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.
Justin's Linklog Posts
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.
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…
hmm, that didn’t work. Let’s try again. Ben’s speculation: http://taint.org/2003/03/21/194426a_mail.html
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. :(
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.
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?
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 ;)
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…
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 ;)
IP: a Hong Kong physician reports on SARS, the ‘atypical pneumonia’ that’s in the news. It’s quite scary stuff.
Masks are worn throughout the hospital. Staff are not going home to children. Please take the warning below seriously. My impression is that even with minimal contact with an infected person people have been becoming ill.
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.’
The Hugo Chavez documentary I enthused about last month will be repeated tomorrow on Irish TV, on Network 2, at 9:25 pm. Strongly recommend seeing this, if you can.
Thanks to Brian Greene for pointing this out…
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.’
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!
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 (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.
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.
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 ;)
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…
William Gibson, talking about why he uses all-caps book titles, gives a short history lesson regarding the rendering of book titles, back in the age of the mimeograph:
Much of my earliest typewriting experience had to do with mimeography, a pre-thermocopy form of reproduction once fairly universal in the world’s offices. You typed, once, on a waxed paper ‘stencil’, clipped this over a silkscreen device with a moving pad or drum of ink behind it, and your mimeograph ran off (or silkscreened, really) as many copies of your document as you required. Owing to the physical peculiarities of the medium, though, it was unwise to underline too frequently on a mimeograph stencil: the single unbroken line was particularly prone to tear, producing leaks and smudging.
People who liked books, and frequently wrote letters, on typewriters, to other people who liked books, tended, free from the constraints of an academic stylesheet, to render titles in all-caps. People who wrote about books for publication in amateur journals (mimeo was an authentic medium of the American samisdat) rendered titles in all-caps in order to avoid stencil-tears. At various times, I was both.
It’s such a pleasure having this kind of stuff to read every day!
Returnadores: a New Life in the Old World. ‘Imported from Argentina to help save the village from a decades-long decline in population which threatened its very future, the Paez family has travelled backwards along the path of the first conquistadores and the generations of Spanish emigrants who followed them.’
Leonard notes the ‘Random word of mixed symbols with length 1 to 27’ type spammer obfuscation, suggesting it’s ‘open source spam’; I reckon it’s more ‘literate programming spam’, in that it’s self-documenting. But it certainly is very wierd. Maybe some spamtool developer has a COBOL fetish.
Anyway, just got back from a very enjoyable work trip to find my visa documents have arrived — so things are probably going to heat up ’round about Thursday, when I have my interview at the US Embassy. Once that happens, it’s full speed ahead on flights, shipping, figuring out how to transport the cat, handing over house to new tenants, etc. etc…
Bitstream Vera released as a beta. The full release, sometime next month, will use an extremely open license. To quote the FAQ:
Are derivative works allowed?
Yes!
I want to sell a software package that uses these fonts: Can I do so?
Sure. Bundle the fonts with your software and sell your software with the fonts. That is the intent of the copyright.
Hey presto — open source fonts! Good work by Jim Gettys, Bitstream and GNOME in making these available.
BlogStart:
Spam: The Register: World’s first 419 revenge killing?
Michael Lekara Wayid, 50, Nigeria’s consul in the Czech Republic, was shot dead at the embassy yesterday morning. The embassy’s 37-year-old receptionist was shot in the hand during the melee which began after a suspect opened fire after visiting the embassy to discuss an unspecified business matter yesterday morning. A 72-year-old Czech man was arrested at the scene on suspicion of murder, the BBC reports. Unconfirmed, and thus far sketchy reports, suggest the unnamed suspect was a victim of a 419 (AKA advanced fee) fraud.
Now that’s taking it a bit too far IMO ;)
GNU Radio, which (as noted on Boing Boing) has just released screenshots of a successfully-decoded HDTV signal, is a totally new way to receive (and possibly, in the future, send) radio-frequency signals. The FCC ponder the implications:
The emergence of the low-cost, generally available SDR which can be configured with … open software will present a new issue for regulators. What will be placed in the hands of the public entrepreneurs, amateurs, and even those with malicious intent will be machines which in principal can emulate, send, and receive any radio signal on any band. …
Then, with the world-wide availability of software that can even be modified if needed, any radio transmitter or receiver can be emulated. Bans on receiver types will be circumventable with ease. Mandates such as the proposed ATSC broadcast flag will be hard to enforce (and may even fail in the presence of a single web-connected noncompliant receiver). And, although not generally an issue for the Commission, it will be possible to implement proprietary systems without the benefit of any license from the patent holder. Because the software is open, as a practical matter virtually all mandated restrictions will be at risk (except for total power output which remains a classical hardware issue). …
In the GNU SDR environment, we have the makings of a powerful new technology that has the potential of solving the spectrum management problem, but we may also have other people in the world writing and distributing software with their own agenda.
Wow. That’s a brave new world. I wish I knew enough about radio tech to really get a handle on this stuff…
Lycos: AOL reports to Members on Its Efforts to Fight Spam. ‘Members Now Reporting 4.1 Million Junk E-Mails Daily To AOL’ …. ‘AOL announced that its proprietary anti-spam filtering technology is blocking up to 780 million pieces of junk mail every day from reaching member e-mail inboxes, which amounts to an average of 22 blocked spam e-mails per account daily.’
Of course, they don’t say how much mail overall arrives at AOL, but I’d hazard a guess it’s not much over 1,300 million messages per day based on those figures.
Antoin (a) has a blog, yay, and (b) mailed me to note that the film I blogged about here is actually called The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, and will be shown at SXSW.
If you’re going to SXSW, do not miss this movie.
Wierd about the name-change — Antoin theorises that it’s got one name for TV, and a snappier title for film distribution. Who knows?
SpamAssassin 2.50 released, with Bayesian goodness, auto-learning, and a 97.77% accuracy out-of-the box. Hooray!
last night RTE showed Chavez – Inside The Coup, a documentary about the 2-day coup d’etat in Venezuela in April 2002 which overthrew Hugo Chavez, and was then in turn overthrown in a popular uprising.
It was incredible. The team had amazing access to Chavez and the presidential palace while the 2-day coup and mass protests went on. The cameras are right there while Chavez is taken into custody by the generals, carries on rolling through the censorship of the media, through the street protests and shotgun-blasting riot police, and then catches the loyal-to-Chavez presidential guard retaking the palace from the inside.
Finally, it follows the negotiations to get Chavez returned from custody etc.; his cabinet are right there, on screen, talking to the generals on the phone while you watch and listen. Incredible footage, right from the thick of it.
As far as I could tell, it’s called Chavez – Inside The Coup, and is by Power Pictures, Irish lads from Galway, no less.
I’ve never seen anything like it. If you get a chance, don’t miss it.
Wired: The Civil War Inside Sony.
By rights, Sony should own the portable player business. The company’s first hit product, back in the ’50s, was the transistor radio, the tinny-sounding invention that took rock and roll out of the house and away from the parents and allowed the whole Elvis thing to happen. A quarter-century later, the Walkman enabled the kids of the ’70s to take their tapes and tune out the world. But the 21st-century Walkman doesn’t bother with tapes or CDs or minidiscs; it stores hundreds of hours of music on its own hard drive. And it sports an Apple logo. ….
Where the iPod simply lets you sync its contents with the music collection on your personal computer, Walkman users are hamstrung by laborious ‘check-in/check-out’ procedures designed to block illicit file-sharing. And a Walkman with a hard drive? Not likely, since Sony’s copy-protection mechanisms don’t allow music to be transferred from one hard drive to another – not an issue with the iPod. ‘We do not have any plans for such a product,’ says Kimura, the smile fading. ‘But we are studying it.’ ….
What’s changed since the original Walkman debuted is that Sony became the only conglomerate to be in both consumer electronics and entertainment. As a result, it’s conflicted: Sony’s electronics side needs to let customers move files around effortlessly, but its entertainment side wants to build in restraints, because it sees every customer as a potential thief.
Great interview with Ashutosh Varshney, an Indian political scientist investigating ethnic violence. From New Scientist, via Damien Morton on FoRK.
So what is the key to predicting which communities will turn violent and which will remain peaceful in times of ethnic unrest?
It comes down to how the cities or villages are structured, and the networks that people form across religious or ethnic divides. In India I have identified two types of civic network, which I call the associational and the everyday. The everyday type covers things such as Hindu and Muslim children playing together and their families and friends visiting each other or eating with each other, or taking part in festivals together. The associational type involves the two groups being members of the same trade unions, sports clubs, student unions, reading clubs, political parties or business organisations. Associational structures go beyond neighbourhood warmth, and in times of unrest they are much more robust. They can be a serious constraint on the polarising strategies of political elites. Places with strong networks of this kind are very likely to remain peaceful.
The Reg: Do webcams break when Tony Blair walks by? A very interesting point; webcams, which provide perpetual surveillance by anyone who wants to, doesn’t quite fit in with modern political image control.
More on SCO v IBM
LWN on the case. An excellent commentary, and features this lovely user-posted comment as well:
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.