(Things I found interesting recently.)
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’ ;)
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. ;)
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.
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’.
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.
Nathan Cochrane has a weblog. He’s a clueful journo who writes about technology for The Age, the Melbourne newspaper — thumbs up for that; I read plenty of The Age during my sojourn in Melbourne, it’s the best newspaper in Oz. (Plus it recommends using Sitescooper and Plucker in their Handheld Howto page, so that’s always going to get a +1 from me ;)
But anyway, a very clueful weblog; lots of good journalism straight from the source. Recommended.
LinMagAU.org: Integrating SpamAssassin with MailMan. I really must get around to getting our server upgraded to MailMan 2.1 so we can apply this; I have one list that’s getting about 5-10 spams a day, and even with ‘subscriber posting only’ set, MM 2.0’s admin interface is very clunky for dealing with that.
Does anyone know if there’s a usable tool to automate Mailman admin BTW? Or give it a good UI?
When you move from one country to another, you often notice some details of the taste and texture of the local foodstuffs. For example, pretty much everything in Thailand tasted slightly fishy to my western tastebuds, due to their widespread use of nam pla, a fermented-fish sauce seasoning.
In the US, there’s a very definite gooey texture and strong sugary flavour which crops up in lots of foodstuffs — right down to salad dressings and soft drinks. Eventually I figured it out — it’s corn syrup, which isn’t really used at all in Europe. According to this review of Fat Land, here’s why it’s everywhere:
According to Critser, a leading journalist on health and obesity, America about 30 years ago went crazy sowing corn. Determined to satisfy an American public that ‘wanted what it wanted when it wanted it,’ agriculture secretary Earl Butz determined to lower American food prices by ending restrictions on trade and growing. The superabundance of cheap corn that resulted inspired Japanese scientists to invent a cheap sweetener called ‘high fructose corn syrup.’ This sweetener made food look and taste so great that it soon found its way into everything from bread to soda pop. Researchers ignored the way the stuff seemed to trigger fat storage.
The book’s thesis seems to be that corn syrup and palm oil are largely to blame for the obesity epidemic. A quick google shows up this LA Times story which covers the book in more detail:
‘High-fructose corn syrup is a really low quality, really cheap sugar,’ the 38-year-old (Robyn) Landis says dismissively. The syrup starts out as cornstarch, which is then made sweeter by converting some of its glucose to fructose; the more fructose in the end product, the sweeter it is. ‘It is not something our bodies should be dealing with. It’s completely unnatural.’ She also objects to the fact that high-fructose corn syrup turns up in unlikely places, such as ketchup, baby food and baked beans. ‘Even chocolate tastes more like sugar than chocolate when it is sweetened with high-fructose corn syrup,’ says Landis …
… Dr. George A. Bray, an obesity researcher and professor of medicine at Louisiana State University Medical Center, also singles out high-fructose corn syrup because the meteoric rise in its consumption closely parallels the jump in obesity rates. ‘Nothing else in the food supply does this. It’s a very, very striking relationship.’
… Ironically, fructose, which is also known as fruit sugar, was once considered a healthier, ‘more natural’ alternative to sucrose, that is, old-fashioned table sugar, because of its presence in fruit. In addition, diabetics thought it was healthier for them because it does not raise insulin or blood sugar levels as high as glucose does. However, animal studies and preliminary human studies have found that a high-fructose diet leads to some of the same health problems that are rampant among overweight Americans, including insulin resistance and elevated triglyceride levels, a marker for heart disease.
(I still plan to get my teeth into a corn dog pretty soon though ;) Gotta get that low-grade meat product fix!)
RSS: Ben Hammersley points at this really wierd posting from Adam Curry. Points and laughs, in fact.
As far as I can see, AC wants development of (N)echo to stop, because he dropped 10,000 dollars getting a year’s paid placement in the Radio Userland aggregator, or something like that. Well, that was a smart investment. I’m sure all the people thinking about (N)echo are dropping tools right now, accordingly. ;)
The RID-Spam Act chugs through Congress. This one’s very much toothless; according to CAUCE, it’s not actually anti-spam really — CAUCE says:
(it is) ‘a gross misnomer to call them ‘anti-spam.’ ‘Anti-consumer,’ sure. ‘Pro-spam,’ even. But not ‘anti-spam.”
Amazingly, DMcC notes that it may even de-fang the stronger state laws if it gets passed. Wow.
And check out this quote from the CNet story:
Rep. Bob Goodlatte, R-Va., defended the bill’s opt-out approach. Goodlatte said that of the physical junk mail he gets, ‘maybe 10 percent of it is something that I have some interest in. For that reason alone I think an opt-out approach is the best solution here.’
Good for him. The way he’s talking there, he’s looking forward to receiving 700,000 mails per year that ‘he has some interest in’. Earth calling Goodlatte — direct email is not the same as physical junk mail. There’s a fundamental economic difference — with email, the recipient pays. That means you cannot compare the volumes so simplistically. Just say no to One Bite Of The Apple!
US Politics: Rod notes this story: The Guardian coming to the US. Excellent! I think that’s a fantastic idea, and they’ll clean up.
Consider this — the only large-circulation print media that (a) people over here read, and (b) had the nerve to really treat the war in Iraq critically, as far as I know, are those two flaming-red anarchosyndicalist rags, the Economist and the Financial Times. (Not only are they not even written in the US, they’re quite conservative by Euro standards.) The US media needs more liberal voices.
Actually, I’m exagerrating heavily here. As Craig has pointed out before, the Christian Science Monitor is a pretty good paper, with some critical journalism — and one with a great story behind it’s provenance to boot.
But the Guardian has a pretty much wide open field all the same — here’s hoping they can get the distribution side sorted out.
E-Voting: Some good comments on this Slashdot story regarding e-voting systems.
The Brazilian legislature mandated a retrofit ‘of 3% (some 12,000 machines) to produce a paper ballot that the voter could peruse and deposit in a box for recount (the first large-scale use of the ‘Mercuri Method’).’
Georgia noted that the e-voting systems ‘were all very flashy and glitzy, but all had severe problems with security and/or usability. We eventually decided to run a pilot program in last year’s off-year election and try out 5 of the most promising machines in a real-world election. The final winner will be used across the state in 2004. No more hanging chad, but I think we are going to have a whole new set of problems to deal with.’
Just taking a look around blogs.linux.ie to see who’s set us up the blog recently; here’s the results:
unfortunately quite a few folks seem to have got bored and left off around mid-April. Ah well.
Quite a few lively blogs to add to the blogroll.
There’s also a burgeoning population of teenage Malaysian blogs, bizarrely enough! planet_aiie, whoelse and corexified. Big slipknot fans it seems.
Malaysia’s not alone in this — here’s a Jamaican guy. Must be the flag on the favourites icon; green and gold on a black background — that’s more linux.jm than linux.ie. ;) Unfortunately for my patois, he stopped updating in April. Sufferation! Oh well, I’ll just have to stick with the Sizzla for my lessons.
a Phillipino blog, too!
Just figuring this one — it seems linux.ie is free and easy to set up a blog at, doesn’t have ads, and does decent RSS with full <content:encoded> blocks. All in all, that makes it a pretty good blog platform when you think about it. Fair enough!
WIPO DG asked to convene meeting on open and collaborative projects to create public goods:
In recent years there has been an explosion of open and collaborative projects to create public goods. These projects are extremely important, and they raise profound questions regarding appropriate intellectual property policies. They also provide evidence that one can achieve a high level of innovation in some areas of the modern economy without intellectual property protection, and indeed excessive, unbalanced, or poorly designed intellectual property protections may be counter-productive. We ask that the World Intellectual Property Organization convene a meeting in calendar year 2004 to examine these new open collaborative development models, and to discuss their relevance for public policy.
I hope this gets somewhere; it’ll be interesting to see what the World Intellectual Property Organization has to say officially about open source, the Human Genome Project, the world wide web, and other unencumbered projects of this type.
Had a very nice long weekend — big BBQ and watching the fireworks on Friday, some bodyboarding and bodysurfing on Sunday. Very relaxing. Now back to work. :(
Ben Hammersley notes ‘the All Time Perfect Daily Mail Story’: Asylum Seekers Eat Queen’s Swans:
A major investigation has been launched by Scotland Yard into claims that the Queen’s swans are being stolen in their hundreds by gangs of asylum-seekers who are cooking and eating them.
The probe comes after a group of men were caught red-handed by police in an east London park. The asylum seekers were barbecuing a duck and officers found two dead swans, ready to be roasted, concealed in bags.
A police spokesman said today: We are appealing for information over the disappearance of swans. There have been incidents of swans being killed, and it appears to be the work of eastern European gangs.
It’s a classic of the genre — combining (a) the queen, (b) cute animals (c) fear of immigrants. That covers all the bases except one. Oh, here it is, bingo! — it’s not entirely true:
Yesterday Scotland Yard stated: ‘There is no police report.’ While there is concern fuelled by a drop in the swan population, the police spokeswoman added: ‘There appears to be a perception that this may be attributable to Eastern Europeans. We stress we have no evidence of this.’
A police spokeswoman … added that, despite some efforts, they could not back up published claims that asylum-seekers had been caught in east London barbecuing a duck with dead swans concealed near by ‘ready to be roasted’. Andy Fisher, head of the wildlife investigation unit, appeared equally baffled. ‘I don’t know where they have got that from – not the Metropolitan Police.’
It’s clearly silly season time again.
Quick Iraq roundup: some photos from Baghdad from Gee, another Iraqi blogger (Gee not in the irish slang sense BTW!); MI6 chief was the BBC’s source for ‘sexing-up’ allegations (Observer).
Also, Guantanamo Bay’s military tribunals are hitting the non-US news media again, now that the death penalty has been raised as a possibility. These Observer and Guardian stories note, regarding the two British citizens who’ve been imprisoned for 18 months (one for 12 months in Bagram airbase): ‘If this treatment happened for an hour in a British police station, no evidence gathered would be admissible’.
Next, A left-wing US soldier blogs from Baghdad.
the iraqi’s who are working for the u.s….doing what ever task we throw at them…are not to upset with us…some of them have family members in the states and they hope that someday they will be able to join them…they don’t hate america at all…and they are conscious enough of what is really going on to make their own decisions…they think that we really are trying to help…they are afraid of the ‘militants’ because when ever the ‘militants’ show up and attack us in their neighborhoods we end up destroying everything…many of the guys say that they chase the ‘militants’ out with any weapons they have…they are just trying to get by…they fear that the ‘militants’ are using horrible tactics to enlist more support…they are using our retaliation against us…for every home…or car…or newsstand…or coffee shop we destroy trying to protect ourselves another ‘freedom fighter’ is born…
He talks about Chomsky, links to Michael Moore — so of course, the neo-con warbloggers reckon he doesn’t exist. ;)
Totally down with the new pronunciation of RSS BTW. Waiting for the dust to settle. ho hum.
Finally, Fergus Cassidy, Sunday Tribune tech journo, has a website. Good reading…
my mate Luke passes on this gem:
I was driving along behind a plumber’s van today. The van was emblazoned with signs saying that the plumber was a sewers and drains expert. Along the rear bumper of the van was the company’s slogan:
‘Your shit is our bread and butter’
I am not making this up.
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…
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).
So, Ev and Cam both went looking for their spammiest spams, and posted ’em. Guess which one it was?
That’s right — ‘My Wife, Jody’. ;)
BBC: Spam peddlers hijack computers. A great article from the Beeb, following the trail of a single spam, all the way back to the person they believe to be the sender — via a hacked British Airways server!
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 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 ;)
This is very cool. It’s a fully browser-based RSS aggregator, no installation required; it just runs in your Mozilla or Firebird browser window. Nifty.
Found via a referrer link on Jeremy’s blog — there are no secrets where public referrer data is involved ;)
Euro software patents vote put back to September:
Members of Parliament from all parties had complained that it was impossible to react adequately within a timeframe of 10 days.
Phew, that’s a relief. This’ll give more time for our representatives to get their heads around the (thorny) issue. Read the FFII press release for more details.
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…
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.
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.
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.
Argh. Lots of ‘your_details.zip’ files flying around; it must be new Win32 virus day! Time to update the filters…
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…
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?
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.
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:
As one commenter on the /. story noted, ‘imagine if McDonalds had patented the drive-thru’.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Patents: the SSLeay workaround
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:
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: