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Author: Justin

Justin Mason, the author of this weblog.

Fixing the Gmail Tasks window bug

Published February 13, 2009

Hey Gmail users! If you’re using Tasks, there’s a slightly annoying bug in Gmail right now — you may see the “Use this link to open Tasks” tip window appear every time you access the inbox page.

Several other people have reported it, and apparently the Google guys are ‘working to resolve it’ at the moment. In the meantime, though, here’s a way to work around the issue without losing Tasks (you will, unfortunately, lose the offline-gmail functionality, though). Simply disable Offline Gmail (Settings -> Offline -> “Disable Offline Gmail for this computer”), and the bug no longer manifests itself.

You can allow Gmail to keep the stored mail on your computer if you like, which will be handy for when the bug is fixed and Offline can be re-enabled — hopefully sooner rather than later.

2 Comments

Continuous deployment

Published February 12, 2009

This is awesome, if a little insane. Continuous Deployment at IMVU: Doing the impossible fifty times a day:

Continuous Deployment means running all your tests, all the time. That means tests must be reliable. We’ve made a science out of debugging and fixing intermittently failing tests. When I say reliable, I don’t mean “they can fail once in a thousand test runs.” I mean “they must not fail more often than once in a million test runs.” We have around 15k test cases, and they’re run around 70 times a day. That’s a million test cases a day. Even with a literally one in a million chance of an intermittent failure per test case we would still expect to see an intermittent test failure every day. It may be hard to imagine writing rock solid one-in-a-million-or-better tests that drive Internet Explorer to click ajax frontend buttons executing backend apache, php, memcache, mysql, java and solr. I am writing this blog post to tell you that not only is it possible, it’s just one part of my day job.

OK, so far, so sensible. But this is where it gets really hairy:

Back to the deploy process, nine minutes have elapsed and a commit has been greenlit for the website. The programmer runs the imvu_push script. The code is rsync’d out to the hundreds of machines in our cluster. Load average, cpu usage, php errors and dies and more are sampled by the push script, as a basis line. A symlink is switched on a small subset of the machines throwing the code live to its first few customers. A minute later the push script again samples data across the cluster and if there has been a statistically significant regression then the revision is automatically rolled back. If not, then it gets pushed to 100% of the cluster and monitored in the same way for another five minutes. The code is now live and fully pushed. This whole process is simple enough that it’s implemented by a handfull of shell scripts.

Mental. So what we’ve got here is:

  • phased rollout: automated gradual publishing of a new version to small subsets of the grid.

  • stats-driven: rollout/rollback is controlled by statistical analysis of error rates, again on an automated basis.

Worth noting some stuff from the comments. MySQL schema changes break this system:

Schema changes are done out of band. Just deploying them can be a huge pain. Doing an expensive alter on the master requires one-by-one applying it to our dozen read slaves (pulling them in and out of production traffic as you go), then applying it to the master’s standby and failing over. It’s a two day affair, not something you roll back from lightly. In the end we have relatively standard practices for schemas (a pseudo DBA who reviews all schema changes extensively) and sometimes that’s a bottleneck to agility. If I started this process today, I’d probably invest some time in testing the limits of distributed key value stores which in theory don’t have any expensive manual processes.

They use an interesting two-phased approach to publishing of the deploy file tree:

We have a fixed queue of 5 copies of the website on each frontend. We rsync with the “next” one and then when every frontend is rsync’d we go back through them all and flip a symlink over.

All in all, this is very intriguing stuff, and way ahead of most sites. Cool!

(thanks to Chris for the link)

4 Comments

Config management as cookery

Published February 11, 2009

interesting to see Chef, a configuration management framework using cooking as a metaphor.

Back in the early ’90s in Iona, I wrote a user/group synchronization tool called “greenpages” which used a cooking metaphor; “spice” (data) was added to “raw” (template) files to produce “cooked” output. Great minds, eh!

2 Comments

IR book recommendation

Published February 9, 2009

Thanks to Pierce for pointing me at this review of an interesting-sounding book called Introduction to Information Retrieval. The book sounds quite useful, but I wanted to pick out a particularly noteworthy quote, on compression:

One benefit of compression is immediately clear. We need less disk space.

There are two more subtle benefits of compression. The first is increased use of caching … With compression, we can fit a lot more information into main memory. [For example,] instead of having to expend a disk seek when processing a query … we instead access its postings list in memory and decompress it … Increased speed owing to caching — rather than decreased space requirements — is often the prime motivator for compression.

The second more subtle advantage of compression is faster transfer data from disk to memory … We can reduce input/output (IO) time by loading a much smaller compressed posting list, even when you add on the cost of decompression. So, in most cases, the retrieval system runs faster on compressed postings lists than on uncompressed postings lists.

This is something I’ve been thinking about recently — we’re getting to the stage where CPU speed has so far outstripped disk I/O speed and network bandwidth, that pervasive compression may be worthwhile. It’s simply worth keeping data compressed for longer, since CPU is cheap. There’s certainly little point in not compressing data travelling over the internet, anyway.

On other topics, it looks equally insightful; the quoted paragraphs on Naive Bayes and feature selection algorithms are both things I learned myself, “in the field”, so to speak, working on classifiers — I really should have read this book years ago I think ;)

The entire book is online here, in PDF and HTML. One to read in that copious free time…

5 Comments

Good reasons to host inelastically on EC2

Published February 9, 2009

Recently, there’s been a bit of discussion online about whether or not it makes sense for companies to host server infrastructure at Amazon EC2, or on traditional colo infrastructure. Generally, these discussions have focussed on one main selling point of EC2: its elasticity, the ability to horizontally scale the number of server instances at a moment’s notice.

If you’re in a position to gain from elasticity, that’s great. But it is still worth noting that even if you aren’t in that position, there’s another good reason to host at an EC2-like cloud; if you want to deploy another copy of the app, either from a different version-control branch (dev vs staging vs production deployments), or to run separate apps with customizations for different customers. These aren’t scaling an existing app up, they’re creating new copies of the app, and EC2 works nicely to do this.

If you can deploy a set of servers with one click from a source code branch, this is entirely viable and quite useful.

Another reason: EC2-to-S3 traffic is extremely fast and cheap compared to external-to-S3. So if you’re hosting your data on S3, EC2 is a great way to crunch on it efficiently. Update: Walter observed this too on the backend for his Twitter Mosaic service.

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Ice Cycling

Published February 6, 2009

I seem to have invented a new extreme sport on the way into work: Ice Cycling. The roads were like an ice-skating rink. Scary stuff :(

Here’s some advice for anyone in the same boat:

  • use a high gear: avoid using low gear if possible, even when starting off. Low revs mean you’re more likely to get traction.

  • try to avoid turns: keep the bike as upright as possible.

  • try to avoid braking: braking is very likely to start a skid in icy conditions.

  • use busy roads: where the ice has been melted by car traffic. In icy conditions, you should ride where the cars have been, since they’ll have melted the ice.

  • ride away from the gutters: they’re more likely to be iced over than the centre of a lane. Again, ride where the cars have been.

  • avoid road markings: it seems these were much icier than the other parts of the road; possibly because their high albedo meant the ice on them hadn’t been melted by the sun yet. So look out for that.

Here’s a good thread on cyclechat.co.uk, and don’t miss icebike.org: ‘Whether commuting to work, or just out for a romp in the woods, you arrive feeling very alive, refreshed, and surrounded with the aura of a cycling god. You will be looked upon with the smile of respect by friends and co-workers. – – – Or was that the sneer of derision…no matter, ICEBIKING is a blast!’ o-kay.

Their recommendations are pretty sane, though. ;)

6 Comments

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…

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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:

4 Comments

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?

10 Comments

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!

3 Comments

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
3 Comments

Listening to music over wifi?

Published December 16, 2008

Hey lazyweb! Long time, no write.

I’m wondering what setup people use to deal with the following situation. Upstairs, I have an Ubuntu 8.04 server with 71GB of MP3s. Downstairs, I have a stereo system. In between the two is a wireless network. How can I listen to the music downstairs, without simply copying the lot (or subsets thereof) onto a local disk on some appliance down there?

Currently, I’m using a VNC client on a Nokia 770 to control a JuK window on the server. This works great, believe it or not! KDE 3 can be coaxed into providing a fantastic UI for a small touchscreen. This then uses Pulseaudio to transmit the sound output using the ESD protocol over TCP to the ESD server on the N770, and the N770 plays back the sound.

Until a few months ago, this worked great. However, something (either hardware changes, network topology changes, or an upgrade to Ubuntu 8.04 on the server) has resulted in effective bitrates between the server and the N770 dropping frequently — hence the audio drops out or changes pitch, rendering it unlistenable :(

I’ve tried using UPNP servers (specifically mediatomb, ushare, and Twonkymedia), with the built-in Media Streamer app on the N770. All fail. MP3s cut off near the end, M3U playlists aren’t supported, and sometimes Media Streamer just locks up. In addition it’s pretty messy trying to get the UPNP servers to notice changes to the MP3 collection.

I’ve also tried using Squeezecenter (nee Slimserver), but the MP3 stream playback support on the N770 is pretty atrocious; there are audible decoding artifacts.

So — anyone got a suggestion? Even something involving iTunes might be helpful — as long as it can at least preserve the Linux server. I’m unlikely to host the full MP3 collection on anything else…

16 Comments

Recession Hits The Digital Depot

Published November 26, 2008

The Digital Depot is ‘an innovative, state-of-the-art building specifically designed to meet the needs of fast growing digital media companies […] developed as a joint initiative of Enterprise Ireland, Dublin City Council and The Digital Hub Development Agency.’ Generally, it’s a pretty nice place to work, and a great resource for startups and small tech companies.

However, recently, it looks like they’ve been embarking on some innovative, state-of-the-art cost-cutting exercises.

There’s a little canteen area, for companies to make tea and coffee, wash up their mugs, etc. Check out this snapshot from the canteen this morning, courtesy of JK’s phone cam:

Notice anything odd about that bottle of washing-up liquid?

Yum yum! Nothing nicer than washing your mug with a dash of toilet cleaner.

2 Comments

Dumb eco-questions you were afraid to ask

Published November 19, 2008

New Scientist have a great article up this week entitled ‘Dumb eco-questions you were afraid to ask’, including:

Q: Does switching from bus to bike really have any effect? After all, cycling isn’t completely carbon neutral because I’ve got to eat to fuel my legs.

A: You are much better off cycling. A 12-kilometre round commute on a bus or subway train is reckoned to generate 164 kilograms of carbon per commuter per year. Somebody cycling that distance would burn about 50,000 calories a year – roughly the amount of energy in 22 kilograms of brown bread. A kilo of brown bread has a carbon footprint of about 1.1 kilograms, so switching from public transport to a bike saves about 140 kilograms of carbon emissions per year — although this only really works if enough people cycle to allow public transport providers to reduce the number of buses and trains they run.

Also included: ‘How clean does the pizza box/can/bottle have to be for it to be recyclable?’; ‘Are laminated juice cartons recyclable?’; ‘What’s worse, the CO2 put out by a gas-fuelled car or the environmental effects of hybrid-car batteries?’; ‘Can I put window envelopes in the paper recycling?’ and many more. Check it out…

Comments closed

VisitWicklow.ie: Spammers

Published November 17, 2008

I think I just got my first spam from a government body! Specifically, VisitWicklow.ie spam from Wicklow County Tourism. It says:

Wicklow County Tourism is launching its sparkling 2008 Christmas campaign this month, with an extensive festive section on our website www.visitwicklow.ie/xmas . Here you will find all the information you need about what is happening in the Garden County this season including Christmas parties, seasonal events, carol singing, festive markets, Santa visits, great accommodation packages etc.

It was sent to a spamtrap address, scraped from an old mail archive. This address is a dedicated spamtrap; I’ve never used it for non-spam-trapping purposes, nor has it ever opted-in to receive mail. So there was no question that I granted permission to anyone to mail it.

The address delivers mail to my personal account — that’s what I do with my spamtraps, until their volumes get too high. So it still qualifies as a “personal email address”. Here’s the full spam with all headers intact.

It appears the message originated at IP address 87.192.126.62:

inetnum:        87.192.126.32 - 87.192.126.63
netname:        IBIS-PA-NET
descr:          BreezeMax-KilpooleHill-Comm-E 3MB 24:1 (2)
country:        IE
admin-c:        IRA6-RIPE
tech-c:         IRA6-RIPE
status:         Assigned PA
remarks:        Please do NOT send abuse complaints to the contacts listed.
remarks:        Please check remarks on individual inetnum records for abuse contacts, or
remarks:        failing that email abuse reports to [email protected].
mnt-by:         IBIS-MNT
source:         RIPE # Filtered

Kilpoole Hill appears to be south of Wicklow town, just the right spot for a wireless tower used for Irish Broadband access from The Murrough, Wicklow Town (mentioned as the address for Wicklow County Tourism in the mail).

Suggestions? Did anyone else get this? How do I report spam sent by the Wicklow County Tourism Board?

Update: they also hit the Irish Linux User’s Group submission address. I wouldn’t be surprised if they scraped the addresses of other ILUG subscribers, then…

13 Comments

Déjà Joué

Published November 11, 2008

James Tauber just mentioned on Twitter:

“is it bad that I just saw a photo of Stockholm and immediately recognized a stretch of road from PGR2, rather than when I was actually there?”

This is something I’ve been thinking about recently. As game graphics improve, the realism levels become close enough to fool our brains into creating something like “real-world” memories for the worlds we’re experiencing in gameplay.

For example, when I visited California for the first time, I was stunned by the feelings of familiarity I felt in response to stuff I’d experienced while playing the super-realistic Grand Theft Auto: Vice City; little things like the way traffic lights were mounted above the road, the design of the curbs, etc., the level of detail for which Rockstar received a “Designer of the Year” nomination — because of this, the streetscape of a typical Californian street was instantly familiar to me.

The same thing happened this weekend, watching footage on TV of Arizona’s Monument Valley. Naturally, I’ve driven a dirt bike around Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas‘ version of this. ;)

Update: another one is the Pripyat level of Call of Duty 4, which would be extremely familiar to anyone viewing these photos from a real-life visit.

I think this phenomenon needs its own name. “déjà vu” is similar, but different — that phenomenon occurs when the memory feels erroneously that an experience has previously happened, whereas in this case, the experience has happened — albeit virtually.

I’ve come up with a phrase to describe this: “déjà joué”. (In French, that’s “already played”, analogous to the “already seen” of “déjà vu”.)

What do you reckon? If you like it, feel free to use it ;)

11 Comments

IBM’s ZTIC

Published November 6, 2008

IBM Zone Trusted Information Channel (ZTIC) — ‘a banking server’s display on your keychain’.

IBM has introduced the Zone Trusted Information Channel (ZTIC), a hardware device that can counter [malware attacks on online banking] in an easy-to-use way. The ZTIC is a USB-attached device containing a display and minimal I/O capabilities that runs the full TLS/SSL protocol, thus entirely bypassing the PC’s software for all security functionality.

The ZTIC achieves this by registering itself as a USB Mass Storage Device (thus requiring no driver installation) and starting a “pass-through” proxy configured to connect with pre-configured (banking) Websites. After starting the ZTIC proxy, the user opens a Web browser to establish a connection with the bank’s Website via the ZTIC. From that moment on, all data transmitted between browser and server pass through the ZTIC; the SSL session is protected by keys maintained only on the ZTIC and, hence, is inaccessible to malware on the PC […].

In addition, all critical transaction information, such as target account numbers, is automatically detected in the data stream between browser and ZTIC. This critical information is then displayed on the ZTIC for explicit user confirmation: Only after pressing the “OK” button does the TLS/SSL connection continue. If any malware on the PC has inserted incorrect transaction data into the browser, it can be easily detected by the user at this moment.

This seems like quite a nice implementation, I think.

However, key management will be problematic. Each server’s public key will need to be stored on the ZTIC, and not be writable/modifiable by the possibly-infected PC, otherwise the “bad guys” could simply insert a cert for a malware proxy server on the PC and perform a man-in-the-middle attack on the TLS session. But for that to be viable, the SSL certs need to change very infrequently, or some new secure procedure to update the certs from a “safe” machine needs to be put in place. Tricky….

6 Comments

Linux: It Just Works

Published November 3, 2008

Here’s a nice little (totally subjective!) story for Linux users.

At home, I have a HP Laserjet 1018 printer; it’s a dinky little USB laser. When I was setting up my Mac running OSX, I attempted to use it.

A common refrain from Mac users is that MacOS X just works — attempt to get something working, and the Mac will do the right thing with little friction, compared to the Linux situation which will involve complex config file editing and what-not. If this experience is anything to go by, that’s not entirely the case anymore. In fact, the exact opposite applied; when I plugged the printer into the Linux box and ran System -> Administration -> Printing -> New Printer, it “just worked” and I wound up with a working network printer within seconds. No such luck with OSX. Some googling revealed the problem:

In summary, the LJ1018 is just not supported on MacOS X. In order to get it working you need to install a third-party port of the Linux printing components foo2zjs, Foomatic, and Ghostscript, ported to MacOS X, and then get busy with the config file editing and undocumented tweaking and what-not. Ouch.

So there you go. Linux: it just works! ;)

(By the way, I was able to work around it by printing from the Mac to the Linux print server in Postscript; the CUPS print server will transcode PS to the native format.)

11 Comments

The horror! the horror!

Published October 28, 2008

Dead Space came out last week, just in time for Hallowe’en. It’s a survival-horror first-person shooter, set in space:

In the bold and often-bloody Dead Space, gamers step into a third-person sci-fi survival horror experience that delivers psychological thrills and gruesome action. Set in the cold blackness of deep space, the atmosphere is soaked with a feeling of tension, dread and sheer terror. In Dead Space, players step into the role of engineer Isaac Clarke – an ordinary man on a seemingly routine mission to fix the communications systems aboard a deep space mining ship. It is not long before Isaac awakes to a living nightmare when he learns that the ship’s crew has been ravaged by a vicious alien infestation. He must fight through the dead silence and darkness of deep space to stay alive.

I absolutely love this genre. If you ask me, Resident Evil 4 is one of the best games ever written; perfectly paced, with some truly terrifying villains, plot twists and tension-laden surprises along the way. There’s no experience in computer gaming quite so viscerally terrifying as the first time you hear Dr. Salvador’s chainsaw revving up in the distance, while trapped in a farmhouse under siege from an army of blood-crazed cultists…

So I got Dead Space last Friday, and have been playing it over the weekend; it’s good. Problem is, it’s not as good as RE4, but then, when you’re up against the best game ever, that’s going to be hard to avoid. Actually, to be honest, the first couple of stages feel very reminiscent of RE4, tending towards derivative. Stage 3, however, comes into its own, with flavours of Aliens. Fingers crossed the upward trend continues…

Reading the comments on a Slashdot thread about the game, I came across this tip:

Call of Cthulhu (Score:5, Informative)

I’d say this is the last game that scared the shit out of me. The fact that you don’t have any health bar, and that your vision, hearing, and even your heartbeat and breathing pace are affected by the situation can really frighten you. I don’t think this game got enough credit. I still haven’t finished the game yet.

Here’s a nice 10 minute video that gives you the general feeling of the whole game. (minus the 320×240 resolution and lossy quality of course). If you get bored skip to the middle.

The video is pretty compelling, so I did some research. It seems the game is still playable on XBox360, albeit with some wonky sound samples during dialogue. Sounds ok to me. I went onto eBay, and was able to find a copy for 8 UK pounds. bargain!

When I twittered about this, I got these responses:

Me: “Call of Cthulhu” 2005 Xbox title, apparently one of the most terrifying games ever written: 8 UK quid on eBay. woot.

Myles at 2:00pm October 23: You won’t be saying woot when your sanity dwindles and you gnaw off your own fingers in an attempt to protect yourself from the Great Old One. [a fair point]

Andrew at 6:56pm October 23: Have you ever played Eternal Darkness for the Gamecube? Really really creepy, and as close to Cthulhu as you can get without paying royalties.

Síofra at 9:06pm October 23: Eternal Darkness – feckin’ brilliant. My first videogame addiction and I remember it fondly. The darkness comes….

So I looked up Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem, too. check this review out:

Resident Evil, this game is most absolutely not. What it is, however, to dedicated players who fully explore its length and intricacies, is one of GameCube’s absolute best games, and indeed one of the greatest titles we’ve ever played. […]

There are insanity effects — hallucinations that have a major role within the game. […] if a character’s sanity bar drops too low, strange things will begin to happen. Very strange things sometimes. These occurrences are sure to set the dark mood of the adventure and have an impact on the play experience. Going insane too much can create unwanted obstacles for players and in doing so may also endanger one’s health and magick supplies. Some of the insanity effects we’ve encountered have proven very disturbing. Some even attempt to pick at the mind of the player outside of the game universe.

Apparently the walls drip with blood when you start losing your mind. Awesome! IGN gave the game 9.6 out of 10, Metacritic gives it 9th position, 92/100, “universal acclaim”, on the all-time high scores list for the Gamecube, and of course, it’s playable on the Wii.

Rosco has already promised I can borrow his copy. Sign me up! Looks like I’ll be scaring the crap out of myself for a while to come…

4 Comments

the on-demand Windows desktop

Published October 24, 2008

A few days ago, Amazon announced that they would be supporting Windows on EC2. IMO, you’d have to be mad to dream of running a server on that platform, so I was totally like “meh”.

However, James Murty pointed out the perfect use case that I’d missed:

Although I much prefer “Unixy” platforms for my own development, I can imagine situations where it would be very handy to have a Windows machine easily available — such as for running those vital but irritating programs that are only made available for Windows. Australian Tax Office, I’m looking at you…

He’s spot on! This is a great use case. If you need to do a little ‘doze work, a quick recompile, or a connect to another stupid platform-limited service — indeed, like the Irish tax office’s Revenue Online Service, for that matter — simply fire up a ‘doze instance, do your hour’s work, SDelete any private files, and shut it down again. All of that will cost 12.5 cents.

This will save me a lot of pain with VMWare, I suspect…

More techie details at RightScale; a trial run.

5 Comments

Switch, ep. 3: revert!

Published October 23, 2008

So, that OSX thing. I’m afraid I’ve given up on the switch; I’m back on Linux. :(

I got the keyboard mapping working, but Focus-Follows-Mouse and the couple of window-management hotkeys I rely on were impossible to work around.

Focus-Follows-Mouse is emulated by iTerm, but every time you switch to an X11 app or to Firefox, a click is required. This app-specific behaviour is jarring and inconsistent.

For some reason, the window-management hotkeys had a tendency to break, or to be disabled by other hotkeys or apps. I never figured out exactly why.

In addition, OSX has a built-in tendency to hibernate once the laptop’s lid is closed. I wanted to disable this, for a number of reasons; most importantly, I tend to leave the laptop closed, leaning beside a chair in the TV room, while I’m at work, but there’s frequently something I want to SSH in for. I tried Caffeine.app to avoid this, but it failed entirely on my hardware. InsomniaX generally works, but for some reason it tends to turn itself off occasionally for rather random reasons (such as switching to battery power, no matter how briefly, then back again). This was the final straw.

So just over a week ago, I installed Ubuntu on the MacBook Pro, following the documentation on the Ubuntu Wiki. Everything worked!

The Wiki’s suggestions were a little hairy to configure — but then, the OSX experience had been, if anything, less easy. Plus, I know my way around a Linux /etc.

On the Linux side, the Avant Window Navigator is truly excellent, and rivals the Dock nicely, and the Baghira kwin theme gives a pretty good OSX sheen to KDE 3. It’s not quite as pretty as OSX, but I’m happy to lose some prettiness for better usability.

Regarding the interface — the current version of the Linux Synaptics driver supports multi-touch (Apple’s patents be damned, seemingly), and all the nice multi-touch tricks supported by most OSX apps work with it too. I’m still working out the optimum settings for this, but it’s very configurable, and quite open.

It’s fantastic ;) I feel like I’m home again. Sorry, Mac people.

(image: CC-licensed, thanks to Dr Craig)

4 Comments

Bonuses for bankers: business as usual

Published October 23, 2008

Wall Street banks in $70bn staff payout:

Financial workers at Wall Street’s top banks are to receive pay deals worth more than $70bn (£40bn) [equivalent to 10% of the US government bail-out package], a substantial proportion of which is expected to be paid in discretionary bonuses, for their work so far this year – despite plunging the global financial system into its worst crisis since the 1929 stock market crash, the Guardian has learned.

Lloyds chief tells staff: you’ll still get bonuses:

The chief executive of Lloyds TSB, one of the banks participating in the [UK] £37bn bank bail-out, has promised staff they will receive bonuses this year despite Gordon Brown’s promise of a crackdown on bankers’ pay following the investment by taxpayers.

In a recorded message to employees, Daniels stressed that the bank faced “very, very few restrictions” in its behaviour despite the injection of up to £5.5bn of taxpayers’ funds. “If you think about it, the first restriction was not to pay bonuses. Well Lloyds TSB is in fact going to pay bonuses. I think our staff have done a terrific job this year. There is no reason why we shouldn’t.”

Now that takes nerve.

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Closed phish data costing $326mm per year

Published October 16, 2008

Richard Clayton posted a very interesting article over at Light Blue Touchpaper; he notes:

Tyler Moore and I are presenting another one of our academic phishing papers today at the Anti-Phishing Working Group’s Third eCrime Researchers Summit here in Atlanta, Georgia. The paper “The consequence of non-cooperation in the fight against phishing” (pre-proceedings version here) goes some way to explaining anomalies we found in our previous analysis of phishing website lifetimes. The “take-down” companies reckon to get phishing websites removed within a few hours, whereas our measurements show that the average lifetimes are a few days.

When we examined our data […] we found that we were receiving “feeds” of phishing website URLs from several different sources — and the “take-down” companies that were passing the data to us were not passing the data to each other.

So it often occurs that take-down company A knows about a phishing website targeting a particular bank, but take-down company B is ignorant of its existence. If it is company B that has the contract for removing sites for that bank then, since they don’t know the website exists, they take no action and the site stays up.

Since we were receiving data feeds from both company A and company B, we knew the site existed and we measured its lifetime — which is much extended. In fact, it’s somewhat of a mystery why it is removed at all! Our best guess is that reports made directly to ISPs trigger removal.

They go on to estimate that ‘an extra $326 million per annum is currently being put at risk by the lack of data sharing.’

This is a classic example of how the proprietary mindset fails where it comes to dealing with abuse and criminal activity online. It would be obviously more useful for the public at large if the data were shared between organisations, and published publicly, but if you view your data feed as a key ingredient of your company’s proprietary “secret sauce” IP, you are not likely to publish and share it :(

The anti-phishing world appears to be full of this kind of stuff, disappointingly — probably because of the money-making opportunities available when providing services to big banks — but anti-spam isn’t free of it either.

Mark another one up for open source and open data…

(thanks to ryanr for the pic)

Comments closed

solid Python queueing?

Published October 15, 2008

OK, message queueing has become insufferably trendy. You don’t need to tell me, I’ve known it’s the bees knees for 4 years now ;)

The only problem is, there doesn’t seem to be a good queue broker written in Python. They’re in Java, Perl, more Perl, or Erlang, but a solid, reliable, persistent queueing backend in Python is nowhere to be found, as far as I can see. Work is a mainly-Python shop, and while we can deploy other languages to our production, staging and test grids easily enough, it’s a lot easier to do developer-desktop testing if we had an all-Python queue backend.

Am I missing one?

8 Comments

Dublinr Exhibition

Published October 14, 2008

Dublin is a city that, photographically at least, can be reduced to a set of clichés, but a new exhibition offers a fresh, vibrant perspective of the Irish Capital. Dublinr is organised by a group of photographers that came together through the photo sharing website Flickr.

The exhibition opens at 6.00pm on Wednesday 5 November, runs until Sunday 9, from 11:00am – 6:30pm daily, and admission is free.

The Joinery Gallery | Arbour Hill | Stoneybatter | Dublin 7.

Some fantastic local photographers, including Andy Sheridan, whose work I’ve been following for a couple of months now; and a good location. D7 is full of good stuff nowadays — in fact, ever since I moved out ;)

3 Comments

IWA post-mortem

Published October 13, 2008

I didn’t win a Web Award — but then, given the competition from a couple of very professional news organisations, I really wasn’t expecting to ;) Silicon Republic won, and rightly so. Good on ’em.

I had a great night nonetheless, hanging out with Vishal, Walter (who won his category!), Conor O’Neill, Jason and a bunch of others.

Thanks to Moviestar.ie and BH Consulting for their sponsorship of a great event — marketing money well-spent, I suspect. Extra thanks to Moviestar for the freebie DVD player. And thanks of course to the mighty Mulley for organising the whole thing — at this stage he’s a finely-honed events machine!

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Want to eat on RTE’s HEAT?

Published October 9, 2008

Here’s an interesting offer — be a restaurant critic/reviewer for RTE’s cooking reality show, HEAT:

Ireland’s top amateur chefs battle it out in our kitchen, each preparing a three course meal to impress the hardest critics; the paying diners. Mentored by Kevin Thornton and Kevin Dundon, these amateurs have a chance to shock or shine. Who wins, who looses (jm: sic), its all down to you. Come eat in the Heat Restaurant and decide who is Ireland’s newest culinary talent.

The restaurant is located in Ely HQ, on Hanover Quay. All three course meals, inc teas and coffees are €30 pp. Drinks are separate.

To dine at Heat, please email diners /at/ loosehorse.ie or call 01 613 6052 with your contact details and your preferred evening. Heat is open for business on Sunday the 19th of October, Sunday the 26th of October, Sunday the 2nd of November, Sunday the 9th of November, and Sunday the 16th of November.

Please note: The evening is being recorded for RTE so if you want to keep a low profile, please consider. Vegetarians, strange allergies and odd requests may or may not be accommodated as Heat has a limited menu and may not always be able to accommodate specific food requirements.

Bon Appetit!

1 Comment

MPLC fail to shake down Irish playschools

Published October 7, 2008

Oh, the irony. According to The Sunday Times, a body called the Motion Picture Licensing Company sent letters to 2,500 Irish playschools (aka kindergartens), demanding payment for children watching DVDs on their premises — a fee of EUR 3, plus 17.5% VAT, per child per year:

Playschools have been given an unexpected lesson on copyright law after a company representing Hollywood studios demanded that each child pay a fee of €3 plus 17.5% VAT per year to watch DVDs in their playgroup.

The Motion Picture Licensing Company (MPLC), which collects royalties on behalf of companies such as Walt Disney, Universal and 20th Century Fox, wrote to 2,500 playschools last month warning that it is illegal to show copyrighted DVDs in public without the correct license.

The letter was sent with the approval of the Irish Preschool Play Association (IPPA), which represents the schools and their 50,000 children. The MPLC had wanted €10 plus VAT per year for each child, but the IPPA negotiated for the lower fee.

Unsurprisingly, playschool owners are freaking out:

“To be honest, when I got the letter with the IPPA newsletter I laughed and binned it,” said Paula Doran, manager of Kiddies Korner, a community playschool in Shankill, south Dublin. “If we brought in something like that the parents would have to pick up the costs. But I don’t like the way they went about it — once you signed up they’d automatically take money out of your account every year.”

“I don’t think too many judges would come down hard on a playschool over this,” she said. “We would rarely show DVDs anyway because it’s frowned upon — kids get enough TV at home. The odd time we would pretend to go to the cinema. We give the children tickets and they watch 20 minutes of Snow White, Fireman Sam or SpongeBob.”

Here’s the funny part — it appears the MPLC failed to take note of its own legal requirements, and is not legally licensed to issue shakedown demands for fees in Ireland:

The MPLC had failed to register with the Irish Patent Office as a copyright licensing body. Under the 2000 Copyright Act, royalty collectors such as the Irish Music Rights Organisation (IMRO) and Phonographic Performance Ireland (PPI) are required to register before they can collect fees. A spokesman for the Patent Office said that if an organisation collects money but hasn’t registered it may be fined or staff may be jailed if a complaint is made and it is found guilty.

Crazily, it sounds like the IPPA didn’t find this out from their own legal advisors:

Irene Gunning, IPPA’s chief executive, said she was disappointed with the MPLC. “We acted in good faith with this organisation and felt we were doing our members good by negotiating them down from €10 per child,” said Gunning. “I feel misled by them now. It is only through an alert mother that we became aware that they need to be registered.”

oh dear. Let’s hear it for alert mothers, I guess. Anyway, expect more similar shakedowns once the MPLC get their little licensing oopsie sorted out:

The MPLC only began operating in Ireland in recent months, after setting up in Britain in 2003. It is also targeting other sectors such as coach operators, which occasionally show movies in public.

More coverage at Techdirt, Ars Technica, and TorrentFreak.

(Image credit: smithco on Flickr. thanks!)

3 Comments

Switch ep. 2: the keyboard

Published September 28, 2008

Well, some bits of this are easy: here’s a MacOS X version of GVim and Vim, which works nicely, is easy to install, and is simply vim/gvim. Great stuff!

But some bits are harder. Remember I was complaining about that silly ± / § key in the top corner of UK/Irish MacBook Pro keyboards? Some investigation reveals that I’m far from alone in this:

‘it fucks up application switching’

‘I hate my MacBook Pro’

a forum post looking for help

another forum post

There are a number of apps that offer key remapping, but for no apparent reason they limit themselves to “popular” remappings only, such as swapping the Control and Caps-Lock keys etc. I presume this is because that was easy to code ;)

The one that does work fully is Ukelele. Watch out though — it comes with a raft of caveats. It’s buggy, at least dealing with my MBP keyboard under OSX 10.5.5; the “Copy Key” functionality doesn’t work, and you need to start using a key mapping file from the Ukelele package, not a system one or one you’ve downloaded, otherwise it’ll silently produce an output file that doesn’t recognise any keys at all. On top of this, each time you make changes, you need to log out and log back in again for them to try them out. (Small mercies: at least you don’t need to do a full reboot, I suppose.)

I’m not impressed by this whole keyboard issue. If you look at photos of the US MacBook Pro keyboard, it’s clear that it doesn’t have the stunted tetris-style Enter and Left-Shift keys that the UK/Irish one does. It also has the tilde key in the normal place, the top left, instead of some bizarre symbol that isn’t even used in this keyboard’s locale, and as Ash Searle noted, when you’re a developer, the # is a hell of a lot more useful than the £ symbol. They’ve basically screwed with a good US keyboard design to bodge in a few extra keys they needed to deal with the tricky European corner cases.

All that would be relatively minor, however, if I could remap the keys to suit my tastes — but it was pretty damn tricky to do that. Key remapping needs to be an easy feature!

I’m still working on the fixed key layout file, but I may post it here once it’s finished to save other Googlers the bother…

Update:: here’s the fixed key layout file:

Irish Fixed.keylayout

Save that to ~/Library/Keyboard Layouts/ , then open System Preferences -> International, select Input Menu, and choose Irish Fixed from the list, and ensure “Show input menu in the menu bar” is on. Close that window, then select “Irish Fixed” from the input menu left of the clock on the menu bar. Log out, and log back in again, and the keys should be sane…

(thanks to Sonic Julez for the MBP key image)

10 Comments

Shortlisted for an Irish Web Award

Published September 24, 2008

Crazy! Somehow or other, this blog has made the shortlist for “Best Technology Site” at the Irish Web Awards 2008, up against TechCentral, Silicon Republic, Camara, and Robin Blandford’s ByteSurgery blog. I have no idea how this happened, given the quality of the sites I’m up against — two of them are even proper news sites, with journalists! ;)

I’ve registered for the Oct 11 event; looking forward to it now…

3 Comments

My Trial Switch, ep. I

Published September 23, 2008

As previously noted, I’ve just bought myself a nice shiny MacBook Pro, to replace an old reliable 5-year-old Thinkpad T40, which ran Linux.

Initially, I was contemplating installing Linux on this one too, and dual-booting. But right now, I’ve decided to give MacOS X a go — why not? I find it’s worthwhile updating aspects of my quotidian computing environment every now and again, and it seems everyone’s doing it. ;) I’ll log my experience on this blog as I go along.

(Worth noting that this isn’t my first Mac; back in 1990, I was the proud owner of a free Macintosh Plus for a year, courtesy of TCD’s “Project Mac” collaboration with Apple Ireland. I wrote a great Mandelbrot Set explorer app.)

First off, the good news: the hardware is very nice indeed. It’s light in weight, esp. compared to my T61p work laptop, the screen clarity is fantastic, and the CPU fairly zooms along — unsurprisingly, given that the T40 was 5 years old.

In addition, the multi-touch touchpad is wonderful; I’m looking forward to lots more multi-touch features.

Unfortunately, some of the other hardware design decisions were pretty wonky. By default it’s quite tricky to keep the laptop running with the lid closed — it seems a decision was made to use passive cooling via the keyboard, so once the lid is closed, that heat cannot escape, causing overheating. There’s a third-party extension I can install to allow it anyway, but it’s festooned with warnings to overclock the fan speed to make up for it… ugh. Since I need the ability to be able to remotely login to my laptop from work if I should happen to forget something, or to kick off a long transfer before I come home, this means I have to leave the laptop open permanently, which I didn’t want to do.

In addition, I initially thought my brightness control was broken, since the laptop screen fluctuates in brightness continually. Turns out this is a feature, responding to ambient light — a poorly-documented one, but at least it’s easy to turn off in System Preferences once you know it’s there.

(Unfortunately, a lot of MacOS seems to consist of poorly-documented features that are hidden “for my own good”. The concept of switching seems to involve me abdicating a good deal of what I’d consider adult control of the machine, to the cult of Steve Who Knows Better. This is taking some getting used to.)

On to the software… what’s getting my goat right now are as follows:

Inability to remap keys (CapsLock key, the useless “+-” key, a lack of “spare” keys for scripted actions)

Up in the top left corner of “international” MacBook keyboards, there’s a useless key with a “+-” and double-S symbol on it. I don’t think I’ve ever typed those symbols in my entire life. I want a ~ there, since that’s where the ~ key lives, but for some reason, MacOS doesn’t include keyboard-remapping functionality to the same level as X11’s wonderful “xmodmap”. It seems this third-party app might allow me to do that, or maybe something called ‘KeyRemap4Macbook’?

This Tao Of Mac HOWTO seems helpful on how to support the “Home”/”End” keys, for external keyboard use.

Focus Follows Mouse

This is a frequent complaint among UNIX-to-Mac switchers. It seems that some apps do a hacky version of it, but then you’ve got this inconsistent thing where you lose track of which apps will automatically pick up focus (Terminal, iTerm) and which ones need a click first (Firefox, indeed everything else). Unfortunately, it seems an app called CodeTek VirtualDesktop would have fixed it, but seems to have been abandoned. :(

Programmable Hotkeys

I use a few hotkeys to do quick window-control actions without involving the mouse; in particular, F1 brings a window to the front, F2 pushes it to the back, F12 minimizes a window, Ctrl-Alt-LeftArrow moves a window half a screen left, and Ctrl-Alt-RightArrow moves a window half a screen to the right. Those are pretty simple, but effective.

This collection of Applescript files, in conjunction with Quicksilver, look like I may be able to do something similar on the Mac. Here’s hoping. LifeHacker suggests that the default for minimize is Cmd-M, so that’s what I need to remap from, at least…

This is a big issue — Dan Kulp had a lot of hot-key-related woes, and wound up going back to Linux as a result. Evan reported the same. I like the idea of MacOS, but my tendonitis-afflicted wrists need their little shortcuts; I’m not willing to compromise on avoiding mouse usage in this way.

(by the way, in order to get F1/F2/F12 back, check the “Use the F1-F12 keys to control software features” box in the Keyboard control panel. Thanks to this page for that tip; it has a few other good tips for UNIX switchers, too.)

Upgrades and Software

So, there’s two main contenders for the “apt-get for Mac” throne — Fink vs MacPorts. Fink takes the Debian approach of downloading binary packages, while MacPorts compiles them from source, BSD/Gentoo-style, on your machine. Since I’m not looking at the source, or picking build parameters, or auditing the code for security issues there and then, I don’t see the need to build it — Fink wins.

One thing though — the installer for Fink informed me that I needed to run “Repair Permissions”, which took a while, and found some things that had somehow already been modified from their system defaults, I’m not sure why. This left me slightly mystified. I then was later told that this is now considered ‘voodoo’. wtf.

Mind you, Daring Fireball suggests that the Mac software update are so poorly implemented that they require essentially rebooting in single-user mode, which sounds frankly terrifying. I hope that’s not the case.

BTW, it’s worth noting that IMO, AWN is as nice as — possibly nicer than — the Dock. ;)

Anyway, that’s post #1 in a series. Let’s see how I get on from here. (thanks to Aman, Craig and Paddy for various tips so far!)

8 Comments

AWS event in Dublin’s Digital Hub

Published September 4, 2008

Brian Scanlan mailed me with this blurb, worth blogging for any AWS users in the Dublin area:

  • Are you a software developer or IT professional working in the Dublin area?

  • Would you like to learn more about Amazon Web Services?

Amazon spent over ten years developing a world-class technology and content platform that powers Amazon web sites for millions of customers daily. Most people think “Amazon.com” when they hear the work; however developers are excited to learn that there is a separate arm of the company, known as Amazon Web Services or AWS.

Using AWS, developers can build software applications leveraging the same robust, scalable and reliable technology that powers Amazon’s retail business.

Amazon Data Services Ireland are delighted to welcome Simone Brunozzi (simoneb at amazon.com), AWS Evangelist for Europe, to Dublin, where he will give an overview of Amazon Web Services, including S3, EC2 and EBS, SimpleDB and more.

Tuesday 16th September 2008 at 7pm, The Digital Exchange Auditorium, Crane Street, Dublin 8

Maps and directions to the venue are here. Refreshments will be served.

All welcome – but places are limited, so please sign-up by mailing aws-dublin-event at amazon.com before Thursday 11th September.

I have no connection to this; not even sure if I’ll be going, as I went to the last one anyway and it was a bit short on technical tips ;) . But worth blogging anyway.

2 Comments

Another POS skimming fraud in Galway

Published September 1, 2008

This is a little late, since I was off on holliers when it came to light — Galway News reports ‘hundreds hit by skimming scam’:

The account details of shoppers who used credit or laser cards to pay for their groceries and other items in a number of Galway shops and supermarkets were illegally skimmed by a gang who apparently managed to interfere with the Chip & PIN terminals at the stores’ check-out counters.

The Irish Times story:

However, it has emerged some cardholders had several thousand euro taken from their accounts overseas before they realised what was happening and alerted their card provider. And it is feared that thousands of other customers do not yet realise their cards have been cloned. Garda sources have confirmed the case involves thousands of cards.

The Galway investigation is centred on one large shop in the county. Gardaí believe several thousand cards have had all of their details skimmed, including pin numbers, over the past month. Some of the cards have already been cloned and used in Canada and other countries where, unlike Ireland, chip and pin protective technology is not in use.

In the Galway case […] Detectives are working on the theory that somebody in the Galway shop may have facilitated the card skimming for an Eastern European crime syndicate.

Gardaí do not believe the payment terminals were tampered with. Gardaí have recovered CCTV images of suspects from in-store cameras.

In the past, cards have been copied using very small hand held devices through which a card is quickly and discreetly skimmed at the point of payment. The information is then copied, or cloned, onto a blank card which is then used like a regular payment card.

Skimming devices around the size of a cigarette lighter can store details from thousands of cards.

The payment terminals from the Galway shop have been taken by gardaí for technical examination as a precaution. The Garda Bureau of Fraud Investigation is leading the inquiry.

This Boards.IE thread is a real eye-opener, containing lots of reports from victims of this scam — many reports saying that they suspect it was in Joyces’ Supermarket in Knocknacarra, although one poster reckons ‘there are now over 20 suspect premises in Galway City and outskirts’. blimey.

On a related note — while shopping in my local supermarket at the weekend, I was pleased to note that when I paid with my credit card, I was asked to sign the slip, instead of using Chip-and-PIN. So it looks like at least one retailer is taking additional care.

On the other hand, the thread also notes many cases of skimming which took place from in-store ATMs in small convenience stores — those are very widespread now. eek. :(

Comments closed

GoDaddy’s spam filter is broken

Published August 29, 2008

GoDaddy is rejecting mail with URLs that appear in the Spamhaus PBL. As this thread on the Amazon EC2 forum notes, this is creating false positives, causing nonspam mail to be rejected. Here’s what GoDaddy reportedly said about this policy:

Unfortunately, our system is set to reject mails sent from or including links listed in the SBL, PBL or XBL. Because the IP address associated to [REMOVED] is listed in the PBL, any emails containing a link to this site will be rejected. This includes plain-text emails including this information.

If this is true, it’s utterly broken.

Spamhaus explicitly warn that this is not to be done, on the PBL page:

Do not use PBL in filters that do any ‘deep parsing’ of Received headers, or for other than checking IP addresses that hand off to your mailservers.

And more explicitly in the Spamhaus PBL FAQ:

PBL should not be used for URI-based blocking! Consider the false positive potential: legitimate webservers hosted with services such as dyndns.com or ath.cx! Or consider that ISPs and other networks are encouraged to list any IP ranges which should not send mail, and that could include web servers! Use SBL or XBL (or sbl-xbl.spamhaus.org) for URI blocking as described in our Effective Spam Filtering section. Use PBL only for SMTP (mail).

Critically, the PBL now lists all Amazon EC2 space, since Spamhaus interpret Amazon’s policy as forbidding email to be delivered via direct SMTP from there. (Note — email, not HTTP.)

With this filter in place at GoDaddy, that now means that if you mail a URL of any page on any site hosted at EC2 to a user of GoDaddy, your mail won’t get through.

Note: this is much worse than blocks of SMTP traffic from EC2. In that case, an EC2 user can relay their legit SMTP traffic via an off-EC2 host. In this case, there is no similar option in HTTP that isn’t insufferably kludgy. :(

5 Comments

The real reason cycling is such a pain in Dublin

Published August 28, 2008

Cian Ginty at the Irish Times writes:

As clunky helmets, yellow reflective gear, and Lycra could be used as a stereotype for Irish cyclists, it might come as a surprise that women wearing high heels are a common sight on bicycles in Copenhagen.

The general image of cycling here is vastly different to so-called bicycle cultures where cycling is normalised and there is talk of a “slow bicycle movement”.

“Among thousands and thousands of cyclists on my daily routes, I think I see one or two reflective vests a week, if that,” says Mikael Colville-Andersen, a cycling advocate living in Copenhagen.

With Denmark, the Netherlands and Germany – where bicycle usage is high – the helmets and reflective clothing we think of as “a must” for cyclists are far from standard.

It then goes on to rehash some of the stuff that has cropped up recently on cycling blogs about cycling safety, helmets, etc.

The only problem with casualization of cycling, removing gear like helmets, is that without corresponding changes to the road and cycleways to make them safer, it will increase accidents and fatalities. I looked this up a couple of weeks back when I came across an anti-helmet site. Chasing up the figures and doing some research, it became clear that if you simply want to cycle without hurting yourself, the facts were not on their side — helmets save lives, especially when dealing with shared roadways as we have here.

Copenhagenization is a result of a better, safer road environment for cyclists, as seen in Denmark and the Netherlands, which makes safety gear not as much of a requirement. But on the other hand, Ireland’s roads are designed mainly for cars, and Dublin Council have done little to help — that makes safety gear a requirement, unfortunately :(

However, I think this is the real reason why people don’t cycle in Dublin:

Let’s take a fictional person, let’s call her Kassandra. Kassandra lives a little north of Copenhagen and rides every to work every day between 07:25 and 07:55 and back again between 15:35 and 16:05. Kassandra doesn’t mind a little light showers, but if the intensity increases to over 0.4 mm over 30 minutes (light rain), then she thinks it is too wet. Kassandra works five days a week and has weekends and holidays free. That gives her 498 trips between September 2002 and the end of August 2003.

How often does Kassandra get wet either to or from her job that year? The answer is, in fact, rarely. On those 498 trips it was only 17 times. That is only 3.5% or on average 1.5 trips a month.

3.5%. Compare that with what’s happened in Dublin this month — I’d estimate that’s meant that at least half of my rides have involved some degree of rainfall, occasioning many cries of woe.

It takes dedication — and lots of wet-weather gear — to ride a bike here…

(Of course, having said that, I look out the window and it’s immediately sunny ;)

Update: Ryan Meade corrects me in the comments:

Justin, you need to take a look at Owen Keegan’s paper to Velo-City 2005, “Weather and Cycling in Dublin : Perceptions and Reality”. The probability of getting wet is actually pretty comparable to the Copenhagen scenario detailed above – 5.5% for a 30 minute journey if you take 0.2mm per hour at the threshold for “getting wet”. On the other hand the vast majority of both cyclists and motorists think it’s more than 15%, with half thinking it’s above 30%.

Amazing how the psychological, “glass half-empty” factor influences my thinking on this. I had no idea!

11 Comments

How tightly linked are the top spam botnets?

Published August 28, 2008

I was away on holidays last week, and when I got back, I found my feed reader full of some good discussion as to whether today’s bigger spam botnets — Srizbi, Rustock, Mega-D, Cutwail/Pushdo — are sharing components, such as “landing” sites, exploits, customers, and even command and control networks. It started with this post on the FireEye Malware Intelligence Lab’s blog noting:

‘Some malware researchers have described Srizbi and Rustock as rival botnets, our data indicates that this apparent rivalry is a sibling rivalry at best. Srizbi and Rustock seem to be supported (controlled) by the same parent (bot herder).’

and in this followup:

‘We can clearly see that Srizbi, Pushdo and Rustock are using same ISP, and in many cases, IPs on the same subnet to host their Command and Control servers. It seems extremely unlikely to our research team that three previously “rival” Botnets would share nearly consecutive IP space, and be hosted in the same physical facility. Of all the data centers and IPs in the world, the fact that they are all on the same subnet is very intriguing. This fact makes the FireEye research team conclude that either the Botnets are operated by the same organization, or that the datacenter (McColo) is a shell corporation that leases out it’s IP space and bandwidth for nefarious actions.’ […]

‘IPs at a typical datacenter are leased out in a /30 or more commonly, a /29 block. However, here we can see that in a given succession of IPs, the three Botnets have C&C servers dispersed throughout. This gives us an impression that same Bot herder leased out a larger range and then distributed it amongst its different Botnets.’

Marshal say: ‘at the very least, the major botnets have common customers.’

Dark Reading cover it like so:

Rustock, which recently edged Srizbi for the top slot as the biggest spammer mostly due to a wave of fake Olympics and CNN news spam, and Srizbi, known for fake video and DVD spam, have been using the same Trojan, Trojan.Exchanger, to download their bot malware updates, researchers say. “This is the first time” we had seen this connection between the two botnets, says Fengmin Gong, chief security content officer for anti-botnet software firm FireEye. “That’s why when we saw it, it was surprising. They definitely have a relationship,” he says. “There’s not the rivalry we used to think about.” […]

Joe Stewart, director of security research for SecureWorks, says the Srizbi-Rustock connection is most likely due to a spammer using both zombie networks — not that the operators of the two botnets are actually collaborating. “What is confusing people is that you’re seeing Rustock bots sending out emails that essentially infect people with Srizbi, so they think it must be Srizbi that’s sending it, but it’s not,” he says. “Srizbi is not just one big model. It’s rented out to lots of different spammers.”

A major spammer may be trying to diversify by using the two botnets, he says. “It could be because they want to separate their malware-seeding operation from their spamming operation,” Stewart says. “Maybe their bots are getting blacklisted faster when they’re sending out URLs with fake video files because they’re easy to spot, so their spam doesn’t get through. So they send malware from this botnet, and spam from this one, to keep out of the blacklists longer.”

I agree that Joe’s scenario is very likely; the spammers aren’t always the same people who operate the botnets, and it only makes sense that some of them would spread their business among multiple nets, to minimize the risk that all of their output would be blocked if one ‘net runs into trouble (or indeed, good filtering ;). But seeing C&C servers sharing LANs also strikes me as unusual. One to watch.

Anyway, it’s good to see that the malware research blogs are now actively tracking and posting updates when the botnets change topics and format; this info is very valuable for us in anti-spam, as it allows us to map from the received spam mails back to the sending botnet, and determine which rules are good at detecting each botnet. Thanks, guys.

(image credit: cobalt123, used under CC license)

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