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Justin's Linklog Posts

Drop bears and Subgenii

Published August 5, 2003

The fearsome Drop Bear is detailed in this forwarded snippet from the forteana list.:

Drop bears are often mistaken for koalas, and to all but a trained naturalist, the differences are minor. They have even been reported to imitate the sleepy demeanor of their genetic cousins, probably as a sort of behavioural camouflage, and roughly one third of all drop bear related fatalities occur when a well-meaning tourist tries to pose with one for a souvenir photograph.

More here. Thankfully I managed to avoid these creatures while camping through Victoria last year — only just about though.

In other news: a great SFWeekly feature on Hal Robins, aka. Dr. Howland Owll of the CotSG.

Date: Wed, 06 Aug 2003 07:42:52 +1000
From: Peter Darben (spam-protected)
To: Forteana List (spam-protected)
Subject: The secret is finally out

While ploughing through the rapidly growing pile of Dungeon/Polyhedron magzines on my desk I found this little gem

—– (for the d20 Modern Gaming System from Dungeon/Polyhedron June, 2003)

Drop Bear

Although the Australian government officially denies the drop bear’s existence, these bloodthirsty relatives of the peaceful koala are the bane of Australia’s parks and forests. Named for their preferred of attack – hurtling down from the shelter of trees onto the heads of unsuspecting prey

  • drop bears are responsible for dozens of deaths each year, and the number

climbs with each passing year.

Drop bears are often mistaken for koalas, and to all but a trained naturalist, the differences are minor. They have even been reported to imitate the sleepy demeanor of their genetic cousins, probably as a sort of behavioural camouflage, and roughly one third of all drop bear related fatalities occur when a well-meaning tourist tries to pose with one for a souvenir photograph.

The internal government conspiracy to disavow the existence of drop bears relates to Australia’s recent tourism marketing. They certainly can’t sell visitors on the idea of coming to Australia if the visitors knew they were going to be savaged by vicious wild animals masquerading at cuddly koalas. Though the Australians themselves are aware that certain chemical repellents such as Aeroguard are effective in discouraging drop bear attacks, forestry service rangers are forbidden by law from explaining exactly why they so heartily recommend it. But as the drop bears’ natural food source, rabbits, are gradually reduced in population, it is only a matter of time before the drop bears turn to more plentiful prey : man.

[nerdish gaming stats omitted]

—–

peter

SCO, etc., etc. (fwd)

Published August 5, 2003

Someday, Ben will set us up the blog, and there will be much rejoicing. In the meantime, I can only quote this one in full, as he hits it on the head:

OK, I know you find this the most boring thing ever and would prefer to find new ways of air-conditioning your chipsets, but, come on! The human drama is nigh Shakespearean.

This guy is pretty good:

http://radio.weblogs.com/0120124/

But, really, RHAT’s filing stands alone. It’s a thing of beauty, as 27-page legal filings go. They give them both barrels; failing business, FUD, insider stock dumping …

http://lwn.net/images/ns/rh-complaint.pdf

ben

Trustic is down

Published August 4, 2003

Trustic: ‘We regret to inform you that we are no longer taking registrations and will soon be closing the service. We have determined that the system as it currently is designed will not achieve the level of accuracy that we require, and an inaccurate system is worse than no system.’

‘The DNS blocklist will remain for a couple of weeks, but it has been configured to never return a match. Please reconfigure your mail servers to not query the blocklist.’

That’s a shame…

P2P and open proxies

Published August 4, 2003

Joe St. Sauver’s excellent presentation on open proxies has been updated. Interesting snippet: Morpheus 3.2 — the filesharing app — is shipping with proxy support. P2P Networks Try to Throw RIAA Off Their Trail (AtNewYork.com):

Morpheus will offer its users the option of connecting to its network via a public proxy server (define). A proxy server acts as an intermediary between two Internet users so that one user does not know the identity of the other. Morpheus won’t be hosting the proxy servers but will instead direct users to a ‘worldwide network’ of public proxies.

iMesh apparently may also include this support, too, in an upcoming version.

press! and a whole load of quickies

Published August 4, 2003

Wired: Finding Bad Spam Delights Geeks:

When freelance Web developer Joe Stump first installed the e-mail filtering program SpamAssassin, he and a friend started a competition. Each day, the two would look through their junk e-mail and try to find the missive that SpamAssassin had assigned the highest score.

‘It was always a little contest between the two of us,’ says Stump. ‘We were always trying to tweak and modify the settings to get it just right. I finally won the contest when I got a spam with a score of 43.’

The points system has really been popular — as Joe Stump says — ‘geeks love numbers’. Screengrabs of the SpamAssassin website on Sky News, ABC, and now this! (thanks to Tim Schutte for the pointer.)

Linux: Wonder what the Ximian guys are blogging about? Ha ha, very funny.

Mark Pilgrim: How to install Windows in 5 hours or less.

Tim O’Reilly on parallels between OSS and the mainframe days. ‘We so often trace our antecedents back simply to the Unix heritage, or the Lisp hacker heritage. But when I’ve talked to IBM old-timers, they make clear just how many of the social dynamics and collaborative software development paradigms of the early mainframe era resemble the open source tradition.’ Interesting…

Humour: Chris recently set us up the blog — and kicks it off with this SCO 419 parody: ‘I AM MR. DARL MCBRIDE CURRENTLY SERVING AS THE PRESIDENT AND CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER OF THE SCO GROUP, FORMERLY KNOWN AS CALDERA SYSTEMS INTERNATIONAL, IN LINDON, UTAH, UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. I KNOW THIS LETTER MIGHT SURPRISE YOUR BECAUSE WE HAVE HAD NO PREVIOUS COMMUNICATIONS OR BUSINESS DEALINGS BEFORE NOW.’ On the roll!

C64 demos

Published August 1, 2003

ah, Donncha reminisces about the Commodore 64 demo scene.

I was involved too, around 1987, coding demos as ‘Mantis’ for XS — a pretty little known group. I wrote 2 really great demos, Rhaphanadosis, and another name I can’t quite remember ;), but they don’t seemed to have survived, which is a shame…

Excellent hoaxing lads

Published August 1, 2003

So it seems that P45.net were behind some classic hoaxes in the Irish media recently, including the Monaghan-Iraq story:

The New York Monaghan Association has issued a strong statement of support for the US military campaign against Iraq. This is despite being unable to carry their usual banner in the New York St Patricks Day Parade because of similarities between an outline map of Monaghan and Iraq.

Busaras comes clean, and Daev kindly remembers to provide 1 page that links to ’em all ;)

Techie tip: cooling Athlon XP CPUs

Published July 30, 2003

so Athlon XP CPUs run pretty hot at full speed all the time, and my PC makes lots of noise as a result. I have a temperature-sensitive CPU fan, so reducing the CPU temp will reduce noise, too.

A while back, I came across this doc, the Athlon Powersaving HOWTO, which contains a great tip — namely a way to put the processor in ‘STPGNT Mode’ (Stop Grant Mode), which disconnects it from the FSB and turns off parts of the CPU when not in use.

It works perfectly, in most respects, although the Ensoniq 5880 onboard sound chip goes crazy when it’s active, as it can’t deal with the changed timings from the CPU. But when I’m playing music, I can’t hear the fans anyway ;)

The details — to keep it brief, just take a look at the commands for my chipset as described here. I’m using ACPI in the kernel anyway, since I’m using software suspend-to-disk as well.

Lessons from history

Published July 30, 2003

I’ve been reading Crooked Timber recently; a good literate weblog. Today’s interesting post, from Kieran Healy: Frustration is not a Strategy. Well worth a read for some context on today’s Middle East, and the fundamental problem with those ‘kill ’em all’ proposals that keep cropping up from the hawks.

Blogs: Nathan Cochrane, Aussie journalist for The Age and writer of a very interesting weblog — has won quite a lot of money on a TV gameshow! I think the term is ‘goodonyamate’, if I recall correctly ;)

(Pity he couldn’t have fixed the BlogShares listing first though.)

Clueless spam quotes and free transport

Published July 29, 2003

NYT: Diverging Estimates of the Costs of Spam. The article points out how the analyst company estimates of the cost of spam widely diverge. That’s reasonable — in fact, that’s analysts for you. Some great data in there, too.

But then we get to this glorious quote:

Peter S. Fader, a marketing professor at the Wharton School who has studied e-mail, says the research firms’ estimates vastly overstate the actual cost of spam. … He also argues that the computers and networks that are being installed to deal with spam will be a powerful resource for processing legitimate e-mail, once spam filters and economic Darwinism tame the spam epidemic.

‘Spam, although it is a bad thing per se, is fostering the growth of the e-mail infrastructure,’ he said.

Yeah — in the same way that arson ‘fosters the growth’ of the firefighting infrastructure. Wow.

Ireland: I’ve just heard about the ‘no fares’ day of protest by CIE’s unions. It seems the unions, rather than closing up shop for the day as would be traditional, decided to take a much more consumer-friendly approach; instead of shutting down the normal public transport services, they ran them for free. Genius.

RTE reported that ‘tens of thousands of people’ travelled for free, and Iarnrod Eireann said that ‘there has been a notable rise in passenger numbers on some inter-city trains to Dublin as people take advantage of free travel.’ Now that’s an effective way to strike…

Referrer spam not via proxies

Published July 27, 2003

So a little more investigation shows that the massive numbers of IPs spamming my referrer logs (like 1000 different IPs every day), are not open proxies as I at first thought; I tested 130, and none had any of the well-known proxy ports open.

My current guess is that they’re malware, such as those ‘ad banner spyware’ programs, and the makers of that software must be doing deals with spam companies to set up the spyware to periodically load URLs in order to referrer-spam for the spam bureau’s customers.

In this case, all the spammed URLs are owned and registered by one porn operation, which is either operating from Switzerland (according to the tech contact info) or Los Angeles (according to the DNS info in whois). (More likely the latter.)

All the IPs doing the spam page loads, are running on Windows XP and Windows 2000 systems as far as I can see, with ports 1025 and 5000 open, so alternatively, maybe they’re trojaned… but there doesn’t seem to be any good evidence indicating that. (those ports are reasonably innocuous.)

Anyone got any ideas? Here’s some sample access_log lines for 100 IPs, gzipped, if anyone wants to check them out.

open proxy referrer spam again

Published July 25, 2003

Googlebot using open proxies? Somehow, I doubt it. An interesting snippet from the access logs again. (Some details rewritten to avoid boosting PageRank.) 

220.73.165.14 - - [25/Jul/2003:04:42:14 +0100] "GET /someurl/foo HTTP/1.0" 2147483647 0 "http://www dot gay-sex-men dot net/" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1)"
220.73.165.14 - - [25/Jul/2003:09:04:17 +0100] "GET /someurl/foo HTTP/1.0" 2147483647 0 "http://www dot gay-sex-men dot net/" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.0; Windows 98; DigExt)"
220.73.165.14 - - [25/Jul/2003:09:15:28 +0100] "GET /someurl/foo HTTP/1.0" 2147483647 0 "http://www dot baitbus dot ws/" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.0; Windows 98; DigExt)"
220.73.165.14 - - [25/Jul/2003:09:18:11 +0100] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.0" 200 130 "-" "GoogleBot"
220.73.165.14 - - [25/Jul/2003:09:27:57 +0100] "GET /someurl/foo HTTP/1.0" 2147483647 0 "http://www dot blowjobs-cumshots dot net/" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows 98)"
220.73.165.14 - - [25/Jul/2003:13:18:04 +0100] "GET /someurl/foo HTTP/1.0" 2147483647 0 "http://www dot hot-legs dot info/" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows 98; Win 9x 4.90)"

Some Fortean snippets

Published July 25, 2003

Some excellent ‘oddly enough’ stories:

  • Giant dog-eating catfish dies: a story mourning the death of Kuno, a 5-foot-long catfish living in the lake at Volksgarten Park in Moenchengladbach, Germany. It’s presumed he died due to a local heatwave and the resulting low water level. ‘Kuno became a local celebrity in 2001 when he sprang from the waters of the lake to swallow a Dachshund puppy whole.’ I had a run-in with giant catfish before; mind you, a bit nearer to their natural habitat, and with less pet ingestion involved.

    Catfish are in the news it seems; this NYT editorial is relevant, if a bit depressing. ‘The next time a … delegation sets off to preach the dogma of free trade abroad, poor nations would be within their rights to thumb their noses.’

  • Yahoo! India: Holding severed head in place, he defied death: van driver has road accident, then: ‘His head almost severed, blood oozing and eyes popping out, Balram was in a dazed state when the accident took place… He, however, kept his head attached to his body with some cloth. When no one came to help him, he drove his own vehicle for 30 km to reach a nursing home in Agra.’ Now that’s grit!

  • More sex than splendour on academy’s Aztec holiday: ‘When Andrew Humphrey entered a competition run by the venerable Royal Academy to win a week experiencing Aztec culture first-hand, he might have expected a genteel tour of the ruins around Mexico City, perhaps taking in the famous floating gardens of Xochimilco. Instead, he found himself tasting contemporary Mexican culture at a notorious adults-only resort with nudity, a ‘sexy pool’ and ‘adult’ shows.’

(All picked up via the forteana mailing list BTW.)

Soldiers in Iraq, and Vipul

Published July 25, 2003

The Killer Elite (Rolling Stone):

The twenty-two-year-old driver, Cpl. Joshua Ray Person, and the vehicle team leader, twenty-eight-year-old Sgt. Brad Colbert — both Afghan War veterans — have already reached a profound conclusion about this campaign: that the battlefield that is Iraq is filled with ‘fucking retards.’

Later on:

Captain America, the platoon commander who is almost universally disrespected by the enlisted men, seems to deal with the stress by rising to a state of jabbering incoherence. Up by the bridge there are four enemy dead scattered under the eucalyptus trees, along with piles of munitions — RPGs, AKs and hand grenades. Captain America runs back and forth, picking up their weapons, hurling them into the nearby canal and screaming at the top of his lungs. No one knows what he’s screaming about or why, but as another officer who came upon this scene later concluded, ‘Whatever he was doing, he was not being in command.’

Fantastic series of articles, well worth a read. (Found on stuff.) Similar to this, here’s an unauthorized weblog from a soldier on duty in Iraq — the inside story.

Spam: Good article by Vipul on spam filtering, at MIT Tech Review:

Here’s a list of three rules (created after the most important features of e-mail) that anti-spam software should strive to follow:

  • 1) Ability to send and receive e-mail from a stranger. (Whitelisting, payment systems, and challenge/response break this rule.)

  • 2) Ability to send and receive pseudo-anonymous e-mail. (Domain-based authentication breaks this rule.)

  • 3) E-mail should be free. (Payment systems break this rule.)

He said it. Killing off several useful legit uses of email, just to fix spam, is no good. Looks like he’s started writing his blog-like thing too, again, so I’ll be adding that to my ‘roll (assuming it stays updated! ;) No RSS yet though…

Great paper on Diebold e-voting systems

Published July 24, 2003

Great report auditing the security features of the Diebold e-voting systems. Summary: what security?

  • despite using relatively ‘smart’ smartcards, they don’t actually get those cards to perform an authentication task; they’re just used as ‘dumb’ memory cards, and there’s no central online database of valid card IDs. Plus, the same write password is used for all smartcards.

    So they really might as well have used formatted floppy disks ;) Duplicating cards (a card is a voting opportunity, ‘vote early, vote often’) would be pretty easy, from the sounds of it.

  • amazingly, the software does not record the ‘voter serial number’ that appears on the card, when a voter casts a vote. So again, duplicating the cards is trivial. Bizarre.

  • all that is required to extract the PIN from an administrator card is a smartcard reader; the PIN is immediately sent in the clear as soon as the card is inserted and the terminal-card protocol initiates.

  • for storage on the internal writable media, between voting and the final upload operation, the logs and votes are encrypted using single DES in CBC mode, with a single shared initialization vector. IMO this is not a big deal as far as I can see, as that’s only stored on the hardware; and if someone can read/write to that, they can subvert the WinCE OS anyway.

Then the kicker:

  • the votes are then decrypted before being sent in the clear over a dialup internet connection.

The mind boggles.

Nathan Barley v. Chris Morris

Published July 24, 2003

The Guardian reports that fake-news genius Chris Morris is collaborating on a new show with Charlie Brooker:

This has led to persistent rumours on internet talkboards and gossip sites that the show will be based around TVGoHome’s character Nathan Barley.

Barley, the star of a fictional TVGoHome docusoap, is a loathsome public school educated, Hoxton-dwelling new media type, obsessed with gadgets and extreme sports.

But given Morris’s fondness for windups and spoofs, this could just as easily be a red herring.

Apparently, Morris and Brooker have collaborated before on smaller segments. Whatever it is, I’m all for it. Fact times Importance equals News!

Gross: The Indian ‘fly boy’ has doctors baffled. ‘Doctors carried out a cystoscopy to clear the boy’s urinary tract, but the treatment has failed because two more flies emerged out of his penis on Monday.’ (aaargh)

Referrer Spam Gets Smarter

Published July 23, 2003

So, it seems the referrer-log spamming is getting worse. The earlier attempts all used a limited set of IPs; probably the real source machines.

However, the latest crop are now relaying through open proxies. Out of a sample size of 10 random IPs, every one was a proxy listed in the OPM blacklist.

The URLs being spamvertised are all pr0n; lots of .ws and .biz hits with pretty colourful names. Take a look here, under any of the top 5 hits. They’re outnumbering the legit hits by about 20 to 1.

BTW, it’s now pretty clear the practice of referrer-spamming is intended to gain Googlejuice; plenty of other sites have noticed it too. It’s worth noting that in my case, it won’t work — my log pages are all off-limits to the Googlebot for quite a while, but the referrer spammers haven’t figured this out yet…

Some notes:

  • the spamvertized URLs include perlcoders.com, openproxies.com,
    • cgifactory.net, so steer clear of those sites.
  • the User-Agents are randomised, similar to spamware’s randomised X-Mailer headers. Some samples include:

    • Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; MSN 6.1; MSNbMSFT; MSNmen-ca; MSNc00; v5m)

    • Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SC/5.10/1.14/Telenor; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)

    • Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1)

    • Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows 98; Wanadoo 5.6)

      My guess is they just took a large list of legit user agents, and used that.

  • I’ve now left them a few little surprises ;)

Spam Gallery, and Fusors

Published July 23, 2003

The Field Guide To Spam, by Dr. John Graham-Cumming of POPFile; seems to be a continuation of his ‘Spammer’s Compendium’ talk at the Spam Conference. Lots of examples of filter-evasion tricks used in spam, with a brief description, example, and categorization.

Worth noting some SpamAssassin dogma here: these may seem to be a good way to evade filters. However, since they are tricks that spam uses, and non-spam mail does not, they then make excellent spam signatures — and the spammers effectively just give us yet another way to identify their spam. ;)

Hacking: Fusor.net is a community of mad scientists amateur fusion researchers, building nuclear fusion devices in their garages and basements. They’re not quite self-sustaining yet, but they’re definitely working on it.

In the meantime, some pretty pictures of poissors, buggle jets, and fusion stars here. Thanks to Mr. FoRK for posting a link to this… amazing.

Missing the point

Published July 22, 2003

Gary Robinson points to an announcement of a new music service, BuyMusic.com — the announcement notes ‘users of the service will not necessarily have the freedom afforded customers of … iTunes … to transfer the music purchased to multiple computers and portable devices, or to burn it to compact discs.’

How do companies like this get funding? Surely it’s obvious that people are not going to sign up for services where they are stuck with crippled DRMware, and don’t actually get to own what they buy. ‘Here’s a car. Oh BTW — you’re only permitted to drive this within 5 miles of your home, it’ll conk out if you go any further.’

I suppose it’s hardly surprising, but BuyMusic.com informs me that my browser and OS are not welcome, in a surreal throwback to 1999. Ho hum, I’ll stick with EMusic, thanks…

In other news, I’ve just signed up for a mailing list called geowanking. Official: best name ever!

Clay Shirky’s latest

Published July 22, 2003

A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy. Clay Shirky does a fantastic job of wrapping up pretty much every important social software site on the ‘net in the last 15 years, all into one neat, tidy paper, then making a few comments that make sense. recommended…

GTLD Nameserver has corrupt data – again

Published July 21, 2003

There were some reports on the SpamAssassin-talk mailing list today, that all queries to the now-defunct orbs.dorkslayers.com DNSBL zone are now returning a true result.

Thomas Mechtersheimer pointed out the culprit: it turns out that b.gtld-servers.net, one of the top-level DNS global TLD servers ( run by Verisign, as far as I can see), is returning 65.246.50.11 for every query for a name that does not exist under the .com and .net zones. That includes second-level names, and anything under a nonexistent second-level name.

Take a look. a.gtld-servers.net is returning the correct NXDOMAIN results, b.gtld-servers.net is blissfully sending all this traffic to some poor UUnet dialup ;) 

dig 242.110.40.68.orbs.dorkslayers.com. @a.gtld-servers.net.
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NXDOMAIN, id: 27661
dig 242.110.40.68.orbs.dorkslayers.com. @b.gtld-servers.net.
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 52998
242.110.40.68.orbs.dorkslayers.com. 15 IN A     65.246.50.11
dig 4905893958xc98gdf9g8945.com @a.gtld-servers.net.
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NXDOMAIN, id: 9454
dig 4905893958xc98gdf9g8945.com @b.gtld-servers.net.
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 42344
4905893958xc98gdf9g8945.com. 15 IN      A       65.246.50.11

Update: It's been fixed, as of about 1200 PDT.

LXG spam (fwd)

Published July 21, 2003

League of Extraordinary Gentlemen spam, forwarded by Joe McNally:

From: ‘Allan Quartermain’ cids@sexualmarketing.com
Subject: ADV: See all of the LXG stars NAKED! – Must Be 18 Years or Older
To: ‘ ‘ zzzzzzzz@zzzzzzzz.co.uk

Joe says: ‘what, ALL of them? Brrr.’

Linux and MS: WinCE now customizable

Published July 19, 2003

Whoa: ‘This spring, Microsoft dropped the price of Windows CE and completely opened its embedded operating system to developers, allowing them for the first time to not only view and modify CE, but also sell products that incorporated the customized code.’

Really? So WinCE developers can modify and then rebuild and sell WinCE with code changes? That’s a big deal. It’s kind of unavoidable, though. That close to the metal is virtually impossible without source IMO.

Most-mailed story ever?

Published July 18, 2003

this story has been mailed 120 times since it was posted on Yahoo! UK at 11:30 AM GMT yesterday. Which is it? Yep, it’s ‘masturbating may protect against prostate cancer’, premiered at New Scientist. Most mailed/blogged story ever, I’d guess!

For some reason I didn’t post this to the blog on Wednesday when it came out, instead posting it to another list. But talking about it with some mates last night, they noted this snippet:

The team speculates that infections caused by intercourse may increase the risk of prostate cancer. ‘Had we been able to remove ejaculations associated with sexual intercourse, there should have been an even stronger protective effect of other ejaculations,’ they suggest.

Interesting!

Arlene McCarthy letter analyzed on patents list

Published July 18, 2003

In case you’re trying to reconcile Arlene McCarthy’s public words, about how the proposed EU legislation helps block software and bizmeth patents, and the FFII’s public words saying the opposite, here’s a helpful email thread cross-posted between the Patents list at AFUL.org and the free-sklyarov-uk list.

Also, Hartmut Pilch notes a prior letter which as yet remains unanswered; ‘All she has until now ever done is to send out standard answers to unspecific letters from concerned (and possibly naive-sounding) software developpers. Whenever someone tries to ask her more specific questions, there is no response at all. However documenting the fact that there is no response may also help. So please remember the public letter and point demand a response at every opportunity.’

The Financial Times has an article (paying subscribers only, but that link excerpts a part) which makes clear the difficulties. ‘oftware protection regulations across EU member states should be harmonized while also allowing software developers to carry on without the threat of patent searches and litigation hanging over their heads. He argues that the EU directive’s wording is opaque: The proposal lists computer implemented inventions as patentable, but this definition fails to establish whether it refers to software algorithms or inventions whose usability is dependent on software. Cane also notes that it is harder to see parallels in software invention and physical invention, and argues that there are few truly novel software inventions because most software is based upon prior work carried out by other people.’ (thanks to Gary Robinson for the link)

I Hate Windows

Published July 18, 2003

So I had to edit a Word doc. Left it for a few minutes, the network connection died, so I tried to save it somewhere else.

Foolishly, I did this by hitting File->Exit, knowing (ha!) that I could save it on the way out. All well and good — until something in Word decided it required the old copy of the doc to save the new one — even though that was in memory, since I could scroll around it etc. (it wasn’t a very long doc).

So it refused to let me save until I restored the network connection. I couldn’t be bothered doing that, so I hit Cancel on that ‘please restore the net connection’ dialog, assuming it’d let me just cut and paste the text, which is all I wanted. Guess what it did? That’s right, it just exited, taking the unsaved doc with it. Argh.

I’ve learned my lesson. Next time, I’ll stick with trusty (and sane) Vim. At least it knows how to do an Edit File UI, even if it’s not quite as pretty (or featureful).

Over-zealous spam filters, pt. xxix

Published July 17, 2003

Neil Gaiman writes about how, for several months, mail to his publishers, DC Comics, was intermittently disappearing into a black hole. Eventually, the culprit was found: AOL-TW’s spam/virus filters. Any mail containing the word ‘Sandman’ — ie. the name of the comic he writes for DC Comics — was being filtered silently, without notifying either the sender or recipient. Wow. His editor’s computer guy reported:

I’ve been informed that the reason why there was a delay in the delivery of this message was because one of several keywords were found within the message. In particular, the word ‘SANDMAN’ was found several times. This has been a telltale sign of one or more computer viruses, so the message was set aside to be investigated by a WB security person.

(Via Crypto-Gram)

‘Outside the Master Plan’

Published July 16, 2003

A good OCWeekly article about Irvine Meadows West — UC Irvine’s trailer park. The trailer park brings a little grit to UCI, and — bonus! — is apparently a good, fun place to live. Super-cheap too, at 130 dollars a month.

Unfortunately it’s going to be closed and replaced with a parking lot:

To the students, many completing their doctoral theses, the trailer park is their private refuge from the master-planned sterility beyond. They see the housing department’s decision to raze the park not as a bow to parking pressures, but a calculated strategy to destroy something ‘outside the master plan’–a phrase that’s become the residents’ motto.

NZ e-commerce sites getting business-method patent shakedown

Published July 15, 2003

<

p>The New Zealand Herald reports that ‘internet retailers nationwide are banding together to fight a Canadian company’s demands for them to pay up or be shut down.’ A Montreal-based company called DE Technologies has ‘written to several e-commerce operators demanding licensing fees for use of international e-commerce processes.’

<

p> The affected ISPs and e-commerce companies are banding together to fight the patent. The NZ Ministry of Economic Development is quoted as saying ‘This is a commercial matter. If people wish to dispute the validity of the patent there are mechanisms in the Patents Act (1953) for them to seek to have the patent revoked’. However, one company has received legal advice indicating that an attempt to have the patent overturned could cost up to NZ$150,000, and some background on the FightThePatent site indicates that there may also be only 12 days (or so) from today to do so.

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p> DE Technologies’ news page gives an interesting angle on their activities in NZ. It seems Ed Pool, the CEO of DET, believed in 2001 that it was ‘an insult to call it a business process. To this day, no one has been able to duplicate this design.’ However, it seems that by 2003, at least 40 NZ-based e-commerce outfits have now figured out the details, because that’s how many legal letters his lawyers have reportedly sent. One such letter demanded a $US10,000 signing fee, a ‘royalty rate’ of 1.5% on every transaction, and 11 US cents for each document generated.

Worth noting that the patent has also been granted in Singapore and the US — where it apparently caused a public outcry and was raised on the Senate floor as an example of a ‘bad patent’, before it was granted anyway.

Giant NYC Cube Becomes Giant NYC Rubik’s Cube

Published July 15, 2003

Astor Cube: ‘One of the most prominent landmarks in the East Village in Manhattan is a statue of a giant steel cube. The cube was built at Astor Place in 1968, and has stood there ever since. (jm: apparently it’s called ‘The Alamo’ by Tony Rosenthal.) …. in true All Too Flat style, we decided the plain black cube would look nicer as the world’s largest Rubik’s Cube!’ (link via MemeFirst)

Evan Alice Hughes

Published July 14, 2003

Congrats to Craig and Erica! Sounds like there was quite a lot of work involved for Erica — ouch — but the end result looks very cute.

Good choice of name, too — my friends Tom and Colette will be tickled by this one, given that they’ve named their son ‘Evan’, and their daughter ‘Alice’ ;)

Quick Links

Published July 14, 2003

Tube Rules — lessons in London Underground etiquette. My favourite: don’t wear massive backpacks.

Dave Malone on broken time-sync software. It seems Tardis, the popular Windows time-syncing software, used HTTP to get a trustworthy timestamp. OK, that’s pretty bad — using TCP/IP against a webserver to try and get a usable time — it’ll be several seconds off in most cases, and is pretty suboptimal in general.

But at least they set up their own server, instead of glomming off someone else’s bandwidth and CPU, right? Nope — they used a server at maths.tcd.ie, along with only 2 others worldwide. And they used GET. And they didn’t send a User-Agent header. And the server wasn’t even a public time server since 1996 anyway.

All seems well now — Dave instituted a policy of returning ‘1999’ as the date, and hopefully everyone has noticed by now. ;)

Finns Scratch Heads Over N.Korea Porn Claim

Published July 12, 2003

Yahoo!: Finns Scratch Heads Over N.Korea Porn Claim:

HELSINKI (Reuters) – Finnish officials were at a loss to explain an allegation made on Thursday by a U.S. official that North Korea has been caught trying to sell pornography in the small Nordic country. ‘It sounds strange. It sounds wild,’ an official at the Foreign Ministry told Reuters.

U.S. Ambassador to Australia Tom Schieffer made the comments earlier on Thursday to the National Press Club in Canberra, saying North Korea was using a ‘mafia-like’ business model to make up a revenue shortfall when the Soviet Union collapsed in the early 1990s.

Found on MemeFirst, which looks like a pretty nifty site. Now to see if I can rig up RSS for it. One of the MemeFirst culprits seems to be Stefan Geens, who also has a blog; he reviews ‘How The Irish Saved Civilization’ in fine style, comparing the annotations of the medieval Hibernian monks to blogging. hmm…

He’s stuck in Dublin, right now, trying to figure out a way to get hold of some bandwidth. I wish him luck.

Techie Details on The Reverse-Proxy Spam Trojan

Published July 11, 2003

Scary stuff — the techie details of the trojan discussed in the NYT article today — Reverse-Proxy Spam Trojan – Migmaf (LURHQ):

LURHQ was able to obtain a copy of the trojan – detected from suspicious activity originating from a VPN user on a firewall on a network we monitor. What we found was the trojan was not a webserver at all, but instead: a reverse proxy server. Instead of hosting the content on the victim’s computer, the spammer instead maintained a ‘master’ webserver. We have dubbed this trojan ‘Migmaf’.

Snopes: Urban Legends Urban Legend

Published July 11, 2003

Brilliant. From this week’s b3ta newsletter via the forteana list comes this work of one-liner UL genius:

Snopes conspiracy: ‘ Snopes was set up in early 1995 by the CIA as a way to debunk popular conspiracy theories, Companies and individuals can now pay to have their urban legend denied on the site, a prime beneficiary being Richard Gere.’

Spam: Hackers Hijack PC’s for Sex Sites (NYT). Good article about a (suspected) Russian spam ring using hijacked PCs and reverse proxies to host spamvertized websites.

Ceramics: Anyone who’s been following the IRTF’s Anti-Spam Research Group mailing list recently, will have come across Mark McCarron’s ‘proposal’ regarding an anti-spam system that has something to do with everyone paying 5,000 UKP, ditching end-to-end SMTP, stopping any non-human-initiated e-mail, and energy from the Pyramids of Giza (I think).

Surprisingly enough, The Reg wrote some unkind words, and now Mark exercises his right to reply. Unmissable, mainly for the details of his reign of terror during school and his ‘jack of all trades’ abilities.

Great fun, in a kind of ‘watching a car-crash’ way.

PI vs IP, and FIT

Published July 10, 2003

Nathan Cochrane meets the Aussie Privacy Commissioner:

We’re talking about a serious privacy vs piracy debate. On the piracy debate we’re talking about management of Intellectual Property (IP). I am a person with Personal Information (PI) and if that is taken away, it is an invasion of my privacy. I would like to hear these people (IP owners) making such a lot of noise about piracy of IP talk about the protections of PI — then they would have some credibilty. There’s a pretty ugly asymmetry in the debate. Both sides need to grow up a bit and be a bit more respective of both sides of the argument.

(Nathan:) For my part, I chipped in that I think it hypocritical that IP owners will kick in my door if they suspect I am stealing their IP, but to steal my PI is just a ‘business case’.

I like the ‘PI’ concept. Perfect timing, given this report on the new ATTBI/Comcast ‘Transition Wizard’. Check out this insanity:

Any Comcast user that actually installed the Transition Wizard has given Comcast permission to do the following;

  • 1) arbitrarily open and read your email without your knowledge and/or consent

  • 2) perform a credit check on you and then share that info with whomever they choose

  • 3) Perform firmware upgrades to your cable modem at their discretion, regardless of who owns it.

    You also agreed not to participate in any future class action suits that may be brought against Comcast for whatever reason. You agreed to this and more when you clicked on the ‘I Agree’ button during the initial installation phase.

Mind you, the actual text isn’t posted, so take it with a grain of salt.

Code: Danny’s notes on the FIT testing OSCon talk — that’s running a test suite as a Wiki. Interesting, but I have to think about how practical it is in general. Demo here, more complex demo here.