Interesting story of how Inktomi replicated knowledge across multiple, separated geographical offices, while doing it in an efficient, cross-platform, reliable and accessible way: first of all, they use TWiki, and second, it's set up as a DistributedTWiki.
Category: Uncategorized
I found a load of snaps from my Casio Watch Camera that I hadn't uploaded yet. I'd uploaded them, but forgot to add them to CVS ;) Here's a nice one -- a ca. 19th century hygrometer made in the Mason family's opticians shop in Essex Bridge, Dublin, found in the museum at Collins Barracks:
U.N. Orders Wonka To Submit To Chocolate Factory Inspections:
UNITED NATIONS -- Responding to pressure from the international community, the U.N. ordered enigmatic candy maker William 'Willy' Wonka to submit to chocolate-factory inspections Monday. 'For years, Wonka has hidden the ominous doings of his research and development facility from the outside world,' U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan said. 'Given the reports of child disappearances, technological advances in glass-elevator transport, and Wonka-run Oompa-Loompa forced-labor camps, the time has come to put an end to three decades of secrecy in the Wonka Empire.'
a memorable mistranslation found in a guesthouse at Annapurna Base Camp :
Help! I'm being underclocked! ;) Perhaps that explained the shortness of breath and dizziness...
(I did some scanning of the hundreds of photos from last year's trip about a month ago, but haven't had a chance to fix 'em all up yet. And I'm not uploading anything until I get to CA and some decent bandwidth.)
Craig's now blogging! Great stuff. He's on the blogroll.
A funny letter from New Scientist regarding the use of monkeys to collect specimens in the field, which was pioneered by John Corner in Singapore.
The botanist noticed that local fruit-pickers trained monkeys to collect fruit, and reasoned that a monkey could similarly be trained to collect flowers, leaves and nuts for his own work. The result was the collection of hundreds of otherwise inaccessible specimens -- and this gem:
Travelling with mule and monkey on a narrow path in the uplands, he spied a new and unrecognised flower on a liana hanging from the path, down a near-vertical cliff face too steep for him to climb down. So he instructed the monkey to descend and collect the flower. But the monkey just looked at him questioningly with its head on one side.
'Go down!' repeated the eminent botanist. At which the monkey gave an eloquent shrug, took hold of the liana and pulled it up hand over hand to collect the flower. No human being, said Corner, had ever, before or since, made him feel so much of a fool.
Boing Boing notes that the SQL Slammer worm 'caused service outages at tens of thousands of Bank of America ATMs and wreaked havoc at Continental Airlines. Apparently, customers at most of the #3 American bank's 13,000 automatic teller machines were unable to process transactions for a period of time.'
Does anyone else find it very scary to contemplate an ATM network connected to the internet, with a sufficiently open set of firewalls that a semi-documented Microsoftish SQL protocol can traverse as far as the ATM servers? Sure, it probably took a few hops, compromising a couple of SQL servers along the way, but each of the firewalls in question must have had that MS-SQL port open for those servers. Yikes.
Someone should teach those guys about network compartmentalization for security; something like an ATM network, where security is hugely essential, should never have a direct IP-based connection to the internet, no matter how many firewalls and gateways are in place.
Spam: NACS: Spam Detection. Great, Catherine's new email system at UCI uses SpamAssassin. Nothing like getting bug reports from your SO ;)
On the other side, though, they've written an excellent set of pages on how to detect and act on the SpamAssassin markup in various MUAs.
it looks like the the latest internet worm is making the rounds, and this one's a biggie. It's been dubbed 'SQLSlammer', since it hammers on the Microsoft SQL ports, attempting to exploit yet another commonly-unpatched 7-month-old MS vulnerability. The best bit: it uses UDP broadcasts to do this, so the traffic load is massive compared to previous worms, so there's lots and lots of backbone hosage as a result. Coverage:
Quick fix: update those router filters to deny all traffic, both UDP and TCP, on port 1434. (you shouldn't need to update the firewall filters of course, because nobody's stupid enough to allow access to open-internet MS SQL traffic, right? ;)
Hooray! finally ditched those 'orrible tables. Thanks to glish.com's CSS layout techniques guide for some nifty cut and paste action.
Kim Jong Il Unfolds Into Giant Robot (Onion). Met up with Paddy Benson last night for a few drinks, and he let me into the secret that The Onion is, once again, officially funny:
'If we add Kim Jong Il's transformation into a giant robot to his already defiant isolationist stance and his country's known nuclear capability, the diplomatic terrain definitely becomes more rocky,' U.S. envoy James Kelly said. 'Kim has made it clear that, if sufficiently threatened, he will not hesitate to use nuclear weapons or his arm-mounted HyperBazooka.'
'We are also forced to consider the possibility that Kim may attempt to robo-meld with other members of the Axis of Evil, forming a MegaMecha-Optima-Robosoldier. Kim would make a powerful right arm -- or even a torso -- for such a mechanism.'
Wotcher Paddy!
Matt Blaze has posted a very neat exploit against 'weaknesses in most master-keyed lock systems, such as those used by offices, schools, and businesses as well as by some residential facilities (particularly apartment complexes, dormitories, and condominiums). These weaknesses allow anyone with access to the key to a single lock to create easily the master key that opens every lock in the entire system. Creating such a key requires no special skill, leaves behind no evidence, and does not require engaging in recognizably suspicious behavior. The only materials required are a metal file and a small number of blank keys, which are often easy to obtain.'
'The vulnerability was discovered by applying the techniques of cryptanalysis, ordinarily used to break secret codes, to the analysis of mechanical lock design.'
Paper here.
Eircom have halved the price of their DSL offering to 54 euros (including VAT). It still has a cap at 4Gb. Still, getting there. I wonder what the competition will do...
Daphne Oram, one of the pioneers of electronic music, has died. (BBC)
Almost un-noticed by the wider world, one of the pioneers of electronic music has died. Without Daphne Oram, we may never had known what the Tardis sounded like. Electronic music - as much a part of today's life as whistling a tune to yourself - grew up amid milk bottles, gravel, keys, and yards of magnetic tape and wires. These were the sort of tools typically scattered around the BBC's Radiophonic Workshop in the 1950s and 60s, when they were used to generate wonderful and ethereal sounds for the airwaves. The mother of this great legacy was Daphne Oram. Aged 18, and armed with a passionate interest in sound, music and electronics, she started work at the BBC in 1943 as a sound engineer.
Another good trip report, from 'babbage' at perl.org.
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Again, and interestingly, quite a few folks agreed with one of SA's core tenets; no single approach (stats, RBLs, rules, distributed hashes) can filter effectively on its own, as spammers will soon figure out a way to subvert that technique. However, if you combine several techniques, they cannot all be subverted at once, so your effectiveness in the face of active attacks is much better.
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Also interesting to note how everyone working with learning-based approaches commented on how hard it was to persuade 'normal people' to keep a corpus. Let's hope SA's auto-training will work well enough to avoid that problem.
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in passing -- babbage noted the old canard about Hotmail selling their user database to spammers. That must really piss the Hotmail folks off ;) I think it's much more likely that, with Moore's Law and the modern internet, a dictionary attack *will* find your account eventually.
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Good tip on the legal angle from John Praed of The Internet Law Group: if a spam misuses the name of a trademarked product like 'Viagra', get a copy to Pfizer pronto. Trademark holders have a particular desire to follow up on infringements like this, as an undefended trademark loses its TM status otherwise.
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David Berlind, ZDNet executive editor: 'They don't want to be involved (in developing an SMTPng)'. He might say that, but I bet their folks working on sending out their bulk-mailed email newsletters might disagree ;). Legit bulk mail senders have to be involved for it to work, and they will want to be involved, too.
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Brightmail have a patent on spam honeypots? Must take a look for this sometime.
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the plural of 'corpus' is 'corpora' ;)
Great report, overall.
It's interesting to see that Infoworld notes that reps from AOL, Yahoo! and MS were all present.
Since the conf, Paul Graham has a new paper up about 'Better Bayesian Filtering', and lists some new tokenization techniques he's using:
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keep dollar signs, exclamation and most punctuation intact (we do that!)
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prepend header names to header-mined tokens (us too!)
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case is preserved (ditto!)
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keep 'degenerate' tokens; 'Subject:FREE!!!' degenerates to 'Subject:free', to 'FREE!!!', and 'free'. (ditto! well, partly. We use degeneration of tokens, but we keep the degenerate tokens in a separate, prefixed namespace from the non-degenerate ones, as he contemplates in footnote 7. It's worth noting that case-sensitivity didn't work well compared to the database bloat it produced; each token needs to be duplicated into the case-insensitive namespace, but that doubled the database size, and the hit-rate didn't go up nearly enough to make it worthwhile.)
Most of these were also discovered and verified experimentally by SpamBayes, too, BTW.
When we were working on SpamAssassin's Bayesian-ish implementation, we took a scientific approach, and used suggestions from the SpamBayes folks and from the SpamAssassin community on tokenizer and stats-combining techniques. We then tested these experimentally on a test corpus, and posted the results. In almost all cases, our results matched up with the SpamBayes folks' results, which is very nice, in a scientific sense.
(PS: update on the Fly UI story -- 'apis' is not French, it's Latin. oops! Thanks Craig...)
Kaitlin Duck Sherwood writes a trip report. Good tidbits:
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many big players in the mail-sending side want to see an SMTPng; a new protocol which is spam-resistant.
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Jon Praed of the Internet Law Group said that 'better spam filters make his job easier: the more contortions that a spammer goes through to make sure that the messages go through, the easier it is to convince a judge that the spammer knew it was wrong.' Excellent!
Andrew McGlinchey writes about a Fly UI: 'I have seen one of the finest instances of user interface design ever, and I saw it in the men's room at Schipol airport in Amsterdam. In each of the urinals, there is a little printed blue fly. It looks a lot like a real fly, but it's definitely iconic - you're not supposed to believe it's a real fly. It's printed near the drain, and slightly to the left.'
I've heard of this one before, and yes, it is an aiming-improvement UI. It started in France around the turn of the century, if I recall correctly. One important fact: it's not a fly -- it's a bee. You see, it's also a visual pun -- the french for 'bee' is 'apis', geddit?
(I'd have commented on the blog, itself, but it's one of those 'create an account to comment' places -- too much trouble!)
He's also spot-on about why tea is big in Ireland: 'The climate is cool, grey and damp. Steady doses of warm drink with a nice gentle caffeine push really keeps you going.' Hey, works in the Himalayas too ;)
BoingBoing, back in December, forwarded this snippet: 'A report issued by UK-based Infrastructure Forum ('TIF') says spam-savvy thieves are using info from 'out of office' email autoresponders and cross-referencing it with publicly available personal data to target empty homes.'
Criminals are buying huge lists of email addresses over the internet and sending mass-mailings in the hope of receiving 'out of office' auto-responses from workers away on holiday.
By cross-reference such replies with publicly available information from online directories such as 192.com or bt.com, the burglars can often discover the name, address and telephone number of the person on holiday. Tif is advising users to warn their staff to be careful of the information they put in their 'out of office' messages.
"You wouldn't go on holiday with a note pinned to your door saying who you were, how long you were away for and when you were coming back, so why would you put this in an email?" said David Roberts, chief executive at Tif. (via VNUNet)
My take on this? Bullshit.
I mean, how many house burglars (a) have the know-how to set up a fast internet connection, get hold of an addresses CD, and send a spam; and then (b) how often does a Reply-To address on a spam stay active once it's sent -- assuming it ever worked in the first place -- before the ISP whacks their account? I would guess 6 hours at the most, and most spam runs wouldn't even be halfway through by that stage (from what I hear).
Self-promoting bullshit of the highest order I reckon.
Steppe by Step (Guardian). "I started wondering if (the 'six degrees of separation' theory) was true today. ... So 35 years on from the original experiment, I decided to test out the urban myth on a world stage: how many steps would it really take to get to someone on the other side of the planet?"
The London-based "city girl" author, Lucy Leveugle, makes it in 9 steps (hey, the world has expanded!) to Purev-Ochir Gungaa, a nomadic herdsman in the middle of the steppes of Outer Mongolia. Amazing.
308 referrer hits from www.xxxstoryarchive.com, 282 from amateur-porn.us, 282 from nude-lesbians.us, etc. Somehow I doubt it. All the hits are 404s, looking for e.g.
nn.nn.nn.nn - - [12/Jan/2003:18:52:13 +0000] GET /pics54754-96 HTTP/1.1 404 284 http://www.celebrity-nude-pics.com/ "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; .NET CLR 1.0.3705)"
Hits from hosts at AT&T WorldNet Services and an SBC PPPoX pool. They're all MSIE 6 on Windows, and it's been going on for a month or so.
Theory: sounds like MSIE's download-to-'view'-offline functionality has bugs; when it hits a 404, maybe it requeues that request but then sends it to entirely the wrong IP.
Alternative theory: it's a pathetically underpowered DDoS. ouch!
Anyone else seen this?
Who knew relocating with a cat could be so tricky? Well, actually, I did. He hates travel. I'm considering just putting him in a crate and handing him off to a courier to do it.
Paul Graham's Spam Conference seems to be doing great; they've moved to a bigger room, and are expecting 480 (!!) attendees.
I still can't make it due to all this movage, but thankfully there's a few SpamAssassin folks going, so we'll still be able to snarf some good tricks with any luck.
In other news, the public mass-check submission run for SpamAssassin 2.50 is about to start; with the new with-bayes and with-net-tests dimensions in the matrix, it's going to be the biggest run yet. Should be fun.
the blogs near me. This will, of course, change once I get to the US ;)
Frequent drinking cuts heart attack risk (New Scientist). ' Half an alcoholic drink every other day, be it wine, whisky or beer, can reduce the risk of heart attacks by a third, a new study shows. The 12-year study published in The New England Journal of Medicine found that the frequency of drinking was the key to lowering the risk of heart disease, rather than the amount, the type of alcohol, or whether or not it was drunk with food.'
Well, looks like it's been announced; McAfee and NAI are buying Deersoft. I wish I could comment properly, but I'm in mid-packing right now and things are a total hectic mess :(
New Scientist: Turing tests filter spam email. "Simple tests designed to distinguish computers from humans are increasingly being used to clamp down on unsolicited, or 'spam', email advertising."
The article notes that Yahoo! has imposed such a test to block automated account-signup-then-spam bots. (Thankfully -- that might discourage some of the more automated 419 spammers.)
Sorry 'bout the lack of blogging -- very busy 'round here, what with a new SpamAssassin release in the pipeline and a move to the US in the offing...
This morning (we living lately in the garret,) I rose, put on my suit with great skirts, having not lately worn any other, clothes but them. Went to Mr. Gunning's chapel at Exeter House, where he made a very good sermon.
Anyway, still recovering from the holidays. Hope you all had a good one..
Yahoo!: Deadline Passes for European Digital Copyright Law. 'A deadline for adopting a new EU law on copyright protection has passed with just two member countries signing up, dealing a blow to media and software companies beset by unauthorized duplication of their works across the Internet.' The two countries are Greece and Denmark, which is odd, considering I thought Ireland had do so too.
Other actors in the private sector, such as Internet service providers, have weighed in heavily on the issue, opposing laws that could ultimately hurt consumer rights.
Yay ISPs!
BBC: An Irish republican song, A Nation Once Again, has been voted the world's top tune according to a BBC World Service poll. 'Following a late surge in votes, the Irish sing along crossed the finishing line ahead of a patriotic Hindi song, Vande Mataram.'
'The poll had to deal with people trying to influence the vote through fan sites and spamming.' No shit. The funniest thing about this poll was the way it suddenly stopped being about 'the world's top 10 tunes' and suddenly became 'how many 'net users can each country mobilize to vote for a patriotic song'.
Still, I'm impressed the clicky fingers of the Irish net population (pop. 6 million) managed to beat those of India (pop. 1 billion)!
Guardian: DrugScope, the drug charity, says that an 'intensive media campaign against the drug ecstasy has led to an increase in cocaine use among young people'. whoops.
'Studies show the reason they no longer use ecstasy is because of the scare stories,' said a spokesman for the charity. 'They haven't seen similar stories about cocaine and their belief is that cocaine is the safer drug. The reality is that cocaine, especially crack cocaine, is a much more harmful drug - it kills more people each year and more people have dependency on it.'
They also add a few UL-busting facts:
DrugScope's guide argues that there are no recorded examples of heroin ever being cut with ground glass ... no drug is instantly addictive and that addiction generally takes several months to develop ... physical withdrawal from heroin is like a bad bout of flu, not a near-death experience.
Aaron's trip to CA comes to a end in a big bang of serious meeting-up.
I read his blog using the rss2mail mail-based news aggregator he wrote (I live in e-mail, especially while I'm still on the wrong side of dialup), and I think this is the most homepage-link-laden blog entry I've ever read. 45 links, count 'em! Wow, I hope he can keep all those name-to-face mappings clear ;)
In other news: it seems that football (proper football, played with feet, ie. soccer) is bad for you: the World Cup penalty shoot-out caused a surge in heart attacks for England fans (New Scientist). Ban Football Now!
Son of Star Wars leaves drivers stranded (Guardian). Interesting collision between military and civvie radio technology.
The upgrading of the security and surveillance systems at (RAF Fylingdales base in Yorkshire, which is planned to be used as a UK base for new US 'Star Wars' projects) ... is knocking out the electrical systems of expensive cars. ... High power radar pulses trigger the immobilising devices of many makes of cars and motorcycles - BMW, Mercedes and Jeep among them. Many have had to be towed out of range of the base before they can be restarted.
Wing Commander Chris Knapman, of RAF Fylingdales, said it was not up to the base to resolve the problem. 'We have had the frequencies we use for a very long time,' he said. 'They are allocated to commercial, military and government users, and the allocation is very tightly controlled. As far as we are concerned, the radars are working on frequencies which are well known, and most car manufacturers take that into account.'
A spokesman for Jeep said: 'The problem is that the government gives manufacturers such a narrow band to operate in - so the radio wave (sic) we use for our key fob is severely restricted.'
AOL patents instant messaging (/.). 'Specifically, any technology that provides 'a network that allows multiple users to see when other users are present and then to communicate with them' is covered.'
The CNet story which /. references points out that the patent was filed in 1997 -- but that's still 6 years after I wrote a similar perl script on the Maths Department UNIX machines in TCD. There's a myriad of similar apps, of the same vintage, too.
The thing I find amazing is this, however -- the AOL patent actually
cites prior art in its References section, namely the
xhtalk README file, dated 1992. There's nothing different between
xhtalk and AOL Instant Messenger apart from the protocol and the look
and feel, and those aren't key to the patent.
The US patent office really needs to start reading the patent applications before granting them.
ho ho, looks like Saddam Hussein also benefited from Crypto AG's NSA back door ;)
Danny reports "the always excellent c't magazine analyses the hypotheticals of the Dutch IP-surveillance scandal:
According to anonymous sources within the Dutch intelligence community, all tapping equipment of the Dutch intelligence services and half the tapping equipment of the national police force, is insecure and is leaking information to Israel. ..."
Yikes. You'd think they'd have learnt from Ireland's mistakes.... this article (update: moved to here) reports that massive back-door use by a third-party government occurred before in similar circumstances, during the Anglo-Irish negotiations of 1985.
For those of you who don't know, these discussions were between the Republic of Ireland and the UK, and took place in London.
In order to allow the negotiating team to contact their government and civil service securely, a million-pound cryptographic system had been bought in order to secure the link between the Irish Embassy in London and the government in Dublin.
Unfortunately, this equipment was thoroughly compromised.
It turns out that the Swiss company from which the equipment was bought, namely Crypto AG, had cooperated with the NSA and the BND (the NSA's German equivalent), to allow them to decipher the traffic trivially. (Judging from the snippet from another article below, sounds like this was done using a known-plaintext attack).
The NSA routinely monitored and deciphered the Irish diplomatic messages. All it took then was for the UK's NSA equivalent, GCHQ, to pull some strings, and the UK government had a distinct advantage in the negotiations from then on.
Another source for details on Crypto AG's breakage is Der Spiegel, issue 36/96, pages 206-207. Here's some snippets:
The secret man (sic) have obviously a great interest to direct the trading of encryption devices into ordered tracks. ... A former employee of Crypto AG reported that he had to coordinate his developments with "people from Bad Godesberg". This was the residence of the "central office for encryption affairs" of the BND, and the service instructed Crypto AG what algorithms to use to create the codes.
Members of the American secret service National Security Agency (NSA) also visited the Crypto AG often. The memorandum of the secret workshop of the Crypto AG in August 1975 on the occasion of the demonstration of a new prototype of an encryption device mentions as a participant the cryptographer of the NSA, Nora Mackebee. ...
Depending on the projected usage area the manipulation on the cryptographic devices were more or less subtle, said Polzer. Some buyers only got simplified code technology according to the motto "for these customers that is sufficient, they don't not need such a good stuff."
In more delicate cases the specialists reached deeper into the cryptographic trick box: The machines prepared in this way enriched the encrypted text with "auxiliary informations" that allowed all who knew this addition to reconstruct the original key. The result was the same: What looked like inpenetrateable secret code to the users of the Crypto-machines, who acted in good faith, was readable with not more than a finger exercise for the informed listener.
So what's the bottom line? Use GPG! ;)
From: Julian Assange (spam-protected)
To: (spam-protected) (spam-protected)
Date: Mon, 14 Oct 1996 13:24:31 +1000 (EST)
Approved: (spam-protected)
Subject: BoS: Crypto AG = Crypto NSA/BNG ?
Thanks to Anonymous for this English translation of the German original.
secret services undermine cryptographic devices
Archive of "DER SPIEGEL" issue 36/96 pages 206-207
"Who is the authorized fourth"
Secret services undermine the protection of cryptographic devices.
Switzerland is a discreet place. Uncounted millions of illegal money find an asylum in the discreet banks of the republic. Here another business can prosper, which does not need any publicity: the production of cryptographic devices.
A top address for tools of secrecy was for several decades the company Crypto AG in Zug. It was founded in 1952 by the legendary Swedish cryptographer Boris Hagelin. Hundreds of thousands of his "Hagelin-machines", pendants of the German "Enigma" devices, were used in World War II on the side of the Allies.
A prospectus of the company states: "In the meantime, the Crypto AG has built up long standing cooperative relations with customers in 130 countries." Crypto AG delivers enciphering devices applicable to voice as well as data networks.
But behind this solid facade the most impudent secret service feint of the century has been staged: German and American services are under suspicion of manipulation of the cryptographic devices of Crypto AG in a way that makes the codes crackable within a very short time, and this allegedly happened until the end of the eighties.
Customers of Crypto AG are many honorable institutions, like the Vatican, as well as countries like Iraq, Iran, Libya, that are at the top of the priority list of U.S. services. At the beginning of the nineties the discreet company was suspected to play an unfair game. What was the source of the "direct precise and undeniable proofs" U.S. president Reagan referred to when he ordered the bombardment of Libya, the country he called the wire puller of the attack against the disco La Belle? Obviously the U.S services were able to read encrypted radio transmissions between Tripoli and its embassy in East Berlin.
Hans Buehler, a sales engineer of Crypto AG, got between the fronts of the secret service war. On March 18, 1992, the unsuspecting tradesman was arrested in Teheran. During the nine and a half months of solitary confinement in a military prison he had to answer over and over again, to whom he leaked the codes of Teheran and the keys of Libya.
In the end Crypto AG paid generously the requested bail of about one million German marks (DM), but dismissed the released Buehler a few weeks later. The reason: Buehlers publicity, "especially during and after his return" was harmful for the company. But Buehler started to ask inconvenient questions and got surprising answers.
Already the ownership of the Crypto AG was diffuse. A "foundation", established by Hagelin, provides according to the company "the best preconditions for the independence of the company".
But a big part of the shares are owned by German owners in changing constellations. Eugen Freiberger, who is the head of the managing board in 1982 and resides in Munich, owns all but 6 of the 6,000 shares of Crypto AG. Josef Bauer, who was elected into managing board in 1970, now states that he, as an authorized tax agent of the Muenchner Treuhandgesellschaft KPMG [Munich trust company], worked due to a "mandate of the Siemens AG". When the Crypto AG could no longer escape the news headlines, an insider said, the German shareholders parted with the high-explosive share.
Some of the changing managers of Crypto AG did work for Siemens before. Rumors, saying that the German secret service BND was hiding behind this engagement, were strongly denied by Crypto AG.
But on the other hand it appeared like the German service had an suspiciously great interest in the prosperity of the Swiss company. In October 1970 a secret meeting of the BND discussed, "how the Swiss company Graettner could be guided nearer to the Crypto AG or could even be incorporated with the Crypto AG." Additionally the service considered, how "the Swedish company Ericsson could be influenced through Siemens to terminate its own cryptographic business."
The secret man have obviously a great interest to direct the trading of encryption devices into ordered tracks. Ernst Polzer*, a former employee of Crypto AG, reported that he had to coordinate his developments with "people from Bad Godesberg". This was the residence of the "central office for encryption affairs" of the BND, and the service instructed Crypto AG what algorithms to use to create the codes. (* name changed by the editor)
Members of the American secret service National Security Agency (NSA) also visited the Crypto AG often. The memorandum of the secret workshop of the Crypto AG in August 1975 on the occasion of the demonstration of a new prototype of an encryption device mentions as a participant the cryptographer of the NSA, Nora Mackebee.
Bob Newman, an engineer of the chip producer Motorola, which cooperated with Crypto AG in the seventies to develop a new generation of electronic encryption machines, knows Mackebee. She was introduced to him as a "counselor".
"The people knew Zug very good and gave travel tips to the Motorola people for the visit at Crypto AG", Newman reported. Polzer also remembers the American "watcher", who strongly demanded the use of certain encryption methods.
Depending on the projected usage area the manipulation on the cryptographic devices were more or less subtle, said Polzer. Some buyers only got simplified code technology according to the motto "for these customers that is sufficient, they don't not need such a good stuff."
In more delicate cases the specialists reached deeper into the
cryptographic trick box: The machines prepared in this way enriched
the encrypted text with "auxiliary informations" that allowed all who
knew this addition to reconstruct the original key. The result was the
same: What looked like inpenetrateable secret code to the users of the
Crypto-machines, who acted in good faith, was readable with not more
than a finger exercise for the informed listener.
The Crypto AG called such reports "old hearsay" and "pure invention". But the process, that was started by the company against the former employee Buehler, on the grounds that he had said that there might be some truth in the suspicions of the Iranian investigators, surprisingly ended in November of last year.
After the trial, that could have brought embarrassing details to the light, the company agreed to an settlement outside the court. Since that time Buehler is very silent with regard to this case. "He made his fortune financially," presumed an insider of the scene.
"In the industry everybody knows how such affairs will be dealed with," said Polzer, a former colleague of Buehler. "Of course such devices protect against interception by unauthorized third parties, as stated in the prospectus. But the interesting question is: Who is the authorized fourth?"
-- "Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies, The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience." - C.S. Lewis, _God in the Dock_ +---------------------+--------------------+----------------------------------+ |Julian Assange RSO | PO Box 2031 BARKER | Secret Analytic Guy Union | (spam-protected) | VIC 3122 AUSTRALIA | finger for PGP key hash ID = | (spam-protected) | FAX +61-3-98199066 | 0619737CCC143F6DEA73E27378933690 | +---------------------+--------------------+----------------------------------+
thanks to blogs, wifi and the web, bullshitting a keynote at a conference isn't quite as easy to pull off as it used to be! From Dan Gillmor's keynote at Supernova, via BoingBoing:
At PCForum, Joe Nacchio, the CEO of Qwest was on-stage, doing a Q and A. Joe was whining about how hard it is to run a phone company these days. Dan (Gillmor) blogged, "Joe's whining." A few moments later, he got an email from someone who wasn't at the conference, someone in Florida, with a link to a page that showed that Joe took $300MM out of the company and has another $4MM to go -- gutting the company as he goes.
Esther Dyson described this as the turning point. The mood turned ugly. The room was full of people reading the blog and everyone stopped being willing to cut Joe any slack.
Check out The World's Top Ten -- Nationalist Marching Songs, that is, as far as I can see -- featuring:
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Vande Mataram and Rakkamma Kaiya Thattu (India)
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Dil Dil Pakistan (guess where)
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A Nation Once Again (Ireland)
India's winning.
Just in case they get cleaned out as vote-rigging, here's what it looks like right now:
more geek politics: A first-hand account of Day One of the Johansen trial in Norway, from Politech. I really hope this goes well.
from Slashdot: Cisco patents 'Intrusion detection signature analysis using regular expressions and logical operators'.
That is so, so sad. Filed January 15, 1999. There's got to be a stack of prior art.
A google search throws up this trivial example first off --
the use of snoop | egrep 'PATTERN1|PATTERN2|PATTERN3'. More
searching reveals Lance
Spitzner's page on Intrusion Detection for Checkpoint FW-1, which
looks like it was originally written in 1997. The alert.sh script
there uses grep(1) plentifully.
If you're wondering what happens to non-US-resident programmers when they run afoul of the US's ludicrous copyright laws (namely the DMCA), take a look at Danny O'Brien's blog entry from the Elcomsoft trial, covering Dmitry Sklyarov's evidence.
18 megaton thermonuclear warhead, Item # 1791560632. "this is that perfect something for the person who has everything." Disappointingly though, "THE THERMO NUCLEAR WARHEAD HAS BEEN REMOVED,AND IS IN NO WAY INCLUDED IN THE SALE". Misleading advertising!
BBC - the Great Smog of 1952 recalled. "Fifty years ago, a choking cloud enveloped much of London and the Home Counties - a toxic fog which killed at least 4,000 people. Here, Barbara Fewster, 74, recalls the Great Smog of 1952." A very Ballardian tale of this environmental disaster:
After a long time we arrived at Kew Bridge - that's at least 10 miles from Hampstead - when my fiancé called out to me, 'I've lost you, where have you got to?' I must have veered off out of range of the sidelights.
At that point, a milk float passed by and my fiancé told me to get in so we could follow its taillights. He put his foot down. Well, then the milkman disappeared and we could hear the float bouncing over the grass on Kew Green. All I could do was get out of the car and continue walking. We later came across a car that had overtaken us earlier on in the journey - it was up a tree, crashed, and no sign of the occupant.
'Spam' Likely to Clutter E-Mail for Some Time, says Jupiter Research (via Reuters).
"It's getting easier to send spam messages. You can buy a CD-ROM with millions of e-mail addresses for next to nothing and send it out for next to nothing," said Jared Blank, senior analyst at Jupiter.
"Spammers are clever people and there is clearly an arms race between spammers and people trying to prevent spam that just constantly escalates," said Forrester analyst Jim Nail. "Having simple lists of spammers and domains -- that's not enough because spammers change domains or addresses to stay ahead."
So, good news: I have a job. Bad news: well, I think that side is obvious ;)
The mother of all package tours: With the world expecting an attack on Iraq any time now, no one in their right mind would take a holiday there - would they? You'd be suprised, says Johann Hari (Guardian).
A fascinating article, from so many angles -- First, the tourists:
I met Julie and Phil. They seemed an almost comically suburban couple: polite, a little posh, all golf jumpers and floral smocks. But then Phil mentioned that his last holiday had been to North Korea. "Yeah, I've been twice since they opened the borders to tourists. I'm a bit of a celebrity there now. People come up to me in the streets and say, 'Why have you come to our country twice?'." ...
Then there was Hannah. How to explain her? A frightfully well-spoken Englishwoman in her early 50s. When we first met, she dispensed with the small talk to say: "I think Saddam is a great man and the USA is a great big global bully. My theory is that he should be given Kuwait. It's perfectly logical if you look at the map." "I think he's rather handsome too," she went on. "Every woman does really. I'd rather like to inspect his weapon of mass destruction myself."
And the politics:
Talking politics in Iraq is like a magic-eye picture, where you have to let your brain go out of focus, not your eyes. One very distinguished old man in a Mosul souk welcomed me warmly and told me how much he had loved visiting London in the 1970s. After much oblique prodding, he said warmly, "I admire British democracy and freedom." He held my gaze. "I very much admire them."
... As we wandered around, looking at the grim exhibits, one of the soldiers on duty guarding the museum told me that three of his brothers died in that war. Everybody in the country lost somebody - yet it is almost impossible to get anybody to talk about it. They speak in a small number of bloodless stock-phrases.
After more than 10 such encounters, it suddenly hit me that the people of Iraq are not even allowed to grieve their huge numbers of dead in their own way. They are permitted only a regulation measure of state-approved grief, which must be expressed in Saddam's language: that of martyrdom and heroism, rather than wailing agony about the futility of a war which slaughtered more than a million people yet left the borders unchanged and achieved nothing.
Thanks to Ben Walsh for the forwardy goodness.
"I am Mr Brunce Anthony, the bill exchange director at the NATIONAL WESTMINSTER BANK PLC." Yes, it's a 419 from that well-known third-world country, the UK.
(PS: Brunce?! what kind of name is that?! Everyone knows only Americans have that kind of ludicrous given name ;)
Date: Wed, 13 Nov 2002 10:40:51 +0100
From: "Brunce Anthony" (spam-protected)
To: (spam-protected)
Subject: FROM: BRUNCE IN UK
Dear Sir,
I am Mr Brunce Anthony, the bill exchange director at the NATIONAL WESTMINSTER BANK PLC, 135 BISHOPSGATE LONDON EC2M 3UR.
I am writing this letter to solicit for support and assistance from you to carry out this business opportunity in my department. Lying in an inactive account is the sum of
Thirty Million United States Dollars($30,000,000.00)belonging
to a foreign customer(Stanley Heard),the former President(Bill Clinton's personal physician) and Chairman of the National Chiropractic Health Care Advisory Committee who happens to be deceased.
He died with his wife and two children in a plane crash on Board a small airplane that plunged into a river. Ever since he died the Bank has been expecting his next of kin to come and claim these funds.
To this effect, we cannot release the money unless some one applies for it as the next of kin, as indicated in our Banking Guideline. Unfortunately he has no family member here in the UK or America who are aware of the existence of the money as he was he was a contract physician to the Chairman of Royal Bank of Scotland.
At this juncture I have decided to do business with you in colloboration with
officials that matter in the Bank, to this effect we solicit your assistance,
in applying as the next of kin, then the money will be proccesed and released to you, as we do not want this money to go into the Bank, Treasury as an unclaimed bill.
The Banking law and guideline stipulate that if such money remains unclaimed for a period of Five years the money will be transfered into the Bank s' Treasury as unclaimed bill. Our request for a Foreigner as a next of kin is occassioned by the fact that the customer was a Foreigner and a British cannot stand as next of kin.
Sir, 15% of the money will be your share as a Foreign partner, while 5% will be for any expenses incured during the transaction, thereafter we would visit your country once the money hits your account for disbursement and investment.
Please reach me at the above email or fax if willing to do business with us.
Best regards,
Mr. Brunce Anthony
Danny O'Brien: Help stop the flood of spam, in the Sunday Times. Great article:
We have had enough of the filth pouring into our mailboxes. Danny O?Brien launches a Doors campaign to clean up e-mail and puts forward a six-point plan involving government, industry and you the reader
DOORS SIX-POINT ACTION PLAN
SOFTWARE MAKERS must improve antispam software, and fast. Filtering spam is good, but only masks the problem. Spam-spotting software must report what and who it has found back to the ISPs, so they can block further spams.
Interesting!
Man uses cell phone to take photo up schoolgirl's skirt. You knew it was inevitable.
Police said Hamano was riding behind the girl on an escalator at JR Kashiwa Station when he took out his mobile phone, held it underneath the girl's skirt and took a photo. The girl was alerted to his presence by the noise emitted by the phone camera's shutter. She turned around to catch Hamano with his hands between her legs.
(via 0xdeadbeef, from MDN's "waiwai" section)
Guardian: Courage under fire. No matter what you think about what's going on in Israel and Palestine, Caoimhe, and the other international observers, require your support:
Friday was a very close call. Caoimhe was shot in the left thigh as she stood in between a firing IDF tank and three young boys in the street. I spoke to her on the phone shortly after the attack as she lay in her hospital bed. She explained that she had been trying to persuade the IDF, after they shot dead a nine-year-old boy, to stop shooting at the children. They had told her to get out of their way or they would shoot her. It was while she was clearing the children off the streets that she was shot. She is sure she was a direct target; the tank was close by, the soldier pointed his gun at her and fired, and continued to do so as she crawled to an alleyway for shelter.
I asked an IDF spokesman for his explanation. 'We are in the middle of a war and we cannot be responsible for the safety of anyone who has not been coordinated by the IDF to be in the occupied territories right now. While we do not want innocent Palestinians to suffer, or internationals to get hurt, we are trying to ensure the safety of the Israelis and we will not tolerate internationals interfering with IDF operations. It is not the job of internationals to stand in the line of fire, unless they are the son of God, but he hasn't come yet.'
A great tale of systems wierdness, via 0xdeadbeef:
'We're having a problem sending email out of the department.' 'What's the problem?' I asked. 'We can't send mail more than 500 miles,' the chairman explained.
Date: Tue, 26 Nov 2002 14:57:40 -0800
From: (spam-protected) (glen mccready)
To: (spam-protected)
Subject: The case of the 500-mile email.
>Forwarded-by: Nev Dull (spam-protected)
>Forwarded-by: Kirk McKusick (spam-protected)
>From: Trey Harris (spam-protected)
Here's a problem that *sounded* impossible... I almost regret posting the story to a wide audience, because it makes a great tale over drinks at a conference. :-) The story is slightly altered in order to protect the guilty, elide over irrelevant and boring details, and generally make the whole thing more entertaining.
I was working in a job running the campus email system some years ago when I got a call from the chairman of the statistics department.
"We're having a problem sending email out of the department."
"What's the problem?" I asked.
"We can't send mail more than 500 miles," the chairman explained.
I choked on my latte. "Come again?"
"We can't send mail farther than 500 miles from here," he repeated. "A little bit more, actually. Call it 520 miles. But no farther."
"Um... Email really doesn't work that way, generally," I said, trying to keep panic out of my voice. One doesn't display panic when speaking to a department chairman, even of a relatively impoverished department like statistics. "What makes you think you can't send mail more than 500 miles?"
"It's not what I *think*," the chairman replied testily. "You see, when we first noticed this happening, a few days ago--"
"You waited a few DAYS?" I interrupted, a tremor tinging my voice. "And you couldn't send email this whole time?"
"We could send email. Just not more than--"
"--500 miles, yes," I finished for him, "I got that. But why didn't you call earlier?"
"Well, we hadn't collected enough data to be sure of what was going on until just now." Right. This is the chairman of *statistics*. "Anyway, I asked one of the geostatisticians to look into it--"
"Geostatisticians..."
"--yes, and she's produced a map showing the radius within which we can send email to be slightly more than 500 miles. There are a number of destinations within that radius that we can't reach, either, or reach sporadically, but we can never email farther than this radius."
"I see," I said, and put my head in my hands. "When did this start? A few days ago, you said, but did anything change in your systems at that time?"
"Well, the consultant came in and patched our server and rebooted it. But I called him, and he said he didn't touch the mail system."
"Okay, let me take a look, and I'll call you back," I said, scarcely believing that I was playing along. It wasn't April Fool's Day. I tried to remember if someone owed me a practical joke.
I logged into their department's server, and sent a few test mails. This was in the Research Triangle of North Carolina, and a test mail to my own account was delivered without a hitch. Ditto for one sent to Richmond, and Atlanta, and Washington. Another to Princeton (400 miles) worked.
But then I tried to send an email to Memphis (600 miles). It failed. Boston, failed. Detroit, failed. I got out my address book and started trying to narrow this down. New York (420 miles) worked, but Providence (580 miles) failed.
I was beginning to wonder if I had lost my sanity. I tried emailing a friend who lived in North Carolina, but whose ISP was in Seattle. Thankfully, it failed. If the problem had had to do with the geography of the human recipient and not his mail server, I think I would have broken down in tears.
Having established that -- unbelievably -- the problem as reported was true, and repeatable, I took a look at the sendmail.cf file. It looked fairly normal. In fact, it looked familiar.
I diffed it against the sendmail.cf in my home directory. It hadn't been altered -- it was a sendmail.cf I had written. And I was fairly certain I hadn't enabled the "FAIL_MAIL_OVER_500_MILES" option. At a loss, I telnetted into the SMTP port. The server happily responded with a SunOS sendmail banner.
Wait a minute... a SunOS sendmail banner? At the time, Sun was still shipping Sendmail 5 with its operating system, even though Sendmail 8 was fairly mature. Being a good system administrator, I had standardized on Sendmail 8. And also being a good system administrator, I had written a sendmail.cf that used the nice long self-documenting option and variable names available in Sendmail 8 rather than the cryptic punctuation-mark codes that had been used in Sendmail 5.
The pieces fell into place, all at once, and I again choked on the dregs of my now-cold latte. When the consultant had "patched the server," he had apparently upgraded the version of SunOS, and in so doing *downgraded* Sendmail. The upgrade helpfully left the sendmail.cf alone, even though it was now the wrong version.
It so happens that Sendmail 5 -- at least, the version that Sun shipped, which had some tweaks -- could deal with the Sendmail 8 sendmail.cf, as most of the rules had at that point remained unaltered. But the new long configuration options -- those it saw as junk, and skipped. And the sendmail binary had no defaults compiled in for most of these, so, finding no suitable settings in the sendmail.cf file, they were set to zero.
One of the settings that was set to zero was the timeout to connect to the remote SMTP server. Some experimentation established that on this particular machine with its typical load, a zero timeout would abort a connect call in slightly over three milliseconds.
An odd feature of our campus network at the time was that it was 100% switched. An outgoing packet wouldn't incur a router delay until hitting the POP and reaching a router on the far side. So time to connect to a lightly-loaded remote host on a nearby network would actually largely be governed by the speed of light distance to the destination rather than by incidental router delays.
Feeling slightly giddy, I typed into my shell:
$ units 1311 units, 63 prefixes
You have: 3 millilightseconds You want: miles
-
558.84719 / 0.0017893979
"500 miles, or a little bit more."
Trey Harris -- I'm looking for work. If you need a SAGE Level IV with 10 years Perl, tool development, training, and architecture experience, please email me at (spam-protected) I'm willing to relocate for the right opportunity.
WSJ: If TiVo Thinks You Are Gay, Here's How to Set It Straight: when a learning "personalisation" algorithm gets it massively wrong.
PS: I think it was Mimi Smartypants who noted that she occasionally misses the odd TV program, just so TiVo doesn't get the wrong idea.
PPS: Joe McNally, who fwded this, notes that IMDB's learner has gone a bit haywire recently, too: "If you liked 'Iris'," it told me the other week, "you'll also enjoy 'Planet of the Apes'." Click further, and apparently you'll also also enjoy 'Pearl Harbour', 'Donnie Darko' and 'Bend It Like Beckham'. Sounds like a game of What Links?
PPPS: all irrelevant in Europe -- TiVo's west-pond-only.
According to the Minister for Communications, Marine and Natural Resources, Mr. D. Ahern, Ireland will "transpose into Irish law the requirements of European Parliament and Council Directive 2002/58/EC concerning the processing of personal data and the protection of privacy in the electronic communications sector" before the end of 2003.
It will be nice to be able to point to the law, eventually -- for what that's worth. Since most spammers are USian, relaying via other countries, actually acting on the law will not be quite so simple. But it will be an improvement.
Hashish 'fell on to back of army lorry'. "Spain's defence ministry is still at a loss to explain how three-quarters of a tonne of hashish had turned up in an army truck. ... 'Anybody could have put the toxic substance there,' said the defence minister". Don't worry minister, I'm sure the customs officials haven't heard that one before...
Fantastic ending:
But now both he and the armed services are being ruthlessly lampooned by, among others, The Puppet Show News ... Mr Trillo, a member of the strict Opus Dei Catholic lay order, is routinely portrayed as a uniformed pothead whose favourite pastime is getting stoned with the mascot of the Spanish Legion, a little white goat called Blanquita.
As both he and Blanquita mourned the lost Eurofighter by lighting up a giant joint at the weekend, the defence minister declared: "It's the only way to fly."
Date: Tue, 26 Nov 2002 10:43:29 +0000
From: "Martin Adamson" (spam-protected)
To: (spam-protected)
Subject: Hashish 'fell on to back of army lorry'
The Guardian
Hashish 'fell on to back of army lorry'
Giles Tremlett in Madrid Tuesday November 26, 2002
It is a matter, you might say, that is shrouded in dense, aromatic smoke - Spain's defence ministry is still at a loss to explain how three-quarters of a tonne of hashish had turned up in an army truck in the country's north African enclave of Melilla.
Embarrassed officials tried to claim that the troops it has permanently stationed in north Africa would never have succumbed to the temptation of smuggling the region's most important cash crop across the Mediterranean.
The high-quality Moroccan hashish, almost certainly produced in the nearby Rif mountains, was found by police sniffer dogs in the port of Melilla as the truck waited to be shipped to Almeria.
"Anybody could have put the toxic substance there," said the defence minister, Federico Trillo, after explaining that the truck had been parked, unattended, in Melilla's port for about two days.
Local police disagreed. The truck had only been parked there for a few hours, they said. They suggested that the khaki kit bags stuffed full of shrink-wrapped dope could only have come from within the Spanish armed forces.
The questioning of eight uniformed suspects has shed no further light on the case and opposition politicians have called for a full explanation from Mr Trillo.
The drugs bust has done little to improve ties with nearby Morocco, which claims Melilla as its own and is constantly accused by Madrid of turning a blind eye to hashish-smuggling.
The find also came at a troubled time for the newly professional Spanish armed forces, which are failing to attract recruits and retain their aircraft: they lost their only trial version of the £50m Eurofighter in an accident last week.
Mr Trillo, a proud military man and stern Catholic conservative, hoped the standing of the armed forces had improved after special forces ejected six poorly armed Moroccan gendarmes from the Parsley islet over the summer.
But now both he and the armed services are being ruthlessly lampoonedby, among others The Puppet Show News, Spain's equivalent of Spitting Image.
Mr Trillo, a member of the strict Opus Dei Catholic lay order, is routinely portrayed as a uniformed pothead whose favourite pastime is getting stoned with the mascot of the Spanish Legion, a little white goat called Blanquita.
As both he and Blanquita mourned the lost Eurofighter by lighting up a giant joint at the weekend, the defence minister declared: "It's the only way to fly."
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2002
Sliced liver, anyone? "The first public autopsy in Britain for 170 years brought back vivid memories of medical school - and an acute sense of hunger - for the Guardian's junior doctor Michael Foxton."
"The process of dismemberment is a deeply weird and dysphoric experience, and it is a dangerous border to cross. I remember the first time I had to do it, as a medical student in an operating theatre. It was a man with stomach cancer, who I had been talking to on the ward the morning before his operation. When the surgeon brought his knife down to make the first cut on his belly, it was everything I could do to stop myself reaching out and grabbing his hand to stop him. Doctors have to cross that line. We have to separate the thinking, smiling, family man from the clinical material. If I hadn't done that I couldn't possibly cut a hole and force a huge chest drain tube a centimetre across into a writhing patient on a respiratory ward at three in the morning, without going mad."
now that's a great name tag:
I just dug up this classic piece of lunacy from the Montauk UFO contingent. Highly recommended if you like reading this kind of wierdness...
DA: Hmmm. Who do these aliens eat?
AC: They specifically like young human children, that haven't been contaminated like adults. Well, there is a gentleman out giving a lot of information from a source he gets it from, and he says that there is an incredible number of children snatched in this country.
DA: Over 200,000 each year.
AC: And that these children are the main entree for dinner.
yum yum!
Blather: I See Dead People, by Mick Cunningham and Dave Walsh. "It's Halloween, it's Trinity College in Dublin, and we're in a packed lecture hall ... for an evening of public lectures entitled "Over Their Dead Bodies... The Secrets That Dead Bodies Tell". And dead bodies speak volumes. "
I went along to this -- it was fantastic stuff, although extremely gory at times. Worth reading, and be thankful they don't have copies of Dr. Harbison's slides.
WSJ: For Bulk E-Mailer, Pestering Millions Offers Path to Profit.
I'm just trying to make a living like everyone else, says Ms. Betterly. ... (she) quickly discovered that she could make a profit if she got as few as 100 responses for every 10 million messages sent for a client, and she figures her income will be $200,000 this year.
And she's based in Tampa, Florida. What is it about Florida?!
Some folks reckon that mailservers should have reverse DNS -- in other words, that the SMTP server should have a fully-valid forward-to-reverse mapping for its address, to cut down on spam and forgeries. All well and good.
Some other folks reckon that filtering on it is therefore a good way to cut down on spam.
It's a nice idea, apart from 2 things:
-
filtering based on this suffers the same problem some DNSBLs have: a false positive hurts the user, rather than the person who is at fault; also the user is virtually powerless to fix it.
-
the correlation between spam and missing reverse DNS is no longer as strong as it used to be, as far as I can tell; spammers know they should pick a relay or proxy with a reverse DNS entry to get through filters, and as it becomes a requirement for relaying in general, more hosts have this anyway (regardless of exploitability or not).
Joel on Software now features a great new article on what he calls "Leaky Abstractions". Some snippets:
-
Even though network libraries like NFS and SMB let you treat files on remote machines "as if" they were local, sometimes the connection becomes very slow or goes down, and the file stops acting like it was local, and as a programmer you have to write code to deal with this. The abstraction of "remote file is the same as local file" leaks. ...
(jm: the 'transparent does not always mean good' problem)
-
Something as simple as iterating over a large two-dimensional array can have radically different performance if you do it horizontally rather than vertically, depending on the "grain of the wood" -- one direction may result in vastly more page faults than the other direction, and page faults are slow. Even assembly programmers are supposed to be allowed to pretend that they have a big flat address space, but virtual memory means it's really just an abstraction, which leaks when there's a page fault and certain memory fetches take way more many nanoseconds than other memory fetches.
(jm: the 'why objects are not always the way to do it' problem)
And finally, he ends with a killer:
Ten years ago, we might have imagined that new programming paradigms would have made programming easier by now. Indeed, the abstractions we've created over the years do allow us to deal with new orders of complexity in software development that we didn't have to deal with ten or fifteen years ago, like GUI programming and network programming. And while these great tools, like modern OO forms-based languages, let us get a lot of work done incredibly quickly, suddenly one day we need to figure out a problem where the abstraction leaked, and it takes 2 weeks. And when you need to hire a programmer to do mostly VB programming, it's not good enough to hire a VB programmer, because they will get completely stuck in tar every time the VB abstraction leaks.
Well said! Read the article!
ICAP-server, an (imaginatively-named) daemon which implements ICAP. This seems to be a transcoding proxy server; in other words, it will convert HTML content on the fly, while you browse.
ICAP itself seems to be a protocol for rewriting HTTP responses; in other words, it allows a proxy server to include a small snippet of ICAP client code, and call out to an ICAP server to do the rewriting. Nifty.
Sounds like this could be very handy for low-bandwidth situations; use ICAP to "downshift" web pages into low-bandwidth versions. For example, banner ads can be trimmed out, heavy images converted to small, low-quality JPEGs, etc. One to watch (or help out with).
Ericsson used to have a commercial product which did something similar, but I can't find it now...
Trinity College, Dublin is currently embroiled in a minor kerfuffle with Lucasfilm over "an uncanny resemblance between the 18th-century Long Room Library at Trinity, and the "Jedi Archives" in the latest episode of the "Star Wars" epic." (Reuters)
The resemblance really is uncanny -- I noticed it myself on watching the movie, but assumed there must have been a hundred similar libraries around the world. Sounds like Trinity think there's only one after all. Given that it's Trinity, maybe they're right.
Compare: the Jedi archives vs. the Long Room.
the Anti-Telemarketing EGBG Counter-Script:
Telemarketers make use of a telescript - a guideline for a telephone conversation. This script creates an imbalance in the conversation between the marketer and the consumer. It is this imbalance, most of all, that makes telemarketing successful. The EGBG Counterscript attempts to redress that balance.
Half of the coolness here is the excellent, form/script-based design. Well suitable for printing out and sticking to the wall beside the 'phone...
I've been reading an article in Edge Magazine, How To Get Rich, by Jared Diamond (author of Guns, Germs and Steel). He investigates more deeply into the differences between cultures, and the effect this has had on their history and dominance, as he did in GG+S; this time with economic might in mind.
For example, he notes that the Chinese, in the middle ages, were a sea-faring nation of astounding skill, exploring most of the coasts of Asia and Africa for trade. They were on the verge of rounding the Cape of Good Hope (and, in the words of Diamond, "colonising Europe" ;) when a new emperor with an anti-Navy bias took power, and recalled them. Since the entirety of China's empire was ruled solely by one power, the emperor, that was that. (Compare with Columbus, who could "shop around" the many superpowers of Europe until his trip across the Atlantic was funded.)
Then, this morning, a pertinent link arrived via Kyle Moffat of forteana: an ancient Chinese map of Africa is now on show in Cape Town (BBC).
The Chinese map, covering more than 17 square metres, was produced in silk. It is thought to be a copy of a map sculpted into rock 20 or 30 years earlier. ...
The Da Ming Hun Yi Tu, or Amalgamated Map of the Great Ming Empire, is a unique snapshot of history. Created in China in 1389, and clearly showing the shape of Africa, more than 100 years before Western explorers and map-makers reached the continent.
BTW, worth noting that I came across the Diamond article from a link in Clay Shirky's guest-blog at Boing Boing. Clay, as usual, is throwing up lots of reading material, which I just don't have time to read ;) so I'm syncing it all to my Palm with Sitescooper. Come on Xerox, where's that electronic paper!?
OK, while we're on the subject: the top 100 HTTPS sites by PageRank. Paypal wins, but HushMail's not far behind.
similar to the much-discussed-elsewhere http search trick, which figures out the top 100 websites according to PageRank, here's the top 100 CGI scripts according to PageRank. They're incomplete, since only scripts with "cgi-bin" in the URL will show up, but hey ho. The top ten:
-
9 : RIPE Whois
-
6 : Altavista
-
5 : US census lookup (ahead of Altavista, how the mighty have fallen!), and their population clock
-
4 : Internic's Whois
-
3 : OAndA's currency converter (a classic)
-
2 : The Babelfish
And the winner is:
boo.
let's ask Googlism some hard questions.
Googlism, what is the web?
-
the web is like canada
-
the web is dedicated to breathing life into women's
-
the web is crippling
-
the web is ruined and i ruined it self
OK, what about the internet?
-
the internet is falling
-
the internet is not printed on paper
-
the internet is like is like a penis
-
the internet is no substitute
And Ireland?
-
ireland is dedicated entirely to development aid
-
ireland is at an end
-
ireland is again the "dirty man" of europe when it comes to
-
ireland is not disneyland
-
ireland is british (what?!)
-
ireland is looking for a german inhouse translator
Right. That's quite enough I think...
rOD links to Massholes, an incredible gripe site for residents of Massachusetts to bitch about shitty driving, for example:
Dear Masshole Driver,
WHAT on earth makes you think that making a right hand turn from the left hand lane is a good idea??? Really, I'd like to know.
Signed, The-nice-person-you-totally-cut-off-and-almost-killed
Incredible stuff. Sounds like they could do with the cool innovation recently introduced here -- the "dob-a-dangerous-driver" line (1).
Let's say you're doing what a friend of mine did a few months ago: crossing the road, with your kid in a buggy, at a pedestrian crossing, with the lights in your favour -- then a speeding driver breaks the lights at top speed and nearly totals the pair of you.
This great innovation then allows you to whip out your mobile phone (hey, this is europe, everyone has one (2)), and immediately report the car's registration number -- and 2 weeks later he receives a fine! Hey presto, instant justice. (3)
And in the last week, they've introduced penalty points for bad driving; 12 points and you lose your license. Things can only get better -- for the pedestrians that is, at least. ;)
(1: no, it's not really called that BTW)
(2: except me, that is -- I'm so far ahead of the bleeding edge I've given them up)
(3: well, I'm exagerrating, I think there was more witness and due process involved, but it's pretty close.)
(4: errno==EDANGLE: dangling footnote found)
ThinkGeek sent me a voucher for 30 bucks. Thanks ThinkGeek (or Sourceforge, I'm not sure which)! So here's what I got:
Mousetrap For Your Fridge Or File Cabinet!
When is the last time you played with your marbles? Welp, dust off your old marble collection (or use the included marbles) and set them on a journey they'll never forget.
You design the marble's treacherous path down the steep slope of your fridge or file cabinet (or any metal surface, as these things are magnetic). You have at your arsenal a combination of chutes, funnels, catapults, spinners and sheer drop offs to arrange according to your mood and tastes.
Give your marble the gift of extreme sports, all in the comfort of your own home or office. Because happy marbles breed happy times...
Too cool. Thanks ThinkGeek/Sourceforge!
(On the other hand, BTW, their chosen shipper for Europe happily charges an extra 6 euros for "import duty". but hey, the toy was free.)
man, this is sweet! BBC front page coverage for Ireland Offline...
"Eircom has cited congestion of the network and not enough demand as the arguments against unmetered (internet access)," said Mr (Dave) Long (IO chairman).
BT-owned ESAT is just one of the telecom operators challenging Eircom to offer a wholesale unmetered product.
"There is huge pent-up demand and our ears are sore from listening to our own customers. For Eircom to say there is no demand is condescending and naive," said (Una) McGirr (of ESAT BT).
Maybe what Eircom mean, is that there's not enough demand to outweigh the unfeasibly large revenues they make from metered internet calls...
(ish!): The management of Sydney's Taronga Zoo has mooted "manual stimulation" of Kibabu the gorilla, in order to grab some monkey semen for artificial insemination.
"I believe it's done in Europe", they say (maybe they're harking back to the days of Weimar Berlin). Zookeepers, being the ones who'd get their hands dirty (so to speak), are -- understandably -- not too keen.
It now looks like something called "electro-ejaculation" will be used instead... sounds painful. (Link from forteana.)
Date: Thu, 31 Oct 2002 07:04:12 +1000
From: Peter Darben (spam-protected)
Subject: Gorilla Wankers
----- (from The Age (Melbourne) 31.10.02)
http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2002/10/30/1035683478852.html
Gorilla tactics rejected
October 31 2002 By Phillip Cornford
Kibabu the gorilla's inability to produce offspring has become an embarrassing industrial issue for Taronga Zoo in Sydney.
The zoo management's proposal for an artificial insemination program using manual stimulation of the sedated gorilla was vetoed by zookeepers.
"It was too bloody dangerous," a zookeeper said last night. "What if he woke up?"
Red-faced Taronga officials last night confirmed the masturbation program was proposed last May, but said there had been no further attempt to employ it. "I believe it's done in Europe," a spokesman said. "There's been a lot of discussion on how to get semen from Kibabu for artificial insemination."
Instead, Kibabu - whose harem numbers five females - will probably be stimulated by an electrical device, a process called electro-ejaculation. Kibabu's failure emerged yesterday as about 350 zoo staff planned to stop work at 2pm tomorrow to discuss workplace agreement issues, including wages, working hours, stress and job-related risks.
-----
peter
My googlism: apparently I'm a tool to autoretrieve news from popular, or am I scheduled to be tried on those charges in december? yikes.
Wikipedia: Edit wars in progress. Fascinating stuff! (thanks to Crummy.com for the link).
the EU's scientific advisors have stated that cod stocks in Europe are at their lowest ever levels, and will collapse without action. grim! More at New Scientist.
Things are getting crazy in the fight against spam: it seems AOL blocked access (for two weeks) to its mailserver from Telia.com, one of Sweden's biggest ISPs (if not the biggest), due to spam.
Attached is an unauthorized translation of an article in the Swedish IDG paper Computer Sweden (web edition, Oct 24), provided by Claes Tullbrink.
Until a (previous) article was published, noting this ban, AOL had not succeeded in contacting Telia to talk about it. Amazing stuff.
Date: Thu, 24 Oct 2002 14:51:19 +0200
From: Claes Tullbrink (spam-protected)
Subject: Telia.com not blocked by AOL any longer
Computer Sweden (in Swedish, password may be required after today):
Oct 24, pm.
For more then two weeks mail from Telia.com was blocked by AOL.
Jocelyn Cole, AOL UK, confirmed the block, which was due to big amounts of spam sent from Telia domains to AOL. The block is now removed, and AOL is cooperating with Telia to find a long term solution to decrease the amount of spam sent from Telia, to protect AOL customers.
Press officer Jan Sjöberg, Telia, says it was the article that solved the
issue: a Telia contact person name was mentioned in the article, and it seems
that AOL had read the articles [and *so* and in no other way knew who they
could contact? CT]
Jan Sjöberg is still not sure how the block was related to spam: due to spam, reports of spam or a customer's open mail relay. Telia will investigate. [proxies was not mentioned. I don't know if "reports of spam" relates to refusing to accept plain mail reports sent to (spam-protected)
Claes
blog is a Good Word -- official. From Bayesian analysis of my mail spool, blog shows up 1525 times in non-spam mail, and never in spam.
Over on Boing Boing, Danny O'Brien notes
People who know me well enough, or google well enough, to uncover out my weirder behaviours will know that I can't drive. It's not some high-falutin' statement about the environment. I'm just not very good at remembering which pedal does what.
Well, it's good to hear there's one more out there; me neither. It's become a bit of a worry recently, since I may be moving to LA, which is notoriously one of the most ped-unfriendly places in the world (Antarctica excepted).
But why, you ask? I don't know -- but I think it's a combo of these factors:
-
owning a car in Ireland is phenomenally expensive: due to bizarre traits of the insurance biz over here, it costs about $100-$140 a week to drive a car. That's quite a luxury. For that price, you might as well just take cabs everywhere and let someone else do the hard work.
-
I live more-or-less in Dublin city centre, so walking and cycling does the trick nicely.
-
Dublin's got good public transport for when the weather's bad (see also cabs above).
-
er, laziness.
I guess it may be something I'll have to sort out, at some stage, maybe. Eventually. (Damn that laziness!)
Bernie Goldbach is currently blogging live from the floor of OPEN_HOUSE_001, Media Lab Europe's inaugural conference.
I'm impressed -- by the technology, that is ;) . He's blogging via email from a Nokia 9210i Communicator, to a Radio weblog, then via XML-RPC to the Kirbycom New Media Cuts Movable Type blog. cool!
Anyway, that's enough of that -- gotta get back to work!
Danny at Oblomovka bought a Roomba, and finds it extra useful for scaring cats.
Still, we did our final moving cash splurge today, and bought a Roomba. And, what do you know, it's actually pretty good: both at cleaning and removing the bejesus out of nearby cats. It backed Dyson into the corner of our living room within minutes - she kept tottering backwards for about ten yards, like she was facing the Feline Terminator.
In a similar vein: I can vouch that, if Lego Mindstorms is good for anything, it's scaring cats with its Otherworldly Silicon Intelligence. I think most cats eventually figure out that if there's a string or stick linking a menacing object and a human, odds are that the human is controlling the object somehow. As a result, a robot really freaks them out.
But with Lego Mindstorms, they do get their revenge eventually, by eating the smaller bricks next time you build a 'bot.
wow, seven to nine of the thirteen DNS root servers were flood-attacked on Monday, and nobody noticed. That's cool.
... experts said the attack, which started about 4:45 p.m. EDT Monday, transmitted data to each targeted root server 30 to 40 times normal amounts. One said that just one additional failure would have disrupted e-mails and Web browsing across parts of the Internet.
Date: Tue, 22 Oct 2002 19:59:06 -0400
From: (spam-protected)
To: (spam-protected)
Subject: So like, a third of the rootservers went down and we didn't even notice.
Yea, I certainly didn't notice. Its cool and scary really -- Cool that the whole net didn't cease to be (even for an hour) and bad that 9 rootservers died period.
Scary mofo shit.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/news/archive/2002/10/22/national1907EDT0772.DTL
Powerful attack cripples majority of key Internet computers
TED BRIDIS, Associated Press Writer
Tuesday, October 22, 2002
(10-22) 16:07 PDT WASHINGTON (AP) --
An unusually powerful electronic attack briefly crippled nine of the 13 computer servers that manage global Internet traffic this week, officials disclosed Tuesday. But most Internet users didn't notice because the attack only lasted one hour.
The FBI and White House were investigating. One official described the attack Monday as the most sophisticated and large-scale assault against these crucial computers in the history of the Internet. The origin of the attack was not known.
Seven of the 13 servers failed to respond to legitimate network traffic and two others failed intermittently during the attack, officials confirmed.
The FBI's National Infrastructure Protection Center was "aware of the denial of service attack and is addressing this matter," spokesman Steven Berry said.
Service was restored after experts enacted defensive measures and the attack suddenly stopped.
The 13 computers are spread geographically across the globe as precaution against physical disasters and operated by U.S. government agencies, universities, corporations and private organizations.
"As best we can tell, no user noticed and the attack was dealt with and life goes on," said Louis Touton, vice president for the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, the Internet's key governing body.
Brian O'Shaughnessy, a spokesman for VeriSign Inc., which operates two of the 13 computers in northern Virginia, said "these sorts of attacks will happen."
"We were prepared, we responded quickly," O'Shaughnessy said. "We proactively cooperated with our fellow root server operators and the appropriate authorities."
Computer experts who manage some of the affected computers, speaking on condition of anonymity, said they were cooperating with the White House through its Office of Homeland Security and the President's Critical Infrastructure Protection Board.
Richard Clarke, President Bush's top cyber-security adviser and head of the protection board, has warned for months that an attack against the Internet's 13 so- called root server computers could be dramatically disruptive.
These experts said the attack, which started about 4:45 p.m. EDT Monday, transmitted data to each targeted root server 30 to 40 times normal amounts. One said that just one additional failure would have disrupted e-mails and Web browsing across parts of the Internet.
Monday's attack wasn't more disruptive because many Internet providers and large corporations and organizations routinely store, or "cache," popular Web directory information for better performance.
"The Internet was designed to be able to take outages, but when you take the root servers out, you don't know how long you can work without them," said Alan Paller, director of research at the SANS Institute, a security organization based in Bethesda, Md.
Although the Internet theoretically can operate with only a single root server, its performance would slow if more than four root servers failed for any appreciable length of time.
In August 2000, four of the 13 root servers failed for a brief period because of a technical glitch.
A more serious problem involving root servers occurred in July 1997 after experts transferred a garbled directory list to seven root servers and failed to correct the problem for four hours. Traffic on much of the Internet ground to a halt.
-- Best regards,
bitbitch (spam-protected)
Giraffes smell so bad for the same reason tourists do: to repel parasites.
(Explanation: in Laos, we heard a funny story about a tourist on the bus who noticed that no locals wanted to sit beside him. He got talking to a local kid and asked why this was, and the kid let him in on the secret: the locals reckon tourists stink of insect repellent. And they're right) (Link)
Date: Mon, 21 Oct 2002 11:04:22 +0100
From: "Tim Chapman" (spam-protected)
To: forteana (spam-protected)
Subject: Why giraffes stink
Ananova: Scientists explain why giraffes smell so bad
Researchers say they have evidence that giraffes smell bad to repel parasites.
Scientists at California's Humboldt State University have found their skin contains a cocktail of antibiotics and repellents.
The team arrived at its conclusion by analysing hair from the neck and back of a zoo giraffe.
They identified several smelly chemicals that work to stunt the growth of fungi and bacteria on skin.
These included indole and 3-methylindole; the same chemical compounds that make faeces smell.
Another compound present - para-cresol - is present in creosote and serves to repel bloodsucking ticks.
Biologist William Wood says rangers and zookeepers have long "noted that giraffes have this overpowering aroma."
South African vernacular for an old male giraffe is "stink bull." He suggests the aroma probably plays an important sexual function. He told Nature an overpowering smell would give potential partners a clear signal that an individual is free of fleas.
Story filed: 10:54 Monday 21st October 2002
I quite like David Chess' log -- it boasts this quite good 419 piss-take:
FROM:PRNCSS. L ORGANA
DEAR friend.
I AM PRINCESS LEIA ORGANA ONLY SURVIVOR
OF THE ROYALFAMILY OF ALDERAN (ALDRN).
I AM MOVED TO WRITE YOU THIS LETTER,
THIS WAS IN CONFIDENCE CONSIDERING MY
PRESENT CIRCUMSTANCE AND SITUATION.
I WAS FALSLEY IMPRISONED UPON THE
IMPERIAL BATTLESTATION ("DEATH STAR")
WHEN MY PLANET WAS HIDEOUSLY DESTROYED
AND ENDED BY THE BVERY BAD SITH LORD
VADER.
Thanks to Cam for the linky goodness.
History of www.maths.tcd.ie. Thanks to Dave Malone for sending me the URL, while chatting about the timeline -- and about how Peter Flynn beat all of us to the coveted "first in Ireland" spot.
But then, being an SGML guru, and marking up a huge quantity of ancient gaelic texts, I don't think anyone could possibly hold it against him ;) Check this out from the Annals Of The Four Masters:
Every plain in Ireland abounded with flowers and shamrocks in the time of Fiacha. These flowers, moreover, were found full of wine, so that the wine was squeezed into bright vessels. Wherefore, the cognomen, Fiacha Fin Scothach, continued to be applied to him.
things are getting scary. Two stories of note:
Guardian: US plans military rule and occupation of Iraq.
The US has plans to establish an American-led military administration in Iraq, similar to the postwar occupation of Germany and Japan, which could last for several years after the fall of Saddam Hussein, it emerged yesterday.
The occupation of the country would need an estimated 75,000 troops, at an annual cost of up to $16bn, and would almost certainly include British and other allied soldiers. It would be run by a senior American officer, perhaps General Tommy Franks, who would lead the assault on Iraq, and whose role would be modelled on that of General Douglas MacArthur in postwar Japan. ....
The Iraqi project, outlined by Mr Bush's senior adviser on the Middle East, Zalmay Khalilzad, would involve running the entire country until a democratic Iraqi government was deemed ready.
The vision laid out in the Bush document is a vision of what used to be called, when we believed it to be the Soviet ambition, world domination. It's a vision of a world in which it is American policy to prevent the emergence of any rival power, whatever it stands for -- a world policed and controlled by American military might.
This goes much further than the notion of America as the policeman of the world. It's the notion of America as both the policeman and the legislator of the world, and it's where the Bush vision goes seriously, even chillingly, wrong. A police force had better be embedded in and guided by a structure of law and consent. There's a name for the kind of regime in which the cops rule, answering only to themselves. It's called a police state.
Worth quoting this snippet too:
For example, as a way of enhancing "national security," it promises to press "other countries" to adopt "lower marginal tax rates" and "pro-growth legal and regulatory policies" -- your doctor's names for tax cuts for the rich and environmental laxity. And it exalts economic relationships as more fundamental than political and social ones (a mental habit that orthodox conservative ideologues share with their orthodox Marxist counterparts), as in this passage praising free trade as a "moral principle": "If you can make something that others value, you should be able to sell it to them. If others make something that you value, you should be able to buy it. This is real freedom, the freedom for a person -- or a nation -- to make a living." (As distinct, presumably, from the secondary, not quite real freedoms of thought, conscience, and expression.)
Mimi Smartypants graces us with some fake Irish prejudice (to go with the Belgian one). "They are drunk all the time and they eat lots of potatoes, at least if you go by the jokes, which is the only way to form one's fake prejudices."
Actually, no, that's about right. Only in Ireland can you find the bonus carbohydrate meal: a meal just isn't a meal unless it contains potatoes, so anything that comes with rice (let's say) will usually have a serving of spuds on top. Nowadays you might have to go off the beaten track a little to get this, but it's still there, if you look. I'm a fake Irishman, clearly, since I don't really like spuds all that much -- but a few of my mates could talk for hours about some especially tasty potatoes they've eaten recently. It's quite bizarre.
She also refers to an existing "fake Belgian prejudice". Well, in my experience, anti-Belgian prejudice generally runs quickly into the difficult issue of Audrey Hepburn, and ends right there. She's just non-bigotable.
Also from Mimi, linked by defective yeti: some fantastic meta-spam commentary.
[Here's] a very weird subject line for spam: Watch Me Film Myself Masturbating. Whoa. That's pretty removed from the subject/object consciousness. Can't I just watch you masturbating? I have to watch "the making of" you masturbating?
If I could fit that onto one line, it'd go right into the SpamAssassin Bugzilla quips file, where we save the most stupid spam hooks -- but I can't, and it might come off wrong on its own.
Er, so to speak.
As BoingBoing has noted already, a Melbourne scientist has proposed that lemon juice could fight HIV effectively, with bonus spermicidal action too:
According to Mr Short, lemons could be used as a contraceptive by soaking a piece of cotton wool in the juice and inserting it into the vagina before sex. "We can show in the lab that lemon juice is very effective in immobilising human sperm and also very effective in killing HIV," he said.
but:
Julian Meldrum, international editor of Aidsmap, told BBC News Online that the principle behind the theory seemed like good science. ... However, he said: "There is not yet enough evidence that this will be safe and effective in practice. ... We also need to examine whether it is safe to put what is quite a strong acid into contact with mucus membranes which are quite delicate."
Ouch. Mr. Short said that some female researchers in his lab have noted that the application of lemon juice didn't hurt. Yeah right -- maybe it didn't quite hurt per se, but I bet it stung like hell!
Top history tidbit:
The practice of using lemon juice to prevent pregnancy was commonly used in medieval times, including by the legendary lothario Casanova, but has been forgotten by modern medicine.
Rod pointed out that my RSS feed was borked. oops, WebMake and HTML::Parser had "tidied" it. Who knew that RDF was case-sensitive? Not I.
Ah well... now fixed.
Found on Paul Graham's site: "according to a recent study, the MAPS RBL, probably the best known blacklist, catches only 24% of spam, with 34% false positives. It would take a conscious effort to write a content-based filter with performance that bad."
The "recent study" is by David Nelson at Giga Information Group, sometime last year.
For the sake of it, I've checked out how the MAPS figures stack up using TCR, Ion Androutsopoulos' metric for measuring spam filter performance. TCR is a very nice single-figure metric, which takes into account the "inconvenience factor" of misfiled mails, based on a "lambda" setting indicating what action is taken when a mail is classified. For MAPS, I'm assuming a lambda of 9, the guideline figure for systems which bounce mail back to the sender, instead of 1 for simple tagging, or 999 for outright deletion with no notification.
So: using a lambda of 9, MAPS gets a TCR of 0.0912, a Spam Recall of 24%, and a Spam Precision of 17%. It's worth noting that the baseline figure for TCR is 1.0, which represents no filtering whatsoever: ie. all the spam comes right into your mailbox.
In other words, using MAPS is more inconvenient all-round than not filtering your mail at all, if these figures are to be believed ;)
More spam: I've just assembled a totally-public corpus of spam and non-spam mail, to allow spamfilter developers to compare and contrast results using the same data. Let's hope it proves useful.
Not spam: finally, I'm off to Chester for a wedding tomorrow morning; my good mates Kitty and Gerry are tying the knot, in Chester Zoo, no less. Let's hope this horrible cold I've had all week dies down before Saturday...
holy shit, Advogato reckons I'm at Master level! Well, that's nice, but I'm not entirely convinced yet. Not that I'm complaining ;)
"I spiked Ted Heath's dinner". "At a meeting in 1970, ad man Jeremy Scott sprinkled speed on the Tory leader's canapes. His firm went on to win the party's account, and Heath won the election." ... "I was really just trying to cheer everyone up," he adds sheepishly. "The quantities I used were minute."
The Guardian: Word of the week: "basically":
"Perhaps you are one of those strong individuals who manages to resist the use of meaningless adverbs, but others will have recognised, guiltily, one of their own favourite words appearing as a verbal tic in a widely broadcast statement this week. On Friday, "shoe bomber" Richard Reid, accused of attempting to blow up a flight from Paris to Miami, introduced a slice of South London syntax into the Boston court where he is being tried. Questioned by the judge about his intentions, he declared: "Basically, I got on to the plane with a bomb. Basically, I tried to ignite it. Basically, yeah, I intended to damage the plane.'' ...
New Scientist: Real-time 2D to 3D video conversion unveiled. "The company behind the new technology claims it is the first system to allow live television events to be watched through a PC in 3D".
A gold urn made for a Nazi party leader has been discovered in a Bavarian lake, prompting a scramble by treasure hunters determined to get their hands on the Third Reich's long-lost riches. However, getting at any gold that might be down there, may not be so easy:
Toplitz is a byword for everything dangerous in Alpine lakes. After 30ft there is no light, and below 100ft, the water is almost freezing. At 348ft, the bottom comes into view. There is no life at the bottom of the lake because there is not enough oxygen to sustain it.
348ft, fact fans, is 116 metres. Yikes, that's some serious diving...
Bringing the net to Eden (Guardian). "In the village of Kirkby Stephen, in the Eden Valley, on the border between Cumbria and the Yorkshire Dales, getting on to the internet is a major effort. With phone lines shared between remote farmhouses, and mobile phones a cruel fantasy, an internet connection here can drop as low as 12Kbps (...) But all of this is about to change. EdenFaster, a local community organisation, is about to supply broadband internet connections to the entire valley, bringing 10,000 people, 500 businesses and 50 schools online with an internet connection 20 times faster than ADSL for half the price. They're doing it on their own because of a perceived lack of demand by telecoms companies. They're doing it wirelessly, and they're one of the leaders in the new revolution in ways to deliver the internet in the UK."