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Justin's Linklog Posts

links for 2006-06-29

Published June 29, 2006

links for 2006-06-27

Published June 27, 2006

links for 2006-06-21

Published June 21, 2006

links for 2006-06-20

Published June 20, 2006

links for 2006-06-19

Published June 19, 2006

Vodafone Ireland’s flat rate mobile data card

Published June 19, 2006

Adrian Weckler posts details of Vodafone Ireland’s new flat price datacard; costing 50 Euros per month, including VAT; fully flat rate (hooray, something useful at last!); and they claim that they’ll be rolling out HSDPA, which offers 1.2Mbps to 11Mbps rates, ‘starting in Dublin in October’.

Those are great numbers, but further info seems thin on the ground; they haven’t bothered updating their own website yet, amazingly.

Anyone got further info? What rates does it offer right now? How would one order such a beast?

Holidaze

Published June 8, 2006

Quick note — I’m off on vacation next week — so I probably won’t read any email while I’m there ;) Talk to you after the 17th.

links for 2006-06-07

Published June 7, 2006

Running Dapper

Published June 7, 2006

I took the plunge over the weekend, and live-upgraded the new ‘Dapper Drake’ Ubuntu release — ouch. Here’s the two key lessons I learned:

  • Don’t run “grub-install” in a misremembered attempt to update the current GRUB boot menu ‘menu.lst’ file with the new kernel; sadly, this will quietly remove important details from your old menu.lst, such as “initrd” lines, rendering those kernels unbootable. Moral: ensure brain is in gear before meddling with MBRs!

  • If you’re a Kubuntu user, watch out. Ensure you run apt-get install ubuntu-base ubuntu-desktop — bringing the entirety of GNOME up to date — as well as apt-get install kubuntu-desktop after the upgrade; it appears that some part of a new hotplugging subsystem is not included as a dependency of kubuntu-desktop. Failure to do this results in an inability to use USB/hotpluggable devices, including internal devices like the Synaptics touchpad. No pointer devices (mice or touchpads) means no X server at boot, which is always a little annoying.

Some day I’ll just do things the right way, and do a fresh-from-CD install instead. Ah well. The good stuff: the new kernel, or possibly Xorg, is proving to be a lot speedier — window updates are noticeably smoother; and the new Ubuntu GNOME theme is similarly tasty.

SpamAssassin advisory CVE-2006-2447

Published June 7, 2006

CVE 2006-2447, in which Radoslaw Zielinski spotted a nasty in spamd’s ‘vpopmail’ support in pretty much all recent versions of Apache SpamAssassin.

If you use spamd with vpopmail, go read the advisory and determine if you need to take action. Not many people will need to, I think; it’s a very rare setup. Still, it’s important to get the warning out there anyway.

The irony is that the bug is triggered partly by the “–paranoid” switch. This was intended to increase security, by increasing paranoia when possibly-unsafe situations arose — hence providing a great demonstration of how the addition of optional code paths, even in the best intentions, can reduce security by allowing bugs to creep in unnoticed.

links for 2006-06-06

Published June 6, 2006

Web x, where x != 2.0

Published June 2, 2006

Regarding the O’Reilly/CMP “Web 2.0 (SM)” trademark shitstorm, Sean McGrath humourously suggested a workaround — using a different revision number instead of “2.0”, specifically e, 2.71….

However, it’s not quite that simple in many jurisdictions, apparently. It seems that trademark law — in the US, at least — allows trademarks which include a number to also cover uses within roughly plus or minus 10 of that number. In other words, CMP’s application will cover the range from Web -8.0 (SM) (assuming negative numbers are included?) to Web 12.0 (SM).

So much for “Web 3.0”, “Web 2.1”, “Web 2.71…”, and so on. Back to the drawing board, Sean! ;)

(disclaimer: IANAL, of course. Credit to Craig for that tidbit.)

Update: doh, got the value of e wrong…

links for 2006-06-01

Published June 1, 2006

links for 2006-05-31

Published May 31, 2006

Blog Spam, and a ‘nofollow’ Post-Mortem

Published May 31, 2006

An interesting article on blog-spam countermeasures — Google’s embarrassing mistake. Quote:

I think it’s time we all agreed that the ‘nofollow’ tag has been a complete failure.

For those of you new to the concept, nofollow is a tag that blogs can add to hyperlinks in blog comments. The tag tells Google not to use that link in calculating the PageRank for the linked site. […]

Since its enthusiastic adoption a year and a half ago, by Google, Six Apart, WordPress, and of course the eminent Dave Winer, I think we can all agree that nofollow has done — nothing. Comment spam? Thicker than ever. It’s had absolutely no effect on the volume of spam. That’s probably because comment spammers don’t give a crap, because the marginal cost of spamming is so low. Also, nofollow-tagged links are still links, which means that humans can still click on them — and if humans can click, there’s a chance somebody might visit the linked sites after all.

I agree. At the time, I pointed at this comment from Mark Pilgrim:

Spammers have it in their heads now that weblog comments are a vector to exploit. They don’t look at individual results and tweak their software to stop bothering individuals. They write generic software that works with millions of sites and goes after them en masse. So you would end up with just as much spam, it would just be displayed with unlinked URLs.

Spammers don’t read blogs; they just write to them.

I still think he was spot on.

However, one part of the ‘Google’s embarrassing mistake’ article is a red herring — I think the chilling effect on “nonspam links” is not to be worried about; as Jeremy Zawodny said, life’s too short to worry about dropping links purely in the hopes of giving yourself Page Rank. I don’t know if I really want links that people are leaving purely for that reason. ;)

In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that Google’s crawler starts treating “nofollow” links as mildly non-spammy in a future revision, due to their wide use in wikis, blogs etc.

To be honest, though — I don’t see the problem of blog-spam much anymore. As I said here:

[Weblog] comment spam should be a lot easier to deal with than SMTP spam. … With weblog comments, you control the protocol entirely, whereas with SMTP you’re stuck with an existing protocol and very little “wiggle room”.

On my WordPress weblog [ie. here] — which, admittedly, gets only about 1/4 of the traffic plasticbag.org does — I’ve instituted a very simple check stolen from Jeremy Zawodny. I simply include a form field which asks the comment poster for my first name, and if they fail to supply that, the comment is dropped. In addition, I’ve removed the form fields to post directly, requiring that all comments are previewed; this has the nice bonus of increasing comment quality, too.

Those are the only antispam measures I’m using there, and as a result of those two I get about 1 successful spam posted per week, which is a one-click moderation task in my email. That’s it.

The key is to not use the same measures as everyone else — if every weblog has a different set of protocols, with different form fields asking different simple questions, the only spammers that can beat that are the ones that write custom code for your site — or use human operators sitting down to an IE window.

Trackbacks, however — turn that off. The protocol was designed poorly, with insufficient thought given to its abuse potential; there’s no point keeping it around, now that it’s a spam vector.

Finally, a “perfect” solution to blog spam, while allowing comments, is unachievable. There will always be one guy who’s going to sit down at a real web browser to hand-type a comment extolling the virtues of some product or another. The goal is to get it to a level where you get one of those per week, and it’s a one-click operation to discard them.

(Update: This story got Slashdotted! The poor server’s been up and down repeatedly — looks like it needs an upgrade. In the meantime, WP-Cache has proven its weight in gold; recommended…)

Retroactive Tagging With TagThe.Net

Published May 30, 2006

Hacky hack hack.

Ever since I enabled tags on taint.org, I’ve been mildly annoyed by the fact that there were thousands of older entries deprived of their folksonomic chunky goodness. A way to ‘retroactively tag’ those entries somehow would be cool.

Last week, Leonard posted a link on his linkblog to TagThe.net, a web service which offers a nifty REST API; simply upload a chunk of text, and it’ll suggest a few tags for that text, like this:

echo 'Hi there, I am a tag-suggesting robot' | curl "http://tagthe.net/api/?text=`urlencode`"
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<memes>
  <meme source="urn:memanage:BAD542FA4948D12800AA92A7FAD420A1" updated="Tue May 30 20:20:39 CEST 2006">
    <dim type="topic">
      <item>robot</item>
    </dim>
    <dim type="language">
      <item>english</item>
    </dim>
  </meme>
</memes>

This looked promising.

Anyway, I’ve now implemented this — it worked great! If you’re curious, here’s details of how I did it. It’s a bit hacky, since I’m only going to be doing this once — and very UNIXy and perlish, because that’s how I do these things — but maybe somebody will find it useful.

How I Retroactively Tagged taint.org

This weblog runs WordPress — so all the entries are stored in a MySQL database. I took the MySQL dump of the tables, and a quick script figured out that out of somewhere over 1600-ish posts, there were 1352 that came from the pre-tag era, requiring tag inference. A mail to the TagThe.Net team established that they were happy with this level of usage.

I grepped the post IDs and text out of the SQL dump, threw those into a text file using the simple format ‘id=NNN text=SQLHTMLSTRING’ (where SQLHTMLSTRING was the nicely-escaped HTML text taken directly from the SQL dump), and ran them through this script.

That rendered the first 2k of each of those entries as a URL-encoded string, invoked the REST API with that, got the XML output, and extracted the tags into another UNIXy text-format output file. (It also added one tag for the ‘proto-tag’ system I used in the early days, where the first word of the entry was a single tag-style category name.)

Next, I ran this script, which in turn took that intermediate output and converted it to valid PHP code, like so:

cat suggestedtags | ./taglist-to-php.pl  > addtags.php
scp addtags.php my.server:taint.org/wp-admin/

The generated page ‘addtags.php’ looks like this:

<?php
  require_once('admin.php');
  global $utw;
  $utw->SaveTags(997, array("music","all","audio","drm-free",
      "faq","lunchbox","destination","download","premiere","quote"));
  [...]
  $utw->SaveTags(998, array("software","foo","swf","tin","vnc"));
  $utw->SaveTags(999, array("oses","eek","longhorn","ram",
    "winsupersite","windows","amount","base","dog","preview","system"));
?>

Once that page was in place, I just visited it in my (already logged in) web browser window, at http://taint.org/wp-admin/addtags.php, and watched as it gronked for a while. Eventually it stopped, and all those entries had been tagged. (If I wasn’t so hackish, I might have put in a little UI text here — but I didn’t.)

The results are very good, I think.

A success: http://taint.org/tag/research has picked up a lot of the interesting older entries where I discussed things like IBM’s Tieresias pattern-recognition algorithm. That’s spot on.

A minor downside: it’s not so good at nouns. This entry talks about Silicon Valley and geographical insularity, and mentions “Silicon Valley” prominently — one or both of those words would seem to be a good thing to tag with, but it missed them.

Still, that’s a minor issue — the tags it has suggested are generally very appropriate and useful.

Next, I need to find a way to auto-generate titles for the really old entries ;)

links for 2006-05-29

Published May 29, 2006

Web 2.0 and Open Source

Published May 29, 2006

A commenter at this post on Colm MacCarthaigh’s weblog writes:

I guess I still don’t understand how Open Source makes sense for the developers, economically. I understand how it makes sense for adapters like me, who take an app like Xoops or Gecko and customize it gently for a contract. Saves me hundreds of hours of labour. The down side of this is that the whole software industry is seeing a good deal of undercutting aimed at sales to small and medium sized commercial institutions.

Similarly, in the follow-up to the O’Reilly “web 2.0” trademark shitstorm, there’s been quite a few comments along the lines of “it’s all hype anyway”.

I disagree with that assertion — and Joe Drumgoole has posted a great list of key Web 2.0 vs Web 1.0 differentiators, which nails down some key ideas about the new concepts, in a clear set of one-liners.

Both open source software companies, and “web 2.0” companies, are based on new economic ideas about software and the internet. There’s still quite a lot of confusion, fear and doubt about both, I think.

Open Source

As I said in my comment at Colm’s weblog — open source is a network effect. If you think of the software market as a single buyer and seller, with the seller producing software and selling to the buyer, it doesn’t make sense.

But that’s not the real picture of a software market. If you expand the picture beyond that, to a more realistic picture of a larger community of all sorts of people at all levels, with various levels interacting in a more complex maze of conversation and transactions, open source creates new opportunities.

Here’s one example, speaking from experience. As the developer of SpamAssassin, open source made sense for me because I could never compete with the big companies any other way.

If I had been considering it in terms of me (the seller) and a single customer (the buyer), economically I could make a case of ‘proprietary SpamAssassin’ being a viable situation — but that’s not the real situation; in reality there was me, the buyer, a few 800lb gorillas who could stomp all over any puny little underfunded Irish company I could put together, and quite a few other very smart people, who I could never afford to employ, who were happy to help out on ‘open-source SpamAssassin’ for free.

Given this picture, I’m quite sure that I made the right choice by open sourcing my code. Since then, I’ve basically had a career in SpamAssassin. In other words my open source product allowed me to make income that I wouldn’t have had, any other way.

It’s certainly not simple economics, is a risk, and is complicated, and many people don’t believe it works — but it’s viable as an economic strategy for developers, in my experience. (I’m not sure how to make it work for an entire company, mind you, but for single developers it’s entirely viable.)

Web 2.0

Similarly — I feel some of the companies that have been tagged as “web 2.0” are using the core ideas of open source code, and applying them in other ways.

Consider Threadless, which encourages designers to make their designs available, essentially for free — the designer doesn’t get paid when their tee shirt is printed; they get entered into a contest to win prizes.

Or Upcoming.org, where event tracking is entirely user-contributed; there’s no professional content writers scribbling reviews and leader text, just random people doing the same. For fun, wtf!

Or Flickr, where users upload their photos for free to create the social experience that is the site’s unique selling point.

In other words — these companies rely heavily on communities (or more correctly certain actors within the community) to produce part of the system — exactly as open source development relies on bottom-up community contribution to help out a little in places.

The alternative is the traditional, “web 1.0” style; it’s where you’re Bill Gates in the late 90’s, running a commercial software company from the top down.

  • You have the “crown jewels” — your source code — and the “users” don’t get to see it; they just “use”.
  • Then they get to pay for upgrades to the next version.
  • If you deal with users, it’s via your sales “channels” and your tech support call centre.
  • User forums are certainly not to be encouraged, since it could be a PR nightmare if your users start getting together and talking about how buggy your products are.
  • Developers (er, I mean “engineers”) similarly can’t go talking to customers on those forums, since they’ll get distracted and give away competitive advantage by accidentally leaking secrets.
  • Anyway, the best PR is the stuff that your PR staff put out — if customers talk to engineers they’ll just get confused by the over-technical messages!

Yeah, so, good luck with that. I remember doing all that back in the ’90’s and it really wasn’t much fun being so bloody paranoid all the time ;)

URLs:

(PS: The web2.0 companies aren’t using all of the concepts of open-source, of course — not all those web apps have their source code available for public reimplementation and cloning. I wish they were, but as I said, I can’t see how that’s entirely viable for every company. Not that it seems to stop the cloners, anyway. ;)

links for 2006-05-26

Published May 26, 2006

links for 2006-05-25

Published May 25, 2006

Pam on the AIDS/LifeCycle

Published May 24, 2006

My mate Pam is cycling in this year’s AIDS/LifeCycle — for a week from June 4 to 10, she’ll be cycling from San Francisco to LA, for charity. That’s 585 miles. Since she bought her bike to do this ride, she’s clocked up a terrifying 2040 miles. Blimey.

It’s for a good cause — go on, make a donation!

links for 2006-05-23

Published May 23, 2006

Poll: keep ‘Fixing Email Weblog’ in Planet Antispam?

Published May 23, 2006

I added the Fixing Email weblog to Planet Antispam a while back — however, I’m not entirely sure at this stage that its content (which is seems to be primarily news syndication) fits with the “planet” concept (which is primarily intended for first-person posts).

So — quick poll. Let me know what you think, pro or con, Planet readers: should I remove the Fixing Email feed from that site?

Update: that was a pretty resounding ‘yes’. Done!

links for 2006-05-22

Published May 22, 2006

Dear Recruiters

Published May 19, 2006

Dear Recruiters,

If you’re going to (a) scrape my CV page from my website, then (b) spam me, unsolicited, offering to represent me for jobs I don’t want in places I don’t live, in explicit contravention of the terms of use [*] of that document — here’s a tip.

Don’t compound the problem by asking me to resend the document in bloody Microsoft Word format. FFS.

([*]: Those terms were, of course, added in an attempt to stem the tide of recruiter spam. Thanks to Colm MacCarthaigh for the idea…)

links for 2006-05-18

Published May 18, 2006

Bebo’s “Irish Invasion”

Published May 18, 2006

Reading this post at Piaras Kelly’s blog, I was struck by something — I never realised quite how bizarre the situation with Bebo is. If you check out the Google Trends ‘country’ tab, Ireland is the only country listed — meaning that search volume for “bebo” is infinitesimal, by comparison, elsewhere! (Update: Ireland was the only country listed, because the URL used limited it to Ireland only. However, the point is still valid when other countries are included, too ;)

It is also destroying Myspace as a search term on the Irish internet. (Update: also fixed)

As a US-based company, they must be mystified by all this attention — the Brazilian invasion of Orkut has nothing on this ;)

I’ll recycle a comment I made on Joe Drumgoole’s weblog as to why this happened:

My theory is that social networking systems, like Bebo, Myspace, linkedin, Friendster, Tribe.net, Orkut, Facebook etc. have all developed their own emergent specialisations. These are entirely driven by their users — although the sites can attempt to push or pull in certain directions (such as Friendster banning ‘non-person’ accounts), fundamentally the users will drive it. All of those sites have massively different user populations; Tribe has the Burning Man crowd, Friendster the daters, Orkut the brazilians etc.

Next, I think kids of school age form a set of small set of cliques. They don’t want to appear cool to friends thousands of miles away, on the internet; they want to appear cool to their peer group in their local school. So all it takes is a group of influential ‘tastemakers’ — the alpha males and females in a year — to go onto Bebo, and it becomes the site for a certain school; and given enough of that, it’ll spread to other schools, and soon Bebo becomes the SNS for the irish school system. In other words, Irish kids couldn’t really care less what US kids think of them; they want to be cool locally.

Also I think MySpace has a similar problem to Orkut — it’s already ‘owned’ by a population somewhere else, who are talking about stuff that makes little sense to Irish teenagers. As a result, it’s not being used as a social system here in Ireland; instead, it’s just used by musicians who want a cheap place to host a few tracks without having to set up their own website.

(Aside: part of the latter is driven by clueless local press coverage of the Arctic Monkeys — they have latched onto their success, put the cart before the horse, and decided that they were somehow ‘made’ by hosting music on MySpace, rather than by the attention of their fans. duh!)

links for 2006-05-17

Published May 17, 2006

5 Years of taint.org

Published May 15, 2006

Five years ago, on 15 May 2001, I started writing this weblog.

Subject matter started with a forward of something odd from the Forteana list — ‘Why Finns are sick of illnesses named after them’. In terms of subject matter, I started the weblog to reduce the amount of forwards I was passing on by email to other groups — hence the preponderance of forteana posts early on.

Nowadays, by contrast, I try to write original ramblings^Wresearch for the main part of the site, and the occasional “fresh bits” I unearth elsewhere are kept separate, posted to the link-blog at del.icio.us/jm.

However, the real reason I started the thing was to act as an experiment in using WebMake as a blog platform — at least, that was the excuse. It worked quite successfully, for what it’s worth — but in mid-August 2005, I eventually accepted that there weren’t enough hours in the day to maintain a weblogging CMS, and its templates, as well as everything else, and that I didn’t really need to test WebMake’s abilities any more, and switched to WordPress. I’m glad I did; WP is a great piece of software.

So what’s been the biggest hit on taint.org, by far? Here it is: http://taint.org/xfer/2004/kittens.jpg . Lots and lots of Google Image referrers, MySpace hotlinkers, etc. etc. ;) It’s a top hit for a GIS search for [kittens], I think.

Random stats, based on April’s logs:

  • About 81247 hits were received during April to the RSS 2.0 feed (the default), 9921 to the Atom feed, and 7795 for the RSS 1.0 rendering. That indicates that format-wars-wise, people just use the default. ;)
  • Assuming the RSS reader apps average out to 1 HTTP GET every 30 mins (as Bloglines and Apple’s reader do), that means there are somewhere around (98963 / (30 * 24 * 2)) = 68 subscribers.
  • In terms of the old style browser-using readership — there were 44926 hits on the front page using web browsers.
  • AWStats claims 2700 visits per day, from around 33000 visitors per month. I find the latter figure hard to believe.

After the front page and the feeds, the scraped RSS feeds at http://taint.org/scraped/ come second, Threadless beating out Perry Bible Fellowship by a little bit.

Top stories last month, based on hits:

  • http://taint.org/2006/04/29/230814a.html — Single-Letter Google Hits
  • http://taint.org/2006/01/20/220239a.html — the SweetheartsConnection.com Scam (still attracting comments from scammees!)
  • http://taint.org/2004/04/15/033025a.html — really outdated stats on GMail’s spam filtering accuracy
  • http://taint.org/2006/04/20/213624a.html — Automatically Invoking screen(1) on Remote Logins
  • http://taint.org/2006/04/15/134751a.html — Google Calendar
  • http://taint.org/2006/04/03/121837a.html — A Gotcha With perl’s “each()”
  • http://taint.org/2005/08/06/024026a.html — The Life of a SpamAssassin Rule
  • http://taint.org/2006/04/21/133432a.html — Phishing and Inept Banks
  • http://taint.org/2006/04/06/210519a.html — RSS Feeds for Events in Dublin
  • http://taint.org/2006/04/13/140841a.html — BT DSL’s Daily Disconnects

Technorati says there are 514 links from 105 sites. I still don’t know what the hell that means. ;)

Update: I’ve remembered that, before I started blogging at taint.org, I kept a diary at Advogato, which dates all the way back to March 2000!

Also, here are some pretty graphs from the graph-top-referers script:

The several slashdottings and a Boing Boinging are quite clear ;)