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Justin's Linklog Posts
Spam: I just got another Jody spam; 40 points
this time, and featuring the very latest in spam fashion, a .biz URL.
Ireland: The best programme on Irish TV, by far, is Sampler. It’s a great magazine series covering Ireland’s underground scenes, with several nice scoops, including being the only set of film cameras around for the police brutality that made the May 6th 2001 Dublin ‘Reclaim the Streets’ protest infamous. Great soundtrack, too.
Timeliness: w00t! I blog about Jason Salavon, and 4 days later Boing Boing and plasticbag.org both pick up on it. (and rightly so.)
Ireland: I’ve just come across Dervala’s take on the I am Canadian Molson ad. Total genius!
Bizarre: Given some historical context, it’s funny how absolutely
insane this sounds:
Guardian: At Home with the Fuhrer.
The best programme on Irish TV, by far, is Sampler. It’s a great magazine series covering Ireland’s underground scenes, with several nice scoops, including being the only set of film cameras around for the police brutality that made the May 6th 2001 Dublin ‘Reclaim the Streets’ protest infamous. Great soundtrack, too.
Naturally, it’s also had a long and illustrious history of no support from RTE, who just seem to hate the whole idea and would prefer they just had a nice, non-controversial chat show instead.
Well, Sampler just won ‘Best Special Interest Programme’ at the Irish Film and Television Awards. Nice one! (Not that you’d know it from the IFTA website, which hasn’t updated the awards pages in 2 years. — update: Simon points out I’m looking at the wrong site: the real one is here.)
Disclaimer: Luke, the producer, is a good mate of mine. But it’s still
a great programme. ;)
Go take a look! Episodes 2 to 5 are online in full, in RealVideo format — and encoded at a pretty decent bitrate.
Spam: I just received a spam containing this (HTML tags made readable by translating angles to round brackets):
Spam: The volume of spam continues to rise inexorably. Brightmail are now estimating that 54% of all mail messages are spam.
The volume of spam continues to rise inexorably. Brightmail are now estimating that 54% of all mail messages are spam.
Nowadays, my personal mail account is getting about 70 a day, rising to
over 200 a day at the weekends. It’s getting tiresome; pretty much
all of it gets marked as spam and diverted, but I still have to wade
through it ‘just in case’, and to build the corpus. I guess I need
to extend my .procmailrc to divert high-scoring spams somewhere
I can check even less frequently ;)
That’s not the really annoying thing, though. I use tagged addressing when I publish my email address, most of the time. It works very well to identify spam sources overall, and divert ‘dead’ addresses that are getting spam, into the spamtraps. That’s the plus.
But the curse of writing spam filters is that you need a good archive of spam; and one of our SpamAssassin corpus guidelines is to attempt to trim out duplicate spams where possible. Many spammers will wind up sending more-or-less identical spam messages, modulo random subject lines, hash-busters, etc., and with (let’s say) 8 tagged addresses in their lists, I’ll get 8 copies of that spam, and have to pay a little bit of attention to trim it down to 1 copy for the corpus.
Damn spam-filter development! All this corpus building is hard work ;)
BTW, note how spam load rises at the weekends; (Tim Hunter, Paul Terry and Alan Judge of eircom.net also noted this in their paper presented at LISA ’03 yesterday ;). There’s a good reason — spammers attempt to deliver their spam while abuse staff are not at their desk. Same thing applies in the network security world; many of those attacks have taken place over a US holiday weekend.
Hallowe’en: best too-late idea for a hallowe’en costume: ‘Top Gun GWB’ in his flight suit. In the end, I played half of the ‘Dr. Frankenstein and Monster’ pair (I was the monster, as C really is a scientist, and computer ‘science’ doesn’t count). Best costume seen: a very impressive onnagata kabuki player.
Patents: New Scientist reports that IBM have applied for a patent on “an electronic password ‘wallet’ that securely stores all your passwords, with overall access via a single password. The wallet pops up on screen whenever you are asked for a password. You enter the master password and the wallet then answers the online request by pasting in the appropriate password for that site.”
Patents: Slashdot gets a lot of stick for cluelessness. Now and again, though, you find well-presented arguments you won’t read elsewhere. Try these:
Patents: World Wide Web Consortium Presents US Patent Office with Evidence Invalidating Eolas Patent: ‘W3C Director Tim Berners-Lee urges USPTO Director to review prior art, take action’.
World Wide Web Consortium Presents US Patent Office with Evidence Invalidating Eolas Patent: ‘W3C Director Tim Berners-Lee urges USPTO Director to review prior art, take action’.
The specific prior art
exhibits cover several 1993 postings by Dave Raggett to the
www-talk mailing list.
Let’s hope the USPTO admits that their patent examiners never bothered to do a Google search ;)
Games: Commodore 64 old-timers may remember Andrew Braybrook’s classic Paradroid, easily one of the best games for that platform, and a classic by any standards. Here’s a copy of the Zzap! 64 review from 1986. Many thumbs up, and the bottom line was that Paradroid ranked as ‘THE classic shoot-em-up’.
Voting: Nathan Cochrane mailed in some great tidbits about the ACT EVACS e-voting system. (thanks!)
Spam: Lee Maguire on pay-per-mail schemes. A great read — recommended to anyone who has given thought to this system.
Nathan Cochrane mailed in some great tidbits about the ACT EVACS e-voting system. (thanks!)
First off, this Debian-news posting notes some snippets from an Age article by Nathan; Here’s some longer excerpts. It features some great quotes: ‘the only platform that provided robustness and voter confidence was GNU Debian Linux, with all source code released under the General Public License (GPL).’
And this one:
‘Classical voting systems, notably the Australian paper ballot, are designed precisely on such anti-trust grounds,’ Jones said. ‘We simply assume from the start that each and every participant in the system is a partisan with a vested interest in doing everything possible to help his or her favorite candidates.’
He said paper and pencil voting systems, such as that first used in Victoria in 1858, meet this test. Electronic voting does not.
This letter to LWN notes: ‘You might be interested to know that some of the work on this project is being done by ‘big name’ open source people, including Andrew Tridgell (aka Mr Samba), Dave Gibson (orionoco wireless LAN driver), Martin Pool (apache), and Rusty Russell (netfilter and other gross kernel hacks)’, and links to the code’s CVS repository!
It seems those guys performed the work on behalf of a Canberra open-source consultancy group, Software Improvements; Here’s the product brochure.
This posting to iRights gives a few more details.
It all looks like an excellent job all ’round, as far as I can see.
SoCal: some great pictures from Derek Balling down in San Diego. Check out those skies!
SoCal: Wild fires are raging throughout Southern California.
Wild fires are raging throughout Southern California.
Last night, I was reading J. G. Ballard’s Millenium People (thanks Lean, it’s great!) outside on the balcony, when the Santa Ana winds whipped up suddenly, blowing hot and dry and laden with ash — then the coyotes started howling.
It felt very much like the end of the world… freaky stuff.
Everything is covered in ash; the air smells of wood smoke; the sun is a minute cent-at-arm’s-length red disc; everything is lit in a very odd reddish-orange tint. And the nearest fire is 30 or so miles away. I’d hate to see what they’re like up close…
Somehow I missed all this in Australia… I hear Sydney was like this for a week over Christmas that year.
Some links:
Funny: A novelty dog toy which breaks wind as it bends over has sparked a major security alert at a US airport.
Networking: Tribe.net has a nifty feature over Friendster; you are encouraged to create ‘tribes’ for things, ideas, and places. Friendster, by contrast, discourages this.
Funny: C sends along a few classic album covers taken from this site. Here’s my favourites:
C sends along a few classic album covers taken from this site. Here’s my favourites:
-
John
- Bult – Julie’s Sixteenth Birthday
- Big Jake Calls the Waders: Big Jake? It’s _Badly Drawn Boy_!
- Millie Jackson – E.S.P. (Extra Sexual Pursuasion) : That damn refraction gets you every time…
- Joyce – Joyce : File under ‘dowdy’.
- Devastatin’ Dave: The Turntable Slave – Zip Zap Rap : I’m speechless. He hasn’t gone away either — nowadays he’s known as Devastatin Dave the Cyberslave.
There’s plenty more…
Voting: I’ve pointed to this before, but I use taint.org partly as a searchable database of annotated bookmarks, so — for reference — here’s the Australian Capital Territory’s EVACS system, an entire, open-source e-voting system:
The Guardian: Melbourne row over art ‘porn’:
‘Police in Australia have investigated pornography claims against an art gallery which exhibited a painting drawn from a 19th-century woodcut by the Japanese artist Hokusai.
The painting, The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife, is by an Australian, David Laity, and is valued at £5,400. It is being shown in a Melbourne gallery. Like the 1814 original, it depicts a woman copulating with an octopus.
Katsushika Hokusai was an influential Japanese painter and woodcut designer in the 18th and 19th centuries — more info and pictures here. (There’s a great exhibition of his work on at the Chester Beatty Library in Dublin right now, which is where I caught it.)
He coined the term ‘Manga’ to describe a collection of sketches. Who knew he also came up with the totally bizarre ‘tentacle porn’ subgenre of anime?
Movies: Inhabitants of San Francisco! Or people nearby who fancy watching a great documentary! According to the SFGate.com Morning Fix, the Castro theater will be showing the amazing documentary The Revolution Will Not Be Televised between Oct 24-30.
Patents: One thing that gets pretty confusing when one investigates the whole patents/open-source/copyright protection field, is the nature of the term Intellectual Property.
Software: Great LWN weekly edition last Friday; not only is there a very nice article about SpamAssassin, debunking the ‘open spam filtering rules considered harmful’ myth, but there’s a great tool tip: Meld, a new graphical merging tool.
Science: A lab rat writes up a report on his participation in two psychology studies on ‘Video Game Violence’ and ‘Violence In the Media.’
The Stovepipe, by Seymour M. Hersh:
The notes said that Jafar was then asked, ‘But this doesn’t mean all W.M.D.? How can you be certain?’ His answer was clear: ‘I know all the scientists involved, and they chat. There is no W.M.D.’