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Justin's Linklog Posts

Senderbase and Alexa

Published July 3, 2003

SenderBase is a cool site which lists email traffic volumes for specific senders and organisations.

This will make for some very cool spam tests. As you can see, several of the top ten sending domains are ISPs that, shall we say, may have a few ‘issues’ with customers’ open proxies. They’re scattered in amongst the Yahoo!s and Hotmails ;) Then there’s a couple of well-known domains that, let’s say, have a habit of appearing on the SBL.

Well, not quite as practical, but useful nonetheless, is Alexa’s ‘traffic detail’ feature for the web.

Very nifty; a log-scale graph of traffic as measured by pageviews from Alexa’s toolbar, and you can pick 2 sites and compare their hitrates. For example, according to this, SpamAssassin is bigger than Jesus ;)

Thanks to ‘Mr. FoRK’ on the FoRK list for this URL…

Patents: the SSLeay workaround

Published July 3, 2003

during this ongoing European software patents thing, I was reminded of a comment I heard a while back from a pro-patent guy.

He was around in the bad old days of SSLeay‘s patent woes. SSLeay, like many cryptographic products in the 80’s and 90’s before the RSA and other patents expired, was in a legal grey area due to patent issues. To quote the ‘Is This Legal?’ section of their FAQ:

That is one of the hard questions on which there is as yet no clear answer. You need to read quite a bit of information to draw your own conclusions – and then go and talk to a lawyer. Again this document is my opinion and as such should be treated in that light – reality could be quite different to how I happen to see things :-).

In short:

  • outside the USA there should be no problems
  • inside the USA RSA hold patents over the RSA algorithms, however if you use RSAREF (which SSLeay can link to) then non-commercial use is probably okay. For commercial purposes you need to talk to RSA to license one of their toolkits (BSAFE) or come to some other licensing arrangement with them.
  • IDEA may be a problem inside Europe and RC4 inside the USA; both can be removed with a simple compile-time option or you can licence the IDEA algorithm.

Eventually, RSA relicensed their algorithms to be freely usable. Thankfully IDEA could be avoided by using alternative algorithms in the SSL transaction, so it wasn’t a biggie; most SSL users just switched it off. Finally, the RSA patent finally expired — so nowadays SSL is commonplace, and using SSL to protect security is a lot easier than it used to be.

Anyway, I’m diverging here… the relevance is this mail from Hartmut Pilch discussing the current euro-swpat proposal. He reckons even the SSLeay defense — saying ‘do not download this software in these countries unless you get these licenses’ — would not work with the current proposal:

To make this clearer: according to the CEC proposal, you still risk being sued even if you only publish a program and warn people ‘please do not execute unless you have obtained a license from XXX’.

SARS — back in the fall?

Published July 2, 2003

SARS special report: Too soon to celebrate (New Scientist).

There are also suspicions that the first outbreak in the southern Chinese province of Guangdong stopped so abruptly because of the onset of summer. The SARS virus does not survive well in a hot environment, and if most transmission is due to people touching contaminated surfaces, higher temperatures would have reduced transmission.

If the season, rather than human intervention, was the main reason for the end of the outbreak, SARS could return with a vengeance in the autumn. That is what happened with the 1918 influenza pandemic, which killed tens of millions. Fortunately, SARS is far less infectious (so far).

Debra Bowen: ‘MS killed useful CA spam law’

Published July 2, 2003

‘Let There Be Spam!’:

COMMITTEE TAKES CUE FROM MICROSOFT, KILLS NATION’S TOUGHEST ANTI-SPAM PROPOSAL

SACRAMENTO – Urged on by Microsoft, the Assembly Business & Professions Committee today unceremoniously killed SB 12 (Bowen), a measure to create the country’s toughest anti-spam law by requiring advertisers to get permission from computer users before sending them unsolicited ads …

‘Does anyone other than the eight members of this committee who either voted ‘no’ or took a walk on the bill really believe Microsoft has any interest in getting rid of spam?,’ wondered California State Senator Debra Bowen (D-Redondo Beach), the author of SB 12, following the bill’s defeat. ‘Trusting Microsoft to protect computer users from spam is like putting telemarketers in charge of the do-not-call list. Microsoft uses a megaphone to tell everyone how much it hates spam at the same time it’s working overtime to kill truly tough anti-spam laws. Why? Microsoft doesn’t want to ban spam, it wants to decide what’s ‘legitimate’ or ‘acceptable’ unsolicited commercial advertising so it can turn around and license those e-mail messages and charge those advertisers a fee to wheel their spam into your e-mail inbox without your permission.’

wow ;) She’s not pulling any punches there…

A ‘pay-to-email’ patent

Published July 1, 2003

The concept of a ‘pay-to-mail’ scheme — charge people to send you mail — is patented, it seems. Good, I never liked it anyway ;)

A method and apparatus for determining whether a party sending an email communication is on a list of parties authorized by the intended receiving party. If the sending party is not on the list of authorized parties, an electronic billing agreement is emailed to the sending party indicating a fee that will be charged to the sending party in return for the message being provided to the intended receiving party. Preferably, the present invention is implemented with Internet communications and utilizes a security protocol to enable the electronic transaction to be transacted in a secure manner.

Date: Tue, 01 Jul 2003 15:00:09 -0400
From: “Bob Wyman” (spam-protected)
To: (spam-protected)
cc: “‘Yakov Shafranovich”‘ (spam-protected)
Subject: RE: US Spam patents: Partial list

A new, spam-related, US Patent was issued today. It is a continuation in part of US Patent 6,192,114 which is on the first list of patents I posted to this group.

See: http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?patentnumber=6587550

US Patent 6,587,550 METHOD AND APPARATUS FOR ENABLING A FEE TO BE CHARGED TO A PARTY INITIATING AN ELECTRONIC MAIL COMMUNICATION WHEN THE PARTY IS NOT ON AN AUTHORIZATION LIST ASSOCIATED WITH THE PARTY TO WHOM THE COMMUNICATION IS DIRECTED

Abstract A method and apparatus for determining whether a party sending an email communication is on a list of parties authorized by the intended receiving party. If the sending party is not on the list of authorized parties, an electronic billing agreement is emailed to the sending party indicating a fee that will be charged to the sending party in return for the message being provided to the intended receiving party. Preferably, the present invention is implemented with Internet communications and utilizes a security protocol to enable the electronic transaction to be transacted in a secure manner.

————————————————————————

Inventors: Council; Michael O. (186 Hurt Dr., Cordele, GA 31015);
Santos; Daniel J. (3525 Roswell Rd., #721, Atlanta, GA 30305) Appl. No.: 783340 Filed: February 14, 2001

Asrg mailing list (spam-protected) https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/asrg

When Good Games Go Bad

Published June 30, 2003

Wired: Hackers Put ‘Bane’ in Shadowbane:

‘Then we realized that somehow an insane god had taken control of our world and was out to kill us all.’

The population of an entire Shadowbane town was forcibly moved to the bottom of the sea, where they drowned. City guards turned feral and attacked town residents. Mobs of never-before-seen superpowerful creatures, seemingly spontaneously spawned from the ether, began to prowl the streets unchecked, killing characters in the most painful way possible.

Audioscrobbler

Published June 30, 2003

Audioscrobbler is cool. Check it out — this is its log of my xmms listening habits, neatly cross-linked and referenced. (The cheesy ‘Liberty X’ listens were Catherine, I swear.)

Anyway, AS is a bit like Napster’s ‘explore other person’s music collection’ feature, which was cool for picking up recommendations — but this one is based on actual plays, and without the link to a service that the RIAA would want to see shut down ASAP. ;)

It can come out with some pretty bizarre results — for example, ‘people who listen to Thievery Corporation also listen to Radiohead’, according to this. Mind you, that’s probably correct…

Prediction: I’ll wind up being top of the list for listening to Acen’s tunes by the end of 2 weeks. That’s the plan at least ;)

Spam filters and FTC’s ‘Do Not Call’ list

Published June 30, 2003

Wired News: Yahoo! Spam Filter Thwarts FTC:

Consumers who used Yahoo Mail e-mail accounts to register for the Federal Trade Commission’s new do-not-call service were met with an ironic twist Friday — Yahoo’s spam filter intercepted confirmation messages sent from FTC servers.

‘Our tests showed that Yahoo’s spam filter was automatically sending the confirmation messages from the do-not-call list into users’ bulk-mail folders,’ said NetFrameworks co-founder and CTO Eric Greenberg. ‘The irony of it is that the spam filter is blocking the very thing that’s supposed to help you stop getting spam over the phone.’

FWIW, I signed up, without any hitches.

As noted elsewhere, their mail-sending systems were massively overloaded — an insane quantity of people were also signing up at the same time, from what I’ve heard.

But a day later, the confirmation message eventually came through, and got run through my ‘dogfood’ SpamAssassin 2.60 installation. That gave it -5.2 points. Not bad, considering they didn’t have reverse DNS records for the machines sending the mails out ;) (update: they do now, btw.)

In case you’re wondering, the tests it hit were: BAYES_00,CLICK_BELOW,DATE_IN_PAST_12_24,NO_REAL_NAME. Pretty respectable, really. Aside: that message getting a BAYES_00 match is impressive, given that (a) that Bayes db was initialized entirely from auto-learned mails, no hand-training; and (b) I’d never received a mail from the Do Not Call registry operators before.

Tamales: this is cool — San Francisco’s boozy culture paid homage last night to ‘The Tamale Lady’:

Tonight, Zeitgeist will swell again for Ramos’ 50th birthday party. There, San Francisco filmmaker Cecil B. Feeder will premiere his mini-documentary ‘Our Lady of Tamale,’ featuring 30-second songs submitted by dozens of San Francisco musicians.

Isn’t that nice. Ben says it went well. Somehow or other we missed her tamales last time we were up, but I’ll be sure to get one next time…

Closed Hardware, PDAs etc.

Published June 27, 2003

BoingBoing with a cautionary tale. When you buy a HipTop Sidekick from T-Mobile, you’re not really buying it in the way you’d imagine — instead, you get to hold it while they operate the software, as far as I can see. As of this week, T-Mobile are going to remotely erase the games that were included with the device, because they are ‘no longer supporting’ them. And tough luck to Sidekick owners.

As BB sez:

Who owns your Sidekick? T-Mobile does, apparently, even if you spent full retail on it (I dropped 250 dollars on mine). You need T-Mobile’s permission to install software on their device. T-Mobile will, from time to time, decide to erase software from your device. And when you stop subscribing to their service, T-Mobile will delete all your data forever, without giving you any mechanism for moving it off the device (and without giving you the ability to design a tool that would let you do this).

I don’t really get it — I mean, this is the reason Palm platforms won in the handheld arena for so long; the user’s control over what they can install, the developer’s freedom to write new apps for the users to install, and the (comparatively) open aspects of their SDK and protocols so that it can be sync’d to by lots of desktop apps.

Competing with all the other PDAs, based on hardware or UI alone, isn’t enough — unless you’re Apple with the iPod. Surely the Sidekick OS developers get this? (Maybe what happened is the OS developers get it — but T-Mobile don’t.)

Talking of the iPod — Gary Robinson notes that Pixo, the vendor of the OS software used on Apple’s iPods has just been bought — by Sun. It seems Pixo nowadays sells server-side Java thingies, which seems wierd for a developer of OSes for handheld platforms — until you read this article from January 2002, which reports that Apple and Pixo were at loggerheads anyway, due to contractual difficulties, and that Pixo had given up on embedded-OS work, due to a shortage of clients.

Anyway, I wonder if Apple got a licensing deal that gave them the source and allows them to update the Pixo OS themselves, if Sun decide to drop that product. (Given that Pixo themselves turned around and set the company in a totally oblique direction, I’d reckon it’s likely.)

Spam: Rod says the National Do Not Call Registry has launched. Sign up here — but wait a while first, it’s massively overloaded right now…

Cocaine-laced Euros

Published June 26, 2003

German euros ‘full of cocaine’ (BBC):

Almost all euro banknotes circulating in Germany contain traces of cocaine, German researchers say. … ‘Nine out of 10 banknotes show clearly measurable amounts of cocaine,’ Professor Fritz Soergel of the Institute for Biomedical and Pharmaceutical Research in Nuremberg was quoted as saying by Reuters news agency.

… The concentrations of cocaine on Spanish euro notes were almost a hundred times that of what was recorded in Germany; … Professor Soergel said that his team was ‘almost knocked flat’ by results of yet another recent study in Barcelona.

Search Engine Optimisation

Published June 26, 2003

Tom Coates on search engine optimisation. Summary: they don’t work; smart search engines realise you’re trying to game them, and will ignore or penalise your site as a result. The correct answer is to provide interesting/good/linkworthy textual information, and keep superfluous eye candy at a sensible level. I agree with his essay, FWIW.

Personally, I reckon Google deserve a lot of credit for turning the web around, from a flashy, Flash-laden animated DHTML blinky-blink medium, back into one where text is king. Once it got recognized that Google used titles, h1 tags, and other semantic markup as key metadata, and that the gimmicky stuff is unindexable, the never-ending slide into flashy blinky-blink land was halted. Phew!

Aside: Labour MP Tom Watson has a weblog?! Wow. He’d get my vote straight away, no matter what his policies were — that’s transparency ;)

Interesting — so does Liberal Democrats MP Richard Allen. This is really amazing. He even links to SpamAssassin as part of a discussion on the All-Party Internet Group‘s spam summit to be held on July 1st!

It’s worth noting that his comment here notes that the APIG concept seems to be leaning towards prosecution of spamvertised products; advertise via spam (sent by you or by a ‘spam outsourcing’ company), and you’re liable. A very sensible approach, as long as they can avoid the danger of malicious spammers spamvertising a product without that company’s permission — a la what happens regularly to SpamCop and SpamHaus.

Twenty Questions AI

Published June 25, 2003

Play 20 questions against an AI. Very cool; it got ‘artichoke heart’ and ‘volcano’ for me, the first within 30, the second within 20. It also whinged about a few questions I’d ‘answered inconsistently’ on the first one (well, they were stupid questions ;)

Log in as an anonymous user to try it out.

SoBig.E all over the place

Published June 25, 2003

Argh. Lots of ‘your_details.zip’ files flying around; it must be new Win32 virus day! Time to update the filters…

QuickThread

Published June 25, 2003

Marc Canter blogs about QuickThread, one of the new services at Steve Yost’s QuickTopic.

It’s a great concept. Want to take a thread offline, or share it as a dedicated forum of its own, without losing the concept flow? Just select all the context messages, forward as attachments by mail to the QT site, and it’ll create a new thread with that context intact. Totally simple. (see the Pictures).

Science: In this interview with Matt Ridley at edge.org, Matt notes:

… There’s another phenomenon going on too, which is equally important and which again people in these kinds of debates over human nature have missed. … behavior affects genes. It doesn’t change the code of the gene, and it doesn’t change the encoded genome … what I’m talking about is changing the expression of genes through things you do in your life.

(for example:) … When you’re under stress, the physiological result is that cortisol increases in your body and has a lot of effects. Cortisol is a transcription factor; it actually alters the expression of certain genes. It does so largely in the immune system, which results in the suppression of immune activity.

Wow. I never realised hormones could have that effect. Good article, as usual…

‘My Wife, Jody’

Published June 25, 2003

Incredible. The text ‘My wife, Jody’ has appeared, reliably, in spam for the last 5 years — I just got one today. (I haven’t actually seen one in my inbox for a while, though, since the chain letters that copy it generally get pretty high scores — this one hit a respectable 48.2 SpamAssassin points, no less.)

Here’s the text it appears in:

MORE TESTIMONIALS

‘My name is Mitchell. My wife, Jody and I live in Chicago. I am an accountant with a major U.S.Corporation and I make pretty good money. When I received this program I grumbled to Jody about receiving ‘junk mail’. I made fun of the whole thing, spouting my knowledge of the population and percentages involved. I ‘knew’ it wouldn’t work. Jody totally ignored my supposed intelligence and few days later she jumped in with both feet. I made merciless fun of her, and was ready to lay the old ‘I told you so’ on her when the thing didn’t work. Well, the laugh was on me! Within 3 weeks she had received 50 responses. Within the next 45 days she had received total $147,200.00 …….. all cash! I was shocked. I have joined Jody in her ‘hobby’.’

Mitchell Wolf M.D., Chicago, Illinois

It’s amazing that the chain letter is never changed, given that for the last few years they are all sent using spamware applications, so the senders must have some techie know-how.

I wonder if there’s a real Mitchell Wolf M.D. in Chicago, and what he’d think of 5 years of faked testimonials using his name?

Some snippets

Published June 25, 2003

Maciej covers some ground I’ve been wondering about, comparing his experiences with the French state system and that here. Definitely worth reading, and I’m looking forward to tomorrow’s.

Oops! NZ channel ‘TV3 has apologised after a graphic labelling US President George W. Bush a ‘professional fascist’ flashed up during its primetime news.’

Henry Farrell writes about homesickness, quoting Dante. It’s such a great quote, I’m going to just reproduce it here:

These are of course silly things to get worked up about; but it’s a universal experience for expatriates to miss the little things as much (if not more than) the greater ones. Dante, who was exiled from Florence, speaks of how

You shall leave everything you love most dearly:
this is the arrow that the bow of exile
shoots first. You are to know the bitter taste
of others’ bread, how salt it is, and know
how hard a path it is for one who goes
descending and ascending others’ stairs.

He’s talking about two things here. First, as an exiled Florentine, he doesn’t like salty bread. Florentines don’t use salt when baking (the result, as far as I remember, of an extended period when the Pisans cut off their salt supplies), so that their bread tastes like blotting paper to non-natives (I lived in Florence three years: my advice to outsiders is to order pane Pugliese in the local bake shops when possible). Second, spiral staircases in Florence tend to curve around the opposite way from staircases elsewhere. Dante’s main point is unassailable; as an exile, you feel longing for the small and unexceptional parts of daily life in your home country, and a quite extraordinary degree of comfort whenever you find them again. Which is why my fridge is now stocked up with Kerrygold.

NetFlix patents the DVD library

Published June 24, 2003

So NetFlix have patented their business method; that is, subscribing to video/DVD rentals — where instead of being charged per disc, you are charged a monthly fee and can keep the rentals indefinitely without late fees. Patent here. Now, NetFlix is a very cool service, I’ve really been enjoying it. But this patent is a bit nasty.

Think about it: what’s difficult about the NetFlix setup? Is it thinking up the concept for how the business works, as described in the patent?

Or is it executing the details, setting up efficient shipping infrastructure, tracking, billing, stock management etc., efficiently enough to make a profit?

Bad news for these companies, who are now infringing:

  • GameFly, which is the NetFlix model applied to games.
  • GreenCine, a more indie- and anime-oriented DVD site.

As one commenter on the /. story noted, ‘imagine if McDonalds had patented the drive-thru’.

Hakim Bey

Published June 24, 2003

Interesting — some thinking about the net, blogs, etc. on Biroco.com meanders into a mail from Hakim Bey:

(…) I’m utterly not responsible for the plethora of Netishness that coagulates around my work. Personally I never ‘uploaded’ a word. Others do it, mostly without my permission and w/out even bothering to inform me. Some of it isn’t even mine – forgeries & often dis-info are rife. The Net is a pathology.

I not only don’t own a computer – I’ve ‘taken agin’ ’em’ & have become a cyber-curmudgeon. Basically I’m only interested in things that don’t have websites. I refuse – or rather am incapable of – compensation for the demise of the physical world (you know what I mean) by losing myself in ‘the terminal state of screenal involution’ to quote a line that came in-somnia last nite.

Joel goes on to say:

Most who have read Hakim Bey seem to imagine that he regards the web as a TAZ (Temporary Autonomous Zone), but in fact he doesn’t, since the physical component is missing, virtuality is not physical, at most all the web can be is an organisational mouthpiece for a TAZ but not a TAZ in itself. I agree with him, but myself, despite chucking my TV in the bin over a decade ago and Zen wanderings away from this medium, I got ensnared in the web nonetheless and do sometimes wonder whether it is indeed ‘compensation for the demise of the physical world’. We’ll see, at present I regard it as a curious assemblage project and a potential widening out of creativity.

‘The Goblin’

Published June 23, 2003

Observer: Russia’s cult video pirate rescripts Lord of the Rings as gangster film. This sounds hilarious — although I bet New World (iirc?) aren’t so happy about it…

They call him the Goblin. He is the new toast of Russia’s massive pirate video industry, his films sought all over Moscow. The trick of his silver screen success is that the Goblin redubs Hollywood movies, using his own ‘better’ Russian alternative to the script.

A former senior police investigator from St Petersburg, Dmitri Puchkov began by making fresh translations to replace the appalling subtitles on pirated films. But now his cult following has found pan-Russian appeal, with a ground-breaking rewrite of the first two parts of The Lord of the Rings.

In a move that has taken the Russian pirate disk world by storm and infuriated traditionalists and copyright lawyers, Puchkov has completely changed the script, turning the ‘good’ characters, like Frodo, into bumbling Russian cops, and the ‘bad’ Orcs into Russian gangsters.

The new, irreverent version of The Lord of the Rings is set in Russia. Frodo Baggins is renamed Frodo Sumkin (a derivative from the Russian word sumka, or bag). The Ranger, Aragorn, is called Agronom (Russian for farm worker). Legolas is renamed Logovaz, after a Russian car company famed for its Ladas. Boromir becomes Baralgin, after a Russian type of paracetemol.

Gandalf spends much of the film trying to impress others with his in-depth knowledge of Karl Marx, and Frodo is cursed with the filthy tongue of a Russian criminal.

2000 IT bosses say NO to EU software patents

Published June 23, 2003

FFII have issued a press release: ‘2000 IT bosses say NO to EU software patents, call for rejection of McCarthy software patent directive proposal’:

A ‘Petition for a Free Europe without Software Patents’ has gained more than 150000 signatures. Among the supporters are more than 2000 company owners and chief executives and 25000 developpers and engineers from all sectors of the European information and telecommunication industries, as well as more than 2000 scientists and 180 lawyers. Companies like Siemens, IBM, Alcatel and Nokia lead the list of those whose researchers and developpers want to protect programming freedom and copyright property against what they see as a ‘patent landgrab’.

Reminder: there’s only 7 days left before the plenary on June 30th, so if you’re European, write to your MEP backing FFII’s position. Full text here.

NZ flatulence tax outrages farmers

Published June 23, 2003

BBC: NZ flatulence tax outrages farmers:

New Zealand’s farmers have criticised a proposed tax on the flatulence emitted by their sheep and cattle. The move is part of the Wellington government’s action to meet its commitments under the Kyoto Protocol on global warming.

Scientists estimate that methane emitted by farm animals is responsible for more than half of the country’s greenhouse gases.

Flatulence from cows, sheep and other ruminants is a serious environmental problem, accounting for about 15% of worldwide emissions of methane – one of the most potent of greenhouse gases.

My Thoughts on ‘Greylisting’

Published June 22, 2003

‘Greylisting’, as described here, has received a lot of attention recently. However, I don’t think it’s a goer; here’s why:

  • Firstly, as Alan Leghart pointed out on the SpamAssassin-talk list:

    This method proposes to delay EVERY SINGLE MESSAGE until a database match is found for sending IP, FROM, and TO. So…we punish everyone in the world, and hope that a delay of one or more hours is considered ‘acceptable’?

    Read his message for a sample typical daily scenario which shows how bad this can be. 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. Even the 300Mhz SpamAssassin spamtrap server gets through mail faster than that, and it’s seeing an absurd mail load ;)

  • Secondly, many VERPing mailing lists and newsletters will need manual whitelisting. Requiring manual intervention == work == what spam filtering is trying to reduce == bad.

  • Thirdly, 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 solution has to consider what would happen if every server admin in the world implements it, and spammers then want to subvert it.

    IMO, ‘greylisting‘ would work fine until the spamtools start retrying, then we’re back to square one — except some legit mail takes a long time to get delivered, and the bandwidth wasted by spam has doubled due to all those retrying spams.

EU Patents — heavy on the spin

Published June 21, 2003

Sounds like the pro-swpat lobby has taken an interesting tack in their PR; IDG’s Infoworld reports that:

The European Parliament is likely to support a law that permits software patents but limits their application to inventions that have a technical effect outside of just a computer program. A program could only be patented if it runs in conjunction with some sort of device such as an intelligent household appliance or a mobile phone.

But bizarrely, that’s exactly what the proposal does not suggest, and that’s exactly what the anti-swpat lobby want it to suggest! Totally, totally wierd.

Software patents update: plenary in 10 days time!

Published June 21, 2003

Despite heavy opposition from a coalition of European SMEs and the Greens/EFA faction of the European Parliament, and despite 2 committees suggesting large amendments, Arlene McCarthy’s pushed the patent ‘reform’ through the JURI committee of the European Parliament. It is now going to be debated in an EP plenary in 10 days time. It seems likely there’ll be a vote on adopting it then, too. We’re being railroaded here. :(

If you are a European and bothered by software patents, now is the time to write to (or even email) MEPs asking them to oppose this directive; it’s the ‘proposed software patentability directive as amended by JURI’ (COM(2002)92 2002/0047).

The letter should support the Eurolinux and/or Green position.

I’ve already received one reply, from Nuala Ahern, a Green MEP for Leinster, who’s happy to take the Greens/EFA line (and responded very quickly, all credit to her!). But the question is, who else among the Irish MEPs is likely to vote on this issue — and how do we effectively lobby in such a short time?

Some background links:

Anyway, if it passes it’s not the end of the world, according to Karl Lenz; I’m not sure I agree with his conclusions though ;)

Leftie TV in the US, and the GIF patent

Published June 20, 2003

So I caught Frontline on PBS last night. At last, some leftie TV that isn’t The Daily Show! ;)

It covered — in excruciating detail — something I’d been wondering about; the massive cost (to end users) of healthcare and prescription medication in the US. The program nicely demolished the ‘but all that money is needed for R&D’ line.

Bottom line: the US drug companies are making 18-22% profit, and they’re not letting go of that. (The median for the Fortune 500 is 3.3%.)

That’s pure profit — not going back into R&D or similar. The breakdown of the biggest revenue sinks averaged across the sector, at the end of the program was: 22% profit, 18% advertising and marketing (one conglomerate in particular spent more on marketing than Pepsi), a couple more aspects of the process, and then, 4th or 5th on the list, 11% of that revenue makes it to research and development.

This should be a huge issue here, but isn’t. I can’t figure it out.

Patents: Kuro5hin has a nice wrap-up of the GIF patent story, now that the patent has finally expired (excerpt: ‘Unisys does nothing’). But what’s this? It’s still extant in Europe, not expiring until a year from now? Great example of the EPO allowing software patents to be registered, even though they’re not legal in Europe.

Mind you, it’s irrelevant now, as (thankfully) Jean-Loup Gailly and Mark Adler wrote the gzip compression algorithm, and gave it to the GNU project. Since then, gzip has now spread into every tool and virtually every platform that might possibly need compression.

George Galloway Papers Were Forgeries

Published June 20, 2003

CSMonitor:

On April 25, 2003, this newspaper ran a story about documents obtained in Iraq that alleged Saddam Hussein’s regime had paid a British member of Parliament, George Galloway, $10 million over 11 years to promote its interests in the West.

An extensive Monitor investigation has subsequently determined that the six papers detailed in the April 25 piece are, in fact, almost certainly forgeries.

The CSMonitor is usually a pretty good paper I hear, and their decision to print this retraction on their front page is a nice sign. But it’s worth noting that it took 2 weeks — not until the UK’s Daily Mail retracted their story, citing that they had determined their documents were forged — before the Monitor thought to check out the letters’ credibility.

And check this out for gullibility:

Smucker recalls that it was the general who brought up George Galloway’s name first at their initial meeting. After the reporter indicated an interest, the general said he knew where those documents were, and that he could have them for Smucker in 24 hours. Smucker says Rasool told him that one of his neighbors, who left Baghdad to attend a Shiite pilgrimage in Karbala, held the documents.

Upon Smucker’s return the next day, the general showed him the Galloway documents as well as the boxes of others on various subjects. After hiring the neighbor, Smucker left with the boxes.

‘I had no knowledge that the general received any of the 800 dollars, though now that I know the documents are forgeries, I have my suspicions,’ says Smucker. ‘At the time I was operating on the premise that these were entirely authentic.’

Suuuure!

The Windows Find Setup Wizard

Published June 20, 2003

Joel writes about a canonical Windows UI mistake: ‘unequivocally the most moronic ‘wizard’ dialog in the history of the Windows operating system. This dialog is so stupid that it deserves some kind of award. A whole new category of award.’ It is, of course, the Find Setup Wizard dialog:

The first problem with this dialog is that it’s distracting. You are trying to find help in the help file. You do not, at that particular moment, give a hoot whether the database is small, big, customized, or chocolate-covered. In the meanwhile, this wicked, wicked dialog is giving you little pedantic lectures that it must create a list (or database). There are about three paragraphs there, most of which are completely confusing. There’s the painfully awkward phrase ‘your help file(s)’. You see, you may have one or more files. As if you cared at this point that there could be more than one. As if it made the slightest amount of difference. But the programmer who worked on that dialog was obviously distressed beyond belief at the possibility that there might be more than one help file(s) and it would be incorrect to say help file, now, wouldn’t it?

It’s a great article; there’s also some fantastic examples of stupid UI tricks that shouldn’t be possible, like detachable menu bars. Read it here.

Sitescooper and RSS

Published June 19, 2003

I did this a while ago, but I’ve been very busy in work and haven’t had time to mention it. But it’s worth doing some preliminary pointing at Sitescooper RSS.

Basically, I’ve added RSS output to Sitescooper, the venerable HTML-scraping script that can disassemble a news/blog/reading-material website efficiently, use a cache, log in, cope with redirects, figure out when stuff is new and when it’s old, perform diffs, confuse you with copious regular expressions, etc. etc.

Sitescooper was originally oriented entirely towards display on a Palm; then new PDAs came out that could do good text or HTML display, so they’re now supported too; and now, I’m no longer commuting and using an RSS aggregator instead for that kind of daily reading, so RSS is the natural next step.

Basically, what this means is that those annoying blogs that don’t include the full text in the item block, or those websites you like that don’t have an RSS feed — make a site file, and scrape them into your aggregator yourself!

This code is present in the current Sitescooper CVS version; the only doco is really what’s in that RSS directory on sitescooper.org.

If your interest is piqued, take a look…

Trademark craziness

Published June 19, 2003

rOD gets an email:

I found your web site, http://www.groovymother.com/archives/week_2002_10_20.html has a reference to a Clue-By-Four ™. Unfortunately, my company owns the trademark to that term, and I am in the process of bringing that product to market. My lawyers have told me that if you do not remove that reference, it dilutes my trademark.

I would much rather ask you politely to remove references to Clue-by-Four™ than have an ugly lawyerese letter sent via certified mail, etc.

WTF? Applied for in 1999, and it refers to a ‘novelty toy, namely a foam rubber two-by-four shaped board’.

Win4Lin

Published June 19, 2003

A glowing review of Win4Lin 5.0 from ‘Open for Business’.

Gotta say, I use Win4Lin regularly, and it’s totally flawless. I had a bit of difficulty getting it installed — the installer didn’t like my kernel for some reason, if I recall correctly, and I had to go grepping through the install script (!). But it’s fantastic once it’s running.

The really impressive thing is when it boots Windows (in a window on your Linux desktop) much faster than Windows boots natively on the same hardware ;) Still haven’t figured out how it does that.

It does a nice job of a virtual network interface too; easier to admin than VMWare’s fake-net-with-DHCP thing. It just insmods a new network module, with a new ethernet address, and that responds to arp requests alongside your ‘real’ Linux interface’s address. Then all the control of IP address, network etc. is under Windows control.

I haven’t found an app that doesn’t work with it yet. (Mind you I hear Direct/X isn’t supported yet fully, so most games are probably out.)

I’ve even used it to watch Quicktime movies — which is pretty impressive when you consider that they’re displaying to a (Win4Lin) framebuffer, which is then displayed to another (VNC) framebuffer, which then displays to the hardware.

IrishWAN National Conference

Published June 19, 2003

IrishWAN are holding a national conference:

IrishWAN the networking group with the goal of building a community owned and run island wide area network infrastructure, will be having a national conference in Limerick on Saturday 28th of June 2003.

There will be IrishWAN members from all across the country, with presentations about wireless technology, updates of activities in many areas, and presentations from Irish wireless suppliers.

Full text here.

Date: Thu, 19 Jun 2003 10:58:15 -0000
From: Robert Fitzsimons (spam-protected)
To: (spam-protected)
Subject: IrishWAN National Conference

IrishWAN National Conference

IrishWAN the networking group with the goal of building a community owned and run island wide area network infrastructure, will be having a national conference in Limerick on Saturday 28th of June 2003.

There will be IrishWAN members from all across the country, with presentations about wireless technology, updates of activities in many areas, and presentations from Irish wireless suppliers.

The conference is open to anybody who has an interest in building or using the IrishWAN network, and is an ideal opportunity for existing and new members to get together to talk about wireless technologies. There will be a 5 Euro charge at the door to pay for the room.

The conference will start at 12:00 and should finish up at 17:30 on Saturday 28th of June, the location will be The Two Mile Inn, Ennis Road, Limerick.

More up-to-date details and the agenda are available at <URL:http://www.irishwan.org/board/showthread.php?threadid=996>.

Hope to see you all there.

Robert Fitzsimons DublinWAN Chairperson (spam-protected) http://wwww.irishwan.org/

ISOC Ireland members mailing list (spam-protected) http://ireland.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/members

Unicode

Published June 19, 2003

Oops! Looks like 2-byte Unicode — UCS-2, aka Unicode 1.0 — will be running into trouble shortly; according to this and this on debian-i18n from back in 2000, several Asian charsets will shortly require 4-byte Unicode characters, which means using either UTF-8 or UCS-4. In particular, correct display of proper nouns in Japanese apparently requires use of the 4-byte planes.

Unicode 1.0 is used widely, in MS products and Java. Expect ‘flag days’ galore when this has to change.

Unicode 2.0 introduced a concept called a ‘surrogate pair’ to fix this; it’s basically introducing multibyte characters into the supposedly fixed-width character-based UCS-2; so all those ‘length == nchars’ assumptions will break — again. Argh.

Now I know why the Linux vendors are going for UTF-8 instead…

MSN’s Google-Killer

Published June 19, 2003

Maciej, Jeremy and Dave have all been blogging about this: Microsoft have unleashed MSNBOT, a new web crawler (judging by the robots.txt string, written in COBOL) which heralds their new search service which will topple Google.

My thoughts: dream on, guys.

What makes Google cool? Fast, accurate searches, and no ads. OK, MSN could do fast searching; that’s doable, it’s just a technical matter.

But what does the latter require? IMO, it takes very strong technical leadership, willing to resist any and every business unit that fancies dropping some cruddy ads on the front page; it’s a cultural issue. This is especially tricky where ads (and money) are involved. Now go take a look at MSN.com. See what I mean? I rest my case.

Here comes the science bit – evaporate!

Published June 19, 2003

New Scientist reports that ‘cosmetics manufacturers are keen to appear cutting edge, and often blind consumers with scientific jargon. But buzzwords like nanocapsules – currently one of their favourites – could be their undoing.’

Scare stories about nanotechnology turning the world to ‘grey goo’ have led Caroline Lucas, Green Party MEP for South East England, to call for new regulations – and one of the targets she has in her sights is the cosmetics industry. Her website claims that ‘thousands of women are acting as unwitting ‘guinea pigs’ for the cosmetics industry…with many products containing ingredients manufactured by ‘nanotechnology’.’

Famous facial products, such as L’Oreal Plenitude and Lancome’s Flash Bronzer Self Tanning Face Gel, do indeed contain billions of nanoscopic capsules designed to help the skin absorb the cream’s active ingredients. Though there’s not a goo-making nanobot in sight, Lucas claims to be ‘horrified to find nanotech products sitting innocently in my bathroom cabinet’.

We wonder what she expected them to do to her. Drain the colour from her face and make it go all mushy?

more on SCO v. IBM: ‘All your base are belong to us’

Published June 17, 2003

Ben forwards a link to this Byte article, SCO: All your base are belong to us. His commentary:

One day I’ll have a blogtastic dalymount.com, but for the moment, have you seen this priceless interview, in which SCO goes over the edge into complete barking insanity?

‘We believe that UNIX System V provided the basic building blocks for all subsequent computer operating systems, and that they all tend to be derived from UNIX System V (and therefore are claimed as SCO’s intellectual property).’

His emphasis. But let’s face it, he’s emphasising the right part ;)

So they now think they are owed money by every modern OS: that includes FreeBSD, Windows, Apple, presumably QNX, etc. etc. Linux was just the easiest one to start with, since the source is available and IBM (with their deep pockets) are closely allied with it. MS have already paid up for a SCO license, although many commentators see this as a means to support SCO in their anti-UNIX lawsuits.

In more detail, SCO claim to have full IP rights to several major components of any high-spec OS:

  • JFS (Journalling File System).
  • NUMA (Non Uniform Memory Access).
  • RCU (Read-Copy Update).
  • SMP (Symmetrical Multi-Processing).

Let’s pick one there: RCU in Linux seems to have originated (at a glance) from code developed by Sequent for their DYNIX/ptx UNIX, which was an AT&T UNIX System V-based OS. Sequent ran into trouble, and were bought out by IBM. Later, patches to implement RCU were submitted by IBM from Sequent’s code.

SCO now owns the AT&T UNIX System V IP; therefore SCO owns the RCU code in Linux — even though Sequent developed it independently, on top of the System V base, as far as I can see. Hey, that’s even more ‘viral’ than the GPL — at least the GPL tells you in advance what mistakes you’d have to make for this to happen! ;)

In other words, it seems their POV is that, if any code came anywhere near other code that may have been part of the original AT&T codebase, it’s now tainted with SCO’s own ‘viral license’. Absolutely insane.

It’s unclear exactly how ‘all subsequent computer operating systems’ also infringe this viral license, but SCO reckon they do.

In the meantime, they don’t seem to have realized that these kinds of over-broad claims are not looked on favourably under EU law; while they make cartooney threats in the US, they open themselves up to all sorts of anti-trust-type claims elsewhere in the world. But then, at this stage I don’t think they plan to actually offer any products, or operate as a software company, so they probably don’t really care about that.

To really muddy the waters, an ex-SCO employee has recently made allegations that SCO copied code from the GPL’d Linux kernel into their UnixWare product.

Ah, fireworks. Anyway.

For a kinder, gentler form of total insanity, check out the guidelines for forming ‘inexplicable mobs’ in Manhattan — via bb. Totally cool.