Digital Rights Ireland blog post on the secret internet-filtering plans : ‘it becomes clear that for some time now the Department of Justice has been proposing the introduction of internet blocking in Ireland – and has been doing this under the radar, without any public consultation or legislative approval. Indeed, it is clear from the list that the Department is not planning on introducing legislation but instead intends to introduce this new form of censorship without any legal basis, based on the now discredited Norwegian and Danish models.’ This is very bad news indeed
(tags: ireland censorship filtering internet great-firewall dri politics freedom)Irish Dept of Justice secretly plotting a China-style “Great Firewall” : according to DRI’s TJ McIntyre via Karlin Lillington. “Blocking involves censorship taken on no legal basis. There is no judge, no jury and no right to be heard if you are blocked,” says McIntyre. “The chances are it also will be used in unaccountable ways by unaccountable organisations.”
(tags: blocking censorship government internet ireland dri filtering great-firewall)ClamAV and The Case of The Missing Mail – Return Path Blog : version 0.94.x got end-of-lifed a year after the release of .95, to fix a bug that would increase bandwidth consumption on their mirrors. To mandate upgrades, the devs sent a kill-switch trigger to .94 installations in the field. chaos ensues, unsurprisingly
(tags: clamav filtering mail ouch upgrades end-of-life support open-source sourcefire return-path)
Justin's Linklog Posts
BlueRunner: Email in the Cloud with Cassandra [PDF] : interesting prez from some IBM researchers on using Cassandra as a mail store, via Jeremy
(tags: via:jzawodny mail cassandra database data ibm nosql performance presentation pdf)N7 Armour Stripe Hoody : too nerdy? it seems possible
(tags: n7 armour mass-effect geek clothing games)
Authentic Carnitas and Three Pounds of Lard : fatty pork deep fried in lard. oh yeah. thanks Ben!
(tags: via:ben pork carnitas mexican recipes food yum lard)Boojum Fresh Mexican Food : new lunch spot serving Mexican food in Dublin. hopefully good, haven’t tried it yet, menu looks promising though
(tags: mexican food dublin ireland lunch meals)Mirror Man of Los Angeles : whoa, amazing street performer outfit
(tags: street-art performance mirrors via:lcbo photos)Every Time Zone : “Never warp your brain with time zone math again.” Quite a useful javascript TZ conversion tool, although it could be more intuitive still
(tags: conversion javascript reference timezones time international)Compu b – 10% off all Apple products this Saturday : new Apple reseller on Dublin’s Grafton Street, sounds like a good deal
(tags: apple ireland shopping via:adrianweckler)
Internet Security is a failure : ASF’s Paul Querna: ‘Security on the Internet sucks, and it is only getting worse. The problem is systemic, with security researchers and developers not producing viable ways for the average user to live on the Internet in a secure fashion without excessive paranoia.’
(tags: asf authentication infrastructure tls internet security)
Radisson Blu Galway – I’d avoid for events « Damien Mulley : Damien shares his atrocious experiences with a Galway hotel, and (naturally) commenters from the hotel’s IP address range pile on what looks like astroturf in the comments
(tags: comments astroturf radisson galway hotels funny events customer-service cluetrain)
Gizzard, a framework for creating distributed datastores : from Twitter. looks interesting
(tags: twitter gizzard database nosql storage sharding scalability scala replication)
“Crosaire” dead : the legendary compiler of the ‘Irish Times’ cryptic crosswords died on Saturday in Harare, Zimbabwe, aged 92
(tags: irish-times history crosswords puzzles cryptic crosaire)
City of Portland develops iPhone app to report city infrastructure problems : ie. take a pic of a pothole and it’ll be reported up to the appropriate office quickly and without hassle. wow. are you watching, Dublin?
(tags: portland cool iphone apps potholes infrastructure city)BenQ W600 projector : 600 euros all-in for an entry-level DLP home cinema projector capable of 720p HD. tempted, but stil a bit pricey
(tags: shopping tv video projectors home cinema dlp hdtv)
Grooveshark Mobile for iPhone : nifty, an official app for this music-streaming site — although for jailbroken iPhones only
(tags: jailbreaking iphone music grooveshark streaming mp3 apps)
Where Tcl and Tk Went Wrong : from David Welton. what, the lack of support for GNOME UI standards was *deliberate*? bad choice if so
(tags: gnome david-welton languages via:fanf scripting gui tk tcl)Gmail APIs and Tools: IMAP and SMTP using OAuth : ‘The Gmail IMAP and SMTP servers have been extended to support authorization via the industry-standard OAuth protocol.’ pretty cool, support third parties sending outbound as you, or filtering your inbound gmail
(tags: gmail mail oauth smtp imap api)creators of AMQP ditching it for ZeroMQ : ‘While iMatix was the original designer of AMQP and has invested hugely in that protocol, we believe it is fundamentally flawed, and unfixable. It is too complex and the barriers to participation are massive. We do not believe that it’s in the best interest of our customers and users to invest further in AMQP. Specifically, iMatix will be stepping out of the AMQP workgroup and will not be supporting AMQP/1.0 when that emerges, if it ever emerges.’ wow, massive downvote there
(tags: queueing amqp zeromq imatix mq protocols openamq via:janl)
BBC News – How spam filters dictated Canadian magazine’s fate : the Canadian mag “The Beaver” is changing its name due to broken filters’ false positives. Bennett Haselton reckons that there’s no incentive to fix FPs, which as Henry Stern notes isn’t the case
(tags: anti-spam false-positives beaver canadia canada bbc)TLS-encrypted spam : the Rustock botnet is now attempting TLS encryption of spam delivery sessions
(tags: tls rustock botnets anti-spam mailchannels ssl encryption)
Pictures from the Irish Blog Awards 2010 : I like the “blogging is dead” funereal theme ;)
(tags: blogging ireland iba blog-awards coffin)
pwnat – NAT to NAT client-server communication : ‘a proxy server that works behind a NAT, even when the client is behind a NAT, without any 3rd party’. nifty, by Samy “MySpace worm” Kamkar
(tags: samy-kamkar apps firewall ip nat networking pwnat stun traversal tcp sysadmin tunneling udp)
Bulgaria: Bulgarian City Struggles as Councilors Play Farmville on Facebook – Novinite.com – Sofia News Agency : ‘The troubled councilor, Dimitar Kerin, has defended himself by saying he was not the only one in the City Hall watering virtual egg plants. He said he had reached only Level 40, whereas Daniela Zhelyazkova, a councilor from the rightist Democrats for Strong Bulgaria party, was already at Level 46.’
(tags: farmville funny slackers bulgaria plovdiv games facebook)Pivotal Tracker : hmm, nice-looking Scrum tool
(tags: scrum collaboration dev management project-management tools agile)
Guinness‘ latest product, Guinness Black Lager, gets a panning in the Irish Times today.
I’m not a fan of Guinness. It’s a good beer, but monotonous when it’s the only thing available. This, from the old Dublin Brewing Company website, makes some interesting allegations as to why that may be the case:
In 1996 the Dublin Brewing Company was set up in Smithfield, in the old James Crean soap factory. As the only other brewery in Dublin to Guiness, Dublin Brewing Company represented a small but real challenge to the Guinness monopoly. Initially [Guinness’] reaction was "it won’t work because, Irish people were brand loyal" and wouldn’t change to anything new." However by November 1997 Guinness could see an increasing threat from a number of new microbreweries which were opening up around Ireland; it built its own microbrewery called St. James’s Gate Beers. In the words of their Weekly News No: 44 "the four unique and distinctive draught beers are designed to meet perceived demand amongst ale and lager drinkers over the age of 28 for a wider choice of tastier draught beers."
The project team had spent 18 months conducting exhaustive R & D into the Irish drinking palette before the launch. This research included taking samples of Beckett’s and D’Arcy’s from public houses in Temple Bar and returning it to their citadel of brewing science for further analysis. Just exactly how do those "Fun Lovin Brewers" in Smithfield make beer? The code word for this return to basic brewing was affectionately known among company staff as "Operation Wolf".
The Dublin Brewing Company, amongst other small breweries was going to be lambs for slaughter. Of course, when you have a virtual monopoly on tap space in most bars, it’s no problem launching no less than four beers in twenty pubs in Dublin overnight. Luckily drinkers in this country know what they want, and if they want a real beer they support the increasing number of microbreweries in Ireland, not a monopoly brewer masquerading as a small producer. The attempt at what was called "full taste" beers turned out to be a disaster. By October 1998 the operation was quietly closed down. However, now that St. James Gate is no more (£3-5m expenditure), we have its latest treat, Breo, being launched with the usual bravado Guinness display on these occasions – 10/15 kegs of beer free for every publican that takes it in. The pub gets the higher number of kegs if they take something else out. As the only other brewery in town, the Dublin Brewing Company is back on the firing line. The Dublin Brewing Company would like to dedicate D’Arcy’s Dublin Stout to the memory of those old Dublin breweries.
Sadly, whether due to Guinness’ tactics or not, the DBC appears to be no more. There are a few microbreweries around Ireland, but generally, the pub taps in this country are dominated by low-quality lagers, and Guinness. At least Paulaner is becoming widely available on tap, imported by Heineken…
Heathrow security man “ogles” female colleague’s breasts using full-body scanner : ‘John Laker, 25, allegedly copped an eyeful of Jo Margetson, 29, when the latter “entered the X-ray machine by mistake”. She was “horrified” as Laker “pressed a button to take a revealing photo” and remarked [on the size of her breasts].’ as Conrad says, “who didn’t see this coming?” Wonder how many other “revealing photos” are on that hard drive
(tags: privacy scanners heathrow the-register uk via:cjodea)
OSSBarcamp : this year’s open-source BarCamp, in Dublin, April 17th. no way I’ll be able to get a talk together (again) but hopefully I can attend ;)
(tags: ossbarcamp open-source dublin ireland barcamp)How to get Google Voice working in Ireland : hacky, but I’m very tempted — GV looks nifty and there’s no indication they’re bothering to roll it out on this side of the pond
(tags: google google-voice phone ireland hacks skype)
alleged Jolley Gang super-ligger chokes to death on a canapé while gatecrashing : wow, incredible irony
(tags: death humour observer ligging jolley-gang gatecrashers irony)
SpamAssassin 3.3.1 went out last Friday. The main change here is the inclusion
of Spamhaus’ new URIBL list, the DBL, as the URIBL_DBL_SPAM rule.
Download page for source tarballs etc. Here’s RPM packages from Warren.
Ruby Best Practices – Full Book Now Available For Free! : one for the to-get queue
(tags: best-practices ruby book free download toread library pdf reference coding)Top Ten One-Liners from CommandLineFu Explained : worth it for #10: ‘Capture video of a linux desktop’: ‘$ ffmpeg -f x11grab -s wxga -r 25 -i :0.0 -sameq /tmp/out.mpg’
(tags: video capture x11 ffmpeg cli bash linux)Sexy Executives : ‘The finest corporate photography – from their extranets, to you’ (via Adrian Weckler)
(tags: via:adrianweckler funny business blogs ceo photography executives zzzz)
Just heading this one off before it gets too much further…
A couple of weeks ago, a researcher found a bug in the spamass-milter project, an open-source milter to integrate SpamAssassin filtering into an MTA. Here’s the exploit details.
This H-Online story covered it:
Security vulnerability in SpamAssassin filter module
The SpamAssassin Milter plug-in which plugs in to Milter and calls SpamAssassin, contains a security vulnerability which can be exploited by attackers using a crafted email to inject and execute code on a mail server. The SpamAssassin Milter plug-in is frequently used to run SpamAssassin on Postfix servers.
(I think this is the source article on Heise.de.)
That was more-or-less accurate — but the problem is the "chinese whispers" effect, where a news story on another site builds on misreadings of another news article. eSecurityPlanet:
Security Flaw Found in SpamAssassin Plug-in
The SpamAssassin Milter plug-in has been found to contain a security vulnerability. […]
sigh.
To clarify: spamass-milter is not a part of SpamAssassin. it’s a third-party product which allows sendmail/postfix users to integrate spamassassin into their message flows as a milter.
a sad story of connections made via second-hand small ads : ‘“It’s free to advertise,” Ned explained. “And we have a lot of things we don’t need.” So each week, they advertised for sale in Loot something from their apartment. This was their social life. Some weeks – the good weeks – they had three or four people who came to see what they were selling.’
(tags: loot stories london small-ads for-sale second-hand irish-times irishwomans-diary rosita-boland)
RE2: a principled approach to regular expression matching : Russ Cox’ C++ lib to provide safer, guaranteed-linear-time, non-exponential regexps, at the cost of dropping support for backreferences and generalized zero-width assertions. actually looks quite useful, unlike most “I’ve fixed regexps” claims ;)
(tags: regular-expressions regexps efficiency linear-time exponential-time backreferences google re2)
VOGON PLIERS : quick! where’s my towel?!
(tags: via:spoon funny google-maps google pliers vogons)
NexPod, Freedom of Espresso : Nespresso-compatible capsules — fill up with your own freshly-ground coffee and use in any Nespresso machine
(tags: nespresso coffee capsules espresso)Wall anchors & plasterboard/dry lining walls : Boards thread with good advice regarding wall fixings for drylined walls
(tags: diy boards walls howto)
openstache, closestache : new nomenclature for “{” and “}”. This I can get behind
(tags: moustache silly openstache closestache squiggly brackets punctuation intercal bang-splat)
DIY Burglar Alarm : Damian Beresford’s experience installing his own home alarm. pretty cheap, sounds quite easy too
(tags: alarm home-alarms house security diy install)Post-mortem for February 24th, 2010 outage – Google App Engine : extremely detailed; power outage in the primary DC resulted in a degraded fleet, and on-calls didn’t have up-to-date on-call docs to respond correctly
(tags: google gae appengine outages post-mortems multi-dc reliability distcomp fleets on-call)Wrex in Effect, or, Deep Space and the Negro/Injun/Krogan Problem : fantastic article about Mass Effect’s political allegory. I’m slightly disappointed that Mass Effect 2 didn’t live up to ME1’s quality, IMO
(tags: mass-effect games gaming politics)
Ubisoft DRM Authentication Servers Go Down : Assassin’s Creed 2 players unable to play the game for no less than 10 hours due to failure of their DRM servers. nice work Ubisoft
(tags: drm fail defective-by-design gaming ubisoft assassins-creed)
Remote Pair Programming : using ssh, screen and emacs
(tags: ssh screen editors emacs pair-programming xp remote collaboration)
Gallery experiment proves theory that science can be fun – The Irish Times – Fri, Mar 05, 2010 : Dublin’s Science Gallery is proving to be a massive success. good news. just wish I could visit more often!
(tags: science science-gallery art museums tcd dublin ireland)
More Best of the Email – The Daily WTF : the “45-hour workweek vs 80-hour vacation” one is a bureaucratic classic
(tags: email via:eoin funny daily-wtf bureaucracy hr health-and-safety omgwtfbbq)
Update News! (in first two posts) – Steam Users’ Forums : mind-boggling work decoding Portal-2-related ARG content by Portal fans. as one jwz commenter put it: ‘Seriously, if aliens ever contact us, the internet will have it worked out and replied to in about three hours fast.’ Also, people are confused by the concept of modems and BBSes; I feel old
(tags: glados portal arg incredible effort)
Unit Testing Achievements : XBox style achievements for Python’s ‘nose’ unit testing framework, eg. ‘Major Letdown: all tests in a suite of at least 100 pass except the last.’ genius!
(tags: via:simonw funny testing unit-tests python xbox gaming achievements nose)FastMail and sessions : a clever HTTP session-management trick (via Tony Finch)
(tags: via:fanf web http sessions cookies fastmail)McSweeney’s Internet Tendency: Selections From H.P. Lovecraft’s Brief Tenure as a Whitman’s Sampler Copywriter : Lovecraftian ads for chocolate. ‘There is a dimension ruled by a blind caramel God-King who sits on a vast, cyclopean milk-chocolate throne while his mindless, gooey followers dance to the piping of crazed flutes. It is said that there are gateways in our world that lead to this caramel hell-planet. The delectable Caramel Chew may be one such portal.’
(tags: caramel lovecraft mcsweeneys geek parody funny food cthulhu chocolate)Approaching 100% spam block: Spamhaus releases the Domain Block List : DBL announcement. working on the SpamAssassin support for 3.3.1…
(tags: spamassassin anti-spam dbl spamhaus dnsbls)
Phishing in Irish : someone has gone to the trouble of translating the ‘Hang Seng Bank’ phish to Gaeilge. I would surmise that some phisher has a table of CCTLD-to-language mappings and is pasting their text into Google Translate before spamming their .ie address list. If only they knew how few people can read it!
(tags: irish gaeilge funny languages translation)
Buzz by analise torrez from Mobile : EPIC BURRITO THREAD demonstrating the true power of Google Buzz
(tags: burritos mmmm yum food lisey google-buzz epic)2010 Irish Blog Awards Nominations : bloody hell, where did these all come from?! wow
(tags: blogs ireland blogging awards)
Search results for url:taint.org on Delicious : wow, you can search a time period for everyone who bookmarked pages on a specific site (via Britta)
(tags: delicious search nifty tools egosurfing via:britta)Mindblowing Python GIL : ‘presentation about how the Python GIL actually works and why it’s even worse than most people even imagine.’ A good chunk btw could be rephrased as ‘pthreads is worse than most people even imagine’. pretty awful data, though
(tags: python gil locking synchronization ouch performance tuning coding interpreters threads pthreads)
ElasticSearch : nifty; Apache-licensed distributed, RESTful, JSON-over-HTTP, schemaless search server with multi-tenancy
(tags: search distributed rest json apache elasticsearch http)Chip and PIN is broken : Ross Anderson’s lab demo an attack on TV whereby any Chip-and-PIN debit card can be used in conjunction with a MITM device, with a PIN of “0000”, verified online, and producing a receipt saying “PIN Verified”. thoroughly hosed
(tags: security banking money chipandpin crypto ross-anderson)