Heads-up, Dublin geeks: Vint Cerf will be speaking at the Dublin Googleplex on Thursday.
Sadly, I won’t be able to make it myself — I had to visit the UK this week. Pity; I would have loved to hear him speak :(
Month: February 2006
While driving around Ireland on a wedding-location-scouting trip, we started receiving texts talking about riots in Dublin; I texted a friend, and got a reply along these lines: “Celtic-topped scobes run riot through O’Connell St, torching cars in Nassau street, hospitalising cops and Charlie Bird. madness!”
I thought he was joking, but nope. A load of IRA-slogan-shouting scumbags really had been allowed to run riot — with paving stones of all things left unsecured in their midst! — and it quickly got way, way out of hand.
The blog coverage is excellent, with lots of photos. I suggest starting with Indymedia Ireland, these Flickr photos and the links on this weblog. It appears the gardai really fell down on this one.
For what it’s worth, I was in town a few hours later, and the rest of Dublin was trouble-free — just the usual Saturday night goings-on. O’Connell St. was still a rubble-strewn mess when I passed through on Sunday, though.
Good news. It appears that SourceForge are now offering full, public use of Subversion for all projects on sf.net!
The SourceForge.net: Subversion (Version Control for Source Code) document contains full details on their setup. Notable key points:
- It’s using authenticated HTTPS — which is great, going by my experiences with the ASF’s setup
- Imports are done from either an existing SF.net CVS repository using cvs2svn, from a Subversion ‘svnadmin dump’ file, or from a CVS repository tarball
- CIAbot support is offered as standard ;)
Awesome. I’ll be trying this out with Uffizi, which I registered as a Sourceforge project a few weeks ago just to try this out. ;)
Hooray! 
SpamAssassin has been voted DataMation Anti-Spam Product of the Year for 2006, earning three times as many votes as the next contender.
This is the second year in a row, which is fantastic — and our margin is increasing each year. ;)
Some news from TREC’s Gordon Cormack:
The TREC 2005 Corpus (92,000 messages – 42,000 ham; 50,000 spam) is now available for self-serve download.
TREC Spam Evaluation is a NIST program to develop methods to measure spam filter accuracy and performance. More details here.
The corpus can be picked up at Gordon’s site. As far as I can tell, this should be a pretty solid corpus for spam researchers and developers.
I don’t do silly blog antics much, but I got tagged by Mat for the Four Things meme. Looking around, it is indeed a bit more interesting than things like the usual LJ quiz, so why not!
I wrote this on the plane from LA to Dublin, which may have affected some of the selections in 4 places I would rather be right now at least ;)
4 jobs I’ve had:
I was Iona Technologies’ first employee, and stayed there for no less than 7 years. I got to see the company grow from a handful of people, most of whom weren’t getting paid (hence how I wound up as the first employee ;), all the way up to a 300-strong multinational, while the company itself formed a core of Ireland’s mini dot-com boom. That was fantastic fun, and educational to boot.
my Dad’s gun/fishing/sporting-goods shop. Was it really a good idea to have a teenager working near firearms? At least I wasn’t the one who unplugged the fridge where the maggots were kept, so that they all hatched over the course of one weekend…
A horrible teenage job — picking tomatoes. I can still feel the orange dust under my fingernails every time I smell fresh tomatoes :( I didn’t last very long at that at all.
writing an Amiga-based kiosk system for virtually no pay whatsoever, at the age of 18 or 19. Ah, exploitation.
4 movies I can watch over and over:
Koyaanisqatsi — it’s dating a little now, since every ad agency through the 90s ripped it off. But still, the invention of a new format. I remember looking at the 405 freeway in LA, and thinking “looks like something out of Koyaanisqatsi” — of course, it was.
Princess Mononoke — either that, or Nausicaa. I just love the way the characters are coloured in shades of grey, rather than black and white.
the Lord of the Rings trilogy — oh dear I’m a hopeless Tolkien fanboy.
Spinal Tap — pure genius.
4 places I’ve lived:
Melbourne, Australia; around the time of the annoying TV drama, The Secret Lives Of Us;
Newport Beach, CA; around the time of the annoying TV drama, The O.C.;
Dublin, Ireland; no annoying TV drama — so far
University of California Irvine, CA; while Irvine itself is the most soulless suburban hellhole I’ve ever visited, living on the UCI campus is quite fun by comparison. Take about 1000 grad students, post-docs and lecturers from around the world; put them all in the same square mile or so; remove all fun (and bars!) from the surrounding areas; watch them make their own entertainment, or go mad.
4 tv shows I love:
4 places I’ve vacationed:
Annapurna Base Camp, Nepal; we trekked our way up to there, then trekked back down again. Unforgettable. I really want to do another Nepal trek as a result
car-camping around the Australian state of Victoria; they have some fantastic national park campsites, which most tourists overlook
learning how to dive in Ko Tao, Thailand; great setting, great dive sites, pretty cheap too!
Yosemite; amazing, world-class natural beauty. Californians don’t realise just how lucky they’ve got it ;)
4 of my favourite dishes:
A good Thai green curry
Laos-style green papaya salad with sticky rice
a good meaty cassoulet, from Fandango in San Luis Obispo. At least, that was the tastiest meal I’ve had in recent months ;)
Mangosteen — the queen of fruit, according to the Thais. I could, and probably have, eaten hundreds of these
4 places I would rather be right now:
spending New Year’s Day with a bunch of friends in rural West Cork or County Galway; until I moved to the US, this was one of my favourite annual traditions.
the Stag’s Head Bar, Dublin, in the snug, again with a bunch of friends
sitting on the grass outside the Pavilion bar in TCD, on a sunny summer’s day (hmm, that’s a lot of bars!)
Chiang Mai, Thailand
4 sites I visit daily:
4 people I’m tagging:
Keith Dawson sent this on — an interview with Jim Gray, head of Microsoft’s Bay Area Research Center and winner of the ACM Turing Award, talking about new transmission systems for truly massive data collections. Very interesting:
[One] option is to send whole computers. …. We’re now into the 2-terabyte realm, so we can’t actually send a single disk; we need to send a bunch of disks. It’s convenient to send them packaged inside a metal box that just happens to have a processor in it. I know this sounds crazy — but you get an NFS or CIFS server and most people can just plug the thing into the wall and into the network and then copy the data.
Dave Patterson, interviewer: What’s the difference in cost between sending a disk and sending a computer?
JG: If I were to send you only one disk, the cost would be double — something like $400 to send you a computer versus $200 to send you a disk. But I am sending bricks holding more than a terabyte of data — and the disks are more than 50 percent of the system cost. Presumably, these bricks circulate and don’t get consumed by one use.
DP: Are you sending them a whole PC?
JG: Yes, an Athlon with a Gigabit Ethernet interface, a gigabyte of RAM, and seven 300-GB disks — all for about $3,000.
DP: It’s your capital cost to implement the Jim Gray version of “Netflicks.” (jm: sic)
JG: Right. We built more than 20 of these boxes we call TeraScale SneakerNet boxes. Three of them are in circulation. We have a dozen doing TeraServer work; we have about eight in our lab for video archives, backups, and so on. It’s real convenient to have 40 TB of storage to work with if you are a database guy. Remember the old days and the original eight-inch floppy disks? These are just much bigger.
DP: “Sneaker net” was when you used your sneakers to transport data?
JG: In the old days, sneaker net was the notion that you would pull out floppy disks, run across the room in your sneakers, and plug the floppy into another machine. This is just TeraScale SneakerNet. You write your terabytes onto this thing and ship it out to your pals. Some of our pals are extremely well connected — they are part of Internet 2, Virtual Business Networks (VBNs), and the Next Generation Internet (NGI). Even so, it takes them a long time to copy a gigabyte. Copy a terabyte? It takes them a very, very long time across the networks they have.
Boing Boing has an interesting case today:
“I filled out a web form for a contest from Miller using a throwaway junk email address and then, months after I dumped the throwaway account, I got this to my main account! Not sure I like the idea of companies tracking me down like this.”
I sent a mail to follow up on this, but it’s worth blogging here too.
This is, unfortunately, common practice among the “legitimate” bulk mailer companies; it’s called “e-pending” (short for “email address appending”). Basically, the advertiser contacts one of the big data-mining companies, provides them with the data they have about the customer — name, postal address, etc., and gets them to match that against their database; the data-miner then provides any other email addresses they may have on file for that user, even if those email addrs were provided for bills, promotional use for other companies, etc.
The advertisers contend that permission was given by the person who’s being mailed; the recipients contend that permission was given to send to a specific address, not all of that person’s addresses in perpetuity.
Here’s a few more examples of e-pending gone bad: two Jennifer Millers, Sony scraping ancient Internic contact addresses, Spamvertized.org comment on the practice, Joe St. Sauver comments.
It’s exclusively a US phenomenon, as far as I know; I think most cases of e-pending are rendered illegal under EU data protection law. Handy. ;)
Update: Brian at the Spam Kings weblog notes that ‘this spooky little spam was the work of Equifax, the big credit reporting agency that shut down its Boca Raton-based spam operation, Naviant, in 2003, due to the impending passage of CAN-SPAM.’
Perfect timing! Just 5 days before I return to Ireland, Damien Mulley posts ‘Broadband choices in Ireland’, a good overview of the options available for consumer broadband internet connection.
I’ve been out of the loop for quite a while, and spoilt by the options available in suburban Southern California (which are, of course, pretty good). But this is a lot better than what was on the table when I left, 3 years ago.
What strikes me is that the upload/download speeds are quite reasonable and pretty close to what you’d see in the US. Similarly, the prices are finally near to the going rate in the US, once the various limitations and add-ons (required ‘bundles’, state taxes etc.) are taken into consideration.
However, virtually all of these deals use the horrendous concept of download
capping! Given that I use this stuff for work, and routinely rsync around
30GB chunks of email corpora between central offices, colo servers, and my
desktop, this just won’t fly. It could be argued that I’m therefore not a
typical broadband consumer, who these deals have been carefully designed to
cater for. But seriously — if a telecommuting software developer isn’t a
typical broadband consumer, who the hell is? Hey telcos: a little flexibility
goes a long way — don’t fence me in. ;)
All in all, it looks like Smart Telecom are the winners; 3Mb/s download, 512Kb upload — and most importantly, no cap — for EUR 35 per month. (And check out that XHTML/WAI-compliant website!)
I probably would have gone with Irish Broadband, but for the past 6 months the only thing I’ve been hearing about them via word-of-mouth has been bad news, detailing customer service meltdown after meltdown. Even the legendarily incompetent ‘biddies’ of Eircom seem to be getting better reviews nowadays.
Talking of Eircon, our dear old dirty-tricks-wielding celtic-tiger-throttling incumbent telco: the top Sponsored Link on a Google search for irish broadband is:
Irish Broadband
www.eircom.ie — More speed, prices reduced by 25%, free modem & a free connection!
Scum.
AOL and Yahoo! have been making a lot of headlines with their plans to reduce their whitelist-management workload — and make a little pay-to-send money on the side — with a deal with Goodmail.
Now Spamhaus have gone on the record against the plan:
On Monday, Richard Cox, chief information officer at antispam organization Spamhaus, said that “an e-mail charge will destroy the spirit of the Internet.”
“The Internet has become what it is because of freedom of communication. Open discussion is what gives it value. There should be no cost for particular services, and e-mail should be free and accessible to all. This will disenfranchise people.”
This is what passports containing RFID chips will look like:
Note the little rectangular logo at the bottom. According to Ed Hasbrouck, that’s the ICAO standard logo indicating that this is an RFID passport, and therefore:
identity thieves, terrorists, direct marketers, data aggregators, malicious governments, or anyone else with a radio receiver within 10 meters (30+ feet) or more whenever your passport is read at a border crossing, airport, etc. can secretly and remotely track you, log your movements through the unique “collision avoidance” ID number sent by the chip, and intercept and decrypt all the data (including your digital photo and, in some countries, your digitized fingerprints) needed to “clone” a perfect copy of your passport, forge other identity credentials, or impersonate you.
Of relevance are the comments over at Bruce Schneier’s weblog entry regarding the Riscure research into the Dutch Biometric Passport’s lousy security.
Interestingly, as one commenter there notes, breaking the crypto may be overkill; the knowledge that a person is carrying a passport from a certain country, or set of countries, may be enough for certain attackers.
I asked the Irish Passport Office about their RFID plans last April:
I’m an Irish citizen and passport-holder. I have been following recent discussions in the US regarding the addition of RFID computer chips to US passports, and I note that the US Department of State is now indicating that this measure was made necessary due to recent International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) standards — namely ICAO Doc 9303.
As a result, since Ireland is a signatory to ICAO regulations, this raises the question as to whether Irish passports shall shortly include similar RFID or “contactless chip” technology.
Can you tell me:
if this is planned?
is there a mechanism for public comment on this process?
who could I further email to ask about this, if you do not know?
Disappointingly, I never received a reply. :( Someday I should really chase this up.
Update, Oct 17 2006: Well, they never bothered replying. They did, however, introduce RFID chips to Irish passports:
The chip technology allows the information stored in an Electronic Passport to be read by special chip readers at a close distance. The chip incorporates digital signature technology to verify the authenticity of the data stored on the chip.
Seeing as I’ve moved house, and am staying at a friend’s temporarily until I head back to .ie, internet access has become a bit of a problem. Hence, I’m posting this via some neighbour’s leeched wifi ;)
To do this, I came up with some seriously hacky IP infrastructure, to wit a repeater setup composed of two off-the-shelf router/NAT/AP boxes, since the signal is pretty weak and needed a boost to cover the useful parts of the house. If you’re curious. the details can be read over here.