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Month: April 2004

E-Voting nobbled in Ireland

Published April 30, 2004

eVoting: Success! The use of e-voting systems for the June elections in Ireland has been abandoned, after a severely critical report from the Commission on Electronic Voting. Take a look at the report here. Some bits:

  • They particularly do not like the continual revision of the software, noting the ‘large number of new versions of the software since the original … review’ and ‘the fact that new versions of the software continue to be issued in the run-up to the June elections’.
  • ‘as the software version proposed for use at the forthcoming elections is not as yet finalised, it is impossible for anyone to certify its accuracy’. (my emphasis)
  • They were not given access to ‘the full source code’.
  • They found a bug! ‘certain of the tests performed at the request of the Commission identified an error in the count software which could lead to incorrect distributions of surpluses’.
  • ‘experts retained by the Commission found it very easy to bypass electronic security measures and gain complete control of the hardened PC, overwrite the software, and thereby in theory to gain complete control over the count in a given constituency’.
  • And they raised the pre-arranged-transfer-pattern hack: ‘publication of ballot results in full is a valuable aid in checking the accuracy of the results but this can in theory reveal deliberate voter signatures of low-preference votes which could allow voters to identify themselves in a context of corruption or intimidation’.

The use of VVAT, and changes to the counting procedures to remove randomisation, was outside the terms of reference, unfortunately, so it’s not totally over yet. But I can’t see the government getting away with re-introducing e-voting without VVAT now.

Finally, the opposition political parties are calling on the Minister to resign.

I’ve got to say — nice work to all the concerned citizens who’ve achieved this, despite the government’s continual stonewalling and secrecy.

CAN-SPAM’s first prosecution

Published April 29, 2004

Spam: CNN: First four charged under ‘can spam’ law:

Court documents in the landmark case in Detroit describe a nearly inscrutable puzzle of corporate identities, bank accounts and electronic storefronts in one alleged spam operation.

At one point, investigators said, packages were sometimes delivered to a restaurant, where a greeter accepted them and passed them along to one defendant.

Detroit Free Press: 4 Oakland men cited in 1st U.S. spam case:

The four are accused of secretly commandeering computers that forward e-mail for some of the nation’s biggest corporations — including Ford Motor Co. — to send millions of junk messages advertising herbal supplements, diet patches and sexual enhancement pills and products.

Other unwitting companies and agencies whose computers were used include Unisys Corp., Amoco Corp., the Administrative Office of the United States Courts and the U.S. Army Information Center, according to a complaint filed in U.S. District Court in Detroit on Wednesday. …..

Unraveling the trail of spam took four months. Berg said that because of the use of proxy servers, trying to trace the spam back to the original sender was difficult. …..

In Karlsruhe, Germany, an Internet security expert and activist named Anders Henke runs what he calls a “proxy pot,” a system that simulates a mail proxy but doesn’t actually forward mail. It sits on the Internet, looking vulnerable to the sophisticated scanning software used by spammers to sniff out open proxies.

Starting in early January, the complaint says, Henke’s proxy pot intercepted 5 million attempts from computer accounts linked to the Michigan men.

More Thoughts on GMail

Published April 28, 2004

Mail: I’ve been playing around with GMail a bit more recently. They’ve fixed the issues they had with Firefox and keyboard control, and it is nice.

Threading: since I plan to bother a few open-source MUA developers ;), I’ve written up a thorough analysis of their ‘conversation’ model, with its ‘collapsable history’, archive-not-delete approach, etc. Take a look, if you’re curious.

HTML: one feature that no-one’s commented on, is that GMail does not create HTML mail — all mail composed through their composer is sent as text/plain only.

This is very interesting, because it suits me just fine. HTML mail causes so many more problems than it solves, especially when full-featured web browser components are used to display it, IMO. I get to see the security exploits this enables, every day in my anti-spam work.

But it’s also very significant that nobody else has commented on it — nobody misses it!

Phantom Labels: another interesting thing I’ve noted: sometimes a mail will appear in your Inbox with a ‘spam’ label, even though you’ve never defined one. It’s not in the ‘Spam’ folder; it’s in your inbox.

Aaron has a good theory on what this is, and I think he’s right — he suggests it’s when ‘ the two emails are in a conversation (same subject); one is marked as spam, one isn’t. So the conversation (which is what appears in your inbox) gets two tags: Spam, and Inbox. So when viewing the list it looks like it gets the Spam tag.’

Also, while I’m here — details on LiveJournal’s distributed filesystem, MogileFS, which apparently ‘will be open source’. Link via acme.

EU IPR Enforcement Directive Approved By Council

Published April 27, 2004

Politics: FFII reports that the ‘IPR Enforcement Directive’, the law proposed to deal with ‘IPR infringement’ by the wife of the CEO of Vivendi Universal, has just been approved by the EU Council.

Another glorious moment of digital cluelessness by the Irish presidency. But then, it had already been passed by the parliament. Reminder: that page lists the Irish MEPs and how they voted on a key amendment, which would have inserted safeguards so that ‘surprise raids … in the middle of the night by private security firms, on the flimsiest evidence’ would not be possible.

It’s now done in Europe. Next step is to deal with it when the member state governments implement it (which has to happen by June 2006).

Neologism Watch: ‘Neverendum’

Published April 27, 2004

Language: So, here’s a word worth noting — ‘Neverendum’. This Guardian article notes:

(Quebecois politician Mario Dumont’s) meteoric ascent is a sign of how weary voters in the French-speaking province have become about what has been dubbed the ‘neverendum referendum’, the debate over whether Quebec should become a country. It has dominated Quebec politics for three decades.

It looks like Ireland’s ever-recurring referenda (motto: ‘if at first the Government fails to get their desired result, try, try again’) have driven the word into usage over there too, judging by this Irish Family Planning Association press release:

‘The idea of holding another pro-life neverendum is clearly ludicrous and serves only to distract from the daily reality of Irish Abortion.’

And there’s even a song, referring to the Nice referendum:

‘The Government should not patronise us but should respect the views of the people,’ he said. Or, as he puts it in verse, ‘What part of our No don?t they understand?’

Pat Kenny tangles with Aileen

Published April 26, 2004

Ireland: So on Saturday last, Pat Kenny, the host of the Late Late Show (Ireland’s longest-running chat show) had Aileen O’Carroll on to talk about the Dublin Grassroots Network’s planned May Day march.

The Gardai have been doing their damnedest to block the march, gaining power to deploy armed police, and in turn, the PR big guns have been deployed in force to get scare stories printed, with the tabloid journos utilizing their considerable wiles in the process.

So, it’s culminated in an appearance on the Late Late for Aileen. By all accounts, it went very well.

Apparently, another great moment of reported hilarity was a lengthy discussion between Pat Kenny, the tabloid journalist, and a ‘security expert’ as to whether there would be ‘agent provocateurs’ present. It seems all agreed there might just be. One wonders if they thought to look up the word beforehand:

Agents provocateurs are also used in the investigation of political crimes. Here, it has been claimed that the provocateurs deliberately seek to incite ineffective radical acts, in order to foster public disdain for the political group being investigated; and to worsen the punishments its members are liable for. Within the United States the COINTELPRO program of the Federal Bureau of Investigation had FBI agents posing as political radicals in order to disrupt the activities of political groups the U.S. government found unacceptably radical. The activities of agents provocateurs against political dissidents in Imperial Russia was one of the grievances that led to the Russian Revolution.

TRIPS, WIPO and the WTO doing the right thing on software patents?

Published April 24, 2004

Patents: The pro-software-patent lobby has frequently stated that TRIPS — the Treaty on Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPs), signed on 1993-12-15 as a constituting document of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) — requires that software be patentable. For example, here’s one from the International Chamber of Commerce:

ICC believes that the directive should follow current practice in the EPO and a number of EU member states and make it clear that computer program products can be claimed. To disallow such claims in the directive would create great legal uncertainty for holders of such patents already granted. Prohibiting product claims would also render enforcement of patents difficult and raise questions with respect to TRIPS compliance. TRIPS requires patents not only to be available, but also to be ‘enjoyable’ in all areas of technology.

Well, it actually appears that the treaty may state exactly the opposite! Christian Beauprez, a UK-based consultant, has taken a closer look at the details, and come up with this:

TRIPS Article 10.1, ‘Computer programs, whether in source or object code, shall be protected as literary works under the Berne Convention (1971).’

WIPO Copyright Treaty Article 4, ‘Computer programs are protected as literary works within the meaning of Article 2 of the Berne Convention. Such protection applies to computer programs, whatever may be the mode or form of their expression’.

This includes the execution or processing of a program, as demonstrated in the EEC software copyright Directive 1991, ‘the permanent or temporary reproduction of a computer program by any means and in any form, in part or in whole. Insofar as loading, displaying, running, transmission or storage’

They also stipulate that exceptions to exclusive rights of authors are to be limited to ‘special cases’ which do not conflict with a normal exploitation of the work and cannot be prejudicial to the author’s rights. (e.g. the rights to sell,rent,broadcast,give away,translate, and generally enjoy.).

… Authors cannot own underlying ideas, but inventors can as part of their ‘invention’. When the field of software (aka data processing) is opened up to ‘inventors’, they can block authors from exploiting their works on the grounds that they own the ‘underlying ideas’. Therefore this is prejudicial to the rights of authors and illegal under all these Treaties.

There’s lots more at Christian’s site. FFII, one of the main anti-software-patenting players in Europe, have agreed that this is a key point in their TRIPS analysis:

In summary it can be said that the European patent establishment is 1. refusing to clarify and concretise the meaning of the TRIPs treaty; 2. wrongly equating the TRIPs treaty with ‘US practise’, using threats of alleged TRIPs-incompatibility for purposes of fostering Fear, Uncertainty and Distrust (FUD); 3. trying to impose a sui generis software patent regime on Europe which is incompatible with the TRIPs treaty.

GMail and Anne

Published April 20, 2004

Spam: Anne Mitchell on GMail’s spam filtering — sounds like her results are actually worse than mine were. But the ads worked well:

… just today, in an email from Mrs. Nwakama Ani, the wife of the late James Ani, a farmer in ZImbabwe, asking me to please help her to export $50million dollars which her late husband amassed, Gmail’s Adsense very thoughtfully offered me ‘Cheap airline tickets from the USA to Zimbabwe’. You know, just in case I want to go over there and help her personally.

Anne’s spam weblog looks like good stuff — I’ve added it to the blogroll…

Machine Molle

Published April 17, 2004

Art: Machine Molle bill themselves as ‘post-production’, but I suspect that’s understating their work — their site has Flash-playable copies of their videos for Royksopp’s ‘Remind Me’, Air’s ‘Electronic Performers’, and a recent ad for Areva, a Canadian power company. All are simply amazing. Go take a look. (link via Joe)

Closed-group Filesharing

Published April 16, 2004

Net: So, it looks like closed-group filesharing will be appearing in several more implementations soon. NTK writes this week, ‘the big new (yet old) killer app this year is going to be a some dinky little program that lets you easily and selectively share individual files with groups and sub-groups of your friends.’

It’s interesting to see this — it’s been several years in the offing. So far, there seems to be two main angles: secure collaboration in a private workgroup, and private filesharing in a closed group, defined socially (I’ve taken to calling this the ‘playgroup’ ;).

Groove is an example of the ‘workgroup’ idea. However, to my mind it’s been crippled by a strict one-platform policy, and possibly because it’s proprietary, commercial software. Still, nice idea.

Several MS researchers helped kickstart the ‘playgroup’ idea with this paper: The Darknet and
the Future of Content Distribution. Clay Shirky’s thoughts.

WASTE is the classic implementation of a ‘playgroup’ darknet, sadly killed off due to ownership issues. NTK state that it ‘was too crypto-tastic to succeed’, but I don’t see that — it was actually excellent software; in particular, its entirely-decentralised and public-key-crypto-based architecture worked surprisingly well in practice, even with NAT, firewalls and all that problematic stuff.

More of the up-and-coming projects — at least the ones that intend to take heed of ‘playgroup’ needs — need to take cues from this app. The only negative in their approach is that the ‘gating’ of new members is too relaxed; all it takes is for one existing member to accept them into the group, their public key is flooded out to all, and pretty much everyone is set to accept the new key by default.

Robert Kaye has written about his thoughts on how this all should work in this ETCON presentation and this O’Reilly Network article. I’m not sure that a loosely-coupled SSH-based system is easily deployable, though; IMO an ‘all-in-one’ app is easier to get installed and deployed.

iFolder is Novell’s new tool in development. This sounds pretty interesting, although it seems very strongly workgroup-oriented, as does Foldershare, a new Windows-only app from some ‘ex-AudioGalaxy staffers’, apparently.

Both operate by using some kind of file-sync algorithm, along the lines of rsync or Unison, to synchronise multiple copies of a dir across a network. (Here’s hoping it’s up to the standard of Unison.) So very large collections will be duplicated throughout the net — which may actually be quite cool for backups, but strikes me as bad news for users on slow links.

And finally, there’s Clevercactus Share — this sounds interesting, is cross-platform, and is now in beta, apparently. Haven’t seen it, though ;)

So far, techie details on the internals of the latter three systems are scant; it’ll be interesting to see how heavily they tilt towards the ‘workgroup’, how well they deal with firewalls and NAT, the extent of crypto use, etc. But nice to see more software entering the field…

Some stats on GMail’s spam filter

Published April 15, 2004

Update: greetings, visitors from 2006! Please pay no attention to these figures, they’re from 2004, and both GMail and SpamAssassin have undergone major changes since those days. Historical interests only.

So, I set up a .forward to forward all my personal mail to GMail to see how it coped with my spam load, and compared it against the personal SpamAssassin install I’m running these days. Here’s the results:

  • test start: Mon Apr 12 15:50:39 PDT 2004
  • test end: Tue Apr 13 18:26:45 PDT 2004
  • total spam messages received by both during the test: 210
  • total ham messages received by both during the test: 528

The SpamAssassin results:

  • true positives: 189
  • false positives: 0
  • false negatives: 21
  • true negatives: 528
  • FP%: 0.00%
  • FN%: 10.00%

The GMail results:

  • true positives: 144
  • false positives: 7
  • false negatives: 66
  • true negatives: 521
  • FP%: 1.32%
  • FN%: 31.42%

So, not too hot. But there are extenuating circumstances! ;)

  • The GMail false positives were not ‘typical’ mail, whatever that is — all of them were Mailman ‘administration required’ messages regarding spam in Mailman mailing list queues. I’d only be annoyed if I was a GMail user administrating Mailman lists. And it turns out there’s a bug in current dev SpamAssassin that now does the same thing…
  • presumably, GMail allows some element of per-user probabilistic classifier training — if so, some ‘move to Inbox’ might also sort those out quite quickly, I’d guess.
  • GMail seems to be a four-phase classification system. Messages can either go into: 1. the inbox, 2. the spam box, 3. the inbox with a little green ‘Spam’ indicator, or 4. the spam box with a little green ‘Inbox’ indicator. Not sure what the latter two do, but they may indicate some level of ‘unsure’ as per spambayes; worth noting that most of the FNs in the Inbox did not get the green ‘Spam’ indicator beside them, though.
  • I used a .forward to bounce the traffic over. So if GMail includes spam-evasion at the SMTP level, along with whatever content-filtering and probabilistic classification they’re using, they wouldn’t get the benefits of that.
  • SpamAssassin has the benefit of some user configuration; I’d got a couple of my spamtrap addresses blacklisted in the SpamAssassin config, and my Bayes databases have been trained using SpamAssassin‘s autolearning.
  • this is all really unscientific, and it’s a really small sample ;)

Surprisingly, all the SpamAssassin mailing list traffic discussing spam, throwing around spammy URLs and phrases, didn’t get caught, however; probably because the volume of spammy phrases in those is less than in the Mailman admin stuff.

Blocking mail with no Message-ID

Published April 14, 2004

Spam: Bram shares a spam-filtering tip — ‘most of the viruses I get have a Message-Id tacked on by the local mailserver. A little bit of messing with procmail and suddenly my junk mail level is under control.’

This is what the SpamAssassin rule MSGID_FROM_MTA_SHORT does. It gets: 

  4.432   6.7680   0.0560    0.992   0.94    3.67  MSGID_FROM_MTA_SHORT

6.7680% of spam is hit, but so is 0.0560% of ham mail — which makes it 99.2% accurate. By default in 2.6x, it gets a score of 3.67 points.

There’s a lot of divergence between people’s corpora — for instance, I currently have no ham mails that hit this, so it’s 100% accurate for my current mail collection; but some other people have an 80% hit-rate.

This is because some large-scale legitimate mass-mailers — for no apparent reason — also omit the Message-ID when they send the message across the internet. This isn’t quite a contravention of RFC 2822, but that RFC strongly recommends using the header:

Though optional, every message SHOULD have a ‘Message-ID:’ field.

(see RFC 2119 for what ‘SHOULD’ means — it’s a strong recommendation.)

The moral for legit senders: make sure you read the RFCs before you start sending SMTP; otherwise you’ll look like a spammer.

The moral for spamfilter developers: watch out for the legit bulk mail senders; some of them do really bizarre things with SMTP. ;)

Daily Show on spam, again

Published April 13, 2004

Spam: Lisa Rein has captured the Daily Show’s segment on spam — ‘Email Trouble’ — Rob Courddry interviewing Scott Richter. (direct link to the 10MB Quicktime movie).

This vidcap leaves out the unfunny subtitles — and it’s on archive.org, so at least you’ll be chewing up non-profit bandwidth instead of someone’s personal-site bandwidth ;) If you haven’t seen it yet, go ahead and download it; it’s well funny.

(link found via Spamblogging.)

Wildfeeds

Published April 13, 2004

TV: from the #tvtorrents FAQ: ‘Wildfeeds’ are ‘a transmission by the network to distribute the episode before it airs around to the tv relay stations. You need to be in the correct location and have a large satellite dish in order to receive them.’

Word for the day!

Good Guardian article on Spam

Published April 12, 2004

Spam: Guardian: Incredible Bulk, by Danny O’Brien. A great article from the
‘Spam and the Law’ conference. ‘This is why people such as Richter are appearing from the shadows. They have a choice: turn legit, or risk an increasingly criminal lifestyle.’

Also spam-related: Code Fish Spam Watch, which lists and dissects phishing attacks, in great detail. Some of those trojans are exceptionally sophisticated — such as this trojan targetting Barclays online banking, which actually takes screenshots of a CAPTCHA-style login protocol. Scary!

Ireland’s Disastrous EU Presidency

Published April 12, 2004

Patents: Disastrous for European software developers, that is.

It looks like Ireland’s EU Council Presidency is pushing through some nasty stuff on behalf of the European Patent Office. FFII says:

On all points where substantial controversy exists, the Council Working Party has taken the most hardline pro-patent view of all parties. They make patentability hinge on the word ‘technical’ and yet refuse to explain what that word means. They have refused the interoperability exemption which even the Legal Affairs Committee had accepted. They have rejected the freedom of publication. They are insisting on making programs directly claimable, something which even Arlene McCarthy and the Commission did not advocate.

Nokia’s Patent Department is leading the PR push:

The (Nokia call-for-support) letter calls on ministers to drop their objections, and to support a draft text issued by the Irish Presidency on March 17th: ‘All of Europe’s innovators, including individual inventors, small and medium size enterprises (SMEs), as well as large multinational companies, require patents to protect their inventions, provide incentives to undertake research and development in Europe, and to promote licensing and technology transfer’, claims the letter.

‘Nokia doesn’t seem to be counting Opera among the European innovators’, comments Håkon Wium Lie, CTO of Opera Software Inc, an innovation leader in the web browser market and producer of much of the software used in Nokia’s mobile phones.

Note that it’s the Patent Department of Nokia, not necessarily Nokia’s top brass, pushing this — here’s a relevant anecdote from FFII:

The patent officials never see the CEOs themselves, and when they appear in public, their thinking on patent matters may surprise the audience. Last week Airbus CEO Peter Kleinschmidt was invited as a pro-patent speaker to a panel in Paris but then, during his speech, congratulated his co-panelist Michel Rocard for his important contributions to containing the expansion of the patent system, which, as he described in detail, was slowing down innovation at Airbus.

(The economic studies and the US’ Federal Trade Commission both concur, incidentally. But it’s pretty unlikely a patent lawyer will say the same thing in public ;)

On the other side, 15 MEPs have signed their own Call For Action which points out that ‘patent professionals in various governments and organisations are now trying to use the EU Council of Ministers in order to sidestep parliamentary democracy in the European Union’ and urges the Council to ‘refrain from any counter-proposals to the European Parliament’s version of the draft, unless such counter-proposals have been explicitely endorsed by a majority decision of the member’s national parliament’.

Let’s see if Ireland’s presidency will do it the democratic way, or in a back-room deal, over all our heads…

Muff News

Published April 12, 2004

Travel: I’m just back from a great road trip around Nevada and Arizona — lots of fun was had, and I even came out $100 up on the blackjack!

In other travels, my mate Eoin recently visited Muff, Co. Donegal, and made sure to get a picture of the event.

Muff is well-reknowned as one of those towns with a silly name; the story goes that they even have a SCUBA diving club, called — guess what — “Muff Diving Club”. Sadly, the reports are apparently greatly exagerrated. Eoin writes:

I have been hearing the story of the ‘muff diving club’ for the last 10 years, and now i can categorically state that its an urban legend. No such thing. There was a ‘top muff’ petrol station though where we picked up a few keyrings. The girl behind the counter was trying to give us all 200 keyrings left in the bag as she was so sick of muppets like us coming in for a laugh.

Finally! My round-the-world journey pics

Published April 6, 2004

Pics: After nearly 2 years of peripateticism, I’ve finally managed to track down my CD-ROMs of scans of a select few of the pictures I took on the round-the-world trip I took back in 2001-2002 (well, it wasn’t quite round-the-world, just Down Under and Asia, but who’s counting).

Here they are:

And some highlights:

McCarthyite smearing, 21st-century style

Published April 5, 2004

Politics: The massive opposition to e-voting without a VVAT by Irish Citizens for Trustworthy Evoting and others, has clearly got Minister Martin Cullen thoroughly needled.

As John Lambe points out here, in the Dail on Wednesday he stated that ICTE are ‘not experts in this field’, ‘have no expertise or international accreditation’, and best of all, he has resorted to the 21st-century equivalent of calling ICTE ‘reds under the bed’ — they are apparently ‘linked to the anti-globalisation movement’. Here’s a cut and paste from the online transcripts:

Mr. Bernard Allen, FG: Electronic voting is a good idea but this system has been badly thought through and public confidence has been badly shaken by a Government unwilling to listen to anyone but its own so-called experts. The Government has called the introduction of this system a step forward, a point reiterated by the Minister. I submit that it is a retrograde step based on insufficient knowledge on the use of technology. The Minister has a new toy and thought everyone would like it. They do not. The Irish Computer Society said: ‘Any electronic voting system must include a paper-based voter-verified audit trail.’ The Minister in his arrogance recently said these people were cranks and Luddites.

Mr. Bernard Durkan, FG: Are they cranks?

Mr. Martin Cullen, FF: They are linked to the anti-globalisation movement. The Deputy should check them out. They are all the same.

Mr. Allen: It is all a–

Mr. Cullen: If Fine Gael bases its policies on such people, it is no wonder it is in decline.

Mr. Durkan: The people concerned are computer experts.

Mr. Allen: We do not know what the Minister’s policies are and where he stands on any matter.

Mr. Paul Kehoe, FG: The Minister should know more about policy having been a member of more than one party.

Mr. Allen: Irish technology experts have told the Government its system must include a paper-based voter-verified audit trail.

Mr. Cullen: They are not experts in this field.

Mr. Allen: The Minister has made a serious allegation about genuine people–

Mr. Cullen: They are not accredited to anything. They have no expertise or international accreditation.

(Interruptions).

Mr. Michael Ring, FG: Fianna Fáil are experts on everything. They have filled every tribunal in the country.

Mr. Allen: The Minister has come to this House and–

Acting Chairman (Jerry Cowley, Ind): Deputy Allen should direct his comments through the Chair.

Mr. Allen: The Chair should ask the Minister to cease interrupting.

Mr. Cullen: Such comments are pathetic. It is no wonder Fine Gael is in such a disorderly state.

Mr. Ring: Fianna Fáil are the experts.

Acting Chairman: I remind Members that this is not a Committee Stage debate. We are dealing with Second Stage and I ask Deputies to allow Deputy Allen to continue without interruption, please.

Mr. Allen: The Minister has vilified people who cannot protect themselves.

Mr. Durkan: Outside the House.

Mr. Allen: The Minister should withdraw the allegation against–

Mr. Cullen: I have not vilified them. I said they are not accredited–

Mr. Allen: The Minister said they are linked to the anti-globalisation movement and suggested we should check them out.

Mr. Cullen: Yes, they are.

Acting Chairman: Deputy Allen, please continue.

Mr. Allen: The Minister should withdraw that allegation against people who cannot protect themselves.

Mr. Cullen: I will not.

Acting Chairman: Deputy Allen, please continue.

Mr. Durkan: The Minister has cast aspersions on people outside this House. In accordance with Standing Orders–

Mr. Cullen: I think they are proud of their links.

Mr. Durkan: On a point of order, the making of such an allegation is not in accordance with the Standing Orders of this House. Perhaps the Minister would like to comment.

Acting Chairman: The Chair has ruled on that matter.

Mr. Durkan: With respect, the Chair has no authority to rule on this matter. Standing Orders apply.

Acting Chairman: That Chair has ruled on the matter.

Mr. Durkan: No, I am sorry, I do not agree. On a point of order, the Minister has cast aspersions–

Mr. Cullen: I paid them a compliment.

Mr. Durkan: The Minister has cast aspersions on people outside this House.

Mr. Cullen: They will regard my remarks as a compliment, a badge of honour.

Antarctica

Published April 3, 2004

Antarctica: I’m obsessed with the wierd collision of out-of-control bureaucracy, strategic-interests-disguised-as-science, and normal life in a way off-normal place, that is the US Antarctic program. It’s fundamentally a microcosm of what future space exploration bases will be like — lots of high-faluting science talk, quite a bit of ‘making sure we have a strategic foothold’ reality, and people getting on with life in one of the most amazing places they can.

Via MeFi, Sandwichgirl.com is a great journal site describing her life way down under — full of great little tidbits like describing Antarctica as ‘the island’, ie. ‘we are all taking bets to see how long it will be before he’s kicked off the island’.

It’s great, although thoroughly overloaded from all the attention right now.

File alongside Big Dead Place and The Symmes Antarctic Intelligencer — highlight:

‘Once you shelter one magic elf, you gotta shelter ’em all’, says NSF Representative Jack Hjorth. ‘I’ve seen it before. Pretty soon all science comes to a standstill and you’re runnin’ a magic elf halfway house.’

Protesting Against Software Patents

Published April 2, 2004

Patents: The FFII are suggesting a 10-day online ‘net strike’ to protest against the ongoing attempts to legalise software patenting in Europe.

The Commission and the Irish EU Council Presidency are pushing for unlimited patentability of software, heavily lobbied by multinationals and patent lawyers. They are ignoring the democratically voted decision of the European Parliament from 24 September 2003, which has the support of more than 300,000 citizens, 2,000,000 SMEs and dozens of economists and scientists.

As a result, I’m putting up a protest front page on these sites:

If you support the actions of FFII, please join in, or even attend the in-person demonstration in Brussels! We need to make it clear that the small software developers of Europe do not support these undemocratic actions.

And finally, shame on the Irish EU Council presidency for supporting the EPO hook, line and sinker. Thanks, and I know who I’ll be voting for in future…

EFF April Fool

Published April 1, 2004

Funny: EFFector Vol. 17, No. 11a April 1, 2004. Some pretty funny gems in this one: USPTO to Start Granting Indulgences, Microsoft Wins Patent for Software Industry Monopolization, and SCO to Sue Over Unauthorized Use of Earth’s Resources:

Lindon, UT – On the heels of its campaign against users of the Free Software program Linux, the SCO Group today announced that it will begin a new round of lawsuits against users of other free resources, including fire, water, air and land.

‘People think they can just use free things without paying for them,’ said SCO CEO Daryl McBribe. ‘This kind of ‘socialism’ is anti-American and a violation of the Constitution. It’s up to corporations like SCO to crush that kind of idealism.’

Ca Plane Pour Moi, GMail, and XCP

Published April 1, 2004

Music: Ever wondered what the lyrics to Plastic Bertrand’s classic belgopunk tune really said? (Apart from ‘I am the king of the divan’, that is.) Wonder no more. (…ok, maybe these are a bit more likely. ‘Ey up!’, indeed.)

Mail: Google Mail front page. It has MXes — but they don’t answer yet. No SPF record yet, either ;)

Funny: XCP – the XML Control Protocol ‘is a drop in replacement for traditional Transmission Control Protocol, or TCP. With the advent of XCP/IP, connection-oriented networking will finally move from the legacy environment of inscrutable bits and bytes to a structured, human-readable world relying upon XML. XCP is the first 4th Generation Protocol, or 4GP. It is designed for a networking environment that is very fast and very reliable – the Internet of today!’

Katamari Damacy

Published April 1, 2004

Games: Katamari Damacy (roughly translated as ‘Clumpsoul’) is a game where you roll around various landscapes, making a giant ball of ‘stuff’.
Here’s a review. It looks like sheer genius; here’s hoping it gets a US/Euro release!

GMail

Published April 1, 2004

Mail: Google announces new mail service. This is not an April Fool’s Day joke — just terrible timing. ;) It’s for real.

Diego has some good comments.

My thoughts:

  • Privacy: ‘we do not disclose your personally identifying information to third parties unless we believe we are required to do so by law or have a good faith belief that such access, preservation or disclosure is reasonably necessary to … (c) detect, prevent, or otherwise address fraud, security or technical issues (including, without limitation, the filtering of spam)’. They’re going to build one hell of a spam-filtering corpus this way ;)
  • A nice ToS clause: ‘Your Intellectual Property Rights. Google does not claim any ownership in any of the content, including any text, data, information, images, photographs, music, sound, video, or other material, that you upload, transmit or store in your Gmail account. We will not use any of your content for any purpose except to provide you with the Service.’

Maypole

Published April 1, 2004

Perl: Maypole

  • BeerDB. Maypole is a Struts-style web application framework by

Simon Cozens, and looks very nice. The number 1 attractive feature (compared to any Java MVC framework ;) is encapsulated in this tagline:

Maypole: if you’re writing code, YOU’RE DOING SOMETHING WRONG.

If/when I wind up writing a web app sometime soon, I may just give this a try…

One thing I’d like to see is a CGI::Application-based Maypole module, for prototyping (and for low-overhead installs, where mod_perl is too much to install). Looks like it’s well on the way.

Psychic Homeland Security

Published April 1, 2004

Funny: Feds Cancel Flight on ‘Psychic’ Bomb Tip: an American Airlines flight was cancelled because of a tip-off from a self-reported psychic.

The purported psychic’s call was ‘unusual,’ conceded Doug Perkins, local administrator for the federal Transportation Security Administration director.

‘But in these times, we can’t ignore anything. We want to take the appropriate measures,’ he said.

Suuuuuuure.