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Month: January 2009

Links for 2009-01-30

Published January 30, 2009

UK’s proposed anti-filesharing quango

Published January 30, 2009

Wow. The IFPI’s strategy of “divide and conquer” by taking individual ISPs to court to force them to institute a 3 strikes policy, as successfully deployed against Eircom this week, is possibly marginally better than this insane obsolete-business-model handout proposed by the UK government in their Digital Britain report:

Lord Carter of Barnes, the Communications Minister, will propose the creation of a quango, paid for by a charge that could amount to £20 a year per broadband connection.

The agency would act as a broker between music and film companies and internet service providers (ISPs). It would provide data about serial copyright-breakers to music and film companies if they obtained a court order. It would be paid for by a levy on ISPs, who inevitably would pass the cost on to consumers.

Jeremy Hunt, the Shadow Culture Secretary, said: “A new quango and additional taxes seem a bizarre way to stimulate investment in the digital economy. We have a communications regulator; why, when times are tough, should business have to fund another one?”

Well said. An incredibly bad idea.

By the way, I’ve noticed some misconceptions about the Eircom settlement. Telcos selling Eircom bitstream DSL (ie. the 2MB or 3MB DSL packages) are immune right now.

They are, however, next on the music industry’s hit-list, reportedly…

Links for 2009-01-29

Published January 29, 2009

Eircom forced to implement “3 strikes and you’re out” for filesharers

Published January 29, 2009

Eircom has been forced to implement “3 strikes and you’re out”, according to Adrian Weckler:

If the music labels come to it with IP addresses that they have identified as illegal file-sharers, Eircom will, in its own words:

“1) inform its broadband subscribers that the subscribers IP address has been detected infringing copyright and

“2) warn the subscriber that unless the infringement ceases the subscriber will be disconnected and

“3) in default of compliance by the subscriber with the warning it will disconnect the subscriber.”

My thoughts — it’s technically better than installing Audible Magic appliances to filter all outbound and inbound traffic, at least.

However, there’s no indication of the degree to which Eircom will verify the “proof” provided by the music labels, or that there’s any penalty for the labels when they accuse your laser printer of filesharing. I foresee a lot of false positives.

Update: LINX reports that the investigative company used will be Dtecnet, a ‘company that identifies copyright infringers by participating in P2P file-sharing networks’. TorrentFreak says:

DtecNet […] stems from the anti-piracy lobby group Antipiratgruppen, which represents the music and movie industry in Denmark. There are more direct ties to the music industry though. Kristian Lakkegaard, one of DtecNet’s employees, used to work for the RIAA’s global partner, IFPI. […]

Just like most (if not all) anti-piracy outfits, they simply work from a list of titles their client wishes to protect and then hunts through known file-sharing networks to find them, in order to track the IP addresses of alleged infringers.

Their software appears as a normal client in, for example, BitTorrent swarms, while collecting IP addresses, file names and the unique hash values associated with the files. All this information is filtered in order to present the allegations to the appropriate ISP, in order that they can send off a letter admonishing their own customer, in line with their commitments under the MoU.

[…] it will be a big surprise if [Dtecnet’s evidence is] of a greater ‘quality’ than the data provided by MediaSentry.

More coverage of the issues raised by the RIAA’s international lobbying for the 3-strikes penalty:

Links for 2009-01-28

Published January 28, 2009

Links for 2009-01-23

Published January 23, 2009

Links for 2009-01-21

Published January 21, 2009

Links for 2009-01-20

Published January 20, 2009

Switched to Magnet

Published January 20, 2009

I’ve switched my home broadband from Eircom’s 3Mbps all-in-one package to Magnet’s 10Mbps LLU package. It’s about a tenner a month cheaper, and significantly faster of course.

The modem arrived last Friday, about 2 weeks after ordering; that night, when I went to check my mail, I noticed that the DSL had gone down, and indeed so had the phone. I was dreading a weekend without the interwebs, it being 9pm on Friday night — but lo, when I plugged in the Magnet router, it all came up perfectly first time!

Great instructions too. Extremely readable and quite comprehensible for a reasonably non-techie person, I’d reckon. So far, they’ve provided great service, too.

I’m not actually getting the full 10Mbps, unfortunately; it’s RADSL, and I’m only getting 5Mbps when I test it. Just as well I didn’t pay the extra tenner to get their 24Mbps package. Still, that’s a hell of a lot faster than the sub-1Mbps speeds I’ve been getting from Eircom.

It’s hard to notice an effective difference when browsing though, as that kind of traffic is dominated by latency effects rather than throughput.

I haven’t even tried their “PCTV” digital TV system; it seems a bit pointless really, I have a networked PVR already, and anyway I doubt they support Linux.

One thing that’s wierd; when my wife attempts to view video on news.bbc.co.uk on her Mac running Firefox, it stalls with the spinny “loading video” image, and the status line claims that it’s downloading from “ad.doubleclick.net”. This worked fine (of course) on Eircom. If I switch to my user account and use Firefox there, it works fine, too — possible difference being that I’m using AdBlock Plus and she’s not. Something to do with the number of simultaneous TCP connections to multiple hosts, maybe? Very odd anyway. It’d be nice to get some time to sit down with tcpdump and figure this one out… any suggestions?

Links for 2009-01-19

Published January 19, 2009

Links for 2009-01-15

Published January 15, 2009

Google.ie HTTPS fail

Published January 15, 2009

Check out what happens when you visit https://www.google.ie/ :

Clicking through Firefox’s ridiculous hoops gets me these dialogs:

Good work, Google and Firefox respectively!

Links for 2009-01-14

Published January 14, 2009

Links for 2009-01-13

Published January 13, 2009

Hack: reassassinate

Published January 12, 2009

A coworker today, returning from a couple of weeks holiday, bemoaned the quantities of spam he had to wade through. I mentioned a hack I often used in this situation, which was to discard the spam and download the 2 weeks of supposed-nonspam as a huge mbox, and rescan it all with spamassassin — since the intervening 2 weeks gave us plenty of time for the URLs to be blacklisted by URIBLs and IPs to be listed by DNSBLs, this generally results in better spamfilter accuracy, at least in terms of reducing false negatives (the “missed spam”). In other words, it gets rid of most of the remaining spam nicely.

Chatting about this, it occurred to us that it’d be easy enough to generalize this hack into something more widely useful by hooking up the Mail::IMAPClient CPAN module with Mail::SpamAssassin, and in fact, it’d be pretty likely that someone else would already have done so.

Sure enough, a search threw up this node on perlmonks.org, containing a script which did pretty much all that. Here’s a minor freshening: download

reassassinate – run SpamAssassin on an IMAP mailbox, then reupload

Usage: ./reassassinate –user jmason –host mail.example.com –inbox INBOX –junkfolder INBOX.crap

Runs SpamAssassin over all mail messages in an IMAP mailbox, skipping ones it’s processed before. It then reuploads the rewritten messages to two locations depending on whether they are spam or not; nonspam messages are simply re-saved to the original mailbox, spam messages are sent to the mailbox specified in “–junkfolder”.

This is especially handy if some time passed since the mails were originally delivered, allowing more of the message contents of spam mails to be blacklisted by third-party DNSBLs and URIBLs in the meantime.

Prerequisites:

  • Mail::IMAPClient
  • Mail::SpamAssassin

Links for 2009-01-09

Published January 9, 2009

Links for 2009-01-08

Published January 8, 2009

  • Map/Reduce and Queues for MySQL using Gearman : A talk by Eric Day and Brian Aker at the upcoming MySQL Conference in April: ‘[Gearman] development is now active again with an optimized rewrite in C, along with features such as persistent message queues, queue replication, improved statistics, and advanced job monitoring. For MySQL, there is also a new user defined function to run Gearman jobs, as well as the possibility to write your own aggregate UDFs using Gearman. This gives you the ability to run functions in separate processes, separate servers, and in other languages. The Gearman framework gives you a robust interface to also run these functions reliably in the “cloud”. This session will introduce these concepts and give examples of sample applications.’ Persistent queues (at last)? Gearman integration directly in the DB? excellent!
    (tags: gearman queueing mysql databases brian-aker mapreduce sql conferences talks papers)

Links for 2009-01-07

Published January 7, 2009

Links for 2009-01-06

Published January 6, 2009

Links for 2009-01-02

Published January 2, 2009

Links for 2009-01-02

Published January 2, 2009