Copyright: Cory Doctorow’s DRM talk presented to MS research yesterday. This is a fantastic introduction to the issues regarding DRM; if you know someone who isn’t convinced that DRM is A Bad Thing, this is the argument they need to read.
Category: Uncategorized
Literature: Happy Bloomsday Centenary! Google agrees:
Tech:
Troubleshooters: Making a bootable CD from a bootable floppy image.
Making a note of this for future reference — it should be handy next time
I need to do a BIOS or firmware upgrade on my Thinkpad.
War: A couple of war links, I’ll keep it short. ;)
Web: http://ws/ . Nifty!
Software: This mail contains a fantastic anecdote from The Common Thread: Science, Politics, Ethics and the Human Genome, by John Sulston, head of the Sanger Centre, and a joint winner of the Nobel Prize for Medicine. I’ll reproduce some bits here:
Conferences: LayerOne was seriously great! Got to meet up with some really interesting people; discuss some nifty stuff; and get some new angles on the whole hacking scene.
Spam: Reg: German hate mail spam attack stuns experts: ‘Mailboxes in Germany and the Netherlands were flooded yesterday with spam containing German right-wing propaganda. Spammers used the Sober.G virus – a mass mailing worm that sends itself to email addresses harvested from infected computers – to spread their messages as widely as possible.’
Security: A very interesting security paper — Understanding Data Lifetime via Whole System Simulation. It combines virtual machines with data-flow tracking (a la perl’s ‘taint’ mechanism, after which this site is named ;)
Spam: Good Salon article on the new forms of spamming, such as Wiki and referrer-log spamming etc. Here’s a good quote:
Web: the June part of the contest is over, but given that there’s a July part still to go — here’s a ‘Nigritude Ultramarine‘ link to Anil Dash.
Mail: GMail users, check your mail; if mine was anything to go by, you should have three new invites to give out.
Web: Bernie Goldbach points to a site that’s news to me: AnotherFriend.com. It’s an Irish dating site.
Hacking: Amazing — the Action Replay cartridge is still around!
Patents: lyranthe.org notes that the EU elections are coming up this Thursday, 11th June. Accordingly, here’s a single-issue roundup of the candidates, from what I’ve heard:
Perl: I’ve been writing a few convenience web-scrapers recently using WWW::Mechanize, with great success.
Spam: Kasia raises a very interesting question. Here it is, in a nutshell:
Health: USDA orders silence on mad cow in Texas: ‘The U.S. Department of Agriculture has issued an order instructing its inspectors in Texas, where federal mad cow disease testing policies recently were violated, not to talk about the cattle disorder with outside parties … The order … was issued in the wake of the April 27 case at Lone Star Beef in San Angelo, in which a cow displaying signs of a brain disorder was not tested for mad cow disease despite a federal policy to screen all such animals.’
Spam: The Spamometer; a
1997-vintage spamfilter along the lines of filter.plx. Interestingly,
I hadn’t seen this before — who knows, if I had, SpamAssassin could have
used a (0.0, 1.0) scoring system instead of the ‘5 point threshold’. ;)
(Thanks, Gary!)
Conferences: I’m going to LayerOne; it looks interesting, and I’ve been hoping to bump into Danny O’Brien (who’s there doing his Life Hacks talk) for a couple of drinks and a blather for quite a while. Other speakers look similarly interesting, in an ‘offbeat hacker conference’ way, so I think it’ll be fun.
Life: I’ve learned one thing this weekend — humans are not designed to function in the desert. I went bush-camping in the Anza-Borrego Desert state park with a few mates, and we quite simply baked in the 45C/113F degree heat. Walking 3 miles in that heat was easily equivalent to 15 miles in normal temperatures.
Photos: the view out to sea from Seal Beach, just south of LA. (duh. thanks Ben, I’d b0rked the link earlier.)
Weblogs: Greenpeace: Mysteries of the Deep — ‘the SV Rainbow Warrior left Auckland, New Zealand, on a voyage around the surrounding waters. Our mission: To highlight the irreversible damage caused to deep sea life by bottom trawling.’ Official weblog maintainer for the voyage: one Daev Walsh. Nice one Daev!
Literature: So, more on this entry — believe it or not, there’s a Japanese Sourceforge project implementing a Wiki called ‘mrkrgnao’. Japanese Joyce fans!
Funny: 
Who knew there was a Commodore 64 gang sign? PRESS PLAY ON TAPE, that’s who!
Marketing: It appears that MATRIX (the Multistate Anti-TeRrorism Information EXchange) at one stage did — and may still — include a ‘terrorism quotient’ field, representing ‘a statistical likelihood of (people) being terrorists’.
Tech: I should note this here just in case anyone finds it useful. A handy tip for anyone visiting Caesar’s Palace; their ‘Business Center’ doesn’t have wifi yet, but (cough) one of their neighbours certainly does ;)
Travel: I’ve just spent a week in the UK; much culture was imbibed, I got to see Michael Landy’s Semi-detached at the Tate, met up with some good mates including the pregnant Lean, and was a happy camper overall.
Patents: According to Ciaran O’Riordan of IFSO, one key aspect of the EU Council’s meeting on the software patent legalisation proposal hinged on the use of the phrase ‘as such’, to effectively sneak a loophole past the Council members:
Spam: Yahoo!’s DomainKeys proposal for sender auth.
Ireland: Update update! The Stallman talk is now free (-as-in-beer), apparently. No more updates, any further news will just be on their site. ;)
Ireland: So I forgot to mention who’s running the Richard Stallman talk in TCD next week.
Compare this recent statement from Minister Mary Hanafin, Minister of State with Responsibility for the Information Society, and this extract from ‘Why Microsoft Wins’ advertorial written by a Microsoft product manager, Sunday Business Post, 2004-05-02:
Circularity: My long-distance provider, Primus, is using SpamAssassin for spam-filtering at their ISP end!
GNU: Hey, Dublin-based people! Richard Stallman will be giving a talk titled ‘The Dangers of Software Patents’ in Dublin on May 24, at 19:30. It’ll be in the TCD Hamilton building, right beside Pearse St. DART station. I’ve never seen him speak, but I hear it’s definitely worth attending, and his message needs to get out there, further into the Irish software industry and political circles.
MS’ latest patent
Patents: Oh, come on. USPTO: task list window for use in an integrated development environment. Here’s claim 1: