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Justin's Linklog Posts

‘Calibrate Me, Dick’

Published April 4, 2003

The Guardian notes the latest bizarre phraseology to emerge from the White House — Calibrate me, Dick:

From Donald Rumsfeld – the man who brought you known unknowns and unknown unknowns – comes a phrase so disorienting in its weirdness that even seasoned Rumsfeldologists have been taken aback by its increasingly frequent use at Pentagon briefings. Uttered one way, it sounds combative like Dirty Harry; uttered another, camp like Austin Powers.

In fact, it appears to be just a hi-tech, precision-guided version of ‘correct me if I’m wrong’, the Dick in question being General Richard Myers, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff. Worryingly, ‘Calibrate me’ is also the name of a song by the scary indie rock group Atombombpocketknife: could Rumsfeld be a fan?

Typical recent usage: ‘The Republican Guard has – calibrate me, Dick – they pulled south in the north and they went north in the southern portion of the country.’

Context in which it almost certainly did not occur, circa 2002: ‘Calibrate me, Dick, but I really don’t think we’re going to need all that much heavy infantry to take Baghdad, are we?’

Portuguese TV Journalists Beaten Up By US Military Police

Published April 4, 2003

Reporters From Portuguese Television Tortured By US Military Police (Indymedia):

Two Western journalists have arrived safely back in Kuwait City after being arrested, beaten up and deprived of food and water in Iraq — by members of the US Army’s military police. ….

Despite possessing the proper ‘Unilateral Journalist’ accreditation issued by the Coalition Forces Central Command, both journalists were detained. …

Castro and Silva entered Iraq 10 days ago. They had been to Umm Qasr and Basra and were traveling to Najaf when they were stopped by the military police. According to Castro, their accredited identification was checked and they were given the all clear to proceed. ‘Suddenly, for no reason, the situation changed,’ Castro told Arab News. ‘We were ordered down on the ground by the soldiers. They stepped on our hands and backs and handcuffed us.

‘We were put in our own car. The soldiers used our satellite phones to call their families at home. I begged them to allow me to use my own phone to call my family, but they refused. When I protested, they pushed me to the ground and kicked me in the ribs and legs.’ ….

After being held for four days, they were transported to the 101st Airborne Division to be escorted out of Iraq.

linky goodness from th’ oul’ sod

Published April 2, 2003

So it looks like Sarah Carey, a good friend of me mate Lean, has a blog, and it’s a great one too! Excellent. Added to the Irish blogroll on the right.

In other news, Simon Boyle got in touch to mention that the Saddam’s top tips for tourists interview in the Fermanagh-based Impartial Reporter was actually written by an contemporary of ours at TCD by the name of Maria Rolston. Apparently she’s good mates with my mate Wooder, too. Simon notes:

She’s the intrepid impartial reporter who wrote the story (and who’s had it reprinted minus attribution all over the world now). Oh the joys of being a first year reporter on a small local paper…

While we’re talking about small local papers, might as well note – tangentially – that Ireland’s local press has a long history of bizarre stories. One favourite, in particular, has gone down in journo legend (and Ulysses): the 19th-century editorial from The Skibbereen Eagle, which solemnly told Lord Palmerston that it had ‘got (its) eye both upon him and on the Emperor of Russia.’ Classic.

IP company hoist by own petard

Published April 2, 2003

Forbes: A Patent On Porn. It seems Acacia Research, an intellectual-property ‘shell’ company, has a bunch of crappy software patents on streaming media (to go with their patent on the ‘V-Chip’, remember that?).

Things haven’t been going too good recently. Apparently, they decided to ‘monetize’ these streaming-media patents — in other words get all Sopranos on a bunch of small players, namely 700 porn site operators, sending some legal threats to ‘pay up — 1-2% of gross — or get sued’ their way.

What happened? Did the pr0nsters roll over and cough up? Not a hope.

Eight firms (of 700) agreed to Acacia’s terms. But 40 didn’t, and Acacia promptly slapped them with lawsuits. Rather than buckling, though, several of the porno sites joined together and stood their ground. Now Acacia is in the fight of its life and may even face a shareholder revolt as a result.

Read on for the rest…

Comment links back again

Published April 1, 2003

the (discuss) links are back, and about time too, things were getting quiet. Anyway, it’s a unified comments forum now. All posts go into one forum, instead of creating a new forum for each weblog posting. Having comments pages for each story just didn’t work for a small-scale blog — and it was impossible to see if there was any new posts for all those individual forums.

1.4 gigabits per second

Published April 1, 2003

Take a look at the BitTorrent bandwidth graphs if you get a chance. The BitTorrent release of Red Hat 9 resulted in a nice smooth ramp up to 1.4 gigabits per second of download traffic, which has been trailing off slowly over the following 20 hours… wow.

Interconnect speed cheat-sheet

Published March 31, 2003

posting this so the googlebrain will pick it up next time I need to find it — Padraig Brady’s interconnect speed cheat sheet. It lists a whole stack of interconnect protocols, from 802.11b, 10Mb/s LAN, to SPP parallel port, to 8mm DAT tape, along with their effective transfer rates in megabytes per second. (I never realised Bluetooth was only as fast as SPP parallel ports — 0.1MB/s. That sucks.)

Saddam Hussein’s top tips for tourists

Published March 31, 2003

Newsflash! Irish local newspapers come through with bizarre-ness yet again:

Fermanagh man Tom Daly (72) is a former schoolteacher and lecturer who spent 15 years working in the Middle East. In an interview with the paper Mr Daly told how in 1988 he arrived in Baghdad and was on his way to the city of Basra …

‘All these taxi drivers were coming down to me offering to take my bags and drive me down to Basra for 60 quid and I wasn’t sure what to do. Then a man in a long dark coat came over to me, put his hand up and said: ‘Don’t listen to them. Take a taxi (sic), it will cost you £10’. I thought this was a much better idea and was glad of the help. All the taxi drivers had also backed away so I asked some of them afterwards: ‘Who was that man?’

They said: ‘That was Mr Saddam Hussein’.’

Tune in next week, when Saddam helps out with some tricky carpet-buying negotiations…

SpamAssassin Needs Your Help!

Published March 28, 2003

while thinking about the CDT’s report on spammer address-scraping techniques again, it occurred to me that one finding is very significant; high-traffic websites probably get much more spam than low-traffic ones.

Now, I’ve got spamtraps up on pretty much all my sites, using a variety of methods:

  • plain mailto links, with instructions to human users not to use them (don’t mail that one either, obviously ;)
  • hidden mailto links in the page’s <head> block (browsers will not display text elements outside the <body> block)
  • hidden mailto links in a <!– HTML comment –>
  • empty mailto links in the text (ie. <a href="mailto:foo></a>)
  • mod_rewrite pages, which are displayed to spam-scraping bots instead of the real thing

But all my sites are small-time, really. ;) So — anyone out there in the blogosphere care to help out the SpamAssassin project, by feeding us trapped spam? It’d be simply a matter of adding a mailto: link, hidden in a comment on a prominent page of your high-traffic website. Gimme a mail to this address if you do.

(warning: that address will expire in 6 months. if you’re reading this after Aug 2003, use the addr on this page instead.)

The spam trapped in such a way is fed into a number of spamtrap-fed network systems, like Razor, DCC, Pyzor, and the Blitzed OPM blacklist. It’s also used during the SpamAssassin score-regeneration process.

Regular expressions win again

Published March 28, 2003

Rael: secrets of the XML gods:

In response to Tim Bray’s dirty little habit of parsing XML with regular expressions, Jon Udell writes: ‘If the XML gods are resorting to Perl and Python hackery to shred documents, are we just spinning our wheels? I don’t think so. But this is, perhaps, an unusual case. … I can, however, make excellent use of the text stream underlying XML abstractions. So, which way to regard a document becomes a kind of Necker cube puzzle. The bad news: it’s confusing. The good news: it’s useful.’

…. I just co-authored a book, 1/4 of which relied heavily on the availability of not only an XML parser, but a SOAP stack. Faced with the reality that more than a handful of readers wouldn’t have either at their disposal, I wrote a hack sure to turn the stomach of any XML purist while turning many a hacker frown upside-down… ‘NoXML, Another SOAP::Lite Alternative’ for the Google Web API. ‘… NoXML is a drop-in alternative to SOAP::Lite. As its name suggests, this home-brewed module doesn’t make use of an XML parser of any kind, relying instead on some dead-simple regular expressions and other bits of programmatic magic. ‘ Elegant? Depends on your definition. Pure? As the driven beach sand. Work? You betcha!

And I thought it was just me. ;)

Kim Jong Il’s IM logs

Published March 28, 2003

Craig links to the livejournal of Kim Jong Il, featuring IM logs with GWB — very funny.

Forteana: on a totally unrelated note — The Lab @ ABC.net.au notes:

An Australian neuroscientist claims he can conjure up the mysterious Australian outback phenomenon of the Min Min lights, now that he has worked out what causes them.

Fantastic description of how, exactly, he did this, by using a temperature inversion, and landscape features, to simulate it. Very interesting, and it makes a lot of sense. Another wierd ‘floating lights’ phenomenon explained… (link via the forteana list, of course).

The article also discusses the fata morgana__ phenomenon, in which landforms that are beyond the horizon appear to float above it in an inverted form. This is interesting, as it explains the Chinese legend of the Blessed Isles, which says that there’s a group of islands that appears infrequently floating above the sea, shaped like mushrooms (if I recall correctly, can’t find much about it online).

BBC: ‘more truth out of Baghdad than the Pentagon at the moment’

Published March 28, 2003

BBC news chiefs have met to discuss the increasing problem of misinformation coming out of Iraq as staff concern grows at the series of premature claims and counter claims by military sources. ‘By last Sunday the southern Iraqi seaport of Umm Qasr had been reported ‘taken’ nine times’ … ‘We’re getting more truth out of Baghdad than the Pentagon at the moment’.

Network Solutions the weakest link, again

Published March 27, 2003

Yahoo: al-Jazeera website redirected: 

The hacker was able to gain control of the domain name by asking domain
seller Network Solutions for the account password on official al-Jazeera
stationery, said an industry source speaking on condition of anonymity.

A spokesman for Network Solutions' parent company declined to comment on
how the hacker was able to hijack the domain name, but said the company
had fixed the problem and was trying to track the impostor down.

'We followed our procedures, in this particular instance someone was able
to get around those procedures,' said Brian O'Shaughnessy, a spokesman
for Internet security firm VeriSign.

rottenflesh: freshmeat gets parodied

Published March 26, 2003

Rottenflesh.net, a piss-take of Freshmeat.net (found via Sweetcode).

About: openJ-GNU is a web secure server that quickly generates backgrounds. It uses mv for menubars. openJ-GNU generates user-interfaces.

Changes: openJ-GNU 3.24.7 enhances robustness for sites that also use newGeekNr. It also was rewritten in Tcl and patches a remote root bug in configuration. One of the developers was sacked. It also compiles.

The Problem with Anti-spam Challenge-Response Systems

Published March 25, 2003

A great summary of the issues surrounding challenge-response anti-spam systems, from Kee Hinckley on the ASRG list. Summary: they’ll work fine for one-person-to-one-person email, but anything beyond that — and there is lots beyond that, in current email use — gets hairier and hairier. Read on for the message.

Robin Cook’s viewpoint

Published March 24, 2003

Robin Cook, who resigned from the UK cabinet last week:

… If you take a response to 9/11 as being a driving force of the American approach to international affairs, I would strongly argue that one of the greatest assets that came out of that was the extraordinarily rich and powerfully diverse coalition against international terrorism.’

That coalition, according to Cook, has now been shattered on the altar of pre-emptive diplomacy. America has long planned to attack Iraq and splits in the UN, Nato and in the European Union were a price worth paying.

‘Now, I’m not an American politician but if I was I would be inveighing against the extent to which the Bush administration had allowed that terrific asset to disintegrate,’ Cook said.

‘Instead the US is left embarking on military action from a position of diplomatic weakness, unable to get any major international organisation to agree with it. We are heading for a very serious risk of a big gulf between the Western and Islamic world. That seems to me to have thrown away a powerful asset for the US which relates to its number one security concern.’

Also, some history (thanks to Dan Brickley for forwarding this): Ireland as the pivot of a league of nations, written by Michael Collins in 1921, shortly after Ireland’s declaration of independence from the UK:

Into such a League might not America be willing to enter? By doing so America would be on the way to secure the world ideal of free, equal, and friendly nations on which her aspirations are so firmly fixed. Ireland’s inclusion as a free member of this League would have a powerful influence in consolidating the whole body, for Ireland is herself a mother country with world-wide influences, and it is scarcely to be doubted that were she a free partner in the League as sketched the Irish in America would surely wish America to be associated in such a combination. In that League the Irish in Ireland would be joined with the Irish in America, and they would both share in a common internationality with the people of America, England, and the other free nations of the League. Through the link of Ireland a co-operation and understanding would arise between England and America, and would render unnecessary those safeguards which England wishes to impose upon Ireland and which by preserving an element of restraint might render less satisfactory the new relations between the two countries.

It’s incredible to consider how much has changed in world politics since those words were written 82 years ago.

And finally, some humour: Power Phillips Home Page:

Powers Phillips, P.C., is a small law firm located in downtown Denver, Colorado within convenient walking distance of over fifty bars and a couple of doughnut shops. Powers Phillips also maintains a small satellite office-in-exile on the cow-covered hillsides near Carbondale, Colorado, where it puts out to pasture some of its aging attorneys.

The firm is composed of lawyers from the two major strains of the legal profession, those who litigate and those who wouldn’t be caught dead in a courtroom.

Litigation lawyers are the type who will lie, cheat and steal to win a case and who can’t complete a sentence without the words ‘I object’ or ‘I demand another extension on that filing deadline.’ Many people believe that litigation lawyers are the reason all lawyers are held in such low esteem by the public. Powers Phillips, P.C. is pleased to report that only three of its lawyers, Trish Bangert, Tom McMahon, and Tamara Vincelette are litigation lawyers, and only one of them is a man.

And it gets worse from there on.

The Perils of ‘Raw’ News

Published March 24, 2003

Mark Lawson in today’s Guardian:

This time, digital satellite viewers can even use their red interactive buttons to call the shots of the shots: zapping between battle zones and international capitals like a James Bond baddie watching the world come down on 30 TV screens in his underground bunker… We belong to a generation which has largely ceased to be surprised by television, but think about this: those who wanted to were able to watch an enemy operation live from the banks of the Tigris. This weekend’s pictures have widened the eyes like nothing since the moon landings, though with rather greater moral complications. The essential problem is that in seeming to know everything, we know nothing. There are wise old journalists who will tell you that the word ‘raw’ is usually a warning. It is unwise to eat raw meat or smell raw sewage and it may be equally foolish to consume raw news coverage.

Forwarded by Tim Chapman on the forteana list.

Kind of irrelevant to me, seeing as I’m now based in the US, and the concept of unbiased, unfiltered TV news doesn’t really seem to exist over here.

Instead, the war coverage consists of an endless array of human interest stories with the troops and whizz-bang explosion footage. There’s absolutely no interpretation, apart from what it might imply for relatives of the US servicemen involved — that’s it. As far as I can see, there is no real liberal news, or a balancing viewpoint, on TV over here.

In about 3 hours of news on TV, I think I saw one opposing viewpoint, 5 minutes with ex-senator George McGovern. That was it.

I’m finding this to be a serious culture shock. Thankfully, I’ve got the web to read and listen to the European stuff instead, so I’m doing that instead. The old Barlow line about the internet and censorship springs to mind…

precision mincemeat manufacture

Published March 21, 2003

IraqBodyCount.net on the JDAM bomb:

The B-2 bomber carries sixteen 2’000 lb. JDAM bombs. If all goes 100% as planned (the bomb does not fall outside of its specified margin of error of 13 meters, and the GPS guidance system is not foiled by a $50 radio jammer kit, easily purchased), then here is what one such bomb does :
  • everyone within a 120 meter radius is killed;
  • to be safe from serious shrapnel damage, a person must be at least 365
    • meters away;

  • to be really safe from all effects of fragmentation, a person must be 1000 meters away, according to Admiral Stufflebeem.

    The B-2s will be used upon targets within Baghdad.

    -Prof Marc W. Herold, IBC Project Consultant

Sounds like the perfect weapon for use in tight city streets. :(

blogging Dengue fever

Published March 21, 2003

Thank ghod this is one experience of SE Asia I missed. I came across this blog through some random blog-hopping last night; it’s two farang tourists blogging their backpacking trip through the region. All great fun until they both catch Dengue fever:

Dengue is commonly called ‘break bone fever’, and I found out why at about 2 AM on the train. I woke up with a 102 fever, in the most intense pain I can recall having in years. Everything hurt, but especially my back and legs. Harper later described the sensation as one of having someone scrape your bones with a knife, and that sounds about right.

Jesus. I am so thankful I missed out on that particular aspect (a mild bout of food poisoning with a fever of 104 was all I had to put up with!)

Dengue fever is endemic to many parts of the region, even Bangkok , the capital city of Thailand. It gets a lot less attention than malaria, since it’s not fatal in the vast majority of cases (unless you get the rarer haemorrhagic version), but it is excruciating by all accounts, and I’ve met quite a few travellers who’ve met someone who caught it. Unfortunately there’s not much you can do to avoid it but slather on the DEET, cover up, and hope for the best.

On a lighter note…

Published March 19, 2003

Well, despite the covert bugging of the European Council offices of 3 major EU delegations, the apparatus of some states, at least, is bringing a smile to my face. The German federal secret service, the Bundesnachrichendienstes (BND), has just published Topf Secret, their official cookbook. Really. The Guardian notes:

The book consists of recipes sent in from around the world by German spies in the field. Thus, there are two recipes from Iraq, several from central Africa, the Philippines and Scotland.

Again, more questions than answers. The Germans have spies in Scotland? Do they really eat haggis? (‘Attention: fill only 2/3 of the stomach since the oat flour will expand. If the stomach is too full it can explode while cooking!’) Do the two recipes from Iraq – for fattousch and tabouleh – have to be so boring (use only crunchy lettuce leaves for the fattousch)? Why are there German agents in Iraq? What are they doing in the US as well, and do they like that nation’s recipe for pumpkin pie?

The Beeb via the ‘net

Published March 18, 2003

wow, the Beeb fed 29,200 simultaneous RealMedia streams at one point today; that breaks down to 18,400 listeners in the UK, 12,800 elsewhere in the world.

Since getting back to bandwidth, I’ve been listening to a lot of Radio 4, waking up to the Today programme in particular. Definitely recommended; nothing like a few clipped RP tones to fill you in on all the details.

Also recommended: the Beeb’s live streams collection, featuring all the FM and digital-radio stations streamed with excellent quality. Who needs Napster when you’ve got internet radio ;)

Maximum turd length standardized by NASA

Published March 18, 2003

for your delectation, I present the NASA standard for acceptable turds in space: ‘c) The fecal collector shall accommodate a maximum BOLUS length of 330 mm (13 in).’

My favourite bit: ‘d) Quantities in excess of these amounts shall not result in an unrecoverable condition.’ I should hope not!

Thanks to James Rogers on the FoRK list for this fine source of bits…

St. Patrick’s day

Published March 17, 2003

My parents, sister, and her husband Luke, just rang to wish lá féile Padraig shona againn. Thanks guys!

But, as part of the deal, I had to promise to impart some google-juice to my Dad’s website; he’s an architectural photographer in Dublin, Ireland, who also does a nice sideline in stock photography, especially where his holiday snaps are involved. So he’s now on the sidebar ;)

The second coming — as a fish

Published March 16, 2003

The Guardian reports that ‘an obscure Jewish sect in New York has been gripped in awe by what it believes to be a mystical visitation by a 20lb carp that was heard shouting in Hebrew, i n what many Jews worldwide are hailing as a modern miracle.’ … ‘According to two fish-cutters at the New Square Fish Market, the carp was about to be slaughtered and made into gefilte fish for Sabbath dinner when it sudden ly began shouting apocalyptic warnings in Hebrew.’

Peter Kay’s Observations of Life

Published March 15, 2003

About time I posted this — everyone who’s read ’em agrees vehemently with at least 5 of these; and a quick Google ™ reveals that this list hasn’t ever had a page to itself out there on the interweb. So here it is.

My personal favourites: 6, 8, 15, 20, 33, and best of all, 28…

  • 1) Triangular sandwiches taste better than square ones.
  • 2) At the end of every party there is always a girl crying.
  • 3) One of the most awkward things that can happen in a pub is when your pint-to-toilet cycle gets synchronised with a complete stranger.
  • 4) You’ve never quite sure whether it’s ok to eat green crisps.
  • 5) Everyone who grew up in the 80’s has entered the digits 55378008 into a calculator.
  • 6) Reading when you’re drunk is horrible.
  • 7) Sharpening a pencil with a knife makes you feel really manly.
  • 8) You’re never quite sure whether it’s against the law or not to have a fire in your back garden.
  • 9) Nobody ever dares make cup-a-soup in a bowl.
  • 10) You never know where to look when eating a banana.
  • 11) Its impossible to describe the smell of a wet cat.
  • 12) Prodding a fire with a stick makes you feel manly.
  • 13) Rummaging in an overgrown garden will always turn up a bouncy ball.
  • 14) You always feel a bit scared when stroking horses.
  • 15) Everyone always remembers the day a dog ran into your school.
  • 16) The most embarrassing thing you can do as schoolchild is to call your teacher mum or dad.
  • 17) The smaller the monkey the more it looks like it would kill you at the first given opportunity.
  • 18) Some days you see lots of people on crutches.
  • 19) Every bloke has at some stage while taking a pee flushed half way through and then raced against the flush.
  • 20) Old women with mobile phones look wrong!
  • 21) Its impossible to look cool whilst picking up a Frisbee.
  • 22) Driving through a tunnel makes you feel excited.
  • 23) You never ever run out of salt.
  • 24) Old ladies can eat more than you think.
  • 25) You can’t respect a man who carries a dog.
  • 26) There’s no panic like the panic you momentarily feel when you’ve got your hand or head stuck in something.
  • 27) No one knows the origins of their metal coat hangers.
  • 28) Despite constant warning, you have never met anybody who has had their arm broken by a swan.
  • 29) The most painful household incident is wearing socks and stepping on an upturned plug.
  • 30) People who don’t drive slam car doors too hard
  • 31) You’ve turned into your dad the day you put aside a thin piece of wood specifically to stir paint with.
  • 32) Everyone had an uncle who tried to steal their nose.
  • 33) Bricks are horrible to carry.
  • 34) In every plate of chips there is a bad chip.

laugh and you’re dead

Published March 14, 2003

Humour:Guardian: The joke’s on Saddam: In northern Iraq, they’re laughing at Saddam Hussein. Luke Harding meets two comedians who have dared to cock a snook at the ruthless dictator – and annoyed him so much that he ordered their assassination.

The film was screened on Kurdish television; and after decades of official repression, it was a huge hit. Saddam’s vigilant agents dispatched a CD copy to Baghdad. The Iraqi president was not amused. His response, when it came, was predictable: he sent several assassins to northern Iraq to kill the entire cast. ‘Fortunately the guys were all arrested (by the Kurdish authorities),’ Hassan recalls. ‘They were found carrying a list. All our names were on it.’

With your fetlocks flowing in the… wind

Published March 14, 2003

Life imitates Father Ted. It seems the Irish Eurovision entry sounds very similar to the Danish entry from 2000, which, if true, is almost exactly the subject of a classic episode of cult comedy TV show Father Ted, My Lovely Horse.

Dougal: ‘So we wouldn’t be stealing the song then?’ Ted: ‘No, it’d be more like we were keeping their memory alive.’ Dougal: ‘So if we won we could give the prize money to their relatives?’ Ted: ‘Yeah, we’ll play that by ear.’

The full low-down on the episode is here. Classic…

Anyway, I’m now in sunny SoCal, set up with more bandwidth than I’ve had in over a year. In fact, I’m swimming in bandwidth. Plus a decent pair of speakers for the ol’ MP3 collection, at last (my last set are in storage and have been for 3 months)… happy happy joy joy.

Myself and my cat had a 16-hour flight, and somehow or other, he seems satisfied. Well, I suppose as long as the catfood and lots of petting is forthcoming, life is grass for this fella. Easily satisfied!

More on SCO v IBM

Published March 8, 2003

LWN on the case. An excellent commentary, and features this lovely user-posted comment as well:

‘Without access to such equipment, facilities, sophisticated methods, concepts and coordinated know-how, it would be difficult or impossible for the Linux development community to create a grade of Linux adequate for enterprise use.’

Alan Cox wrote the first SMP version of Linux. Do you know who bought Alan the hardware? It was Caldera :-)

Not IBM, after all, but Caldera — who are now part of the SCO group. This usenet posting from 1995 backs that up, as does the Caldera-badged Linux SMP page.

‘Prestigious Non-Accredited Degree’ sites shut down

Published March 7, 2003

The BBC reports that trading standards officials from the UK and US have successfully shut down an Israeli/Romanian/US-based fake-degree spam operation. Or maybe they’ve just shut down 3 websites, which is all I can see in that report — that’s not going to make a whole lot of difference, so let’s hope not.

SCO sues IBM over Linux

Published March 7, 2003

SCO sues IBM (via Slashdot) . Talk about self-immolation: sue IBM, of all companies, with an intellectual property case. One SCO claim:

‘It is not possible for Linux to rapidly reach Unix performance standards for complete enterprise functionality without the misappropriation of Unix code.’

Apart from the fact that SMP is just not a state-of-the-art thing any more; things move on! Perhaps if SCO/Novell/USL hadn’t sat on their hands for 10 years, swapping IP and suing BSDI, they’d still be in the game. Anyway, here’s what the analysts think:

‘It’s a fairly end-of-life move for the stockholders and managers of that company,’ said Jonathan Eunice, an Illuminata analyst. ‘Really what beat SCO is not any problem with what IBM did; it’s what the market decided. This is a way of salvaging value out of the SCO franchise they can’t get by winning in the marketplace.’

He said it.

Cough Cheat Millionaire transcript

Published March 6, 2003

The transcript of the “Who Wants To Be A Millionaire” episode at the centre of a current UK court case; the producers claim that the contestant cheated, with the aid of a coughing accomplice. Going by this transcript, it’s an open-and-shut case IMO.

Who the fuck is Amanda Perez?

Published March 6, 2003

and why is she spamming me?

From: “Amanda Perez” amandaperez@virginrecords.com To: 20021202123631.31AB416F1F@jmason.org

Let’s send Amanda Perez and her new video ‘Angel’ to the top of MTV’s Total Request Live!

I don’t think so. How’s about reporting her to SpamCop instead?

Wow, Virgin Records, you are in so much trouble; spamming me with this crap, using a scraped address — in fact, not even a valid address; it’s a Message-Id! That address has never existed to receive mail. Out and out spamming. Unbelievable.

Update: actually, it’s probably nothing to do with Virgin, on reflection; nothing in the headers indicates anything apart from a dialup PacBell customer. So, Virgin Records, sorry for all the shouting ;)

very nasty new sendmail vulnerability

Published March 3, 2003

Remote Sendmail Header Processing Vulnerability.

Attackers may remotely exploit this vulnerability to gain ‘root’ or superuser control of any vulnerable Sendmail server. Sendmail and all other email servers are typically exposed to the Internet in order to send and receive Internet email. Vulnerable Sendmail servers will not be protected by legacy security devices such as firewalls and/or packet filters. This vulnerability is especially dangerous because the exploit can be delivered within an email message and the attacker doesn’t need any specific knowledge of the target to launch a successful attack.

Sendmail versions from 5.79 to 8.12.7 are vulnerable.

Protection mechanisms such as implementation of a non-executable stack do not offer any protection from exploitation of this vulnerability. Successful exploitation of this vulnerability does not generate any log entries.

Great…