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Category: Uncategorized

Links for 2008-10-17

Published October 17, 2008

Links for 2008-10-16

Published October 16, 2008

Closed phish data costing $326mm per year

Published October 16, 2008

Richard Clayton posted a very interesting article over at Light Blue Touchpaper; he notes:

Tyler Moore and I are presenting another one of our academic phishing papers today at the Anti-Phishing Working Group’s Third eCrime Researchers Summit here in Atlanta, Georgia. The paper “The consequence of non-cooperation in the fight against phishing” (pre-proceedings version here) goes some way to explaining anomalies we found in our previous analysis of phishing website lifetimes. The “take-down” companies reckon to get phishing websites removed within a few hours, whereas our measurements show that the average lifetimes are a few days.

When we examined our data […] we found that we were receiving “feeds” of phishing website URLs from several different sources — and the “take-down” companies that were passing the data to us were not passing the data to each other.

So it often occurs that take-down company A knows about a phishing website targeting a particular bank, but take-down company B is ignorant of its existence. If it is company B that has the contract for removing sites for that bank then, since they don’t know the website exists, they take no action and the site stays up.

Since we were receiving data feeds from both company A and company B, we knew the site existed and we measured its lifetime — which is much extended. In fact, it’s somewhat of a mystery why it is removed at all! Our best guess is that reports made directly to ISPs trigger removal.

They go on to estimate that ‘an extra $326 million per annum is currently being put at risk by the lack of data sharing.’

This is a classic example of how the proprietary mindset fails where it comes to dealing with abuse and criminal activity online. It would be obviously more useful for the public at large if the data were shared between organisations, and published publicly, but if you view your data feed as a key ingredient of your company’s proprietary "secret sauce" IP, you are not likely to publish and share it :(

The anti-phishing world appears to be full of this kind of stuff, disappointingly — probably because of the money-making opportunities available when providing services to big banks — but anti-spam isn’t free of it either.

Mark another one up for open source and open data…

(thanks to ryanr for the pic)

solid Python queueing?

Published October 15, 2008

OK, message queueing has become insufferably trendy. You don’t need to tell me, I’ve known it’s the bees knees for 4 years now ;)

The only problem is, there doesn’t seem to be a good queue broker written in Python. They’re in Java, Perl, more Perl, or Erlang, but a solid, reliable, persistent queueing backend in Python is nowhere to be found, as far as I can see. Work is a mainly-Python shop, and while we can deploy other languages to our production, staging and test grids easily enough, it’s a lot easier to do developer-desktop testing if we had an all-Python queue backend.

Am I missing one?

Links for 2008-10-14

Published October 14, 2008

Dublinr Exhibition

Published October 14, 2008

Dublin is a city that, photographically at least, can be reduced to a set of clichés, but a new exhibition offers a fresh, vibrant perspective of the Irish Capital. Dublinr is organised by a group of photographers that came together through the photo sharing website Flickr.

The exhibition opens at 6.00pm on Wednesday 5 November, runs until Sunday 9, from 11:00am – 6:30pm daily, and admission is free.

The Joinery Gallery | Arbour Hill | Stoneybatter | Dublin 7.

Some fantastic local photographers, including Andy Sheridan, whose work I’ve been following for a couple of months now; and a good location. D7 is full of good stuff nowadays — in fact, ever since I moved out ;)

IWA post-mortem

Published October 13, 2008

I didn’t win a Web Award — but then, given the competition from a couple of very professional news organisations, I really wasn’t expecting to ;) Silicon Republic won, and rightly so. Good on ’em.

I had a great night nonetheless, hanging out with Vishal, Walter (who won his category!), Conor O’Neill, Jason and a bunch of others.

Thanks to Moviestar.ie and BH Consulting for their sponsorship of a great event — marketing money well-spent, I suspect. Extra thanks to Moviestar for the freebie DVD player. And thanks of course to the mighty Mulley for organising the whole thing — at this stage he’s a finely-honed events machine!

Links for 2008-10-10

Published October 10, 2008

Links for 2008-10-09

Published October 9, 2008

Want to eat on RTE’s HEAT?

Published October 9, 2008

Here’s an interesting offer — be a restaurant critic/reviewer for RTE’s cooking reality show, HEAT:

Ireland’s top amateur chefs battle it out in our kitchen, each preparing a three course meal to impress the hardest critics; the paying diners. Mentored by Kevin Thornton and Kevin Dundon, these amateurs have a chance to shock or shine. Who wins, who looses (jm: sic), its all down to you. Come eat in the Heat Restaurant and decide who is Ireland’s newest culinary talent.

The restaurant is located in Ely HQ, on Hanover Quay. All three course meals, inc teas and coffees are €30 pp. Drinks are separate.

To dine at Heat, please email diners /at/ loosehorse.ie or call 01 613 6052 with your contact details and your preferred evening. Heat is open for business on Sunday the 19th of October, Sunday the 26th of October, Sunday the 2nd of November, Sunday the 9th of November, and Sunday the 16th of November.

Please note: The evening is being recorded for RTE so if you want to keep a low profile, please consider. Vegetarians, strange allergies and odd requests may or may not be accommodated as Heat has a limited menu and may not always be able to accommodate specific food requirements.

Bon Appetit!

Links for 2008-10-08

Published October 8, 2008

Links for 2008-10-07

Published October 7, 2008

MPLC fail to shake down Irish playschools

Published October 7, 2008

Oh, the irony. According to The Sunday Times, a body called the Motion Picture Licensing Company sent letters to 2,500 Irish playschools (aka kindergartens), demanding payment for children watching DVDs on their premises — a fee of EUR 3, plus 17.5% VAT, per child per year:

Playschools have been given an unexpected lesson on copyright law after a company representing Hollywood studios demanded that each child pay a fee of €3 plus 17.5% VAT per year to watch DVDs in their playgroup.

The Motion Picture Licensing Company (MPLC), which collects royalties on behalf of companies such as Walt Disney, Universal and 20th Century Fox, wrote to 2,500 playschools last month warning that it is illegal to show copyrighted DVDs in public without the correct license.

The letter was sent with the approval of the Irish Preschool Play Association (IPPA), which represents the schools and their 50,000 children. The MPLC had wanted €10 plus VAT per year for each child, but the IPPA negotiated for the lower fee.

Unsurprisingly, playschool owners are freaking out:

“To be honest, when I got the letter with the IPPA newsletter I laughed and binned it,” said Paula Doran, manager of Kiddies Korner, a community playschool in Shankill, south Dublin. “If we brought in something like that the parents would have to pick up the costs. But I don’t like the way they went about it — once you signed up they’d automatically take money out of your account every year.”

“I don’t think too many judges would come down hard on a playschool over this,” she said. “We would rarely show DVDs anyway because it’s frowned upon — kids get enough TV at home. The odd time we would pretend to go to the cinema. We give the children tickets and they watch 20 minutes of Snow White, Fireman Sam or SpongeBob.”

Here’s the funny part — it appears the MPLC failed to take note of its own legal requirements, and is not legally licensed to issue shakedown demands for fees in Ireland:

The MPLC had failed to register with the Irish Patent Office as a copyright licensing body. Under the 2000 Copyright Act, royalty collectors such as the Irish Music Rights Organisation (IMRO) and Phonographic Performance Ireland (PPI) are required to register before they can collect fees. A spokesman for the Patent Office said that if an organisation collects money but hasn’t registered it may be fined or staff may be jailed if a complaint is made and it is found guilty.

Crazily, it sounds like the IPPA didn’t find this out from their own legal advisors:

Irene Gunning, IPPA’s chief executive, said she was disappointed with the MPLC. “We acted in good faith with this organisation and felt we were doing our members good by negotiating them down from €10 per child,” said Gunning. “I feel misled by them now. It is only through an alert mother that we became aware that they need to be registered.”

oh dear. Let’s hear it for alert mothers, I guess. Anyway, expect more similar shakedowns once the MPLC get their little licensing oopsie sorted out:

The MPLC only began operating in Ireland in recent months, after setting up in Britain in 2003. It is also targeting other sectors such as coach operators, which occasionally show movies in public.

More coverage at Techdirt, Ars Technica, and TorrentFreak.

(Image credit: smithco on Flickr. thanks!)

Links for 2008-10-06

Published October 6, 2008

Links for 2008-10-02

Published October 2, 2008

Links for 2008-10-01

Published October 1, 2008

Links for 2008-09-29

Published September 29, 2008

Switch ep. 2: the keyboard

Published September 28, 2008

Well, some bits of this are easy: here’s a MacOS X version of GVim and Vim, which works nicely, is easy to install, and is simply vim/gvim. Great stuff!

But some bits are harder. Remember I was complaining about that silly ± / § key in the top corner of UK/Irish MacBook Pro keyboards? Some investigation reveals that I’m far from alone in this:

‘it fucks up application switching’

‘I hate my MacBook Pro’

a forum post looking for help

another forum post

There are a number of apps that offer key remapping, but for no apparent reason they limit themselves to "popular" remappings only, such as swapping the Control and Caps-Lock keys etc. I presume this is because that was easy to code ;)

The one that does work fully is Ukelele. Watch out though — it comes with a raft of caveats. It’s buggy, at least dealing with my MBP keyboard under OSX 10.5.5; the "Copy Key" functionality doesn’t work, and you need to start using a key mapping file from the Ukelele package, not a system one or one you’ve downloaded, otherwise it’ll silently produce an output file that doesn’t recognise any keys at all. On top of this, each time you make changes, you need to log out and log back in again for them to try them out. (Small mercies: at least you don’t need to do a full reboot, I suppose.)

<img src=’http://taint.org/x/2008/macbook-pro-keyboard-euro-return.png‘ align=’right’>I’m not impressed by this whole keyboard issue. If you look at photos of the US MacBook Pro keyboard, it’s clear that it doesn’t have the stunted tetris-style Enter and Left-Shift keys that the UK/Irish one does. It also has the tilde key in the normal place, the top left, instead of some bizarre symbol that isn’t even used in this keyboard’s locale, and as Ash Searle noted, when you’re a developer, the # is a hell of a lot more useful than the £ symbol. They’ve basically screwed with a good US keyboard design to bodge in a few extra keys they needed to deal with the tricky European corner cases.

All that would be relatively minor, however, if I could remap the keys to suit my tastes — but it was pretty damn tricky to do that. Key remapping needs to be an easy feature!

I’m still working on the fixed key layout file, but I may post it here once it’s finished to save other Googlers the bother…

Update:: here’s the fixed key layout file:

Irish Fixed.keylayout

Save that to ~/Library/Keyboard Layouts/ , then open System Preferences -> International, select Input Menu, and choose Irish Fixed from the list, and ensure “Show input menu in the menu bar” is on. Close that window, then select “Irish Fixed” from the input menu left of the clock on the menu bar. Log out, and log back in again, and the keys should be sane…

(thanks to Sonic Julez for the MBP key image)

Links for 2008-09-26

Published September 26, 2008

Links for 2008-09-24

Published September 24, 2008

Shortlisted for an Irish Web Award

Published September 24, 2008

<img src="http://taint.org/x/2008/WebAwardsFlyerNominee.jpg" align=right alt=""> Crazy! Somehow or other, this blog has made the shortlist for "Best Technology Site" at the Irish Web Awards 2008, up against TechCentral, Silicon Republic, Camara, and Robin Blandford’s ByteSurgery blog. I have no idea how this happened, given the quality of the sites I’m up against — two of them are even proper news sites, with journalists! ;)

I’ve registered for the Oct 11 event; looking forward to it now…

My Trial Switch, ep. I

Published September 23, 2008

As previously noted, I’ve just bought myself a nice shiny MacBook Pro, to replace an old reliable 5-year-old Thinkpad T40, which ran Linux.

Initially, I was contemplating installing Linux on this one too, and dual-booting. But right now, I’ve decided to give MacOS X a go — why not? I find it’s worthwhile updating aspects of my quotidian computing environment every now and again, and it seems everyone’s doing it. ;) I’ll log my experience on this blog as I go along.

(Worth noting that this isn’t my first Mac; back in 1990, I was the proud owner of a free Macintosh Plus for a year, courtesy of TCD’s "Project Mac" collaboration with Apple Ireland. I wrote a great Mandelbrot Set explorer app.)

First off, the good news: the hardware is very nice indeed. It’s light in weight, esp. compared to my T61p work laptop, the screen clarity is fantastic, and the CPU fairly zooms along — unsurprisingly, given that the T40 was 5 years old.

In addition, the multi-touch touchpad is wonderful; I’m looking forward to lots more multi-touch features.

Unfortunately, some of the other hardware design decisions were pretty wonky. By default it’s quite tricky to keep the laptop running with the lid closed — it seems a decision was made to use passive cooling via the keyboard, so once the lid is closed, that heat cannot escape, causing overheating. There’s a third-party extension I can install to allow it anyway, but it’s festooned with warnings to overclock the fan speed to make up for it… ugh. Since I need the ability to be able to remotely login to my laptop from work if I should happen to forget something, or to kick off a long transfer before I come home, this means I have to leave the laptop open permanently, which I didn’t want to do.

In addition, I initially thought my brightness control was broken, since the laptop screen fluctuates in brightness continually. Turns out this is a feature, responding to ambient light — a poorly-documented one, but at least it’s easy to turn off in System Preferences once you know it’s there.

(Unfortunately, a lot of MacOS seems to consist of poorly-documented features that are hidden "for my own good". The concept of switching seems to involve me abdicating a good deal of what I’d consider adult control of the machine, to the cult of Steve Who Knows Better. This is taking some getting used to.)

On to the software… what’s getting my goat right now are as follows:

Inability to remap keys (CapsLock key, the useless "+-" key, a lack of "spare" keys for scripted actions)

Up in the top left corner of "international" MacBook keyboards, there’s a useless key with a "+-" and double-S symbol on it. I don’t think I’ve ever typed those symbols in my entire life. I want a ~ there, since that’s where the ~ key lives, but for some reason, MacOS doesn’t include keyboard-remapping functionality to the same level as X11’s wonderful "xmodmap". It seems this third-party app might allow me to do that, or maybe something called ‘KeyRemap4Macbook’?

This Tao Of Mac HOWTO seems helpful on how to support the "Home"/"End" keys, for external keyboard use.

Focus Follows Mouse

This is a frequent complaint among UNIX-to-Mac switchers. It seems that some apps do a hacky version of it, but then you’ve got this inconsistent thing where you lose track of which apps will automatically pick up focus (Terminal, iTerm) and which ones need a click first (Firefox, indeed everything else). Unfortunately, it seems an app called CodeTek VirtualDesktop would have fixed it, but seems to have been abandoned. :(

Programmable Hotkeys

I use a few hotkeys to do quick window-control actions without involving the mouse; in particular, F1 brings a window to the front, F2 pushes it to the back, F12 minimizes a window, Ctrl-Alt-LeftArrow moves a window half a screen left, and Ctrl-Alt-RightArrow moves a window half a screen to the right. Those are pretty simple, but effective.

This collection of Applescript files, in conjunction with Quicksilver, look like I may be able to do something similar on the Mac. Here’s hoping. LifeHacker suggests that the default for minimize is Cmd-M, so that’s what I need to remap from, at least…

This is a big issue — Dan Kulp had a lot of hot-key-related woes, and wound up going back to Linux as a result. Evan reported the same. I like the idea of MacOS, but my tendonitis-afflicted wrists need their little shortcuts; I’m not willing to compromise on avoiding mouse usage in this way.

(by the way, in order to get F1/F2/F12 back, check the "Use the F1-F12 keys to control software features" box in the Keyboard control panel. Thanks to this page for that tip; it has a few other good tips for UNIX switchers, too.)

Upgrades and Software

So, there’s two main contenders for the "apt-get for Mac" throne — Fink vs MacPorts. Fink takes the Debian approach of downloading binary packages, while MacPorts compiles them from source, BSD/Gentoo-style, on your machine. Since I’m not looking at the source, or picking build parameters, or auditing the code for security issues there and then, I don’t see the need to build it — Fink wins.

One thing though — the installer for Fink informed me that I needed to run "Repair Permissions", which took a while, and found some things that had somehow already been modified from their system defaults, I’m not sure why. This left me slightly mystified. I then was later told that this is now considered ‘voodoo’. wtf.

Mind you, Daring Fireball suggests that the Mac software update are so poorly implemented that they require essentially rebooting in single-user mode, which sounds frankly terrifying. I hope that’s not the case.

BTW, it’s worth noting that IMO, AWN is as nice as — possibly nicer than — the Dock. ;)

Anyway, that’s post #1 in a series. Let’s see how I get on from here. (thanks to Aman, Craig and Paddy for various tips so far!)

Links for 2008-09-22

Published September 22, 2008

Links for 2008-09-19

Published September 19, 2008

Links for 2008-09-18

Published September 18, 2008

teh new shiny

Published September 17, 2008
new MacBook Pro

now to install Ubuntu ;)

Update: here’s the first bug, spotted in Apple’s "thank you for registering your Mac" mail:

Hi. 

Welcome to Apple.
We're just as excited as you are.

........................................................................... 

Thanks for registering your new Mac. We have the following on record in your name:
[[IREG_PRODUCT_HTML]]

Templates are hard!

Links for 2008-09-16

Published September 16, 2008