Online censorship now bordering on the ridiculous in Turkey – Reporters Without Borders : ‘access to websites containing words on the list would in theory be suspended and it would be impossible to create new ones containing them. However, it is not clear how and to what extent the directive will be implemented in practice. The TIB could decide to suppress or block pages for just one blacklisted word. … The list, which borders on the ridiculous, includes words such as “etek” (skirt), “baldiz” (sister-in-law) and “hayvan” (animals). It poses serious problems for access to online information. If words such as “free” and “pic” are censored, countless references to freedom and everyday photos will be eliminated from the Turkish Internet.’ Incredible (via Danny)
(tags: via:mala repression internet turkey censorship filtering false-positives)
Month: April 2011
Yahoo Sells Delicious To YouTube Founders : ‘Q: Will AVOS maintain the Delicious service with all of its functionality A: Yes, that’s the plan. There may be a time of adjustment as AVOS re-launches Delicious, but the company’s intention is to add new features and grow the service overall.’
(tags: avos yahoo delicious acquisitions)Linux Profiling tools and techniques : great tips for system-level and app-level profiling on Linux from Padraig
(tags: profiling optimization linux cache valgrind)
SmugMug’s Don MacAskill on last week’s EBS outage : comme il faut
(tags: EBS outages aws smugmug)LRB · James Meek · In the Sorting Office : ‘The postwoman is paid a pittance to deliver corporate mail. She hasn’t done her job well, yet so few people have complained about missed deliveries that she hasn’t been found out. Across the world, postal services are being altered like this: optimised to deliver the maximum amount of unwanted mail at the minimum cost to businesses. In the internet age private citizens are sending less mail than they used to, but that’s only part of the story of postal decline. The price of driving down the cost of bulk mailing for a handful of big organisations is being paid for by the replacement of decently paid postmen with casual labour and the erosion of daily deliveries.’ (via Tony Finch)
(tags: via:fanf post mail postal-service holland dutch postmen work jobs business politics lrb)Amazon EC2 outage: summary and lessons learned : Rightscale CTO on last week’s outage; pretty detailed, good round-up of useful commentary from around the web, too
(tags: ebs ec2 aws cloud availability slas rightscale amazon)Dropbox dedupe feature allows materialization of any file, if you know its hash : ‘allows users to exploit Dropbox’s file hashing scheme to copy files into their account without actually having them. Dropship will save the hashes of a file in JSON format. Anyone can then take these hashes and load the original file into their Dropbox account using Dropship.’ heh. that sounds very familiar, I seem to recall thinking about this problem on several occasions… ;) Dropbox certainly didn’t like it, going by this account
(tags: security filesharing dropbox online-backup online-storage p2p hashes sha dmca)Hacker News comments thread on the Dropbox dedupe bug : some good discussion on workarounds
(tags: dropbox hashes p2p filesharing tech security sha)DuoSecurity : well-packaged, well-designed, two-factor auth for SSH from Dug Song. free for small-scale use, too, it looks like. awesome! I’ve signed up (via Nelson)
(tags: via:nelson security authentication authorization two-factor-auth openssh ssh dug-song)
Dylan Collins asks: has Ireland peaked as an Internet hub? : based on Twitter’s surprise move passing over Dublin for London, and how to fix it: “launch the Internet Visa, an aggressive program that allows all Irish Internet companies to recruit from anywhere in the world. Reduce the red tape (combine all permit and visa documentation), guarantee a turnaround time measured in days (a small number) and avoid all the mistakes the UK has made with its Startup Visa initiative. Bring the talent from everywhere outside the EU to Ireland. Ireland doesn’t scale organically. So it needs to in-source. We need to be honest about our shortcomings and tackle them with something which will make HR Directors smile. Imagine a country with all the existing advantages of Ireland plus the ability to hire anyone in the world you wanted. Who in their right mind wouldn’t establish their European base there?” He’s dead right, this is a massive problem for the Irish tech industry right now
(tags: ireland bureaucracy red-tape twitter tech business visas work government dylan-collins)Bug 647959 – Add Honest Achmed’s root certificate to Mozilla : ‘Honest Achmed is at least more honest than Comodo.’ lol
(tags: comodo security security-theatre ssl tls certificates funny trust firefox)
demerphq on “perl’s regexps are slow” : His classic response to the Russ Cox DFA-over-NFA regular expressions paper. ‘A general purpose regex engine like that required for perl has to be able to do a lot, and has to balance considerations ranging from memory footprint of a compiled object, construction time, flexibility, rich feature-sets, the ability to accomodate huge character sets, and of course most importantly matching performance. And it turns out that while DFA engines have a very good worst case match time, they dont actually have too many other redeeming features. Construction can be extremely slow, the memory footprint vast, all kinds of trickery is involved to do unicode or capturing properly and they aren’t suitable for patterns with backreferences.’ — Also interesting to note that he mentions an approach I’ve used in several SpamAssassin speedup add-ons, too ;)
(tags: performance perl regular-expressions perlmonks demerphq regexps dfa nfa state-machines)
This sounds very cool! Nice one, hackerspace ppl.
Ireland’s Hackerspaces and Makerspaces (091 Labs – Galway, Belfast Hackerspace, MilkLabs – Limerick, Nexus Cork and TOG – Dublin) have been asked to build and man a temporary hackerspace during the MindField – International Festival of Ideas (http://www.mindfield.ie/). MindField will take place over the weekend of 29 April – 1 May in Merrion Square.
During MindField our temporary hackerspace will provide a range of events where festival participants can learn about diybio, 3D printing, basic electronics and micro controllers, electronic fashion/crafting and open data. These events are included in the festival schedule (http://mindfield.ie/festival-schedul/).
In parallel with these events we have an opportunity run a Hardware Hacking Challenge. In this challenge we will try to engage a group of willing hacker, makers and festival participants in the challenge to create or construct interesting or innovative projects out of recycled hardware. We are trying to source interesting materials, electronic devices or equipment that can be used to based projects off or as sources of components.
We are particularly interested in devices that contain various types of transducers which can then be hooked up to micro controllers and computers. We’re not looking for normal computer equipment or servers we’ve got lots of that, but more unusual stuff that people have lying around.
If you think you’ve got something they might like, contact Robert Fitzsimons.
brandnewretro | scans from the past : a mate of mine, scanning Irish cultural artifacts from Ireland in the ’70s and ’80s. fanzines!
(tags: fanzines irish ireland history 1980s 1970s dundalk culture scans)Pound : ‘a reverse proxy, load balancer and HTTPS front-end for Web server(s). Pound was developed to enable distributing the load among several Web-servers and to allow for a convenient SSL wrapper for those Web servers that do not offer it natively. Pound is distributed under the GPL’
(tags: https ssl http proxy web pound reverse-proxy)What is Facebook’s architecture? – Quora : nicely detailed summary
(tags: quora architecture facebook http web websites)How Little Sleep Can You Get Away With? : ‘after just a few days, the four- and six-hour group reported that, yes, they were slightly sleepy. But they insisted they had adjusted to their new state. Even 14 days into the study, they said sleepiness was not affecting them. In fact, their performance had tanked. In other words, the sleep-deprived among us are lousy judges of our own sleep needs. We are not nearly as sharp as we think we are.’
(tags: sleep rest brain science neuroscience)
Permanent TSB’s tracker-mortgage paydown option isn’t such a good deal after all : ‘it might be in your interest if you have a tracker mortgage and are unable to get a better rate of interest on the €5,000 that you are being tempted to repay PTSB. You can get up to 4.2% from PTSB deposit accounts, 9.7% from 10-year Irish sovereign bonds, 9% from residential property. Yet PTSB is prepared to give you less than a measly 2% over a five year period on your €5,000 repayment.’
(tags: ptsb permanent-tsb finance money mortgages tracker-mortgage investment)This Bacteria is Violating Copyright | tor.com | Science fiction and fantasy | Blog posts : the Joyce estate playing their usual role. ‘are we now nearing a point where copyright law can result in the retraction of a life form?’ (via John Looney)
(tags: copyright dna bacteria james-joyce joyce-estate frivolous lawsuits copyfight craig-venter)Virgin and NTL filtering fail : ‘Virgin and NTL [in the UK] blocked [del.icio.us] for years’ due to a false positive — joshua
(tags: del.icio.us false-positives filtering uk isps virgin ntl fail via:hackernews)
Nelson Minar on map tiles : quite a lot of detail into the prevailing state of the art in how online zoomable maps store their tiles
(tags: mapping maps google-maps nelson reference tiling storage)pyflakes.vim – on-the-fly Python code checking in Vim : Vim gets a good IDE feature. ‘highlights common Python errors like misspelling a variable name on the fly. It also warns about unused imports, redefined functions, etc.’
(tags: ide vim python programming via:preddit coding)
Rumor: Google “Disgusted” With Record Labels : ‘Once again, Warner is the fly in the ointment, the same company that praises Spotify one day, renews their licenses for the rest of the world and then the next day doesn’t want to license them in the US.’
(tags: google music cloud licensing music-industry record-labels warner-music streaming)
Dublin – Europe’s Next Startup Petri Dish? – NYTimes.com : ‘Ireland’s tech scene continues to expand in spite of the woeful state of the rest of the economy with a plethora of accelerator programs, seed funds and events like Founders and the IBM smartcamp global finals happening there in the last year or two. ‘
(tags: ireland tech software startups)