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ooer missus (via Kenneth)
Justin's Linklog Posts
Here’s an interesting form of advance fee fraud I hadn’t heard of before; it’s a good example of 419 scammers ruining yet another casual online marketplace.
Let’s say you have a room you want to rent. You put up a "housemate wanted" ad on Craigslist or wherever. Here’s the the reply you’ll get:
Hi There,
How re you doing? I hope all is well. I’m martha Robot , am 26 yrs old and Am originally from chester united Kingdom . Graduate of I have a master degree in fashion design and I work as a professional fashion designer. I’m am not in the united kingdom right now, i am presently in West africa . I am currently working on contract for a company call (African Family Home Fashions) here in West Africa which the contract will be ending soon. I will be returning to your place soon. I enjoy traveling, It is very interesting to get more knowledge about the new countries, new people and traditions. It’s great to have such a possibility. As i was searching through the web i saw the advert of your place . I would like to know maybe it’s still available becasue i’m extremely interested in it. Here are the questions i would like to know about the room before planing to move in to the following questions below:
A}I will like to know the major intersection nearest your neighbourhood.like shopping mall,Churches,bus line e.t.c
B}I will like to know the total cost for the my initial move as in first month rent and if you accept deposit.
C}I will like to know if there is any garage or parking space cos I will have my own car come over.
D}I will like to have the rent fee per month plus the utilities.
E}I will like to have the description of the place, size, and the equipments in there.
F}I will also like to know Your payment mode.
G}I will like to know if I can make an advance payment ahead my arrival that will be stand as a kind of commitment that I am truely coming over and for you to hold the place down for me.
I will be very glad to have all this questions answered with out leaving a stone unturned…You can Call my Landlord for more references in UK ..+447024046815.
Email me back:
Thanks. Martha.
Needless to say, this is a scam. Here’s how it works (courtesy of this post): The interested "applicant" will send a cashier’s check or money order for the deposit, the value of which greatly exceeds the actual amount requested. They will then claim the overpayment to be an honest error based on their confusion about how these things work, and ask the victim to send back a money order refunding that amount, or to send it on to a "travel agent" who is supposedly booking the scammer’s flight. The payment will be made via a non-refundable mechanism like the 419er’s favourite, Western Union. It will be a matter of great urgency, as they will claim to need the funds to make the trip over. Her money order will clear, their’s will not — and there’s no way to refund the payment, so it’s gone. This is a classic advance-fee fraud trick, it seems.
Got to love that nom de plume, though — "Martha Robot". GREE-TINGS MAR-THA RO-BOT!
Googling for ‘major intersection nearest your neighbourhood’ churches bus finds plenty more:
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‘Melina Crawford, am 26 yrs old and Am originally from Sevilla, Spain‘
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‘sanyo rose, am 28 yrs old and Am originally from Barcelona, Spain‘
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Another ‘sanyo rose, am 28 yrs old and Am originally from Barcelona, Spain‘
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‘a warning about Cassandra Sanchez, am 26 yrs old and Am originally from Barcelona, Spain‘
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‘Dawn Louise Jamison, presently in Amsterdam Holland on a business trip‘
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‘daniella Pedro, am 26 yrs old and Am originally from Barcelona, Spain‘
Finally, a Washington-based realtor has written up a good walkthrough of the scam. He notes:
I recently ran an ad on craigslist.com to see if they were still working it. Craigslist has posted many warnings against responding to such solicitations and I was curious if the scammers had moved on to more fertile ground. They have not; I received 16 such inquiries in one day to a simple ad offering a room for rent in Bellevue. I used a fictitious identity and a newly created email address. I’ll use the emails from just one of them as an example. This particular scammer managed to have a check on my doorstep by the next day!
(thanks to nimbus9 for the headsup)
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new cinema listings site for Ireland. nice web2.0-ish layout, but missing lots of stuff you’d expect nowadays: search-by-reviews, feeds, Upcoming.org-style social features, etc. (in fact, they’d almost be better off just using Upcoming.org IMO ;)
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paraphrased: “enough linkblogging! new content please!”
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the bug appears to affect client-side resolvers, which can be cache-poisoned by malicious DNS servers using predictable TXIDs in DNS responses. current fix is to randomize ports when making queries? I think. more: http://www.kb.cert.org/vuls/id/800113
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good guide to diagnosing I/O bottlenecks on modern Linuxes using -d and -x
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no mention of what it does with mail from and so on, however (via Nelson)
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‘a flexible, efficient, automated mechanism for serializing structured data – think XML, but smaller, faster, and simpler’, defined with an IDL-style language. see also Thrift and http://teddziuba.com/2008/07/build-google-protocol-buffers.html
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by the Dutch team behind the crack of the Dutch travel card, based on the same MIFARE system as London’s Oyster cards. paper coming in October
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Ryanair vs Bravofly, Bravofly scraping Ryanair’s site allegedly in contravention of their T&Cs
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I’m quoted!, arguing that the death of invention in the modern age is greatly exaggerated: ‘the next Wikipedia could easily come from one teenager’s laptop in their back bedroom in Kildare […] the barriers to [invention] are lower than ever.’
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‘The way things are going, I half-expect to hear a quiet electric “peep” noise each time I flush the toilet; another bowel movement logged by Bumland Security.’
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as usual, a description of what you _shouldn’t_ be doing, provides a great illustration of what you _should_ be doing ;) (via Vinoski)
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‘Four resourceful humans test the tolerance levels of four human resource managers by constantly failing to show up for work after being offered a job. The aim… To see who can hold onto their job the longest without ever working a day.’ truly hilarious
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fix is to use the kernel from Intrepid Ibex, for now
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aha. this explains a long-running issue I’ve had on my Thinkpad at home
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‘a new text markup format. Its syntax is a blend of Donald Knuth’s TEX and various wiki markup.’ has a formal grammar, rather than an ad-hoc parser (guilty). quite nice, although would have been better if it didn’t reinvent so many wheels (via adulau)
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[the Viacom/Youtube privacy disaster demonstrates] ‘what’s wrong with trusting corporations with your data: if the corporation says “I’m not going to be evil,” and the government says “oh yes you are,” it’s pretty much _the end of the conversation_.’
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alt microblogging platform with a few key wins over Twitter & Jaiku: stability (so far!), open, decentralized, and Affero-licensed OSS. I’m “jm” on it, but not writing there — yet. but looking forward to an API so I can add it to twit.ie
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some third-party app developers get access to it, some don’t. one dev says: ‘It’s frustrating to just get locked out after spending so much time making stuff for Twitter users’
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910-node cluster sorting 1TB of data in 209 seconds, using Hadoop and HDFS. I wish we had a Hadoop cluster to do SpamAssassin mass-checks on ;)
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‘a fast, distributed, in-memory workqueue service’, written in C with libevent, lots of client libs for different languages. Nice lifecycle model. The queues are not persistent yet, though, unfortunately
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‘a semi-automated, largely passive web application security audit tool. .. detection and annotation of potential problems based on the observation of existing, user-initiated traffic in complex web 2.0 environments’, by lcamtuf
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Bebo need to do some anti-abuse work
Over the past few weeks, I’ve increasingly heard of spam and abuse problems originating in Amazon EC2.
This has culminated in a blog post yesterday by Brian Krebs at the Washington Post:
It took me by surprise this weekend to discover that that mounds of porn spam and junk e-mail laced with computer viruses are actively being blasted from digital real estate leased to [Amazon].
He goes on to discuss how EC2 space is now actively blocked by Outblaze, and has been listed by Spamhaus in their PBL list. A spokesperson for Amazon said:
"We have a clear acceptable use policy and whenever we have received a complaint of spam or malware coming through Amazon EC2, we have moved swiftly to strictly enforce the use policy by network isolating (or even terminating) any offending instances," Kinton said. She added that Amazon has since taken action against the EC2 systems hosting the [malware].
However as Seth Breidbart noted in the comments, ‘note that Amazon will terminate the instance. That means that the spammer just creates another instance, which gets a new IP address, and continues spamming.’ True enough — as described, instance termination simply isn’t good enough.
My recommendations:
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as John Levine noted, it’s likely that Amazon need to treat EC2-originated traffic similarly to how an ISP treats their DSL pools — filtering outbound traffic for nastiness, in particular rate-limiting port 25/tcp connections on a per-customer basis, so that an instance run by (or infiltrated by) a spammer cannot produce massive quantities of spam before it is detected and cut off.
However, I’m not talking about blocking port 25/tcp outbound entirely. That’s not appropriate — an EC2 instance is analogous to a leased colo box in a server farm, and not being able to send mail from our instances would really suck for EC2 users (like myself and my employers).
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It would help if there were a way to look up customer IDs from the IP address of the EC2 nodes they’re using — either via WHOIS or through rDNS. Even an opaque customer ID string would allow anti-abuse teams to correlate a single customer’s activity as they cycle through EC2 instances. This would allow those teams to deal with the reputation of Amazon’s customers, instead of Amazon’s own rep, analogous to how "traditional" hosters use SWIP to publicize their reassignments of IPs between their customers.
There’s some more discussion buried in a load of knee-jerking on the NANOG thread. Here’s a few good snippets:
Jon Lewis: ‘I got the impression the only thing Amazon considers abuse is use of their servers and not paying the bill. If you’re a paying customer, you can do whatever you like.’ (ouch.)
Ken Simpson: ‘IMHO, Amazon will eventually be forced to bifurcate their EC2 IP space into a section that is for "newbies" and a section for established customers. The newbie space will be widely black-listed, but will also have a lower rate of abuse complaint enforcement. The only scalable way to deal with a system like EC2 is to provide clear demarcations of where the crap is likely to originate from.’
Bill Herrin: ‘From an address-reputation perspective EC2 is no different than, say, China. Connections from China start life much closer to my filtering threshold that connections from Europe because a far lower percentage of the connections from China are legitimate. EC2 will get the same treatment.’
There’s also an earlier thread here.
Anyway, this issue is on fire — Amazon need to get the finger out and deal with it quickly and effectively, before EC2 does start to run into widespread blocks. I’m already planning migration of our mail-sending components off of EC2; we’re already seeing blocks of mail sent from it, and it’s looking likely that these will increase. :(
(It’s worth noting that a block of EC2’s netblocks today will produce a load of false positives, mainly on transactional mail, if you’re contemplating it. So I wouldn’t recommend it. But a lot of sites are willing to accept a few FPs, it seems.)
Twitter has this nasty habit — if you come across a tweet in your feed reader containing a URL, and you want to follow that link, you can’t, because Twitter doesn’t auto-link URLs in its RSS feeds. Instead, you have to click on the feed item, itself, wait for that to open in the browser, then click on the link in the new browser tab. That link will, in turn, open in another new tab.
Here’s a quick-hack Greasemonkey user script to inhibit this second new-tab:
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Amazon really need to sort out some effective anti-abuse policies for EC2 soon, before things go pear-shaped
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awesome; NAT-tunneling without any prior config, even if both ends are behind NAT. written by the author of the MySpace worm, Samy Kamkar
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interesting, I would have thought they’d be in a good position to just do something like what the SpamAssassin vbounce ruleset does
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oh dear. they _really_ need to get proactive on this before the shit really hits the fan, this is not going well
‘You’ll know what my riddle means
When you’ve eaten mangosteens.’
— The Crab That Played with the Sea, by Rudyard Kipling
When I travelled through Thailand, I got rightly hooked on the delicious mangosteen, traditionally dubbed the "Queen of Fruit" by the Thais. I’ve been keeping an eye out ever since, through our travels to the US and back, without any luck. (In particular, they’ve been blocked by US customs for a long time, although reportedly this is changing nowadays.)
Finally, last year, they appeared in our local Tesco supermarket here in Ireland — or at least, an empty box appeared, sans fruit! That was it, though, until a couple of weeks ago, when my friend Bob was lucky enough to come across a few, and grabbed 4 for me. (Thanks Bob!)
It appears they’re in season around the start of June, which is when they make it to Tesco’s. Naturally, they’re much more expensive here — Tesco were selling them for about EUR 1.20 each, whereas a bag of 30 were about 50 cents when we used to buy them at the street-side in Ko Chang. But that’s to be expected, really.
Since they’re tricky enough to get hold of, I thought I should document exactly what to do with them once you get ’em ;)
They start off looking like this, roughly tomato-sized fruit with a thick, papery rind:
Get your thumbnail into the rind, not too deep though!, and tear it off like so:
Look at the rind’s great colour! Watch out for it, though, as it stains clothing easily. Discard the rind, and pluck out the fleshy, juicy white segments:
(Pay no attention to their resemblance to testicles. ;)
Finally you’ll wind up with 6 or so seedless segments, and 1 or 2 seed-bearing segments, larger than the others, containing a large inedible seed along with a fair bit of flesh:
Eat ’em and enjoy the flavour — it’s a bit like a tart, vanilla-y peach, but juicier, creamier and much smoother in texture. Mmmm, truly delicious. I’m looking forward to picking up some more soon!
I considered planting the seeds, but unfortunately, you can forget about growing a tree in your back yard; the mangosteen tree requires a tropical climate:
‘The mangosteen is ultra-tropical. It cannot tolerate temperatures below 40º F (4.44º C), nor above 100º F (37.78º C). Nursery seedlings are killed at 45º F (7.22º C).’
Ah well. Seems I’ll be at Tesco’s mercy for more.
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a good guide to using Wireshark to diagnose this, as used by Audible Magic and Sandvine
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in other words, Comcast’s Sandvine appliances use the same technique as Audible Magic. Wonder if this works; I was under the impression that one would have to block RSTs on both ends of the connection, and many commenters agree
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using a Bayes classifier trained on intra-packet intervals and packet length. nifty! (via /.)
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good interview with Irish Times MD, Maeve Donovan, on their removal of the paywall: ‘it had become clear that there were not sufficient numbers of Irish Times readers prepared to pay for online content.’ seems the example of the Grauniad was influential
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make the obtuse pg_locks table more useful. ‘show any queries that are waiting on a lock, and the query that currently holds the lock on which those queries are waiting.’ haven’t tried it out yet
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The SGAE agency will collect on sales of mobile phones (EUR 1.10), blank CDs (17c each), laser printers (EUR 10), scanners (EUR 9), CD recorders (3.40). I guess Spanish consumers have a license to download freely now, since they’re already paying for it
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using a couple of mod_rewrite rules and a redirect to www.avg.com
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there goes my pocket money. I <3 the woot crew
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‘It’s a common enough misconception, but Irish national newspapers have not and are not currently showing the large-scale declines in readership as seen in the UK and US. The market is reasonably stable.’ interesting
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A film festival is putting this on? wtf, does not compute. good line up though. at Filmbase, Curved St, Temple Bar, 10am Friday 27th June
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intro to the EAM (Execute Around Method) closure-based resource-management pattern. I was wondering what this trick was called
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I missed this at the time. great news
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yay, PutPlace on Windows is now in public beta
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handy algorithm to take N randomly-selected samples from a passing stream of data; must use this on the SpamAssassin spamtraps
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‘one of my mentors told me that the chief responsibility of a CEO to his staff is to improve the CV of every staff member [..] I sincerely hope that each and every career immensely benefited as a result.’ Certainly worked for me – thanks Chris!
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A company called “TenFour Sweden” apparently sold a product called “TFS Gateway” that supported virus scans, prior to Trend’s patent filing. Note that they’re still looking for people who _used_ TFS Gateway in 1995
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it was a Hungarian sysadmin protesting a $227M investment in MS licences throughout the Hungarian state system as a massive waste of money: “I think there are much more useful free software solutions available, for no charge.”
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very good list of differences, and compelling downsides to cfengine. sounds like I need to give Puppet another chance after all
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Amazingly clear breakdown of my social groups — great infoviz. Must try something like this for SpamAssassin spamtrap data (via Leonard)
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lovely. would prefer the tee, but it’s sold out for now
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this is becoming critical for use of git as a file-synchronization mechanism for my MP3 collection, for obvious reasons. looks like it should be possible with git 1.5.6
Joey Hess suggests that current discussions about the superfluity of DVCS systems have a parallel in how the internet protocol world, circa 1993, played out:
I’m reminded of 1993. Using the internet at that time involved using a mishmash of stuff — Telnet, FTP, Gopher, strange things called Archie and Veronica. Or maybe this CERN "web" thing that Tim Berners-Lee had just invented a few years before, but that mostly was useful to particle physicists.
Then in 1994 a few more people put up web sites, then more and more, and suddenly there was an inflection point. Suddenly we were all browsing the web and all that other stuff seemed much more specialised and marginalised.
I would disagree, a little. Back in the early ’90’s, I was a sysadmin playing around with internet- and intranet-facing TCP/IP services (although in those days, the term "intranet" hadn’t been coined yet), so I gained a fair bit of experience at the coal-face in this regard. The mish-mash of protocols — telnet, gopher, Archie, WAIS, FTP, NNTP, and so on — all had their own worlds and their own views of the ‘net. What changed this in 1993 was not so much the arrival of HTTP, but TimBL’s other creation: the URL.
The URL allowed all those balkanized protocols to be supported by one WWW client, and allowed a HTML document to "link" to any other protocol —
The WWW browsers can access many existing data systems via existing protocols (FTP, NNTP) or via HTTP and a gateway. In this way, the critical mass of data is quickly exceeded, and the increasing use of the system by readers and information suppliers encourage each other.
This was a great "embrace and extend" manoeuvre by TimBL, in my opinion — by embracing the existing base of TCP/IP protocols, the WWW client became the ideal user interface to all of them. Once NCSA Mosaic came along, there really was no alternative to rival the Web’s ease of use. This was the case even if you didn’t have a HTTP server of your own; you could still access HTML documents and remote URLs.
In essence, HTML and the URL were the trojan horse, paving the way for HTTP (as HTML’s native distribution protocol) to succeed. It wasn’t the web sites that helped the WWW "win", but embrace-and-extend via the URL.
For what it’s worth, I think there is an interesting parallel in today’s DCVS world: git-svn.
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Ubuntu Ireland LoCo team now has a drop-in centre on Saturdays between 11am-4pm at the Camara offices in the Digital Hub, on Thomas St in Dublin 8
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‘Our programs have left the desktop and found their new home on the web. System administration issues loom large.’ I agree with the thesis, but Puppet as a key component to fix this? it’s just cfengine in Ruby, snore
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great sketch: James Joyce and Samuel Beckett at the pitch ‘n’ putt (NSFW)
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to hold Django’s trademarks and IP. that’s a major step forward, congrats guys. although I’m sure there’d have been room at the ASF too ;)
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the ‘Jura Internet Connection Kit’ has a few security holes, it seems. ‘Fun things you can do with a Jura coffee maker: Change the preset coffee settings; [..] Change the amount of water per cup (say 300ml for a short black) and make a puddle’
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an announcement-only Google Group for notifications about GAE downtime and outages. useful, considering they had a major datastore outage yesterday
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Boards user boasts of cheating in the Leaving Cert exams, is identified, and an epic thread unfolds. IRISH INTERNETS – SERIOUS BUSINESS
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70% of UK kids aged 18-24 download music illegally; 87% of all respondents have copied music CDs; 74% said they’d be interested in a working, DRM-free legal download service
Happy Firefox Download Day — or rather, Firefox Download Evening!
It turns out that the "day" in question has been defined as a 24-hour period starting at 10am Pacific Time; rather than compensating for the effects of timezones around the world, they’ve just picked an arbitrary 24-hour period.
That’s 6pm in Irish time, for example. At least I’m not one of the 57,000 Japanese pledgers, who’d be waiting up until 2am to kick off their download. It seems a little bizarre that there’s little leeway provided for non-US downloaders, who are right now twiddling their thumbs, waiting, while their "day" passes.
Annoyingly, the main world record page simply says ‘the official date for the launch of Firefox 3 is June 17, 2008’ — no mention of a starting time or official timezone at all!
This is the top thread on their forum right now — in addition to the omission of an entire continent ;)
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‘right now it feels like an ugly popularity contest. I can only assume that the A-listers of the Irish blogging world are lovely, lovely people because to be frank, some of them are shit-awful writers.’ be sure to read the name-calling in the comments
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ouch, he cites plenty of bad management at ORA. On the plus side, the end result, “High Performance MySQL”, 2nd Ed, sounds like it came out well — eventually! all in all though, it sounds like I dodged a bullet on that one, hard work
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sounds like this guy’s work laptop was trojaned by a virus/malware, then used to host child porn, for which he was then prosecuted. what a nightmare scenario — thankfully the forensics analyst figured it out
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The Register says “maybe”. mind you, that means absolutely feck all ;)
On programmers "going dark" — Aristotle Pagaltzis writes:
Jeff Atwood argues that open source projects are in real danger of programmers “going dark,” which means they lock themselves away silently for a long time, then surface with a huge patch that implements a complex feature.
It seems to me that this is as much a technological problem as a social issue… and that we have the technological solution figured out: it’s called distributed version control. It means that that lone developer who locked himself in a room need not resurface with a single huge patch – instead, he can come back with a branch implementing the feature in individually comprehensible steps. At the same time, it allows the lone programmer to experiment in private and throw away the most embarrassing mistakes, addressing part of the social problem.
However, I don’t think he realised that the Jeff Atwood story he responded to was in fact an echo of Ben Collins-Sussman’s original article, where he specifically picked out DVCS as a source of this danger:
A friend of mine works on several projects that use git or mercurial. He gave me this story recently. Basically, he was working with two groups on a project. One group published changes frequently…
“…and as a result, I was able to review consistently throughout the semester, offering design tweaks and code reviews regularly. And as a result of that, [their work] is now in the mainline, and mostly functional. The other group […] I haven’t heard a peep out of for 5 months. Despite many emails and IRC conversations inviting them to discuss their design and publish changes regularly, there is not a single line of code anywhere that I can see it. […] Last weekend, one of them walked up to me with a bug […] and I finally got to see the code to help them debug. I failed, because there are about 5000 lines of crappy code, and just reading through a single file I pointed out two or three major design flaws and a dozen wonky implementation issues. I had admonished them many times during these 5 months to publish their changes, so that we (the others) could take a look and offer feedback… but each time met with stony silence. I don’t know if they were afraid to publish it, or just don’t care. But either way, given the code I’ve seen, the net result is 5 wasted months.”
Before you scream; yes yes, I know that the potential for cave-hiding and writing code bombs is also possible with a centralized version control system like Subversion. But my friend has an interesting point:
“I think this failure is at least partially due to the fact that [DVCS] makes it so damn easy to wall yourself into a cave. Had we been using svn, I think the barrier to caving would have been too high, and I’d have seen the code.”
In other words, yes, this was fundamentally a social problem. A team was embarrassed to share code. But because they were using distributed version control, it gave them a sense of false security. “See, we’re committing changes to our repository every day… making progress!” If they had been using Subversion, it’s much less likely they would have sat on a 5000 line patch in their working copy for 5 months; they would have had to share the work much earlier.
To be honest, I’d tend to agree with Aristotle; just because centralized VC makes it harder to maintain a "private branch" with this "high barrier to caving", and this therefore imposes a technical pressure to fix a social problem, doesn’t mean that is a good thing. I’d prefer to fix the DVCS to apply social pressure, and have both working tools and a working social organisation.
Another commenter on Ben’s original post put it well:
I [..] disagree, strongly, that DVCS makes code hiding any more difficult than single-branch VCS. When using a single branch, it’s usually a very small group of people who are allowed to commit. Any patches from non-core contributors get lost in a tangle of IRC pastebins, mailing lists, bug trackers, and blog posts. Furthermore, even if these patches are eventually committed, they have lost all their associated version information — the destructive rebase you complain about. DVCS allows anybody to branch from trunk, record their changes, and publish their branch in a service like Launchpad or github. For an example of this, look at the mass of user-created branches for popular projects like GNOME Do or AWN.
It’s very interesting to see those Launchpad sites, in my opinion.
I’ve spent many years shepherding contributions to SpamAssassin through our Bugzilla. We’ve often lost rule contributors, who are particularly hard to attract for some reason, due to delays and human overhead involved in this method. :( So an improved interface for this would be very useful…
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‘As [a govt minister] attempted to speak, he was surrounded by Coir [ie. extreme-right-wing anti-abortion group Youth Defense] activists who screamed at him and sang “there’s no Lisbon”. When [Joan] Burton attempted to intervene, she was spat at.’ lovely
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release management failure on this scale is pretty worrying in an open-source project; here’s hoping the upcoming 1.0 actually happens
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“face value ticket reselling”. no auctions, no additional fees, no bullshit demand-generation or touts buying up the lot — just p2p buying and selling of gig tickets. looks like a good option
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classic Onion. ‘Cheney reportedly makes reference to President Bush and the Iraq War, alludes to the 9/11 attacks 27 times, and warns eerily about Americans “making the wrong choice” in November.’
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‘iodine lets you tunnel IPv4 data through a DNS server. This can be usable in different situations where internet access is firewalled, but DNS queries are allowed.’ looks a good deal cleaner than OzyManDNS, packages available for many distros
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due mainly to ridiculous bureaucratic worries about “treading on other people’s toes”, according to Richard Clayton and Tyler Moore. seems like an obvious and worryingly exploitable security hole
So, Nelson is apparently contemplating a trip to Ireland, and was looking for tips. Since he’s not the first to ask, I thought I’d do some research among my friends on things to do and good places to stay and eat in our native country. Here’s the result.
First off — it’s worth noting that we’re all thirty-somethings, so backpacker stuff and heavy boozing is no longer on the menu. If you’re after that, though, head for Temple Bar in Dublin ;) This is mainly nice hotels, good food, and interesting things to look at.
To start with, I’d recommend driving as a means of getting around. Lots of the good stuff can’t be reached any other way, and the roads are generally pretty good nowadays (if a little narrow).
Prepare for rain.
Things to do: Connemara and Kerry are stunning; in my opinion, they’re unmissable, if you’re coming to Ireland in search of natural beauty. Clare and West Cork are pretty good too. Generally, the west coast is the place to go.
A friend recommends the Skelligs: ‘the best thing I’ve seen in Ireland. If its sunny. If its raining it sucks so don’t go.’ (I’ve never been — appalling, given that my great-grandfather wrote one of the definitive works on them, I need to fix that.)
Stuff to avoid: Dublin’s not too hot, unfortunately. Over-priced and hard to get around due to traffic. I mean, it’s quite nice, especially to live in, but as a tourist destination compared to other cities around the world I don’t quite get the attractiveness. Also, the south-east corner of the country, while full of nice friendly people, is exorbitantly expensive in my experience (even pricier than Dublin!), short on good stuff to see, and a bit of a washout, so I say skip it. (I have no idea why it’s so expensive, BTW. my theory is that it’s a traditional in-country holiday venue for Dubliners, and the Wexford inhabitants love to fleece us, so we got fleeced. whatever.)
In general, I’d say the larger towns aren’t too exciting; stick to the country.
The Lonely Planet guide to Ireland, while frequently backpacker-oriented, is pretty good for non-backpacker stuff as well. If you’re driving around, it’s a good source of offbeat stuff to check out. I used it a lot when driving around Connemara last year. They also do a great book of hikes which I can recommend.
Next, places to stay… that friend again: ‘if you’re doing the Ring of Kerry, I strongly recommend diverting to Valentia and staying in Glanleam House (beautiful grub, beautiful gardens, cheap) and doing a day trip from there to the Skelligs.’
Temple House in Sligo also comes recommended: ‘a classical Georgian mansion set in an estate of 1,000 acres, overlooking a 13th century lakeside castle of the Knights Templar.’
There are lots of useless hotel/B&B sites in Google, making it hard to tell crap from quality. But these sites come recommended:
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Ireland’s Blue Book – ‘luxury accommodation in Irish Country House Hotels, Manor Houses and Castles. Also listed are Ireland’s finest gourmet restaurants.’ This is high-end stuff, but it’s pretty reliable, as far as I can see.
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Friendly Homes of Ireland – another friend says ‘aka crazy houses of Ireland — terrible webpage, but good accommodation (its also a more attractive guide). We stayed here and loved it.’
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Hidden Ireland – ‘a unique collection of historic private houses which provide the very best and most stylish country house accommodation available in Ireland – great Irish hospitality at an affordable price. Our houses are not hotels and are very much more than ordinary guesthouses. They all offer a rare opportunity to experience the lifestyle of a bygone age – a special and fascinating alternative to conventional tourist accommodation.’
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Irish Landmark Trust, if you’re interested in self-catering stays at heritage houses.
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Georgina Campbell guidebooks are apparently quite good.
Finally, scams and rip-offs are few and far between, so that’s not something to worry about. Crappy service and mediocre food, however, is more likely to be the source of problems. At least you can now get decent espresso pretty much everywhere!
Hope that helps someone ;) Got tips of your own? Feel free to add comments!
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‘Multiple groups of nude participants will be photographed outdoors by Tunick as part of his series of installations that have previously taken place in cities around the world including New York, Amsterdam and Mexico City.’
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kokogiak’s amazing blog of top photos hot off the newswires. his selection is fantastic (via Waxy)
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to read — a bunch of Bloom Filter tricks. doesn’t load here yet, but when bos and joshua both bookmark it you know it’s going to be worth reading ;)
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VM pool management using XMPP, used in their ‘EngineYard’ cloud computing platform. I’m sceptical of real-world usage of XMPP, however, since _every_ impl seems to have horrible i14y bugs…
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brilliant! probably best for non-desktop systems, though. my $400 Dell laptop acting as a home server now has 224MB of additional superfast swap ;)
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nice demo of sharding a counter to avoid locking overhead under heavy load
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great detailed post about SmugMug’s EC2 horizontal-scaling controller
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insanely complex, requiring hacks in about:config followed by pasting a line of raw Javascript into the address bar. wtf Firefox? (via:wwhyte)
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“xdotool”, command-line app to perform window management manipulation for X11, similar to sawfish-ui or Enlightenment’s proprietary UIs, can now activate/warp to windows. must use this to reinstate the Pidgin feature I miss
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I’m getting more hits from this Polish article about the Debian/OpenSSL security fiasco, than from many other sources
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‘There will be a demonstration at the Barbican in London on July 16th 2008 (outside the BT AGM) protesting against the use of Deep Packet Inspection for the purpose of behavioural advertising (specifically Phorm).’ good plan IMO
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good news, Hudson is a fantastic app!
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Rev3 closed off access to their BitTorrent tracker, used to distribute legit files; MediaDefender, a supposedly legit company, launched a massive SYN flood in response, wiping out their network for a holiday weekend. incredible — here’s hoping Rev3 sue
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‘when he’s hauled out of the swamp by somebody throwing a snake, it was too rubbery and long to be an anaconda. If it was a real anaconda, 2 or 3 people wouldn’t be able to hold it, I can tell you; I’ve tried, and they are enormously strong.’ etc.
TypePad AntiSpam looks pretty cool. I’ve been trying it out for the past week on taint.org and underseacommunity.com, with no false positives or false negatives so far (although mind you I don’t get much spam, anyway, on those blogs, fortunately). Both are WordPress blogs — I set up Akismet, got a TypePad API key, and edited 3 lines in "wp-content/plugins/akismet/akismet.php", and I was off.
However, here’s the key bit, the bit I’m most excited about — /svn/antispam/trunk/, particularly the GPL v2 LICENSE file — a fully open source backend!
The backend is a perl app built on Gearman and memcached. It uses DSpam instead of SpamAssassin, but hey, you can’t have everything ;) Nice, clean-looking perl code, too. Here’s hoping I get some tuits RSN to get this installed locally…
Firefox 3 Release Candidate 1 was released earlier this month. I’ve upgraded.
I tried switching to it a couple of months back, but gave up, since my favourite extensions were AWOL. This time around though, they’re almost all present. Since Firefox is now basically an operating system in its own right, with upgrade pain all of its own, and a couple of people have asked, here’s what I needed to do to get from Firefox 2 to 3:
Make a list of my favoured extensions
Namely, from most important to least:
- Greasemonkey
- MozEx
- Session Manager
- No Squint
- Adblock Plus
- Download Statusbar
- Web Developer Toolbar
- SubmitToTab
- CustomizeGoogle
- Firebug
- Live HTTP Headers
Create a new Mozilla profile
This allowed me to keep my Firefox 2.0 settings entirely intact, a key step. Install Firefox 3, and start it with "firefox -ProfileManager", then create a new profile and start with that.
Get installing
The following extensions from the above list were available by now for Firefox 3, through addons.mozilla.org:
- Adblock Plus
- Download Statusbar
- No Squint
- Session Manager
- Web Developer Toolbar
- Live HTTP Headers
- CustomizeGoogle
Firebug was slightly trickier, since you need the
1.1 beta version, directly from their site 1.2 beta version, specially designed for Firefox 3 support, available only from their ‘releases’ page.
However, Greasemonkey, SubmitToTab, and MozEx were still missing. :(
Greasemonkey, thankfully, wasn’t too hard to find — the latest nightly build from this directory does the trick.
MozEx seems dead — the Firefox 2 support was added in a development snapshot, and there’s no sign of Firefox 3 support. This was in danger of becoming a show-stopper, since I spend all day editing text in browser textareas in Trac, Bugzilla, and Wordpress — until I found It’s All Text!, which is even slightly prettier and simpler than MozEx. yay. The only thing to watch out for is that after setting the path to the editor command, I had to quit and restart the browser for it to recognise it as valid.
SubmitToTab is the only desirable plugin remaining. It looks like it won’t be making it any time soon, but I’m prepared to live without it. ;)
Also, while discussing this on Twitter, Vipul wondered if XPather was available — turns out that yes, v1.4 of XPather supports FF3. Looks cool too; I’ve installed it ;)
Copy bookmarks
Exit the browser, copy the "bookmarks.html" file from the old profile directory (~/.mozilla/firefox/jocfzbfo.jm in my case) to the new one (~/.mozilla/firefox/7bkf89ws.ff3), and restart it.
I didn’t bother copying cookies — I’m happy to log in again on all those sites. (I don’t like carrying too much baggage between upgrades…)
I also opened the Greasemonkey user scripts dir (~/.mozilla/firefox/jocfzbfo.jm/gm_scripts), clicked on each script there, and installed them that way to FF3. A little laborious, but nothing serious really.
Done!
End result: I’m using FF3, and it’s working quite nicely. Memory usage is consistently below 300MB, so far — I haven’t seen any bloating yet, which is a big improvement. I’m probably going to stick with it.
One thing: I did have to turn off the new image scaling effect, however — text font size modification also now scales images to match, which is very annoying (and jaggy). No Squint allows this quite neatly.