Security: Ross Anderson, crypto and security guru extraordinaire, moonlights as — wait for it — a street bagpipe player:
Justin's Linklog Posts
Hacks: Nearly-Live Planetary Desktop Backgrounds. ‘a selection of desktop-sized high-quality PNG images, using near-real-time cloud data, and some very nicely rendered maps using satellite data, to create a nifty, nearly-live world map desktop background.’
Funny: Kiera Knightley’s photoshop boobjob has been all over the place recently — it’s a pretty extensive reworking. But then, that’s standard practice nowadays…
Web: Worth noting for the various sites in Ireland and the UK that I’ve heard of recently, who have been looking for ways to do shared, collaborative calendaring of upcoming public events: upcoming.org is your man.
Unix: via
Ted Leung,
Adam Rosi-Kessel’s Linux Tips page has some very useful tips, and
this one’s great — to avoid
getting SSH connection resets, add the following to your .ssh/config:
Movies: Hacking Netflix, via torrez.
Web: Back in 2002, it occurred to someone to check the Google search results for ‘http’, to figure out what the most popular sites were.
Spam: we’ve decided that SpamAssassin needs a logo update. If you’ve got the skills (and let’s face it, it wouldn’t be too hard to top my effort), please feel free to enter a logo in the contest!
TV: RTE’s ‘Prime Time’ secured a fantastic interview with GWB, with Carole Coleman asking a few very pointed questions. Watch it with RealPlayer, or listen to the audio in MP3 (2.7Mb).
Ireland: Here’s a hot UL that’s floating around the irish web right now —
Web: Minor software announcement — after some time using HTMLThumbnail, album, and even WebMake to build photo galleries, I finally got peeved enough, and gave in to the temptation of ‘not invented here’. ;)
Spam: SpamAssassin is now officially an Apache top-level project! InternetNews.com coverage:
Spam: or, ‘SlashDot spam drama’. So, a few days ago, I forwarded a link to a paper I’d been sent — it’s a great paper, and I’m not just saying that because SpamAssassin did well — it really tests some of the popular open-source spam filters comprehensively, and correctly. (The authors have 24 years of information retrieval research between them.)
UNIX: I’ve just made the first change to my core bash
configuration in years, to add
-b to the set command-line. It triggered some thinking about
when the last one was.
Software: Mark Twomey, in response to all the Win32 API stuff recently:
Security: some crypto drama.
Net: WINW Is Not WASTE: ‘WINW is a small worlds networking utility. It was inspired by WASTE … (WINW) has diverged from its original mission to create a clean-room WASTE clone. Today, the WINW feature set is different from that of WASTE, and its protocol is incompatible with WASTE’s protocol. However, WINW and WASTE achieve similar goals: they allow people who trust each other to communicate securely.’
Software: Economist: Unix’s founding fathers (via sourcefrog.net). A very good article on Thompson, Kernighan and Ritchie’s amazing achievement, with some new details I hadn’t heard before:
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.
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.
MS’ latest patent
Patents: Oh, come on. USPTO: task list window for use in an integrated development environment. Here’s claim 1: