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Month: March 2004

Slurpie

Published March 31, 2004

Web: Slurpie – (another) distributed peer-to-peer downloading protocol (via HtP).

This looks pretty interesting; no special server is required, Slurpie can be used to download files from a HTTP/FTP server in a ‘swarming’ fashion similar to BitTorrent.

However, Slurpie does require a central server of its own, which it needs to ‘know about’ somehow in advance, and that server will then know who’s downloading what. Not sure how you’d do that effectively; in this case, a .torrent-type file format that contains the ‘main’ file URL and a URL for the Slurpie server, might be more effective.

EPO Patents by Country

Published March 30, 2004

Patents: The pro-swpat lobby like to claim that software patenting will benefit EU-based SMEs and the economy, instead of benefitting large, US-based companies.

It’s pretty trivial to show this up, however. Here’s the figures, based on FFII’s stats on EPO software patent applications by country of applicant (current as of 2003/11/15):

Country of applicant
Patents applied with EPO
US 22778 46.84%
(All EU countries combined) 11855 24.38%
JP 10580 21.76%
CA 1074 2.21%
IL 724 1.49%
AU 525 1.08%
KR 500 1.03%
SG 95 0.20%
NZ 73 0.15%
RU 66 0.14%
(all remaining countries) 357 0.73%

So, a whopping 46.84% of the patent applications on file with the European Patent Office were registered by US companies, not local inventors; and only 24.38% of the patent applications were from EU-based companies.

Doc Searls rocks, and EPO patents by country

Published March 30, 2004

Linux: Doc Searls will be speaking at LinuxWorld Expo 2004 in Dublin. Apparently, he’ll be discussing DIY-IT — the ‘real’ Linux story (‘how the demand side supplies itself’). That presentation is great — strongly recommended.

(If you’re in a hurry, just skip to the funny part.)

Patents: op-ed article in the Sydney Morning Herald about patents and US-Australia ‘free trade’ talks.

… The cost of fighting a patent litigation battle in the US has dropped considerably. “Claims are now actually decided by a judge and only about 3 per cent of cases go to trial,” he says. “Therefore, costs have been limited dramatically. In most cases, costs are less than $US2 million.” (jm: my emphasis)

The question remains as to how many small Australian technology companies can afford to put up that sort of money if they believe their patent has been infringed or, worse still, if they have been accused of infringing a patent. (jm: exactly! the playing field is tilted dramatically.)

…

Local software developer Jeremy Howard believes that the US-Australia free trade agreement legislation has the potential to stifle local development. Howard has created two software systems with global potential, a portable email product called Fastmail (jm: hooray Fastmail!) and an insurance-industry package called Profit Optimising System. He believes two particular provisions of the FTA could be devastating to local software development. One is the requirement for Australia to have legislation similar to the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and the other is the stringent enforcement of software patents.

“The (DMCA) legislation removes the ability to use reverse engineering to make products compatible with existing products,” Howard says. “There are two negative effects of this. It reduces competition: effectively no one who writes software can be compatible with existing proprietary software. It’s also bad for security and privacy: people won’t be allowed to analyse protocols to see whether they’re secure because that’s considered reverse engineering. Thus, we see that this legislation will protect vendors from bad publicity as well as competition.”

Howard considers DMCA as a serious threat to the local software industry, but he believes a potentially even greater threat from the FTA will be a requirement for Australia to stringently enforce software patents.

“Many US software companies have huge portfolios of patents,” he says. “It costs millions to fight a (disputed) patent suit, so small companies will be forced to pay licence fees to patent holders or be shut down. This means that it will clearly not be practical for small software businesses to try to become established on the world stage. We’ll be spending more time worrying about patents instead of innovating.”

A very, very clueful article. Here’s hoping EU-based journalists are taking notes! The data about software patents being of much greater benefit to US companies than local exporters is a big deal, so I’ll write about that in the next posting.

Ann Widdecombe

Published March 29, 2004

Funny: The Guardian’s got a new agony aunt — Buck up! Ann Widdecombe’s no-nonsense solutions to life’s knotty problems.

My husband left his wife and child for me eight months ago. I have two children, younger than his, from a previous relationship. Despite what I feel was a very reasonable divorce settlement, my husband still spends as much on his first child as he did before, and still gives his ex-wife additional money whenever she asks for it. It all amounts to easily as much as he spends on us, his new family. I think we should be his first priority now, especially as his ex-wife is a professional woman and has ample funds for everything she and her child might need. He wouldn’t be depriving them of anything. Am I right? (Name and address withheld)

(Ann’s response — best read in a shrill schoolmarmish tone…)

He should have stayed with his wife as he vowed to do when he married her. You should have married and stayed with the father of your kids. Then you wouldn’t be in this silly mess, where the only victims are the children. Goodnight.

Also, overheard: ‘(European companies) employing US-based contractors these days is a shrewd business move due to the strength of the Euro — America is like the India of Europe.’

IJC Invents the ‘De-Bapper’

Published March 29, 2004

Funny: Hooray for the International Jewish Conspiracy! They’ve come up with The De-Bapper — de-baptize a fundamentalist Christian of your choice now, without their consent!

What brought this on? It seems the Mormons started it:

The Church of Latter-day Saints, a religious sect founded by a man who claimed to learn the word of God by putting his face in a hat, has been baptizing the dead, including up to several hundred thousand Jews. … Jews to have been baptized include Menachem Begin, a former prime minister of Israel, diarist Anne Frank, and the Baal Shem Tov, the spiritual leader whose teachings form the basis for the Hasidic movement. …

“Mormons baptize the dead using a practice known as proxy baptism, which allows a living person to stand in for the deceased,” explains Yosef Shmidt, counter-Mormon intelligence specialist. “The process is slow, and requires a ceremony that includes complete immersion of the proxy in water. ‘De-bapping’ is done on a specially consecrated Macintosh G-4 computer, known as the Mac A/B. It’s faster, and since you use fewer towels, better for the environment.”

Top ten De-Baptism choices include Mel Gibson, ‘S&M Film Director’, and GWB, ‘IJC Puppet’. Also worth a read over at the IJC:

IJC Yet to Choose US President: “The International Jewish Conspiracy’s Government Oversight Committee have still not decided who they will install as America’s next president … The Keeper of the Silver Spoon, who has overseen George W. Bush’s meteoric rise from AA reject to International Jewish Conspiracy puppet, fears his protege may be a one-hit wonder … ‘It’s not that he said all Jews are going to hell. … It’s that every time he tries to think for himself, he gets it wrong. When we told him to screw the economy, we meant with his stupid tax cuts, where the rich would get the extra. Instead he pours it all into the desert.”

And: href=”http://www.internationaljewishconspiracy.com/articles/ijc_031208_lizard.html”> Are You a Giant Lizard? You’d Be Surprised!: “Conspiracy theorist David Icke has claimed that most members of the Illuminati (including some of the world’s premier Cognoscenti here at the International Jewish Conspiracy) are, in fact, giant shape-shifting lizards called Draconians. Although Icke has singled out two Jewish families, the Rothschilds and the Bronfmans, the International Jewish Conspiracy’s Medical Corps fears that other INJEWCON Members may be at risk.” Read the article for some easy ways to tell (‘when angry, do you hiss and climb the drapes?’)

Arch – distributed source-control repositories

Published March 27, 2004

Software: sourcefrog: arch rocks: mirroring. This is incredibly cool:

Finally, GNU Arch lets you do this. Anyone can mirror a public archive. In fact, several sites such as sourcecontrol.net have set up to just mirror all the open source software they can find. Others mirror just intermittently, as a backup in case a primary archive is lost.

What’s more, because changesets are strongly GPG-signed, people using the archive can feel sure that they’re getting the changes as the original author wrote them, without any accidental or intentional modifications.

BTW, that ‘archive’ — in Arch-land, an archive is a source-code version control repository. In other words, if you want to track development work on a project, you take a private copy of the repository and sync up to every change as it is made remotely, in essence duplicating the central archive (although changes only go one way, obviously).

Then, if you have the privileges — you can merge any changes you make on that archive back up to the central one.

Very cool. I really need to take some time to get into Arch.

OpenOffice tip

Published March 27, 2004

Tools: a handy OpenOffice.org tip: when typing, you often want to emphasise a word with italics, bold, or underlining. Interestingly, OOo adds a nifty text-markup-influenced AutoFormat feature — if you surround the word with asterisks, e.g.

I really *really* think you should foo

it’ll convert on-the-fly to bold:

I really really think you should foo

I like it! It’s much more natural than CTRL-B, CTRL-U etc. Only pity is that _underlines_ don’t turn into italics — I know that seems more logical, but nowadays, an underline means a hyperlink, and IMO the italic is more widely used for emphasis as a result.

Craving an Irish Breakfast

Published March 26, 2004

Food: For some damn reason, it’s impossible to get pork sausages here in southern CA. The only good ones I’ve had were at the Cat and Fiddle, an english pub in LA, who do really kick-ass all-day UK-style breakfasts.

However, it’s been a while since I’ve been up there, and I’ve got a fierce hankering for a dacent brekkie — one featuring sossies, rashers, and black pudding. However, some asking around has pointed me to FoodIreland.com, which has a fine range of proper food — including what is recognisably a Full Irish Breakfast! (some readers may note the similarities to breakfasts in parts of the UK, but I’ll insist on calling it a ‘Full Irish’, thank you very much.)

It also does Proper Tea (heavy on the Assam tips), Marmite, crisps and Jammie Dodgers. Quality!

But there are a couple of minor nits — first off, it’s excruciatingly expensive. But money’s no object where a dacent brekkie is involved. Secondly, Lynx deodorant — WTF? People are willing to pay extra for that stuff? And most importantly of all — where are the King Crisps!?

nose-picking

Published March 26, 2004

Funny: According to a ‘top Austrian doctor’, picking your nose and eating it is good for you:

‘Medically it makes great sense and is a perfectly natural thing to do. In terms of the immune system the nose is a filter in which a great deal of bacteria are collected, and when this mixture arrives in the intestines it works just like a medicine.

‘Modern medicine is constantly trying to do the same thing through far more complicated methods, people who pick their nose and eat it get a natural boost to their immune system for free.’

E-Paper finally on the market

Published March 25, 2004

Tech: … nearly. The Sony Reader EBR-1000EP. 170 pixels-per-inch is a nice resolution, and in general it looks very cool, esp. considering the E-Paper aspects (ie. looks like paper, back-lighting not required, easier to read). However — never mind that it’s only available in Japan so far, even once it becomes available in the US, its pricing structure is moronic:

All three of the Impress Watch articles say it will cost around 40,000 yen – approximately $400 USD. And this is just for the reader, subscribing to the e-book service costs $5-10/month. They do, however, have the option of just purchasing single books for 350 yen, about $3.25.

Dammit — I don’t want e-books and their DRM and lock-in — I just want a HTML viewer like Plucker or iSilo, so I can use Sitescooper!

Also, it’s not yet foldable. Once I can fold up the reader into a little ball in my pocket, then fold it out again into an A4-sized ‘page’, I’ll be a happy man.

Still, getting there — let’s hope they get a clue and kill off that DRM. Otherwise, I can’t see myself buying one, even once the price comes down.

Funny: (in a geeky way): mentioned on LWN — ‘granted, drawing circles w/ GIMP is a bit like finding 2 + 2 by evaluating the integral of 2dx over the range 0..2.’

(jm: worth noting that the same applies for Photoshop, for that matter — in this respect GIMP has emulated Adobe’s ‘you need to buy Illustrator to do that’ attitude. That’s really quite bizarre when you think about it. Wonder if GIMP 2.0 fixes that?)

Blocked By SonicWall!

Published March 24, 2004

Censorship: This is pretty funny — a friend writes that SonicWall‘s ‘Content Filter’ has judged my home page and FOUND IT WANTING: 

  The URL
  http://jmason.org/
  is currently rated as:
  category 4 - Pornography

w00t! It’s true, I have some pretty hot pics up there — the accuracy of their content filtering product amazes me!

Antarctica – the Big Dead Place

Published March 24, 2004

Funny: Big Dead Place: ‘This site is dedicated to Antarctica and to thinking about Antarctica.’ It’s also pretty funny, and full of meat for an Antarctic obsessive like me.

‘The Thing’ review: ‘Common icons of Antarctic life are repeated throughout the movie with uncanny precision: spilled fuel; ubiquitous barrels; plentiful whisky; anti-intellectualism; resentment toward Norwegians being the first at Pole; general madness; obsession with generators; and black flags planted in the snow …. the most noteworthy deviation from actual USAP practices is that in the film everyone has a flamethrower. In the movie, fire is a tool against insidious dangers and is employed as an agent for the community against the threat of a larger hostile organism. In the actual USAP, employees are forbidden flamethrowers.’

Also — ‘The Finn’s Tooth’ — looks like they took cocktail advice from Eric Rescorla! (link via MeFi.)

Bet you never thought of this

Published March 24, 2004

Tech: Excellent post from Colin Charles here:

Which brings us to an interesting point. Computers today are largely based on metaphors that the average urban bloke understands. Like we have a desktop, to represent our workspace. How do we transpose such an idea to someone in a rural area? What about a blinking cursor, in a language like Urdu that has no translation? They’ve resulted in calling it a ‘firefly’!

That’s taking Danny’s ‘eating out of the trash bins outside a cubicle farm’ comment even further…

Jon Udell’s forged S/MIME signature, and spam

Published March 23, 2004

Spam: Jon Udell: How to forge an S/MIME signature, and Liudvikas Bukys’ take on the results: ‘Jon Udell tries his hand at S/MIME signature forgery, revealing that PKI is not a panacea. A digital signature proves something. The proof is strong but the something is weak (if it just demonstrates that you clicked a few things to get a persona certificate).’

He then suggests two ways to use this info in useful ways:

The first is ‘higher-class certificates (where certificate authorities demand more proof, and encode that fact in the certificate). But higher quality means harder to get and less actual deployment. And higher quality means more attractive target for theft of keys.’

In the anti-spam case, it also means that you trust the certificate provider to both (a) accept money from their customers to issue them certs, and (b) take away those certs from their own customers if they infringe by sending spam messages. This is the hard part. There’s an active financial disincentive for a company to do this; the people who benefit (the end-users) are not their paying customers, whereas the people who get hurt (the infringers) are. Economics dictates that they water down the requirements, in order to maximise their profits — making the system useless.

On the other hand we have: ‘reputation systems. Of course, building robust reputation systems is not easy. Users may wish to have multiple sources of reputation information to fit their own definitions of good and bad behavior and how fast those judgments are made. It replays the whole DNS blacklist deployment. Some reputation systems may seem arbitrary and capricious. Others may be too slow or too tolerant. They are all lawsuit targets. Will there be too many to choose from?’

‘zackly. An excellent illustration of how S/MIME or other PKI will not solve the spam problem, and we’ll still have the same DNSBL situation as we have now (although hopefully working a lot better).

S/MIME may solve the forged-email problem, like SPF does — however, like SPF it will still need to work with reputation systems to be usable as an anti-spam scheme.

New EU patent activity, and TRIPS says software is a ‘literary work’?

Published March 23, 2004

Patents: FFII: Conferences and ‘Patent Riots’ in Brussels 2004-04-14
: ‘The Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure (FFII) calls on its 50.000 European supporters and on 300.000 petition signatories, including more than 2000 CEOs of European software companies, to take to the streets in Brussels on April 14 and in national capitals around 1st of May, and to temporarily block access to their websites, in protest against new moves by the EU Council and Commission to legalise patents on computerised calculation rules and business methods’.

Last year, the European Parliament voted to exclude software and business methods from patentability. Now, it appears the EU Council is secretly planning to push that through regardless — so FFII are planning another round of protest for 2004-04-14.

In other news — the European Patent Office and other pro-patent bodies have always insisted that the WTO Trade-Related Intellectual Property (TRIPS) treaty required that software be patentable. However, this poster thinks not:

Article 10 of said treaty clearly states: a.. ‘Computer programs, whether in source or object code, shall be protected as literary works under the Berne Convention (1971).’

This is the strange thing you see, the statement doesn’t seem to mean that much on first glance. It is only when reading it closely that one realises that it does not simply say that ‘computer programs are automatically copyrighted under the Berne Convention’, it specifies they ‘shall be protected as literary works’.

Literary works cannot be patented because they are not inventions. Indeed if literary works could be patented one would have to concede that books, screenplays, and music could be patented as well although according to my research there is no provision for this in law. We would also have to apply patent laws to these areas since we are not allowed, apparently under article 5 to restrict on the basis of the field of technology.

On reflection, it’s actually a very interesting comparison. Like literary works, it’s not the idea of what software does (the plot summary) that makes it valuable, it’s all the fiddly details of its implementation (the full story). Hmm! Maybe TRIPS got that right after all…

Editable Text-to-HTML converters

Published March 23, 2004

Web: Dive Into Markdown — a great post from John Gruber about editable-text-to-HTML formats (he’s the author of Markdown):

… my actual workflow looked like this:

  1. Write in BBEdit.
  2. Preview in a browser.
  3. Switch back to BBEdit for revisions.
  4. Repeat until done.
  5. Log into MT, paste the article, publish.

Eventually, it dawned on me: this is madness. The primary advantage to using a computer for writing is the immediacy of editing. Write, read, revise, all in the same window, all in the same mode.

Totally agreed (although note, I’m using my own, very similar, EtText instead of Markdown ;). But this weblog is 100% EtText-driven, instead of HTML — I just throw an email at it, and it publishes it. I don’t think I’ve used the web interface in months.

Which reminds me — I really should steal some ideas gather inspiration from Markdown for EtText at some stage. ;)

LOAF

Published March 20, 2004

Social: LOAF is ‘a way to share your address book without abandoning your privacy.’

A nifty use of Bloom filters to share your address book in a one-way manner — when you receive a mail, you can query your LOAF db to see if any of your correspondents previously corresponded with the sender; but they cannot look up the LOAF file to determine your correspondents, unless they know that correspondent’s email address in advance.

This, BTW, would be a very good way to implement a ‘Do-Not-Email’ list — although the other two problems with those still apply.

Interesting stuff — although I wonder how acceptable the 4-8Kb MIME part overhead per message will be…

Windows Partition Pain

Published March 20, 2004

Computer: Argh. When I bought my laptop, I had no option but to buy it with Windows XP — IBM doesn’t seem to sell them any other way. (you can pay extra to buy it that way from EmperorLinux, but really, the main reason I wouldn’t want it is to save money, I’m afraid.)

Anyway, so I kept the XP partition safe, and jumped through various hoops to keep it in one piece; after all, it had cost me money to pay for that Windows license, and you never know when I might need it to upgrade some firmware or whatever.

Well, after trying (twice) to upgrade some firmware — the BIOS, namely, to get APM hibernation working — and having XP crash on me both times, I left it for a bit.

That was a couple of weeks ago. I just tried to check some files on the /windows partition — and something has scribbled all over the FAT32 sectors. Rien de Windows plus. :(

(Prime suspect right now is the Phoenix BIOS ‘suspend-to-disk’ tool — I just looks flakey, and I know it goes in and tweaks with some kind of undocumented BIOS wierdness. I bet anything it’s told the BIOS that the first FAT32 partition was a suspend partition, and one of the failed susp-to-disk attempts scribbled all over it.)

I suppose I’ll probably reinstall at some stage… if only to get this bloody BIOS upgraded and suspend-to-disk working!

Nominative Determinism

Published March 19, 2004

Names: Popbitch sez ‘Microsoft are just about to launch their new Windows Server 2003. The project manager who oversaw its development? Todd Wanke.’

Sure enough, it’s true. But that’s not all he did — he was also involved with the Windows 2000 Customer Love Team. No smutty jokes please, I’m being perfectly serious here…

Prior Art: Representing Queries in a DNSBL Lookup

Published March 19, 2004

Spam: DNS blocklists are a well-established, low-latency way to query a database of IP addresses for info. If you need to query a database over the internet quickly and in a connectionless manner, they’re ideal.

Declude have a page called how ip4r (DNSBL-style) DNS lookups work, which describes the general method:

  • input: the DNS zone for the DNSBL (e.g. ‘sbl.spamhaus.org’)
  • input: IP address to query about (e.g. ‘1.2.3.4’)
  • perform A, or TXT query to retrieve data: ‘dig
    4.3.2.1.sbl.spamhaus.org. TXT’
  • output: data (waves hands… not important right now)

All well and good, if all you have is a single IP address as input. But what if you want to attach more query parameters — such as your user ID, or some numeric value to set a ‘sensitivity’ level, like the SpamAssassin threshold system?

Easy-peasy: encode it in the looked-up hostname. Assuming you want to pass
a user ID number of ‘9583495’ and a threshold value of ‘7’ along with the query above, here’s one way to do it:

  • ‘dig threshold.7.uid.9583495.4.3.2.1.sbl.spamhaus.org. TXT’

Note that to avoid charset issues, marshalling into an ‘-a-z0-9.’ namespace is probably safest. Of course, a dynamic DNS server is required to process these. But the protocol itself, at least, will support it.

(Just brain-dumping here so I have an URL to point to in future, and to get it into archive.org etc…)

Megalithomania!

Published March 18, 2004

History: Megalithomania is an incredible website ‘originally dedicated to Irish megaliths, but now expanded to include all sorts of antiquities that are of importance/interest.’

The author visits sites each week, writes up brief reports, takes photos, and logs the log on this excellent website; every site is added to a map, and there’s a whole load of ways to find sites by location, by clicking on a flash map, by date of visit etc.

It’s a triumph of usability, very pretty, and who knew there was a kist in Dublin Zoo’s tapir enclosure?

Hope everyone had a good Paddy’s Day! (PS: note: most definitely not ‘Patty’s Day’.)

Apple doing a Speech-Driven Interface

Published March 17, 2004

UIs: Apple planning ‘Spoken Interface’ for 10.4. Damn! This was one of the main reasons I chose Linux over MacOS X for my new laptop!

You see, Linux has xvoice, which combined with a scriptable window manager and the now-samizdata version of IBM’s ViaVoice for Linux, means that a whole lot of UI navigation can be performed via voice.

Well, now it seems Apple are into the idea too — and they’ll probably do the job right and without the samizdata. ;) (Found via WorldChanging).

Politics: The full Bruce Sterling ‘State of the World 2004’ speech.

More on the WSJ interviewee

Published March 16, 2004

Spam: So this Orlando Soto guy again — the story hit Slashdot today, and the /.ers did some digging. It appears that Mr. Soto runs dduo.com, listing himself at the bottom of the page as ‘Orlando Soto – Webmaster/Owner’. He sells a wide range of apps, including:

  • IP Ad Web Sender: ‘Send your advertising message to millions of people instantly! Target your advertisement geographically! Advertising message on someone’s screen, the second you send it! To send messages, IP Ad Web Sender uses a program called net send which is part of windows and is installed by default in Windows 2000, Windows NT and Windows XP.’

Yep, that’s Messenger spam. But don’t worry, he flogs the solution too:

  • IP Blocker: ‘Protect yourself against a new type of annoying pop up spam message called IP Ads that can be sent directly to your computer anytime while you are online.’

Or you could just save your money and turn it off the easy way.

GPRS, and the price of it

Published March 16, 2004

Tech: GPRS roaming works… technically. Joi Ito gets a $3,500 bill for checking his mail around the world. Yowch.

FWIW, I’ve never met anyone who’s used GPRS for anything other than the odd demo, or emergency use only, except for employees of the mobile carriers — and they get it for free.

My bet is that the basic failure was a disconnect between the real world and the specification stages — someone somewhere picked up one of those massively-inflated analyst reports a few years ago, said ‘I’d like a piece of that road-warrior market which will be worth $5 billion by 2005, it says here!’ and set prices (to stun) accordingly.

Sad, Lonely Man Turns to Spam for Comfort

Published March 15, 2004

Spam: WSJ: For Orlando Soto, No Day Is Complete Without Some Spam.

Mr. Soto routinely comes home to some 150 e-mail pitches, and he loves getting them all … he buys stuff pitched in spam e-mail — again and again. He buys spam-pitched aromatherapy oils for his wife and pharmaceuticals for himself. … He buys stuff via spam for himself and to resell on Web sites he sets up — a business idea he got from a spam pitch. …

It’s mind-blowing — leaves you wondering how one man could be so gullible, and hand over so much money to some of the world’s dodgiest vendors, without even any concept of comparison shopping (and without falling victim to identity theft and a cleared-out bank account). Until you get to this line:

In the past, Mr. Soto says he has sent out spam himself,

Aha.

but he doesn’t any more for fear of the increasing multitude of federal and state spam regulations now on the books.

Of course. (link via Craig)

Aliso Viejo and Dihydrogen Monoxide

Published March 15, 2004

Funny: AP: SoCal city falls victim to Internet hoax, considers banning items made
with water. It’s the old ‘dihydrogen monoxide’ hoax again:

‘It’s embarrassing,’ said City Manager David J. Norman. ‘We had a paralegal who did bad research.’

The paralegal apparently fell victim to one of the many official looking Web sites that have been put up by pranksters to describe dihydrogen monoxide as ‘an odorless, tasteless chemical’ that can be deadly if accidentally inhaled.

So — ha ha, stupid Aliso Viejo city officials. But seriously — why is a paralegal making decisions on scientific issues? Isn’t that what the EPA and their environmental scientists are there for? Tail wagging the dog, I think.

Thank you, MS Word Metadata

Published March 15, 2004

Politics: California AG forwards anti-P2P screed on behalf of the MPAA.

However, the metadata associated with the Microsoft Word document indicates it was either drafted or reviewed by a senior vice president of the Motion Picture Association of America. According to this metadata (automatically generated by the Word application), the document’s author or editor is ‘stevensonv.’ (The metadata of a document is viewable through the File menu under Properties.)

Sources tell Wired News that the draft letter’s authorship is attributed to Vans Stevenson, the MPAA’s senior vice president for state legislative affairs. MPAA representatives have issued similar criticisms of P2P technology in the past. Stevenson could not be reached for comment.

Funny: Humorix: Feds Unveil Practical Method To Combat Spam. ”If a spammer
has access to a list of millions of clue-impaired users, they won’t need to bother sending spam to anybody else’, Thullweppon argued.’ (thanks to Kenneth Porter for the link!)

Closed-Source Runtimes

Published March 11, 2004

Open Source: A good entry at sourcefrog.net describing some reasons people are driven to use open source — the closed-source component library one, in particular, drives me nuts.

I’ve run into this in the past — here’s an example I can point to. That’s a fixed version of Java 1.0’s java.util.StreamTokenizer class, to fix a bug where space cannot be treated as a special character. (Hopefully it’s now obsolete, seeing as I wrote that 9 years ago!)

Note that I probably do not have permission to use and redistribute that class. Also note that the bug fix I submitted to Java 1.0 probably never made it into the code, because I was an individual user and not a major corporate client. The bug may have been fixed independently, however, given that StreamTokenizer still exists, but I doubt my fix ever got near the dev team. (However it still means I can say I fixed a bug in James Gosling’s code ;)

Invariably, getting access to source, and being allowed to fix bugs in it, is a key issue — and one that continually drives developers to open source/free software libraries. RMS has been saying this for years, of course.

Music: A massive selection of links to mp3 blogs. gabba > Pod looks very interesting… they even had a copy of Egyptian Empire’s Horn Track recently, one of my favourites.

Markdown: another ‘Plain Text to HTML’ lib

Published March 10, 2004

Web: Plain text, transparently turned into nice markup, is an idea that’s clearly never going to go away.

Setext has been around for over a decade, I wrote EtText myself for use in WebMake and elsewhere (including this very weblog!), Zope came up with StructuredText, and more recently, there’s been Textile and reStructuredText. Now welcome the newest arrival: Markdown.

First impressions: looks an awful lot like EtText, TBH, but I’d presume that’s the shared heritage from Setext. ;)

My feedback: I’d recommend supporting ‘-‘ (dash) for list bullets — it turns out that’s a whole lot more widely supported than ‘*’ (asterisk), including in Vim. Also, automatic link inference is very handy; picking up http: URIs and turning email addrs into mailto: links may not look super-pretty, but saves a lot of typing, and EtText Auto links are pretty handy for stuff that’s never going to be anything other than a link (take uncommon nouns like ‘SlashDot‘, for example).

Irish MEPs and their votes on IP Enforcement

Published March 9, 2004

Ireland: Now that the IP Enforcement directive has passed, Irish readers might be interested to find out how their MEPs voted on it.

First off, the good ones:

  • PATRICIA MCKENNA – GREEN PARTY MEP (DUBLIN) since 1994
  • NUALA AHERN – GREEN PARTY MEP (LEINSTER) since 1994

Both of the Green MEPs voted along party lines on a key amendment, amendment 54, which would have limited enforcement to commercial-scale counterfeiting rather than individual infringement.

But on the other side, we have these, who voted for applicability of the directive to all ‘IPR’, according to FFII. The hall of shame:

  • JOE McCARTIN – FINE GAEL MEP (CONNACHT/ULSTER) since 1979
  • JOHN CUSHNAHAN – FINE GAEL MEP (MUNSTER) since 1989
  • DANA ROSEMARY SCALLON – INDEPENDENT MEP (CONNACHT/ULSTER) since 1999
  • NIALL ANDREWS – FIANNA FAIL MEP (DUBLIN) since 1984
  • GERARD COLLINS – FIANNA FAIL MEP (MUNSTER) since 1994
  • JIM FITZSIMONS – FIANNA FAIL MEP (LEINSTER) since 1984
  • LIAM HYLAND – FIANNA FAIL MEP (LEINSTER) since 1994

Unsurprising to see the conservative FFers (and Dana!) in there — but what do FG think they’re doing?

Considering that FFII read this as permitting ‘surprise raids on teenagers in the middle of the night by private security firms on the flimsiest of evidence’, as passed, this is a ‘hall of shame’ issue.

The moral: vote Green!

More on the new EU IP Enforcement Directive

Published March 9, 2004

EU: EU Reporter (PDF) thoroughly trashes the new law:

The legislation as structured is opposed by lawyers and judges, who have said that large corporations will be able to slap pre-emptive injunctions on small manufacturers and put them out of business without any fear of having to pay compensation if their action proves to be no more than to gain commercial advantage.

Music companies will get the right to demand raids merely on suspicion of a breach including on private homes.

WITHOUT PROOF factories could be closed, assets and bank accounts frozen by opportunist actions based on patents claims, Greg Perry, Director General of the Brussels-based European Generic Medicines Association told EU Reporter. …

Pressure from the current 15 Member States is being blamed by a large swathe of industry for rushing bad legislation into law. Surprisingly, one of Britain’s largest corporations has slammed both parliament and Council saying: ‘It will take many years to undo the damage that this legislation has the potential to do.’ Unsurprisingly the corporation, normally close to the British Government, refused to be named.

‘Group Coca-Cola Schemes’, and the EU IP Enforcement Directive passes

Published March 9, 2004

Ireland: Bad news from home.

A truly ground-breaking concept, the ‘Group Broadband Scheme’, has been watered down into a shadow of what it could be with a requirement that all community internet access schemes be operated in association with ‘an Internet Service Provider or Authorised Operator’.

In other words, rather than a radical new way to provide affordable non-profit, community-owned high-speed internet access in rural areas, it’s just business as usual:

‘With the launch of the 1st Call for Group Broadband Scheme proposals, it is clear the Minister intends to require that any application for funding under the group broadband scheme initiative be made in association with an Internet Service Provider (ISP) or Authorised Operator (AO)’, said (Ireland Offline) chairman Christian Cooke, ‘a so-called Broadband Internet Service Provider (BISP)’. …..

Experience in the UK has shown that the commercial provision of broadband in rural areas is not financially viable. Low population and wide dispersal lead to lower margins than can be supported by a profit-oriented enterprise. ….

Ireland Offline warned that the prerequisite of partnering with a BISP as a condition of GBS funding, there is a very real danger of companies cherry-picking more lucrative areas, leaving communities for which the funding should have been made available … without any services.

‘In short, in its current form, the group broadband scheme initiative bears no resemblance to the group water schemes, to rural broadband provision’, said Cooke, ‘and every resemblance to the packaging of subsidized local monopolistic franchises, monopolistic because no competitor could go head-to-head with a subsidized service. It is therefore better to think of them as not so much like group water schemes as ‘group coca-cola schemes’.’

IrelandOffline press release here.

In other EU news — the EU Parliament has approved the IP Enforcement Directive. The Greens report:

  • Patents are included within the scope of the directive.
  • only 3 parts of the directive are limited to ‘commercial scale’. This means that the provisions of Articles 7(1), 8 and 9 can potentially be used against consumers. In the US this kind of legislation has been used to target, amongst others, children and their parents for downloading music.
  • there are concerns amongst ISPs that they can be attacked for ‘providing’ the means to download content which is protected by copyright.

James Heald: ‘Exactly what will now happen, and exactly what surprises it may lead to, will now depend on the different details of how the directive is now implemented from member country to member country across Europe.’

Back to the drawing board, pt XVII

Published March 8, 2004

Security: Educated Guesswork forwards a great illustration of real-world security-measure subversion.

Public places with relatively unattended and un-secured toilet facilities, like train stations, have historically had a problem with intravenous drug users using the cubicles to inject. So about 10 years ago, some bright spark came up with the idea of lighting these places with ultraviolet lights, under which the blue blood in someone’s veins cannot be seen.

Apparently, this works — or at least worked until recently, when the IV drug users figured out an ingenious circumvention technique — highlight your veins beforehand using a UV marker. In normal lighting, the ink is invisible — but once in the UV-lit area, it shows up, apparently better than the veins show up under normal lighting anyway!

As EKR says: ‘remember, folks, your opponent will change his behavior to oppose you. That’s why he’s called your opponent.’

Health: An oldie from 1998. City Limits: 7 1/2 Days. An undercover investigative reporter gets incarcerated as a mental patient in Brooklyn — for a lot longer than he planned. Horrific.

Life: yesterday, I saw Mohammed Ali in the flesh. I was totally star-struck.