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Month: April 2005

Forfás Intellectual Property Lecture Series

Published April 26, 2005

Ireland: Worth watching for european software-patent watchers, Forfás, Ireland’s ‘national policy advisory board on enterprise, trade, science, technology and innovation’ are running a series of monthly seminars on ‘Intellectual Property’ in association with Licensing Executives Society Britain and Ireland.

This one looks quite interesting — 10 June: ‘Patenting Software – The Current State of Play’, Author Barry Moore, of Hanna Moore & Curley, patent attorneys.

Interested parties can attend with pre-registration, or wait to download the mp3 at Forfás’ website, apparently, along with the rest of the lecture series. (No sign what the license is on those files, though ;)

the ISA has a new chair

Published April 21, 2005

Patents: It seems the Irish Software Association has a new chairperson, namely Bernadette Cullinane. Whether this has anything to do with Cathal Friel’s ‘out of line’ statements, who knows…

John McCormac passed on some interesting quotes from an Irish Times interview, which were also syndicated here:

‘The incoming chairwoman of the Irish Software Association (ISA), Bernie Cullinane, has pledged to support the introduction of a proposed European Union directive on software patents.

She also warned members of the European parliament against blocking the controversial new directive or weakening it by proposing a host of amendments. …

Ms. Cullinane, a former chief operating officer of the Irish company Performix said European firms needed to protect their intellectual property in a similar manner to the way US firms can.

‘We don’t want any further dilution of the current situation on patents,’ she said in an interview with The Irish Times following her ratification as chairwoman of the ISA last night.’

My emphasis — given that the current situation is that they are unenforceable in Europe, that’s good, because we on the other side don’t want a dilution either!

‘We do need to look at how the US is developing its software industry and a removal of the patent (sic) could weaken venture capitalists’ appetites for investing in new innovative companies.’

The whole ‘venture capital requires patents’ line is easily debunked. I’m sure the VC companies are telling Ms. Cullinane that they want patents, of course; it’s just that they’re wrong. ;) Laura Creighton, a European investor, gave a fantastic speech in Brussels in 2003 about investment and patents:

Software Patents (in the US in the 1990s) encouraged venture capitalists to make foolish investments, because they believed the patents were worth something. Venture capitalists often do not mind if the companies where they have invested go bankrupt — as long as they hold title to the patents. They can start over again with a different team.

Sadly, when the bubble burst, the venture capitalists discovered that their patents were only good for a trip to court — or at least some legal wrangling with a bunch of lawyers. A software patent is not like a hardware patent, where typically one, or at most a few covers the whole invention. Dozens, sometimes hundreds of patents, are relevant to any piece of software. So an investor, who now owns the assets of a defunct company — cannot take its patents and hand them to a new development team and say ‘build this’. It is impossible to develop software today without infringing somebody’s American patent.

The venture capitalists, having lost fortunes backing companies which had no real product, are now uninterested in investing in any software companies whatsoever. Right now the American economy could benefit from more investment — but the capital is not going into software companies. Again, part of the problem is software patents. The venture capitalists have learned that all software is in violation of somebody’s patent. So they do not want to touch the stuff. Thus on the up side, and the down side, the existence of software patents have contributed to creating the stock bubble, and making the recovery slower and harder than it needed to be. So #4 is right out — the existence of software patents are inhibiting investment right now, and for very good reason.

In other words, the presence of software patents has ‘weakened venture capitalists’ appetites for investing in new innovative companies’, as Ms. Cullinane put it.

Anyway — to keep the VCs happy, small companies can still obtain software patents in the US, and spend the tens of thousands of dollars required to register and enforce them in court, if they so desire. They can bring the US software industry to a legal standstill if they like, as they seem to have done, as long as European software developers can quietly carry on developing software for use outside the US ;)

But at least things aren’t as bad as the situation with my neighbours — I live a few miles from the offices of Acacia Research, the notorious patent trolls, who’ve just initiated a new lawsuit against Intel and TI.

Reportedly however, they’re planning to open a European office this quarter…

The Stag’s Head days may be numbered

Published April 21, 2005

Dublin: This is it — it could be the end of an era. CB Richard Ellis auctioneers have a page up noting a new property to be auctioned on Wednesday 11th May 2005 — The Stag’s Head, 1 Dame Court, Dublin 2:

The Stag’s Head is one of Dublin’s most famous and finest landmark licensed premises, with many outstanding Victorian features.

The bar is lavishly appointed with many fine Victorian features from the beautiful mahogany panelling through to the red Connemara marble counter and the ornate stained glass windows.

Accommodation briefly comprises ground floor traditional style bar with feature mahogany and marble topped bar counter and terrazzo flooring with a snug area to the rear with ornate stained glass skylight. On the first floor there is a further lounge bar area with feature bay window. On the second floor there is a large catering kitchen, dry goods store and office. In the basement there is a further lounge bar area, cold room and toilets.

Many nights were spent in the Stag’s Head partaking of their excellent Guinness. It used to be my local, at one stage, and I still drop back in for a night when I get the chance. Save the Stag’s!

As my mate Ben put it —

The new owners will doubtless get rid of the (moth-eaten, stuffed) fox, put in recorded music and big-screen televisions, hire bouncers, open on Sundays, extinguish the distinctive odour of damp, replace the marble with formica, and dig up the Dame St mosaic and trade it to the Russian Mafia for heroin and trafficked women. Evil bastards.

Anonymous blogging made simple

Published April 20, 2005

Privacy: after reading Adam Shostack’s weblog posting about private/anonymous blogging, I’ve been driven to think about that, and would up writing up a case study of Cogair, which was an influential anonymously-published proto-weblog in Ireland in the ’90s.

Now, quinn at ambiguous.org quotes a review of EFF’s recent ‘anonymous blogging’ guidelines, which largely comes up with one conclusion: it’s a usability nightmare. The problem is, the EFF report recommends using invisiblog.com, which in turns uses the Mixmaster remailers. Those things are awful, and I doubt anyone but their authors could possibly know how to use them ;)

Here’s an easier way to blog anonymously. I haven’t tried it (honest ;) but from keeping up on this stuff, it should work…

Firefox

  • First off, install Firefox. No point giving your identity away through an MSIE security hole. Clear out all cookies in Preferences:Privacy:Cookies (or better still — start a new Firefox profile from scratch).
  • Visit IPID and note down the IP address noted (this is your own, traceable, IP address).

Tor

  • Next, install Tor, EFF’s ‘Onion routing’ anonymizer system. This also means installing privoxy as directed in the Tor install guide.
  • Set up Tor on your machine, so that Firefox will browse via that software.
  • Using Tor, visit IPID and make sure it doesn’t give you the same traceable IP address. This is to make sure you’re browsing securely.

Hushmail

  • visit Hushmail and create a new free email account. Obviously, don’t use usernames and passwords that map in any way to your existing ones, and avoid words that may show up under your interests (especially if they’re googleable)…

Blogger

  • Using that Hushmail account as the email address, go to Blogger.com and create yourself a blog, then get publishing.
  • Hey presto — anonymous blogging the easy way!
  • For safety, don’t use the Firefox anonymous-blogging profile for any sites other than Hushmail and Blogger.com‘s publishing end. (A future Firefox vulnerability could expose personal info directly from Firefox itself.)

This is essentially the ‘TOR to blog server’ method described at the privateblogging wiki.

Now, note that along that chain we have 3 levels of identity — the IP address (hidden by Tor), the email address (traceable to Hushmail, who could conceivably give up the Tor router’s IP), and the Blogger.com weblog site (traceable to Blogger, who could give up the Hushmail address and the Tor router’s IP).

As long as you don’t give it away in your writings on that weblog — and as long as Tor remains safe — your own identity in turn is safe, too; and Tor has proved safe, so far.

There are still problems:

  • The weblog site itself could still get taken down, e.g. via a DMCA takedown notice. This could be an issue, depending on what’s being published.
  • Tor traffic is identifiable as such as it traverses the internet. For bloggers in countries with a pervasive internet surveillance regime at the local ISP end, the watchers will be able to tell that Tor is in use, and tell who is the person using Tor. (They won’t be able to tell what it’s being used for, just that it’s being used.)

PS, for the future: the guys behind Tor are working on a replacement for Mixmaster anonymous remailer software, called Mixminion. There’s also a wiki for discussion of ‘private blogging’ here.

MythTV and KnoppMyth progress

Published April 19, 2005

TV: here’s a quick update on my PVR box progress. I have a very extensive /etc/LOG which I should probably just publish as-is, really, rather than trying to make it legible ;)

Anyway, the hardware arrived last month, but the main VIA EPIA ME6000 board was non-functional — it could never get as far as powering up the CRT for the BIOS self-test. So it was RMA’d back to http://www.mini-box.com, and they sent out a replacement, which arrived a couple of weeks ago.

I finally got to checking this out the weekend before last, and hey presto, it powered up nicely. There followed a whole week of busy nights doing a load of cautious hardware hooking-up, not-so-cautious KnoppMyth installation, and thoroughly non-cautious hacking crazily at the desired enclosure with a hacksaw (because I was too cheap to buy a Dremel).

Things got a little hairy with respect to CPU temperatures, but some looking at specs (the VIA Eden CPU can deal with up to 90 degrees C!), and repurposing of a bin-bound case fan together with some soldering and snipping, has that under control.

Eventually, we’re now at the stage where it can:

  • watch live TV in perfect realtime, pause, rewind, timeshift, ffwd, etc. (the PVR-350 output is good)
  • record our desired shows (bloody Antiques Roadshow! argh), according to the TV schedule
  • play mp3s
  • be ssh’able and sftp’able via a wifi USB dongle
  • expose its schedule and allow recording via MythWeb
  • expose its full desktop UI via x11vnc

and it looks good doing it, too. Credit goes to the MythTV guys for a fantastic job on their project, especially with its well-polished UI.

In addition, I have to plug KnoppMyth heavily. They’re dealing with an awful situation with hardware compatibility where bleeding edge features like MPEG2 decoding and TV out are concerned, and doing a great job — there’s been several occasions where I’ve been staring down the barrel of a daunting patch/rebuild/test cycle, and then find out that KnoppMyth includes that component built-in for free.

But — on the other hand — no credit to the hardware vendors. As I link-blogged yesterday, VIA is doing the classic ‘throw it over the wall’ trick with respect to their linux support — video drivers are written and deposited on their website, with scant documentation and virtually no support.

That’s bad enough, but even worse is the situation with Hauppauge’s PVR-250 and PVR-350 TV encoder/decoder cards. I realised soon into the setup process that other options for these should have been considered — Hauppauge have done a great job at confusing the issue for driver developers, as far as I can see. Here’s an example. When you buy a ‘WinTV PVR-350’ card, you may get the same box with the same manuals etc., but including these bonuses under the covers:

  • one of seemingly about 5 different tuner chips, which you’ll need to edit /etc/modules.conf for;
  • one of about 3 different remote controls with differing output codes;
  • a good chance you’ll have to enter two mysterious ioctls to fix the colour registers, because recent PVR-350 models have changed these somehow and everything shows up as purple-on-green through its TV-Out.

It’s absurd. The results are threads like this and a truly daunting setup procedure, which (of course) everyone blames on the software (and Linux itself).

Anyway — how am I doing vs. Brendan‘s progress? ;)

  • pro: my X display sizes are good
  • pro: no need to switch audio outputs
  • pro: I’m not using a separate cable box, so no need to hack up something IR to switch channels for me
  • con: I can’t yet watch AVIs or other video files, which I think he has working.

More on the latter when I eventually solve it. (it’s tricky. I suspect I’ll need to run two X servers with two TV-Outs to do this acceptably, and that’s uncharted waters.)

More ways malware damages internet infrastructure: DNS servers

Published April 15, 2005

Malware: spotted on NANOG — Six PCs caused BigPond problems:

Disconnecting six compromised personal computers on Tuesday evening eased the difficulties caused by bogus requests which clogged BigPond’s domain name servers (DNS), slowing customer e-mail and Web site access, Telstra said.

A Telstra spokesperson said the carrier had narrowed the list of malware that could have infected the computers to three, adding the problem could have been caused by a combination of those viruses or Trojans. He declined to name the suspects.

He said the PCs generated 95 percent of the bogus requests which caused the problems that evening.

The ‘problems’ in question are described here :

One forum participant (on Aussie forum Whirlpool), who claimed to be a BigPond customer, said on Monday: ‘I’m in Canberra and it’s been almost unusable all afternoon. I’m snowed under at the moment and it is really driving me crazy. Three out of four links fail to load first time and sometimes take eight or nine tries before it does.’

Another said: ‘I am having problems loading Web pages, I get the 404 error. I have to retry five to 10 times to get some places.’

Petri Helenius, in a post to NANOG, notes:

Consumer ISP’s who don’t proactively take care of security/abuse usually end up with harvesting-bots which consume significant amount of DNS resources, typically doing anything from a few dozen to a thousand queries a second. A few hundred of these will seriously hamper an usually provisioned recursive server.

Interesting. It’s been a long time since I’ve relied on an ISP’s recursive DNS servers; in my recent experience (Comcast, Cox.net) they’ve always been overloaded, and take aaaages to give me answers. Maybe this is why.

It makes sense; most Windows machines will indeed use the ISP’s NSes, because that’s what DHCP tells you to do; and setting up a BIND or djbdns instance locally to query the roots directly is still a UNIX-only trick, as far as I know.

The upshot?

  • 1. Yet another good reason why ISPs should proactively disconnect infected customers, as they deny service to other users of the ISP.
  • 2. A good demonstration of yet another way the techie community’s experience of web surfing and internet use differs from that of the unwashed masses in the hinternet — that ‘shanty-town of pop-ups and porn adware’, as Danny O’Brien puts it.
  • 3. Sometime soon, if it hasn’t happened already, someone’s going to bundle up an ‘Internet Accelerator’ lump of shareware that sets up a local recursive NS on Windows which queries the roots, and it’ll become the latest popular Windows download. Then the load on the root servers will really start rising.

(PS: top tip — ever wanted a publically-queriable recursive nameserver, or a good IP address for pinging, that’s easy to remember? 4.2.2.1 is what you’re after.)

pick a ‘flu, any ‘flu — well, maybe not that one

Published April 13, 2005

Health: Meridian Bioscience Inc. of Cincinnati, Ohio mails lethal pandemic strain of ‘flu to nearly 5000 labs in 18 countries:

The firm was told to pick an influenza A sample and chose from its stockpile the deadly 1957 H2N2 strain.

Check out how it was spotted:

On March 26, National Microbial Laboratory Canada detected the 1957 pandemic strain in a sample not connected with the test kit. After informing WHO and the CDC of the strange finding, the lab investigated. It informed the U.N. health agency on Friday that it had traced the virus to the test kit.

My emphasis. omgwtfbbq!

(WHO’s influenza chief) Klaus Stohr said the test kits are not the only supplies of the 1957 pandemic strain sitting in laboratories around the world. ‘The world really has to think what routine labs should be doing with these samples they have kept in the back of their fridges,’ Stohr said.

True: the lovely C has a story from her TCD days of a vial of smallpox
found buried deep in the ice in the back of a long-forgotten freezer, apparently rediscovered by someone during a routine spring cleaning. This was in the early ’90s, when smallpox was supposedly down to samples in just two high-security labs, in Russia and America.

Interesting fall-out from the Irish Times Microsoft supplement

Published April 12, 2005

Open Source: on the 18th March the Irish Times published a commercial supplement for Microsoft. Naturally, given that it was paid advertising, there were lots of MS plugs — but in the mix there was also a couple of more worrying articles: one by Tom Kitt, government ‘Minister for the Information Society’, noting

Microsoft has been one of the most innovative companies in the world and has a long track record over several decades of creating new product markets. The EU has to be open to allowing such innovation in Europe. Ireland will continue to argue at EU level, based on the solid evidence of our successful economy, that the Community must look at its rules on innovation and intellectual property rights to ensure they encourage risk taking in Europe and growth in the IT industry in the EU and around the globe.

And another with Cathal Friel, credited as ‘chairman of the Irish Software Association‘. Quoting the article text:

(Friel) also noted that Open Source software – which is developed by large communities of programmers and distributed for free or at low cost – is also going to have an effect on the software market. While Friel believes Open Source itself has a limited business model – ‘at the end of the day, there’s nothing but services to sell’ – it is nonetheless becoming more pervasive and is ‘a fact of life’ for more traditional software companies. He believes the Open Source movement is actually stifling innovation, because fewer programmers will develop software without the financial incentive of success.

MS observers will note that both Kitt and Friel’s statements mirror the MS ‘party line’ — either the lads were well-briefed, or they just put their names to a story written by MS PR.

Well, there’s been an interesting follow-up. Éibhear Ó hAnluain put pen to paper about Cathal Friel’s statements, and received an interesting reply:

I received a ‘phone call from Kathryn Raleigh, Director of the ISA, in reponse to my letter. As I was unable to take notes at the time, what follows is a memory of the conversation. She told me that the ISA would like to apologise to me for any offense that I took from the comments. She said that the first the ISA heard of the comments was after the piece was published and the Mr. Friel was not speaking with the ISA’s authority. She told me that the ISA had indeed conducted some sort of analysis of the market regarding licensing and the ‘proprietary’ versus Free Software competition, and that the ISA’s position on the matter is not to have a position. She gave me the impression that Mr. Friel has been told that he was out of line. She asked me to convey the ISA’s regrets to my colleagues.

Well now, that’s interesting!

I find it very encouraging to see that the ISA don’t take the position noted in Friel’s article, anyway. In my opinion, this is wise — alienating free software and open-source-using companies doesn’t seem likely to be a good idea, given that many of today’s SMEs use open source extensively ‘behind the scenes’ in production, if not directly in the products they sell.

There’s also the matter of Google’s recent major entry into the Irish software industry, with its new offices in Barrow St. in Dublin. MS are no longer the only major multinational player on the Irish scene to whom open source’s success, or failure, is a key factor in their business plans. Google use free software extremely extensively internally, are members of several major free software bodies including the FSF, and have released quite a few interesting pieces of open source software themselves.

Spam and Broken Windows, and wecanstopspam.org

Published April 11, 2005

Spam: Spam Chongqing: Spamming Experiment:

Kasia at unix-girl.com decided to run a spamming experiment on her blog. She posted a couple spams to her own blog and waited to see what would happen. In less than 24 hours she received 356 more spams.

The chongqing guys confirm this, and I’ve noticed this as well (although just in passing, I’ve never tried testing it).

Interestingly, I’m pretty sure the same thing can happen with mailing lists, if the mailing list archives are allowed to contain the mailing list’s posting address, and the list allows open posting. It works like this:

  • spammer A posts a spam to the list
  • spam is archived
  • google finds archived spam
  • list-builders B, C, D google for search terms, find archive page for that mail message
  • B, C, D scrape the addresses from that page and pick up the list posting address
  • they then either sell on to spammers E, F, and G, who spam that address, or they spam the address themselves
  • and redo loop from the start.

One key factor is the search terms B, C, and D use. My theory is that they are intending to generate ‘targeted’ lists, and in spamming, most targeted lists are simply lists of addresses scraped from pages that show up in a google search for a specific keyword — ‘meds’, ‘viagra’, ‘degree’, etc.

Joe at chonqing surmises that it may be through the Broken Windows Theory — that spam appearing in a weblog’s comments, or in a wiki page, indicates that the administrator is asleep at the wheel and more spam can be posted with impunity. in my opinion, that’s probably more likely for google-spam and wiki-spam than for email spam, but undoubtedly is a factor.

PS: href=”http://chongq.blogspot.com/2005/04/another-spammer-owned-antispam-site.html”> wecanstopspam.org has been allowed to lapse and has been stolen by a spammer. Oh dear.

Nose Leeches

Published April 11, 2005

Health: On a lighter note, I’ve been getting through my last two weeks mail and RSS data, and came across this beauty.

It’s a truly venerable internet urban legend — the Nepalese Nose Leech story. Even given that I assumed it was more than likely a UL, I still took care not to drink from streams when I visited leech-infested areas, especially in Nepal!

Well, it appears it may not be a UL after all —

Doctors have removed a leech from the nose of a 55-year-old Hong Kong woman after she swam and washed her face in a stream, a medical journal reported.

The woman went to her doctor complaining of nose bleeds and an occasional sensation that something was blocking her left nostril, the Hong Kong Medical Journal said in its April issue. Her family doctor noticed a brownish mass in her nostril but couldn’t remove it because of heavy bleeding, the journal said.

The patient was taken to the emergency room, where doctors identified the problem as a bloodsucking leech. They had trouble pulling it out because the 2 inch invertebrate retracted into the nostril and disappeared, the journal said.

Part of the slimy leech was in a passage of her nasal cavity and a larger segment was in her sinus cavity, the article said.

Doctors used a nasal spray to anesthetize the dark brown leech that had a sucker on the front part of its body. After two minutes, the leech moved slowly out of the antrum (sinus) and was retrieved with forceps, the journal said.

The woman said that one month before her symptoms developed, she swam and washed her face in a stream while hiking. Doctors checked other members of her hiking group and found another leech in the nose of a man who washed his face in the stream, the journal said.

Link via jwz, AP wire story, abstract at Hong Kong Medical Journal site, MEDLINE abstract, including a line noting ‘this form of leech infestation has not been previously reported’ — except on teh internets!

Where I’d gotten to

Published April 11, 2005

Meta: You might have noticed things being a bit quite around here recently. Unfortunately, it wasn’t for good reasons.

A close family member in Ireland died suddenly on Good Friday. Once we found out, being in Death Valley (of all places) that weekend, we made a mad dash back home for the removal, funeral, and so on. The past two weeks have been not so much fun, all in all.

I’m torn between eulogising here, and keeping it offline. All in all, I think it’d be better to not use this weblog for that; I don’t think it’d be appropriate. But he’ll be greatly missed.