(Things I found interesting recently.)
Doh: Garret Collins on the IE-rant mailing list points out a notable ‘oops’ moment in Sky News Ireland’s new promo:
(Original here.)
Funny: Here’s the
Daily Show
segment with Scott Richter (WMV, 9.8MB).
Just ignore the lame subtitles added by whoever encoded the file… the rest of it’s seriously funny! ‘Clitorious’, indeed.
Update! 2004-04-13: thanks to Lisa Rein, there’s now a 10MB Quicktime .mov version, sans unfunny subtitles. I’d strongly suggest downloading that instead.
Patents: There’s a good discussion over at Joi Ito’s weblog on software patents.
Unfortunately, there’s a persistent, and popular, fallacy that crops up quite frequently in these discussions, and does so here in the comments:
‘much of the processing of patents has been, to use understatement, deficient. An invention that is ‘silly or obvious’ will likely not pass the approrpiate legal test – if this test is applied by people who understand the inventive technology …. while I agree with most of your observations about deficiencies, I fail to see the logic in your solution (to simply outlaw these kinds of inventions).’
So, what the commenter is saying is that the patenting of software and business methods would be acceptable, if only the ‘inventive bar’ was raised so that trivial patents were not granted.
The problem with this is that:
that they patent ideas instead of physical inventions.
A parallel would be to allow the patenting of plot-lines in fiction, meter in poetry, or combinations of ingredients and cooking methods in recipes. These are all ideas, transformed into output ‘products’ by performing them as input on a set of hardware (books, cooking equipment), in the same way as software patents and business method patents are abstract ideas that operate on input, generating output, when implemented on a CPU. So, should they be patentable, too?
Patenting of physical designs is fundamentally different from patenting of abstract ideas in one key way. Physical designs must function correctly under real-world physics, and this requires extensive up-front design and prototyping, before they can be turned into mass-produced products.
Abstract ideas can be developed mentally, and the up-front work required before the idea can be put down on paper is trivial by comparison.
Consider these EPO patents: EP0807891 (Sun’s ‘shopping cart’ patent) or EP0689133 (Adobe’s ‘tabbed palette window’ patent). The up-front work required to devise these applications is trivial to anyone with a rudimentary knowledge of UI design; the hard part appears to be writing the legalese, and I understand the patent lawyers take care of that part. ;)
Compare with US patent D0450164, a design patent for a Dyson washing machine. The level of detail, and extensive specifications, is massive, and it’s clear a lot of work had gone into the process before the patent application was filed.
In addition, the commenter assumes that extensive prior art searches really do take place. From what I’ve heard from patent applicants, and from what I’ve observed in the range of granted software patents, this is cursory at best, and generally performed by the patent lawyer and the examiner, not the applicant themselves.
I’ve even observed a few patents where prior art, cited in the patent, implemented exactly what was claimed!
Toys:
![My Breedster profile](http://breedster.drunkmenworkhere.org/members/24872.png"
width="64)
Argh, I’ve been infected by the Breedster STD!
Apparently, though, there’s a way around it through reincarnation, or — rumour has it — through touching Asriel, the bug with the power to heal.
In the meantime, paranoia reigns, and this time of crisis has brought out the worst in some bugs:
It’s an interesting piece of emergent net-art, if you ask me, but the STD is pissing me off. (it’s itchy!)
Literature: Ulysses:
The cat walked stiffly round a leg of the table with tail on high.
— Mkgnao!
— O, there you are, Mr Bloom said, turning from the fire.
The cat mewed in answer and stalked again stiffly round a leg of the table, mewing. Just how she stalks over my writingtable. Prr. Scratch my head. Prr.
Mr Bloom watched curiously, kindly the lithe black form. Clean to see: the gloss of her sleek hide, the white button under the butt of her tail, the green flashing eyes. He bent down to her, his hands on his knees.
— Milk for the pussens, he said.
— Mrkgnao! the cat cried.
They call them stupid. They understand what we say better than we understand them. She understands all she wants to. Vindictive too. Cruel. Her nature. Curious mice never squeal. Seem to like it. Wonder what I look like to her. Height of a tower? No, she can jump me.
— Afraid of the chickens she is, he said mockingly. Afraid of the chookchooks. I never saw such a stupid pussens as the pussens.
— Mrkrgnao! the cat said loudly.
mrkrgnao.com is available ;)
EVoting: I didn’t realise it, but the Open Voting Consortium‘s ‘EVM2003’ e-voting system looks excellent. Here’s the key point: it produces printed ballots, unlike the DRE (Direct Recording Electronic) systems. Those are what’s counted, and those are what the voter verifies. And it’s open-source, too, so the source is available.
Here’s a good intro from the Baltimore Sun:
Although it’s far from a finished product, the system retains what’s good about current electronic voting systems. It’s voter-friendly, easier than older systems to administer, and accessible to blind voters without assistance.
It also addresses the concerns of today’s critics. First, it uses open-source software that’s available for public inspection – eliminating the secrecy that outrages critics of today’s proprietary “black box” systems.
Second, the software is free and can run on a variety of computer platforms, which makes the system cheaper to acquire and maintain. Third, it creates a paper trail of printed ballots that can be counted by hand or machine in case of disputed elections – without compromising privacy for the blind.
Instead of printing a “receipt” that confirms a ballot cast electronically, it’s based on the quaint notion that the best ballot is still a paper ballot. “We didn’t see any reason to reinvent the wheel,” said Fred McLain, the project’s lead software developer.
Iraq: OK, I’ve been keeping quiet on the whole Iraq thing — so far, it’s pretty much turned into what I was suspecting would happen once GWB declared ‘Mission Accomplished’, and now there’s lots more people saying what I previously felt wasn’t being said. However, I’ve just heard something that really winds me up.
Richard Perle was being interviewed on BBC Radio 4’s PM show about the torture at Abu Ghraib. He made a comment to the effect that ‘at least the Abu Ghraib incidents weren’t as bad as Saddam’s use of the human shredder’.
First off, two wrongs do not make a right, and the neocons needs to stop assuming that this is an excuse.
Secondly, the human shredder story is uncorroborated rumour from a single person in Northern Iraq, and no evidence has ever found to support it. All evidence points to the opposite.
But if we let it pass without debunking, this one’s going to go down as ‘history’, alongside the ‘babies thrown out of incubators’ story from Gulf War I, and the ‘bayoneted babies’ story from 1914.
Patents: The Irish EU Presidency keeps on rolling.
FFII notes that ‘this Wednesday, the Irish Presidency managed to secure a qualified majority for a counter-proposal to the software patents directive, with only a few countries – including Belgium and Germany – showing resistance. (This ‘compromise’ is the most pro-patent text yet,) discarding all the amendments from the European which would limit patentability. Instead the lax language of the original Commission proposal is to be reinstated in its entirety, with direct patentability of program text fragments added as icing on the cake.’
‘The proposal is now scheduled to be confirmed without discussion at a meeting of ministers on 17-18 May, unless one of the Member States changes its vote. In a remarkable sign of unity in times of imminent elections, members of the European Parliament from all groups across the political spectrum are condemning this blatant disrespect for democracy in Europe.’
Some quotes from MEPs about this behaviour:
Amazingly, the Council proposal documents aren’t even being released to the public, ‘due to the sensitive nature of the negotiations and the absence of an overriding public interest’; the FFII got hold of them via a leak.
There’s still a chance that this can be reversed; this still needs to be confirmed at the Competitiveness Council of Ministers on 17-18 May. This isn’t a dead cert just yet. As a result, FFII are proposing more demonstrations and another ‘net strike’.
It’s unclear whether writing to anyone will make a difference, at least for people in Ireland, however; everything I’ve read seems to indicate that our representatives on the EU Competitivity Council are not on our side.
Specifically, the only names I can find regarding this Council are Mary Harney, pro-business, anti-regulation right-wing leader of the Progressive Democrats and ‘President-in-Office’ of this committee; and the staff of the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment’s Intellectual Property Unit.
(Of course, Harney at least can always be voted out at the next elections, and I’d strongly suggest anyone working in the field bear that in mind if this gets passed!)
News:
Newseum: Today’s Front Pages (Flash map view). A great site;
the best thing about it is, a double-click on each newspaper’s
‘dot’ will pop up their front page as a larger image in a new
window, and give you a URL for a full-page PDF file.
Best of all, those full-page PDF links update every day with that day’s front page… for example, these are eminently bookmarkable:
Excellent!
A bit like The Guardian’s Digital Edition, but a whole lot cheaper and simpler.
EVoting: No ducking the f*ing question . . . did he say it? (Irish Independent) (reg req’d, see bugmenot):
A direct transcription of Mr (Michael) Smith’s comments reads: “Let them, f* it, we’ll say no more – we’ll say no more.”
Given the barrage of taunts he was facing in the Dail at the time, it is quite plausible – and in context – if the ‘eff it’ is replaced in the sentence by ‘duck it’.
The Opposition was continually interrupting Mr Smith when he was trying to put a brave face on the Government’s squandering of EUR 52m on e-voting. Ill at ease and clearly keen to avoid the onslaught from the Opposition, the minister seemed to know he was on a hiding to nothing.
Labour leader Pat Rabbitte, who has made baiting Michael Smith a career work-in-progress, was pursuing his quarry with noticeable effect. Mr Smith’s eyes narrowed as his mouth tightened in frustration, he turned to address his frontbench colleagues, and uttered the sentence that has turned him from Tipperary choirboy to bad-boy rapper.
It seems that the F-word isn’t specifically prohibited in the Dail — “the ‘Salient Rulings of the Chair, Second Edition’, the book which governs behaviour in the Dail, doesn’t specifically forbid the use” of the word. It does, however, apparently prohibit the words “brat, buffoon, chancer, communist, corner boy, fascist, gurrier, guttersnipe, hypocrite, rat, (and) scumbag.” (‘corner boy’?)
Patents: I’ve just come across Tim Oren’s page on the Unisys GIF patent furore of 1994-5. Tim used to be VP of ‘Future Technology’ at CompuServe.
The GIF furore, in case you missed it, was one of the most far-ranging software patent debacles to date. Here’s what happened…
Compuserve was one of the biggest online services at the time. In 1987 they’d created GIF, an efficient image file format, for public use, with a very liberal license. As a result, everyone and their dog wrote software to read and write GIF files (including myself ;).
GIF, like many other tools of the time, used the LZW (Lempel-Ziv-Welch) file compression scheme, which had been widely published without any indication that it was considered proprietary. LZW was pretty much the de-facto standard for file compression in the early 90s, in the same way that ‘gzip’ is nowadays.
However — 7 years later, in 1994, Unisys suddenly announced that they had filed for, and eventually received, a patent on the LZW algorithm. As Tim wrote at the time, this was a ‘submarine’ patent. (Unisys had owned that patent since 1985, and pursued hardware licenses — but all and sundry believed that the patent didn’t cover software-only implementations.)
Unisys shook downbrought an infringement suit against
Compuserve, who had published the GIF standard and implemented it widely
in their software. Compuserve had ‘no recourse but to settle’.
(Interestingly, it appears that at the time, Unisys seemed to think that GIF decoders needed licenses as well — popular thinking nowadays is that only GIF encoders need licensing, but Unisys didn’t think so at that stage at least.)
There is a happy ending — thankfully, free software saved the day. ;)
As Tim writes, Thomas Boutell, Jean-loup Gailly and others came up with PNG; Jean-loup and Mark Adler wrote GZIP; and LZW was consigned to the dustbin of unusable technology for most new projects. Old projects, of course, had to go through some redesign pains to achieve the same goal.
BTW, it’s worth noting that, even though the Unisys patent has expired, it’s still not safe to dust off LZW. GNU (and others) believe that there’s another patent filed on the same algorithm independently by — guess who — IBM, which doesn’t expire until 11 August
The lesson: be careful when implementing published standards. Nowadays, the IETF requires that contributors disclose ‘the existence of any proprietary or intellectual property rights in the contribution that are reasonably and personally known to the contributor’. But in this case, the patent was owned by another body, Unisys, and the contributor (CIS) didn’t know that, so that wouldn’t have helped.
So, the real lesson: Just Say No to software patents ;)
Television: Tony Bowden: BBCtorrent? ‘Later this month, the BBC will launch a pilot project that could lead to all television programmes being made available on the internet.’ I have my fingers firmly crossed here. This could be really excellent news. Of course, not being located in the UK could make it not-so-easy to actually watch them from here, but the underlying thinking is really cool.
Tech: LayerOne. Weekend conf in LA, with Danny O’Brien — think I might just tag along!
Patents: Posting this here so I can find it in future. Here’s a /. comment saying ‘if it becomes impossible to safely develop software in the US and EU due to patents, innovation will move to India and China’. This isn’t quite true anymore — my response, noting the Brazil/Glaxo/AZT case.
Europe: Given the Irish EU Presidency’s recent passing of the IP Enforcement Directive and the second attempt to get the Software Patents directive through using the EU Council of Ministers, is it really appropriate for Microsoft to “contribute” to the Irish EU Presidency?
MS reportedly see software patents as a very important part of their strategy to deal with open source, as they noted way back in 1998 in the leaked Halloween I document.
MS is reportedly applying for 10 new patents a day (or is it per week? eWeek can’t decide. anyway.)
It’s pretty clear that MS want to ‘de-commoditize’ open standards, using software patents; they said so in the Halloween doc. Their XML Word-processing patent, which claims to patent the use of two open standards (XML and XSD) in a word-processing file format, is a great example of locking up an open standard as a patented, proprietary format.
As a result, they’d have a vested interest in helping the EU Presidency to decide that software patents should be legalised in the EU. A more conspiracy-minded type than myself might read something into their ‘contributions’ accordingly ;)
Now, it could be all touchy-feely niceness from MS. This eWeek article quotes David Kaefer, Microsoft’s director of business development for intellectual property:
According to … Kaefer, “We’ll make our IP available to all comers, open-source or not.” Kaefer added that Microsoft isn’t focused on what garage-shop developers are doing …
Sounds lovely, except it didn’t happen in this case, where MS threatened an open-source developer with patent litigation:
Today I received a polite phone call from a fellow at Microsoft who works in the Windows Media group. He informed me that Microsoft has intellectual property rights on the ASF format and told me that, although I had reverse engineered it, the implementation was still illegal since it infringed on Microsoft patents. … At his request, and much to my own sadness, I have removed support for ASF in VirtualDub 1.3d, since I cannot risk a legal confrontation.
eVoting: Success! The use of e-voting systems for the June elections in Ireland has been abandoned, after a severely critical report from the Commission on Electronic Voting. Take a look at the report here. Some bits:
The use of VVAT, and changes to the counting procedures to remove randomisation, was outside the terms of reference, unfortunately, so it’s not totally over yet. But I can’t see the government getting away with re-introducing e-voting without VVAT now.
Finally, the opposition political parties are calling on the Minister to resign.
I’ve got to say — nice work to all the concerned citizens who’ve achieved this, despite the government’s continual stonewalling and secrecy.
Spam:
CNN: First four charged under ‘can spam’ law:
Court documents in the landmark case in Detroit describe a nearly inscrutable puzzle of corporate identities, bank accounts and electronic storefronts in one alleged spam operation.
At one point, investigators said, packages were sometimes delivered to a restaurant, where a greeter accepted them and passed them along to one defendant.
Detroit Free Press: 4 Oakland men cited in 1st U.S. spam case:
The four are accused of secretly commandeering computers that forward e-mail for some of the nation’s biggest corporations — including Ford Motor Co. — to send millions of junk messages advertising herbal supplements, diet patches and sexual enhancement pills and products.
Other unwitting companies and agencies whose computers were used include Unisys Corp., Amoco Corp., the Administrative Office of the United States Courts and the U.S. Army Information Center, according to a complaint filed in U.S. District Court in Detroit on Wednesday. …..
Unraveling the trail of spam took four months. Berg said that because of the use of proxy servers, trying to trace the spam back to the original sender was difficult. …..
In Karlsruhe, Germany, an Internet security expert and activist named Anders Henke runs what he calls a “proxy pot,” a system that simulates a mail proxy but doesn’t actually forward mail. It sits on the Internet, looking vulnerable to the sophisticated scanning software used by spammers to sniff out open proxies.
Starting in early January, the complaint says, Henke’s proxy pot intercepted 5 million attempts from computer accounts linked to the Michigan men.
Mail: I’ve been playing around with GMail a bit more recently. They’ve fixed the issues they had with Firefox and keyboard control, and it is nice.
Threading: since I plan to bother a few open-source MUA developers ;), I’ve written up a thorough analysis of their ‘conversation’ model, with its ‘collapsable history’, archive-not-delete approach, etc. Take a look, if you’re curious.
HTML: one feature that no-one’s commented on, is that GMail does not create HTML mail — all mail composed through their composer is sent as text/plain only.
This is very interesting, because it suits me just fine. HTML mail causes so many more problems than it solves, especially when full-featured web browser components are used to display it, IMO. I get to see the security exploits this enables, every day in my anti-spam work.
But it’s also very significant that nobody else has commented on it — nobody misses it!
Phantom Labels: another interesting thing I’ve noted: sometimes a mail will appear in your Inbox with a ‘spam’ label, even though you’ve never defined one. It’s not in the ‘Spam’ folder; it’s in your inbox.
Aaron has a good theory on what this is, and I think he’s right — he suggests it’s when ‘ the two emails are in a conversation (same subject); one is marked as spam, one isn’t. So the conversation (which is what appears in your inbox) gets two tags: Spam, and Inbox. So when viewing the list it looks like it gets the Spam tag.’
Also, while I’m here — details on LiveJournal’s distributed filesystem, MogileFS, which apparently ‘will be open source’. Link via acme.
Politics: FFII reports that the ‘IPR Enforcement Directive’, the law proposed to deal with ‘IPR infringement’ by the wife of the CEO of Vivendi Universal, has just been approved by the EU Council.
Another glorious moment of digital cluelessness by the Irish presidency. But then, it had already been passed by the parliament. Reminder: that page lists the Irish MEPs and how they voted on a key amendment, which would have inserted safeguards so that ‘surprise raids … in the middle of the night by private security firms, on the flimsiest evidence’ would not be possible.
It’s now done in Europe. Next step is to deal with it when the member state governments implement it (which has to happen by June 2006).
Language: So, here’s a word worth noting — ‘Neverendum’. This Guardian article notes:
(Quebecois politician Mario Dumont’s) meteoric ascent is a sign of how weary voters in the French-speaking province have become about what has been dubbed the ‘neverendum referendum’, the debate over whether Quebec should become a country. It has dominated Quebec politics for three decades.
It looks like Ireland’s ever-recurring referenda (motto: ‘if at first the Government fails to get their desired result, try, try again’) have driven the word into usage over there too, judging by this Irish Family Planning Association press release:
‘The idea of holding another pro-life neverendum is clearly ludicrous and serves only to distract from the daily reality of Irish Abortion.’
And there’s even a song, referring to the Nice referendum:
‘The Government should not patronise us but should respect the views of the people,’ he said. Or, as he puts it in verse, ‘What part of our No don?t they understand?’
Ireland: So on Saturday last, Pat Kenny, the host of the Late Late Show (Ireland’s longest-running chat show) had Aileen O’Carroll on to talk about the Dublin Grassroots Network’s planned May Day march.
The Gardai have been doing their damnedest to block the march, gaining power to deploy armed police, and in turn, the PR big guns have been deployed in force to get scare stories printed, with the tabloid journos utilizing their considerable wiles in the process.
So, it’s culminated in an appearance on the Late Late for Aileen. By all accounts, it went very well.
Apparently, another great moment of reported hilarity was a lengthy discussion between Pat Kenny, the tabloid journalist, and a ‘security expert’ as to whether there would be ‘agent provocateurs’ present. It seems all agreed there might just be. One wonders if they thought to look up the word beforehand:
Agents provocateurs are also used in the investigation of political crimes. Here, it has been claimed that the provocateurs deliberately seek to incite ineffective radical acts, in order to foster public disdain for the political group being investigated; and to worsen the punishments its members are liable for. Within the United States the COINTELPRO program of the Federal Bureau of Investigation had FBI agents posing as political radicals in order to disrupt the activities of political groups the U.S. government found unacceptably radical. The activities of agents provocateurs against political dissidents in Imperial Russia was one of the grievances that led to the Russian Revolution.
Patents: The pro-software-patent lobby has frequently stated that TRIPS — the Treaty on Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPs), signed on 1993-12-15 as a constituting document of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) — requires that software be patentable. For example, here’s one from the International Chamber of Commerce:
ICC believes that the directive should follow current practice in the EPO and a number of EU member states and make it clear that computer program products can be claimed. To disallow such claims in the directive would create great legal uncertainty for holders of such patents already granted. Prohibiting product claims would also render enforcement of patents difficult and raise questions with respect to TRIPS compliance. TRIPS requires patents not only to be available, but also to be ‘enjoyable’ in all areas of technology.
Well, it actually appears that the treaty may state exactly the opposite! Christian Beauprez, a UK-based consultant, has taken a closer look at the details, and come up with this:
TRIPS Article 10.1, ‘Computer programs, whether in source or object code, shall be protected as literary works under the Berne Convention (1971).’
WIPO Copyright Treaty Article 4, ‘Computer programs are protected as literary works within the meaning of Article 2 of the Berne Convention. Such protection applies to computer programs, whatever may be the mode or form of their expression’.
This includes the execution or processing of a program, as demonstrated in the EEC software copyright Directive 1991, ‘the permanent or temporary reproduction of a computer program by any means and in any form, in part or in whole. Insofar as loading, displaying, running, transmission or storage’
They also stipulate that exceptions to exclusive rights of authors are to be limited to ‘special cases’ which do not conflict with a normal exploitation of the work and cannot be prejudicial to the author’s rights. (e.g. the rights to sell,rent,broadcast,give away,translate, and generally enjoy.).
… Authors cannot own underlying ideas, but inventors can as part of their ‘invention’. When the field of software (aka data processing) is opened up to ‘inventors’, they can block authors from exploiting their works on the grounds that they own the ‘underlying ideas’. Therefore this is prejudicial to the rights of authors and illegal under all these Treaties.
There’s lots more at Christian’s site. FFII, one of the main anti-software-patenting players in Europe, have agreed that this is a key point in their TRIPS analysis:
In summary it can be said that the European patent establishment is 1. refusing to clarify and concretise the meaning of the TRIPs treaty; 2. wrongly equating the TRIPs treaty with ‘US practise’, using threats of alleged TRIPs-incompatibility for purposes of fostering Fear, Uncertainty and Distrust (FUD); 3. trying to impose a sui generis software patent regime on Europe which is incompatible with the TRIPs treaty.
Spam: Anne Mitchell on GMail’s spam filtering — sounds like her results are actually worse than mine were. But the ads worked well:
… just today, in an email from Mrs. Nwakama Ani, the wife of the late James Ani, a farmer in ZImbabwe, asking me to please help her to export $50million dollars which her late husband amassed, Gmail’s Adsense very thoughtfully offered me ‘Cheap airline tickets from the USA to Zimbabwe’. You know, just in case I want to go over there and help her personally.
Anne’s spam weblog looks like good stuff — I’ve added it to the blogroll…
Art: Machine Molle bill themselves as ‘post-production’, but I suspect that’s understating their work — their site has Flash-playable copies of their videos for Royksopp’s ‘Remind Me’, Air’s ‘Electronic Performers’, and a recent ad for Areva, a Canadian power company. All are simply amazing. Go take a look. (link via Joe)
Code: A very good intro to Bloom Filters at perl.com by Maciej Ceglowski.
Strikes me as something that might be very applicable to the SpamAssassin auto-whitelist…
Net: So, it looks like closed-group filesharing will be appearing in several more implementations soon. NTK writes this week, ‘the big new (yet old) killer app this year is going to be a some dinky little program that lets you easily and selectively share individual files with groups and sub-groups of your friends.’
It’s interesting to see this — it’s been several years in the offing. So far, there seems to be two main angles: secure collaboration in a private workgroup, and private filesharing in a closed group, defined socially (I’ve taken to calling this the ‘playgroup’ ;).
Groove is an example of the ‘workgroup’ idea. However, to my mind it’s been crippled by a strict one-platform policy, and possibly because it’s proprietary, commercial software. Still, nice idea.
Several MS researchers helped kickstart the ‘playgroup’ idea with this
paper: The Darknet and
the Future of Content Distribution. Clay Shirky’s
thoughts.
WASTE is the classic implementation of a ‘playgroup’ darknet, sadly killed off due to ownership issues. NTK state that it ‘was too crypto-tastic to succeed’, but I don’t see that — it was actually excellent software; in particular, its entirely-decentralised and public-key-crypto-based architecture worked surprisingly well in practice, even with NAT, firewalls and all that problematic stuff.
More of the up-and-coming projects — at least the ones that intend to take heed of ‘playgroup’ needs — need to take cues from this app. The only negative in their approach is that the ‘gating’ of new members is too relaxed; all it takes is for one existing member to accept them into the group, their public key is flooded out to all, and pretty much everyone is set to accept the new key by default.
Robert Kaye has written about his thoughts on how this all should work in this ETCON presentation and this O’Reilly Network article. I’m not sure that a loosely-coupled SSH-based system is easily deployable, though; IMO an ‘all-in-one’ app is easier to get installed and deployed.
iFolder is Novell’s new tool in development. This sounds pretty interesting, although it seems very strongly workgroup-oriented, as does Foldershare, a new Windows-only app from some ‘ex-AudioGalaxy staffers’, apparently.
Both operate by using some kind of file-sync algorithm, along the lines of rsync or Unison, to synchronise multiple copies of a dir across a network. (Here’s hoping it’s up to the standard of Unison.) So very large collections will be duplicated throughout the net — which may actually be quite cool for backups, but strikes me as bad news for users on slow links.
And finally, there’s Clevercactus Share — this sounds interesting, is cross-platform, and is now in beta, apparently. Haven’t seen it, though ;)
So far, techie details on the internals of the latter three systems are scant; it’ll be interesting to see how heavily they tilt towards the ‘workgroup’, how well they deal with firewalls and NAT, the extent of crypto use, etc. But nice to see more software entering the field…
Web: doing my bit for PageRank: jew.
Mail: I’ve dusted off my old e-mail usability wishlist, made a couple of changes to reflect the current situation now that GMail has implemented some of them, and Wikified the page.
There’s still a couple that I think would be valuable, so anyone looking at new usability ideas for email is welcome to take a look ;)
Update: greetings, visitors from 2006! Please pay no attention to these figures, they’re from 2004, and both GMail and SpamAssassin have undergone major changes since those days. Historical interests only.
So, I set up a .forward to forward all my personal mail to GMail to see how it coped with my spam load, and compared it against the personal SpamAssassin install I’m running these days. Here’s the results:
The SpamAssassin results:
The GMail results:
So, not too hot. But there are extenuating circumstances! ;)
Surprisingly, all the SpamAssassin mailing list traffic discussing spam, throwing around spammy URLs and phrases, didn’t get caught, however; probably because the volume of spammy phrases in those is less than in the Mailman admin stuff.
Web: Following Anil Dash’s lead, here’s a few non-me Justins found via images.google.com:
Spam: Bram shares a spam-filtering tip — ‘most of the viruses I get have a Message-Id tacked on by the local mailserver. A little bit of messing with procmail and suddenly my junk mail level is under control.’
This is what the SpamAssassin rule MSGID_FROM_MTA_SHORT does. It gets:
4.432 6.7680 0.0560 0.992 0.94 3.67 MSGID_FROM_MTA_SHORT
6.7680% of spam is hit, but so is 0.0560% of ham mail — which makes it 99.2% accurate. By default in 2.6x, it gets a score of 3.67 points.
There’s a lot of divergence between people’s corpora — for instance, I currently have no ham mails that hit this, so it’s 100% accurate for my current mail collection; but some other people have an 80% hit-rate.
This is because some large-scale legitimate mass-mailers — for no apparent reason — also omit the Message-ID when they send the message across the internet. This isn’t quite a contravention of RFC 2822, but that RFC strongly recommends using the header:
Though optional, every message SHOULD have a ‘Message-ID:’ field.
(see RFC 2119 for what ‘SHOULD’ means — it’s a strong recommendation.)
The moral for legit senders: make sure you read the RFCs before you start sending SMTP; otherwise you’ll look like a spammer.
The moral for spamfilter developers: watch out for the legit bulk mail senders; some of them do really bizarre things with SMTP. ;)
Spam: Lisa Rein has captured the Daily Show’s segment on spam — ‘Email Trouble’ — Rob Courddry interviewing Scott Richter. (direct link to the 10MB Quicktime movie).
This vidcap leaves out the unfunny subtitles — and it’s on archive.org, so at least you’ll be chewing up non-profit bandwidth instead of someone’s personal-site bandwidth ;) If you haven’t seen it yet, go ahead and download it; it’s well funny.
(link found via Spamblogging.)
TV: from the #tvtorrents FAQ: ‘Wildfeeds’ are ‘a transmission by the network to distribute the episode before it airs around to the tv relay stations. You need to be in the correct location and have a large satellite dish in order to receive them.’
Word for the day!
Spam:
Guardian: Incredible Bulk, by Danny O’Brien. A great article from the
‘Spam and the Law’ conference. ‘This is why people such as Richter are
appearing from the shadows. They have a choice: turn legit, or risk an
increasingly criminal lifestyle.’
Also spam-related: Code Fish Spam Watch, which lists and dissects phishing attacks, in great detail. Some of those trojans are exceptionally sophisticated — such as this trojan targetting Barclays online banking, which actually takes screenshots of a CAPTCHA-style login protocol. Scary!
Patents: Disastrous for European software developers, that is.
It looks like Ireland’s EU Council Presidency is pushing through some nasty stuff on behalf of the European Patent Office. FFII says:
On all points where substantial controversy exists, the Council Working Party has taken the most hardline pro-patent view of all parties. They make patentability hinge on the word ‘technical’ and yet refuse to explain what that word means. They have refused the interoperability exemption which even the Legal Affairs Committee had accepted. They have rejected the freedom of publication. They are insisting on making programs directly claimable, something which even Arlene McCarthy and the Commission did not advocate.
Nokia’s Patent Department is leading the PR push:
The (Nokia call-for-support) letter calls on ministers to drop their objections, and to support a draft text issued by the Irish Presidency on March 17th: ‘All of Europe’s innovators, including individual inventors, small and medium size enterprises (SMEs), as well as large multinational companies, require patents to protect their inventions, provide incentives to undertake research and development in Europe, and to promote licensing and technology transfer’, claims the letter.
‘Nokia doesn’t seem to be counting Opera among the European innovators’, comments Håkon Wium Lie, CTO of Opera Software Inc, an innovation leader in the web browser market and producer of much of the software used in Nokia’s mobile phones.
Note that it’s the Patent Department of Nokia, not necessarily Nokia’s top brass, pushing this — here’s a relevant anecdote from FFII:
The patent officials never see the CEOs themselves, and when they appear in public, their thinking on patent matters may surprise the audience. Last week Airbus CEO Peter Kleinschmidt was invited as a pro-patent speaker to a panel in Paris but then, during his speech, congratulated his co-panelist Michel Rocard for his important contributions to containing the expansion of the patent system, which, as he described in detail, was slowing down innovation at Airbus.
(The economic studies and the US’ Federal Trade Commission both concur, incidentally. But it’s pretty unlikely a patent lawyer will say the same thing in public ;)
On the other side, 15 MEPs have signed their own Call For Action which points out that ‘patent professionals in various governments and organisations are now trying to use the EU Council of Ministers in order to sidestep parliamentary democracy in the European Union’ and urges the Council to ‘refrain from any counter-proposals to the European Parliament’s version of the draft, unless such counter-proposals have been explicitely endorsed by a majority decision of the member’s national parliament’.
Let’s see if Ireland’s presidency will do it the democratic way, or in a back-room deal, over all our heads…
Travel: I’m just back from a great road trip around Nevada and Arizona — lots of fun was had, and I even came out $100 up on the blackjack!
In other travels, my mate Eoin recently visited Muff, Co. Donegal, and made sure to get a picture of the event.
Muff is well-reknowned as one of those towns with a silly name; the story goes that they even have a SCUBA diving club, called — guess what — “Muff Diving Club”. Sadly, the reports are apparently greatly exagerrated. Eoin writes:
I have been hearing the story of the ‘muff diving club’ for the last 10 years, and now i can categorically state that its an urban legend. No such thing. There was a ‘top muff’ petrol station though where we picked up a few keyrings. The girl behind the counter was trying to give us all 200 keyrings left in the bag as she was so sick of muppets like us coming in for a laugh.
Pics: 
After nearly 2 years of
peripateticism, I’ve finally managed to track down my CD-ROMs of scans of
a select few of the pictures I took on the
round-the-world trip I took back in 2001-2002 (well, it wasn’t quite
round-the-world, just Down Under and Asia, but who’s counting).
Here they are:
And some highlights:
Politics: The massive opposition to e-voting without a VVAT by Irish Citizens for Trustworthy Evoting and others, has clearly got Minister Martin Cullen thoroughly needled.
As John Lambe points out here, in the Dail on Wednesday he stated that ICTE are ‘not experts in this field’, ‘have no expertise or international accreditation’, and best of all, he has resorted to the 21st-century equivalent of calling ICTE ‘reds under the bed’ — they are apparently ‘linked to the anti-globalisation movement’. Here’s a cut and paste from the online transcripts:
Mr. Bernard Allen, FG: Electronic voting is a good idea but this system has been badly thought through and public confidence has been badly shaken by a Government unwilling to listen to anyone but its own so-called experts. The Government has called the introduction of this system a step forward, a point reiterated by the Minister. I submit that it is a retrograde step based on insufficient knowledge on the use of technology. The Minister has a new toy and thought everyone would like it. They do not. The Irish Computer Society said: ‘Any electronic voting system must include a paper-based voter-verified audit trail.’ The Minister in his arrogance recently said these people were cranks and Luddites.
Mr. Bernard Durkan, FG: Are they cranks?
Mr. Martin Cullen, FF: They are linked to the anti-globalisation movement. The Deputy should check them out. They are all the same.
Mr. Allen: It is all a–
Mr. Cullen: If Fine Gael bases its policies on such people, it is no wonder it is in decline.
Mr. Durkan: The people concerned are computer experts.
Mr. Allen: We do not know what the Minister’s policies are and where he stands on any matter.
Mr. Paul Kehoe, FG: The Minister should know more about policy having been a member of more than one party.
Mr. Allen: Irish technology experts have told the Government its system must include a paper-based voter-verified audit trail.
Mr. Cullen: They are not experts in this field.
Mr. Allen: The Minister has made a serious allegation about genuine people–
Mr. Cullen: They are not accredited to anything. They have no expertise or international accreditation.
(Interruptions).
Mr. Michael Ring, FG: Fianna Fáil are experts on everything. They have filled every tribunal in the country.
Mr. Allen: The Minister has come to this House and–
Acting Chairman (Jerry Cowley, Ind): Deputy Allen should direct his comments through the Chair.
Mr. Allen: The Chair should ask the Minister to cease interrupting.
Mr. Cullen: Such comments are pathetic. It is no wonder Fine Gael is in such a disorderly state.
Mr. Ring: Fianna Fáil are the experts.
Acting Chairman: I remind Members that this is not a Committee Stage debate. We are dealing with Second Stage and I ask Deputies to allow Deputy Allen to continue without interruption, please.
Mr. Allen: The Minister has vilified people who cannot protect themselves.
Mr. Durkan: Outside the House.
Mr. Allen: The Minister should withdraw the allegation against–
Mr. Cullen: I have not vilified them. I said they are not accredited–
Mr. Allen: The Minister said they are linked to the anti-globalisation movement and suggested we should check them out.
Mr. Cullen: Yes, they are.
Acting Chairman: Deputy Allen, please continue.
Mr. Allen: The Minister should withdraw that allegation against people who cannot protect themselves.
Mr. Cullen: I will not.
Acting Chairman: Deputy Allen, please continue.
Mr. Durkan: The Minister has cast aspersions on people outside this House. In accordance with Standing Orders–
Mr. Cullen: I think they are proud of their links.
Mr. Durkan: On a point of order, the making of such an allegation is not in accordance with the Standing Orders of this House. Perhaps the Minister would like to comment.
Acting Chairman: The Chair has ruled on that matter.
Mr. Durkan: With respect, the Chair has no authority to rule on this matter. Standing Orders apply.
Acting Chairman: That Chair has ruled on the matter.
Mr. Durkan: No, I am sorry, I do not agree. On a point of order, the Minister has cast aspersions–
Mr. Cullen: I paid them a compliment.
Mr. Durkan: The Minister has cast aspersions on people outside this House.
Mr. Cullen: They will regard my remarks as a compliment, a badge of honour.
Spam: Don’t miss this account of the capture of a 419 scammer in mid-spam. Nice work, Steffen! (PS: I don’t think eating a USB memory stick would do any good ;)
