doc. Left it for a few minutes, the network connection died, so I tried to save it somewhere else.
Foolishly, I did this by hitting File->Exit, knowing (ha!) that I could save it on the way out. All well and good -- until something in Word decided it required the old copy of the doc to save the new one -- even though that was in memory, since I could scroll around it etc. (it wasn't a very long doc).
So it refused to let me save until I restored the network connection. I couldn't be bothered doing that, so I hit Cancel on that 'please restore the net connection' dialog, assuming it'd let me just cut and paste the text, which is all I wanted. Guess what it did? That's right, it just exited, taking the unsaved doc with it. Argh.
I've learned my lesson. Next time, I'll stick with trusty (and sane) Vim. At least it knows how to do an Edit File UI, even if it's not quite as pretty (or featureful).
A good OCWeekly article about Irvine Meadows West -- UC Irvine's trailer park. The trailer park brings a little grit to UCI, and -- bonus! -- is apparently a good, fun place to live. Super-cheap too, at 130 dollars a month.
Unfortunately it's going to be closed and replaced with a parking lot:
To the students, many completing their doctoral theses, the trailer park is their private refuge from the master-planned sterility beyond. They see the housing department's decision to raze the park not as a bow to parking pressures, but a calculated strategy to destroy something 'outside the master plan'--a phrase that's become the residents' motto.
<
p>The New Zealand Herald reports that 'internet retailers nationwide are banding together to fight a Canadian company's demands for them to pay up or be shut down.' A Montreal-based company called DE Technologies has 'written to several e-commerce operators demanding licensing fees for use of international e-commerce processes.'
<
p> The affected ISPs and e-commerce companies are banding together to fight the patent. The NZ Ministry of Economic Development is quoted as saying 'This is a commercial matter. If people wish to dispute the validity of the patent there are mechanisms in the Patents Act (1953) for them to seek to have the patent revoked'. However, one company has received legal advice indicating that an attempt to have the patent overturned could cost up to NZ$150,000, and some background on the FightThePatent site indicates that there may also be only 12 days (or so) from today to do so.
<
p> DE Technologies' news page gives an interesting angle on their activities in NZ. It seems Ed Pool, the CEO of DET, believed in 2001 that it was 'an insult to call it a business process. To this day, no one has been able to duplicate this design.' However, it seems that by 2003, at least 40 NZ-based e-commerce outfits have now figured out the details, because that's how many legal letters his lawyers have reportedly sent. One such letter demanded a $US10,000 signing fee, a 'royalty rate' of 1.5% on every transaction, and 11 US cents for each document generated.
Worth noting that the patent has also been granted in Singapore and the US -- where it apparently caused a public outcry and was raised on the Senate floor as an example of a 'bad patent', before it was granted anyway.
Astor Cube: 'One of the most prominent landmarks in the East Village in Manhattan is a statue of a giant steel cube. The cube was built at Astor Place in 1968, and has stood there ever since. (jm: apparently it's called 'The Alamo' by Tony Rosenthal.) .... in true All Too Flat style, we decided the plain black cube would look nicer as the world's largest Rubik's Cube!' (link via MemeFirst)
Congrats to Craig and Erica! Sounds like there was quite a lot of work involved for Erica -- ouch -- but the end result looks very cute.
Good choice of name, too -- my friends Tom and Colette will be tickled by this one, given that they've named their son 'Evan', and their daughter 'Alice' ;)
Tube Rules -- lessons in London Underground etiquette. My favourite: don't wear massive backpacks.
Dave Malone on broken time-sync software. It seems Tardis, the popular Windows time-syncing software, used HTTP to get a trustworthy timestamp. OK, that's pretty bad -- using TCP/IP against a webserver to try and get a usable time -- it'll be several seconds off in most cases, and is pretty suboptimal in general.
But at least they set up their own server, instead of glomming off someone else's bandwidth and CPU, right? Nope -- they used a server at maths.tcd.ie, along with only 2 others worldwide. And they used GET. And they didn't send a User-Agent header. And the server wasn't even a public time server since 1996 anyway.
All seems well now -- Dave instituted a policy of returning '1999' as the date, and hopefully everyone has noticed by now. ;)
Yahoo!: Finns Scratch Heads Over N.Korea Porn Claim:
HELSINKI (Reuters) - Finnish officials were at a loss to explain an allegation made on Thursday by a U.S. official that North Korea has been caught trying to sell pornography in the small Nordic country. 'It sounds strange. It sounds wild,' an official at the Foreign Ministry told Reuters.
U.S. Ambassador to Australia Tom Schieffer made the comments earlier on Thursday to the National Press Club in Canberra, saying North Korea was using a 'mafia-like' business model to make up a revenue shortfall when the Soviet Union collapsed in the early 1990s.
Found on MemeFirst, which looks like a pretty nifty site. Now to see if I can rig up RSS for it. One of the MemeFirst culprits seems to be Stefan Geens, who also has a blog; he reviews 'How The Irish Saved Civilization' in fine style, comparing the annotations of the medieval Hibernian monks to blogging. hmm...
He's stuck in Dublin, right now, trying to figure out a way to get hold of some bandwidth. I wish him luck.
Scary stuff -- the techie details of the trojan discussed in the NYT article today -- Reverse-Proxy Spam Trojan - Migmaf (LURHQ):
LURHQ was able to obtain a copy of the trojan - detected from suspicious activity originating from a VPN user on a firewall on a network we monitor. What we found was the trojan was not a webserver at all, but instead: a reverse proxy server. Instead of hosting the content on the victim's computer, the spammer instead maintained a 'master' webserver. We have dubbed this trojan 'Migmaf'.
Nathan Cochrane meets the Aussie Privacy Commissioner:
We're talking about a serious privacy vs piracy debate. On the piracy debate we're talking about management of Intellectual Property (IP). I am a person with Personal Information (PI) and if that is taken away, it is an invasion of my privacy. I would like to hear these people (IP owners) making such a lot of noise about piracy of IP talk about the protections of PI -- then they would have some credibilty. There's a pretty ugly asymmetry in the debate. Both sides need to grow up a bit and be a bit more respective of both sides of the argument.
(Nathan:) For my part, I chipped in that I think it hypocritical that IP owners will kick in my door if they suspect I am stealing their IP, but to steal my PI is just a 'business case'.
I like the 'PI' concept. Perfect timing, given this report on the new ATTBI/Comcast 'Transition Wizard'. Check out this insanity:
Any Comcast user that actually installed the Transition Wizard has given Comcast permission to do the following;
1) arbitrarily open and read your email without your knowledge and/or consent
2) perform a credit check on you and then share that info with whomever they choose
3) Perform firmware upgrades to your cable modem at their discretion, regardless of who owns it.
You also agreed not to participate in any future class action suits that may be brought against Comcast for whatever reason. You agreed to this and more when you clicked on the 'I Agree' button during the initial installation phase.
Mind you, the actual text isn't posted, so take it with a grain of salt.
Code: Danny's notes on the FIT testing OSCon talk -- that's running a test suite as a Wiki. Interesting, but I have to think about how practical it is in general. Demo here, more complex demo here.
Nathan Cochrane has a weblog. He's a clueful journo who writes about technology for The Age, the Melbourne newspaper -- thumbs up for that; I read plenty of The Age during my sojourn in Melbourne, it's the best newspaper in Oz. (Plus it recommends using Sitescooper and Plucker in their Handheld Howto page, so that's always going to get a +1 from me ;)
But anyway, a very clueful weblog; lots of good journalism straight from the source. Recommended.
LinMagAU.org: Integrating SpamAssassin with MailMan. I really must get around to getting our server upgraded to MailMan 2.1 so we can apply this; I have one list that's getting about 5-10 spams a day, and even with 'subscriber posting only' set, MM 2.0's admin interface is very clunky for dealing with that.
Does anyone know if there's a usable tool to automate Mailman admin BTW? Or give it a good UI?
When you move from one country to another, you often notice some details of the taste and texture of the local foodstuffs. For example, pretty much everything in Thailand tasted slightly fishy to my western tastebuds, due to their widespread use of nam pla, a fermented-fish sauce seasoning.
In the US, there's a very definite gooey texture and strong sugary flavour which crops up in lots of foodstuffs -- right down to salad dressings and soft drinks. Eventually I figured it out -- it's corn syrup, which isn't really used at all in Europe. According to this review of Fat Land, here's why it's everywhere:
According to Critser, a leading journalist on health and obesity, America about 30 years ago went crazy sowing corn. Determined to satisfy an American public that 'wanted what it wanted when it wanted it,' agriculture secretary Earl Butz determined to lower American food prices by ending restrictions on trade and growing. The superabundance of cheap corn that resulted inspired Japanese scientists to invent a cheap sweetener called 'high fructose corn syrup.' This sweetener made food look and taste so great that it soon found its way into everything from bread to soda pop. Researchers ignored the way the stuff seemed to trigger fat storage.
The book's thesis seems to be that corn syrup and palm oil are largely to blame for the obesity epidemic. A quick google shows up this LA Times story which covers the book in more detail:
'High-fructose corn syrup is a really low quality, really cheap sugar,' the 38-year-old (Robyn) Landis says dismissively. The syrup starts out as cornstarch, which is then made sweeter by converting some of its glucose to fructose; the more fructose in the end product, the sweeter it is. 'It is not something our bodies should be dealing with. It's completely unnatural.' She also objects to the fact that high-fructose corn syrup turns up in unlikely places, such as ketchup, baby food and baked beans. 'Even chocolate tastes more like sugar than chocolate when it is sweetened with high-fructose corn syrup,' says Landis ...
... Dr. George A. Bray, an obesity researcher and professor of medicine at Louisiana State University Medical Center, also singles out high-fructose corn syrup because the meteoric rise in its consumption closely parallels the jump in obesity rates. 'Nothing else in the food supply does this. It's a very, very striking relationship.'
... Ironically, fructose, which is also known as fruit sugar, was once considered a healthier, 'more natural' alternative to sucrose, that is, old-fashioned table sugar, because of its presence in fruit. In addition, diabetics thought it was healthier for them because it does not raise insulin or blood sugar levels as high as glucose does. However, animal studies and preliminary human studies have found that a high-fructose diet leads to some of the same health problems that are rampant among overweight Americans, including insulin resistance and elevated triglyceride levels, a marker for heart disease.
(I still plan to get my teeth into a corn dog pretty soon though ;) Gotta get that low-grade meat product fix!)
RSS: Ben Hammersley points at this really wierd posting from Adam Curry. Points and laughs, in fact.
As far as I can see, AC wants development of (N)echo to stop, because he dropped 10,000 dollars getting a year's paid placement in the Radio Userland aggregator, or something like that. Well, that was a smart investment. I'm sure all the people thinking about (N)echo are dropping tools right now, accordingly. ;)
The RID-Spam Act chugs through Congress. This one's very much toothless; according to CAUCE, it's not actually anti-spam really -- CAUCE says:
(it is) 'a gross misnomer to call them 'anti-spam.' 'Anti-consumer,' sure. 'Pro-spam,' even. But not 'anti-spam.''
Amazingly, DMcC notes that it may even de-fang the stronger state laws if it gets passed. Wow.
And check out this quote from the CNet story:
Rep. Bob Goodlatte, R-Va., defended the bill's opt-out approach. Goodlatte said that of the physical junk mail he gets, 'maybe 10 percent of it is something that I have some interest in. For that reason alone I think an opt-out approach is the best solution here.'
Good for him. The way he's talking there, he's looking forward to receiving 700,000 mails per year that 'he has some interest in'. Earth calling Goodlatte -- direct email is not the same as physical junk mail. There's a fundamental economic difference -- with email, the recipient pays. That means you cannot compare the volumes so simplistically. Just say no to One Bite Of The Apple!
US Politics: Rod notes this story: The Guardian coming to the US. Excellent! I think that's a fantastic idea, and they'll clean up.
Consider this -- the only large-circulation print media that (a) people over here read, and (b) had the nerve to really treat the war in Iraq critically, as far as I know, are those two flaming-red anarchosyndicalist rags, the Economist and the Financial Times. (Not only are they not even written in the US, they're quite conservative by Euro standards.) The US media needs more liberal voices.
Actually, I'm exagerrating heavily here. As Craig has pointed out before, the Christian Science Monitor is a pretty good paper, with some critical journalism -- and one with a great story behind it's provenance to boot.
But the Guardian has a pretty much wide open field all the same -- here's hoping they can get the distribution side sorted out.
E-Voting: Some good comments on this Slashdot story regarding e-voting systems.
The Brazilian legislature mandated a retrofit 'of 3% (some 12,000 machines) to produce a paper ballot that the voter could peruse and deposit in a box for recount (the first large-scale use of the 'Mercuri Method').'
Georgia noted that the e-voting systems 'were all very flashy and glitzy, but all had severe problems with security and/or usability. We eventually decided to run a pilot program in last year's off-year election and try out 5 of the most promising machines in a real-world election. The final winner will be used across the state in 2004. No more hanging chad, but I think we are going to have a whole new set of problems to deal with.'
Just taking a look around blogs.linux.ie to see who's set us up the blog recently; here's the results:
unfortunately quite a few folks seem to have got bored and left off around mid-April. Ah well.
Quite a few lively blogs to add to the blogroll.
There's also a burgeoning population of teenage Malaysian blogs, bizarrely enough! planet_aiie, whoelse and corexified. Big slipknot fans it seems.
Malaysia's not alone in this -- here's a Jamaican guy. Must be the flag on the favourites icon; green and gold on a black background -- that's more linux.jm than linux.ie. ;) Unfortunately for my patois, he stopped updating in April. Sufferation! Oh well, I'll just have to stick with the Sizzla for my lessons.
a Phillipino blog, too!
Just figuring this one -- it seems linux.ie is free and easy to set up a blog at, doesn't have ads, and does decent RSS with full <content:encoded> blocks. All in all, that makes it a pretty good blog platform when you think about it. Fair enough!
WIPO DG asked to convene meeting on open and collaborative projects to create public goods:
In recent years there has been an explosion of open and collaborative projects to create public goods. These projects are extremely important, and they raise profound questions regarding appropriate intellectual property policies. They also provide evidence that one can achieve a high level of innovation in some areas of the modern economy without intellectual property protection, and indeed excessive, unbalanced, or poorly designed intellectual property protections may be counter-productive. We ask that the World Intellectual Property Organization convene a meeting in calendar year 2004 to examine these new open collaborative development models, and to discuss their relevance for public policy.
I hope this gets somewhere; it'll be interesting to see what the World Intellectual Property Organization has to say officially about open source, the Human Genome Project, the world wide web, and other unencumbered projects of this type.
Had a very nice long weekend -- big BBQ and watching the fireworks on Friday, some bodyboarding and bodysurfing on Sunday. Very relaxing. Now back to work. :(
Ben Hammersley notes 'the All Time Perfect Daily Mail Story': Asylum Seekers Eat Queen's Swans:
A major investigation has been launched by Scotland Yard into claims that the Queen's swans are being stolen in their hundreds by gangs of asylum-seekers who are cooking and eating them.
The probe comes after a group of men were caught red-handed by police in an east London park. The asylum seekers were barbecuing a duck and officers found two dead swans, ready to be roasted, concealed in bags.
A police spokesman said today: We are appealing for information over the disappearance of swans. There have been incidents of swans being killed, and it appears to be the work of eastern European gangs.
It's a classic of the genre -- combining (a) the queen, (b) cute animals (c) fear of immigrants. That covers all the bases except one. Oh, here it is, bingo! -- it's not entirely true:
Yesterday Scotland Yard stated: 'There is no police report.' While there is concern fuelled by a drop in the swan population, the police spokeswoman added: 'There appears to be a perception that this may be attributable to Eastern Europeans. We stress we have no evidence of this.'
A police spokeswoman ... added that, despite some efforts, they could not back up published claims that asylum-seekers had been caught in east London barbecuing a duck with dead swans concealed near by 'ready to be roasted'. Andy Fisher, head of the wildlife investigation unit, appeared equally baffled. 'I don't know where they have got that from - not the Metropolitan Police.'
It's clearly silly season time again.
Quick Iraq roundup: some photos from Baghdad from Gee, another Iraqi blogger (Gee not in the irish slang sense BTW!); MI6 chief was the BBC's source for 'sexing-up' allegations (Observer).
Also, Guantanamo Bay's military tribunals are hitting the non-US news media again, now that the death penalty has been raised as a possibility. These Observer and Guardian stories note, regarding the two British citizens who've been imprisoned for 18 months (one for 12 months in Bagram airbase): 'If this treatment happened for an hour in a British police station, no evidence gathered would be admissible'.
Next, A left-wing US soldier blogs from Baghdad.
the iraqi's who are working for the u.s....doing what ever task we throw at them...are not to upset with us...some of them have family members in the states and they hope that someday they will be able to join them...they don't hate america at all...and they are conscious enough of what is really going on to make their own decisions...they think that we really are trying to help...they are afraid of the 'militants' because when ever the 'militants' show up and attack us in their neighborhoods we end up destroying everything...many of the guys say that they chase the 'militants' out with any weapons they have...they are just trying to get by...they fear that the 'militants' are using horrible tactics to enlist more support...they are using our retaliation against us...for every home...or car...or newsstand...or coffee shop we destroy trying to protect ourselves another 'freedom fighter' is born...
He talks about Chomsky, links to Michael Moore -- so of course, the neo-con warbloggers reckon he doesn't exist. ;)
Totally down with the new pronunciation of RSS BTW. Waiting for the dust to settle. ho hum.
Finally, Fergus Cassidy, Sunday Tribune tech journo, has a website. Good reading...
my mate Luke passes on this gem:
I was driving along behind a plumber's van today. The van was emblazoned with signs saying that the plumber was a sewers and drains expert. Along the rear bumper of the van was the company's slogan:
'Your shit is our bread and butter'
I am not making this up.
SenderBase is a cool site which lists email traffic volumes for specific senders and organisations.
This will make for some very cool spam tests. As you can see, several of the top ten sending domains are ISPs that, shall we say, may have a few 'issues' with customers' open proxies. They're scattered in amongst the Yahoo!s and Hotmails ;) Then there's a couple of well-known domains that, let's say, have a habit of appearing on the SBL.
Well, not quite as practical, but useful nonetheless, is Alexa's 'traffic detail' feature for the web.
Very nifty; a log-scale graph of traffic as measured by pageviews from Alexa's toolbar, and you can pick 2 sites and compare their hitrates. For example, according to this, SpamAssassin is bigger than Jesus ;)
Thanks to 'Mr. FoRK' on the FoRK list for this URL...
SARS special report: Too soon to celebrate (New Scientist).
There are also suspicions that the first outbreak in the southern Chinese province of Guangdong stopped so abruptly because of the onset of summer. The SARS virus does not survive well in a hot environment, and if most transmission is due to people touching contaminated surfaces, higher temperatures would have reduced transmission.
If the season, rather than human intervention, was the main reason for the end of the outbreak, SARS could return with a vengeance in the autumn. That is what happened with the 1918 influenza pandemic, which killed tens of millions. Fortunately, SARS is far less infectious (so far).
So, Ev and Cam both went looking for their spammiest spams, and posted 'em. Guess which one it was?
That's right -- 'My Wife, Jody'. ;)
BBC: Spam peddlers hijack computers. A great article from the Beeb, following the trail of a single spam, all the way back to the person they believe to be the sender -- via a hacked British Airways server!
Wired: Hackers Put 'Bane' in Shadowbane:
'Then we realized that somehow an insane god had taken control of our world and was out to kill us all.'
The population of an entire Shadowbane town was forcibly moved to the bottom of the sea, where they drowned. City guards turned feral and attacked town residents. Mobs of never-before-seen superpowerful creatures, seemingly spontaneously spawned from the ether, began to prowl the streets unchecked, killing characters in the most painful way possible.
Audioscrobbler is cool. Check it out -- this is its log of my xmms listening habits, neatly cross-linked and referenced. (The cheesy 'Liberty X' listens were Catherine, I swear.)
Anyway, AS is a bit like Napster's 'explore other person's music collection' feature, which was cool for picking up recommendations -- but this one is based on actual plays, and without the link to a service that the RIAA would want to see shut down ASAP. ;)
It can come out with some pretty bizarre results -- for example, 'people who listen to Thievery Corporation also listen to Radiohead', according to this. Mind you, that's probably correct...
Prediction: I'll wind up being top of the list for listening to Acen's tunes by the end of 2 weeks. That's the plan at least ;)
This is very cool. It's a fully browser-based RSS aggregator, no installation required; it just runs in your Mozilla or Firebird browser window. Nifty.
Found via a referrer link on Jeremy's blog -- there are no secrets where public referrer data is involved ;)
Euro software patents vote put back to September:
Members of Parliament from all parties had complained that it was impossible to react adequately within a timeframe of 10 days.
Phew, that's a relief. This'll give more time for our representatives to get their heads around the (thorny) issue. Read the FFII press release for more details.
BoingBoing with a cautionary tale. When you buy a HipTop Sidekick from T-Mobile, you're not really buying it in the way you'd imagine -- instead, you get to hold it while they operate the software, as far as I can see. As of this week, T-Mobile are going to remotely erase the games that were included with the device, because they are 'no longer supporting' them. And tough luck to Sidekick owners.
As BB sez:
Who owns your Sidekick? T-Mobile does, apparently, even if you spent full retail on it (I dropped 250 dollars on mine). You need T-Mobile's permission to install software on their device. T-Mobile will, from time to time, decide to erase software from your device. And when you stop subscribing to their service, T-Mobile will delete all your data forever, without giving you any mechanism for moving it off the device (and without giving you the ability to design a tool that would let you do this).
I don't really get it -- I mean, this is the reason Palm platforms won in the handheld arena for so long; the user's control over what they can install, the developer's freedom to write new apps for the users to install, and the (comparatively) open aspects of their SDK and protocols so that it can be sync'd to by lots of desktop apps.
Competing with all the other PDAs, based on hardware or UI alone, isn't enough -- unless you're Apple with the iPod. Surely the Sidekick OS developers get this? (Maybe what happened is the OS developers get it -- but T-Mobile don't.)
Talking of the iPod -- Gary Robinson notes that Pixo, the vendor of the OS software used on Apple's iPods has just been bought -- by Sun. It seems Pixo nowadays sells server-side Java thingies, which seems wierd for a developer of OSes for handheld platforms -- until you read this article from January 2002, which reports that Apple and Pixo were at loggerheads anyway, due to contractual difficulties, and that Pixo had given up on embedded-OS work, due to a shortage of clients.
Anyway, I wonder if Apple got a licensing deal that gave them the source and allows them to update the Pixo OS themselves, if Sun decide to drop that product. (Given that Pixo themselves turned around and set the company in a totally oblique direction, I'd reckon it's likely.)
Spam: Rod says the National Do Not Call Registry has launched. Sign up here -- but wait a while first, it's massively overloaded right now...
German euros 'full of cocaine' (BBC):
Almost all euro banknotes circulating in Germany contain traces of cocaine, German researchers say. ... 'Nine out of 10 banknotes show clearly measurable amounts of cocaine,' Professor Fritz Soergel of the Institute for Biomedical and Pharmaceutical Research in Nuremberg was quoted as saying by Reuters news agency.
... The concentrations of cocaine on Spanish euro notes were almost a hundred times that of what was recorded in Germany; ... Professor Soergel said that his team was 'almost knocked flat' by results of yet another recent study in Barcelona.
Tom Coates on search engine optimisation. Summary: they don't work; smart search engines realise you're trying to game them, and will ignore or penalise your site as a result. The correct answer is to provide interesting/good/linkworthy textual information, and keep superfluous eye candy at a sensible level. I agree with his essay, FWIW.
Personally, I reckon Google deserve a lot of credit for turning the web around, from a flashy, Flash-laden animated DHTML blinky-blink medium, back into one where text is king. Once it got recognized that Google used titles, h1 tags, and other semantic markup as key metadata, and that the gimmicky stuff is unindexable, the never-ending slide into flashy blinky-blink land was halted. Phew!
Aside: Labour MP Tom Watson has a weblog?! Wow. He'd get my vote straight away, no matter what his policies were -- that's transparency ;)
Interesting -- so does Liberal Democrats MP Richard Allen. This is really amazing. He even links to SpamAssassin as part of a discussion on the All-Party Internet Group's spam summit to be held on July 1st!
It's worth noting that his comment here notes that the APIG concept seems to be leaning towards prosecution of spamvertised products; advertise via spam (sent by you or by a 'spam outsourcing' company), and you're liable. A very sensible approach, as long as they can avoid the danger of malicious spammers spamvertising a product without that company's permission -- a la what happens regularly to SpamCop and SpamHaus.
Play 20 questions against an AI. Very cool; it got 'artichoke heart' and 'volcano' for me, the first within 30, the second within 20. It also whinged about a few questions I'd 'answered inconsistently' on the first one (well, they were stupid questions ;)
Log in as an anonymous user to try it out.
Argh. Lots of 'your_details.zip' files flying around; it must be new Win32 virus day! Time to update the filters...
Marc Canter blogs about QuickThread, one of the new services at Steve Yost's QuickTopic.
It's a great concept. Want to take a thread offline, or share it as a dedicated forum of its own, without losing the concept flow? Just select all the context messages, forward as attachments by mail to the QT site, and it'll create a new thread with that context intact. Totally simple. (see the Pictures).
Science: In this interview with Matt Ridley at edge.org, Matt notes:
... There's another phenomenon going on too, which is equally important and which again people in these kinds of debates over human nature have missed. ... behavior affects genes. It doesn't change the code of the gene, and it doesn't change the encoded genome ... what I'm talking about is changing the expression of genes through things you do in your life.
(for example:) ... When you're under stress, the physiological result is that cortisol increases in your body and has a lot of effects. Cortisol is a transcription factor; it actually alters the expression of certain genes. It does so largely in the immune system, which results in the suppression of immune activity.
Wow. I never realised hormones could have that effect. Good article, as usual...
Incredible. The text 'My wife, Jody' has appeared, reliably, in spam for the last 5 years -- I just got one today. (I haven't actually seen one in my inbox for a while, though, since the chain letters that copy it generally get pretty high scores -- this one hit a respectable 48.2 SpamAssassin points, no less.)
Here's the text it appears in:
MORE TESTIMONIALS
'My name is Mitchell. My wife, Jody and I live in Chicago. I am an accountant with a major U.S.Corporation and I make pretty good money. When I received this program I grumbled to Jody about receiving 'junk mail'. I made fun of the whole thing, spouting my knowledge of the population and percentages involved. I 'knew' it wouldn't work. Jody totally ignored my supposed intelligence and few days later she jumped in with both feet. I made merciless fun of her, and was ready to lay the old 'I told you so' on her when the thing didn't work. Well, the laugh was on me! Within 3 weeks she had received 50 responses. Within the next 45 days she had received total $147,200.00 ........ all cash! I was shocked. I have joined Jody in her 'hobby'.'
Mitchell Wolf M.D., Chicago, Illinois
It's amazing that the chain letter is never changed, given that for the last few years they are all sent using spamware applications, so the senders must have some techie know-how.
I wonder if there's a real Mitchell Wolf M.D. in Chicago, and what he'd think of 5 years of faked testimonials using his name?
Maciej covers some ground I've been wondering about, comparing his experiences with the French state system and that here. Definitely worth reading, and I'm looking forward to tomorrow's.
Oops! NZ channel 'TV3 has apologised after a graphic labelling US President George W. Bush a 'professional fascist' flashed up during its primetime news.'
Henry Farrell writes about homesickness, quoting Dante. It's such a great quote, I'm going to just reproduce it here:
These are of course silly things to get worked up about; but it's a universal experience for expatriates to miss the little things as much (if not more than) the greater ones. Dante, who was exiled from Florence, speaks of how
You shall leave everything you love most dearly:
this is the arrow that the bow of exile
shoots first. You are to know the bitter taste
of others' bread, how salt it is, and know
how hard a path it is for one who goes
descending and ascending others' stairs.He's talking about two things here. First, as an exiled Florentine, he doesn't like salty bread. Florentines don't use salt when baking (the result, as far as I remember, of an extended period when the Pisans cut off their salt supplies), so that their bread tastes like blotting paper to non-natives (I lived in Florence three years: my advice to outsiders is to order pane Pugliese in the local bake shops when possible). Second, spiral staircases in Florence tend to curve around the opposite way from staircases elsewhere. Dante's main point is unassailable; as an exile, you feel longing for the small and unexceptional parts of daily life in your home country, and a quite extraordinary degree of comfort whenever you find them again. Which is why my fridge is now stocked up with Kerrygold.
So NetFlix have patented their business method; that is, subscribing to video/DVD rentals -- where instead of being charged per disc, you are charged a monthly fee and can keep the rentals indefinitely without late fees. Patent here. Now, NetFlix is a very cool service, I've really been enjoying it. But this patent is a bit nasty.
Think about it: what's difficult about the NetFlix setup? Is it thinking up the concept for how the business works, as described in the patent?
Or is it executing the details, setting up efficient shipping infrastructure, tracking, billing, stock management etc., efficiently enough to make a profit?
Bad news for these companies, who are now infringing:
As one commenter on the /. story noted, 'imagine if McDonalds had patented the drive-thru'.
Interesting -- some thinking about the net, blogs, etc. on Biroco.com meanders into a mail from Hakim Bey:
(...) I'm utterly not responsible for the plethora of Netishness that coagulates around my work. Personally I never 'uploaded' a word. Others do it, mostly without my permission and w/out even bothering to inform me. Some of it isn't even mine - forgeries & often dis-info are rife. The Net is a pathology.
I not only don't own a computer - I've 'taken agin' 'em' & have become a cyber-curmudgeon. Basically I'm only interested in things that don't have websites. I refuse - or rather am incapable of - compensation for the demise of the physical world (you know what I mean) by losing myself in 'the terminal state of screenal involution' to quote a line that came in-somnia last nite.
Joel goes on to say:
Most who have read Hakim Bey seem to imagine that he regards the web as a TAZ (Temporary Autonomous Zone), but in fact he doesn't, since the physical component is missing, virtuality is not physical, at most all the web can be is an organisational mouthpiece for a TAZ but not a TAZ in itself. I agree with him, but myself, despite chucking my TV in the bin over a decade ago and Zen wanderings away from this medium, I got ensnared in the web nonetheless and do sometimes wonder whether it is indeed 'compensation for the demise of the physical world'. We'll see, at present I regard it as a curious assemblage project and a potential widening out of creativity.
Observer: Russia's cult video pirate rescripts Lord of the Rings as gangster film. This sounds hilarious -- although I bet New World (iirc?) aren't so happy about it...
They call him the Goblin. He is the new toast of Russia's massive pirate video industry, his films sought all over Moscow. The trick of his silver screen success is that the Goblin redubs Hollywood movies, using his own 'better' Russian alternative to the script.
A former senior police investigator from St Petersburg, Dmitri Puchkov began by making fresh translations to replace the appalling subtitles on pirated films. But now his cult following has found pan-Russian appeal, with a ground-breaking rewrite of the first two parts of The Lord of the Rings.
In a move that has taken the Russian pirate disk world by storm and infuriated traditionalists and copyright lawyers, Puchkov has completely changed the script, turning the 'good' characters, like Frodo, into bumbling Russian cops, and the 'bad' Orcs into Russian gangsters.
The new, irreverent version of The Lord of the Rings is set in Russia. Frodo Baggins is renamed Frodo Sumkin (a derivative from the Russian word sumka, or bag). The Ranger, Aragorn, is called Agronom (Russian for farm worker). Legolas is renamed Logovaz, after a Russian car company famed for its Ladas. Boromir becomes Baralgin, after a Russian type of paracetemol.
Gandalf spends much of the film trying to impress others with his in-depth knowledge of Karl Marx, and Frodo is cursed with the filthy tongue of a Russian criminal.
FFII have issued a press release: '2000 IT bosses say NO to EU software patents, call for rejection of McCarthy software patent directive proposal':
A 'Petition for a Free Europe without Software Patents' has gained more than 150000 signatures. Among the supporters are more than 2000 company owners and chief executives and 25000 developpers and engineers from all sectors of the European information and telecommunication industries, as well as more than 2000 scientists and 180 lawyers. Companies like Siemens, IBM, Alcatel and Nokia lead the list of those whose researchers and developpers want to protect programming freedom and copyright property against what they see as a 'patent landgrab'.
Reminder: there's only 7 days left before the plenary on June 30th, so if you're European, write to your MEP backing FFII's position. Full text here.
BBC: NZ flatulence tax outrages farmers:
New Zealand's farmers have criticised a proposed tax on the flatulence emitted by their sheep and cattle. The move is part of the Wellington government's action to meet its commitments under the Kyoto Protocol on global warming.
Scientists estimate that methane emitted by farm animals is responsible for more than half of the country's greenhouse gases.
Flatulence from cows, sheep and other ruminants is a serious environmental problem, accounting for about 15% of worldwide emissions of methane - one of the most potent of greenhouse gases.
Sounds like the pro-swpat lobby has taken an interesting tack in their PR; IDG's Infoworld reports that:
The European Parliament is likely to support a law that permits software patents but limits their application to inventions that have a technical effect outside of just a computer program. A program could only be patented if it runs in conjunction with some sort of device such as an intelligent household appliance or a mobile phone.
But bizarrely, that's exactly what the proposal does not suggest, and that's exactly what the anti-swpat lobby want it to suggest! Totally, totally wierd.
Despite heavy opposition from a coalition of European SMEs and the Greens/EFA faction of the European Parliament, and despite 2 committees suggesting large amendments, Arlene McCarthy's pushed the patent 'reform' through the JURI committee of the European Parliament. It is now going to be debated in an EP plenary in 10 days time. It seems likely there'll be a vote on adopting it then, too. We're being railroaded here. :(
If you are a European and bothered by software patents, now is the time to write to (or even email) MEPs asking them to oppose this directive; it's the 'proposed software patentability directive as amended by JURI' (COM(2002)92 2002/0047).
The letter should support the Eurolinux and/or Green position.
I've already received one reply, from Nuala Ahern, a Green MEP for Leinster, who's happy to take the Greens/EFA line (and responded very quickly, all credit to her!). But the question is, who else among the Irish MEPs is likely to vote on this issue -- and how do we effectively lobby in such a short time?
Some background links:
Anyway, if it passes it's not the end of the world, according to Karl Lenz; I'm not sure I agree with his conclusions though ;)
So I caught Frontline on PBS last night. At last, some leftie TV that isn't The Daily Show! ;)
It covered -- in excruciating detail -- something I'd been wondering about; the massive cost (to end users) of healthcare and prescription medication in the US. The program nicely demolished the 'but all that money is needed for R&D' line.
Bottom line: the US drug companies are making 18-22% profit, and they're not letting go of that. (The median for the Fortune 500 is 3.3%.)
That's pure profit -- not going back into R&D or similar. The breakdown of the biggest revenue sinks averaged across the sector, at the end of the program was: 22% profit, 18% advertising and marketing (one conglomerate in particular spent more on marketing than Pepsi), a couple more aspects of the process, and then, 4th or 5th on the list, 11% of that revenue makes it to research and development.
This should be a huge issue here, but isn't. I can't figure it out.
Patents: Kuro5hin has a nice wrap-up of the GIF patent story, now that the patent has finally expired (excerpt: 'Unisys does nothing'). But what's this? It's still extant in Europe, not expiring until a year from now? Great example of the EPO allowing software patents to be registered, even though they're not legal in Europe.
Mind you, it's irrelevant now, as (thankfully) Jean-Loup Gailly and Mark Adler wrote the gzip compression algorithm, and gave it to the GNU project. Since then, gzip has now spread into every tool and virtually every platform that might possibly need compression.
On April 25, 2003, this newspaper ran a story about documents obtained in Iraq that alleged Saddam Hussein's regime had paid a British member of Parliament, George Galloway, $10 million over 11 years to promote its interests in the West.
An extensive Monitor investigation has subsequently determined that the six papers detailed in the April 25 piece are, in fact, almost certainly forgeries.
The CSMonitor is usually a pretty good paper I hear, and their decision to print this retraction on their front page is a nice sign. But it's worth noting that it took 2 weeks -- not until the UK's Daily Mail retracted their story, citing that they had determined their documents were forged -- before the Monitor thought to check out the letters' credibility.
And check this out for gullibility:
Smucker recalls that it was the general who brought up George Galloway's name first at their initial meeting. After the reporter indicated an interest, the general said he knew where those documents were, and that he could have them for Smucker in 24 hours. Smucker says Rasool told him that one of his neighbors, who left Baghdad to attend a Shiite pilgrimage in Karbala, held the documents.
Upon Smucker's return the next day, the general showed him the Galloway documents as well as the boxes of others on various subjects. After hiring the neighbor, Smucker left with the boxes.
'I had no knowledge that the general received any of the 800 dollars, though now that I know the documents are forgeries, I have my suspicions,' says Smucker. 'At the time I was operating on the premise that these were entirely authentic.'
Suuuure!
Joel writes about a canonical Windows UI mistake: 'unequivocally the most moronic 'wizard' dialog in the history of the Windows operating system. This dialog is so stupid that it deserves some kind of award. A whole new category of award.' It is, of course, the Find Setup Wizard dialog:
The first problem with this dialog is that it's distracting. You are trying to find help in the help file. You do not, at that particular moment, give a hoot whether the database is small, big, customized, or chocolate-covered. In the meanwhile, this wicked, wicked dialog is giving you little pedantic lectures that it must create a list (or database). There are about three paragraphs there, most of which are completely confusing. There's the painfully awkward phrase 'your help file(s)'. You see, you may have one or more files. As if you cared at this point that there could be more than one. As if it made the slightest amount of difference. But the programmer who worked on that dialog was obviously distressed beyond belief at the possibility that there might be more than one help file(s) and it would be incorrect to say help file, now, wouldn't it?
It's a great article; there's also some fantastic examples of stupid UI tricks that shouldn't be possible, like detachable menu bars. Read it here.
I've just copied in a new image for the blog entry on the Joyce bridge; this one's much sharper.
Ah, hell, might as well reproduce it here again, it is very pretty after all:
Isn't that lovely?
I did this a while ago, but I've been very busy in work and haven't had time to mention it. But it's worth doing some preliminary pointing at Sitescooper RSS.
Basically, I've added RSS output to Sitescooper, the venerable HTML-scraping script that can disassemble a news/blog/reading-material website efficiently, use a cache, log in, cope with redirects, figure out when stuff is new and when it's old, perform diffs, confuse you with copious regular expressions, etc. etc.
Sitescooper was originally oriented entirely towards display on a Palm; then new PDAs came out that could do good text or HTML display, so they're now supported too; and now, I'm no longer commuting and using an RSS aggregator instead for that kind of daily reading, so RSS is the natural next step.
Basically, what this means is that those annoying blogs that don't include the full text in the item block, or those websites you like that don't have an RSS feed -- make a site file, and scrape them into your aggregator yourself!
This code is present in the current Sitescooper CVS version; the only doco is really what's in that RSS directory on sitescooper.org.
If your interest is piqued, take a look...
rOD gets an email:
I found your web site, http://www.groovymother.com/archives/week_2002_10_20.html has a reference to a Clue-By-Four ™. Unfortunately, my company owns the trademark to that term, and I am in the process of bringing that product to market. My lawyers have told me that if you do not remove that reference, it dilutes my trademark.
I would much rather ask you politely to remove references to Clue-by-Four™ than have an ugly lawyerese letter sent via certified mail, etc.
WTF? Applied for in 1999, and it refers to a 'novelty toy, namely a foam rubber two-by-four shaped board'.
A glowing review of Win4Lin 5.0 from 'Open for Business'.
Gotta say, I use Win4Lin regularly, and it's totally flawless. I had a bit of difficulty getting it installed -- the installer didn't like my kernel for some reason, if I recall correctly, and I had to go grepping through the install script (!). But it's fantastic once it's running.
The really impressive thing is when it boots Windows (in a window on your Linux desktop) much faster than Windows boots natively on the same hardware ;) Still haven't figured out how it does that.
It does a nice job of a virtual network interface too; easier to admin than VMWare's fake-net-with-DHCP thing. It just insmods a new network module, with a new ethernet address, and that responds to arp requests alongside your 'real' Linux interface's address. Then all the control of IP address, network etc. is under Windows control.
I haven't found an app that doesn't work with it yet. (Mind you I hear Direct/X isn't supported yet fully, so most games are probably out.)
I've even used it to watch Quicktime movies -- which is pretty impressive when you consider that they're displaying to a (Win4Lin) framebuffer, which is then displayed to another (VNC) framebuffer, which then displays to the hardware.
IrishWAN are holding a national conference:
IrishWAN the networking group with the goal of building a community owned and run island wide area network infrastructure, will be having a national conference in Limerick on Saturday 28th of June 2003.
There will be IrishWAN members from all across the country, with presentations about wireless technology, updates of activities in many areas, and presentations from Irish wireless suppliers.
Date: Thu, 19 Jun 2003 10:58:15 -0000
From: Robert Fitzsimons (spam-protected)
To: (spam-protected)
Subject: IrishWAN National Conference
IrishWAN National Conference
IrishWAN the networking group with the goal of building a community owned and run island wide area network infrastructure, will be having a national conference in Limerick on Saturday 28th of June 2003.
There will be IrishWAN members from all across the country, with presentations about wireless technology, updates of activities in many areas, and presentations from Irish wireless suppliers.
The conference is open to anybody who has an interest in building or using the IrishWAN network, and is an ideal opportunity for existing and new members to get together to talk about wireless technologies. There will be a 5 Euro charge at the door to pay for the room.
The conference will start at 12:00 and should finish up at 17:30 on Saturday 28th of June, the location will be The Two Mile Inn, Ennis Road, Limerick.
More up-to-date details and the agenda are available at <URL:http://www.irishwan.org/board/showthread.php?threadid=996>.
Hope to see you all there.
Robert Fitzsimons DublinWAN Chairperson (spam-protected) http://wwww.irishwan.org/
ISOC Ireland members mailing list (spam-protected) http://ireland.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/members
Oops! Looks like 2-byte Unicode -- UCS-2, aka Unicode 1.0 -- will be running into trouble shortly; according to this and this on debian-i18n from back in 2000, several Asian charsets will shortly require 4-byte Unicode characters, which means using either UTF-8 or UCS-4. In particular, correct display of proper nouns in Japanese apparently requires use of the 4-byte planes.
Unicode 1.0 is used widely, in MS products and Java. Expect 'flag days' galore when this has to change.
Unicode 2.0 introduced a concept called a 'surrogate pair' to fix this; it's basically introducing multibyte characters into the supposedly fixed-width character-based UCS-2; so all those 'length == nchars' assumptions will break -- again. Argh.
Now I know why the Linux vendors are going for UTF-8 instead...
Maciej, Jeremy and Dave have all been blogging about this: Microsoft have unleashed MSNBOT, a new web crawler (judging by the robots.txt string, written in COBOL) which heralds their new search service which will topple Google.
My thoughts: dream on, guys.
What makes Google cool? Fast, accurate searches, and no ads. OK, MSN could do fast searching; that's doable, it's just a technical matter.
But what does the latter require? IMO, it takes very strong technical leadership, willing to resist any and every business unit that fancies dropping some cruddy ads on the front page; it's a cultural issue. This is especially tricky where ads (and money) are involved. Now go take a look at MSN.com. See what I mean? I rest my case.
New Scientist reports that 'cosmetics manufacturers are keen to appear cutting edge, and often blind consumers with scientific jargon. But buzzwords like nanocapsules - currently one of their favourites - could be their undoing.'
Scare stories about nanotechnology turning the world to 'grey goo' have led Caroline Lucas, Green Party MEP for South East England, to call for new regulations - and one of the targets she has in her sights is the cosmetics industry. Her website claims that 'thousands of women are acting as unwitting 'guinea pigs' for the cosmetics industry...with many products containing ingredients manufactured by 'nanotechnology'.'
Famous facial products, such as L'Oreal Plenitude and Lancome's Flash Bronzer Self Tanning Face Gel, do indeed contain billions of nanoscopic capsules designed to help the skin absorb the cream's active ingredients. Though there's not a goo-making nanobot in sight, Lucas claims to be 'horrified to find nanotech products sitting innocently in my bathroom cabinet'.
We wonder what she expected them to do to her. Drain the colour from her face and make it go all mushy?
Ben forwards a link to this Byte article, SCO: All your base are belong to us. His commentary:
One day I'll have a blogtastic dalymount.com, but for the moment, have you seen this priceless interview, in which SCO goes over the edge into complete barking insanity?
'We believe that UNIX System V provided the basic building blocks for all subsequent computer operating systems, and that they all tend to be derived from UNIX System V (and therefore are claimed as SCO's intellectual property).'
His emphasis. But let's face it, he's emphasising the right part ;)
So they now think they are owed money by every modern OS: that includes FreeBSD, Windows, Apple, presumably QNX, etc. etc. Linux was just the easiest one to start with, since the source is available and IBM (with their deep pockets) are closely allied with it. MS have already paid up for a SCO license, although many commentators see this as a means to support SCO in their anti-UNIX lawsuits.
In more detail, SCO claim to have full IP rights to several major components of any high-spec OS:
Let's pick one there: RCU in Linux seems to have originated (at a glance) from code developed by Sequent for their DYNIX/ptx UNIX, which was an AT&T UNIX System V-based OS. Sequent ran into trouble, and were bought out by IBM. Later, patches to implement RCU were submitted by IBM from Sequent's code.
SCO now owns the AT&T UNIX System V IP; therefore SCO owns the RCU code in Linux -- even though Sequent developed it independently, on top of the System V base, as far as I can see. Hey, that's even more 'viral' than the GPL -- at least the GPL tells you in advance what mistakes you'd have to make for this to happen! ;)
In other words, it seems their POV is that, if any code came anywhere near other code that may have been part of the original AT&T codebase, it's now tainted with SCO's own 'viral license'. Absolutely insane.
It's unclear exactly how 'all subsequent computer operating systems' also infringe this viral license, but SCO reckon they do.
In the meantime, they don't seem to have realized that these kinds of over-broad claims are not looked on favourably under EU law; while they make cartooney threats in the US, they open themselves up to all sorts of anti-trust-type claims elsewhere in the world. But then, at this stage I don't think they plan to actually offer any products, or operate as a software company, so they probably don't really care about that.
To really muddy the waters, an ex-SCO employee has recently made allegations that SCO copied code from the GPL'd Linux kernel into their UnixWare product.
Ah, fireworks. Anyway.
For a kinder, gentler form of total insanity, check out the guidelines for forming 'inexplicable mobs' in Manhattan -- via bb. Totally cool.
GREENS/EFA: Patent vote fails Europe's software programmers. Damn.
UK and German MEPs, in rejecting amendments to the report, have ignored the opinions of the Economic and Social Council, the Industry committee, the Culture committee, 140,000 people and 30 leading software scientists who signed two petitions to the Parliament, as well as the 95% of the European citizens who took part in a European Commission public consultation.
So I guess the next step is figure out who those MEPs were, and make sure they never get our votes again.
There's still time though: Mercedes Echerer MEP (Greens - A) notes: 'You can be sure that the report will have a very bumpy ride when it goes to plenary in September with one third of committee members in opposition.' We can at least try to let our voices be heard by the other two-thirds...
However, in some good Euronews: the Czech republic has passed a referendum on joining the EU.
In response to this post regarding Ireland's piracy rate of 42%, Simon pointed out a possible flaw in the methodology on the forum;
'Although they could be comparing high software usage to negligible software sales in Ireland. Anyone with a half decent purchasing dept will buy from the UK or US to avoid ridiculous euro pricing. Compare prices on the Macromedia Store's shop, Studio MX in International English for $899 in the international store, $1133 in the UK store, or $1180 in the Euro store (all prices ex-taxes).'
So I took a look over the weekend. Here's the page on the survey. In the PDF, page 12-13, they describe the methodology. my comments:
'To estimate software demand, IPR developed ratios for the amount of software installed on each PC. This was developed from market research on the U.S. market.' Do all markets really use the same software on their PCs? e.g. Asian markets will use text-entry apps, US markets will not.
'the difference between software applications installed (demand) and software applications legally shipped (supply) equals the estimate of software applications pirated.'
'Uplift factors' are applied to generalize software shipment data from the participating companies, first to the entire US industry, then to the world. 'These uplift factors include estimates for open-source software. For this study, IPR has assumed that open source software is free and not pirated.' eh, thanks ;)
I'm not quite sure what this means, but I think it means that they make an estimate of how much of the software shipment data represents OS software, and then add that to the 'legally shipped' side.
'IPR believes that certain software shipments in the data collected from participating companies are reported for one country, but the software is exported and used in another country. In order to account for this and to eliminate this effect from the piracy study as much as possible, net import estimates were developed on a country-by-country basis.'
This covers Simon's point -- but it's not 100% clear, since those biases aren't listed. I wonder if it takes into account Ireland's paradoxical situation; while Ireland is (or was, at least) the world's top exporter of software, it's still cheaper for Irish users to import software applications from overseas ;)
Dublin: the new bridge just down the road from my house has finally been completed -- in time for Bloomsday it seems, since it's named after Joyce. Obligingly, the Dublin traffic camera operators have got a great night shot of it:
Patents: the SSLeay workaround
during this ongoing European software patents thing, I was reminded of a comment I heard a while back from a pro-patent guy.
He was around in the bad old days of SSLeay's patent woes. SSLeay, like many cryptographic products in the 80's and 90's before the RSA and other patents expired, was in a legal grey area due to patent issues. To quote the 'Is This Legal?' section of their FAQ:
Eventually, RSA relicensed their algorithms to be freely usable. Thankfully IDEA could be avoided by using alternative algorithms in the SSL transaction, so it wasn't a biggie; most SSL users just switched it off. Finally, the RSA patent finally expired -- so nowadays SSL is commonplace, and using SSL to protect security is a lot easier than it used to be.
Anyway, I'm diverging here... the relevance is this mail from Hartmut Pilch discussing the current euro-swpat proposal. He reckons even the SSLeay defense -- saying 'do not download this software in these countries unless you get these licenses' -- would not work with the current proposal: