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Justin's Linklog Posts

More pics of the wild fires, and going for a SONGS

Published October 27, 2003

SoCal: some great pictures from Derek Balling down in San Diego. Check out those skies!

Nukes: Great! The OC Weekly reports ‘the much-maligned San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station (SONGS) has finally gotten some recognition — but probably not the kind it wants: it now ranks (third) among the U.S. facilities most likely to suffer a meltdown, according to the Union of Concerned Scientists, a scientific group that monitors nuclear safety.’

A serious meltdown at SONGS would result in a massive release of radioactivity that could immediately kill more than 100,000 people in South County and northern San Diego County and ultimately cause hundreds of thousands of cases of cancer and genetic defects.

That’s 15 miles away from me, fact fans. Mind you, having grown up directly west of Sellafield’s discharge pipes, I’m used to a bit of radioactivity ;)

It’s the end of the world as we know it…

Published October 27, 2003

SoCal: 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:

It’s the end of the world as we know it…

Published October 27, 2003

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:

On the reliability of e-voting machines

Published October 23, 2003

Tech: Diebold tech support:

‘I have been waiting for someone to give me an explanation as to why Precinct 216 gave Al Gore a minus 16022 when it was uploaded. Will someone please explain this so that I have the information to give the auditor instead of standing here “looking dumb”.’

Wonderful.

Worst album covers ever

Published October 23, 2003

Funny: C sends along a few classic album covers taken from this site. Here’s my favourites:

There’s plenty more…

Worst album covers ever

Published October 23, 2003

C sends along a few classic album covers taken from this site. Here’s my favourites:

There’s plenty more…

Tentacle Porn has a long and illustrious history

Published October 22, 2003

Japan: 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?

E-Voting: ACT’s open-source e-voting system

Published October 22, 2003

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:

EVACS is the computer system that provides for electronic voting and electronic counting for ACT Legislative Assembly elections. It provides for counting according to the Hare-Clark electoral system rules set out in the Electoral Act 1992.

EVACS was written using Linux open source software to ensure appropriate transparency. A copy of the source code is available in a zip file (127 kb). The source code for the casual vacancy module is in a separate file (38 kb). For more information contact Software Improvements.

Still not perfect — it uses electronic ballot stations, instead of paper ballots — but it does support paper ballots. And it’s open source; note the keyword above — ‘appropriate transparency‘. They said it, not me ;)

Tentacle Porn has a long and illustrious history

Published October 22, 2003

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?

SF film tip: ‘The Revolution Will Not Be Televised’

Published October 22, 2003

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.

I’ve blogged this before, but quick recap: it’s an incredible movie documenting what happened in the Venezuelan Presidential Palace on April 11th 2002, when President Hugo Chavez was briefly deposed by a coup d’etat. It covers the entire period, and amazingly has pretty-much full access to everything that Chavez, his cabinet, and his loyal soldiers did and said. A sample:

‘On the day of the coup, we only began realising what was actually going on when the state TV signal was cut. Up until then, people had been shot and there was a terrible sense of confusion, but still the reality of what was taking place hadn’t exactly sunk in. Then later that night, the media started saying that Chavez had fled to Cuba and that he had resigned, when in fact he was in the palace — and so were we. It became clear then that something very calculated and sinister was unfolding.’

Really, it’s well worth watching. Due to its comments on the actions, and spin, of the current US administration, Harry Knowles reckons it’ll never get a public release in the US outside a film festival (and I’d agree) — so you’re going to have to watch it in a lefty theater or nothing.

(BTW the website needs some work though — it uses the horrible ‘reinventing the scrollbar’ DHTML trick, urgh.)

On ‘Intellectual Property’

Published October 22, 2003

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.

What’s called ‘IP’ consists of three parts: copyright, patents, and trademarks. This extract from Harvard’s ‘Intellectual Property in Cyberspace’ series notes:

In the eighteenth century, lawyers and politicians were more likely to refer to patents and copyrights as ‘monopolies’ than they were to refer to them as forms of ‘property.’ … Thomas Jefferson was the most prominent adherent of this view, but many others shared his attitude to varying degrees. ….

Another, more general manifestation of the same trend has been the growing power of the phrase ‘intellectual property.’ Before the Second World War, use of the phrase as shorthand for copyrights, patents, trademarks, and related entitlements was rare. Since that time, it has become steadily more common. n105 Today, it is the standard way for lawyers and law teachers to refer to the field.

Why does the popularity of the term matter? The answer … is that legal discourse has power. Specifically, the use of the term ‘property’ to describe copyrights, patents, trademarks, etc. conveys the impression that they are fundamentally ‘like’ interests in land or tangible personal property — and should be protected with the same generous panoply of remedies. ….

Regrettably, the pleas by Cohen and a few others that judges jettison the concept of ‘property’ and frankly confront the public policy implications of protecting certain kinds of information fell largely on deaf ears. The ‘propertization’ of the field continued — and is now well-nigh complete.

It’s common to read commentary by outsiders — journalists especially — who conflate all three forms of ‘IP’, and therefore assuming that all three should be considered as ‘equal’ to physical property. In other words, they fall into this trap.

In reality, a trademark should have much more protection than a patent; copyright over ‘bits’ is not the same thing as physical ownership of atoms; the concept of the public domain is a whole lot different between ‘things’ and ‘bits’; there’s a difference.

To this end, this disclaimer from the UN World Summit on the Information Society is very significant; they’ve recognised these issues.

This working group has come to recognize that the term ‘intellectual property rights’ carries bias and encourages simplistic overgeneralization. Therefore this working group does not carry the name IPR. In particular, this group does not endorse the legal school of thought, which advocates that productions of the mind shall be treated in a similar way as real estate property. This legal doctrine implicitly backs the concept that copyrights should last for ever.

Nice work! (thanks to Russell McOrmond and Seth Johnson for noting it.)

Meld for graphical merging

Published October 22, 2003

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.

Basically, when you have two pieces of text, and want to merge them together into one, you need a merge tool. This is a tricky job; most people just get the tool to stick them all in one file, CVS-style, and try to figure it out visually. It’s fraught with problems.

Hence the idea of using a GUI to ease the task. There have been other graphical merge tools before; I know of the proprietary one bundled with ClearCase, and tkdiff. However, both of these just aren’t very good — it’s quite simply too hard to figure out exactly what direction which piece of text came from.

Looks like meld is a fantastic effort to fix this; take a look at the screenshots. The key is the approach they’ve taken of having a drawable area in the middle between the two differing texts; this is used for lines and graphical indications of what came from where. It really seems to work, from what I can see.

Dodgy computer games studies

Published October 21, 2003

Science: A lab rat writes up a report on his participation in two psychology studies on ‘Video Game Violence’ and ‘Violence In the Media.’

Sadly, it seems clear that the video-game violence study will return biased results due to flawed test conditions.

Of the three games played, the most violent — a first-person shooter — was modified, either through incompetence or deliberate tweaking, to use frustrating control settings and a high level of difficulty; whereas the least violent — a sim game — was set up with all the defaults and automatic help enabled.

In my experience, frustration, in any task, has a direct correlation with anger levels. So a frustrating game, violent or not, will probably give more aggressive responses in a violence measurement — hence the FPS game above will almost definitely be cited as ‘inciting violent emotions’.

Bad scientists! No doctorate!

PS: hmm, I wonder if the paper will document the exact configuration
of the games?

Linux: Happy birthday, KDE! I love it. Most recent discovery: the excellent support for printing in KDE 3.1 using the kprinter GUI.

Control your life support via the Internet!

Published October 20, 2003

Security: Romania Emerges As Nexus of Cybercrime (AP). Contains this glorious nightmare scenario:

BUCHAREST, Romania – It was nearly 70 degrees below zero outside, but the e-mail on a computer at the South Pole Research Center sent a different kind of chill through the scientists inside.

‘I’ve hacked into the server. Pay me off or I’ll sell the station’s data to another country and tell the world how vulnerable you are,’ the message warned.

Proving it was no hoax, the message included scientific data showing the extortionist had roamed freely around the server, which controlled the 50 researchers’ life-support systems.

One question: why was an internet-connected computer controlling the life support systems? eeek.

Control your life support via the Internet!

Published October 20, 2003

Romania Emerges As Nexus of Cybercrime (AP). Contains this glorious nightmare scenario:

BUCHAREST, Romania – It was nearly 70 degrees below zero outside, but the e-mail on a computer at the South Pole Research Center sent a different kind of chill through the scientists inside.

‘I’ve hacked into the server. Pay me off or I’ll sell the station’s data to another country and tell the world how vulnerable you are,’ the message warned.

Proving it was no hoax, the message included scientific data showing the extortionist had roamed freely around the server, which controlled the 50 researchers’ life-support systems.

One question: why was an internet-connected computer controlling the life support systems? eeek.

Compare and Contrast

Published October 20, 2003

Politics: Eli Lilly wants it both ways. First off pro-free-market:

Not many U.S. companies would put ‘maintenance of free market’ at the top of their worry list, but the pharmaceutical industry has genuine reasons for concern.

But then, anti-free-market!:

Starting immediately, if a Canadian wholesaler tries to order more Lilly product than Lilly’s estimate of what is appropriate for Canadian use, ‘they will not be able to have it,’ Smith said.

‘Don’t eat slugs’

Published October 20, 2003

Funny: The Medical Journal of Australia has issued a warning: Australians, don’t eat slugs. ‘The warning came after a Sydney student contracted a potentially deadly form of meningitis after eating a slug for a $20 bet.’

Secsed-up

Published October 20, 2003

Humour: Data::Secs2 — canoncial string for nested data. A format for representing nested data structures in accordance with SEMI E5-94, Semiconductor Equipment Communications Standard 2 (SECS-II), apparently pronounced “‘sex two’ with gusto and a perverted smile.”

The manual page goes on:

In order not to plagarize college students, credit must be given where credit is due. Tony Blair, when he was a college intern at Intel Fab 4, in London invented the SEMI SECS standards. When the Intel Fab 4 management discovered Tony’s secsification of their host and equipment, they elected to have security to escort Tony out the door. This was Mr. Blair’s introduction to elections which he leverage into being elected prime minister. In this new position he used the skills he learned at the Intel fab to secsify intelligence reports on Iraq’s weopons of mass distruction.

‘Secsed-up’, surely!?

Using a Web of Trust to stop spam

Published October 20, 2003

Spam: Been thinking about a distributed ‘web of trust’ approach to fighting spam.

Combine those with another key point — that we do not need PKI, crypto, or any other changes to identify senders in current SMTP — and it could be done today, I think.

Why we don’t need crypto to identify an SMTP sender

Every email message delivered via SMTP across the internet will contain these headers:

  • the From line
  • one or more Received headers

Traditionally, whitelisting uses just the From line, which is vulnerable to spoofing. SpamAssassin used this up to version 2.3x. Spammers started spoofing mails where ‘From’ was the same as ‘To’, and since most people had themselves in the whitelist, that worked. boo.

In 2.3x or 2.4x, we added code to extract the IP addresses from the Received headers, and use a combined token — ( from_address, ip_address ) — as the sender’s address.

(In fact, we use just the top 24 bits of each IP to deal with situations like DHCP or dialup pools, where a relay may get a different IP every now and again. That’s close enough, at least.)

This is much harder to forge without doing a full-scale TCP spoofing attack; which is why the SpamAssassin auto-whitelist generally works well.

So basically, to identify someone strongly enough to provide a spam fix in plain old vanilla current SMTP, gen up a string containing their ‘From’ address, along with all the /24 masks of the IP addresses found in the ‘Received’ headers.

Remove your relays’ IP addresses, and you have an unspoofable ID for that person’s SMTP traffic. Any spammer who wants to spoof that, will have to compromise their mail server (or a server in the same /24). That’s not cost-effective for spamming.

Note that whitelisting based on that is effectively what the SpamAssassin auto-whitelist does. But for that to be more useful than the AWL, it has to extend over the internet to those people your friends haven’t corresponded with yet; ie. it’s got to be distributed.

(If you would like to comment on this scheme, I’d prefer if you could post comments at this QuickTopic forum.)

Using a Web of Trust to stop spam

Published October 20, 2003

Been thinking about a distributed ‘web of trust’ approach to fighting spam.

Combine those with another key point — that we do not need PKI, crypto, or any other changes to identify senders in current SMTP — and it could be done today, I think.

Why we don’t need crypto to identify an SMTP sender

Every email message delivered via SMTP across the internet will contain these headers:

  • the From line
  • one or more Received headers

Traditionally, whitelisting uses just the From line, which is vulnerable to spoofing. SpamAssassin used this up to version 2.3x. Spammers started spoofing mails where ‘From’ was the same as ‘To’, and since most people had themselves in the whitelist, that worked. boo.

In 2.3x or 2.4x, we added code to extract the IP addresses from the Received headers, and use a combined token — ( from_address, ip_address ) — as the sender’s address.

(In fact, we use just the top 24 bits of each IP to deal with situations like DHCP or dialup pools, where a relay may get a different IP every now and again. That’s close enough, at least.)

This is much harder to forge without doing a full-scale TCP spoofing attack; which is why the SpamAssassin auto-whitelist generally works well.

So basically, to identify someone strongly enough to provide a spam fix in plain old vanilla current SMTP, gen up a string containing their ‘From’ address, along with all the /24 masks of the IP addresses found in the ‘Received’ headers.

Remove your relays’ IP addresses, and you have an unspoofable ID for that person’s SMTP traffic. Any spammer who wants to spoof that, will have to compromise their mail server (or a server in the same /24). That’s not cost-effective for spamming.

Note that whitelisting based on that is effectively what the SpamAssassin auto-whitelist does. But for that to be more useful than the AWL, it has to extend over the internet to those people your friends haven’t corresponded with yet; ie. it’s got to be distributed.

(If you would like to comment on this scheme, I’d prefer if you could post comments at this QuickTopic forum.)

That Forbes Article

Published October 19, 2003

Open Source: Forbes: Linux’s Hit Men.

The dispute, which was leaked to an Internet message board, offers a rare peek into the dark side of the free software movement–a view that contrasts with the movement’s usual public image of happy software proles linking arms and singing the ‘Internationale’ while freely sharing the fruits of their code-writing labor.

(Here we go again — the old ‘free software is communism’ line, cf. the ‘Give Communism A Try!’ / Nazi Penguin posters SCO made up earlier this year.)

The article goes on to bemoan how software companies who write proprietary extensions into GPL-licensed software, have to comply with the terms of the license.

It’s all a bit of an obvious dig — but I am looking forward to the follow-up article — that’s the one where the author bemoans how commercial software companies send out their ‘enforcers’ to extort money from companies who don’t bother paying the royalties and runtime license fees their licenses require.

PS: Hmm, ‘software prole’ — maybe I’ll adopt that in the same way
Suresh has adopted ‘lower-middle-class Unix sysadmin’:

The other title came from a spammer who asked Ramasubramanian what she’d done that made him report her to her ISP.

‘I gave her a standard set of links and information on why spam is bad, and took the time to explain all this to her. She then asked me what I did for a living. When I replied that I was a Unix administrator at an ISP, she blew up and said, ‘I thought you were a successful businessman and marketer, but you are only a lower-middle-class Unix sysadmin. Don’t you dare talk to me like this!!!”

Oh look, Suresh has a journal, too; I never realised. Cool.

SCO’s no-show invoices

Published October 19, 2003

SCOvLinux: GrokLaw: Groklaw’s Open Letter Linked to SCO’s Backing Off Invoicing.

‘SCO Group Inc is backing-down from threats to invoice organizations running Linux while extending SGI’s compliance deadline.

‘A company spokesperson said yesterday SCO’s plan to invoice organizations, on the basis that Linux illegally contains SCO code, had changed following what he claimed was success of its UnixWare licensing program. . . .

‘Members of the open source community warned SCO last month in an open letter they would initiate civil action under anti-fraud and consumer protection statutes.’

My take: ‘What? You mean extortion through fraudulent invoicing is illegal? Oops, call the mail room!’

BTW, anyone who hasn’t read the GrokLaw Open Letter to SCO yet, really should. It’s a great summary of all the many points where SCO is wrong.

MS on Choice

Published October 18, 2003

Music: This is great. Microsoft’s general manager for the Windows Digital Media division, Dave Fester, on iTunes for Windows:

If you use Apple’s music store along with ITunes, you don’t have the ability of using the over 40 different Windows Media-compatible portable music devices. When I’m paying for music, I want to know that I have choices today and in the future.

Oh, the schadenfreude. (I wonder how many MP3-compatible portable music devices there are?)

AdvogatoDay

Published October 17, 2003

Tech: So, I just looked at NTK; it has a brief bit about Bram Cohen ‘having solved content distribution, (announcing) he was now tackling other simple problems: reputation systems, version control and perhaps after lunch the NP-complete set.’

Hmm, interesting! Let’s take a look at his diary — and what do I find but a whole load of entries on using trust metrics against spam. Bugger. Looks like I have my weekend reading cut out for me.

Also notable: Advogato has added native RSS support, which makes this pretty pointless; and they’ve also added an XML-RPC interface. Expect to see taint.org entries getting copied up there soon, as a result. ;)

Uptown, Downtown and Midtown

Published October 17, 2003

Language: AussieInAmerica on {up,down,mid}town:

Something that is common here in Atlantic Canadian and northeast American small cities is to refer to the CBD (or city centre/downtown) as ‘uptown’, especially if coming to the city from its environs. BUT… once I am ‘uptown’ , I would then refer to my location as ‘downtown’. In other words, ‘uptown’ is the city centre/ CBD only if you are not there yet. ‘Uptown’ becomes ‘downtown’ once you arrive there. AND, since many smaller cities have one main street that leads in and out, if you head out of ‘downtown’ up that street you are going ‘uptown’. Follow? It works for us and I can’t recall any confusion.

(Author:) Hmm, I’m glad you folk have got it sorted out! I am reminded of Grover’s existential crisis on Sesame Street as he was coming to grips with ‘here’ and ‘there’. Every time he pitter-pattered over to ‘there’, it turned into ‘here’.

Great site. Some pretty good Strine, too — ‘Jeggoda Sinny?’ really is a common query!

Spamcop and ‘Al-Quada’, sitting in a tree

Published October 17, 2003

Humour: The null device reports a spam entitled, ‘julian haight funds terrorists b alqoswmw l lgng’.

Julian haight spamcops CEO is rumoured to have conections with Al-Quada, one of the most disruptive terrorist orginisations on earth. hes specialty is cyber terrorism. which disperses highly needed homeland security funds by rendering multi million dollar industrys unprofitable.

haights main motive is the perversion of American free enterprise.

Oh, the poor spammers! One comment quotes Samuel Johnson: ‘patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel’.

Also present is some lovely pictures of Carlton, with trams, greenery, grey skies, and that distinctive turn-of-the-century Aussie architectural style. A couple of years ago, I lived just around the corner in North Melbourne; looking at those photos, it seems like I could just pop out the front door and walk through it all on the way down to the Vic market. They thoroughly evoke day-to-day just-outside-the-CBD Melbourne.

Spamcop and ‘Al-Quada’, sitting in a tree

Published October 17, 2003

The null device reports a spam entitled, ‘julian haight funds terrorists b alqoswmw l lgng’.

Julian haight spamcops CEO is rumoured to have conections with Al-Quada, one of the most disruptive terrorist orginisations on earth. hes specialty is cyber terrorism. which disperses highly needed homeland security funds by rendering multi million dollar industrys unprofitable.

haights main motive is the perversion of American free enterprise.

Oh, the poor spammers! One comment quotes Samuel Johnson: ‘patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel’.

Also present is some lovely pictures of Carlton, with trams, greenery, grey skies, and that distinctive turn-of-the-century Aussie architectural style. A couple of years ago, I lived just around the corner in North Melbourne; looking at those photos, it seems like I could just pop out the front door and walk through it all on the way down to the Vic market. They thoroughly evoke day-to-day just-outside-the-CBD Melbourne.

iTunes adding indie tunes

Published October 17, 2003

Music: Indie Labels Debut At iTunes Music Store: ‘I happened to notice a Thievery Corporation release from Eighteenth Street Lounge Music in the ‘Just Added’ section…doing some more exploring, I found releases from Matador (Interpol, Pizzicato Five) and Nettwerk (BT) as well.’ (thx Karlin !)

Hmm — that’s good news for iTunes, but pretty bad news for EMusic. Those labels are all very well-represented on EM.

Wonder if I can run iTunes under Wine?

Recycling – Australia has it right

Published October 16, 2003

Environment: The Irish Times reports:

The State is facing a waste crisis that is threatening to bury the country, according to the Minister for the Environment, Mr Cullen. He said yesterday every person in this State was now producing 700 kg of household and commercial waste a year.

‘That is three times more than they do in the Netherlands. If this continues, the figure will rise to two tonnes per person by 2015,’ he said.

Landfills in six out of 10 regions in the country had less than three years capacity left, yet people were producing enough waste to cover every single town in Ireland. ‘We have to change. Doing nothing is not an option,’ Mr Cullen said.

Well, duh. So what have they done? They’ve setup a website, raceagainstwaste.com, with a page on recycling replete with techie details of how recycling works, then suggesting such gems as ‘if they do not already run one, suggest to your local authority that it considers starting a plastics recycling scheme.’

Brilliant. I’m sure they’ll listen. Nice delegation, Mr Cullen!

In the meantime, apparently 92.2% of the ‘waste stream’ is sent to landfills instead of recycling.

I’m not just knocking here — the amazing thing about recycling is that it’s been done right elsewhere. All this wheel-reinvention is totally superfluous. Here’s the details on Victoria, Australia’s kerbside recycling system; it’s pretty simple.

Each household gets 1 large basin-type plastic tray thing, in which you can put washed, unsealed, recyclable plastic containers. You tie up bundles of recyclable paper into another pile when you leave out the rubbish. And finally, you get a wheelie bin for the rest; stuff that really is rubbish. The bin guys then keep the 3 types of rubbish separate when they pick it up.

Yes, it takes a little bit of time to wash the plastic containers and tie up the paper into bundles. But nobody minds; they’re doing the right thing! It’s a hell of a lot better than chucking the lot into a single container and hoping that some expensive machine at the far end can sort it all out again.

It’s also better than the current Irish and US systems, where we’re expected to bring certain kinds of trash to a centralized drop-off point ourselves. First off, this is very impractical unless you’ve got a car to do it in — and sufficient motivation to do so; and secondly, the bulkiest rubbish — packaging, paper and plastic — is not included, just glass.

The Bin Tax

Published October 15, 2003

Over the past few months, Dublin has seen increasing resistance to newly-introduced rubbish-removal charges, or as they’re being called, ‘the bin tax’.

The charges are:

  • levied in addition to the ‘local services’ charges in income tax,
    • which already cover rubbish removal.
      • 80 Euro to 150 Euro per annum currently, with one government report suggesting that they could rise to 635 Euro per annum.
      • a flat fee per year, regardless of quantity — so there’s no incentive to recycle or compost your rubbish to bring that down.
      • not tied to any recycling initiative. The rubbish is still heading for a landfill, in most regions.
      • a flat fee for everyone, regardless of income. So the better-off pay exactly the same amount as a welfare recipient. (There is a waiver of 75 Euro for welfare recipients, but it’s discretionary and reportedly not always granted).

The last point is key — UK residents may be reminded of a similar flat-rate tax introduced by Thatcher in the 80’s… and we all know how that ended.

The result is that a large number, 75% of the population in the affected areas, have taken the course of non-payment of the charges.

There’s been lots of organised protest throughout Dublin, with constant picketing outside bin depots. Joe Higgins TD (a member of the Dail, the Irish parliament) and County Councillor Clare Daly have spent three weeks in jail so far, due to protesting on this issue.

Now, things are really starting to heat up — reportedly, the bin workers are starting to support the campaign, refusing to cross protest lines and refusing to drive lorries from depots if protesters are present. In some depots, they have even joined the picketers!

It’s not all good though — yesterday, national news shocking footage (SMIL) of a protester being dragged for several hundred feet by a speeding van.

This one’s getting interesting.

Snippets

Published October 15, 2003

Bits: BarbieOS, a cutdown version of Debian from Mattel. Really. ‘BarbieOS 1.0 is the result of almost a year’s worth of marketing research into what pre-adolescent girls want in a mobile Linux solution aimed at being a desktop replacement.’ (via Ben)

Great site — also has US.BLAST.D Worm Wreaks Havoc on US Post Office, Mail Delivery Halted (‘Until a patch can be created by Microsoft and deployed by the MCSEs who maintain the nation’s critical infrastructure, President Bush has urged all Americans to lock in a safe or a drawer all of their pens, pencils, stamps, white paper and envelopes so that they cannot be exploited by the virus and used to write out more copies of itself.’

— and An Open Letter from RIAA President Hillary Rosen to Music Pirates Everywhere (‘Currently an RIAA-backed online service known as Pressplay allows users to subscribe for $18.95 a month to a small library of popular works and listen to them via half-quality audio streams if they have broadband connections. Users may download 10 songs a month to burn to CDs if they wish. Pressplay exclusively supports the Windows Media Audio format, and therefore each song benefits from active scripting support, expiration dates, copy protection and proven Microsoft security. With embedded scripts, each song can also enhance the user experience by opening web pages featuring more music they might like to buy. After only 8 months online and a strategic partnership with AOL, Pressplay currently boasts more than 100 subscribers and is growing every day.’)

Spam: Bayesian comment filter for Movable Type, nifty. Pity it’s still using the Paul Graham method, which is not so hot. (thx Antoin!)

The Funniest Thing I’ve Read

Published October 15, 2003

Humour: Guardian Talk: The Barefoot Doctor, live online. This is the funniest thing I’ve read in months — thanks Tom!

(Background: ‘The Barefoot Doctor’ is the ‘healer’ who writes for The Observer Magazine on ‘wellbeing, alternative therapies and medicines and ways to cope with modern life’. Everything can apparently be healed through kidney massage and a few essential oils.)

Q: A case study, Mr Barefoot: my bus has crashed – I’ve got a compound fracture in my right leg, the bone is sticking out from under the skin and is wedged into the ‘Used Tickets’ receptacle, my skull has had a good old thump against the seat in front and is impersonating a boiled egg after the first thump with the teaspoon, and my ribs have been broken into bits like a packet of smokey bacon crisps someone has stood on.

What herbs and aromatic oils would you recommend?

Doc: you may jest – however, aromatic oils or potions can be extremely effective in speeding the healing process eg – manuka honey,lavender, marigold etc – thanks for bringing it up

Q: oooh good answer. yes i’m going out to buy some manuka honey right away. what do you do with it, is it nice on toast?

lavender, marigolds? is he opening a kitchen department?

Q: My unfortunate friend received a quite severe beating in the street a few days ago and has since been passing blood in his urine, in copius amounts.

Can recomend any effective massage oils for my friend? Its quite urgent because he’s beginning to talk incoherently about bright lights, can’t move and fainting.

Thank you, 3000

(… snip several hundred similar hilariously bitchy ‘questions’… Barefoot Doctor disappears for a while…)

Q: Where is he? Maybe the Barefoot Cab Driver who learnt to drive by karmic chanting has driven into a tree — or can’t find first gear?

(BTW the real ‘barefoot doctors’ were a different kettle of fish entirely; ‘part-peasant, part-doctor’ commune-level health workers in revolutionary China.)

For Reference: Why Greylisting Sucks

Published October 15, 2003

Spam: I’ve been meaning to collate a page about why I don’t like greylisting. My previous posting is relatively useful, but it needs an update, so here it is:

First off, every single message is delayed until a database match is found for the combination of sending IP, envelope-from and envelope-to. As Alan Leghart pointed out, ‘So…we punish everyone in the world, and hope that a delay of one or more hours is considered ‘acceptable’? Maybe some people already expect a mail to take several hours to reach a recipient. In that case, you need to fix your mail server.’

Secondly, large mailing lists that use VERP (generating keyed From addresses for each mail for good bounce-handling) will require manual whitelisting for each list, or each host.

Yahoo! Groups, for example,
uses VERP for all its lists, and also will not retry delivery if the first attempt fails.

There’s even buggy SMTP servers that do not support retrying, believe it or not.

(Once again, as for many spamfilter designs, the unusual SMTP clients are the ‘edge cases’ that cause the most trouble.)

Manual whitelisting == work == what spam filtering is trying to reduce == bad.

Thirdly, and most seriously, it assumes spammers would never introduce retries into their spam-tools if it took off. Tempfailing, what this is based on, is effective right now because spamtools don’t retry. But every proposed spam solution has to consider what would happen if every server admin in the world implements it, and spammers then want to subvert it.

For a spamtool to retry, it just needs to track 4xx responses, and if it encounters one, save these items of data:

  • From, To addrs and HELO string used
  • proxy IP used (btw proxies are almost never shut down successfully, so the spammer can generally assume this can be reused next time)
  • random seed used to generate random hashbuster tokens etc., so the body text matches

That’s really not a lot of data — 64 bytes per address that requires a retry. Then, an hour or more later, do the retry.

So, IMO, ‘greylisting‘ will work fine in the short term, until it becomes reasonably common — then the spamtool developers will start adding retry code.

Then we’re back to square one — except some legit mail takes much longer to get delivered, and the bandwidth wasted by spam has doubled, due to all those retrying spams. That’s not really progress.

The Funniest Thing I’ve Read

Published October 15, 2003

Guardian Talk: The Barefoot Doctor, live online. This is the funniest thing I’ve read in months — thanks Tom!

(Background: ‘The Barefoot Doctor’ is the ‘healer’ who writes for The Observer Magazine on ‘wellbeing, alternative therapies and medicines and ways to cope with modern life’. Everything can apparently be healed through kidney massage and a few essential oils.)

Q: A case study, Mr Barefoot: my bus has crashed – I’ve got a compound fracture in my right leg, the bone is sticking out from under the skin and is wedged into the ‘Used Tickets’ receptacle, my skull has had a good old thump against the seat in front and is impersonating a boiled egg after the first thump with the teaspoon, and my ribs have been broken into bits like a packet of smokey bacon crisps someone has stood on.

What herbs and aromatic oils would you recommend?

Doc: you may jest – however, aromatic oils or potions can be extremely effective in speeding the healing process eg – manuka honey,lavender, marigold etc – thanks for bringing it up

Q: oooh good answer. yes i’m going out to buy some manuka honey right away. what do you do with it, is it nice on toast?

lavender, marigolds? is he opening a kitchen department?

Q: My unfortunate friend received a quite severe beating in the street a few days ago and has since been passing blood in his urine, in copius amounts.

Can recomend any effective massage oils for my friend? Its quite urgent because he’s beginning to talk incoherently about bright lights, can’t move and fainting.

Thank you, 3000

(… snip several hundred similar hilariously bitchy ‘questions’… Barefoot Doctor disappears for a while…)

Q: Where is he? Maybe the Barefoot Cab Driver who learnt to drive by karmic chanting has driven into a tree — or can’t find first gear?

(BTW the real ‘barefoot doctors’ were a different kettle of fish entirely; ‘part-peasant, part-doctor’ commune-level health workers in revolutionary China.)

For Reference: Why Greylisting Sucks

Published October 14, 2003

I’ve been meaning to collate a page about why I don’t like greylisting. My previous posting is relatively useful, but it needs an update, so here it is:

First off, every single message is delayed until a database match is found for the combination of sending IP, envelope-from and envelope-to. As Alan Leghart pointed out, ‘So…we punish everyone in the world, and hope that a delay of one or more hours is considered ‘acceptable’? Maybe some people already expect a mail to take several hours to reach a recipient. In that case, you need to fix your mail server.’

Secondly, large mailing lists that use VERP (generating keyed From addresses for each mail for good bounce-handling) will require manual whitelisting for each list, or each host.

Yahoo! Groups, for example,
uses VERP for all its lists, and also will not retry delivery if the first attempt fails.

There’s even buggy SMTP servers that do not support retrying, believe it or not.

(Once again, as for many spamfilter designs, the unusual SMTP clients are the ‘edge cases’ that cause the most trouble.)

Manual whitelisting == work == what spam filtering is trying to reduce == bad.

Thirdly, and most seriously, it assumes spammers would never introduce retries into their spam-tools if it took off. Tempfailing, what this is based on, is effective right now because spamtools don’t retry. But every proposed spam solution has to consider what would happen if every server admin in the world implements it, and spammers then want to subvert it.

For a spamtool to retry, it just needs to track 4xx responses, and if it encounters one, save these items of data:

  • From, To addrs and HELO string used
  • proxy IP used (btw proxies are almost never shut down successfully, so the spammer can generally assume this can be reused next time)
  • random seed used to generate random hashbuster tokens etc., so the body text matches

That’s really not a lot of data — 64 bytes per address that requires a retry. Then, an hour or more later, do the retry.

So, IMO, ‘greylisting‘ will work fine in the short term, until it becomes reasonably common — then the spamtool developers will start adding retry code.

Then we’re back to square one — except some legit mail takes much longer to get delivered, and the bandwidth wasted by spam has doubled, due to all those retrying spams. That’s not really progress.