Ho hum... SCO staggers on. Snore. Quick links:
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- Analysts to SCO
Slashdot roundup -- mostly worth reading for the top 2 comments ;)
Category: Uncategorized
JA forwards a link to Veronica Guerin, the new movie by Joel Schumacher, based on the life of the eponymous Irish journo. It boasts this beaut on their official ad website:
In the mid-1990s, Dublin was nothing short of a war zone, with a few powerful drug lords battling for control. ... Based on a true story, this powerful, emotional film from producer Jerry Bruckheimer (jm: oh no) ... and producer Joel Schumacher ... gives unique insight into a fascinating and complex aspect of the Irish conflict ...
My emphasis. Oh dear oh dear oh dear. Somehow or other I must have missed all the warzone stuff... I wonder if they're confusing it with Bogota?
Slate with a fantastic article about Salam Pax:
His latest post mentioned an afternoon he spent at the Hamra Hotel pool, reading a borrowed copy of The New Yorker. I laughed out loud. He then mentioned an escapade in which he helped deliver 24 pizzas to American soldiers. I howled. Salam Pax, the most famous and most mysterious blogger in the world, was my interpreter. The New Yorker he had been reading--mine. Poolside at the Hamra--with me. The 24 pizzas--we had taken them to a unit of 82nd Airborne soldiers I was writing about. ...
I needed a new interpreter to fill the gap for two weeks or so, and the colleague mentioned that he had just met a smart and friendly guy named Salam. I quickly traced Salam to the Sheraton Hotel. Salam--this is his real first name--was sitting in a chair in the lobby, reading Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle. I knew, at that moment, that I would hire him.
... we'll all be hearing more from Salam: He has signed up to write a fortnightly column for the Guardian, and he continues to blog. He also continues to be surprised by the reaction to his work. When he was told by the Austrian interviewer that his fans had begun making 'Salam Pax' T-shirts and coffee mugs, his response was frank--'Are you kidding?' Nobody is kidding. The coffee mugs are for real, and Salam Pax is for real.
Thanks to Ben for another top tip. Ben, start a blog!
Karlin forwards a good round-up from Conor O'Clery, the Irish Times' Washington correspondent, on the WMD evidence issues:
At one point during rehearsals at CIA headquarters in Washington for that speech, Mr Powell threw several pages into the air and declared: 'I'm not reading this. This is bullshit,' according to today's US News and World Report.
The most overblown conclusions about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction came from a 'mini-CIA' set up in the Pentagon by the Defence Secretary, Mr Donald Rumsfeld, according to an army intelligence officer who told Time magazine: 'Rumsfeld was deeply, almost pathologically, distorting the intelligence.' ....
A classified assessment of Iraq's chemical weapons by the Defence Intelligence Agency in September 2002, obtained by US News, stated: 'There is no reliable information on whether Iraq is producing and stockpiling chemical weapons ...'
I meant to blog about this event back in April at the time, but never got around to it. Basically, towards the end of April, there was a demonstration in Falujah in Iraq, shots were (reportedly) fired from the crowd, and US troops opened fire, killing 2 and injuring 14.
Well, Charlie Stross has saved me the bother ;) -- he's written a good summary of the historical precedent for this chain of events, and what resulted back then.
A timely reminder for the European Commission, while it considers permitting software patents.
In the US, software patents have been permitted for years, with hilarious results. Here's a good example.
Back in 1997-98, spam was a minor irritant, but the practice of 'listbombing' (forge-subscribing one's enemies to lots of mailing lists) was more troublesome. As a result, several mailing-list manager programs like Majordomo added challenge-response to their subscription process; this is why, when you sign up for a list, you have to click on a link in the mail you get, to 'confirm' you really asked to be signed up. (Here's a mail detailing how LISTSERV had this feature in March 1996.)
All very clever, and it solved the problem nicely.
Some bright sparks then noticed this, and decided it was non-obvious somehow to apply this to spam filtering. They overlooked the prior art (more listed here) and registered some patents.
Fast-forward to 2003, and we see that there are now no less than three pretty-much-identical anti-spam C-R patents which have been granted:
- United States Patent 6,199,102: Cobb March 6, 2001 (applied: Aug 26, 1997): Method and system for filtering electronic messages
- United States Patent 6,112,227: Heiner August 29, 2000 (applied Aug 6, 1998): Filter-in method for reducing junk e-mail
- United States Patent 6,546,416: Kirsch April 8, 2003 (applied Dec 9, 1998): Method and system for selectively blocking delivery of bulk electronic mail
Oops! Where's the popcorn?
(Thanks to this posting from RFG for spotting this.)
Google News has been forced to remove IndyMedia from Google News' feed of sources, by an email campaign.
I'm in two minds about this -- I can see Google News' point. If an unmoderated feed allows crap like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion to get through, then GN obviously doesn't want that turning up in their 'news' search results. But removing IMC altogether seems suboptimal; I would assume the front page newswire -- or at least the features -- is a bit more moderated, and therefore trustworthy.
Getting balanced news -- and that means lefty IMC along with neocon Fox -- is key, and Google News was doing a pretty good job up 'til that point.
a good interview with nmap's Fyodor on /. Snippet:
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During your time running Honeypots, you'll have seen a lot of compromised systems. Is there any incident that's really stuck in your mind because of the audacity of the attempt, or the stupidity of the person attempting the breakin?
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On the humorous front, one attacker was was running a public webcam during his exploits, so we were able to watch him crack into our boxes in real time :). I will resist the urge to link a screenshot. His rough location was determined when we noticed Mrs. Doubtfire playing on his TV and correlated that with public schedule listings. He was working with a Pakistani group, but was actually on the US East Coast.
In the 'disturbing audacity' front, this year we found that a group of crackers had broken into an ecommerce site and actually programmed an automated billing-sytem-to-IRC gateway. They could obtain or validate credit card numbers by simply querying the channel bot! Expect a more detailed writeup soon.
temporary politics break. ;) This story was big news in the UK a few weeks ago, but never made it into the news over here. Dr. Asaf Durakovic, a former US Army advisor, sent a team to Afghanistan to test civilians for uranium contamination after the war there:
Without exception, every person donating urine specimens tested positive for uranium internal contamination. ... the donors presented concentrations of toxic and radioactive uranium isotopes between 100 and 400 times greater than in the Gulf veterans tested in 1999. (jm: also on average 26 times the maximum permissible level in the US)
'If (the) findings are corroborated in other communities across Afghanistan, the country faces a severe public health disaster... Every subsequent generation is at risk.'
Also, a very interesting interview with Major Doug Rokke, who worked on the cleanup procedures during the first Gulf War, dealing with DU and other contaminants.
wow, this is truly insane. After Novell went on the record noting that SCO do not own the SVR3 or SVR4 IP (which seems to be borne out by a note on the licensing arrangement for the UNIX trademark), SCO's case seems to be in a bit of trouble. So now they're threatening to sue Linus Torvalds.
current /. poll: what SpamAssassin setting do you use? Cool! (but who are the nutters voting 'less than 0'?)
Tech: Danny blogs about fuel-cell vehicles, linking to the DrivingTheFuture site. I met Doug Korthof of DTF a month or two ago -- a nice guy with a persuasive case, namely that electric vehicles work, and the current concentration on fuel-cell and hybrid vehicles is a diversionary tactic.
The facts of the matter really are quite wierd, as the OC Weekly interview notes:
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When (Doug) first got the (GM) EV1, the lease allowed for unlimited mileage. But the car came with something else: a defective lead-acid Delco battery that took a couple of trips to the mechanic to get replaced. GM wound up replacing all the Delcos with Panasonic lead-acid batteries. But there was an unanticipated consequence: the Panasonics got such dramatically better range than the Delcos that GM took all its EV1s that had not been leased off the market and forced existing drivers into new leases that did limit mileage.
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Korthof experienced even better mileage with a nickel-metal hydride battery that allowed his 1997 Honda EV-Plus to run for 140 miles without a recharge. Honda took the car back in 2002 and junked it. No subsequent electric cars had nickel batteries, and Chevron Texaco Corp. since acquired the worldwide patent to nickel-metal hydride batteries, which the company is partly using to satisfy the burgeoning hybrid-car market.
I took a look at the EV1 myself, and talked to Doug about the recharging system he uses. He recharges their 2 EVs directly from a plug socket in his garage, and with his house fitted with solar panels, it costs about 25 bucks a month to keep them charged. Of course, there's a lot of up-front cost to install the solar panels and buy the EVs, but IMO it would be worth it.
A moot point anyway -- most EVs (with the exception of the Toyota RAV4-EV) can no longer be bought, even second hand. Instead, there's a recall in operation, and existing EVs are being recalled and dismantled. Even purely from a 'cool tech' POV, this is a shame.
Margaret McGaley has been investigating the Nedap/Powervote e-voting system that's recently come into use in Ireland, as part of her undergrad thesis, and the conclusion is not good: 'E-voting poses a threat to our democracy'. She goes on:
I hope to mount a campaign over the next few months with the following goals:
- to prevent the use of the Nedap/Powervote system in Irish elections,
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to prevent the purchase of any more equipment or software from
- Nedap/Powervote by the Irish government, and
- to convince the government that any electronic voting system used in this country should be developed here, using formal methods and the Mercuri method, and should be open source.
More info at the the report site.
The Nedap/Powervote e-voting system is the one that the Irish government never bothered getting a copy of the source for, instead doing a basic under-NDA source audit. Reportedly, there were comments in the resulting review doc along the lines of 'The source code and comments for this section is in Dutch, so we're not sure exactly what it does'. And if that's not bad enough, it runs on WinCE, with the votes tabulated in an Access database. ;)
Let's hope Nedap/Powervote use their election-fixing powers purely for good, and not for evil! ;)
BTW, myself, I'm surprised the Irish government (a) went to a Dutch company for the technology to do this, and (b) didn't get hold of the entire system's components and source, or at least do a stronger audit, given their experience of imported computing devices including some 'bonus functionality' in the past.
No, not the supposedly politically-motivated nul points for the UK, the much more scandalous way that RTE ignored democracy and the popular vote in favour of their own autocratic 'Star Chamber' jury. Outrage! Boo!
'Voters had a five-minute slot in which to register their selections after all of the songs had been performed. Because Ireland was third of the entries to disclose its voting, the phone lines could not be kept open for any longer than the five-minute slot. Eircom, which operated the phone lines, had agreed with RTE' that it would collate all of the votes within nine to 10 minutes of lines closing. While the company fulfilled its obligation, RTE' decided to use a jury verdict rather than phone votes. ...
(My emphasis.) Hmm... methinks the journo doth protest too much.
Eircom said its decision not to charge voters for their calls was a goodwill gesture and should not be interpreted as an admission of failure on its part regarding its role in the voting. 'The system and the technology on our part worked as it should have on the night,' a spokeswoman said.'
Aaaaah. I get the picture.
A cautionary tale of consumer electronics regional lockdown follows. Hopefully Google'll pick it up and it'll help someone else in the same boat.
So I brought my PS2 with me from Ireland, along with a few good games, figuring that it'd be cheaper, and simpler, to bring them and buy a few bits of converter hardware here, rather than buy the lot from scratch.
How wrong I was. :(
So I've already spent about 50 bucks on a step-up transformer to convert US 110v to the 220v my European PS2 requires. Of course, the European PS2 outputs in PAL rather than NTSC, and most US TVs, including my one, accepts only NTSC input.
So the next step is a PAL to NTSC converter. Sounds like a pretty simple piece of equipment, right? Well, nope. Most pages out there that deal with this recommend either (A) buying a multi-region DVD player that'll convert PAL to NTSC on the fly -- which won't work for me, as I'm not looking to play DVDs per se -- (B) buying a converter like this one for about 280 dollars, (C) buying a new TV (even more expensive), or (D) buying a VCR that'll convert on the fly, like the Samsung SV-5000W, for about 350 dollars. (forget it, that's more than the price of the PS2!)
However, there does seem to be another option: a PAL-to-XGA converter, allowing me to display the PS2 output on my PC's monitor. Still pricey at 152 dollars though.
One more: I could just buy a new PS2 over here for 180 dollars and install a multi-region mod chip. But my soldering skills are rusty, and license-wise, it's iffy. :(
Finally, though, the winning option seems to be this: Lik-Sang.com sell a PS2-to-VGA output converter box for about 50 dollars plus shipping. Given that the display quality is improved -- and my monitor is sharper and bigger than my TV anyway -- I think I'll go for this.
Hubris: wow, SpamAssassin is on CNN.com!
The cool thing is -- this photo's syndicated by AP. Looks like SpamAssassin's name is truly in lights now...
The story of the U.S.S. Constitution and her drunkard sailors. A great story, so I forwarded it on, and what do you know, Ben debunks it thoroughly:
What a load of bollocks.
As to the alcohol detail, working it out on fingers and toes, it comes to over 3 gallons of liquor per person per day. 12 pints of rum would be a big day for me and I probably wouldn't want to get up and do it all over again the next day. And by day 100 ...
But the big honking red flag here is that the US was at war with FRANCE, not Britain, at the time. Ponder for a moment the concept of a US ship (when the US Navy was brand new and very small) sinking this many British ships and, ahem, sailing up the Firth of Clyde to -- this gets good -- raid a distillery. I think some response from the Royal Navy would have been considered ...
And the ship was launched on the 22nd, not the 27th.
Of course, this wouldn't stop, oh, the SECRETARY OF THE NAVY from repeating it as fact!
Ben, you should start your own blog.
Caelen and Barbara's travelogue from Luang Prabang just fills me with reminiscence for Laos -- I'd go back in a shot, it's an amazing country (well, for tourists at least, not sure about the folks living there).
Also interesting to see that Caelen went for some minor surgery while in Bangkok. Great idea -- 150 bucks is a hell of a lot cheaper than you'd get it pretty much anywhere else, and the Bangkok hospitals that cater for tourists are, by all accounts, super-swanky. Great idea!
wow, this is wierd.
So I did a quick blog-hop, as you do. First, I visited Bernie's interim weblogs.com blog (thanks for the link B! BTW, this looks cool).
From there, I hopped to Micheal O'Foghlu's site, and finally settled the question -- yes, he is related to Cormac O'Foghlu, who I used to work with ;)
On to Sean McGrath's blog, where I came across an interesting link to DemoTelco -- a nifty site where anyone can set up a blog and write entries via SMS messages. Set up by a Dublin company, Newbay.
Cool. To check it out, I took a look at one of the blogs on the 'most popular' sidebar, and what do you know -- it's Caelen King's foneblog!
Lots of (er, frankly bizarre) pics of Caelen and Barbara. Given the shots of Euro coins and crappy Dublin weather, I guess they're back from their round-the-world trip, then...
Sure enough, it notes:
We are back in Ireland and back at work - Our Really Big Adventure is over
Know that feeling. :( Still, at least they went to the bother of finishing up their travelogue. I think I'll take a read over that in full when I get a chance...
Ray Everett-Church of CAUCE writes regarding the latest US Senate anti-spam bill.
This bill simply creates a set of baseline standards for truthfulness, which if the spammer can meet, they can send as much spam as they wish. This characteristic, common to all the leading spam bills, makes it a gross misnomer to call them 'anti-spam.' 'Anti-consumer,' sure. 'Pro-spam,' even. But not 'anti-spam.'
Any legislation that permits all of America's estimated 23 million small businesses to legally send everyone at least one email cannot be considered anti-spam. And any bill that limits a consumer's recourse to clicking an opt-out link 23 million times isn't going to make our lives any better. By limiting enforcement to Attorneys General or the FTC, with no recourse for consumers, these bills virtually guarantee the status quo: extremely limited enforcement. Even the FTC and state AGs have said giving them more enforcement power without commensurate resources is a waste of time.
A good example of why opt-out does not work as a basis for anti-spam action; it permits every single potential sender to still spam you once, in full legality -- what's been called the 'one bite of the apple' problem.
Given that (as Ray says) there's 23 million small businesses in the US, that's a potential 23 million spams to your email address, and 23 million 'remove' requests you'd have to send to unsubscribe -- every three years, to boot. Full open letter from CAUCE here.
My cat has turned into a murderer. For the last week, he's been going out and bagging 1-2 wild animals per day; mostly rabbits, but some voles and a finch too.
It's really wrecking my head. I don't have the nuts to kill a half-dead rabbit in cold blood, so I wind up leaving them in the bushes to die; and I'm sure that's exactly what happens to most of 'em. The other day I had to fish out a dead baby rabbit, put it in a plastic bag, and dump it in the bin.
Maybe I should leave them out for the hawks. There's a pretty big peregrine and red-tailed hawk population around here.
Alternatively, maybe some cat
transformation sets would help... at least around the house: 'The cat
which became a hood figure is likely to have a broom at any moment, and is
likely to begin cleaning.'
Bonus: via jwz:
Yoz does a great job rounding up some Plan For Spam links. First off, he links to a great essay, Shooting The Messenger, which nicely rebuts the idea that to deal with spam, we need an SMTPng. Recommended. (He goes a bit overboard with some hard-ass filtering recommendations at the end IMO, though...)
Secondly, Yoz links to a couple more posts. The first is a friendly-fire incident involving the SpamCop DNS blacklists, illustrating the dangers of peer-to-peer 'this is spam' reporting. There's a related issue with the SpamCop DNSBL, in that it's over-sensitive; one report can sometimes be enough to get a site BLed, which is not good. The problems with SpamCop's hair-trigger thresholds are well-documented, and -- hopefully -- Julian will fix them soon.
The second is a mail from John Gilmore to Politech. He says 'a simple rule for anti-spam measures that preserves non-spammers' freedom to communicate is: No anti-spam measure should ever block a non-spam message. But there isn't a single anti-spam organization that actually follows this rule.'
Wrong. That's exactly the SpamAssassin angle. If the user says it's not spam, it's not spam -- and we have to figure out a way to get our scoring system to return that result, if at all possible. And yes, it gets it wrong about 0.1% of the time -- and that's why we never tell users to block, bounce or delete spam if at all possible; just mark it 'possible spam' and divert to another folder, and always let a human take a look to verify that decision.
Given the nature of the spam problem, and the nuisance it poses to virtually everybody trying to use email, that's the best that can be done at this point.
And yes, something has to be done. Spam is a massive problem. If it's not dealt with somehow, and kept out of our day-to-day inboxes, people will stop using mail. Before spam filters became ubiquitous, I talked to many casual internet users who (a) closed down their email address every 6 months to escape the flood, or (b) gave up reading their mail because of it. (And why did spam filters become ubiquitous?)
It comes down to: what's better for the internet -- a mislabelled email in your 'spam bucket' folder -- or no email at all?
Given that something like 8.13% of of the hosts that have sent non-spam mail to me do not have reverse DNS information recorded, the fact that AOL have just switched this on as a requirement will be interesting:
: jm ftp 1019...; dig aol.com mx aol.com. 3559 IN MX 15 mailin-01.mx.aol.com. mailin-01.mx.aol.com. 92 IN A 152.163.224.26 ... : jm ftp 1020...; telnet 152.163.224.26 25 Trying 152.163.224.26... Connected to 152.163.224.26. Escape character is '^]'. 220-rly-za01.mx.aol.com ESMTP mail_relay_in-za1.6; Thu, 22 May 2003 15:09:54 -0400 220-America Online (AOL) and its affiliated companies do not 220- authorize the use of its proprietary computers and computer 220- networks to accept, transmit, or distribute unsolicited bulk 220- e-mail sent from the internet. Effective immediately: AOL 220- may no longer accept connections from IP addresses which 220 have no reverse-DNS (PTR record) assigned. ^] telnet> q Connection closed.
New Scientist: Alchemy with light shocks physicists:
Claims of 'unexpected and stunning new physical phenomena' are rare in the abstract of a reputable scientific paper. But the latest report by photonics crystal pioneer John Joannopoulos and his group at MIT, soon to be published in Physical Review Letters, does not disappoint.
The researchers document the ultimate control over light: a way to shift the frequency of light beams to any desired colour, with near 100 per cent efficiency. 'The degree of control over light really is quite shocking,' comments photonics expert Eli Yablonovitch at the University of California, Los Angeles.
If the effect can be harnessed, it will revolutionise a range of fields - turning heat into light, for example, or prized terahertz rays. Right now, the only way to shift the frequency of a light beam involves sending an extremely intense light pulse - with a power of many megawatts or even gigawatts - along next to it.
This interacts with the first beam and alters its frequency, but the technique is expensive, requires high-power equipment, and is generally pretty inefficient. But when Joannopoulos and his colleagues Evan Reed and Marin Soljacic investigated what happens when shock waves pass through a device called a photonic crystal, they discovered a completely unexpected effect.
I'm just posting this because I like the word 'photonics' ;) But this is apparently really cool new tech.
BBC: How does Dyson make water go uphill? A very cool hack from a Dyson engineer for the Chelsea Flower Show -- an M. C. Escher-influenced water feature which gives the illusion that the water is flowing uphill.
A set of four glass ramps positioned in a square clearly show water travelling up each of them before it pours off the top, only to start again at the bottom of the next ramp.
It is a sight which defies logic, and has become probably the most memorable image of this year's show.
Mr Dyson says his inspiration was a drawing by the Dutch artist MC Escher (he of Gothic palaces where soldiers are eternally walking upstairs, and of patterns where birds turn into fish).
Privacy: Danny forwards this post which discusses what the poster calls the 'little elves' problem. Very good point and contains this great real-world example:
Peter Wright in 'Spycatcher' ... describes one of the problems arising out of the Berlin Tunnel Operation thus: 'So much raw intelligence was flowing out from the East that it was literally swamping the resources available to transcribe (and translate) and analyse it. MI6 had a special transcription center set up in Earl's Court, but they were still transcribing material seven years later when they discovered that George Blake had betrayed the Tunnel to the Russians from the outset'.
Funnily enough, I have the same problem -- a lack of processing power to deal with the raw incoming volume -- with my spamtraps from time to time. Now I can describe it in terms of 'little elves'.
Patents: W3C announce patent policy. They've decided on Royalty-Free as a requirement, good news. TimBL's comments on the decision:
Many participants in the original development of the Web knew that they might have sought patents on the work they contributed to W3C, and that they might have tried to secure exclusive access to these innovations or charge licensing fees for their use. However, those who contributed to building the Web in its first decade made the business decision that they, and the entire world, would benefit most by contributing to standards that could be implemented ubiquitously, without royalty payments.
This decision on the W3C Patent Policy coincides almost exactly with the tenth anniversary of CERN's decision to provide unencumbered access to the basic Web protocols and software developed there, even before the creation of W3C. In fact, the success of technical work at the World Wide Web Consortium depended significantly on that decision by CERN. The decision to base the Web on royalty-free standards from the beginning has been vital to its success until now. The open platform of royalty-free standards enabled software companies to profit by selling new products with powerful features, enabled e-commerce companies to profit from services that on this foundation, and brought social benefits in the non-commercial realm beyond simple economic valuation. By adopting this Patent Policy with its commitment to royalty-free standards for the future, we are laying the foundation for another decade of technical innovation, economic growth, and social advancement.
Quite. I remember seeing Mosaic for the first time -- my first thought was 'wow, it's like those commercial hypertext systems, but it's free'. Initially, the free-ness was a lot more important than the network transparency it also offered.
There had already been several commercial hypertext systems, with expensive licensing terms. I'd only ever seen them bundled with other products (like the AIX documentation viewer) or used in kiosk systems.
They pretty much foundered when HTTP and HTML became available. But there's no question to my mind that if CERN had made HTTP/HTML a commercial, licensed, or royalty-paying proposition, we wouldn't even be talking about the web (or should I say the 'WWW'?) nowadays.
(of the phone variety). I've been driven mad by telemarketers; one of the more irritating local innovations (thankfully 'sales cold calls' are pretty hard to operate with European privacy laws, so it wasn't a problem back home).
Well, Congress over here recently passed a 'do not call' list, so you could ring up the maintainers and ask for your number to be added, and hey presto, no more phone spam. Well, CalPundit writes:
The federal law doesn't cover banks, airlines or phone companies or calls made within a state.
Wow. That's like saying 'the law doesn't cover calls made on a day ending in 'y'.' In my experience, those companies make 95% of the calls. Great.
Think I'll stick with the tried-and-trusted 'ring through to answerphone during the afternoon and early evening' filter...
DMCA: IP: Using treaties to lock in DMCA enforcement:
On May 6, President Bush and Prime Minister Goh of Singapore signed the U.S.-Singapore Free Trade Agreement (the 'FTA'). President Bush has termed the FTA 'the first of its kind' - apparently meaning that it is the first free trade agreement between the United States and an Asian nation.
But the FTA is also the first of its kind in another sense, as well. It is the first international trade agreement to demand that the signatories implement anti-circumvention provisions similar to those of the hotly controversial Digital Millennium Copyright Act ('DMCA').
It's Naomi Klein meets Slashdot ;) Hopefully it'll be blocked though, since it has serious domestic results too:
This step will have international, as well as domestic consequences: If Congress approves the FTA, it will not able to alter the DMCA without violating its obligations to Singapore.
Of course, according to some correspondents, Ireland's copyright regime (reformed in 2000) quietly inserted its own DMCA provisions. Of course, nobody noticed, except for the legal lobbyists who were hoping this would happen. Doh. Is nowhere safe for freedom-to-tinker these days?
Scam-O-Rama: Absolutely incredible. These guys have taken the art of 419er-baiting to the ultimate extreme -- they're successfully extracting money from the 'Lads from Lagos':
Wow. Also this IDG.NET story notes:
There's an odd battle building in the dark alleys and byways of the Internet, being fought by diverse characters such as Dr. Sigmund Freud, Kris Kringle, the late Princess Margaret, a German-Hungarian gypsy called Hans Gneesunt-Boompsadazi, a Chinese restaurateur called Hu Flung Dung, and the Patagonian Liberation Front. ....
In what is regarded as the Titanic of the genre ... three bogus explorers called Captain Stabbin, Lonslo Tossov and Ilichy Miracsky, in their equally fictitious boat 'The Lucky Lad', kept a gang of Lads on the run for several months with clowning exploits describing their supposed passage up and down the West African coast, failing to meet the Lads on several occasions for a variety of improbable reasons.
Eventually the good captain pulled the plug on the reverse scam, informing the lads in no uncertain terms that they were 'mugus' -- a word used in Nigeria to denote an utter idiot.
I came across this while looking for info on the practice of signing guestbooks as Mugu Guyman. One theory I've heard is that means a 419er has visited the guestbook, scraped the email addresses for 419 fraud, and it's a sign for other 419ers to keep away from those addresses as they're already 'taken'. As the quote says above, 'Mugu' is apparently a term meaning something along the lines of 'gullible idiot'. Most of the comments seem to support this:
- 'me i done here mugu mugu off'
- 'TOGO GUYMEN KEEP OFF FROM THIS SITE I DEY HERE LAGOS ?TOGO GHANA GUYMEN MUGU NO DEY HERE'
- 'Avary good site pls all guyman keep off,oooooooooooooooooo.'
Then, a few seem to indicate that it's a sign to other 419ers not to spam those addresses while a scam is in progress:
- 'south africa, jo bong, mugu guyman kindly keep offoooooooooooooo someone have visitedooooooooooooooo and still waiting for reply ok'
- 'VERY HICE ALL MUGU GUYMAN KEEP OFF IT HAS BEEN DONE PLEASE DON,T SPOIL JOB FOR I DONO DO ALL0000000000000000000000000000000000000'
Dunno what all the oooooooooing is about though... ;)
New Scientist: The Last Word: 'Q: I have heard that it is possible to live on Guinness and milk alone. Is this true, or even partially true?'
'A: This is not quite true. Guinness does contain many vitamins and minerals in small quantities, but is lacking vitamin C, as well as calcium and fat. So, to fulfil all of your daily nutritional requirements you would need to drink a glass of orange juice, two glasses of milk, and 47 pints of Guinness. -- Nigel Goodwin , University of Nottingham'
No problem!
Karlin posts a good story on the whole 'rescue of Private Jessica Lynch' story. Great quote:
Further, British military Group Captain Al Lockwood, the British Army spokesman at central command in Iraq, says that the British could not believe the pandering way in which the US military dealt with the US media, culminating in the Lynch episode, and the gushing, unquestioning acceptance of same by the US media. 'In reality we had two different styles of news media management,' said Lockwood. 'I feel fortunate to have been part of the UK one.'
The American strategy was to concentrate on the visuals and to get a broad message out. Details - where helpful - followed behind. The key was to ensure the right television footage. The embedded reporters could do some of that. On other missions, the military used their own cameras, editing the film themselves and presenting it to broadcasters as ready-to-go packages. The Pentagon had been influenced by Hollywood producers of reality TV and action movies.
One interesting result is that, while the US media (or TV at least) is happy to spew this pabulum, for some reason, these days, most other media outlets world-wide are a bit more likely to apply a critical eye, suspecting spin.
No matter whether it's true or not, excessive media management (or filming of action movies ;) over flimsy stories is quickly exposed. This promulgates the impression world-wide that the wool is being pulled over the viewers' eyes, and that the source of the news is fundamentally telling fibs.
In case you missed it -- SCO's letter to Linux customers. Executive summary:
- open-source code development methodology bashing, to start with
- SCO will 'suspend their own Linux-related activities', whatever they were
- all users of Linux are vaguely threatened in a 'cartooney' fashion
- 'Similar to analogous efforts underway in the music industry, we are prepared to take all actions necessary to stop the ongoing violation of our intellectual property or other rights.'
Classy! And a bonus good point from a comment on this LJ article: 'According to this article, SCO Linux 4.0 contains version 2.4.19 of the Linux kernel. ... By the act of distributing the Linux 2.4.19 kernel, SCO has irrevocably released any and all of their intellectual property present in the 2.4.19 kernel under the (terms of the) GPL.'
my ex-employers, IONA Technologies Announces Chris Horn as CEO -- again:
In a series of further moves, Mr. Barry Morris, CEO since May 2000, Mr. Steven Fisch, COO, who joined the company in August 2002, and Mr. David James, Executive Vice President Corporate Development, who joined in 1997, have resigned.
'The Board of IONA Technologies is responding firmly to the challenges and opportunities of the changed marketplace, to position the company for profitable growth and to take advantage of market opportunities through business and new product development. I want to thank Barry, Steven and David for their enormous contributions to IONA and I wish them well in their next challenges,' said Dr. Chris Horn.
Good to hear it!
Salam Pax blogs about an interesting NGO:
I have heard today that a NGO called Communication sans frontiers has arrived in Iraq and will help. They will probably be doing what the Red Cross is doing, a center in Baghdad and a team moving around Iraq. The Red Cross has been moving its phone service, if you can call it that, around Baghdad. Two days for each district and they depend on the word of mouth to spread the news, usually they end up with huge lines and waiting lists but everybody is grateful. Many people have no way telling their relatives abroad how they are doing. A couple of Arabic TV stations, mainly Jazeera, has been putting their cameras in the street and allowing people to send regards to their relatives abroad, tell them they are OK hoping that they would be watching at the time. So what the Red Cross has been doing, and I think what Communication sans frontiers would ultimately be doing is much appreciated.
According to this comment on the command-post.org blog, it's actually called Telecoms Sans Frontieres:
Telecoms sans Frontieres has created a new humanitarian aid concept: the humanitarian telephone system. TSF's mission is to operate anywhere in the world, in the heart of military conflicts or in the wake of natural disasters, in order to enable the local population to simply say: I'm alive.
Now there's a cool idea for any BOFHs who fancy doing some interesting volunteer work for a year... ;)
A classic Ali G moment, via Maureen Dowd in the New York Times (username: sitescooper/sitescooper):
- YOUNG MAN: How does you make countries do stuff you want?
- MR. BAKER: Well, the way you deal with countries on foreign policy issues . . . is you deal with carrots and sticks.
- YOUNG MAN: But what country is gonna want carrots, even if it's like a million tons of carrots that you're giving over there----
- MR. BAKER: Well, carrots -- I'm not using the term literally. You might send foreign aid -- money, money.
- YOUNG MAN: Well, money's better than carrots. Even if a country love carrots and that is, like, their favorite national food, if they get given them----
- MR. BAKER: Well, don't get hung up on carrots. That's just a figure of speech.
- YOUNG MAN: So would you ever send carrots? You know, is there any situation----
- MR. BAKER: No, no.
- YOUNG MAN: What about if there was a famine?
- MR. BAKER: Carrots, themselves? No.
Beautiful.
Initially, there were a lot of media reports in the UK and Ireland, about how negatively it was taken in the US; this interview with the director reckons that was rubbish put about by UK media:
'I've got a theory about this: In Britain, we're no longer world leaders in anything. ... Yet the one thing we still maintain, and cling on to jealously, is that we've got the best sense of humour in the world. So we don't like the idea that people in other countries get our sense of humour. We prefer to cling to the idea that our comedy is too sophisticated for the Americans And yet the truth is rather different. If you look at sitcoms, with a couple of exceptions, all the best ones come from America, like Friends, Frasier, Seinfeld and so on.'
'I actually think Americans get the undertones of satire almost better than the British. It can't be coincidence that the best comedies on our TV are all imported from America.'
But then even the bad reviews never said that Ali G was too sophisticated, complaining instead that the satire wasn't subtle enough. Maybe the Americans are the more comedy-literate, after all.
TidBITS weighs in. They cover the issues very well, and also have noticed the problem that arises when a C-R system decides to challenge e-commerce notifications -- like your air travel e-tickets, for example.
Found at
Gary Robinson's blog, where he also links a couple of taint.org
items, cheers Gary ;)
Also, from /.: the House of Lords debates the etymology of 'spam'. Quite funny:
Lady Saltoun of Abernethy: My Lords, do the Government have any plans to restrict unsolicited faxes? My fax paper is always being wasted by people who send me faxes I do not want. I do not know whether they could be called 'corned beef' or something, but I have had enough of them.
Plus another anti-spam Senate bill, from Rep. W.J. 'Billy' Tauzin (R-La.) and F. James Sensenbrenner Jr. (R-Wis.). This one is apparently riddled with loopholes: 'this is yet another bill . . . attempting to get rid of the porn and the scams, but really clearing the way for legitimate companies to spam," said John Mozena, co-founder of ... CAUCE.'
As I've said before, C-R is not an acceptable way, alone, to deal with spam. You're just pushing the work away from yourself, and onto your legitimate correspondents -- and you won't make any friends as a result. Things get worse when anything more complex than simple person-to-person mail intrudes, like internet mailing lists. (And come on folks -- that particular innovation is only 24 years old ;)
Case in point this week: Declan McCullagh gets bitten:
My reluctant conclusion is that C-R systems with flawed implementations have the potential to end legitimate mailing lists as we know them today.
and Dave Farber says:
If I start getting a flood of challenges from earthlink ipers that require my response I will most likely declare them SPAM and you will stop receiving IP mail.
John Levine's follow-up is well worth a read, as he predicts massive (and trivial) whitelist exploitation by spammers to avoid C-R -- and then we'll be worse off than we were when we started.
Finally, there's quite a funny quote in John's mail:
A relatively easy to solve problem with challenge systems is that most of them are written by dimwits who don't understand the way that e-mail really works. In 1983 the 4.3BSD Berkeley Unix 'vacation' program correctly dealt with mail from lists and other mechanical sources, yet 20 years later I still see out-of-office replies from Lotus Notes and MS Exchange to list mail every day. (Is there really nobody at IBM or Microsoft who used 4.3BSD or knows the rules of thumb to recognize non-personal but legit mail?)
I have often wondered that myself ;)
So I've signed up for EMusic. Just my luck -- with perfect timing, they've instituted a new download policy, whereby one has to use a proprietary download application -- and it doesn't work on Red Hat versions after 7.3; to quote their install instructions:
The Linux version of the Download Manager 2.0 was developed for Red Hat 6.2, 7.3 and Mandrake 8.1. Any flavors of Linux outside of these may not support the EMusic Download Manager 2.0. If you are having issues, we recommend that you switch your Linux flavor or OS in order to download with the EMusic Download Manager 2.0.
There's two workarounds: use the Red Hat 7.3 shared libraries for system libc and libnss, as described by John Anderson of genehack.org here; or apparently, a local proxy can be used as long as you use the IP address of the proxy in the emusicdlm app -- not the hostname.
I'm conflicted now; I was about to go recommending this service to all and sundry, but
-
it really makes the Linux version a hell of a lot harder to run. (I hope they fix that, at least). Previously, it was simply 'right click to download', which is insanely easy and simple.
-
more worryingly -- in my experience, this kind of 'tightening up' is often symptomatic of a company running out of cash and spiralling 'round the plughole, IMO. :(
On the good side, once I downloaded and set up the genehack hack^Wworkaround, it's now working perfectly.
I've just downloaded an album from their service in about 3 minutes (at 400Kb/s), first try, and the tracks are all crystal-clear VBR MP3s. Now that's nice...
(PS: -1 for whichever glibc genius decided to change the libnss API
incompatibly.)
Horror as maggots bore into game farmer's eye (Saturday Star, South Africa):
'I was in the veld hunting with a group of foreign tourists when I felt something flick into my eye. I thought it was just a miggie but that evening my whole face started to swell,' he said.
Spangenberg went to his doctor and was given eye drops but the swelling got worse. 'I started getting terrible migraines and at times I could see nothing but dark and light shadows out of my eye.'
His doctor sent him to eye specialist Bruce Staples in Bethlehem who suspected that the Bot fly was responsible but initially couldn't spot the larvae - so he treated the inflammation.
When Spangenberg came in again, Staples spotted the worms in the retina and managed to hunt them down with the laser. Staples said by that stage they had begun to pupate and started to run and hide when he went after them with the laser.
This story notes that, in Africa at least, they generally attempt to infect sheep eyes rather than those of humans; but snopes has pictures (warning: extremely gross) from an earlier infestation in Honduras.
Botfly larvae are horrible, horrible little creatures. Urgh. This combines two of my pet neuroses -- maggots and things happening to eyes -- I think I'm going to get sick...
Boca (Raton, FL) stamping itself spam capital (Palm Beach Post):
'Boca Raton is stamping itself worldwide for millions of Internet users flooded in spam as the 'world spam capital,' said Steve Linford, director of the Spamhaus Project ...
'We'd rather be known for our parks and quality of life,' Boca Raton Mayor Steven Abrams said.'
Found via spamNEWS.
wow, the FTC get so many reports of spam, they have to use this monster to deal with it! That's serious volume.
(Image courtesy of spamNEWS and Neil Schwartzman -- thanks Neil)
Myself and Ronald F. Guilmette co-wrote an advisory on vulnerabilities in FormMail. Here it is, archived from RFG's bugtraq posting:
Anonymous Mail Forwarding Vulnerabilities in FormMail 1.9
By manipulating inputs to the FormMail CGI script, remote users may abuse the functionality provided by FormMail to cause the local mail server on the same (web) server system to send arbi- trary e-mail messages to arbitrary e-mail destination addresses. Such e-mail messages may contain real or forged sender e-mail addresses (in the From: headers) entirely of the attacker's choosing. In some cases, the envelope sender addresses of such messages may also be set to arbitrary values by the attacker.
I helped with a few cases where FormMail is vulnerable here, namely the injection of newlines attack.
When this came out, I was in Australia, packing in preparation for a month-long camping trip around Victoria ;) The Lake Catani campsite at Mount Buffalo was amazing. (whoa, compare that page with this e-commerce monstrosity -- urgh)
Saddam Hussein, or Mighty Morphin' Power Ranger? You decide:
... (UFO Roundup Middle East correspondent) Mohammed Daud al-Hayyat has a theory that the golden necklaces worn by Saddam and his son Qusay are protective devices given to them by the reputed Zarzi aliens. ...
'People say that when they wear these necklaces, Saddam and Qusay have only to clasp hands, and the circle of light will appear,' Mohammed explained, 'The alien vortex will instantly transport them to safety. In this manner, they can create the circle without the Zarzi aliens being present.' ...
'The latest rumor is that Saddam will shortly address the people of Iraq from an alien base on the moon! They say this will happen in four or five days.'
Classic! Snipped from UFO Roundup, via the Forteana list; full extract here. (Link)
Date: Fri, 09 May 2003 11:39:10 -0000
From: "uncle_slacky" (spam-protected)
To: (spam-protected)
Subject: Re: FWD (UASR) 1958: A case of time travel in Montana
--- In (spam-protected) "Terry W. Colvin" (spam-protected) wrote:
UFO ROUNDUP Volume 8, Number 18 May 7, 2003
You missed the best segment - the one about Saddam and the UFO:
The Saddam video "is the talk of everyone in Baghdad," reported Ayesha al-Khatabi, a UFO Roundup Middle East correspondent. "But what is most puzzling is the mysterious golden necklace Saddam was wearing when the Azamiyah video was made. Qusay was wearing one, as well. Since Saddam is not known for wearing jewelry with his uniforms, my sources in Iraq cannot understand why he chose to wear it that day."
Fellow correspondent Mohammed Daud al-Hayyat has a theory that the golden necklaces worn by Saddam and his son Qusay are protective devices given to them by the reputed Zarzi aliens.
(Editor's Note: According to an urban legend, a UFO crashed in Iraq either during 1991 or 1998. Saddam granted the surviving aliens sanctuary, allowing them to live in either an underground base at Zarzi or at the centuries-old citadel at Qalaat-e-Julundi in the As- Zab as-Saghir (Little Zab) river valley in northern Iraq.)
"People say that when they wear these necklaces, Saddam and Qusay have only to clasp hands, and the circle of light will appear," Mohammed explained, "The alien vortex will instantly transport them to safety. In this manner, they can create the circle without the Zarzi aliens being present."
Two days after Saddam's appearance, "on April 11 (2003)," al- Azamiyah "was the site of a firefight between Iraqis holed up in a mosque and U.S. Marines hunting for leaders of Saddam's regime."
Ayesha noted that "al-Azamiyah is primarily a neighborhood of Sunni Muslims, so Saddam Hussein knew he would be among friends when he appeared there."
Also on Wednesday, April 9, 2003, according to ufologist Jose Escamilla, a cylindrical UFO was seen dodging American anti-aircraft bursts while flying over Baghdad.
"I found a rod (cylindrical UFO) that zipped through anti-aircraft explosions over the city," Escamilla reported, "And this rod flew effortlessly and was not hit nor affected by the explosions in the air. Clear shot and it was moving very fast."
Ayesha speculated that this "may have been the UFO that brought Saddam Hussein to al-Azamiyah earlier. The Escamilla video may actually show Saddam and Qusay leaving the city after their surprise appearance."
On Wednesday, April 30, 2003, the ousted dictator created another stir when "a London-based Arabic newspaper published a handwritten letter purportedly signed by Saddam Hussein that called on Iraqis to rise up against American forces."
Saddam "urged Iraqis to rebel against the 'infidel, criminal, murderous and cowardly occupier,' promised that people who collaborated with American-led forces would be punished and predicted that 'the day of liberation and victory will come."'
"Faxed to the offices of Al-Quds al-Arabi, the letter was dated April 28, the date of Saddam's 66th birthday."
"The newspaper's editor, Abdel Bari Atwan...said he had seen Saddam's signature before and believed the one on the letter was 'definitely' his."
However, "U.S. officials were skeptical about the authenticity" of Saddam's letter and "are unsure whether Saddam survived two bombings that targeted buildings where he was believed to be, one at the outset of the war and one at the closing days."
President George W. Bush, "speaking Sunday (April 20, 2003) at Fort Hood in Texas, said that if Saddam was alive, 'I would suggest he not pop his head up."'
"In the last week, Iraqis say they have seen Saddam emerging from an underground tunnel in his hometown of Tikrit, riding in a taxi in the southern city of Basra and living in a former Sheraton Hotel in Baghdad."
"'There have been more sightings of Saddam Hussein than of Elvis,' Rick Wiles, editor of American Freedom News, said."
"Opinion is equally divided. Some people say Saddam is at Zarzi with the aliens," Mohammed Daud al-Hayyat added, "Others say he is at the underground base at al- Ouja, two kilometers (1.2 miles) north of Tikrit. The latest rumor is that Saddam will shortly address the people of Iraq from an alien base on the moon! They say this will happen in four or five days."
Entertainment - AP TV: Shatner's Ex-Wife Sues Over Horse Semen.
Thanks to Ben for pointing out that one.
Good news -- Dear Raed is back on the air, in one piece!
Let me tell you one thing first. War sucks big time. Don't let yourself ever be talked into having one waged in the name of your freedom. Somehow when the bombs start dropping or you hear the sound of machine guns at the end of your street you don't think about your 'imminent liberation' anymore.
But I am sounding now like the Taxi drivers I have fights with whenever I get into one.
Reactionary taxi drivers -- the same the world over ;) A fantastic read. So many details from the point of view of a 'normal' Iraqi on the streets. If you've been following the war and subsequent events, you can't miss it.
Israeli Defence Force fires on parents of injured British peace activist (Independent) (and the British defence attache to Tel Aviv): 'The parents of a British peace activist who was shot in the head by Israeli troops, came under fire themselves' ... (they) 'were in a British diplomatic convoy entering the town of Rafah in the Gaza Strip when Israeli soldiers at a checkpoint fired a shot'. 'The incident ... took place despite the Israeli Army being given notice of the journey on at least three occasions'. Incredible. More at the Guardian, too.
just got back from a super-quick booze-soaked weekend visit to Ben in SF. It was so good to visit a city once again, and get the opportunity to paint the town red, hit the bars, eat in plentiful cheap restaurants, and generally enjoy city life (which I've been missing massively since the move from Dublin). But now back in post-suburban Irvine to cope with the hangover.
Also got to meet up with Komal, one of my co-workers up there -- which was cool. Unfortunately it was a super-speedy weekend whistle-stop tour though, so having a good social meet-up with all the guys will have to wait until the next visit. ;)
Net: 'The Canadian scientists who broke the genetic code for SARS ... say they couldn't have done it without the Internet. ... The key to that collaboration was ordinary e-mail'.
It also turns out the ProMED mailing list was the central point at which SARS reports were collated in the early stages, even despite evasion and cover-up by the Chinese state.
So there you go -- as usual, SMTP is the killer app -- or in this case, a life-saving app! All the more reason to figure out ways to deal with spam and return SMTP to its top spot in the protocol pantheon.
Good thing the FTC Spam Forum went so well, then. Sounds like there was unprecedented agreement between the non-spam folks, clear understanding of the issues by quite a few of the Washington denizens, and maybe even some good footage of the other side digging holes for themselves.
Health: US, Asian Airlines Disagree on SARS. Me, I just wish the airlines would stop being so bloody cheap, and bring in more fresh air rather than recirculating. ;)
Date: Sun, 04 May 2003 12:20:16 -0400
From: STEPHEN JONES (spam-protected)
To: (spam-protected) (spam-protected)
Subject: Internet is a good thing says Steve Jones clone
Internet played a key role in decoding SARS genome, scientists say
DENNIS BUECKERT
OTTAWA (CP) - The Canadian scientists who broke the genetic code for SARS just weeks after the disease appeared say they couldn't have done it without the Internet.
Scientists from the Michael Smith Genome Sciences Centre of the B.C. Cancer Agency say their achievement relied on rapid communication with scientists around the world. The key to that collaboration was ordinary e-mail, said Steven Jones of the Vancouver-based research agency in a teleconference Thursday sponsored by Science magazine.
"Within a day of us having a press release announcing our participation in the sequencing we had an amazing amount of e-mail from scientists all around the world," Jones said.
As soon as the sequence was decoded, the B.C. researchers posted it on the Internet.
"People were, within minutes of that, able to download the sequence and analyse it in their own laboratories and their own computers," Jones said.
"The Internet has had a profound impact on how this data has been shared and how scientists have collaborated."
A short time later, researchers at the Atlanta Centers for Disease Control published the sequence of a coronavirus taken from another SARS patient.
The genetic coding for the two viruses were virtually identical, boosting confidence that the coronavirus was in fact the causal agent.
Now both sequences are posted on the World Wide Web for the benefit of researchers in many countries racing to find a reliable test for SARS, and a vaccine to prevent it.
Scientists say the speed of the decoding was amazing.
The first reports of the new disease came from China in November, and on March 13 cases were reported in Toronto and Vancouver. The sequences were posted on the net on April 15.
By contrast, it took years to identify the agents behind diseases like AIDS and hepatitis C.
Mel Crajdon of the B.C. Centre for Disease Control said all evidence points to the coronavirus as being the cause of SARS, despite some seemingly contradictory findings.
Earlier this week Frank Plummer, who heads the National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg, said he was puzzled by the number of people who show evidence of the SARS coronavirus but not symptoms of the disease.
Crajdon suggested the apparent anomaly is due to imperfect understanding of how the disease presents itself, as well as lack of reliable tests for the presence of the virus.
"I'm not surprised by the results that have been obtained to date and I think that they will rapidly improve," he said.
More than 5,400 cases of SARS have been diagnosed worldwide, with at least 394 deaths. In Canada, there have been 23 deaths, all in the Toronto area.
-
- -
On the Net:
SARS sequences: http://sciencemag.org/features/data/sars
SARS data: http://aaas.org
SARS Comments: http://eurekalert.org
Tim Bray is opening my eyes to lots of the itty bitty details of i18n with Unicode. I had very vague ideas about so many things he's writing here, so it's an educational read, especially this:
In Java, characters are represented by the char data type, which is claimed to be a '16-bit Unicode character'. Unfortunately, as I pointed out recently, there really is no such thing. To be precise, a Java char represents a UTF-16 code point, which may represent a character or may, via the surrogate mechanism, represent only half a character. The consequence of this is that the following methods of the String class can produce results that are incorrect: charAt, getChars, indexOf, lastIndexOf, length, and substring. Of course, if you are really sure that you will never have to deal with an 'astral-plane' character, to the point of being willing to accept that your software will break messily if one shows up, you can pretend that these errors can't happen.
To me, this feels just like deciding that you'll hever have to deal with more than 64K of memory, or a database bigger than 32 bits in size, or a date after December 31, 1999. What Hunter S. Thompson would call 'bad craziness.' I'll settle for 'shortsighted.'
Wow, and there was I thinking Java had that sorted. If you ever plan to deal with 21st-century-style i18n (ie. using Unicode), you'd better read these articles.
Spam: via BoingBoing, how to extract 500 bucks, painlessly, from telemarketers, under the TCPA. Not yet applicable to spam -- but who knows, maybe in a few month's time...
Open Source: Colm MacCarthaigh caught Dell out a few months ago; turns out they were distributing a wireless AP, the Dell Truemobile 1184, which contained a modified Linux distro -- but were not distributing the source to the GPL'ed parts.
Well, all credit to Dell. They've admitted their slip-up, resolved the problem admirably, and openly, and have shipped Colm a CD-ROM with all the GPL'ed source on it , which Colm has made available here . Mistakes happen, but it was nicely resolved.
Declan McCullagh: A modest proposal to end spam. Good article on Larry Lessig's 'spam bounties' proposal.
Lofgren's plan won't give everyone who gets spammed new rights to sue (although spam victims may already may have some rights under state antispam or other laws). Instead, it states that people sending unsolicited commercial e-mail must label it with 'ADV:' in the subject line or run the risk of being sued by the Federal Trade Commission. If you are the first to report an unlabeled spam-o-gram to the government, you will get a bounty of 'not less than 20 percent' of the fine the spammer pays, assuming it can ever be collected.
There are problems with this. As far as I know, the FTC is not having a problem collecting spam -- the figures I've seen (can't recall them right now) indicate that they get hundreds of megs a day. (Even the SpamAssassin.org spamtraps get over 100Mb a day.)
The difficulty is chasing down the perpetrator, and prosecuting. That takes law-enforcement manpower, and that's just not there right now -- because, let's face it, spam is not a serious offence like rape or murder.
Anyway, Declan says that the major problem is that the spammers are offshore:
For one thing, an increasing percentage of it comes from overseas, and you can be certain that offshore bulk mailers will gleefully thumb their noses at Congress. Ken Schneider, chief technical officer of antispam company Brightmail, estimates that 30 percent to 50 percent of the spam his company tracks comes from outside the United States. 'It's a big number,' Schneider said. 'It's a global economy, and spammers are certainly taking advantage of it.'
This is a frequent misapprehension. This is not the case. It's true that much spam is relayed through machines in Asia and South America, but the originators -- the people who are writing the spam and sending it to compromised relay machines and proxies -- are US-based. In fact, a vast quantity of 'em seem to be based in Florida. (This is the thing about country-code blacklists. In reality, if we could track a message all the way back to the origin, a state-code blacklist for FL would probably work much better ;)
In other news from the same article:
... Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., is expected to introduce a bill this week to create an national 'do not e-mail' list--an idea that the New Democrats touted earlier this month.
OK, while I'm here, let's debunk 'do no mail' lists too. ;) 'Do not call' lists work well for telephones, since you typically have only one phone number. But for email:
-
one can have thousands of valid email addresses forwarding to you (I do). There's a variety of methods to address even one user, for example 'foo@jmason.org', 'foo@jmason.org.', 'foo%jmason.org@localhost', 'foo@212.17.35.15', 'foo@dogma.slashnull.org' will all reach me. That's not even considering 'role' addresses, like 'sales@', 'info@', etc., or single-use addresses set up for particular transactions, like 'onetime-buying-stuff-from-ecommerce-site-example@jmason.org'.
-
mailing lists and 'exploders' are widespread, and frequently spammed.
-
'do not mail' lists are hard to implement, since they may be vulnerable to scraping (if naively done) or dictionary attacks (less naive).
In summary, I'm not confident a 'do not mail' list could actually be operable.
Finally -- The SBL's answer to the EMarketersAmerica.org SLAPP lawsuit.
I've been trying to reduce all the anti-war stuff, since there's plenty of other sources for that and I reckon I'm boring everyone. But this story's a doozie -- US, UK intelligence agencies accuse Bush and Blair of distorting and fabricating evidence in rush to war:
A high-level UK source said last night that intelligence agencies on both sides of the Atlantic were furious that briefings they gave political leaders were distorted in the rush to war with Iraq. 'They ignored intelligence assessments which said Iraq was not a threat,' the source said. Quoting an editorial in a Middle East newspaper which said, 'Washington has to prove its case. If it does not, the world will for ever believe that it paved the road to war with lies', he added: 'You can draw your own conclusions.' ...
'The INC saw the demand, and provided what was needed,' he said. 'The implication is that they polluted the whole US intelligence effort.'
BBC: Wartime role of Queen's dressmaker. 'Details have emerged about the wartime activities of the Queen's dressmaker Sir Hardy Amies, who died last month aged 93.'
Apparently, he served with the Special Operations Executive (SOE) in Brussels, liaising with the Belgian resistance. During this time, he organised a photo-shoot for Vogue magazine featuring members of the resistance movement posing for photographs!
Seems he got away with it, though -- another officer writes in his file:
'However, it is not for me to reason why, but no doubt the profile of Lt.Col Amies in the next issue of the Vogue will cause a flutter in many feminine hearts when they realise that their handsome couturier is, after all, the Scarlet Pimpernel of this war.'
Tim O'Reilly: Killer Apps Share A Common Thread: Hacker Geeks.
The really interesting bit in this is the discussion of the Amazon Web Services:
Rob Federick, senior technology manager for Amazon.com, asked for a show of hands for those in the room who considered Amazon.com to be a retailer business and those who considered it to be a technology platform. O'Reilly was amongst the few who raised hands in support of the latter.
It didn't start out that way. But Amazon soon discovered developers taking the Amazon interface and adding their own ideas. A 19-year-old developer from Romania, 'Catlin,' began designing store fronts that looked like the Amazon.com site, and then allowing other developers to download the source code for free.
'We are allowing people to create and innovate in ways that Amazon.com cannot do on its own,' Federick said.
This is incredibly significant, and shows how Amazon's leadership has a totally different vision compared to other online retailers. The others take the 'Altavista view' -- they want to lock their users 'in the trunk' as Dave Winer says; users stay on the retailer's site, aggregators and price-comparison engines are locked out, having to jump through hacky screen-scraping hoops, etc.
In contrast, Amazon are more than happy to let other sites scrape their content using their web services, even if this could be used to show how other sites have lower prices, or possibly lose them sales. Wow. I'm sure that was hard to sell internally, but it's a great move.
Spam: Reg: new spam trojan, called Proxy-Guzu. Yet another. :(
Yahoo: Guinness brews up African recipe.
DUBLIN (Reuters) - Guinness is brewing up an African-style version of its famous stout to quench the thirst of Ireland's growing immigrant population. Tests are under way to replicate Guinness manufactured in Nigeria at its St. James' Gate headquarters in Dublin. The African version of Guinness Foreign Extra Stout tastes sweeter and heavier than the traditional draught popular in the west, and is almost double in strength.
A Guinness spokeswoman said the new brand was a result of consumer demand from Ireland's growing African population. 'This is the home of Guinness and so we're seeing if we can brew the African recipe here and produce it at St. James' Gate to the same recipe as in Nigeria,' she said. ...
Guinness Foreign Extra Stout was first exported from Ireland in the 19th century to British colonies. The first Guinness exports to Africa were to Sierra Leone in 1827. The stronger alcohol content helped preserve it during the long sea journey.
I can't wait to try it out. I used to continually overhear conversations on the bus between Dublin locals and Africans regarding whose Guinness was best -- time to settle the argument! ;)
Luther Blisset strikes again; the pseudonymous trickster anarchist collective from Bologna named after a West Indian footballer (it's all 'explained' in the manifesto) is still at work. Now they've written a swashbuckling bestseller historical novel called Q:
Q has finally reached Britain, in Shaun Whiteside's zippy and rumbustious translation (Heinemann, £14.99). Set in Germany, the Low Countries and Venice between the 1520s and 1550s, it dramatises the bloody popular revolts that accompanied (and challenged) Luther's Reformation, and the Catholic undercover strategies that wrecked these radical movements. Imagine Umberto Eco's knack for the swashbuckling thriller-of-ideas crossed with an artful touch of the Le Carrés, and you have a fair idea of the novel's mood. ....
Q works like a charm as a sordid, splendid period romp that painlessly informs its readers about the theological strife that splintered Europe (and the banking networks that re-connected it). Yet the reasons why a bunch of Bolognese stirrers shoud seize upon this theme soon grow clear. Effectively, their novel also operates as an allegory of Italian leftist politics since the Seventies. Out of the chaos of Utopian gambits and guerrilla provocations, in a murk of subterfuge, an elite plan for a 'new world order' emerges.
Sounds great! Must remember to stick that in the wishlist.
Wierd. For the last two days, the PM news programme on BBC Radio 4 has been discussing the recent admission by (iirc) the US military commander in control of the Guantanamo Bay detention center, that there are several Afghani children who have been detained there, since the war in Afghanistan.
This has elicited the reactions you'd expect from UNICEF, etc., seeing as it's in contravention of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.
However, there's nothing on any English-language news pages I can find; just this Der Spiegel story, not even on the BBC news site itself.
Update: Didn't look hard enough! Here it is. Also, the Irish Times reports:
(General Richard Myers) responded sharply to questions about critical world reaction to the detention of three children, ages 13 to 15, at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba where the US military holds suspected al-Qaeda and Taliban members.
'Despite their age these are very dangerous people,' he said. 'Some have killed. some have said they will kill again.'
Defence Secretary Mr Donald Rumsfeld said the US was 'keeping them down there to keep them off the streets'.
Hmm. On the BBC, the commander of the joint task force at Guantanamo, Major General Geoffrey Miller was interviewed; he said that the children had been press-ganged into fighting for the Taliban, and had been victims of abuse during that time. 'very dangerous people'?
wtf? From the Red Hat 9 at(1) manual page:
At allows fairly complex time specifications, extending the POSIX.2 standard. ... You may also specify midnight, noon, or teatime (4pm).
The sugar industry in the US is threatening to bring the World Health Organisation to its knees by demanding that Congress end its funding unless the WHO scraps guidelines on healthy eating, due to be published on Wednesday.
The threat is being described by WHO insiders as tantamount to blackmail and worse than any pressure exerted by the tobacco lobby.
In a letter to Gro Harlem Brundtland, the WHO's director general, the Sugar Association says it will 'exercise every avenue available to expose the dubious nature' of the WHO's report on diet and nutrition, including challenging its $406m (£260m) funding from the US.
The industry is furious at the guidelines, which say that sugar should account for no more than 10% of a healthy diet. It claims that the review by international experts which decided on the 10% limit is scientifically flawed, insisting that other evidence indicates that a quarter of our food and drink intake can safely consist of sugar.
Does anyone in their right mind think that a food intake consisting of 25% sugar makes any sense whatsoever?
Food over here, BTW, has been really good compared to Ireland. We have a branch of Trader Joe's just down the road, which has supplied us with stacks of fantastic organic and/or healthy eats, for far cheaper than what the local supermarket charges for the usual pasteurised, added-sugar, added-salt crap.
This is just as well, because that supermarket has some really nasty stuff; even the bread is sweet due to added sugar! yuck. (In passing, pet food peeve: pasteurised orange juice. Pasteurisation of fruit juice kills the flavour and texture, and is thoroughly pointless; with that much acid and sugar, there's no way any nasty bacteria can survive, assuming the juice is citrus and is fresh enough. But maybe that's the point; saleable while less fresh == longer shelflife == profit.)
Goodbye to Baghdad (Guardian). Some good snippets:
The information ministry and TV headquarters were obvious targets (for looters), but the wanton destruction of St George's church was unexpected. ... A man living next door to the church said Christians were seen as part of the regime.
Tariq Aziz, after all, is a Christian. Also, this -- I knew it! --
The US tanks that shot their way into the city have lost their menace. Children now go right up to the US soldiers, smile, and swear at them in Arabic, finding it hilarious that the troops think they are being friendly.
And the politics of the Shia/Sunni divide:
'The whole administration has been robbed and destroyed, except for those institutions which have been guarded by them (provisional Shia local government),' said the hospital director. He was transparently unhappy at having to take orders from the Shia clergy, but said America had left him no choice.
'Without them, this hospital would have vanished. We have no civilian administration now. Until now America hasn't done anything for the civilian administration. They are just occupying us and doing nothing.'
The doctor's dilemma raises a larger question. Did Bush go to war on Saddam Hussein's secular dictatorship to pave the way for an Islamist Shia regime bordering Iran? Because that is what is beginning to take root in Saddam City, and in other neighbourhoods of Baghdad. ....
The new Shia assertiveness - whether through ambitions of religious government or the exuberance with which millions this week participated in a religious pilgrimage banned under Saddam - has horrified the Iraqi middle and upper classes, and the minority Sunni elite, which has been the traditional ruler of Iraq from the days of the Ottoman empire.
Like the Americans, they have been slow to react these past two weeks, stunned by the speed with which the regime collapsed and mortified by the knowledge that millions have watched on TV as Iraqis laid waste to their own country, and history.
(or humour?) Rod Liddle: How I was seized for my smoker's cough:
Despite the almost total absence of SARS around here, the various governments are very worried, apart from the Singaporean government, which, I suspect, likes nothing more than imposing rigorous screening and quarantine programmes upon its somewhat cowed citizens and scrubbing everything down with disinfectant every five minutes. Stand on a street corner for too long in Singapore and you're likely to be sprayed with Dettol. But that was true long before SARS presented itself. ...
We are still in the blame stage of this 'epidemic' and the blame shifts according to where you are and what the local government believes. A similar pattern of xenophobic mythology established itself during the early stages of Asian flu, Aids and the Ebola virus. Nasty, incurable diseases are almost always the fault of foreigners doing despicable, uncivilised things, usually with animals. Betcha there's a gruesome SARS film from Hollywood by the end of next year, with a heroic American doctor played by Ben Affleck, who saves Chicago, or something.
Rod Liddle is very clearly on holiday.
NYT: Internet Is Losing Ground in Battle Against Spam.
'We have allowed these spam cops to rise out of nowhere to be self-appointed police and block whole swaths of the industry,' said Bob Dallas, an executive of Empire Towers, an e-mail firm in Toledo, Ohio, widely cited on antispam lists used by many Internet companies.'This is against everything that America stands for,' Mr. Dallas added.
'The consumer should be the one in control of this.'
Wow, way to shoot yourself down in flames. Without a spam filter to detect unsolicited bulk mail and differentiate from the solicited stuff from their friends and legit subscriptions, the consumer has control how, exactly?
BTW, Empire Towers have a very impressive ROKSO listing. It says: 'Empire Towers (ET) is a hard-line stealth spamming operation whose spams are illegal in most US states. ET goes to elaborate lengths to hide spam origins and obfuscate URLs. They operate by obtaining multiple class C netblocks on multiple ISPs known for lax handling of spam complaints, the class Cs serving to make their account more valuable to the ISP so in theory harder to terminate.'
Jason Kottke: Portal Wars II: When Search Engines Attack. He makes a great point (from Robert Morris at Etech 2002): while advances on the internet are typically heralded as tech-driven, in fact they're more often usability-driven. Examples:
Mosaic was not an advancement in technology over TBL's original browser. Blogger is a highly-specialized FTP client. IM is IRC++ (or IRC for Dummies, depending on your POV).
Dead right. Good tech, without the rough edges sanded down, and a degree of comprehensibility, is useless.
Aside: I wonder if Robert Morris, IBM is any relation to Robert T Morris, the 1988 internet worm guy?
It seems alarm clocks may be responsible for more than just waking you up at unfriendly hours of the day -- they may also make you hallucinate and imagine visitations from supernatural beings, according to Michael Persinger, a psychologist who's been investigating the effects of complex electromagnetic fields on the brain's perception. He says:
As a human being, I am concerned about the illusionary explanations for human consciousness and the future of human existence. Consequently after writing the Neuropsychological Base of God Beliefs (1987), I began the systematic application of complex electromagnetic fields to discern the patterns that will induce experiences (sensed presence) that are attributed to the myriad of ego-alien intrusions which range from gods to aliens. The research is not to demean anyone's religious/mystical experience but instead to determine which portions of the brain or its electromagnetic patterns generate the experience.
So it turns out that Horizon, the BBC science programme, has just shown an episode about Dr. Persinger's work. The transcript isn't up yet, unfortunately, but some mails on the forteana list make it sound like it'll be well worth a read when it is. (It'll be here, apparently.)
One great find is this paper:
'A left-handed Roman Catholic female adolescent with a history of early brain trauma reported nightly visitations by a sentient being. During one episode she experienced vibrations of the bed, an external presence along the left side that moved into her body, inner vaginal (not clitoral) and uterine sensations, and the sense of being impregnated by a force she attributed to the Holy Spirit. After the latter experience she felt an invisible baby superimposed upon her left shoulder. Analyses of the measurements for magnetic anomalies within her bedroom indicated an electric clock about 20 cm from her head while she slept. The complex form of the 4 microT magnetic pulses generated by the clock was similar to shapes that evoke electrical seizures in epileptic rats and sensitive humans.'
Also worth noting that Richard Dawkins has little aptitude for religious feelings, even magnetically-induced ones!
The Open Proxy Problem, a PowerPoint/PDF presentation shown at the Internet2 Members Meeting of April 9th 2003, by Joe St Sauver, Ph.D (Director, User Services and Network Applications University of Oregon Computing Center).
Well worth a read if you're interested in network security or spam. Joe's done an astonishing job of researching every angle of the issue, from historical comparisons to 'blue boxes' circa 1971, the status of proxy servers to the Chinese government, and even a statistical analysis of proxy DNSBL overlap. (BTW, did you know that the New York Times was broken into via an open proxy?)
I've just fixed my desktop machine (had to buy a new CPU, unfortunately, after the old one died during shipping).
I then upgraded to Red Hat 9 (woo, very nice), switched to KDE for my desktop, and took a look at software suspend (because the machine is too noisy to leave on permanently in the corner of the living room).
However, the latter won't work with my video card; instead, the machine reboots continually when resuming from suspend. Problem.
A bit of thinking about the problem came up with a nifty solution... I'd heard of folks using a VNC server for their main desktop, in order to connect to it from any machine they found themselves near, and not be 'tethered' to one particular desktop machine. The same system also means I can run my desktop with a virtual display, and just 'connect' to this from the real one. Then, when I want to suspend, I can just kill off the X server, suspend, and start up a new one after resume.
If you're curious about how to do this, read on...
From: Justin Mason
Subject: setting up a VNC desktop
Software suspend won't work with my video card; instead, the machine reboots continually when resuming from suspend. Problem.
A bit of thinking about the problem came up with a nifty solution... I'd heard of folks using a VNC server for their main desktop, in order to connect to it from any machine they found themselves near, and not be 'tethered' to one particular desktop machine. The same system also means I can run my desktop with a virtual display, and just 'connect' to this from the real one. Then, when I want to suspend, I can just kill off the 'hardware' X server, suspend, and start up a new one after resume.
First, install xf4vnc. This gives you a VNC server that can use the 'Render' extension, and therefore display anti-aliased text efficiently. Installation of this is a bit of a manual job, unfortunately, since the author hasn't actually packaged it in any way. Not too hard though; just 3 copy commands; I don't think you actually need any files apart from the two in the xf4vnc-linux-i386 group.
Create a file called ~/.xserverrc containing:
:: /usr/local/bin/Xvnc-xf4vnc -depth 16 -geometry 1152x864 -deferupdate 10 :0
Best to make the depth and geometry match your current display.
Next, create a script called ~/bin/x containing:
:: #!/bin/sh
:: X :1 &
:: sleep 4
:: vncviewer -compresslevel 0 -quality 9 -fullscreen -display :1 localhost:0
(ie. start an X display on :1, then display vncviewer to that display.) Don't forget to make it executable with chmod.
Now, close your current X desktop, return to the console, and run startx to start a new one. This won't display; instead, it'll run GNOME/KDE/whatever using a virtual framebuffer. CTRL-Z and bg that process.
Run the x script. It'll connect to your virtual desktop. That's it!
You can now hit CTRL-ALT-Backspace to your heart's content. When your display is killed, the applications and desktop remain untouched. When you rerun the x script, it'll reconnect and nothing will have changed apart from the mouse pointer position. In fact, I just restarted my X server halfway through that sentence ;)
Have fun!
Guardian: Ministers may be questioned over cover-up.
The cover-up into security force collusion with loyalist murder gangs in Northern Ireland may have reached the highest echelons of the army and even government ministers, Britain's most senior police officer revealed yesterday. ...
He said loyalist paramilitaries had been helped by RUC officers and members of a covert army squad, the FRU (force research unit), and that the cooperation between them included 'wilful failure to keep records, the absence of accountability, the withholding of intelligence and evidence, and the extreme of agents being involved in murder'.
More comments on that RHL9 review... interesting to see that RH ran into the same Unicode problem we did with SpamAssassin -- namely that using Unicode charsets is horrifically slow compared to plain old ASCII. (This is the main reason we use ASCII internally in SpamAssassin.)
Bootup Scripts and Unicode: All the text processing utilities, grep, awk, sort, etc all work significantly slower when using the Unicode UTF locale. To speed the bootup, in the /etc/rc.sysinit and other SysV scripts, because the configuration is using 7bit ASCII these utilities are now invoked with LC_ALL=C utility to force the C locale.
(Also interesting to note who reported the bug, too ;)
Other nice additions:
-
Keith Packard's
xrandr, to resize and rotate an X screen on the fly. -
redhat-config-(tab) to list all system config stuff from the commandline. At last, sensible naming for this stuff! - Debuginfo RPMs, to install debug symbols for your system libraries on-the-fly.
- Subversion. (Although I'm a bit disappointed to read that svn doesn't improve on CVS' ability to do merges at all, which has drastically reduced my keenness to upgrade.)
Good techie review of RH9, thanks Padraig. I find this horrifically kludgy, though:
Just a quick observation. The way text editors save files normally, is to create a new file with a temporary random name, and then move/rename the new file to name of the original. Using this technique, if the file being edited has ACLs, the ACLs will be lost. The Vim editor uses libacl to obtain the original ACLs, and then add them back after the save. It is important that other applications that save files in the same fashion are updated to use libacl.
Bad bad bad. Shouldn't require application code updates like this. I
think this is POSIX' fault. Mind you, according to acl(5), it looks
like umask(2) and a concept of
parent-directory-affecting-child-nodes'-ACLs seems to apply; so that
improves matters a little.
Still, I don't like the idea of changing something as fundamental as the system calls used to copy and update files in a filesystem, which hasn't changed in ~15 years on the UNIX platform. I am sure there'll be nasty side-effects. Maybe that's why the POSIX 1003.1e ACL standardization effort foundered ;)
You just can't get away from 'em. Irish bars, I mean.
'The first public house in Afghanistan since the fall of the Taliban has opened - and it's Irish. The Irish Club opened on a secluded side street in the centre of Kabul last month - on St Patrick's Day.' ...
'There are Afghan staff, of course, but they have all been given Irish names - Kevin, Jimmy, Michael, George - 'to protect them from possible retaliation' ...
Fazel Ahmed Manawi, the deputy supreme court justice, said any Muslims found drinking at the Irish Club will be punished. 'We have got a lot of foreigners living in our country and unfortunately, this is a necessary thing for them,' he said.' (Full story)
Date: Fri, 18 Apr 2003 09:36:01 +0100
From: Joe McNally (spam-protected)
To: Yahoogroups Forteana (spam-protected)
Subject: Afghanistan - no end to the horror in sight
http://www.irishnews.com/access/daily/current.asp?SID=431306
Out with the Taliban, in with the craic
THE first public house in Afghanistan since the fall of the Taliban has opened - and it's Irish.
In Taliban times, a fully stocked Irish pub serving whiskey and cold beer in the heart of the ultra-Islamic country's capital would have been unimaginable.
It still is for many Afghans, but the Kabul night-spot has been a life-saver for many expatriates working in the city.
The Irish Club opened on a secluded side street in the centre of Kabul last month - on St Patrick's Day.
There is no sign, and not even a number on the door, but in a country where terrorists are still a real threat, that is exactly the way the Irish owner Sean Martin McQuade wants it.
"We wanted to keep a low profile, so we didn't advertise whatsoever," he said.
"But people know where to find us. News travels fast by word of mouth."
In a mock Tudor-style house behind the blank outer wall, immaculate Afghan waiters in black trousers, white shirts and black bow ties serve up beer for £1.25 and cocktails for £1.90.
Customers - mostly aid workers, diplomats and journalists - crowd around a wooden bar topped off with green marble imported from Ireland.
Afghan carpets are strewn about the floor. Posters for Guinness are tacked all over the walls. Small lanterns - handy during the sporadic power cuts - are placed on every table.
"We are the first people to stick our necks out and say this can be a cosmopolitan city," Mr McQuade, who has worked as an engineer in Afghanistan for the last 11 years, said.
He insisted that he had gone out of his way not to offend anyone and had sought the approval of a neighbourhood mullah to open the bar. In return, he promised to help rebuild the pot-holed road in front of the club and to help relocate an adjacent school to a bigger, better site.
The bar is officially licensed by the state to sell alcohol - but only to foreigners. An Afghan bouncer keeps locals out, checking IDs and making sure patrons sign in.
There are Afghan staff, of course, but they have all been given Irish names - Kevin, Jimmy, Michael, George - "to protect them from possible retaliation".
The Taliban may no longer be in power, but Muslim conservatives continue to hold sway in Afghanistan.
Fazel Ahmed Manawi, the deputy supreme court justice, said any Muslims found drinking at the Irish Club will be punished.
"We have got a lot of foreigners living in our country and unfortunately, this is a necessary thing for them," he said.
« Back -- Joe McNally :: Flaneur at Large :: http://www.flaneur.org.uk
CBC.ca: Venezuela has Proof Washington was Behind Failed Coup, says General .
The embassy also rejected allegations by governing party legislators that two U.S. military officials who visited the Fuerte Tiuna military base in Caracas the day before Chavez's ouster were helping coup leaders.
The two officers spent two hours at the base April 11 to investigate information about troop movements, the embassy said. They left hours before Chavez was deposed. Two officers returned to the base April 13 for another evaluation of the situation.
According to the Council on Hemispheric Affairs:
Venezuelan and U.S. officials are investigating allegations that two high-level military officials from the U.S. embassy, including Army Lt. Col. James Rogers, were at Fuerte Tiuna military base the first night of the coup while Chávez was being held there.
The U.S. embassy initially called the allegations 'pure rubbish.' A month after the overthrow, it issued a statement saying the two officials were at the base for two hours late Thursday afternoon, April 11, just before the coup unfolded that evening. They were checking reports of troop movements, the embassy said, and returned Saturday, April 13, during the coup to check the general situation.
Ri-ight.
The details of how the coup occurred are deepening suspicions of U.S. involvement among critics, such as Birns, who draw parallels to the 1973 coup in Chile. They contend that Chávez's overthrow was not the result of a 'spontaneous popular uprising' as the coup leaders, the U.S. government and Chávez opponents contend. Rather, they say, it was a highly orchestrated, carefully thought-out plan by a corrupt class of business, labor, media and military elites who are backed by the United States and who see Chávez's 'peaceful revolution' on behalf of Venezuela's impoverished majority as a threat to their privileges.
'This is as classic as they come,' said William Blum, author of Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II. In an April 27 interview with NCR, Blum said the CIA was 'not even embarrassed' to use its 'same methods all over again,' namely, helping to create a situation of chaos and violence that invites the military to step in.
reStructuredText is apparently the new wave of text-based markup -- in the Python community at least. ;)
It's basically a reworking of Zope's StructuredText, which -- like my own EtText, which is what this blog is written in -- is itself a reworking of Setext. Setext is an old Amiga smart-text format which I first encountered in the Plexus web server back in 1993. Plexus, BTW, was what HTTP server number 70-something ran.
It's interesting. I'd been considering modifying EtText to use some StructuredText ideas, such as indentation indicating tag-nesting levels. But it looks like reStructuredText has got rid of that idea, and instead does what EtText does: ie. indentation indicates quoting. So it must have driven someone up the wall in that case.
There's a reStructuredText primer here. Compare with EtText's quick intro. (gack, what is that font I'm using there? ;)
Still, a few other nice ideas to steal ;) -- I like the idea of ending the paragraph with colon-colon to indicate that the next quoted block is a code sample in monospace format. hmm...
the 'Ask Don Rumsfeld' simulator...
Your question was:
Any sign of those WMDs yet, Don?
Answer:
It might just be in the words one uses, and someone would then say, oh, my goodness, he thinks this and someone else thinks that. I am impatient. I probably will remain impatient. And if everything were being done absolutely perfectly, I probably would still be impatient. Our relationship with them is multi-faceted, it's political, it's economic, and clearly there are security implications.
I guess anything's possible. I can't validate it. Oh, I think I'll leave that for the coming days and weeks. Now that I think of it, I shouldn't have mentioned it. So when we do the best we can and we pull all this information together, and we then say well that's basically what we see as the situation, that is really only the known knowns and the known unknowns.
Maybe that is kind of idiosyncratic behaviour on my part but it seems quite rational to me and I think I will stick with it. And it's constantly a moving target. Well, you know, the United States has a wonderful record of humanitarian assistance, and caring about people, and participation in funding of medical activities, and food programs for people, and we're not against any religion. As a country, we're not against any race.
It's just not knowable. We are looking for code words to describe a relationship that is in transition, I think, is a challenge. I don't have any good current information that would validate that story.
A group of Russian train conductors needed hospital treatment after smashing their heads repeatedly against a train window to find out who had the strongest forehead.
The conductors came up with the contest as a way of passing time on the 3,000 mile journey from Novosibirsk in Siberia to Vladivostock. The men were treated in hospital after stopping the train midway through the journey at the town of Vyazemskaya and demanding medical help, Pravda reports.
Story filed: 08:48 Thursday 17th April 2003 (Ananova)
Wow. I think this is the most blocklist hits I've ever seen in a mail... the open relay 61.159.235.36 is listed in a whole 19 DNS blocklists.
- T_RCVD_IN_DEADBEEF (0.0 points) RBL: T_RCVD_IN_DEADBEEF RBL A check: found 36.235.159.61.bl.deadbeef.com., type: 127.0.0.2
- RCVD_IN_NJABL (1.2 points) RBL: Received via a relay in dnsbl.njabl.org RBL A check: found 36.235.159.61.dnsbl.njabl.org., type: 127.0.0.9
- RCVD_IN_OSIRUSOFT_COM (0.5 points) RBL: Received via a relay in relays.osirusoft.com RBL A check: found 36.235.159.61.relays.osirusoft.com., type: 127.0.0.9
- RCVD_IN_UNCONFIRMED_DSBL (0.0 points) RBL: Received via a relay in unconfirmed.dsbl.org RBL TXT check: found 36.235.159.61.unconfirmed.dsbl.org., type: http://dsbl.org/listing?ip=61.159.235.36
- T_RCVD_IN_WIREHUB_PROXIES (0.0 points) RBL: T_RCVD_IN_WIREHUB_PROXIES RBL A check: found 36.235.159.61.proxies.blackholes.wirehub.net., type: 127.0.0.2
- T_RCVD_IN_GIPPER (0.0 points) RBL: T_RCVD_IN_GIPPER RBL A check: found 36.235.159.61.proxy.bl.gweep.ca., type: 127.0.0.1
- T_RCVD_IN_WIREHUB_BH (0.0 points) RBL: T_RCVD_IN_WIREHUB_BH RBL A check: found 36.235.159.61.blackholes.wirehub.net., type: 127.0.0.2
- RCVD_IN_DSBL (4.3 points) RBL: Received via a relay in list.dsbl.org RBL TXT check: found 36.235.159.61.list.dsbl.org., type: http://dsbl.org/listing?ip=61.159.235.36
- RCVD_IN_BL_SPAMCOP_NET (0.0 points) RBL: Received via a relay in bl.spamcop.net RBL TXT check: found 36.235.159.61.bl.spamcop.net., type: Blocked - see http://spamcop.net/bl.shtml?61.159.235.36
- T_RCVD_IN_SORBS (0.0 points) RBL: T_RCVD_IN_SORBS RBL A check: found 36.235.159.61.dnsbl.sorbs.net., type: 127.0.0.2
- RCVD_IN_SBL (1.1 points) RBL: Received via SBLed relay, see http://www.spamhaus.org/sbl/ RBL TXT check: found 36.235.159.61.sbl.spamhaus.org., type: Listed on SBL - see http://spamhaus.org/SBL/sbl.lasso?query=SBL5950
- RCVD_IN_OPM (4.3 points) RBL: Received via a relay in opm.blitzed.org RBL TXT check: found 36.235.159.61.opm.blitzed.org., type: open proxy - see http://blitzed.org/proxy/?ip=61.159.235.36
- T_RCVD_IN_OSSOCKS (0.0 points) RBL: T_RCVD_IN_OSSOCKS RBL A check: found 36.235.159.61.socks.relays.osirusoft.com., type: 127.0.0.9
- T_RCVD_IN_MONKEYS_UPL (0.0 points) RBL: Received via a relay in proxies.relays.monkeys.com. RBL TXT check: found 36.235.159.61.proxies.relays.monkeys.com., type: BLOCKED: See http://www.monkeys.com/upl/listed-ip-0.cgi?ip=61.159.235.36
- T_RCVD_IN_OPM_HTTP_CONNECT (0.0 points) RBL: T_RCVD_IN_OPM_HTTP_CONNECT
- T_RCVD_IN_SORBS_HTTP (0.0 points) RBL: T_RCVD_IN_SORBS_HTTP
- T_RCVD_IN_FIVETEN_SPAM (0.0 points) RBL: T_RCVD_IN_FIVETEN_SPAM
-
T_RCVD_IN_OPM_HTTP_POST (0.0 points) RBL: T_RCVD_IN_OPM_HTTP_POST
Aha. looking it up, it's in China. That explains it... Full message here.
Date: Thu, 17 Apr 2003 07:51:51 +0000
From: "HGH Free Sample" (spam-protected)
To: (spam-protected)
Subject: SPAM(40.60) Shed Weight While You Sleep with HGH hyvsjpilripyoiebf
This is a multi-part message in MIME format.
------------=_3E9E19A5.69236551
Content-Disposition: inline
This mail is probably spam. The original message has been attached along with this report, so you can recognize or block similar unwanted mail in future. See http://spamassassin.org/tag/ for more details.
Content preview: As seen on NBC, CBS, CNN, and even Oprah! The health
discovery that actually reverses aging while burning fat.
Content analysis details: (40.60 points, 5 required) T_DATE_SPAMWARE_Y2K (0.0 points) Date header uses unusual Y2K formatting ADDR_FREE (0.8 points) From Address contains FREE RATWARE_EGROUPS (4.3 points) Bulk email software fingerprint (eGroups) foun d in headers FROM_ENDS_IN_NUMS (0.7 points) From: ends in numbers BANG_OPRAH (4.3 points) BODY: Talks about Oprah with an exclamation! SOME_BREAKTHROUGH (0.9 points) BODY: Describes some sort of breakthrough WHILE_YOU_SLEEP (2.6 points) BODY: While you Sleep REVERSE_AGING (2.9 points) BODY: Reverses Aging BANG_EXERCISE (2.7 points) BODY: Talks about exercise with an exclamation ! DIET (0.0 points) BODY: Lose Weight Spam AS_SEEN_ON (3.3 points) BODY: As seen on national TV! T_AS_SEEN_ON (0.0 points) BODY: /seenn\b\s*(?:TV|ABC|NBC|CBS|CNN|Op rah|USA Today|48 Hours|(The )?New York Times|\w+\s+TV|:)/i T_BLANK_LINE_RATIO_01_08_10 (0.0 points) BODY: T_BLANK_LINE_RATIO_01_08_10 HTML_50_60 (0.1 points) BODY: Message is 50% to 60% HTML BAYES_90 (2.9 points) BODY: Bayesian classifier says spam probabilit y is 90 to 99%
[score: 0.9050] HTML_MESSAGE (0.0 points) BODY: HTML included in message T_BLANK_LINE_RATIO_20_08_10 (0.0 points) BODY: T_BLANK_LINE_RATIO_20_08_10 T_BLANK_LINE_RATIO_04_08_10 (0.0 points) BODY: T_BLANK_LINE_RATIO_04_08_10 T_BLANK_LINE_RATIO_08_08_10 (0.0 points) BODY: T_BLANK_LINE_RATIO_08_08_10 HTML_TAG_BALANCE_HTML (0.0 points) BODY: HTML has unbalanced "html" tags T_MIME_QP (0.0 points) RAW: T_MIME_QP MIME_HTML_NO_CHARSET (0.0 points) RAW: Message text in HTML without specified charset FORGED_RCVD_HELO (1.0 points) Received: contains a forged HELO DATE_IN_FUTURE_03_06 (1.5 points) Date: is 3 to 6 hours after Received: date T_RCVD_IN_DEADBEEF (0.0 points) RBL: T_RCVD_IN_DEADBEEF
[RBL A check: found 36.235.159.61.bl.deadbeef.com., type: 12 7.0.0.2] RCVD_IN_NJABL (1.2 points) RBL: Received via a relay in dnsbl.njabl.org
[RBL A check: found 36.235.159.61.dnsbl.njabl.org., type: 12 7.0.0.9] RCVD_IN_OSIRUSOFT_COM (0.5 points) RBL: Received via a relay in relays.osiruso ft.com
[RBL A check: found 36.235.159.61.relays.osirusoft.com., typ
e: 127.0.0.9]
RCVD_IN_UNCONFIRMED_DSBL (0.0 points) RBL: Received via a relay in unconfirmed
.dsbl.org
[RBL TXT check: found 36.235.159.61.unconfirmed.dsbl.org., t
ype: http://dsbl.org/listing?ip=61.159.235.36]
T_RCVD_IN_WIREHUB_PROXIES (0.0 points) RBL: T_RCVD_IN_WIREHUB_PROXIES
[RBL A check: found 36.235.159.61.proxies.blackholes.wirehub .net., type: 127.0.0.2] T_RCVD_IN_GIPPER (0.0 points) RBL: T_RCVD_IN_GIPPER
[RBL A check: found 36.235.159.61.proxy.bl.gweep.ca., type: 127.0.0.1] T_RCVD_IN_WIREHUB_BH (0.0 points) RBL: T_RCVD_IN_WIREHUB_BH
[RBL A check: found 36.235.159.61.blackholes.wirehub.net., t
ype: 127.0.0.2]
RCVD_IN_DSBL (4.3 points) RBL: Received via a relay in list.dsbl.org
[RBL TXT check: found 36.235.159.61.list.dsbl.org., type: ht tp://dsbl.org/listing?ip=61.159.235.36] RCVD_IN_BL_SPAMCOP_NET (0.0 points) RBL: Received via a relay in bl.spamcop.ne t
[RBL TXT check: found 36.235.159.61.bl.spamcop.net., type: B locked - see http://spamcop.net/bl.shtml?61.159.235.36] T_RCVD_IN_SORBS (0.0 points) RBL: T_RCVD_IN_SORBS
[RBL A check: found 36.235.159.61.dnsbl.sorbs.net., type: 12 7.0.0.2] RCVD_IN_SBL (1.1 points) RBL: Received via SBLed relay, see http://www. spamhaus.org/sbl/
[RBL TXT check: found 36.235.159.61.sbl.spamhaus.org., type:
Listed on SBL - see http://spamhaus.org/SBL/sbl.lasso?query=SBL5950]
RCVD_IN_OPM (4.3 points) RBL: Received via a relay in opm.blitzed.org
[RBL TXT check: found 36.235.159.61.opm.blitzed.org., type:
open proxy - see http://blitzed.org/proxy/?ip=61.159.235.36] T_RCVD_IN_OSSOCKS (0.0 points) RBL: T_RCVD_IN_OSSOCKS
[RBL A check: found 36.235.159.61.socks.relays.osirusoft.com
., type: 127.0.0.9] T_RCVD_IN_MONKEYS_UPL (0.0 points) RBL: Received via a relay in proxies.relays .monkeys.com.
[RBL TXT check: found 36.235.159.61.proxies.relays.monkeys.c
om., type: BLOCKED: See http://www.monkeys.com/upl/listed-ip-0.cgi?ip=61.159.23 5.36] T_RCVD_IN_OPM_HTTP_CONNECT (0.0 points) RBL: T_RCVD_IN_OPM_HTTP_CONNECT T_RCVD_IN_SORBS_HTTP (0.0 points) RBL: T_RCVD_IN_SORBS_HTTP T_RCVD_IN_FIVETEN_SPAM (0.0 points) RBL: T_RCVD_IN_FIVETEN_SPAM T_RCVD_IN_OPM_HTTP_POST (0.0 points) RBL: T_RCVD_IN_OPM_HTTP_POST MISSING_MIMEOLE (0.1 points) Message has X-MSMail-Priority, but no X-MimeOL E MIME_HTML_ONLY (0.1 points) Message only has text/html MIME parts HG_HORMONE (1.0 points) Talks about hormones for human growth T_MIME_HTML_NO_DOCTYPE (0.0 points) T_MIME_HTML_NO_DOCTYPE MISSING_OUTLOOK_NAME (0.0 points) Message looks like Outlook, but isn't
The original message did not contain plain text, and may be unsafe to open with some email clients; in particular, it may contain a virus, or confirm that your address can receive spam. If you wish to view it, it may be safer to save it to a file and open it with an editor.
------------=_3E9E19A5.69236551
Content-Description: original message before SpamAssassin
Content-Disposition: attachment
by localhost.jmason.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 714158B318 for (spam-protected) Wed, 16 Apr 2003 23:03:54 -0400 (EDT)
by localhost with IMAP (fetchmail-5.9.0) for (spam-protected) (single-drop); Wed, 16 Apr 2003 20:03:54 -0700 (PDT)
From: "HGH Free Sample" (spam-protected)
To: (spam-protected)
Subject: Shed Weight While You Sleep with HGH hyvsjpilripyoiebf
Date: Thu, 17 Apr 03 07:51:51 GMT
This is a multi-part message in MIME format.
--8_0AED7_CBCE_D_E.1F.
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> As seen on
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> Forget aging
and dieting forever!
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