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Justin's Linklog Posts

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…

(Untitled)

Published April 18, 2003

Guardian: Ministers may be questioned over cover-up.

The cover-up into security force collusion with loyalist murder gangs in Northern Ireland may have reached the highest echelons of the army and even government ministers, Britain’s most senior police officer revealed yesterday. …

He said loyalist paramilitaries had been helped by RUC officers and members of a covert army squad, the FRU (force research unit), and that the cooperation between them included ‘wilful failure to keep records, the absence of accountability, the withholding of intelligence and evidence, and the extreme of agents being involved in murder’.

More RHL9 comments

Published April 18, 2003

More comments on that RHL9 review… interesting to see that RH ran into the same Unicode problem we did with SpamAssassin — namely that using Unicode charsets is horrifically slow compared to plain old ASCII. (This is the main reason we use ASCII internally in SpamAssassin.)

Bootup Scripts and Unicode: All the text processing utilities, grep, awk, sort, etc all work significantly slower when using the Unicode UTF locale. To speed the bootup, in the /etc/rc.sysinit and other SysV scripts, because the configuration is using 7bit ASCII these utilities are now invoked with LC_ALL=C utility to force the C locale.

(Also interesting to note who reported the bug, too ;)

Other nice additions:

  • Keith Packard’s xrandr, to resize and rotate an X screen on the fly.
  • redhat-config-(tab) to list all system config stuff from the commandline. At last, sensible naming for this stuff!
  • Debuginfo RPMs, to install debug symbols for your system libraries on-the-fly.
  • Subversion. (Although I’m a bit disappointed to read that svn doesn’t improve on CVS’ ability to do merges at all, which has drastically reduced my keenness to upgrade.)

Red Hat 9, and POSIX ACLs

Published April 18, 2003

Good techie review of RH9, thanks Padraig. I find this horrifically kludgy, though:

Just a quick observation. The way text editors save files normally, is to create a new file with a temporary random name, and then move/rename the new file to name of the original. Using this technique, if the file being edited has ACLs, the ACLs will be lost. The Vim editor uses libacl to obtain the original ACLs, and then add them back after the save. It is important that other applications that save files in the same fashion are updated to use libacl.

Bad bad bad. Shouldn’t require application code updates like this. I think this is POSIX’ fault. Mind you, according to acl(5), it looks like umask(2) and a concept of parent-directory-affecting-child-nodes’-ACLs seems to apply; so that improves matters a little.

Still, I don’t like the idea of changing something as fundamental as the system calls used to copy and update files in a filesystem, which hasn’t changed in ~15 years on the UNIX platform. I am sure there’ll be nasty side-effects. Maybe that’s why the POSIX 1003.1e ACL standardization effort foundered ;)

Afghanistan’s First Irish Pub Opens

Published April 18, 2003

You just can’t get away from ’em. Irish bars, I mean.

‘The first public house in Afghanistan since the fall of the Taliban has opened – and it’s Irish. The Irish Club opened on a secluded side street in the centre of Kabul last month – on St Patrick’s Day.’ …

‘There are Afghan staff, of course, but they have all been given Irish names – Kevin, Jimmy, Michael, George – ‘to protect them from possible retaliation’ …

Fazel Ahmed Manawi, the deputy supreme court justice, said any Muslims found drinking at the Irish Club will be punished. ‘We have got a lot of foreigners living in our country and unfortunately, this is a necessary thing for them,’ he said.’ (Full story)

Venezuelan General: ‘Proof Washington was behind coup’

Published April 18, 2003

CBC.ca: Venezuela has Proof Washington was Behind Failed Coup, says General .

The embassy also rejected allegations by governing party legislators that two U.S. military officials who visited the Fuerte Tiuna military base in Caracas the day before Chavez’s ouster were helping coup leaders.

The two officers spent two hours at the base April 11 to investigate information about troop movements, the embassy said. They left hours before Chavez was deposed. Two officers returned to the base April 13 for another evaluation of the situation.

According to the Council on Hemispheric Affairs:

Venezuelan and U.S. officials are investigating allegations that two high-level military officials from the U.S. embassy, including Army Lt. Col. James Rogers, were at Fuerte Tiuna military base the first night of the coup while Chávez was being held there.

The U.S. embassy initially called the allegations ‘pure rubbish.’ A month after the overthrow, it issued a statement saying the two officials were at the base for two hours late Thursday afternoon, April 11, just before the coup unfolded that evening. They were checking reports of troop movements, the embassy said, and returned Saturday, April 13, during the coup to check the general situation.

Ri-ight.

The details of how the coup occurred are deepening suspicions of U.S. involvement among critics, such as Birns, who draw parallels to the 1973 coup in Chile. They contend that Chávez’s overthrow was not the result of a ‘spontaneous popular uprising’ as the coup leaders, the U.S. government and Chávez opponents contend. Rather, they say, it was a highly orchestrated, carefully thought-out plan by a corrupt class of business, labor, media and military elites who are backed by the United States and who see Chávez’s ‘peaceful revolution’ on behalf of Venezuela’s impoverished majority as a threat to their privileges.

‘This is as classic as they come,’ said William Blum, author of Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II. In an April 27 interview with NCR, Blum said the CIA was ‘not even embarrassed’ to use its ‘same methods all over again,’ namely, helping to create a situation of chaos and violence that invites the military to step in.

reStructuredText v. EtText

Published April 18, 2003

reStructuredText is apparently the new wave of text-based markup — in the Python community at least. ;)

It’s basically a reworking of Zope’s StructuredText, which — like my own EtText, which is what this blog is written in — is itself a reworking of Setext. Setext is an old Amiga smart-text format which I first encountered in the Plexus web server back in 1993. Plexus, BTW, was what HTTP server number 70-something ran.

It’s interesting. I’d been considering modifying EtText to use some StructuredText ideas, such as indentation indicating tag-nesting levels. But it looks like reStructuredText has got rid of that idea, and instead does what EtText does: ie. indentation indicates quoting. So it must have driven someone up the wall in that case.

There’s a reStructuredText primer here. Compare with EtText’s quick intro. (gack, what is that font I’m using there? ;)

Still, a few other nice ideas to steal ;) — I like the idea of ending the paragraph with colon-colon to indicate that the next quoted block is a code sample in monospace format. hmm…

Ask Don Rumsfeld!

Published April 17, 2003

the ‘Ask Don Rumsfeld’ simulator…

Your question was:

Any sign of those WMDs yet, Don?

Answer:

It might just be in the words one uses, and someone would then say, oh, my goodness, he thinks this and someone else thinks that. I am impatient. I probably will remain impatient. And if everything were being done absolutely perfectly, I probably would still be impatient. Our relationship with them is multi-faceted, it’s political, it’s economic, and clearly there are security implications.

I guess anything’s possible. I can’t validate it. Oh, I think I’ll leave that for the coming days and weeks. Now that I think of it, I shouldn’t have mentioned it. So when we do the best we can and we pull all this information together, and we then say well that’s basically what we see as the situation, that is really only the known knowns and the known unknowns.

Maybe that is kind of idiosyncratic behaviour on my part but it seems quite rational to me and I think I will stick with it. And it’s constantly a moving target. Well, you know, the United States has a wonderful record of humanitarian assistance, and caring about people, and participation in funding of medical activities, and food programs for people, and we’re not against any religion. As a country, we’re not against any race.

It’s just not knowable. We are looking for code words to describe a relationship that is in transition, I think, is a challenge. I don’t have any good current information that would validate that story.

Ways to pass the time on boring train journeys, pt.XVII

Published April 17, 2003

A group of Russian train conductors needed hospital treatment after smashing their heads repeatedly against a train window to find out who had the strongest forehead.

The conductors came up with the contest as a way of passing time on the 3,000 mile journey from Novosibirsk in Siberia to Vladivostock. The men were treated in hospital after stopping the train midway through the journey at the town of Vyazemskaya and demanding medical help, Pravda reports.

Story filed: 08:48 Thursday 17th April 2003 (Ananova)

Record for most blocked host on the ‘net

Published April 17, 2003

Wow. I think this is the most blocklist hits I’ve ever seen in a mail… the open relay 61.159.235.36 is listed in a whole 19 DNS blocklists.

  • T_RCVD_IN_DEADBEEF (0.0 points) RBL: T_RCVD_IN_DEADBEEF RBL A check: found 36.235.159.61.bl.deadbeef.com., type: 127.0.0.2
  • RCVD_IN_NJABL (1.2 points) RBL: Received via a relay in dnsbl.njabl.org RBL A check: found 36.235.159.61.dnsbl.njabl.org., type: 127.0.0.9
  • RCVD_IN_OSIRUSOFT_COM (0.5 points) RBL: Received via a relay in relays.osirusoft.com RBL A check: found 36.235.159.61.relays.osirusoft.com., type: 127.0.0.9
  • RCVD_IN_UNCONFIRMED_DSBL (0.0 points) RBL: Received via a relay in unconfirmed.dsbl.org RBL TXT check: found 36.235.159.61.unconfirmed.dsbl.org., type: http://dsbl.org/listing?ip=61.159.235.36
  • T_RCVD_IN_WIREHUB_PROXIES (0.0 points) RBL: T_RCVD_IN_WIREHUB_PROXIES RBL A check: found 36.235.159.61.proxies.blackholes.wirehub.net., type: 127.0.0.2
  • T_RCVD_IN_GIPPER (0.0 points) RBL: T_RCVD_IN_GIPPER RBL A check: found 36.235.159.61.proxy.bl.gweep.ca., type: 127.0.0.1
  • T_RCVD_IN_WIREHUB_BH (0.0 points) RBL: T_RCVD_IN_WIREHUB_BH RBL A check: found 36.235.159.61.blackholes.wirehub.net., type: 127.0.0.2
  • RCVD_IN_DSBL (4.3 points) RBL: Received via a relay in list.dsbl.org RBL TXT check: found 36.235.159.61.list.dsbl.org., type: http://dsbl.org/listing?ip=61.159.235.36
  • RCVD_IN_BL_SPAMCOP_NET (0.0 points) RBL: Received via a relay in bl.spamcop.net RBL TXT check: found 36.235.159.61.bl.spamcop.net., type: Blocked – see http://spamcop.net/bl.shtml?61.159.235.36
  • T_RCVD_IN_SORBS (0.0 points) RBL: T_RCVD_IN_SORBS RBL A check: found 36.235.159.61.dnsbl.sorbs.net., type: 127.0.0.2
  • RCVD_IN_SBL (1.1 points) RBL: Received via SBLed relay, see http://www.spamhaus.org/sbl/ RBL TXT check: found 36.235.159.61.sbl.spamhaus.org., type: Listed on SBL – see http://spamhaus.org/SBL/sbl.lasso?query=SBL5950
  • RCVD_IN_OPM (4.3 points) RBL: Received via a relay in opm.blitzed.org RBL TXT check: found 36.235.159.61.opm.blitzed.org., type: open proxy – see http://blitzed.org/proxy/?ip=61.159.235.36
  • T_RCVD_IN_OSSOCKS (0.0 points) RBL: T_RCVD_IN_OSSOCKS RBL A check: found 36.235.159.61.socks.relays.osirusoft.com., type: 127.0.0.9
  • T_RCVD_IN_MONKEYS_UPL (0.0 points) RBL: Received via a relay in proxies.relays.monkeys.com. RBL TXT check: found 36.235.159.61.proxies.relays.monkeys.com., type: BLOCKED: See http://www.monkeys.com/upl/listed-ip-0.cgi?ip=61.159.235.36
  • T_RCVD_IN_OPM_HTTP_CONNECT (0.0 points) RBL: T_RCVD_IN_OPM_HTTP_CONNECT
  • T_RCVD_IN_SORBS_HTTP (0.0 points) RBL: T_RCVD_IN_SORBS_HTTP
  • T_RCVD_IN_FIVETEN_SPAM (0.0 points) RBL: T_RCVD_IN_FIVETEN_SPAM

  • T_RCVD_IN_OPM_HTTP_POST (0.0 points) RBL: T_RCVD_IN_OPM_HTTP_POST

Aha. looking it up, it’s in China. That explains it… Full message here.

Priorities

Published April 16, 2003

Good to see the US troops in Baghdad were kept busy keeping an eye on the important stuff — like surrounding the Oil Ministry building with 50 tanks and snipers, while the largest collection of antiquities in the Middle East got trashed. That’s keeping your priorities straight!

The imposing building in the Al-Mustarisiya quarter is guarded by around 50 US tanks which block every entrance, while sharpshooters are positioned on the roof and in the windows.

The curious onlooker is clearly unwelcome. Any motorist who drifts within a few metres of the main entrance is told to leave immediately.

Residents noted that the irrigation ministry, just next door, was torched.

(Sydney Morning Herald) (more in attached mail).

Iraqwar.ru Redux

Published April 16, 2003

Did Russians Use Blog To Aid Iraq? Some slightly paranoid theories, IMO. Interesting to note, though, that Stratfor reckons it was written by GRU (or ex-GRU) staff.

The bottom line of the article, more or less, is that it was written by some ex-GRU people who possibly wanted to help the Iraqis, who indirectly received the intelligence from folks still employed by the agency.

Interesting snippet:

Denisov said ‘a high-level source’ told him that sensitive information being promulgated in the Russian media, Iraqwar.ru included, was one … item on the agenda during Bush national security advisor Condoleezza Rice’s meeting the day before at the Kremlin with Russian President Vladimir V. Putin.

For reference: email usability

Published April 15, 2003

I was clearing out my mail last night, and came across a message that referenced a mail I sent a few years back; it’s a selection of feature requests I made at the start of development of Evolution, the GNOME mail reader/contact manager/Outlook clone. (Not sure if any got implemented BTW ;)

Since I still think some of these are killer ideas that would really improve email readers, and since the only copy is sitting in a mailing list archive, I’ll take a local copy here by posting it.

Worth noting that the reason it came up was a quick mail exchange with Kaitlin ‘Duck’ Sherwood, who’s the queen of email usability, and will be working on the OSAF’s Chandler PIM (and mail) application. Not only had she read the CHI’96 paper in question, she noted it as a ‘profound influence’! Cool — and bodes well for Chandler!

Kaitlin also replied with some excellent plans for folder-overview presentation; I can’t wait to see the results in Chandler, personally. If you want an idea of this stuff, her page on the Perfect Email Client lives here.

Quick top tip: filtering or colorizing messages based how you’re addressed in the headers is immediately beneficial. Quoting Ducky:

My pet view also color-codes messages based on how you were addressed.
  • to me and only me
  • to me and other people
  • cc me and only me
  • cc me and other people
  • bcc me
    • Most people who have implemented the above techniques (you can do it
    with either Outlook or Eudora, though it’s somewhat painful to set up) tell me they’ve saved between 25% and 50% of their prior email time.

She’s right, too!

‘And if she back with new coalition of da willing you better know fi run fast’

Published April 14, 2003

SomethingAwful: Livin’ In A Dictator’s Paradise. Possibly the funniest thing I’ve read in weeks:

Those of you who follow the minor news related to the recent war in Iraq might have noticed a story about the CIA broadcasting an insulting rap song about Saddam Hussein on their radio airplane. While this may seem like a fairly good idea if you’re say drunk or waging a war against a rival gangsta rapper when you’re fighting a real war it seems a little silly. Oh how wrong I was! Set to the tune of ‘Gangsta’s Paradise’ this rap is roughly two minutes of distilled pathos, no doubt swaying the thoughts of many Iraqis against their brutal dictator and earning the United States a reputation for intelligence. Think about it, one day you’re strapped to a mattress spring with a car battery hooked up to your testicles being shocked for mispronouncing ‘Tikrit’. The next day you’re listening to the radio and on comes this ‘awesome’ rap song about Saddam with lines like ‘My days are finished and I will die – all I need is chili fries’ and ‘Everybody in the house say we hate you’.

That’s about when you say goodbye to your family, strap some dynamite to your chest, and sprint to the nearest Marine Corps checkpoint. What a fucking travesty. There is so much wrong with this whole concept, let alone the cringe inducing execution, that it’s hard to know where to start a rant about it. The whole thing reeks of the clumsy hipster appeal of something like ‘Poochy’ from the ‘The Simpsons’ only ten times worse because instead of a stodgy corporate think-tank it was done by the government. Asking them to create anything that’s in touch with the youth market is sort of like going to a retirement home and asking a bunch of septuagenarians with Alzheimer’s disease to pen a film script about teens coming of age in the ghetto.

Helpfully, Zack provides some suggested new tunes to cover for the next conflict with Syria… read on…

Amazing photo of London by night

Published April 12, 2003

Wow. An incredible shot up at Astronomy Pic of the Day, taken by an unnamed astronaut on-board the ISS with a digital camera. Hyde Park, Regent’s Park, and the M25 are all very clearly visible.

So I guess that means the Great Wall is no longer the only man-made structure visible from space then ;)

Reasons Not To Buy Dell Laptops, pt. XVII

Published April 11, 2003

While trying to figure out why my loaner laptop is SO SLOW, I found this on the Linux Dell laptop temperature-control i8k driver website:

No credits to DELL Computer who has always refused to give support on Linux or provide any useful information on the I8K buttons and their buggy BIOS.

Makes you wonder if there are any laptop manufacturers with a concept of open hardware support.

(BTW, current theories on the woeful speed are (a) 128megs of RAM just isn’t enough to use GNOME or KDE on linux these days, and (b) a 4200rpm disk with feck-all cache can’t handle any hard work.)

Other bad news: my heavy-lifting desktop PC’s arrived and won’t power on. yikes.

But — on a brighter note: the sun’s come out; I saw an eagle yesterday; and it rained last night, and all the birds are twittering in the trees, catching worms etc. In the meantime, the lazy cat sits on the balcony and watches idly, even when one lands on the railing less than 3 feet away. I suppose catfood is a lot easier to get hold of. ;)

‘Crows shall feed on Gordon Brown’s pancreas’

Published April 11, 2003

Ben Hammersley links to these two works of comedic genius: Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf’s new column in the Grauniad:

Earlier in the week I watched as joyous Iraqis celebrated our triumph by pulling down – with the help of defecting American soldiers – Baghdad’s only statue of actor Robert Donat as Mr Chips. I understand it was quite a good film, but we have no need of your imperialist icons now. Saddam has freed us from your oppressive rule, so we are saying goodbye to your Mr Chips. Ha! I have made myself laugh! I will not gloat further over this thrilling but predictable defeat which vindicates me so completely.

Also, a blog here. Brilliant.

Tim Bray on Drugs

Published April 11, 2003

Tim Bray’s weblog is a great read; I’ve added it to my daily list. Today, he’s provided a fantastic article about the drugs problem in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside.

Dublin has historically had a serious of up-and-down swings with a heroin problem; at one stage, it was one of the worst in Europe. It improved quite a lot during the 90’s, but it’s going downhill again, apparently; maybe the legislators need to read this article.

(The big problem as far as I can see is that treatment centres are horrifically underfunded, it being a lot easier, and — while not cheaper — at least already budgeted for, to ship the junkies off to prison. Business as usual. Of course, while they’re there, they’re (a) off the streets (out of sight, out of mind), and (b) learning all the latest criminal techniques, and getting well hooked on all the cheap heroin in there.)

(BTW did you know that one reason heroin is massively popular in prisons, is due to drug-testing? Apparently, marijuana can be detected a month after use, whereas heroin is undetectable 48 hours afterwards. So prison drug-testing regimes indirectly encourage heroin use. Oops!)

Linux: Linux Journal: report from LinuxWorld Ireland. Sounds like a great talk from maddog and Michael Meeks. And if you look carefully at the photo on that article page, you can see Proinnsias in the background!

Mind you, I would probably have just done my ‘incomprehensible question about software patents’ schtick with the IBM guy again…

What with this and GUADEC coming to Dublin, I’m missing all the good piss-ups^Wevents it seems ;)

Z/Yen and RSA UK: purveyors of clueless FUD, as expected

Published April 10, 2003

BoingBoing and /. get to work on that Z/Yen/RSA press release:

But the amazing thing is what Z/Yen and its client, RSA conclude: that the 25% of the people who deliberately associated with the network were ‘malicious,’ and that the 71% who sent email were sending spam. This is such a transparently, deliberately (heh) stupid conclusion, it boggles the mind: how can ‘deliberate’ equate to ‘malicious?’ How can ‘sending email’ equate to ‘sending spam?’

So in other words, there were 2 honeypot access points, left open for 2 weeks in the City of London.

25% of the people who connected to the APs, did so deliberately (whatever that means — see below).

Then, 71% of those people sent mail. Not spam: no ‘make money fast’, no ‘URGENT ASSISTANCE’ etc.; they just hit the ‘Send / Receive’ button in Outlook.

But obviously Z/Yen and RSA felt the need to spice things up a bit, so:

  • s/accessed WLAN deliberately/accessed WLAN maliciously/

  • s/sent mail/sent SPAM/

  • s/read slashdot/ate babies/

OK, I made that last one up. But I would not be surprised.

Some more digging reveals that the report in question is now up on the RSA UK website (it wasn’t yesterday), and can be downloaded here (PDF) . It’s 5 slim pages written by Phil Cracknell, of CISSP (Cracknell Information Systems Security Partnership), who has a history of spreading WiFUD, it seems. The report leads with

The many wireless security surveys … do not actually show how real the threat of wireless hacking is. Less dramatically, they do not show the threat of someone using your network for non-malicious use (theft of service).

Sheesh. He forgot to mention the bit about operating a wireless network without switching on any security features.

Also, there’s no explanation of what the difference is between a ‘deliberate’ and ‘accidental’ connection. As far as I can tell, an ‘accidental’ connection is one where the user disconnected reasonably quickly; there’s no indication that any of the connections were caused by anything other than Windows XP’s ability to associate with any network it can find within range.

It then goes on to scare-monger about the use of ‘exterior chalk markings’, noting that ‘you will be found and your networks will be used/attacked’.

So, in other words, the paper says:

  • if you run an open WiFi AP, people will use it to send/receive mail, and possibly surf the web.

  • this is Bad

  • people may draw nerdy things with chalk on the pavement outside, which will Make It Worse

And there’s two things to pick up from it:

  • this Phil Cracknell guy is really short of clients

  • It’s amazing how scare-mongering a 200-word report can become, when it’s bad to start with, and then filtered through 3 layers of PR gibbons and crappy journos who don’t have a clue what it’s on about

One good thing to come out of it: the term WiFUD, perfect for the next Phil Cracknell escapade.

Aeronautics.RU

Published April 9, 2003

Joe Haslam (hi Joe!) mailed about Aeronautics.RU, wondering if it’s a fake. I’m pretty sure not, and John Sutherland at The Guardian concurs, noting that it was big in the City of London:

You don’t factor news into your model, but intelligence. There is a surfeit of war news, but reliable intelligence is hard to come by. The canny (stock market) trader in these parlous days has a first port of call – GRU (Glavnoye Razvedyvatelnoye Upravleniye), the espionage arm of the Russian military.

GRU is the most sophisticated agency of its kind in the world. And, since Glasnost, the most transparent. GRU has thousands of agents worldwide (especially in countries such as Iraq, where Russia has traditional trade links). Intelligence has always been a top priority for Ivan. The number of agents operated by the GRU during the Soviet era was six times the number of agents operated by the KGB.

Russia, superpower that it was, still has spy satellites, state-of-the-art interception technology and (unlike the CIA) men on the ground. The beauty of GRU is that it does not (like the CIA) report directly to the leadership but to the Russian ministry of defence. In its wisdom, it makes its analyses publicly available. These are digested as daily bulletins on www.iraqwar.ru.

… and syndicated onto Aeronautics.RU as well. Sadly, since the Russians closed up their Baghdad embassy and got out of Iraq, just in time it seems, all the reports have dried up. Ah well.

The reporting was incredibly detailed, and modulo a big chip on their shoulder about US imperialism, pretty informative.

Joe also points to another Aeronautics.RU article, ‘how military communications are intercepted’. Venik, the author, notes that the US is using SINCGARS ‘frequency-hopping’ radios, which use a daily-broadcast shared secret as an initial vector for the algorithm which determines what frequencies to ‘hop’ through, throughout the day.

However, security afforded by frequency-hopping methods is very dependant on the strict adherence to protocols for operating such radios. The US troops and other operators of frequency-hopping radio sets frequently disregard these protocols. An example would be an artillery unit passing digital traffic in the frequency-hopping mode, which would enable an unauthorized listener to determine the frequency-hopping algorithm and eavesdrop on the transmission. (jm: sounds like a known-plaintext attack; similar attacks were used by the Allies on German use of Enigma during WWII.)

Even when proper protocols for using frequency-hopping radios are being adhered to interception and decryption of these signals is still possible. The frequency-hopping interceptors are special advanced reconnaissance wideband receivers capable of simultaneously tracking a large number of frequency-hopping encrypted transmissions even in high background noise environments.

It then details some seriously specialized equipment for breaking frequency-hopping radio transmissions, which can ‘process the complete 30 to 80 MHz ground-to-ground VHF band within a 2.5 ms time slot’.

So judging by all of that, the chances of finding one of those ‘FH-1 frequency-hopping interceptors’, ‘manufactured by VIDEOTON-MECHLABOR Manufacturing and Development Ltd of Hungary’, sitting in the Russian embassy in Iraq about 2 weeks ago, would have been pretty high I’d bet. ;)

He doesn’t detail why encryption the system uses, or how that is supposedly being broken. But I don’t doubt it was, personally. Given the ‘artillery unit’ hole noted above, there were probably quite a few ways to get hold of the day’s key, given enough time and thought; and from what I’ve read, it can only be very tricky to use good crypto, and keep it secure, in a battlefield environment. And those Russians have had plenty of time to think about US military systems after all. ;)

RSA, Z/Yen report open WiFi hot-spots used to send spam

Published April 9, 2003

Well, this is bad news. It seems one of the biggest bugbears for open Wifi hot-spots, ‘what if it’s used to spam’, may now be happening on a wide scale…

Unauthorized WLAN Connections Used to Send Spam (2 April 2003)

Data gathered from a wireless LAN (WLAN) honeypot showed that nearly 75% of intentional unauthorized connections made were used to send spam. (newsfactor.com)

The honeypots were set up in the City of London for 2 weeks, as default, open WLANs. This is the nearest I can come to a source. Both RSA Security UK and Z/Yen don’t list it on their press releases pages.

My thoughts: it could be the Jeem or Rewt spam-relaying trojans searching for open nets automatically, from infected machines. Strikes me that there wouldn’t be too many spammers war-driving around London, in person.

Thanks to Tony Earnshaw for forwarding it on from SANS NewsBytes…

Military dialect and ‘clearing’ (fwd)

Published April 9, 2003

“There’s even dialects of ‘english’ military jargon. An ex-general giving analysis on Sky (TV) commented that during the last Gulf War, confusion was caused because when a US commander said they’d ‘cleared’ a town they meant they’d gone past it, but when a british commanders said he’d ‘cleared’ a town he meant he’d dealt with most pockets of enemey and there was no signifigant resitence left in it and it was now ‘safe’ for occupation.

The two confusions caused american comanders to wonder what a british comander was still doing in a town he’d said he’d ‘cleared’, and british troops wondering who the hell was shooting at them out of towns the americans had said they’d ‘cleared’.” (via Barbara Barrett on the forteana list)

Artprice/artlist: winners of the address-scraping spammer speed record

Published April 8, 2003

Wow. A spammer has already scraped my blog and caught that one-use cdt_comment_go address I posted a week or so ago. That has to be a record. Ah well, Bayes and the SBL are catching it nicely…

The spammer in question is artprice.com, aka. artlist.com, aka a bunch of unrepentant spammers who’ve been out-and-out spamming for years, from France. Nothing worse than a full-time spamhaus. My consolation is that if they do this after August, I can prosecute them for it, since France is in the EU ;)

Just for reference, if anyone finds this on a Google search: the address was a one-use disposable job, for comments on a survey, posted once, and never used for sign-ups or even to send a single mail message. This is 100% spam, through and through.

Spamming my HTTP referrer logs, pt. 2

Published April 4, 2003

I’ve been getting a very wierd attack on my sites recently, including this blog, the SpamAssassin websites, and http://jmason.org/ , whereby some luser is sending lots of requests, using made-up URLs in the referral field. Initially, I thought it was some kind of underpowered retaliation for SpamAssassin, but if that’s the case, they need to bone up a bit more on how these things work ;)

Alternatively, it could be an attempt to gain Googlejuice, by getting links from public referrer logs (my ones are).

Up ’til about a month ago, it was all porn sites. Recently, though, it’s been a selection of real domains that sound like they were put together by combining dictionary words or something.

All the attempts have come from IP address 216.127.68.58, owned by Everyone’s Internet, Inc. in Houston, TX:

216.127.68.58 – – [31/Mar/2003:00:01:53 +0100] “GET / HTTP/1.1” 200 72143 “http://www.aircheckfactory.com” “User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.0)”

Here’s the domains in question:

  • AIRCHECKFACTORY.COM
  • ALTOTECHNOLOGY.COM
  • BAIDYANATHINDIA.COM
  • NXTCENTURY.COM
  • TIMEART.NET
  • WOTEVA.COM

Perhaps they’re recent lapsed domains which the spammer has picked up. Otherwise, what’s the connection between Baidyanath (a manufacturer of Ayurvedic products in India, thx Suresh) and ‘woteva’ (which sounds like ‘whatever’ in a UK english accent)?

I’ve whois’d them all, and they all seem to share two things: the name ‘Robert Woodley’ (or its initials), and the number (772) 594-2421. Area code 772 is — guess where — Florida. They should just cut to the chase and put ‘The Spammer State’ on their numberplates.

The pages on those sites are automatically-generated using what looks like USENET postings and google image search results, with a link to Commission Junction.

None of the names are in ROKSO, it seems. Do they ring a bell with anyone reading?

Habeas Suing (Alleged) Spammers

Published April 4, 2003

Habeas: Avalend, Intermark Media, BigDogSecrets.com, Clickbank, and Keynetics Sued for Using Counterfeit Habeas Trademark to get Unwanted Email Through, Trademark Infringement, and Breach of Contract.

The first suit, against Avalend and Intermark Media, alleges infringement of the Habeas trademark, including infringing use of the Habeas trademark in email in order to help ensure its delivery. The second lawsuit, against Heller, Stuchinski, Clickbank and Keynetics, includes a breach of contract claim against Heller, based on the signing of a Habeas license and then using the Habeas trademark in email which did not comply with the Habeas license. The companies advertised in Heller’s email are named as co-defendants.

Sweet. Sounds like the first two are alleged to have out-and-out forged the mark without a license, and the latter three are alleged to have gained a license and breached it. Habeas’ business model relies on successful enforcement, and actively being a threat against spammers who attempt to abuse their mark. I hope this goes well for them.

BTW, for folks who cannot countenance the idea of paying for a mark to send bulk mail: Habeas’ model is just like that of Underwriters Laboratories, which performs (physical) product safety testing, and provides a mark to certify that a product has passed those tests — and can therefore be judged ‘safer’ than products that do not have the mark. In Habeas’ case, instead of a product’s safety, they vouch for a mail’s non-spamminess.

It’s not a ‘mail protection racket’ — it’s a way for you to send a mail saying ‘this trustworthy agency has vouched that this is not spam’. And if I trust Habeas, it allows me to extend that trust to you, even if I’ve never heard of you before.