(Things I found interesting recently.)
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."
ESAT-BT's website. See the 'Go On-Line for 1 cent a minute' ad? It's not actually a link ;)
found on plasticbag.org, caption It's worse than we thought:
SFGate: bored union reps make their own entertainment. "It was like a 'Blazing Saddles' routine, because every time these guys would move on their seats, you could hear flatulence," said one union source. "And it went on the whole day! "
I've moved to pinging blo.gs instead of weblogs.com; blo.gs seems to have some quite neat features.
some startup called ActiveBuddy has patented instant-messaging bots -- in an application filed August 2000. Hilarity ensues...
ActiveBuddy founder Tim Kay: "We invented interactive agents. (jm: bwahaha) Anybody using his or her own tools (to make bots) is obviously using our technology without paying us to license the server, for example. We are a startup company and we have to protect out future. That's basically why we secured this patent" (in 2000).
Chris McClelland of WiredBots: "The Net::AIM module (which allows bot developers to connect to the AOL Instant Messenger TOC protocol through Perl) was around since 1998".
Aryeh Goldsmith (author of Net::AIM): "the Net::AIM module is distributed with a bot".
Jupiter analyst Michael Gartenberg: (the patent is) a "big win for the ActiveBuddy folks," especially if it holds up to scrutiny.
My emphasis. ;) Sounds like ActiveBuddy have just spent a lot of money patenting something with a whole CPANload of prior art, and are on their way down the dot.plughole.
Date: Tue, 01 Oct 2002 23:25:52 -0700
From: "Mr. FoRK" (spam-protected)
To: (spam-protected)
Subject: Re: ActiveBuddy
Oh... and they patented it too, because "We invented interactive agents."
=== http://www.internetnews.com/bus-news/article.php/1446781
August 15, 2002 ActiveBuddy's Patent Win Riles IM Bot Developers By Ryan Naraine
New York-based ActiveBuddy has won a crucial patent covering instant messaging bot-making technology, but hobbyists and amateur developers aren't buying the company's claim that it invented the technology.
ActiveBuddy was granted Patent No. 6,430,602 which covers the method and system for interactively responding to instant messaging requests and the company said it would move swiftly to enforce the patent, a move that is sure to create a brouhaha in the bot developer space.
ActiveBuddy founder Tim Kay, who is listed as an inventor in the patent claim, told internetnews.com the clinching of the patent validates the company's business model of creating interactive agents (bots) that respond to IM queries.
"We invented interactive agents. Anybody using his or her own tools (to make bots) is obviously using our technology without paying us to license the server, for example. We are a startup company and we have to protect out future. That's basically why we secured this patent," Kay said.
"Any company such as ours that is venture-funded has to protect itself. It's standard procedure to file for patents when you invent something. This simply allows us to build a business," Kay added.
He did not say whether ActiveBuddy had specific plans to issue cease and desist orders to Web sites that share code and bot-making techniques but, already, there are rumblings among developers that ActiveBuddy's patent win is ludicrous.
David deVitry, who founded the RunABot site laughed off the patent win and believes it is unenforceable because of the availability of prior art. "They (ActiveBuddy) don't have anything that's really unique. They're just the first to commercialize it and make money from IM bots," he said.
deVitry's RunABot site sells tools for bots that run on instant messaging, e-mails and the Web, but he is unfazed by ActiveBuddy's patent win. "I'm confident that ActiveBuddy's patent is unenforceable. "I can name a handful of IM bots that were running long before ActiveBuddy was even a company," he argued.
WiredBots CEO Chris McClelland was also among the developer crowd wary of ActiveBuddy's patent win. "Patents block innovation and hurt consumers. When big companies use their financial might to patent software, they undermine the very nature of software, its openness," McClelland argued.
At WiredBots, McClelland distributes free code and tips on making and running IM bots and, like deVitry, he argued that bots have been running on instant messaging networks long before ActiveBuddy put in a patent claim in August 2000.
"I know for a fact that protocols that allow unofficial clients to connect to the AIM service have been around long before 2000. In fact, the Net::AIM module [which allows potential bot developers to connect to the TOC protocol through Perl] was around since 1998," McClelland said, disputing ActiveBuddy's claims that it invented the technology.
ActiveBuddy disputed McClelland's claims. "I am fairly confident, there were no interactive agents on IM at that point when the application was filed (August 22, 2000). I'm certainly not aware of any," said Kay, who doubles as ActiveBuddy's chief technology officer.
However, back in August 1999, programmer Aryeh Goldsmith wrote the Net::AIM module, which is timestamped at CPAN.
"I've had bots running a little before that date (1999) and since that time. I'm sure there are plenty of others who have built bots and have been running them as well," Goldsmith said in an e-mail exchange.
"It's important to note that the Net::AIM module was also distributed with a bot. It may have been a very simplistic one -- having only the function of waiting for messages and replying with a random quote -- but it was a bot none-the-less. Intelligent bots simply do a little more "processing" between the receiving and replying phase," Goldsmith added.
"I'm not familiar with that," Kay said in response to claims that interactive bots were in existence even before ActiveBuddy launched, with venture funding from Reuters and Wit Soundview.
"Clearly, we use our patented technology in our products. If you want to do things that our products allow you to do, your best choice is to use our products," Kay said, referring to the recent launch of the Lite BuddyScript Server, which can be used by hobbyists to develop and run IM bots.
"The buddyscript suite of tools is the best that's available. We're confident they are the best choice (for users) who are building interactive agents. The subject of enforcing the patent shouldn't even come up. Anyone wanting to build a very good interactive agent will find that our tools are the very best," Kay added.
Kay said ActiveBuddy was not worried about competing firms offering bot-making tools. "Our primary level of comfort comes from the fact that we have the best choice for developers and others. When given the choice, we're confident people will choose ours," he said.
Jupiter analyst Michael Gartenberg isn't surprised by the brouhaha surrounding the patent win. "This is just the latest example of a company that has picked up a key patent on critical technology and is going to use it to exploit the market. It's not surprising that the smaller developers are crying foul," he said.
Gartenberg, who covers emerging platforms from the research firm, described the news as a "big win for the ActiveBuddy folks," especially if it holds up to scrutiny.
"This underscores the notion of how powerful the ownership of key patents are in the technology landscape. We saw it in the Amazon.com "one-click" case and the recent controversy over the JPEG patent. This is just the latest example of it," Gartenberg added.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Mr. FoRK" (spam-protected)
To: (spam-protected)
Cc: "Rohit Khare" (spam-protected)
Sent: Tuesday, October 01, 2002 11:07 PM
Subject: ActiveBuddy
> Kind of interesting application of 'agent' technology.
> A mix of telnet and Eliza?
> (wonder if KnowNow needs this as a partner...)
>
> ==
> http://www.activebuddy.com/products/index.shtml
> ActiveBuddy, Inc. has developed patented technology for building and
> deploying interactive agents. ActiveBuddy's BuddyScript technology powers
> business solutions that leverage the functionality, convenience and appeal
> of instant messaging to provide an efficient and immediate means of
> communication with customers and constituents.
>
> ActiveBuddy technology is proven in the marketplace by the smash success
of
> SmarterChild, ActiveBuddy's showcase interactive agent launched in June
2001
> and visited by over 8 million consumers in its first year of life.
>
> Interactive agents allow your customers and constituents to receive
> information and services in a natural, conversational interface.
>
>
> Software Products
> BuddyScriptT Server - an end-to-end software solution for deploying
> interactive agents. BuddyScript Server provides every component required
to
> operate an interactive agent, including connectivity with the messaging
> network, message routing, data access, message formatting, user and
session
> management, and detailed tracking. BuddyScript Server is offered in four
> configurations to meet your capacity needs. Its scaleable architecture
> supports virtually unlimited usage. More...
>
> ===
> Here is a sample conversation on (MSN Messenger with 'SmarterChild'):
>
> Mike says:
> how are you?
>
> SmarterChild says:
> Great thx! You?
>
> Mike says:
> Fine. What is the weather like in seattle?
>
> SmarterChild says:
> Current weather conditions for Seattle, WA:
>
> Currently: 57 F
> Condition: Few Clouds
> Real Feel: 57 F
> Dewpoint: 44
> Humidity: 62 %
> Visibility: 10 mi
> Wind: N/0 mph
>
> Next time, just type "weather seattle, wa."
>
> To get the forecast for Seattle, WA, just type "forecast.''
>
The Rockall Times reports that Mel Gibson is to shoot Finnegan's Wake in Hittite:
Highly talented Hollywood all-rounder Mel Gibson is to direct a film version of James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake made entirely in the ancient Anatolian language Hittite, we can reveal.
Respected linguist Gibson -- whose flawless Scottish accent in 1995 epic Braveheart wowed audiences worldwide -- has further stated that the film will carry no subtitles. Hopefully I'll be able to transcend language barriers with visual storytelling, he told a press conference. People think I'm crazy, and maybe I am, Gibson added. But maybe I'm a genius.
Hollywood agrees. Take any project, stick Mel's name on it and you've got a surefire blockbuster, the film's producer told The Rockall Times. In any case, we've rewritten the script to include a suitable anti-English imperialist slant and a couple of big battle scenes. That'll pack 'em in. ...
Gibson hopes that the success of Finnegan -- Cry for Freedom will enable him to bankroll some of his other pet projects, including a Inuit remake of Bridget Jones' Diary and his eagerly-anticipated Macbeth, set in 1970s Belfast and spoken entirely in Etruscan with Sanskrit subtitles.
the FoRK list comes through with some truly classic high wierdness:
If one wants to purge the sources of malice of say a black magician, then purge his dinosaurs and his dinosaur eggs. Unfortunately most of our religions are based on dinosaur protection of eggs and thus mind control, regardless of the front they put out to the public.
Date: Mon, 30 Sep 2002 22:11:10 -0700
From: "Mr. FoRK" (spam-protected)
To: (spam-protected)
Subject: Dinosaurs Eggs and the Origins of Good and Evil
One of the most bizarre pages I've seen on the Web. At first I thought it might be some sort of back-story to a RPG, but, nope, it looks like somebody believes this.
===
http://www.viking-z.org/r20i.htm
M09. Dinosaurs Eggs and the Origins of Good and Evil.
DINOSAURS. Reptoid ETs are reported to be 12 foot high crocodiles walking on their hind legs. This is a description of a dinosaur. It now appears in Remote Viewing that the Reptoid ETs, dinosaurs and dragons are all linked together and that they all originated on Earth. The Erideans who are Reptoid derivatives have a home planet (in the Eridanus system) like all other ETs. The Reptoids have no reported home planet. They also come over as entities with little brain who control their bodies directly by spirit. This is a description of a ghost or disincarnate entity regardless of how people see them. Thus it could be that the Reptoids, Erideans, Nordics, Anunnaki, but not the Greys, all have origins on Earth and have a strong link to Earth even if they choose to live elsewhere. The Greys do not appear to have a renal or urinary system and this points to them not originating on Earth. The definitive work on dragons is "The Flight of Dragons" by Peter Dickinson. If dragons did exist in the flesh, they did not survive the long bow. Targets do not come much bigger.
Truth is stranger than fiction. Thus the writer's current scenario is that there were a race of dinosaurs which developed psychic intelligence to guard their eggs and young, and who probably preferred to live underground. They survived the wipe out of the dinosaurs 50 million years ago with difficulty. They evolved into the Erideans and transferred to a more hospitable planet (for them) possibly with the help of another race of ETs who wanted slaves but otherwise had no interest in Earth or mind control.
Thus it appears that the current Reptoids are the Spirits or ghosts of the dinosaurs. They must have been powerful to survive 50 million years and also to appear to some people. They have appeared to the writer in remote viewing. They are living on as vampire entities. Such immortal minds are contagious and can easily jump race and species barriers. If they can be encouraged to reincarnate, then the power sources of the black magicians and mind controllers will disappear. Encouraging them to reincarnate will help so called immortal minds to disappear as immortal minds have great difficulty surviving reincarnation. Purging people's dinosaurs should remove all perverse psychic abilities not under their control. They are a source of Satanic Guardian Angels and demons. They control us by owning our psi. Thus if we regain ownership of psi, we must relinquish their control and that of all other mind controllers. Encourage people to regain ownership of their psi.
THE ORIGINS OF LOVE, HATE AND PURE MALICE. The following scenario appears to hold water and can account for the origins of our Universal Subconscious.
Dinosaurs laid their eggs and buried them either underground or in piles of rotting vegetation (a good source of beetles and grubs for young hatchelings). They did not sit on their eggs to keep them warm, which made them very vulnerable to drastic climate and temperature change. In order to keep away predators some at least developed psychic mind control. To do this they had to capture ownership of the psi of potential predators. This is an act of hatred and outward looking. While a few dinosaurs did develop the ability to bear living young, most did not. The dinosaurs got in first and so their mind control tends to override all other latter minds. They have become the source of all Satans, devils and demons.
Birds on the other hand developed the ability to sit on their eggs and keep them warm. A hen bird normally lays a series of eggs (say one per day) and only starts sitting when the clutch is completely laid. Thus all eggs tend to hatch together as they all have an equal period of warmth. This is primarily an act of love but inward looking. Bearing live young is not suitable to a bird of the air. A pregnant pigeon would not fly very far. Antarctic penguins tuck a single egg between their legs to keep it warm, even if they are standing on ice.
Mammals developed live bearing of their young which is also primarily an act of love and inward looking. This is especially true as a mammalian female can not desert her young in the womb in case of emergency as can a bird sitting on a nest.
Dinosaurs developed hate and mind control of others to protect their young, while birds and mammals developed love. Birds and mammals certainly do hate all enemies of their young, but this is secondary.
If one wants to purge the sources of malice of say a black magician, then purge his dinosaurs and his dinosaur eggs. Unfortunately most of our religions are based on dinosaur protection of eggs and thus mind control, regardless of the front they put out to the public. Religion tends to concentrate on "How to Brainwash your Neighbour". Conscious thought has built many mighty empires, theologies and slave control systems out of using "How to care for and protect one's young" as a foundation.
Thus the foulest form of abuse possible is to call something "A load of dinosaur's eggs". Purging the dinosaurs and dinosaur's eggs of any entity tends to purge all malice back to its roots.
It looks as if mighty immortal minds have built up from small beginnings, aided and abetted by various occultists and other. As they will insist on vampiring the living for energy to avoid reincarnation and disturbing the serenity of the writer, he encourages them to reincarnate.
ITEMS FOR INSPECTION. For mind control to take place, then someone must take control or ownership of the target's psi and pleasure centres. Check for the following.
Nest of dinosaur's eggs, holy dinosaurs, etc.
Eggs, controllers or owners in peoples psi, pleasure centres, pain killing hormones, abilities, etc.
Mind machines.
The original engraving or engram.
GOD and SATAN appear to be job titles and not entities in their own right. T hey appear to be dinosaur engravings or engrams. No doubt dinosaurs were the first job holders.
TIMETRACKS are worth investigating as our complete history from the start of time.
My, our, Man's timetracks, etc.
The time tracks of the Universe, Universal Subconscious, Galactic Subconscious, etc.
EXTINCT RACES of ETs can cause problems when they live on in vampire mode. Their virtues may known to channelers but they can also have vices. Whenever one hears of races which have evolved on to higher planes, suspect that the higher plane is a vampire one. One may never know what they looked like or other basic characteristics, which makes linking back a trifle difficult. Every extinct race, etc.
BLOOD ANCESTORS are also worth investigating as minds can be passed down via genetic linkages. Some of these can be over 2,000 years old. Every blood ancestor, ancestral mind, genetic mind, etc.
VNUNet: You have mail: 31 billion a day, set to rise to 60 billion by 2006 (according to IDC). "Only a more effective means of filtering out spam would 'ensure that email continues to be a valuable business and personal communications tool,' he said."
Torture A Spammer, a nifty Flash game from "white hat" email-marketing firm, emailSherpa.
Argh, so much mail to get through; I was away this weekend, then
offline for most of today waiting for a new line to be installed. But I
did get a new candidate for the bizarre spam award: Q: DOES YOUR FOREIGN
ACCENT SIMPLY GET IN THE WAY? Simple answer: nope. next!
some ILUG regulars conducted a war-drive around Dublin and found 378 stations, with quite a high range of WEP use compared to previous surveys: 39%. BTW, is this the first use of warcycling? The green alternative!
Mozilla fans (and people who want to see how anti-aliasing is doing getting into Mozilla HEAD) may find Chris Blizzard's blog worth tracking.
I've added a few more folks to the blogroll -- Jeremy Zawodny (who now hosts one of the SpamAssassin primary sites), Rod, who contributes regularly to SpamAssassin, and Joel, who just writes cool articles about software development. ;) Where? yonder over rightwards...
BoingBoing forwards 2 links to hilarious Nigerian Scam parodies, one from Dick Cheney and one from Laura Bush. Cory quotes it already, but it's too good to miss, so I will too:
I am the widow of the late President George W. Bush of the United States of America. I am writing you this letter in confidence regarding my current circumstances.
I escaped the United States ahead of death squads with my husband and two children Jenna and Frank, moving first to England and then, when my husband's political enemies took power there, to Austria. All of our wealth, obtained legitimately through baseball, oil drilling and insider trading, was seized by the new government of the USA under the despotic regime of (Dr.) Noam Chomsky, except for the contents of a few Swiss bank accounts. These bank accounts, which contain social security lock-box funds and the bulk of the 2001 budget surplus, could not be accessed by me or my children, due to agreements made between the socialist government of the USA and Swiss bank regulators. They seized our ranch in Crawford, Texas and now use it to teach homosexualist propaganda to schoolchildren.
Aliens create portrait of Richard and Judy. Well, not really aliens -- John Lundberg et al -- but it is very cool. (Richard and Judy btw are crappy daytime TV presenters in the UK)
Idiot falls for 419 scam, hook line and sinker, bankrupting her employers. "It's unbelievable that she fell for this," gasped investigating FBI Special Agent James Hoppe, echoing the sentiments of Jules Olsman, president of Olsman Mueller & James. "This is just absolutely beyond description," he said.
Gamasutra reports from GDC Europe. It's good to see Systemic Game Design is getting a lot more attention these days as CPU power increases on consoles, instead of the random 3D graphics tweakery that predominates on the PC platform. Systemic game design is defined here as follows:
"Instead of hard-coding lots of features into the game .. the systemic paradigm tries to create global patterns which provide emergent gameplay, and the ability to create alternative strategies using the level's resources. ... In this way a player can come up with new ideas to solve problems by combining items in ways that perhaps even the level designers hadn't considered. This improves the sense of immersion and freedom, while emphasizing player's self-expression capabilities through the game. ... An example of a systemic game is GTA3, where each mission can be solved in dozens of ways, as compared to old lock-and-key adventure games, where player expression and alternative strategies were basically non-existent. In a systemic game world, the player can use different methods to solve a problem. In a non-systemic game world, you must guess how the game designer wanted you to solve the problem, even if that way does not feel very intuitive, nor fun."
Mmm. Grand Theft Auto 3. PS: GTA3 can also be found on my Amazon wishlist ;)
P. J. O'Rourke visits Cairo -- during Ramadan (made the same mistake myself). Highlights include driving:
I saw a driving school. What could the instruction be like? No, no, Anwar, faster through the stop sign, and make your left from the far-right lane. Surely John Kifner, Chris Matthews, and NBC News are kidding when they use Arab street as a metaphor for anything in the Middle East. Or, considering the history of the Middle East, maybe they aren't.
And then plenty of politics:
I had lunch with an Egyptian who had been born in the United States. When he was in high school, in suburban Chicago, he became serious about religion and observed Ramadan with rigor. Then he went to Egypt to work as a journalist, and now, in Ramadan, he was having lunch. My sister is a Christian fundamentalist, I said. She wouldn't crash a plane into the World Trade Center, but she might land pretty hard on evolution. And then we'd all have to remain amoebas. A lot of people don't make that connection, the Egyptian journalist from Chicago said.
But O'Rourke then goes on to quote The Middle East Media and Research Institute. Do a search on The Guardian's site for more info on those guys (upshot: very loose cherry-picked "translations", with an emphasis on misrepresenting the importance of the speaker -- so, for example, "random lunatic with an axe to grind against Israel" becomes "government spokesman", that kind of thing).
Apart from that, overall, an interesting article.
The sustainably-powered wireless network with satellite uplink set up at the Big Green Gathering, near Cheddar in Somerset, last July. Pretty interesting, although ghod knows I would not want to have to pedal too much just to check my mail.
And, oh look, there's a spam-relevant comment in the Lessons Learnt section!
Many people will check their email happily, unless they have to (pedal) for an equal amount of time! If this is extended to the environment, then slow email servers and spam are causing huge amounts of wasted energy and pollution, and not just psychologically. The question on many people's lips was "what is the alternative?"
Answer: SquirrelMail.
The Reclaim The Streets demo last Sunday went off well, sounds like. I would have gone but I hadn't heard (or had forgotten) about it :(
The fact that it went well is a relief, because the last one became a bloodbath when some of the Gardai got a little over-excited, removed their identification, and started swinging clubs and "arresting" attendees indiscriminately. Very nasty, or so I hear. (I wasn't back in Dublin by that point.)
Along with some reports of massive corruption in the Donegal police force, this event turned out to be a watershed in how Irish folks are viewing their police. That kind of thing wasn't really a problem over here in the last few years -- but now it seems to have all changed. Old news for people in the UK, US, Northern Ireland and Australia -- but quite new to us here.
I've added titles to this blog, since RSS looks silly without them. But I am not going back through all those entries... argh...
While trekking in Nepal, I had a copy of the Lonely Planet Guide to Trekking in the Himalayas, borrowed from our mates Caolan and Barbara. It was especially notable for its incredible medical section, which contained lots of info on what drugs to use to treat various diseases, described symptomatically (of course, in most of the world, most of the common illnesses boast symptoms similar to "I have greenish foul-smelling gravy squirting from both ends of my body". But it's good to be able to tell them apart).
It was also notable, because anyone who had a copy knew all about altitude sickness, and were indescribably paranoid. The ones who were charging up the trails as fast as they could generally did not have a copy, and no doubt half of them came back down again in slightly nasty circumstances.
Anyway, it was the best medical info I've ever read. Reading the paper today, I came across a reference to e-med.co.uk, which claims to be medical info, including treatment details, for people who might be far away from a doctor. The perfect resource for a know-it-all who doesn't want to spend money and time on a doctor, just to be told to go home and take an aspirin! Unfortunately it seems to be a "consultation by email" service, rather than "look it all up" one. Ah well.
Caolan and Barbara should be somewhere around Oz by now. I must see if I can dig up the URL of their travelogue site, it's great fun.
Spam cost calculator: figure out how much spam costs.
a good reply to the Nigerian scams, on Slashdot:
...unfortunately I don't have that much money. I do have seventeen dollars and fifty-six cents. I really want you to have all of that. I hope you can overlook the fact that I'm several million short of your goal, but the key is that I try hard and I'm an excellent wind surfer.
BB reports that "Russian entrepreneurs are spraypainting logoed advertisements for their products and services on stray dogs and releasing them as walking, starving billboards." This sounds just a bit too Chris Morris to me, and considering it came via Ananova / Orange Today's "quirkies" service -- which is not exactly reknowned for doing the backup research first -- I would say it's pretty unlikely... let's see what forteana make of it.
Peerfear: a scraping sitefilter servlet for scraping sites into RSS.
quotes some guy called "Kevin Hemenway" who wrote a document called The Semantic Web: 1-2-3. So I was thinking "hmmm... Kevin Hemenway... I though Morbus Iff wrote that". Then the penny dropped. Another pseudonym blown apart by the callous Mark Pilgrim!
hooray, I got rid of that horrible "add line breaks to preserve short lines in HTML" feature from EtText, it was driving me nuts. The irony is, I only added it because txt2html had it. Keeping up with the Joneses just causes trouble, it seems.
a spam mail asks: jm, do we have your money? There's a very simple answer: "no you don't, and you never will, you scumbags". Scutterin' gobsheens, as Podge and Rodge would say.
Spent an enlightening day clambering around Dublin's rooftops with a bunch of helium balloons on a 20-metre piece of string. Can you guess what I was doing? Yes, it's the latest geek pastime: Hunt The Line Of Sight!
All was well -- we found it, the weather was lovely, my Aussie-learnt balloon technique rocked, and we came up with some better ways to do it in future ;)
This promo calendar for an Italian coffin manufacturer has been doing the blog-rounds recently -- and the more eagled-eyed viewer might have wondered at the words MIKE LEAVE ME ALONE written on the back of the last model.
Well, wonder no more -- an italian Forteana subscriber, Giuseppe de Nicolellis, has got to the bottom of it. Case closed!
Date: Fri, 20 Sep 2002 23:31:25 +0200
From: "Giuseppe de Nicolellis" (spam-protected)
To: (spam-protected)
Subject: Sex and death: mystery solved
> http://www.cofanifunebri.it/sexy-calendario.htm - somewhat unlikely
> promo calendar from an Italian coffin manufacturer.
>
> So do you fancy giving them a call and finding out why the last model has "MIKE
> LEAVE ME ALONE" written on her back?
The webmaster of www.cofanifunbri.it has just answered my enquiry. He published the image more than an year ago without the writing. A few months ago he received this e-mail from a website offering adult contents for webmasters:
Do you have a license to use this image? I do not have a license on file for:
Registrant: Matteucci Maurizio (COFANIFUNEBRI-DOM) Villa Bastilica, 30 Roma, 00148 IT
Please let me know if you have purchased the license under a different name, or please remove the image from your site.
Thanks, Mikey PhoenixContent.com
(spam-protected)
Our webmaster decided to suggest him politely to f..ck off adding the writing on the back of the lady.
(Our webmaster didn't explain whether he really stole the image from the website or not, and I didn't dare to ask).
Another Fortean Mystery solved!
denic
Good article about SpamAssassin at IBM developerWorks:
After having used JunkFilter for years, and thinking it was pretty good, I was blown away by how effective SpamAssassin is. I think that this is due in large part to several good design decisions on the part of SpamAssassin's developers.
Why, thank you! ;)
Aaron shares his rss-by-mail script. My reaction (cut from mail): "Together with my Mailman-archives-to-RSS script, and my blog (which is updated by mail), soon the semantic web will run entirely on SMTP..." (cackles evilly).
Well, maybe not yet -- but it's getting there. a bit.
Two weeks ago, six top financial institutions met privately with AOL Time Warner, Microsoft, IBM and other leading corporate instant messaging providers and urged them to build communications networks that interoperate. .... The meeting, which took place at Merrill Lynch's New York offices, was among the first convened by the Instant Messaging Standards Board (IMSB), a newly created consortium led by financial services firms Lehman Brothers, J.P. Morgan Chase, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley Dean Witter, UBS and Deutsche Bank.
Holy shit, that's a lot of gorillas! (via Doc).
Danny O'Brien is off to the event of the year: Philip Glass and the Glass Ensemble performing a live accompaniment to a showing of Koyaanisqatsi. I am, needless to say, green with envy. Chance of that coming to Dublin? Hovering around the "zero" mark I should think. Bugger.
In other news, Cam is back, and in good form, from the sounds of it. Apparently SpamAssassin filtered 7MB of spam while he was away. So someone gets more spam than I do!
goddammit. Just got a PS2 for my birthday (wahoo!), and immediately thought about getting hold of the Koyaanisqatsi/Powaqqatsi 2-pack DVD. But it's region-coded to US/Canada only in the edition on Amazon.com, and not available at all at Amazon.co.uk. Region coding is evil.
Of course, I could buy it somewhere else -- but I wasn't planning to buy it, I was looking to set up an Amazon.com wishlist!
David Brin gets all anti-fannish about Star Wars Episode 2: Attack of the Clones. I really don't know why he bothers, it and Episode 1 were atrocious, George Lucas has lost it, full stop, IMO. But I did like the way Brin refers to Yoda as "one green preachy oven mitt"; I'd just append "with the voice of Fozzie Bear".
And who are the critics who've never seen a Maori before? "bounty hunter Jango Fett even looks Latino" my arse.
Microsoft's Spanish thesaurus, included in Word for Windows 6.0 in Mexico, contains some unfortunate synonyms:
That would be the risk when you use a mid-1930s source document, it sounds like!
Date: Tue, 17 Sep 2002 13:42:02 +0100
From: Barbara Barrett (spam-protected)
To: (spam-protected) (spam-protected)
Subject: Micro$oft's Spanish language problems
-------- Original Message --------
Microsoft Apology for Errors in Spanish
MEXICO CITY (Reuter) - Microsoft Corp, the world's biggest software company, apologized Friday to Mexicans for ``grave errors" in its computer thesaurus that equated Indians with cannibals. Several Mexicans telephoned the company to protest after a newspaper reported Wednesday that the Spanish thesaurus included in Microsoft's popular word processor program Word for Windows 6.0 contained some unfortunate synonyms. Used by up to 200,000 people in Mexico, a country whose population is mainly descended from Aztec and Maya Indians, the Microsoft program sugggested as alternatives for the word "Indian:" ``man-eater" or ``savage." Consulted for synonyms for ``Western," the Spanish language program gave ``Aryan," ``white" and ``civilized." Lesbians were equated with ``pervert" and ``depraved person."
``Microsoft Mexico offers an apology to its users and to the public in general for some grave errors in the synonyms of the Microsoft Word dictionary in Spanish, whose mistaken connotations are offensive," the company said in a full-page newspaper advertisement published Friday. Microsoft Mexico marketing manager Alejandra Calatayud said the company was dispatching a language expert next week from its software development center in Ireland to discuss changes to the thesaurus with El Colegio de Mexico, Mexico's most august cultural body.
``We accept our responsibility and hope to have a new version of the dictionary available in about five weeks," she told Reuters. The revised version will be made available free of charge via the Internet. Ignacio Blum, Microsoft Mexico's product manager for office products, told Reuters that the computer thesaurus was based on existing dictionaries. ``If you check these words in most dictionaries, you will find the same definitions," he said.
Mexican politicians and intellectuals condemned the pejorative computer thesaurus anyway. ``I see this as profoundly dangerous because it is a lack of respect for our dignity as Mexicans and for our indigenous roots," said Adriana Luna, an opposition party congresswoman on the lower house's culture committee. ``We must give battle to combat this specter of conservatism and fascism which is appearing all around us" Florentino Castro, a legislator from the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), was quoted as saying in the newspaper La Jornada. The English version of the Microsoft Word program does not give the same synonyms. Homosexual was equated with ``gay" or "lesbian" and Indian was ``cave dweller," ``ancient tribe" or ``aborigine."
Sitescooper: Aaron notes that the Wayback Machine has added support for diffing HTML, using technology licensed from DocuComp (demo), and he notes "HTML Diff is extremely difficult and they do a half decent job, but it's got plenty of room to improve."
Maybe they should look at Sitescooper: it's had HTML diffing for the last
3 years, using diff(1) or Algorithm::Diff and some basic knowledge
of HTML presentation. Though mind you, DocuComp might have some trouble
having a look, as it's free software, licensed under the GPL. :)
Of course, Sitescooper is a big, chunky lump of application, very oriented towards scraping an entire news site, downloading the latest news, stripping down the HTML and delivering that in one file -- ie. exactly what you want for viewing news sites offline on a PDA, but when you want to use just nifty feature in there, you're stuck with the whole application. It's just not UNIX.
So, one thing I've been thinking about doing recently, is taking some of the code in Sitescooper and refactoring it into a UNIX toolset; a wget-style getting tool, which has Sitescooper's knowledge of how to cache and rewrite URLs; a HTML-differ; and a few other tools. But this is still thinking, at the moment.
A good article about Prague's CZFree.net, via Cory. Hopefully it'll provide some good ideas for the Irish-WAN folks:
The most promising way (of getting onto the internet) seems to be connecting to the backbone on a wholesale basis, which is what CZFree.net does through its backbone provider -- TransgasNet, the telecoms arm of gas company Transgas. "The connection is already built, and it's real broadband, guaranteed connection, so the issue of Internet connection is solved," Janda said.
CZFree.net also has a unique approach to providing Internet connectivity to its members. Janda said that the idea is to give each user at least 32 kbps Internet connectivity (around two-thirds of the dial-up access speed) free, while users who want additional bandwidth will pay a certain fee. The fee is still undecided because the initiative is still in the formative phase, but it should be Kc 200 to Kc 300. The connection to the wireless network is free by default, although every user has to invest in the hardware necessary for exchanging data over the Wi-Fi.
If hackers ruled the world. My favourite:
hooray, those Next/Prev links are now implemented. I knew sitemap support in WebMake would come in handy, eventually. If you're using Mozilla, switch on that View -> Show -> Site Navigation Bar and hyperventilate with excitement.
Some day I should start adding titles to all these blog items... some day when I have a lot of time on my hands, that is.
some changes around these parts, in case you haven't noticed. Firstly, I've caved, and adopted the de-facto std of having a sidebar. Everyone's doing it, and I just want to fit in.
Secondly, there's now an RSS
feed, at the request of Bernie at
topgold. All you folks with yer fancy news aggregators and what-not
can now add taint.org/rss10.xml to the blogrolling list.
Thirdly, I've deprecated my old home page content, replacing it with this blog. After all, an infrequently-updated website is a useless website, and this is my most frequently-updated site these days.
I've been ogg-encoding my CD collection. Soundtrack for today:
Future Sound of London, Dead Cities
Philip Glass, Koyaanisqatsi
(Update, Feb 2007: This PSA may be relevant to this story, possibly.)
it seems a herbal remedy which "mystified and delighted doctors when it cured prostate cancer", in fact contained hefty quantities of synthetic drugs (link):
We do have to admit that these are not natural substances ... and that at least some, if not all, of the biological activity has to be attributed to these synthetic compounds.
Date: Sun, 08 Sep 2002 19:25:37 +0100
From: Rachel Carthy (spam-protected)
To: (spam-protected)
Subject: Um, is diethystilbestrol a herb?
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/nm/20020903/sc_nm/health_cancer_prostate_dc_1
'Alternative' Prostate Medicine Contains Drugs Tue Sep 3, 3:53 PM ET
By Maggie Fox, Health and Science Correspondent
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A so-called alternative herbal compound that mystified and delighted doctors when it cured prostate cancer in fact contained strong drugs that can only be made in the laboratory, researchers said on Tuesday.
Called PC-SPES, the compound was pulled off the market in February when the U.S. Food and Drug Administration said it contained prescription-only ingredients.
A team of Czech and U.S. researchers confirmed that the allegedly natural preparation contains the prescription bloodthinner warfarin, an analgesic called indomethacin and an artificial version of estrogen.
"These are synthetic compounds and under the circumstances we don't have a good explanation for their finding their way into this preparation," Dr. Robert Nagourney of Rational Therapeutics in Long Beach, California, who led the study, said in a telephone interview.
Nagourney advocates the use of standard drugs and alternative therapies to treat cancer and was hoping to find out how PC-SPES worked.
PC-SPES -- the name combines "PC" for prostate cancer and the Latin world "spes" which means hope -- astonished doctors soon after it was introduced in 1996. Its maker, BotanicLabs of Brea, California, said it contained seven Chinese or Indian herbs plus saw palmetto.
No clinical studies showed how well it worked against prostate cancer, which affects 189,000 American men a year and kills 30,000. But anecdotal evidence showed it could help even advanced prostate cancer patients.
"That was what launched my interest in the mid-1990s," said Nagourney, whose team published its findings in this week's issue of the Journal of the National Cancer Institute.
"We were already trying it in patients. I was seeing objective responses. I was very anxious to see if we could isolate the active ingredient."
But Nagourney's team could not make their own mixture of the eight plant products work.
So they sent PC-SPES to the labs of Milos Sovak of the University of California San Diego, who worked with colleagues in the Czech Republic to analyze it.
That was when they found the rogue ingredients, which should only be used under a doctor's supervision.
The estrogen component, diethystilbestrol, could itself explain many of the effects of the product, Nagourney said. The hormone estrogen is sometimes used to treat prostate cancer.
Indomethacin also may have properties that work against tumor cells, as do other drugs in the same class, the researchers said.
Warfarin can cause dangerous bleeding and in October 2001 doctors in Seattle reported a case of severe bleeding in a man who was taking PC-SPES.
"We do have to admit that these are not natural substances ... and that at least some, if not all, of the biological activity has to be attributed to these synthetic compounds," Nagourney said.
He has not given up hope, however. "There are meritorious natural products that need to be explored," Nagourney said. He said all "alternative" remedies should be scientifically tested, as drugs are.
BotanicLab, which closed in June, had warned customers to stop using its product and throw away any unused capsules. --
"The good Christian should be aware of mathematicians and all those who make empty promises. The danger already exists that the mathematicians have made a covenant with the devil to darken the spirit and to confine man in the bonds of Hell." St Augustine of Hippo, late 4th C AD.
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Ireland: EircomTribunal.com,
which highlights very effectively, and quite humourously, the current
situation with the internet fiasco in Ireland. This is sure to be
sued into oblivion very shortly ;)
Via forteana: Quorn, the yummy meat-substitute, has been having a hard time of it recently. First, there's a court case going on in the US at the moment, where some people are suing the company claiming that Quorn makes them puke -- now the UK's Advertising Standards Authority is requiring that they get rid of claims of its "mushroom" origins, and note more clearly that it's a mycoprotein.
But hey, anyone who thinks eating "real" meat bought in a an average supermarket is a good idea, can stick with that, as the hormones turn them into hirsute, uddered bovines. I'm happy with my mostly-veggie diet.
Gordon Rutter, fungus expert at forteana, notes in passing:
A few years ago there was a court case about mushroom soup - the majority are actually made with boletes rather than what people would think of as mushrooms. The reason is that mushrooms don't preserve very well whereas boletes do and people did not want lumpy bits of black putrescence floating in their soup.
He also notes that the Quorn fungus is a tiny bit more closely related to the fungus that causes athlete's foot, than it is to a mushroom. urgh. Now I feel sick.
Date: Wed, 04 Sep 2002 09:51:00 +0100
From: "Gordon Rutter" (spam-protected)
To: (spam-protected)
Subject: Re: Mmm, fungal
There are lots of historical precedents over this sort of argument - a few years ago there was a court case about mushroom soup - the majority are actually made with boletes rather than what people would think of as mushrooms. The reason is that mushrooms don't preserve very well whereas boletes do and people did not want lumpy bits of black putrescence floating in their soup. Thsi was eventually got over when "experts" were brought in to testify that in common useage mushroom refered to something of a particular shape that was fungal in origin and edible.
The quorn people have a bit of problem with names and thigns - a couple of years ago they were informed they were using a totally different species to the one they were telling everyone - who says taxonomists don't have a job to do.
BTW the species they use is a parasite of grasses which is carcinogenic in humans! Oh to be totally exact it's a mutated form which is no longer carcinogenic. When BSE hit the headlines quorn production literally doubled over the space of however long it takes to build a fermenter - best thing that could have happened fro them business wise.
Gordon
As previously mentioned -
http://www.guardian.co.uk/food/Story/0,2763,785679,00.html
Quorn 'meat' must be sold as fungus
James Meikle, health correspondent
Wednesday September 4, 2002
The Guardian
The advertising standards authority has declared that the Quorn brand of meat substitutes has been misleading the public by referring to their key ingredient as a "mushroom protein".
It has told manufacturers Marlow Foods to delete the claim from advertising unless it also gives equal prominence to either the ingredient's fungal origin or explains its technical origin as a mycoprotein, found naturally in the soil but then put in a glucose medium and fermented.
The food industry is already under investigation by the food standards agency for being too ready to use label descriptions that imply natural, country goodness.
The authority's decision was in response to complaints from the mushroom industry which alleged that Quorn's makers were trying to transfer "agreeable associations consumers have with mushrooms" to their product, and from the Centre for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI), a US not-for-profit organisation. These related to three magazine advertisements implying that Quorn mince and burgers were "made from a natural mushroom protein".
But there was some good news for Quorn. The food agency has refused to have the range withdrawn from sale despite the CPSI's consistent questioning of the products' safety record.
Marlow Foods, based in north Yorkshire, agreed to suspend the term "mushroom protein" from its promotional material. The chairman of the food agency, Sir John Krebs, has already suggested the term "fungal" was rather more accurate than "mushroom" when it came to decribing the ingredient's origin.
The company said last night: "We accept the ASA's ruling. We have always strived to provide meaningful consumer information. We will take the ASA's comments into account when planning any future advertising."
