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Justin's Linklog Posts

Telecoms sans Frontieres

Published May 14, 2003

Salam Pax blogs about an interesting NGO:

I have heard today that a NGO called Communication sans frontiers has arrived in Iraq and will help. They will probably be doing what the Red Cross is doing, a center in Baghdad and a team moving around Iraq. The Red Cross has been moving its phone service, if you can call it that, around Baghdad. Two days for each district and they depend on the word of mouth to spread the news, usually they end up with huge lines and waiting lists but everybody is grateful. Many people have no way telling their relatives abroad how they are doing. A couple of Arabic TV stations, mainly Jazeera, has been putting their cameras in the street and allowing people to send regards to their relatives abroad, tell them they are OK hoping that they would be watching at the time. So what the Red Cross has been doing, and I think what Communication sans frontiers would ultimately be doing is much appreciated.

According to this comment on the command-post.org blog, it’s actually called Telecoms Sans Frontieres:

Telecoms sans Frontieres has created a new humanitarian aid concept: the humanitarian telephone system. TSF’s mission is to operate anywhere in the world, in the heart of military conflicts or in the wake of natural disasters, in order to enable the local population to simply say: I’m alive.

Now there’s a cool idea for any BOFHs who fancy doing some interesting volunteer work for a year… ;)

Ali G in the NYT

Published May 14, 2003

A classic Ali G moment, via Maureen Dowd in the New York Times (username: sitescooper/sitescooper):

  • YOUNG MAN: How does you make countries do stuff you want?
  • MR. BAKER: Well, the way you deal with countries on foreign policy issues . . . is you deal with carrots and sticks.
  • YOUNG MAN: But what country is gonna want carrots, even if it’s like a million tons of carrots that you’re giving over there—-
  • MR. BAKER: Well, carrots — I’m not using the term literally. You might send foreign aid — money, money.
  • YOUNG MAN: Well, money’s better than carrots. Even if a country love carrots and that is, like, their favorite national food, if they get given them—-
  • MR. BAKER: Well, don’t get hung up on carrots. That’s just a figure of speech.
  • YOUNG MAN: So would you ever send carrots? You know, is there any situation—-
  • MR. BAKER: No, no.
  • YOUNG MAN: What about if there was a famine?
  • MR. BAKER: Carrots, themselves? No.

Beautiful.

Initially, there were a lot of media reports in the UK and Ireland, about how negatively it was taken in the US; this interview with the director reckons that was rubbish put about by UK media:

‘I’ve got a theory about this: In Britain, we’re no longer world leaders in anything. … Yet the one thing we still maintain, and cling on to jealously, is that we’ve got the best sense of humour in the world. So we don’t like the idea that people in other countries get our sense of humour. We prefer to cling to the idea that our comedy is too sophisticated for the Americans And yet the truth is rather different. If you look at sitcoms, with a couple of exceptions, all the best ones come from America, like Friends, Frasier, Seinfeld and so on.’

‘I actually think Americans get the undertones of satire almost better than the British. It can’t be coincidence that the best comedies on our TV are all imported from America.’

But then even the bad reviews never said that Ali G was too sophisticated, complaining instead that the satire wasn’t subtle enough. Maybe the Americans are the more comedy-literate, after all.

More on C-R

Published May 14, 2003

TidBITS weighs in. They cover the issues very well, and also have noticed the problem that arises when a C-R system decides to challenge e-commerce notifications — like your air travel e-tickets, for example.

Found at Gary Robinson’s blog, where he also links a couple of taint.org items, cheers Gary ;)

Also, from /.: the House of Lords debates the etymology of ‘spam’. Quite funny:

Lady Saltoun of Abernethy: My Lords, do the Government have any plans to restrict unsolicited faxes? My fax paper is always being wasted by people who send me faxes I do not want. I do not know whether they could be called ‘corned beef’ or something, but I have had enough of them.

Plus another anti-spam Senate bill, from Rep. W.J. ‘Billy’ Tauzin (R-La.) and F. James Sensenbrenner Jr. (R-Wis.). This one is apparently riddled with loopholes: ‘this is yet another bill . . . attempting to get rid of the porn and the scams, but really clearing the way for legitimate companies to spam,” said John Mozena, co-founder of … CAUCE.’

The Perils of Challenge-Response hits PoliTechBot

Published May 13, 2003

As I’ve said before, C-R is not an acceptable way, alone, to deal with spam. You’re just pushing the work away from yourself, and onto your legitimate correspondents — and you won’t make any friends as a result. Things get worse when anything more complex than simple person-to-person mail intrudes, like internet mailing lists. (And come on folks — that particular innovation is only 24 years old ;)

Case in point this week: Declan McCullagh gets bitten:

My reluctant conclusion is that C-R systems with flawed implementations have the potential to end legitimate mailing lists as we know them today.

and Dave Farber says:

If I start getting a flood of challenges from earthlink ipers that require my response I will most likely declare them SPAM and you will stop receiving IP mail.

John Levine’s follow-up is well worth a read, as he predicts massive (and trivial) whitelist exploitation by spammers to avoid C-R — and then we’ll be worse off than we were when we started.

Finally, there’s quite a funny quote in John’s mail:

A relatively easy to solve problem with challenge systems is that most of them are written by dimwits who don’t understand the way that e-mail really works. In 1983 the 4.3BSD Berkeley Unix ‘vacation’ program correctly dealt with mail from lists and other mechanical sources, yet 20 years later I still see out-of-office replies from Lotus Notes and MS Exchange to list mail every day. (Is there really nobody at IBM or Microsoft who used 4.3BSD or knows the rules of thumb to recognize non-personal but legit mail?)

I have often wondered that myself ;)

Northern Ireland policing: imploding

Published May 12, 2003

Wow, the policing situation in Northern Ireland is undergoing meltdown (again).

First off, ‘Stakeknife’ has been named. He was a very high-up member of the IRA (‘head of security for the IRA’s northern command’ apparently), and a double agent for the British Army’s FRU division. The Sunday Herald coverage is here. This is seemingly due to some revelations by a double-agent turned whistleblower.

He’s not a nice character by all accounts:

‘It would be tantamount to being exposed as running a Latin American-style murder squad if the truth came out,’ one said. Unlike Nelson, Stakeknife sometimes did the killings himself. He is also supposed to have arranged for republican targets to be in the wrong place at the wrong time so loyalist hit teams could ‘take them out’. An intelligence source added: ‘This guy was licensed to kill and he killed very many people — or arranged their deaths.’

So, last week, Castlereagh barracks — where files on the agent were kept, and ‘supposedly the most secure security force barracks in western Europe’ — was broken into by a team from British Army intelligence. From that article, it seems pretty brazen; they used army passes, went directly to the room where the papers were moved, knew that security teams were not operational, took exactly the right files, and left:

One former FRU source said: ‘There was no way it was paramilitaries — they couldn’t pull it off. The branch couldn’t do it as they’d get spotted by their own pals in the RUC and MI5 just don’t do rough stuff like this. There’s no one except an intelligence corps CME team who could do this and there is no other motive for them doing it than protecting Stakeknife.’

More NI stuff: Martin McGuinness transcripts: Cryptome again. Surprisingly interesting, mostly for the relaxed chats with Mo Mowlam!

  • Mo: ‘Ahem, the second thing I was gonna say was that I was gonna go to AMERICA and if I’ve got it I’m still gonna go for a couple of days, this week. So I won’t be around much and then I’m on two weeks holiday.’
  • MM: ‘Right’.
  • Mo: ‘So, it was really if there was anything, ahem?’
  • MM: ‘Your holiday plans and mine are colliding then.’
  • Mo: ‘I’m going 26th for two weeks’.
  • MM: ‘So am I, 26th for two weeks.’
  • Mo: ‘Your not going to TURKEY I hope?’
  • MM: ‘No I’m going to Kerry.’
  • (Both laugh)

EMusic again

Published May 12, 2003

So I’ve signed up for EMusic. Just my luck — with perfect timing, they’ve instituted a new download policy, whereby one has to use a proprietary download application — and it doesn’t work on Red Hat versions after 7.3; to quote their install instructions:

The Linux version of the Download Manager 2.0 was developed for Red Hat 6.2, 7.3 and Mandrake 8.1. Any flavors of Linux outside of these may not support the EMusic Download Manager 2.0. If you are having issues, we recommend that you switch your Linux flavor or OS in order to download with the EMusic Download Manager 2.0.

There’s two workarounds: use the Red Hat 7.3 shared libraries for system libc and libnss, as described by John Anderson of genehack.org here; or apparently, a local proxy can be used as long as you use the IP address of the proxy in the emusicdlm app — not the hostname.

I’m conflicted now; I was about to go recommending this service to all and sundry, but

  • it really makes the Linux version a hell of a lot harder to run. (I hope they fix that, at least). Previously, it was simply ‘right click to download’, which is insanely easy and simple.

  • more worryingly — in my experience, this kind of ‘tightening up’ is often symptomatic of a company running out of cash and spiralling ’round the plughole, IMO. :(

On the good side, once I downloaded and set up the genehack hack^Wworkaround, it’s now working perfectly.

I’ve just downloaded an album from their service in about 3 minutes (at 400Kb/s), first try, and the tracks are all crystal-clear VBR MP3s. Now that’s nice…

(PS: -1 for whichever glibc genius decided to change the libnss API incompatibly.)

Horrific – when botfly larvae attack

Published May 10, 2003

Horror as maggots bore into game farmer’s eye (Saturday Star, South Africa):

‘I was in the veld hunting with a group of foreign tourists when I felt something flick into my eye. I thought it was just a miggie but that evening my whole face started to swell,’ he said.

Spangenberg went to his doctor and was given eye drops but the swelling got worse. ‘I started getting terrible migraines and at times I could see nothing but dark and light shadows out of my eye.’

His doctor sent him to eye specialist Bruce Staples in Bethlehem who suspected that the Bot fly was responsible but initially couldn’t spot the larvae – so he treated the inflammation.

When Spangenberg came in again, Staples spotted the worms in the retina and managed to hunt them down with the laser. Staples said by that stage they had begun to pupate and started to run and hide when he went after them with the laser.

This story notes that, in Africa at least, they generally attempt to infect sheep eyes rather than those of humans; but snopes has pictures (warning: extremely gross) from an earlier infestation in Honduras.

Botfly larvae are horrible, horrible little creatures. Urgh. This combines two of my pet neuroses — maggots and things happening to eyes — I think I’m going to get sick…

The FTC’s ‘Fridge’

Published May 9, 2003

wow, the FTC get so many reports of spam, they have to use this monster to deal with it! That’s serious volume.

(Image courtesy of spamNEWS and Neil Schwartzman — thanks Neil)

for posterity: the FormMail advisory

Published May 9, 2003

Myself and Ronald F. Guilmette co-wrote an advisory on vulnerabilities in FormMail. Here it is, archived from RFG’s bugtraq posting:

Anonymous Mail Forwarding Vulnerabilities in FormMail 1.9

By manipulating inputs to the FormMail CGI script, remote users may abuse the functionality provided by FormMail to cause the local mail server on the same (web) server system to send arbi- trary e-mail messages to arbitrary e-mail destination addresses. Such e-mail messages may contain real or forged sender e-mail addresses (in the From: headers) entirely of the attacker’s choosing. In some cases, the envelope sender addresses of such messages may also be set to arbitrary values by the attacker.

I helped with a few cases where FormMail is vulnerable here, namely the injection of newlines attack.

When this came out, I was in Australia, packing in preparation for a month-long camping trip around Victoria ;) The Lake Catani campsite at Mount Buffalo was amazing. (whoa, compare that page with this e-commerce monstrosity — urgh)

UFO Roundup on Saddam’s Alien Technology

Published May 9, 2003

Saddam Hussein, or Mighty Morphin’ Power Ranger? You decide:

… (UFO Roundup Middle East correspondent) Mohammed Daud al-Hayyat has a theory that the golden necklaces worn by Saddam and his son Qusay are protective devices given to them by the reputed Zarzi aliens. …

‘People say that when they wear these necklaces, Saddam and Qusay have only to clasp hands, and the circle of light will appear,’ Mohammed explained, ‘The alien vortex will instantly transport them to safety. In this manner, they can create the circle without the Zarzi aliens being present.’ …

‘The latest rumor is that Saddam will shortly address the people of Iraq from an alien base on the moon! They say this will happen in four or five days.’

Classic! Snipped from UFO Roundup, via the Forteana list; full extract here. (Link)

‘Then they just drop off’

Published May 7, 2003

The BBC reports on one animal-borne disease which I, for one, do not want to see making that zoonotic jump to humans:

Gruesome VD hits Tanzania baboons

Scientists are investigating a horrific new venereal disease which is affecting baboons in Tanzania. … Male baboons are particularly badly hit by the new disease, says Elibariki Mtui from the African Wildlife Foundation in Arusha. ‘The genitals kind of rot away, then they just drop off,’ he said.

Salam’s Back

Published May 7, 2003

Good news — Dear Raed is back on the air, in one piece!

Let me tell you one thing first. War sucks big time. Don’t let yourself ever be talked into having one waged in the name of your freedom. Somehow when the bombs start dropping or you hear the sound of machine guns at the end of your street you don’t think about your ‘imminent liberation’ anymore.

But I am sounding now like the Taxi drivers I have fights with whenever I get into one.

Reactionary taxi drivers — the same the world over ;) A fantastic read. So many details from the point of view of a ‘normal’ Iraqi on the streets. If you’ve been following the war and subsequent events, you can’t miss it.

IDF fires on British defense attache

Published May 6, 2003

Israeli Defence Force fires on parents of injured British peace activist (Independent) (and the British defence attache to Tel Aviv): ‘The parents of a British peace activist who was shot in the head by Israeli troops, came under fire themselves’ … (they) ‘were in a British diplomatic convoy entering the town of Rafah in the Gaza Strip when Israeli soldiers at a checkpoint fired a shot’. ‘The incident … took place despite the Israeli Army being given notice of the journey on at least three occasions’. Incredible. More at the Guardian, too.

SARS genome decoding ‘couldn’t have been done without mail’

Published May 5, 2003

just got back from a super-quick booze-soaked weekend visit to Ben in SF. It was so good to visit a city once again, and get the opportunity to paint the town red, hit the bars, eat in plentiful cheap restaurants, and generally enjoy city life (which I’ve been missing massively since the move from Dublin). But now back in post-suburban Irvine to cope with the hangover.

Also got to meet up with Komal, one of my co-workers up there — which was cool. Unfortunately it was a super-speedy weekend whistle-stop tour though, so having a good social meet-up with all the guys will have to wait until the next visit. ;)

Net: ‘The Canadian scientists who broke the genetic code for SARS … say they couldn’t have done it without the Internet. … The key to that collaboration was ordinary e-mail‘.

It also turns out the ProMED mailing list was the central point at which SARS reports were collated in the early stages, even despite evasion and cover-up by the Chinese state.

So there you go — as usual, SMTP is the killer app — or in this case, a life-saving app! All the more reason to figure out ways to deal with spam and return SMTP to its top spot in the protocol pantheon.

Good thing the FTC Spam Forum went so well, then. Sounds like there was unprecedented agreement between the non-spam folks, clear understanding of the issues by quite a few of the Washington denizens, and maybe even some good footage of the other side digging holes for themselves.

Health: US, Asian Airlines Disagree on SARS. Me, I just wish the airlines would stop being so bloody cheap, and bring in more fresh air rather than recirculating. ;)

Scientists from the Michael Smith Genome Sciences Centre of the B.C. Cancer Agency say their achievement relied on rapid communication with scientists around the world. The key to that collaboration was ordinary e-mail, said Steven Jones of the Vancouver-based research agency in a teleconference Thursday sponsored by Science magazine.

“Within a day of us having a press release announcing our participation in the sequencing we had an amazing amount of e-mail from scientists all around the world,” Jones said.

As soon as the sequence was decoded, the B.C. researchers posted it on the Internet.

“People were, within minutes of that, able to download the sequence and analyse it in their own laboratories and their own computers,” Jones said.

“The Internet has had a profound impact on how this data has been shared and how scientists have collaborated.”

A short time later, researchers at the Atlanta Centers for Disease Control published the sequence of a coronavirus taken from another SARS patient.

The genetic coding for the two viruses were virtually identical, boosting confidence that the coronavirus was in fact the causal agent.

Now both sequences are posted on the World Wide Web for the benefit of researchers in many countries racing to find a reliable test for SARS, and a vaccine to prevent it.

Scientists say the speed of the decoding was amazing.

The first reports of the new disease came from China in November, and on March 13 cases were reported in Toronto and Vancouver. The sequences were posted on the net on April 15.

By contrast, it took years to identify the agents behind diseases like AIDS and hepatitis C.

Mel Crajdon of the B.C. Centre for Disease Control said all evidence points to the coronavirus as being the cause of SARS, despite some seemingly contradictory findings.

Earlier this week Frank Plummer, who heads the National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg, said he was puzzled by the number of people who show evidence of the SARS coronavirus but not symptoms of the disease.

Crajdon suggested the apparent anomaly is due to imperfect understanding of how the disease presents itself, as well as lack of reliable tests for the presence of the virus.

“I’m not surprised by the results that have been obtained to date and I think that they will rapidly improve,” he said.

More than 5,400 cases of SARS have been diagnosed worldwide, with at least 394 deaths. In Canada, there have been 23 deaths, all in the Toronto area.

  • – –

On the Net:

SARS sequences: http://sciencemag.org/features/data/sars

SARS data: http://aaas.org

SARS Comments: http://eurekalert.org

Unicode, and how Java got it wrong

Published May 1, 2003

Tim Bray is opening my eyes to lots of the itty bitty details of i18n with Unicode. I had very vague ideas about so many things he’s writing here, so it’s an educational read, especially this:

In Java, characters are represented by the char data type, which is claimed to be a ’16-bit Unicode character’. Unfortunately, as I pointed out recently, there really is no such thing. To be precise, a Java char represents a UTF-16 code point, which may represent a character or may, via the surrogate mechanism, represent only half a character. The consequence of this is that the following methods of the String class can produce results that are incorrect: charAt, getChars, indexOf, lastIndexOf, length, and substring. Of course, if you are really sure that you will never have to deal with an ‘astral-plane’ character, to the point of being willing to accept that your software will break messily if one shows up, you can pretend that these errors can’t happen.

To me, this feels just like deciding that you’ll hever have to deal with more than 64K of memory, or a database bigger than 32 bits in size, or a date after December 31, 1999. What Hunter S. Thompson would call ‘bad craziness.’ I’ll settle for ‘shortsighted.’

Wow, and there was I thinking Java had that sorted. If you ever plan to deal with 21st-century-style i18n (ie. using Unicode), you’d better read these articles.

Spam: via BoingBoing, how to extract 500 bucks, painlessly, from telemarketers, under the TCPA. Not yet applicable to spam — but who knows, maybe in a few month’s time…

Open Source: Colm MacCarthaigh caught Dell out a few months ago; turns out they were distributing a wireless AP, the Dell Truemobile 1184, which contained a modified Linux distro — but were not distributing the source to the GPL’ed parts.

Well, all credit to Dell. They’ve admitted their slip-up, resolved the problem admirably, and openly, and have shipped Colm a CD-ROM with all the GPL’ed source on it , which Colm has made available here . Mistakes happen, but it was nicely resolved.

EMusic.com vs. Apple

Published May 1, 2003

a message on Dave Farber’s IP list tipped EMusic.com as a little-known alternative to Apples new music store. So I took a look, and whaddya know, it’s incredible! Here’s the key points:

  • A fantastic selection of my favourite genres: roots reggae, dancehall, ambient and drum and bass. This is exactly the stuff you can’t find on P2P nets nowadays, and it’s not on Apple’s store either. EMusic is not so hot for the top-40 stuff, but let’s face it, I will never want to listen to Britney’s latest anyway.

  • ‘Try before you buy’ 30-second track tasters, so you can listen to
    • the tune just enough to see if you like it before committing.
  • A flat monthly rate of 10 bucks, for 50 tracks a month.

  • Download as plain old un-DRM-encumbered MP3s. So it’ll work fine on my Linux desktop, and pretty much any music-listening device you can possibly imagine for the next few years.

Wow. I’m so signing up for this. I think in 10 minutes I’ve identified my next 6 months’ listening material…

The ‘Overseas Spammers’ and ‘Do Not Mail List’ Fallacies

Published April 30, 2003

Declan McCullagh: A modest proposal to end spam. Good article on Larry Lessig’s ‘spam bounties’ proposal.

Lofgren’s plan won’t give everyone who gets spammed new rights to sue (although spam victims may already may have some rights under state antispam or other laws). Instead, it states that people sending unsolicited commercial e-mail must label it with ‘ADV:’ in the subject line or run the risk of being sued by the Federal Trade Commission. If you are the first to report an unlabeled spam-o-gram to the government, you will get a bounty of ‘not less than 20 percent’ of the fine the spammer pays, assuming it can ever be collected.

There are problems with this. As far as I know, the FTC is not having a problem collecting spam — the figures I’ve seen (can’t recall them right now) indicate that they get hundreds of megs a day. (Even the SpamAssassin.org spamtraps get over 100Mb a day.)

The difficulty is chasing down the perpetrator, and prosecuting. That takes law-enforcement manpower, and that’s just not there right now — because, let’s face it, spam is not a serious offence like rape or murder.

Anyway, Declan says that the major problem is that the spammers are offshore:

For one thing, an increasing percentage of it comes from overseas, and you can be certain that offshore bulk mailers will gleefully thumb their noses at Congress. Ken Schneider, chief technical officer of antispam company Brightmail, estimates that 30 percent to 50 percent of the spam his company tracks comes from outside the United States. ‘It’s a big number,’ Schneider said. ‘It’s a global economy, and spammers are certainly taking advantage of it.’

This is a frequent misapprehension. This is not the case. It’s true that much spam is relayed through machines in Asia and South America, but the originators — the people who are writing the spam and sending it to compromised relay machines and proxies — are US-based. In fact, a vast quantity of ’em seem to be based in Florida. (This is the thing about country-code blacklists. In reality, if we could track a message all the way back to the origin, a state-code blacklist for FL would probably work much better ;)

In other news from the same article:

… Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., is expected to introduce a bill this week to create an national ‘do not e-mail’ list–an idea that the New Democrats touted earlier this month.

OK, while I’m here, let’s debunk ‘do no mail’ lists too. ;) ‘Do not call’ lists work well for telephones, since you typically have only one phone number. But for email:

In summary, I’m not confident a ‘do not mail’ list could actually be operable.

Finally — The SBL’s answer to the EMarketersAmerica.org SLAPP lawsuit.

New Yorker on Spam

Published April 30, 2003

Via Ben:

Much funnier than Seinfeld would have you believe.

Unhappy Intelligence

Published April 30, 2003

I’ve been trying to reduce all the anti-war stuff, since there’s plenty of other sources for that and I reckon I’m boring everyone. But this story’s a doozie — US, UK intelligence agencies accuse Bush and Blair of distorting and fabricating evidence in rush to war:

A high-level UK source said last night that intelligence agencies on both sides of the Atlantic were furious that briefings they gave political leaders were distorted in the rush to war with Iraq. ‘They ignored intelligence assessments which said Iraq was not a threat,’ the source said. Quoting an editorial in a Middle East newspaper which said, ‘Washington has to prove its case. If it does not, the world will for ever believe that it paved the road to war with lies’, he added: ‘You can draw your own conclusions.’ …

‘The INC saw the demand, and provided what was needed,’ he said. ‘The implication is that they polluted the whole US intelligence effort.’

WWII’s Campest Spy

Published April 29, 2003

BBC: Wartime role of Queen’s dressmaker. ‘Details have emerged about the wartime activities of the Queen’s dressmaker Sir Hardy Amies, who died last month aged 93.’

Apparently, he served with the Special Operations Executive (SOE) in Brussels, liaising with the Belgian resistance. During this time, he organised a photo-shoot for Vogue magazine featuring members of the resistance movement posing for photographs!

Seems he got away with it, though — another officer writes in his file:

‘However, it is not for me to reason why, but no doubt the profile of Lt.Col Amies in the next issue of the Vogue will cause a flutter in many feminine hearts when they realise that their handsome couturier is, after all, the Scarlet Pimpernel of this war.’

Threats close Kabul’s Irish bar

Published April 29, 2003

BlogStart:

Booze: BBC: Threats close Kabul’s Irish bar:

Terrorism alerts have prompted the owners of Kabul’s only bar to close down temporarily. The Irish Club has been a roaring success with correspondents reporting hundreds of drinkers inside at a time since it opened on Ireland’s national holiday, St Patrick’s Day.

But the popularity of the bar, which is open only to foreigners in the predominately Muslim state, appears to have attracted the interest of terrorists, United Nations staff in the city said. ….

Owners of the bar hope it will reopen next week, but its clientele is set to shrink after the UN banned its staff from going there for security reasons and other foreign aid organisations and diplomatic missions have issued warnings to their personnel. ‘It’s been placed off limits indefinitely after warnings that it could be the target of a terror attack,’ said UN spokesman David Singh.

Still, the owners say they’ll do some renovation work while it’s closed. Looking forward to the Beeb story about ‘Kabul’s Irish bar now boasts extensive beer garden and function room’ next month…

Spam: In other news, it seems AOL, Yahoo! and Hotmail are banding together to ‘reduce spam’. This could be interesting.

A peek into a spammer’s inbox, and ‘targeting’

Published April 29, 2003

Aardvark.co.nz: The Sound Of A Spammer’s Laugh. Depressing reading. The article’s has screenshot of two MMF-spam dropboxes — here’s one. It’s full of mails from the spammer’s victims. Upshot: make sure your friends know not to reply to spam — and definitely not MMF spam. Mind you, if you’re reading this blog, you and your friends are probably too smart for that anyway ;)

Also: Brad Templeton on spam’s 25th birthday; Brian Hayes in American Scientist. The latter has this nice (although wholly unscientific ;) graph of spam topics — and it sounds like Brian’s getting spammed by artmarket.com.

That raises an interesting point. Spam is frequently trumpeted (by the spammers) as ‘targeted’. What this often means, in reality, is that they’ve just randomly selected addresses and put them in a list as supposedly targeted for a given topic; or else run a Google search for a related term, and shoved a load of addresses from all pages found into a ‘targeted’ list.

For example, my spam load includes:

  • Artmarket, above. I’ve never been known to buy art, apart from a few cheapo prints, and that was off-line.

  • The septic tank spammers. I have about 30 spams from the last 2 years flogging septic tanks. I don’t even know what one looks like.

  • Turkish political spam. Don’t have a clue. I went to Turkey on holiday once, but I never gave my email address to anyone ;)

  • the obvious stuff everyone gets: Japanese, Chinese and Korean spam. I can’t even read the ideograms, let alone understand the written language.

Plus the usual MMF, get rich quick, and porno spam. Not once have I seen a spam hawking DVDs of Koyaanisqatsi, classic breakbeat releases, or the new William Gibson novel — now that would be targeting. But no…

Amazon Web Services

Published April 27, 2003

Tim O’Reilly: Killer Apps Share A Common Thread: Hacker Geeks.

The really interesting bit in this is the discussion of the Amazon Web Services:

Rob Federick, senior technology manager for Amazon.com, asked for a show of hands for those in the room who considered Amazon.com to be a retailer business and those who considered it to be a technology platform. O’Reilly was amongst the few who raised hands in support of the latter.

It didn’t start out that way. But Amazon soon discovered developers taking the Amazon interface and adding their own ideas. A 19-year-old developer from Romania, ‘Catlin,’ began designing store fronts that looked like the Amazon.com site, and then allowing other developers to download the source code for free.

‘We are allowing people to create and innovate in ways that Amazon.com cannot do on its own,’ Federick said.

This is incredibly significant, and shows how Amazon’s leadership has a totally different vision compared to other online retailers. The others take the ‘Altavista view’ — they want to lock their users ‘in the trunk’ as Dave Winer says; users stay on the retailer’s site, aggregators and price-comparison engines are locked out, having to jump through hacky screen-scraping hoops, etc.

In contrast, Amazon are more than happy to let other sites scrape their content using their web services, even if this could be used to show how other sites have lower prices, or possibly lose them sales. Wow. I’m sure that was hard to sell internally, but it’s a great move.

Spam: Reg: new spam trojan, called Proxy-Guzu. Yet another. :(

Dublin Guinness to brew the Nigerian version

Published April 27, 2003

Yahoo: Guinness brews up African recipe.

DUBLIN (Reuters) – Guinness is brewing up an African-style version of its famous stout to quench the thirst of Ireland’s growing immigrant population. Tests are under way to replicate Guinness manufactured in Nigeria at its St. James’ Gate headquarters in Dublin. The African version of Guinness Foreign Extra Stout tastes sweeter and heavier than the traditional draught popular in the west, and is almost double in strength.

A Guinness spokeswoman said the new brand was a result of consumer demand from Ireland’s growing African population. ‘This is the home of Guinness and so we’re seeing if we can brew the African recipe here and produce it at St. James’ Gate to the same recipe as in Nigeria,’ she said. …

Guinness Foreign Extra Stout was first exported from Ireland in the 19th century to British colonies. The first Guinness exports to Africa were to Sierra Leone in 1827. The stronger alcohol content helped preserve it during the long sea journey.

I can’t wait to try it out. I used to continually overhear conversations on the bus between Dublin locals and Africans regarding whose Guinness was best — time to settle the argument! ;)

Luther Blissett, author

Published April 26, 2003

Luther Blisset strikes again; the pseudonymous trickster anarchist collective from Bologna named after a West Indian footballer (it’s all ‘explained’ in the manifesto) is still at work. Now they’ve written a swashbuckling bestseller historical novel called Q:

Q has finally reached Britain, in Shaun Whiteside’s zippy and rumbustious translation (Heinemann, £14.99). Set in Germany, the Low Countries and Venice between the 1520s and 1550s, it dramatises the bloody popular revolts that accompanied (and challenged) Luther’s Reformation, and the Catholic undercover strategies that wrecked these radical movements. Imagine Umberto Eco’s knack for the swashbuckling thriller-of-ideas crossed with an artful touch of the Le Carrés, and you have a fair idea of the novel’s mood. ….

Q works like a charm as a sordid, splendid period romp that painlessly informs its readers about the theological strife that splintered Europe (and the banking networks that re-connected it). Yet the reasons why a bunch of Bolognese stirrers shoud seize upon this theme soon grow clear. Effectively, their novel also operates as an allegory of Italian leftist politics since the Seventies. Out of the chaos of Utopian gambits and guerrilla provocations, in a murk of subterfuge, an elite plan for a ‘new world order’ emerges.

Sounds great! Must remember to stick that in the wishlist.

Guantanamo Bay detainees including children

Published April 26, 2003

Wierd. For the last two days, the PM news programme on BBC Radio 4 has been discussing the recent admission by (iirc) the US military commander in control of the Guantanamo Bay detention center, that there are several Afghani children who have been detained there, since the war in Afghanistan.

This has elicited the reactions you’d expect from UNICEF, etc., seeing as it’s in contravention of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.

However, there’s nothing on any English-language news pages I can find; just this Der Spiegel story, not even on the BBC news site itself.

Update: Didn’t look hard enough! Here it is. Also, the Irish Times reports:

(General Richard Myers) responded sharply to questions about critical world reaction to the detention of three children, ages 13 to 15, at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba where the US military holds suspected al-Qaeda and Taliban members.

‘Despite their age these are very dangerous people,’ he said. ‘Some have killed. some have said they will kill again.’

Defence Secretary Mr Donald Rumsfeld said the US was ‘keeping them down there to keep them off the streets’.

Hmm. On the BBC, the commander of the joint task force at Guantanamo, Major General Geoffrey Miller was interviewed; he said that the children had been press-ganged into fighting for the Taliban, and had been victims of abuse during that time. ‘very dangerous people’?

‘at teatime’?

Published April 26, 2003

wtf? From the Red Hat 9 at(1) manual page:

At allows fairly complex time specifications, extending the POSIX.2 standard. … You may also specify midnight, noon, or teatime (4pm).

US sugar industry threathens to kill off WHO

Published April 25, 2003

This is quite simply insane:

The sugar industry in the US is threatening to bring the World Health Organisation to its knees by demanding that Congress end its funding unless the WHO scraps guidelines on healthy eating, due to be published on Wednesday.

The threat is being described by WHO insiders as tantamount to blackmail and worse than any pressure exerted by the tobacco lobby.

In a letter to Gro Harlem Brundtland, the WHO’s director general, the Sugar Association says it will ‘exercise every avenue available to expose the dubious nature’ of the WHO’s report on diet and nutrition, including challenging its $406m (£260m) funding from the US.

The industry is furious at the guidelines, which say that sugar should account for no more than 10% of a healthy diet. It claims that the review by international experts which decided on the 10% limit is scientifically flawed, insisting that other evidence indicates that a quarter of our food and drink intake can safely consist of sugar.

Does anyone in their right mind think that a food intake consisting of 25% sugar makes any sense whatsoever?

Food over here, BTW, has been really good compared to Ireland. We have a branch of Trader Joe’s just down the road, which has supplied us with stacks of fantastic organic and/or healthy eats, for far cheaper than what the local supermarket charges for the usual pasteurised, added-sugar, added-salt crap.

This is just as well, because that supermarket has some really nasty stuff; even the bread is sweet due to added sugar! yuck. (In passing, pet food peeve: pasteurised orange juice. Pasteurisation of fruit juice kills the flavour and texture, and is thoroughly pointless; with that much acid and sugar, there’s no way any nasty bacteria can survive, assuming the juice is citrus and is fresh enough. But maybe that’s the point; saleable while less fresh == longer shelflife == profit.)

Goodbye to Baghdad

Published April 25, 2003

Goodbye to Baghdad (Guardian). Some good snippets:

The information ministry and TV headquarters were obvious targets (for looters), but the wanton destruction of St George’s church was unexpected. … A man living next door to the church said Christians were seen as part of the regime.

Tariq Aziz, after all, is a Christian. Also, this — I knew it! —

The US tanks that shot their way into the city have lost their menace. Children now go right up to the US soldiers, smile, and swear at them in Arabic, finding it hilarious that the troops think they are being friendly.

And the politics of the Shia/Sunni divide:

‘The whole administration has been robbed and destroyed, except for those institutions which have been guarded by them (provisional Shia local government),’ said the hospital director. He was transparently unhappy at having to take orders from the Shia clergy, but said America had left him no choice.

‘Without them, this hospital would have vanished. We have no civilian administration now. Until now America hasn’t done anything for the civilian administration. They are just occupying us and doing nothing.’

The doctor’s dilemma raises a larger question. Did Bush go to war on Saddam Hussein’s secular dictatorship to pave the way for an Islamist Shia regime bordering Iran? Because that is what is beginning to take root in Saddam City, and in other neighbourhoods of Baghdad. ….

The new Shia assertiveness – whether through ambitions of religious government or the exuberance with which millions this week participated in a religious pilgrimage banned under Saddam – has horrified the Iraqi middle and upper classes, and the minority Sunni elite, which has been the traditional ruler of Iraq from the days of the Ottoman empire.

Like the Americans, they have been slow to react these past two weeks, stunned by the speed with which the regime collapsed and mortified by the knowledge that millions have watched on TV as Iraqis laid waste to their own country, and history.

BBC chief attacks U.S. war coverage (fwd)

Published April 25, 2003

BBC Director General Greg Dyke singled out for criticism the fast growing News Corp’s Fox News Channel, owned by media baron Rupert Murdoch, and Clear Channel Communications, the largest operator of radio stations in the United States, with over 1,200 stations, for special criticism.

‘Personally, I was shocked while in the United States by how unquestioning the broadcast news media was during this war,’ Dyke said in a speech at a University of London conference on Thursday.

‘If Iraq proved anything, it was that the BBC cannot afford to mix patriotism and journalism. This is happening in the United States and if it continues, will undermine the credibility of the U.S. electronic news media.’

Dyke singled out Fox News, the most popular U.S. cable news network during the conflict, for its ‘gung-ho patriotism,’ saying: ‘We are still surprised when we see Fox News with such a committed political position.’

Good bits, via the IP list.

SARS and Singapore

Published April 23, 2003

(or humour?) Rod Liddle: How I was seized for my smoker’s cough:

Despite the almost total absence of SARS around here, the various governments are very worried, apart from the Singaporean government, which, I suspect, likes nothing more than imposing rigorous screening and quarantine programmes upon its somewhat cowed citizens and scrubbing everything down with disinfectant every five minutes. Stand on a street corner for too long in Singapore and you’re likely to be sprayed with Dettol. But that was true long before SARS presented itself. …

We are still in the blame stage of this ‘epidemic’ and the blame shifts according to where you are and what the local government believes. A similar pattern of xenophobic mythology established itself during the early stages of Asian flu, Aids and the Ebola virus. Nasty, incurable diseases are almost always the fault of foreigners doing despicable, uncivilised things, usually with animals. Betcha there’s a gruesome SARS film from Hollywood by the end of next year, with a heroic American doctor played by Ben Affleck, who saves Chicago, or something.

Rod Liddle is very clearly on holiday.

Spammers in the NYT again

Published April 22, 2003

NYT: Internet Is Losing Ground in Battle Against Spam.

‘We have allowed these spam cops to rise out of nowhere to be self-appointed police and block whole swaths of the industry,’ said Bob Dallas, an executive of Empire Towers, an e-mail firm in Toledo, Ohio, widely cited on antispam lists used by many Internet companies.

‘This is against everything that America stands for,’ Mr. Dallas added.

‘The consumer should be the one in control of this.’

Wow, way to shoot yourself down in flames. Without a spam filter to detect unsolicited bulk mail and differentiate from the solicited stuff from their friends and legit subscriptions, the consumer has control how, exactly?

BTW, Empire Towers have a very impressive ROKSO listing. It says: ‘Empire Towers (ET) is a hard-line stealth spamming operation whose spams are illegal in most US states. ET goes to elaborate lengths to hide spam origins and obfuscate URLs. They operate by obtaining multiple class C netblocks on multiple ISPs known for lax handling of spam complaints, the class Cs serving to make their account more valuable to the ISP so in theory harder to terminate.’

‘Internet advances not always pure tech’ shocker

Published April 22, 2003

Jason Kottke: Portal Wars II: When Search Engines Attack. He makes a great point (from Robert Morris at Etech 2002): while advances on the internet are typically heralded as tech-driven, in fact they’re more often usability-driven. Examples:

Mosaic was not an advancement in technology over TBL’s original browser. Blogger is a highly-specialized FTP client. IM is IRC++ (or IRC for Dummies, depending on your POV).

Dead right. Good tech, without the rough edges sanded down, and a degree of comprehensibility, is useless.

Aside: I wonder if Robert Morris, IBM is any relation to Robert T Morris, the 1988 internet worm guy?

Evil Alarm Clocks

Published April 21, 2003

It seems alarm clocks may be responsible for more than just waking you up at unfriendly hours of the day — they may also make you hallucinate and imagine visitations from supernatural beings, according to Michael Persinger, a psychologist who’s been investigating the effects of complex electromagnetic fields on the brain’s perception. He says:

As a human being, I am concerned about the illusionary explanations for human consciousness and the future of human existence. Consequently after writing the Neuropsychological Base of God Beliefs (1987), I began the systematic application of complex electromagnetic fields to discern the patterns that will induce experiences (sensed presence) that are attributed to the myriad of ego-alien intrusions which range from gods to aliens. The research is not to demean anyone’s religious/mystical experience but instead to determine which portions of the brain or its electromagnetic patterns generate the experience.

So it turns out that Horizon, the BBC science programme, has just shown an episode about Dr. Persinger’s work. The transcript isn’t up yet, unfortunately, but some mails on the forteana list make it sound like it’ll be well worth a read when it is. (It’ll be here, apparently.)

One great find is this paper:

‘A left-handed Roman Catholic female adolescent with a history of early brain trauma reported nightly visitations by a sentient being. During one episode she experienced vibrations of the bed, an external presence along the left side that moved into her body, inner vaginal (not clitoral) and uterine sensations, and the sense of being impregnated by a force she attributed to the Holy Spirit. After the latter experience she felt an invisible baby superimposed upon her left shoulder. Analyses of the measurements for magnetic anomalies within her bedroom indicated an electric clock about 20 cm from her head while she slept. The complex form of the 4 microT magnetic pulses generated by the clock was similar to shapes that evoke electrical seizures in epileptic rats and sensitive humans.’

Also worth noting that Richard Dawkins has little aptitude for religious feelings, even magnetically-induced ones!

The Open Proxy Problem

Published April 21, 2003

The Open Proxy Problem, a PowerPoint/PDF presentation shown at the Internet2 Members Meeting of April 9th 2003, by Joe St Sauver, Ph.D (Director, User Services and Network Applications University of Oregon Computing Center).

Well worth a read if you’re interested in network security or spam. Joe’s done an astonishing job of researching every angle of the issue, from historical comparisons to ‘blue boxes’ circa 1971, the status of proxy servers to the Chinese government, and even a statistical analysis of proxy DNSBL overlap. (BTW, did you know that the New York Times was broken into via an open proxy?)

Using VNC For Your Main Desktop

Published April 21, 2003

I’ve just fixed my desktop machine (had to buy a new CPU, unfortunately, after the old one died during shipping).

I then upgraded to Red Hat 9 (woo, very nice), switched to KDE for my desktop, and took a look at software suspend (because the machine is too noisy to leave on permanently in the corner of the living room).

However, the latter won’t work with my video card; instead, the machine reboots continually when resuming from suspend. Problem.

A bit of thinking about the problem came up with a nifty solution… I’d heard of folks using a VNC server for their main desktop, in order to connect to it from any machine they found themselves near, and not be ‘tethered’ to one particular desktop machine. The same system also means I can run my desktop with a virtual display, and just ‘connect’ to this from the real one. Then, when I want to suspend, I can just kill off the X server, suspend, and start up a new one after resume.

If you’re curious about how to do this, read on…