taint.org: Justin Mason’s Weblog

Phishing in Irish : someone has gone to the trouble of translating the ‘Hang Seng Bank’ phish to Gaeilge. I would surmise that some phisher has a table of CCTLD-to-language mappings and is pasting their text into Google Translate before spamming their .ie address list. If only they knew how few people can read it!
(tags: irish gaeilge funny languages translation)

Buzz by analise torrez from Mobile : EPIC BURRITO THREAD demonstrating the true power of Google Buzz
(tags: burritos mmmm yum food lisey google-buzz epic)

2010 Irish Blog Awards Nominations : bloody hell, where did these all come from?! wow
(tags: blogs ireland blogging awards)

Search results for url:taint.org on Delicious : wow, you can search a time period for everyone who bookmarked pages on a specific site (via Britta)
(tags: delicious search nifty tools egosurfing via:britta)

Mindblowing Python GIL : ‘presentation about how the Python GIL actually works and why it’s even worse than most people even imagine.’ A good chunk btw could be rephrased as ‘pthreads is worse than most people even imagine’. pretty awful data, though
(tags: python gil locking synchronization ouch performance tuning coding interpreters threads pthreads)

RFC 5782 – DNS Blacklists and Whitelists : John Levine gets DNS*Ls standardized, at last. we should really check SpamAssassin to see if it’s compliant, I guess ;)
(tags: dnsbls anti-spam dnswl dnsbl rfcs standards via:fanf)

ElasticSearch : nifty; Apache-licensed distributed, RESTful, JSON-over-HTTP, schemaless search server with multi-tenancy
(tags: search distributed rest json apache elasticsearch http)

Chip and PIN is broken : Ross Anderson’s lab demo an attack on TV whereby any Chip-and-PIN debit card can be used in conjunction with a MITM device, with a PIN of “0000″, verified online, and producing a receipt saying “PIN Verified”. thoroughly hosed
(tags: security banking money chipandpin crypto ross-anderson)

Tethering with your O2.ie iPhone : well done O2, you’ve made it insanely complicated and marginally useless
(tags: tethering iphone o2 ireland wireless 3g tariffs telco)

How do we kick our synchronous addiction? : great post on the hazards of programming in an async framework, and how damn hard it is. good comments thread too (via jzawodny)
(tags: via:jzawodny coding python javascript scalability ruby concurrency erlang async node.js twisted)

PeteSearch: How to split up the US : wow. fascinating results from social-network cluster analysis of Facebook, splitting up the entire USA into 7 clusters
(tags: clusters facebook data statistics maps culture analytics datamining demographics socialnetworking graph dataviz)

Inside View from Ireland: Analysing Electronic Forensics Evidence : fascinating note from Bernie Goldbach: ‘MORE THAN 20 YEARS ago, I worked with message traffic and the work told me the importance of verifying source material.’
(tags: bernie spam anti-spam authentication spoofing security phishing)

Op-Ed Contributor – Microsoft’s Creative Destruction – NYTimes.com : MS internal politics routinely torpedoed cool new projects. surprise, surprise. ‘Engineers in the Windows group falsely claimed [ClearType] made the display go haywire when certain colors were used. The head of Office products said it was fuzzy and gave him headaches. The VP for pocket devices was blunter: he’d support ClearType and use it, but only if I transferred the program and the programmers to his control.’
(tags: cleartype microsoft software bureaucracy politics culture management corporate nytimes)

Dublin City Development Plan 2011-2017: Public Consultation – boards.ie : Dublin City Council is offering the ability to public consultation via a Boards forum. cool
(tags: boards dublin council consultation politics civic)

Trojan torrent sites – why you should never reuse passwords : ‘for a number of years, a person has been creating torrent sites that require a login and password as well as creating forums set up for torrent site usage and then selling these purportedly well-crafted sites and forums to other people innocently looking to start a download site of their very own. However, these sites came with a little extra — security exploits and backdoors throughout the system. This person then waited for the forums and sites to get popular and then used those exploits to get access to the username, email address, and password of every person who had signed up.’
(tags: passwords security torrents warning twitter accounts)

What Second Life can teach your datacenter about scaling Web apps : good scaling advice from Linden Labs’ Ian Wilkes (who doesn’t seem to have a blog, sadly)
(tags: linden ian-wilkes scaling datacenters scalability deployment ops services)

Lift View First : explaining Lift’s code-free “display only” templating system. I like it. Very similar concept to WebMake’s “scraped templates”: http://webmake.taint.org/doc/scraping.html , nearly 10 years old now!
(tags: java scala lift templates templating scraping)

Daily Links Posts from pinboard.in : hmm. may be one for the TODO list
(tags: pinboard tags blog wordpress rss links)

Ross Anderson and Steven J Murdoch rip into Verified By VISA : ‘this is yet another case where security economics trumps security engineering, but in a predatory way that leaves cardholders less secure.’
(tags: verified-by-visa security phishing web banks banking money authentication finance visa 3dsecure papers)

Spamalyser : a custom pastebin for spam messages. cool
(tags: spamalyser spam anti-spam paste pastebin web)