If you’re wondering what happens to non-US-resident programmers when they run afoul of the US’s ludicrous copyright laws (namely the DMCA), take a look at Danny O’Brien’s blog entry from the Elcomsoft trial, covering Dmitry Sklyarov’s evidence.
Justin's Linklog Posts
18 megaton thermonuclear warhead, Item # 1791560632. “this is that perfect something for the person who has everything.” Disappointingly though, “THE THERMO NUCLEAR WARHEAD HAS BEEN REMOVED,AND IS IN NO WAY INCLUDED IN THE SALE”. Misleading advertising!
BBC – the Great Smog of 1952 recalled. “Fifty years ago, a choking cloud enveloped much of London and the Home Counties – a toxic fog which killed at least 4,000 people. Here, Barbara Fewster, 74, recalls the Great Smog of 1952.” A very Ballardian tale of this environmental disaster:
After a long time we arrived at Kew Bridge – that’s at least 10 miles from Hampstead – when my fiancé called out to me, ‘I’ve lost you, where have you got to?’ I must have veered off out of range of the sidelights.
At that point, a milk float passed by and my fiancé told me to get in so we could follow its taillights. He put his foot down. Well, then the milkman disappeared and we could hear the float bouncing over the grass on Kew Green. All I could do was get out of the car and continue walking. We later came across a car that had overtaken us earlier on in the journey – it was up a tree, crashed, and no sign of the occupant.
‘Spam’ Likely to Clutter E-Mail for Some Time, says Jupiter Research (via Reuters).
“It’s getting easier to send spam messages. You can buy a CD-ROM with millions of e-mail addresses for next to nothing and send it out for next to nothing,” said Jared Blank, senior analyst at Jupiter.
“Spammers are clever people and there is clearly an arms race between spammers and people trying to prevent spam that just constantly escalates,” said Forrester analyst Jim Nail. “Having simple lists of spammers and domains — that’s not enough because spammers change domains or addresses to stay ahead.”
So, good news: I have a job. Bad news: well, I think that side is obvious ;)
The mother of all package tours: With the world expecting an attack on Iraq any time now, no one in their right mind would take a holiday there – would they? You’d be suprised, says Johann Hari (Guardian).
A fascinating article, from so many angles — First, the tourists:
I met Julie and Phil. They seemed an almost comically suburban couple: polite, a little posh, all golf jumpers and floral smocks. But then Phil mentioned that his last holiday had been to North Korea. “Yeah, I’ve been twice since they opened the borders to tourists. I’m a bit of a celebrity there now. People come up to me in the streets and say, ‘Why have you come to our country twice?’.” …
Then there was Hannah. How to explain her? A frightfully well-spoken Englishwoman in her early 50s. When we first met, she dispensed with the small talk to say: “I think Saddam is a great man and the USA is a great big global bully. My theory is that he should be given Kuwait. It’s perfectly logical if you look at the map.” “I think he’s rather handsome too,” she went on. “Every woman does really. I’d rather like to inspect his weapon of mass destruction myself.”
And the politics:
Talking politics in Iraq is like a magic-eye picture, where you have to let your brain go out of focus, not your eyes. One very distinguished old man in a Mosul souk welcomed me warmly and told me how much he had loved visiting London in the 1970s. After much oblique prodding, he said warmly, “I admire British democracy and freedom.” He held my gaze. “I very much admire them.”
… As we wandered around, looking at the grim exhibits, one of the soldiers on duty guarding the museum told me that three of his brothers died in that war. Everybody in the country lost somebody – yet it is almost impossible to get anybody to talk about it. They speak in a small number of bloodless stock-phrases.
After more than 10 such encounters, it suddenly hit me that the people of Iraq are not even allowed to grieve their huge numbers of dead in their own way. They are permitted only a regulation measure of state-approved grief, which must be expressed in Saddam’s language: that of martyrdom and heroism, rather than wailing agony about the futility of a war which slaughtered more than a million people yet left the borders unchanged and achieved nothing.
Thanks to Ben Walsh for the forwardy goodness.
“I am Mr Brunce Anthony, the bill exchange director at the NATIONAL WESTMINSTER BANK PLC.” Yes, it’s a 419 from that well-known third-world country, the UK.
(PS: Brunce?! what kind of name is that?! Everyone knows only Americans have that kind of ludicrous given name ;)
Danny O’Brien: Help stop the flood of spam, in the Sunday Times. Great article:
We have had enough of the filth pouring into our mailboxes. Danny O?Brien launches a Doors campaign to clean up e-mail and puts forward a six-point plan involving government, industry and you the reader
DOORS SIX-POINT ACTION PLAN
SOFTWARE MAKERS must improve antispam software, and fast. Filtering spam is good, but only masks the problem. Spam-spotting software must report what and who it has found back to the ISPs, so they can block further spams.
Interesting!
Man uses cell phone to take photo up schoolgirl’s skirt. You knew it was inevitable.
Police said Hamano was riding behind the girl on an escalator at JR Kashiwa Station when he took out his mobile phone, held it underneath the girl’s skirt and took a photo. The girl was alerted to his presence by the noise emitted by the phone camera’s shutter. She turned around to catch Hamano with his hands between her legs.
(via 0xdeadbeef, from MDN’s “waiwai” section)
Guardian: Courage under fire. No matter what you think about what’s going on in Israel and Palestine, Caoimhe, and the other international observers, require your support:
Friday was a very close call. Caoimhe was shot in the left thigh as she stood in between a firing IDF tank and three young boys in the street. I spoke to her on the phone shortly after the attack as she lay in her hospital bed. She explained that she had been trying to persuade the IDF, after they shot dead a nine-year-old boy, to stop shooting at the children. They had told her to get out of their way or they would shoot her. It was while she was clearing the children off the streets that she was shot. She is sure she was a direct target; the tank was close by, the soldier pointed his gun at her and fired, and continued to do so as she crawled to an alleyway for shelter.
I asked an IDF spokesman for his explanation. ‘We are in the middle of a war and we cannot be responsible for the safety of anyone who has not been coordinated by the IDF to be in the occupied territories right now. While we do not want innocent Palestinians to suffer, or internationals to get hurt, we are trying to ensure the safety of the Israelis and we will not tolerate internationals interfering with IDF operations. It is not the job of internationals to stand in the line of fire, unless they are the son of God, but he hasn’t come yet.’
A great tale of systems wierdness, via 0xdeadbeef:
‘We’re having a problem sending email out of the department.’ ‘What’s the problem?’ I asked. ‘We can’t send mail more than 500 miles,’ the chairman explained.
WSJ: If TiVo Thinks You Are Gay, Here’s How to Set It Straight: when a learning “personalisation” algorithm gets it massively wrong.
PS: I think it was Mimi Smartypants who noted that she occasionally misses the odd TV program, just so TiVo doesn’t get the wrong idea.
PPS: Joe McNally, who fwded this, notes that IMDB’s learner has gone a bit haywire recently, too: “If you liked ‘Iris’,” it told me the other week, “you’ll also enjoy ‘Planet of the Apes’.” Click further, and apparently you’ll also also enjoy ‘Pearl Harbour’, ‘Donnie Darko’ and ‘Bend It Like Beckham’. Sounds like a game of What Links?
PPPS: all irrelevant in Europe — TiVo’s west-pond-only.
According to the Minister for Communications, Marine and Natural Resources, Mr. D. Ahern, Ireland will “transpose into Irish law the requirements of European Parliament and Council Directive 2002/58/EC concerning the processing of personal data and the protection of privacy in the electronic communications sector” before the end of 2003.
It will be nice to be able to point to the law, eventually — for what that’s worth. Since most spammers are USian, relaying via other countries, actually acting on the law will not be quite so simple. But it will be an improvement.
Hashish ‘fell on to back of army lorry’. “Spain’s defence ministry is still at a loss to explain how three-quarters of a tonne of hashish had turned up in an army truck. … ‘Anybody could have put the toxic substance there,’ said the defence minister”. Don’t worry minister, I’m sure the customs officials haven’t heard that one before…
Fantastic ending:
But now both he and the armed services are being ruthlessly lampooned by, among others, The Puppet Show News … Mr Trillo, a member of the strict Opus Dei Catholic lay order, is routinely portrayed as a uniformed pothead whose favourite pastime is getting stoned with the mascot of the Spanish Legion, a little white goat called Blanquita.
As both he and Blanquita mourned the lost Eurofighter by lighting up a giant joint at the weekend, the defence minister declared: “It’s the only way to fly.”
Sliced liver, anyone? “The first public autopsy in Britain for 170 years brought back vivid memories of medical school – and an acute sense of hunger – for the Guardian’s junior doctor Michael Foxton.”
“The process of dismemberment is a deeply weird and dysphoric experience, and it is a dangerous border to cross. I remember the first time I had to do it, as a medical student in an operating theatre. It was a man with stomach cancer, who I had been talking to on the ward the morning before his operation. When the surgeon brought his knife down to make the first cut on his belly, it was everything I could do to stop myself reaching out and grabbing his hand to stop him. Doctors have to cross that line. We have to separate the thinking, smiling, family man from the clinical material. If I hadn’t done that I couldn’t possibly cut a hole and force a huge chest drain tube a centimetre across into a writhing patient on a respiratory ward at three in the morning, without going mad.”
now that’s a great name tag:
I just dug up this classic piece of lunacy from the Montauk UFO contingent. Highly recommended if you like reading this kind of wierdness…
DA: Hmmm. Who do these aliens eat?
AC: They specifically like young human children, that haven’t been contaminated like adults. Well, there is a gentleman out giving a lot of information from a source he gets it from, and he says that there is an incredible number of children snatched in this country.
DA: Over 200,000 each year.
AC: And that these children are the main entree for dinner.
yum yum!
Blather: I See Dead People, by Mick Cunningham and Dave Walsh. “It’s Halloween, it’s Trinity College in Dublin, and we’re in a packed lecture hall … for an evening of public lectures entitled “Over Their Dead Bodies… The Secrets That Dead Bodies Tell”. And dead bodies speak volumes. ”
I went along to this — it was fantastic stuff, although extremely gory at times. Worth reading, and be thankful they don’t have copies of Dr. Harbison’s slides.
WSJ: For Bulk E-Mailer, Pestering Millions Offers Path to Profit.
I’m just trying to make a living like everyone else, says Ms. Betterly. … (she) quickly discovered that she could make a profit if she got as few as 100 responses for every 10 million messages sent for a client, and she figures her income will be $200,000 this year.
And she’s based in Tampa, Florida. What is it about Florida?!
Some folks reckon that mailservers should have reverse DNS — in other words, that the SMTP server should have a fully-valid forward-to-reverse mapping for its address, to cut down on spam and forgeries. All well and good.
Some other folks reckon that filtering on it is therefore a good way to cut down on spam.
It’s a nice idea, apart from 2 things:
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filtering based on this suffers the same problem some DNSBLs have: a false positive hurts the user, rather than the person who is at fault; also the user is virtually powerless to fix it.
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the correlation between spam and missing reverse DNS is no longer as strong as it used to be, as far as I can tell; spammers know they should pick a relay or proxy with a reverse DNS entry to get through filters, and as it becomes a requirement for relaying in general, more hosts have this anyway (regardless of exploitability or not).
Joel on Software now features a great new article on what he calls “Leaky Abstractions”. Some snippets:
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Even though network libraries like NFS and SMB let you treat files on remote machines “as if” they were local, sometimes the connection becomes very slow or goes down, and the file stops acting like it was local, and as a programmer you have to write code to deal with this. The abstraction of “remote file is the same as local file” leaks. …
(jm: the ‘transparent does not always mean good’ problem)
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Something as simple as iterating over a large two-dimensional array can have radically different performance if you do it horizontally rather than vertically, depending on the “grain of the wood” — one direction may result in vastly more page faults than the other direction, and page faults are slow. Even assembly programmers are supposed to be allowed to pretend that they have a big flat address space, but virtual memory means it’s really just an abstraction, which leaks when there’s a page fault and certain memory fetches take way more many nanoseconds than other memory fetches.
(jm: the ‘why objects are not always the way to do it’ problem)
And finally, he ends with a killer:
Ten years ago, we might have imagined that new programming paradigms would have made programming easier by now. Indeed, the abstractions we’ve created over the years do allow us to deal with new orders of complexity in software development that we didn’t have to deal with ten or fifteen years ago, like GUI programming and network programming. And while these great tools, like modern OO forms-based languages, let us get a lot of work done incredibly quickly, suddenly one day we need to figure out a problem where the abstraction leaked, and it takes 2 weeks. And when you need to hire a programmer to do mostly VB programming, it’s not good enough to hire a VB programmer, because they will get completely stuck in tar every time the VB abstraction leaks.
Well said! Read the article!
ICAP-server, an (imaginatively-named) daemon which implements ICAP. This seems to be a transcoding proxy server; in other words, it will convert HTML content on the fly, while you browse.
ICAP itself seems to be a protocol for rewriting HTTP responses; in other words, it allows a proxy server to include a small snippet of ICAP client code, and call out to an ICAP server to do the rewriting. Nifty.
Sounds like this could be very handy for low-bandwidth situations; use ICAP to “downshift” web pages into low-bandwidth versions. For example, banner ads can be trimmed out, heavy images converted to small, low-quality JPEGs, etc. One to watch (or help out with).
Ericsson used to have a commercial product which did something similar, but I can’t find it now…
Trinity College, Dublin is currently embroiled in a minor kerfuffle with Lucasfilm over “an uncanny resemblance between the 18th-century Long Room Library at Trinity, and the “Jedi Archives” in the latest episode of the “Star Wars” epic.” (Reuters)
The resemblance really is uncanny — I noticed it myself on watching the movie, but assumed there must have been a hundred similar libraries around the world. Sounds like Trinity think there’s only one after all. Given that it’s Trinity, maybe they’re right.
Compare: the Jedi archives vs. the Long Room.
the Anti-Telemarketing EGBG Counter-Script:
Telemarketers make use of a telescript – a guideline for a telephone conversation. This script creates an imbalance in the conversation between the marketer and the consumer. It is this imbalance, most of all, that makes telemarketing successful. The EGBG Counterscript attempts to redress that balance.
Half of the coolness here is the excellent, form/script-based design. Well suitable for printing out and sticking to the wall beside the ‘phone…
I’ve been reading an article in Edge Magazine, How To Get Rich, by Jared Diamond (author of Guns, Germs and Steel). He investigates more deeply into the differences between cultures, and the effect this has had on their history and dominance, as he did in GG+S; this time with economic might in mind.
For example, he notes that the Chinese, in the middle ages, were a sea-faring nation of astounding skill, exploring most of the coasts of Asia and Africa for trade. They were on the verge of rounding the Cape of Good Hope (and, in the words of Diamond, “colonising Europe” ;) when a new emperor with an anti-Navy bias took power, and recalled them. Since the entirety of China’s empire was ruled solely by one power, the emperor, that was that. (Compare with Columbus, who could “shop around” the many superpowers of Europe until his trip across the Atlantic was funded.)
Then, this morning, a pertinent link arrived via Kyle Moffat of forteana: an ancient Chinese map of Africa is now on show in Cape Town (BBC).
The Chinese map, covering more than 17 square metres, was produced in silk. It is thought to be a copy of a map sculpted into rock 20 or 30 years earlier. …
The Da Ming Hun Yi Tu, or Amalgamated Map of the Great Ming Empire, is a unique snapshot of history. Created in China in 1389, and clearly showing the shape of Africa, more than 100 years before Western explorers and map-makers reached the continent.
BTW, worth noting that I came across the Diamond article from a link in Clay Shirky’s guest-blog at Boing Boing. Clay, as usual, is throwing up lots of reading material, which I just don’t have time to read ;) so I’m syncing it all to my Palm with Sitescooper. Come on Xerox, where’s that electronic paper!?
OK, while we’re on the subject: the top 100 HTTPS sites by PageRank. Paypal wins, but HushMail’s not far behind.
similar to the much-discussed-elsewhere http search trick, which figures out the top 100 websites according to PageRank, here’s the top 100 CGI scripts according to PageRank. They’re incomplete, since only scripts with “cgi-bin” in the URL will show up, but hey ho. The top ten:
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9 : RIPE Whois
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6 : Altavista
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5 : US census lookup (ahead of Altavista, how the mighty have fallen!), and their population clock
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4 : Internic’s Whois
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3 : OAndA’s currency converter (a classic)
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2 : The Babelfish
And the winner is:
boo.
let’s ask Googlism some hard questions.
Googlism, what is the web?
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the web is like canada
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the web is dedicated to breathing life into women’s
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the web is crippling
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the web is ruined and i ruined it self
OK, what about the internet?
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the internet is falling
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the internet is not printed on paper
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the internet is like is like a penis
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the internet is no substitute
And Ireland?
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ireland is dedicated entirely to development aid
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ireland is at an end
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ireland is again the “dirty man” of europe when it comes to
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ireland is not disneyland
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ireland is british (what?!)
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ireland is looking for a german inhouse translator
Right. That’s quite enough I think…
rOD links to Massholes, an incredible gripe site for residents of Massachusetts to bitch about shitty driving, for example:
Dear Masshole Driver,
WHAT on earth makes you think that making a right hand turn from the left hand lane is a good idea??? Really, I’d like to know.
Signed, The-nice-person-you-totally-cut-off-and-almost-killed
Incredible stuff. Sounds like they could do with the cool innovation recently introduced here — the “dob-a-dangerous-driver” line (1).
Let’s say you’re doing what a friend of mine did a few months ago: crossing the road, with your kid in a buggy, at a pedestrian crossing, with the lights in your favour — then a speeding driver breaks the lights at top speed and nearly totals the pair of you.
This great innovation then allows you to whip out your mobile phone (hey, this is europe, everyone has one (2)), and immediately report the car’s registration number — and 2 weeks later he receives a fine! Hey presto, instant justice. (3)
And in the last week, they’ve introduced penalty points for bad driving; 12 points and you lose your license. Things can only get better — for the pedestrians that is, at least. ;)
(1: no, it’s not really called that BTW)
(2: except me, that is — I’m so far ahead of the bleeding edge I’ve given them up)
(3: well, I’m exagerrating, I think there was more witness and due process involved, but it’s pretty close.)
(4: errno==EDANGLE: dangling footnote found)
ThinkGeek sent me a voucher for 30 bucks. Thanks ThinkGeek (or Sourceforge, I’m not sure which)! So here’s what I got:
Mousetrap For Your Fridge Or File Cabinet!
When is the last time you played with your marbles? Welp, dust off your old marble collection (or use the included marbles) and set them on a journey they’ll never forget.
You design the marble’s treacherous path down the steep slope of your fridge or file cabinet (or any metal surface, as these things are magnetic). You have at your arsenal a combination of chutes, funnels, catapults, spinners and sheer drop offs to arrange according to your mood and tastes.
Give your marble the gift of extreme sports, all in the comfort of your own home or office. Because happy marbles breed happy times…
Too cool. Thanks ThinkGeek/Sourceforge!
(On the other hand, BTW, their chosen shipper for Europe happily charges an extra 6 euros for “import duty”. but hey, the toy was free.)
man, this is sweet! BBC front page coverage for Ireland Offline…
“Eircom has cited congestion of the network and not enough demand as the arguments against unmetered (internet access),” said Mr (Dave) Long (IO chairman).
BT-owned ESAT is just one of the telecom operators challenging Eircom to offer a wholesale unmetered product.
“There is huge pent-up demand and our ears are sore from listening to our own customers. For Eircom to say there is no demand is condescending and naive,” said (Una) McGirr (of ESAT BT).
Maybe what Eircom mean, is that there’s not enough demand to outweigh the unfeasibly large revenues they make from metered internet calls…
(ish!): The management of Sydney’s Taronga Zoo has mooted “manual stimulation” of Kibabu the gorilla, in order to grab some monkey semen for artificial insemination.
“I believe it’s done in Europe”, they say (maybe they’re harking back to the days of Weimar Berlin). Zookeepers, being the ones who’d get their hands dirty (so to speak), are — understandably — not too keen.
It now looks like something called “electro-ejaculation” will be used instead… sounds painful. (Link from forteana.)
My googlism: apparently I’m a tool to autoretrieve news from popular, or am I scheduled to be tried on those charges in december? yikes.
Wikipedia: Edit wars in progress. Fascinating stuff! (thanks to Crummy.com for the link).
the EU’s scientific advisors have stated that cod stocks in Europe are at their lowest ever levels, and will collapse without action. grim! More at New Scientist.
Things are getting crazy in the fight against spam: it seems AOL blocked access (for two weeks) to its mailserver from Telia.com, one of Sweden’s biggest ISPs (if not the biggest), due to spam.
Attached is an unauthorized translation of an article in the Swedish IDG paper Computer Sweden (web edition, Oct 24), provided by Claes Tullbrink.
Until a (previous) article was published, noting this ban, AOL had not succeeded in contacting Telia to talk about it. Amazing stuff.