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Justin's Linklog Posts

Antarctica

Published April 3, 2004

Antarctica: I’m obsessed with the wierd collision of out-of-control bureaucracy, strategic-interests-disguised-as-science, and normal life in a way off-normal place, that is the US Antarctic program. It’s fundamentally a microcosm of what future space exploration bases will be like — lots of high-faluting science talk, quite a bit of ‘making sure we have a strategic foothold’ reality, and people getting on with life in one of the most amazing places they can.

Via MeFi, Sandwichgirl.com is a great journal site describing her life way down under — full of great little tidbits like describing Antarctica as ‘the island’, ie. ‘we are all taking bets to see how long it will be before he’s kicked off the island’.

It’s great, although thoroughly overloaded from all the attention right now.

File alongside Big Dead Place and The Symmes Antarctic Intelligencer — highlight:

‘Once you shelter one magic elf, you gotta shelter ’em all’, says NSF Representative Jack Hjorth. ‘I’ve seen it before. Pretty soon all science comes to a standstill and you’re runnin’ a magic elf halfway house.’

Protesting Against Software Patents

Published April 2, 2004

Patents: The FFII are suggesting a 10-day online ‘net strike’ to protest against the ongoing attempts to legalise software patenting in Europe.

The Commission and the Irish EU Council Presidency are pushing for unlimited patentability of software, heavily lobbied by multinationals and patent lawyers. They are ignoring the democratically voted decision of the European Parliament from 24 September 2003, which has the support of more than 300,000 citizens, 2,000,000 SMEs and dozens of economists and scientists.

As a result, I’m putting up a protest front page on these sites:

If you support the actions of FFII, please join in, or even attend the in-person demonstration in Brussels! We need to make it clear that the small software developers of Europe do not support these undemocratic actions.

And finally, shame on the Irish EU Council presidency for supporting the EPO hook, line and sinker. Thanks, and I know who I’ll be voting for in future…

EFF April Fool

Published April 1, 2004

Funny: EFFector Vol. 17, No. 11a April 1, 2004. Some pretty funny gems in this one: USPTO to Start Granting Indulgences, Microsoft Wins Patent for Software Industry Monopolization, and SCO to Sue Over Unauthorized Use of Earth’s Resources:

Lindon, UT – On the heels of its campaign against users of the Free Software program Linux, the SCO Group today announced that it will begin a new round of lawsuits against users of other free resources, including fire, water, air and land.

‘People think they can just use free things without paying for them,’ said SCO CEO Daryl McBribe. ‘This kind of ‘socialism’ is anti-American and a violation of the Constitution. It’s up to corporations like SCO to crush that kind of idealism.’

Ca Plane Pour Moi, GMail, and XCP

Published April 1, 2004

Music: Ever wondered what the lyrics to Plastic Bertrand’s classic belgopunk tune really said? (Apart from ‘I am the king of the divan’, that is.) Wonder no more. (…ok, maybe these are a bit more likely. ‘Ey up!’, indeed.)

Mail: Google Mail front page. It has MXes — but they don’t answer yet. No SPF record yet, either ;)

Funny: XCP – the XML Control Protocol ‘is a drop in replacement for traditional Transmission Control Protocol, or TCP. With the advent of XCP/IP, connection-oriented networking will finally move from the legacy environment of inscrutable bits and bytes to a structured, human-readable world relying upon XML. XCP is the first 4th Generation Protocol, or 4GP. It is designed for a networking environment that is very fast and very reliable – the Internet of today!’

Katamari Damacy

Published April 1, 2004

Games: Katamari Damacy (roughly translated as ‘Clumpsoul’) is a game where you roll around various landscapes, making a giant ball of ‘stuff’.
Here’s a review. It looks like sheer genius; here’s hoping it gets a US/Euro release!

GMail

Published April 1, 2004

Mail: Google announces new mail service. This is not an April Fool’s Day joke — just terrible timing. ;) It’s for real.

Diego has some good comments.

My thoughts:

  • Privacy: ‘we do not disclose your personally identifying information to third parties unless we believe we are required to do so by law or have a good faith belief that such access, preservation or disclosure is reasonably necessary to … (c) detect, prevent, or otherwise address fraud, security or technical issues (including, without limitation, the filtering of spam)’. They’re going to build one hell of a spam-filtering corpus this way ;)
  • A nice ToS clause: ‘Your Intellectual Property Rights. Google does not claim any ownership in any of the content, including any text, data, information, images, photographs, music, sound, video, or other material, that you upload, transmit or store in your Gmail account. We will not use any of your content for any purpose except to provide you with the Service.’

Maypole

Published April 1, 2004

Perl: Maypole

  • BeerDB. Maypole is a Struts-style web application framework by

Simon Cozens, and looks very nice. The number 1 attractive feature (compared to any Java MVC framework ;) is encapsulated in this tagline:

Maypole: if you’re writing code, YOU’RE DOING SOMETHING WRONG.

If/when I wind up writing a web app sometime soon, I may just give this a try…

One thing I’d like to see is a CGI::Application-based Maypole module, for prototyping (and for low-overhead installs, where mod_perl is too much to install). Looks like it’s well on the way.

Psychic Homeland Security

Published April 1, 2004

Funny: Feds Cancel Flight on ‘Psychic’ Bomb Tip: an American Airlines flight was cancelled because of a tip-off from a self-reported psychic.

The purported psychic’s call was ‘unusual,’ conceded Doug Perkins, local administrator for the federal Transportation Security Administration director.

‘But in these times, we can’t ignore anything. We want to take the appropriate measures,’ he said.

Suuuuuuure.

Slurpie

Published March 31, 2004

Web: Slurpie – (another) distributed peer-to-peer downloading protocol (via HtP).

This looks pretty interesting; no special server is required, Slurpie can be used to download files from a HTTP/FTP server in a ‘swarming’ fashion similar to BitTorrent.

However, Slurpie does require a central server of its own, which it needs to ‘know about’ somehow in advance, and that server will then know who’s downloading what. Not sure how you’d do that effectively; in this case, a .torrent-type file format that contains the ‘main’ file URL and a URL for the Slurpie server, might be more effective.

EPO Patents by Country

Published March 30, 2004

Patents: The pro-swpat lobby like to claim that software patenting will benefit EU-based SMEs and the economy, instead of benefitting large, US-based companies.

It’s pretty trivial to show this up, however. Here’s the figures, based on FFII’s stats on EPO software patent applications by country of applicant (current as of 2003/11/15):

Country of applicant
Patents applied with EPO
US 22778 46.84%
(All EU countries combined) 11855 24.38%
JP 10580 21.76%
CA 1074 2.21%
IL 724 1.49%
AU 525 1.08%
KR 500 1.03%
SG 95 0.20%
NZ 73 0.15%
RU 66 0.14%
(all remaining countries) 357 0.73%

So, a whopping 46.84% of the patent applications on file with the European Patent Office were registered by US companies, not local inventors; and only 24.38% of the patent applications were from EU-based companies.

Doc Searls rocks, and EPO patents by country

Published March 30, 2004

Linux: Doc Searls will be speaking at LinuxWorld Expo 2004 in Dublin. Apparently, he’ll be discussing DIY-IT — the ‘real’ Linux story (‘how the demand side supplies itself’). That presentation is great — strongly recommended.

(If you’re in a hurry, just skip to the funny part.)

Patents: op-ed article in the Sydney Morning Herald about patents and US-Australia ‘free trade’ talks.

… The cost of fighting a patent litigation battle in the US has dropped considerably. “Claims are now actually decided by a judge and only about 3 per cent of cases go to trial,” he says. “Therefore, costs have been limited dramatically. In most cases, costs are less than $US2 million.” (jm: my emphasis)

The question remains as to how many small Australian technology companies can afford to put up that sort of money if they believe their patent has been infringed or, worse still, if they have been accused of infringing a patent. (jm: exactly! the playing field is tilted dramatically.)

…

Local software developer Jeremy Howard believes that the US-Australia free trade agreement legislation has the potential to stifle local development. Howard has created two software systems with global potential, a portable email product called Fastmail (jm: hooray Fastmail!) and an insurance-industry package called Profit Optimising System. He believes two particular provisions of the FTA could be devastating to local software development. One is the requirement for Australia to have legislation similar to the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and the other is the stringent enforcement of software patents.

“The (DMCA) legislation removes the ability to use reverse engineering to make products compatible with existing products,” Howard says. “There are two negative effects of this. It reduces competition: effectively no one who writes software can be compatible with existing proprietary software. It’s also bad for security and privacy: people won’t be allowed to analyse protocols to see whether they’re secure because that’s considered reverse engineering. Thus, we see that this legislation will protect vendors from bad publicity as well as competition.”

Howard considers DMCA as a serious threat to the local software industry, but he believes a potentially even greater threat from the FTA will be a requirement for Australia to stringently enforce software patents.

“Many US software companies have huge portfolios of patents,” he says. “It costs millions to fight a (disputed) patent suit, so small companies will be forced to pay licence fees to patent holders or be shut down. This means that it will clearly not be practical for small software businesses to try to become established on the world stage. We’ll be spending more time worrying about patents instead of innovating.”

A very, very clueful article. Here’s hoping EU-based journalists are taking notes! The data about software patents being of much greater benefit to US companies than local exporters is a big deal, so I’ll write about that in the next posting.

Ann Widdecombe

Published March 29, 2004

Funny: The Guardian’s got a new agony aunt — Buck up! Ann Widdecombe’s no-nonsense solutions to life’s knotty problems.

My husband left his wife and child for me eight months ago. I have two children, younger than his, from a previous relationship. Despite what I feel was a very reasonable divorce settlement, my husband still spends as much on his first child as he did before, and still gives his ex-wife additional money whenever she asks for it. It all amounts to easily as much as he spends on us, his new family. I think we should be his first priority now, especially as his ex-wife is a professional woman and has ample funds for everything she and her child might need. He wouldn’t be depriving them of anything. Am I right? (Name and address withheld)

(Ann’s response — best read in a shrill schoolmarmish tone…)

He should have stayed with his wife as he vowed to do when he married her. You should have married and stayed with the father of your kids. Then you wouldn’t be in this silly mess, where the only victims are the children. Goodnight.

Also, overheard: ‘(European companies) employing US-based contractors these days is a shrewd business move due to the strength of the Euro — America is like the India of Europe.’

IJC Invents the ‘De-Bapper’

Published March 29, 2004

Funny: Hooray for the International Jewish Conspiracy! They’ve come up with The De-Bapper — de-baptize a fundamentalist Christian of your choice now, without their consent!

What brought this on? It seems the Mormons started it:

The Church of Latter-day Saints, a religious sect founded by a man who claimed to learn the word of God by putting his face in a hat, has been baptizing the dead, including up to several hundred thousand Jews. … Jews to have been baptized include Menachem Begin, a former prime minister of Israel, diarist Anne Frank, and the Baal Shem Tov, the spiritual leader whose teachings form the basis for the Hasidic movement. …

“Mormons baptize the dead using a practice known as proxy baptism, which allows a living person to stand in for the deceased,” explains Yosef Shmidt, counter-Mormon intelligence specialist. “The process is slow, and requires a ceremony that includes complete immersion of the proxy in water. ‘De-bapping’ is done on a specially consecrated Macintosh G-4 computer, known as the Mac A/B. It’s faster, and since you use fewer towels, better for the environment.”

Top ten De-Baptism choices include Mel Gibson, ‘S&M Film Director’, and GWB, ‘IJC Puppet’. Also worth a read over at the IJC:

IJC Yet to Choose US President: “The International Jewish Conspiracy’s Government Oversight Committee have still not decided who they will install as America’s next president … The Keeper of the Silver Spoon, who has overseen George W. Bush’s meteoric rise from AA reject to International Jewish Conspiracy puppet, fears his protege may be a one-hit wonder … ‘It’s not that he said all Jews are going to hell. … It’s that every time he tries to think for himself, he gets it wrong. When we told him to screw the economy, we meant with his stupid tax cuts, where the rich would get the extra. Instead he pours it all into the desert.”

And: href=”http://www.internationaljewishconspiracy.com/articles/ijc_031208_lizard.html”> Are You a Giant Lizard? You’d Be Surprised!: “Conspiracy theorist David Icke has claimed that most members of the Illuminati (including some of the world’s premier Cognoscenti here at the International Jewish Conspiracy) are, in fact, giant shape-shifting lizards called Draconians. Although Icke has singled out two Jewish families, the Rothschilds and the Bronfmans, the International Jewish Conspiracy’s Medical Corps fears that other INJEWCON Members may be at risk.” Read the article for some easy ways to tell (‘when angry, do you hiss and climb the drapes?’)

Arch – distributed source-control repositories

Published March 27, 2004

Software: sourcefrog: arch rocks: mirroring. This is incredibly cool:

Finally, GNU Arch lets you do this. Anyone can mirror a public archive. In fact, several sites such as sourcecontrol.net have set up to just mirror all the open source software they can find. Others mirror just intermittently, as a backup in case a primary archive is lost.

What’s more, because changesets are strongly GPG-signed, people using the archive can feel sure that they’re getting the changes as the original author wrote them, without any accidental or intentional modifications.

BTW, that ‘archive’ — in Arch-land, an archive is a source-code version control repository. In other words, if you want to track development work on a project, you take a private copy of the repository and sync up to every change as it is made remotely, in essence duplicating the central archive (although changes only go one way, obviously).

Then, if you have the privileges — you can merge any changes you make on that archive back up to the central one.

Very cool. I really need to take some time to get into Arch.

OpenOffice tip

Published March 27, 2004

Tools: a handy OpenOffice.org tip: when typing, you often want to emphasise a word with italics, bold, or underlining. Interestingly, OOo adds a nifty text-markup-influenced AutoFormat feature — if you surround the word with asterisks, e.g.

I really *really* think you should foo

it’ll convert on-the-fly to bold:

I really really think you should foo

I like it! It’s much more natural than CTRL-B, CTRL-U etc. Only pity is that _underlines_ don’t turn into italics — I know that seems more logical, but nowadays, an underline means a hyperlink, and IMO the italic is more widely used for emphasis as a result.

Craving an Irish Breakfast

Published March 26, 2004

Food: For some damn reason, it’s impossible to get pork sausages here in southern CA. The only good ones I’ve had were at the Cat and Fiddle, an english pub in LA, who do really kick-ass all-day UK-style breakfasts.

However, it’s been a while since I’ve been up there, and I’ve got a fierce hankering for a dacent brekkie — one featuring sossies, rashers, and black pudding. However, some asking around has pointed me to FoodIreland.com, which has a fine range of proper food — including what is recognisably a Full Irish Breakfast! (some readers may note the similarities to breakfasts in parts of the UK, but I’ll insist on calling it a ‘Full Irish’, thank you very much.)

It also does Proper Tea (heavy on the Assam tips), Marmite, crisps and Jammie Dodgers. Quality!

But there are a couple of minor nits — first off, it’s excruciatingly expensive. But money’s no object where a dacent brekkie is involved. Secondly, Lynx deodorant — WTF? People are willing to pay extra for that stuff? And most importantly of all — where are the King Crisps!?

nose-picking

Published March 26, 2004

Funny: According to a ‘top Austrian doctor’, picking your nose and eating it is good for you:

‘Medically it makes great sense and is a perfectly natural thing to do. In terms of the immune system the nose is a filter in which a great deal of bacteria are collected, and when this mixture arrives in the intestines it works just like a medicine.

‘Modern medicine is constantly trying to do the same thing through far more complicated methods, people who pick their nose and eat it get a natural boost to their immune system for free.’

E-Paper finally on the market

Published March 25, 2004

Tech: … nearly. The Sony Reader EBR-1000EP. 170 pixels-per-inch is a nice resolution, and in general it looks very cool, esp. considering the E-Paper aspects (ie. looks like paper, back-lighting not required, easier to read). However — never mind that it’s only available in Japan so far, even once it becomes available in the US, its pricing structure is moronic:

All three of the Impress Watch articles say it will cost around 40,000 yen – approximately $400 USD. And this is just for the reader, subscribing to the e-book service costs $5-10/month. They do, however, have the option of just purchasing single books for 350 yen, about $3.25.

Dammit — I don’t want e-books and their DRM and lock-in — I just want a HTML viewer like Plucker or iSilo, so I can use Sitescooper!

Also, it’s not yet foldable. Once I can fold up the reader into a little ball in my pocket, then fold it out again into an A4-sized ‘page’, I’ll be a happy man.

Still, getting there — let’s hope they get a clue and kill off that DRM. Otherwise, I can’t see myself buying one, even once the price comes down.

Funny: (in a geeky way): mentioned on LWN — ‘granted, drawing circles w/ GIMP is a bit like finding 2 + 2 by evaluating the integral of 2dx over the range 0..2.’

(jm: worth noting that the same applies for Photoshop, for that matter — in this respect GIMP has emulated Adobe’s ‘you need to buy Illustrator to do that’ attitude. That’s really quite bizarre when you think about it. Wonder if GIMP 2.0 fixes that?)

Blocked By SonicWall!

Published March 24, 2004

Censorship: This is pretty funny — a friend writes that SonicWall‘s ‘Content Filter’ has judged my home page and FOUND IT WANTING: 

  The URL
  http://jmason.org/
  is currently rated as:
  category 4 - Pornography

w00t! It’s true, I have some pretty hot pics up there — the accuracy of their content filtering product amazes me!

Antarctica – the Big Dead Place

Published March 24, 2004

Funny: Big Dead Place: ‘This site is dedicated to Antarctica and to thinking about Antarctica.’ It’s also pretty funny, and full of meat for an Antarctic obsessive like me.

‘The Thing’ review: ‘Common icons of Antarctic life are repeated throughout the movie with uncanny precision: spilled fuel; ubiquitous barrels; plentiful whisky; anti-intellectualism; resentment toward Norwegians being the first at Pole; general madness; obsession with generators; and black flags planted in the snow …. the most noteworthy deviation from actual USAP practices is that in the film everyone has a flamethrower. In the movie, fire is a tool against insidious dangers and is employed as an agent for the community against the threat of a larger hostile organism. In the actual USAP, employees are forbidden flamethrowers.’

Also — ‘The Finn’s Tooth’ — looks like they took cocktail advice from Eric Rescorla! (link via MeFi.)

Bet you never thought of this

Published March 24, 2004

Tech: Excellent post from Colin Charles here:

Which brings us to an interesting point. Computers today are largely based on metaphors that the average urban bloke understands. Like we have a desktop, to represent our workspace. How do we transpose such an idea to someone in a rural area? What about a blinking cursor, in a language like Urdu that has no translation? They’ve resulted in calling it a ‘firefly’!

That’s taking Danny’s ‘eating out of the trash bins outside a cubicle farm’ comment even further…

Jon Udell’s forged S/MIME signature, and spam

Published March 23, 2004

Spam: Jon Udell: How to forge an S/MIME signature, and Liudvikas Bukys’ take on the results: ‘Jon Udell tries his hand at S/MIME signature forgery, revealing that PKI is not a panacea. A digital signature proves something. The proof is strong but the something is weak (if it just demonstrates that you clicked a few things to get a persona certificate).’

He then suggests two ways to use this info in useful ways:

The first is ‘higher-class certificates (where certificate authorities demand more proof, and encode that fact in the certificate). But higher quality means harder to get and less actual deployment. And higher quality means more attractive target for theft of keys.’

In the anti-spam case, it also means that you trust the certificate provider to both (a) accept money from their customers to issue them certs, and (b) take away those certs from their own customers if they infringe by sending spam messages. This is the hard part. There’s an active financial disincentive for a company to do this; the people who benefit (the end-users) are not their paying customers, whereas the people who get hurt (the infringers) are. Economics dictates that they water down the requirements, in order to maximise their profits — making the system useless.

On the other hand we have: ‘reputation systems. Of course, building robust reputation systems is not easy. Users may wish to have multiple sources of reputation information to fit their own definitions of good and bad behavior and how fast those judgments are made. It replays the whole DNS blacklist deployment. Some reputation systems may seem arbitrary and capricious. Others may be too slow or too tolerant. They are all lawsuit targets. Will there be too many to choose from?’

‘zackly. An excellent illustration of how S/MIME or other PKI will not solve the spam problem, and we’ll still have the same DNSBL situation as we have now (although hopefully working a lot better).

S/MIME may solve the forged-email problem, like SPF does — however, like SPF it will still need to work with reputation systems to be usable as an anti-spam scheme.

New EU patent activity, and TRIPS says software is a ‘literary work’?

Published March 23, 2004

Patents: FFII: Conferences and ‘Patent Riots’ in Brussels 2004-04-14
: ‘The Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure (FFII) calls on its 50.000 European supporters and on 300.000 petition signatories, including more than 2000 CEOs of European software companies, to take to the streets in Brussels on April 14 and in national capitals around 1st of May, and to temporarily block access to their websites, in protest against new moves by the EU Council and Commission to legalise patents on computerised calculation rules and business methods’.

Last year, the European Parliament voted to exclude software and business methods from patentability. Now, it appears the EU Council is secretly planning to push that through regardless — so FFII are planning another round of protest for 2004-04-14.

In other news — the European Patent Office and other pro-patent bodies have always insisted that the WTO Trade-Related Intellectual Property (TRIPS) treaty required that software be patentable. However, this poster thinks not:

Article 10 of said treaty clearly states: a.. ‘Computer programs, whether in source or object code, shall be protected as literary works under the Berne Convention (1971).’

This is the strange thing you see, the statement doesn’t seem to mean that much on first glance. It is only when reading it closely that one realises that it does not simply say that ‘computer programs are automatically copyrighted under the Berne Convention’, it specifies they ‘shall be protected as literary works’.

Literary works cannot be patented because they are not inventions. Indeed if literary works could be patented one would have to concede that books, screenplays, and music could be patented as well although according to my research there is no provision for this in law. We would also have to apply patent laws to these areas since we are not allowed, apparently under article 5 to restrict on the basis of the field of technology.

On reflection, it’s actually a very interesting comparison. Like literary works, it’s not the idea of what software does (the plot summary) that makes it valuable, it’s all the fiddly details of its implementation (the full story). Hmm! Maybe TRIPS got that right after all…

Editable Text-to-HTML converters

Published March 23, 2004

Web: Dive Into Markdown — a great post from John Gruber about editable-text-to-HTML formats (he’s the author of Markdown):

… my actual workflow looked like this:

  1. Write in BBEdit.
  2. Preview in a browser.
  3. Switch back to BBEdit for revisions.
  4. Repeat until done.
  5. Log into MT, paste the article, publish.

Eventually, it dawned on me: this is madness. The primary advantage to using a computer for writing is the immediacy of editing. Write, read, revise, all in the same window, all in the same mode.

Totally agreed (although note, I’m using my own, very similar, EtText instead of Markdown ;). But this weblog is 100% EtText-driven, instead of HTML — I just throw an email at it, and it publishes it. I don’t think I’ve used the web interface in months.

Which reminds me — I really should steal some ideas gather inspiration from Markdown for EtText at some stage. ;)

LOAF

Published March 20, 2004

Social: LOAF is ‘a way to share your address book without abandoning your privacy.’

A nifty use of Bloom filters to share your address book in a one-way manner — when you receive a mail, you can query your LOAF db to see if any of your correspondents previously corresponded with the sender; but they cannot look up the LOAF file to determine your correspondents, unless they know that correspondent’s email address in advance.

This, BTW, would be a very good way to implement a ‘Do-Not-Email’ list — although the other two problems with those still apply.

Interesting stuff — although I wonder how acceptable the 4-8Kb MIME part overhead per message will be…

Windows Partition Pain

Published March 20, 2004

Computer: Argh. When I bought my laptop, I had no option but to buy it with Windows XP — IBM doesn’t seem to sell them any other way. (you can pay extra to buy it that way from EmperorLinux, but really, the main reason I wouldn’t want it is to save money, I’m afraid.)

Anyway, so I kept the XP partition safe, and jumped through various hoops to keep it in one piece; after all, it had cost me money to pay for that Windows license, and you never know when I might need it to upgrade some firmware or whatever.

Well, after trying (twice) to upgrade some firmware — the BIOS, namely, to get APM hibernation working — and having XP crash on me both times, I left it for a bit.

That was a couple of weeks ago. I just tried to check some files on the /windows partition — and something has scribbled all over the FAT32 sectors. Rien de Windows plus. :(

(Prime suspect right now is the Phoenix BIOS ‘suspend-to-disk’ tool — I just looks flakey, and I know it goes in and tweaks with some kind of undocumented BIOS wierdness. I bet anything it’s told the BIOS that the first FAT32 partition was a suspend partition, and one of the failed susp-to-disk attempts scribbled all over it.)

I suppose I’ll probably reinstall at some stage… if only to get this bloody BIOS upgraded and suspend-to-disk working!

Nominative Determinism

Published March 19, 2004

Names: Popbitch sez ‘Microsoft are just about to launch their new Windows Server 2003. The project manager who oversaw its development? Todd Wanke.’

Sure enough, it’s true. But that’s not all he did — he was also involved with the Windows 2000 Customer Love Team. No smutty jokes please, I’m being perfectly serious here…

Prior Art: Representing Queries in a DNSBL Lookup

Published March 19, 2004

Spam: DNS blocklists are a well-established, low-latency way to query a database of IP addresses for info. If you need to query a database over the internet quickly and in a connectionless manner, they’re ideal.

Declude have a page called how ip4r (DNSBL-style) DNS lookups work, which describes the general method:

  • input: the DNS zone for the DNSBL (e.g. ‘sbl.spamhaus.org’)
  • input: IP address to query about (e.g. ‘1.2.3.4’)
  • perform A, or TXT query to retrieve data: ‘dig
    4.3.2.1.sbl.spamhaus.org. TXT’
  • output: data (waves hands… not important right now)

All well and good, if all you have is a single IP address as input. But what if you want to attach more query parameters — such as your user ID, or some numeric value to set a ‘sensitivity’ level, like the SpamAssassin threshold system?

Easy-peasy: encode it in the looked-up hostname. Assuming you want to pass
a user ID number of ‘9583495’ and a threshold value of ‘7’ along with the query above, here’s one way to do it:

  • ‘dig threshold.7.uid.9583495.4.3.2.1.sbl.spamhaus.org. TXT’

Note that to avoid charset issues, marshalling into an ‘-a-z0-9.’ namespace is probably safest. Of course, a dynamic DNS server is required to process these. But the protocol itself, at least, will support it.

(Just brain-dumping here so I have an URL to point to in future, and to get it into archive.org etc…)

Megalithomania!

Published March 18, 2004

History: Megalithomania is an incredible website ‘originally dedicated to Irish megaliths, but now expanded to include all sorts of antiquities that are of importance/interest.’

The author visits sites each week, writes up brief reports, takes photos, and logs the log on this excellent website; every site is added to a map, and there’s a whole load of ways to find sites by location, by clicking on a flash map, by date of visit etc.

It’s a triumph of usability, very pretty, and who knew there was a kist in Dublin Zoo’s tapir enclosure?

Hope everyone had a good Paddy’s Day! (PS: note: most definitely not ‘Patty’s Day’.)

Apple doing a Speech-Driven Interface

Published March 17, 2004

UIs: Apple planning ‘Spoken Interface’ for 10.4. Damn! This was one of the main reasons I chose Linux over MacOS X for my new laptop!

You see, Linux has xvoice, which combined with a scriptable window manager and the now-samizdata version of IBM’s ViaVoice for Linux, means that a whole lot of UI navigation can be performed via voice.

Well, now it seems Apple are into the idea too — and they’ll probably do the job right and without the samizdata. ;) (Found via WorldChanging).

Politics: The full Bruce Sterling ‘State of the World 2004’ speech.

More on the WSJ interviewee

Published March 16, 2004

Spam: So this Orlando Soto guy again — the story hit Slashdot today, and the /.ers did some digging. It appears that Mr. Soto runs dduo.com, listing himself at the bottom of the page as ‘Orlando Soto – Webmaster/Owner’. He sells a wide range of apps, including:

  • IP Ad Web Sender: ‘Send your advertising message to millions of people instantly! Target your advertisement geographically! Advertising message on someone’s screen, the second you send it! To send messages, IP Ad Web Sender uses a program called net send which is part of windows and is installed by default in Windows 2000, Windows NT and Windows XP.’

Yep, that’s Messenger spam. But don’t worry, he flogs the solution too:

  • IP Blocker: ‘Protect yourself against a new type of annoying pop up spam message called IP Ads that can be sent directly to your computer anytime while you are online.’

Or you could just save your money and turn it off the easy way.

GPRS, and the price of it

Published March 16, 2004

Tech: GPRS roaming works… technically. Joi Ito gets a $3,500 bill for checking his mail around the world. Yowch.

FWIW, I’ve never met anyone who’s used GPRS for anything other than the odd demo, or emergency use only, except for employees of the mobile carriers — and they get it for free.

My bet is that the basic failure was a disconnect between the real world and the specification stages — someone somewhere picked up one of those massively-inflated analyst reports a few years ago, said ‘I’d like a piece of that road-warrior market which will be worth $5 billion by 2005, it says here!’ and set prices (to stun) accordingly.

Sad, Lonely Man Turns to Spam for Comfort

Published March 15, 2004

Spam: WSJ: For Orlando Soto, No Day Is Complete Without Some Spam.

Mr. Soto routinely comes home to some 150 e-mail pitches, and he loves getting them all … he buys stuff pitched in spam e-mail — again and again. He buys spam-pitched aromatherapy oils for his wife and pharmaceuticals for himself. … He buys stuff via spam for himself and to resell on Web sites he sets up — a business idea he got from a spam pitch. …

It’s mind-blowing — leaves you wondering how one man could be so gullible, and hand over so much money to some of the world’s dodgiest vendors, without even any concept of comparison shopping (and without falling victim to identity theft and a cleared-out bank account). Until you get to this line:

In the past, Mr. Soto says he has sent out spam himself,

Aha.

but he doesn’t any more for fear of the increasing multitude of federal and state spam regulations now on the books.

Of course. (link via Craig)

Aliso Viejo and Dihydrogen Monoxide

Published March 15, 2004

Funny: AP: SoCal city falls victim to Internet hoax, considers banning items made
with water. It’s the old ‘dihydrogen monoxide’ hoax again:

‘It’s embarrassing,’ said City Manager David J. Norman. ‘We had a paralegal who did bad research.’

The paralegal apparently fell victim to one of the many official looking Web sites that have been put up by pranksters to describe dihydrogen monoxide as ‘an odorless, tasteless chemical’ that can be deadly if accidentally inhaled.

So — ha ha, stupid Aliso Viejo city officials. But seriously — why is a paralegal making decisions on scientific issues? Isn’t that what the EPA and their environmental scientists are there for? Tail wagging the dog, I think.

Thank you, MS Word Metadata

Published March 15, 2004

Politics: California AG forwards anti-P2P screed on behalf of the MPAA.

However, the metadata associated with the Microsoft Word document indicates it was either drafted or reviewed by a senior vice president of the Motion Picture Association of America. According to this metadata (automatically generated by the Word application), the document’s author or editor is ‘stevensonv.’ (The metadata of a document is viewable through the File menu under Properties.)

Sources tell Wired News that the draft letter’s authorship is attributed to Vans Stevenson, the MPAA’s senior vice president for state legislative affairs. MPAA representatives have issued similar criticisms of P2P technology in the past. Stevenson could not be reached for comment.

Funny: Humorix: Feds Unveil Practical Method To Combat Spam. ”If a spammer
has access to a list of millions of clue-impaired users, they won’t need to bother sending spam to anybody else’, Thullweppon argued.’ (thanks to Kenneth Porter for the link!)