taint.org: Justin Mason’s Weblog

Funny: EFFector Vol. 17, No. 11a April 1, 2004. Some pretty funny gems in this one: USPTO to Start Granting Indulgences, Microsoft Wins Patent for Software Industry Monopolization, and SCO to Sue Over Unauthorized Use of Earth’s Resources:

Lindon, UT - On the heels of its campaign against users of the Free Software program Linux, the SCO Group today announced that it will begin a new round of lawsuits against users of other free resources, including fire, water, air and land.

‘People think they can just use free things without paying for them,’ said SCO CEO Daryl McBribe. ‘This kind of ’socialism’ is anti-American and a violation of the Constitution. It’s up to corporations like SCO to crush that kind of idealism.’

Tags: april, effector, funny, granting, indulgences, kind, sco, software, start, uspto, vol

Mail: Google announces new mail service. This is not an April Fool’s Day joke — just terrible timing. ;) It’s for real.

Diego has some good comments.

My thoughts:

• Privacy: ‘we do not disclose your personally identifying information to third parties unless we believe we are required to do so by law or have a good faith belief that such access, preservation or disclosure is reasonably necessary to … (c) detect, prevent, or otherwise address fraud, security or technical issues (including, without limitation, the filtering of spam)’. They’re going to build one hell of a spam-filtering corpus this way ;)
• A nice ToS clause: ‘Your Intellectual Property Rights. Google does not claim any ownership in any of the content, including any text, data, information, images, photographs, music, sound, video, or other material, that you upload, transmit or store in your Gmail account. We will not use any of your content for any purpose except to provide you with the Service.’

Tags: april, content, day, fool, google, information, joke, mail, service, timing

Spam: Since the CAN-SPAM act passed Congress, there’s been quite a few comments raised against it — unsurprising, as it does still have quite a few shortcomings.

However, one of the negative comments needs to be debunked — namely the old favourite, ‘most spam comes from countries outside the US’. In April, Declan McCullagh even quoted the CTO of Brightmail to this effect.

This is not true.

What’s happening here is that it appears a lot of spam is coming via non-US servers, if do simplistic analysis of the IP addresses that are connecting to your mail servers. But look a little deeper — some testing will reveal that those IPs are compromised hosts, running proxies or trojans to relay spam from their genuine origin.

Capturing relays in foreign countries is good sense for a spammer, because the network-abuse staff of a foreign ISP will be slower to react to complaints if they don’t speak the complainant’s language; in addition, some offshore ISPs seem to tolerate much more than US/European ISPs would. For example, in a few cases, US-based spammers are installing servers in offshore colocation facilities to operate their spam runs, and generally getting away with it — much more than they would in the US or Europe. In some cases, there’s serious abuse occurring — here’s a ROKSO report indicating Chinese servers being used to operate a massive SMTP AUTH username/password cracking operation against hosts across the world.

Once you get beyond these origin-obfuscation methods, and follow the spam to the source (which is hard work BTW!), you find yourself back in the US. The Spamhaus.org front page ‘top 10 worst spam countries’ list still features the US at number 1.

Now, what about if a spam law passes, and the spammers do move offshore?

I would say that a good 80% of the spamming population will, after a few prosecutions, find themselves unwilling to leave their home country and move to a foreign place in order to continue spamming. After all, wholesale relocation to a foreign society is hard work. So IMO, they’ll move on to other pursuits and leave the email spam racket.

However, it is possible that the most motivated spammers themselves will pack up their bags and physically leave the US. This is where concentrating on the spam bureaus themselves becomes a dead end, and concentrating on their customers, the companies using the bureaus, is useful. Read the CAUCE FAQ:

Because most spam advertises goods or services offered by US-based entities (for example, get-rich-quick schemes and quack medical remedies being sold out of someone’s basement), we advocate anti-spam laws in which the focus is not where the email came from but on whose behalf the spam was sent. If the law applies to the advertiser — the entity profiting from the activity — it doesn’t matter where the spam originates.

The FAQ also raises this very good point:

Second, the reach of US law outside the borders of the US is tenuous at best, however that fact does not negate the need for or effectiveness of laws against those in the US. It can be very difficult to bring a murderer to justice in the US if they escape abroad, but no one could seriously argue that this fact means domestic murder laws are unnecessary or irrelevent. Spam isn’t comparable to murder, but if our judicial system means anything, the same principles of justice must apply.

Dead right.

Tags: act, april, brightmail, can-spam, congress, cto, effect, favourite, isps, spam

Just taking a look around blogs.linux.ie to see who’s set us up the blog recently; here’s the results:

• unfortunately quite a few folks seem to have got bored and left off around mid-April. Ah well.

• Quite a few lively blogs to add to the blogroll.

• There’s also a burgeoning population of teenage Malaysian blogs, bizarrely enough! planet_aiie, whoelse and corexified. Big slipknot fans it seems.

• Malaysia’s not alone in this — here’s a Jamaican guy. Must be the flag on the favourites icon; green and gold on a black background — that’s more linux.jm than linux.ie. ;) Unfortunately for my patois, he stopped updating in April. Sufferation! Oh well, I’ll just have to stick with the Sizzla for my lessons.

• a Phillipino blog, too!

Just figuring this one — it seems linux.ie is free and easy to set up a blog at, doesn’t have ads, and does decent RSS with full <content:encoded> blocks. All in all, that makes it a pretty good blog platform when you think about it. Fair enough!

Tags: aiie, april, blog, blogroll, linux, look, mid, planet, population, whoelse

CSMonitor:

On April 25, 2003, this newspaper ran a story about documents obtained in Iraq that alleged Saddam Hussein’s regime had paid a British member of Parliament, George Galloway, $10 million over 11 years to promote its interests in the West.

An extensive Monitor investigation has subsequently determined that the six papers detailed in the April 25 piece are, in fact, almost certainly forgeries.

The CSMonitor is usually a pretty good paper I hear, and their decision to print this retraction on their front page is a nice sign. But it’s worth noting that it took 2 weeks — not until the UK’s Daily Mail retracted their story, citing that they had determined their documents were forged — before the Monitor thought to check out the letters’ credibility.

And check this out for gullibility:

Smucker recalls that it was the general who brought up George Galloway’s name first at their initial meeting. After the reporter indicated an interest, the general said he knew where those documents were, and that he could have them for Smucker in 24 hours. Smucker says Rasool told him that one of his neighbors, who left Baghdad to attend a Shiite pilgrimage in Karbala, held the documents.

Upon Smucker’s return the next day, the general showed him the Galloway documents as well as the boxes of others on various subjects. After hiring the neighbor, Smucker left with the boxes.

‘I had no knowledge that the general received any of the 800 dollars, though now that I know the documents are forgeries, I have my suspicions,’ says Smucker. ‘At the time I was operating on the premise that these were entirely authentic.’

Suuuure!

Tags: april, csmonitor, general, hussein, monitor, newspaper, regime, saddam, smucker, story

Lost from the Baghdad museum: truth (Guardian). hmmm! It seems we’ve been had:

(In April, it was widely reported that) 100,000-plus priceless items were looted (from the Baghdad museum) either under the very noses of the Yanks, or by the Yanks themselves. And the only problem with it is that it’s nonsense. It isn’t true. It’s made up. It’s bollocks.

Incredible — it seems (a) the museum was looted — to a degree; the vast majority of ‘missing’ items had actually been moved into safe storage, and ‘most of the serious looting was an inside job’.

And (b) the academics and journalists who reported ‘170,000 items … stolen or destroyed’ had been led by the nose by Dr Donny George, the museum’s director of research. It just wasn’t true:

Over the past six weeks it has gradually become clear that most of the objects which had been on display in the museum galleries were removed before the war. Some of the most valuable went into bank vaults, where they were discovered last week. Eight thousand more have been found in 179 boxes hidden ‘in a secret vault’. And several of the larger and most remarked items seem to have been spirited away long before the Americans arrived in Baghdad.

George is now quoted as saying that that items lost could represent ‘a small percentage’ of the collection and blamed shoddy reporting for the exaggeration. ‘There was a mistake,’ he said. ‘Someone asked us what is the number of pieces in the whole collection. We said over 170,000, and they took that as the number lost. Reporters came in and saw empty shelves and reached the conclusion that all was gone. But before the war we evacuated all of the small pieces and emptied the showcases except for fragile or heavy material that was difficult to move.’

This indictment of world journalism has caused some surprise to those who listened to George and others speak at the British Museum meeting. One art historian, Dr Tom Flynn, now speaks of his ‘great bewilderment’. ‘Donny George himself had ample opportunity to clarify to the best of (his) knowledge the extent of the looting and the likely number of missing objects,’ says Flynn. ‘Is it not a little strange that quite so many journalists went away with the wrong impression, while Mr George made little or not attempt to clarify the context of the figure of 170,000 which he repeated with such regularity and gusto before, during, and after that meeting.’ To Flynn it is also odd that George didn’t seem to know that pieces had been taken into hiding or evacuated. ‘There is a queasy subtext here if you bother to seek it out,’ he suggests.

Tags: april, collection, guardian, hmmm, museum, number, problem, truth, war, yanks

I meant to blog about this event back in April at the time, but never got around to it. Basically, towards the end of April, there was a demonstration in Falujah in Iraq, shots were (reportedly) fired from the crowd, and US troops opened fire, killing 2 and injuring 14.

Well, Charlie Stross has saved me the bother ;) — he’s written a good summary of the historical precedent for this chain of events, and what resulted back then.

Tags: april, blog, crowd, demonstration, end, event, falujah, fire, summary, time

The Open Proxy Problem, a PowerPoint/PDF presentation shown at the Internet2 Members Meeting of April 9th 2003, by Joe St Sauver, Ph.D (Director, User Services and Network Applications University of Oregon Computing Center).

Well worth a read if you’re interested in network security or spam. Joe’s done an astonishing job of researching every angle of the issue, from historical comparisons to ‘blue boxes’ circa 1971, the status of proxy servers to the Chinese government, and even a statistical analysis of proxy DNSBL overlap. (BTW, did you know that the New York Times was broken into via an open proxy?)

Tags: april, internet, network, open, pdf, powerpoint, presentation, problem, proxy, sauver

CBC.ca: Venezuela has Proof Washington was Behind Failed Coup, says General .

The embassy also rejected allegations by governing party legislators that two U.S. military officials who visited the Fuerte Tiuna military base in Caracas the day before Chavez’s ouster were helping coup leaders.

The two officers spent two hours at the base April 11 to investigate information about troop movements, the embassy said. They left hours before Chavez was deposed. Two officers returned to the base April 13 for another evaluation of the situation.

According to the Council on Hemispheric Affairs:

Venezuelan and U.S. officials are investigating allegations that two high-level military officials from the U.S. embassy, including Army Lt. Col. James Rogers, were at Fuerte Tiuna military base the first night of the coup while Chávez was being held there.

The U.S. embassy initially called the allegations ‘pure rubbish.’ A month after the overthrow, it issued a statement saying the two officials were at the base for two hours late Thursday afternoon, April 11, just before the coup unfolded that evening. They were checking reports of troop movements, the embassy said, and returned Saturday, April 13, during the coup to check the general situation.

Ri-ight.

The details of how the coup occurred are deepening suspicions of U.S. involvement among critics, such as Birns, who draw parallels to the 1973 coup in Chile. They contend that Chávez’s overthrow was not the result of a ’spontaneous popular uprising’ as the coup leaders, the U.S. government and Chávez opponents contend. Rather, they say, it was a highly orchestrated, carefully thought-out plan by a corrupt class of business, labor, media and military elites who are backed by the United States and who see Chávez’s ‘peaceful revolution’ on behalf of Venezuela’s impoverished majority as a threat to their privileges.

‘This is as classic as they come,’ said William Blum, author of Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II. In an April 27 interview with NCR, Blum said the CIA was ‘not even embarrassed’ to use its ’same methods all over again,’ namely, helping to create a situation of chaos and violence that invites the military to step in.

Tags: april, base, chavez, chvez, coup, embassy, fuerte, situation, tiuna, troop

last night RTE showed Chavez - Inside The Coup, a documentary about the 2-day coup d’etat in Venezuela in April 2002 which overthrew Hugo Chavez, and was then in turn overthrown in a popular uprising.

It was incredible. The team had amazing access to Chavez and the presidential palace while the 2-day coup and mass protests went on. The cameras are right there while Chavez is taken into custody by the generals, carries on rolling through the censorship of the media, through the street protests and shotgun-blasting riot police, and then catches the loyal-to-Chavez presidential guard retaking the palace from the inside.

Finally, it follows the negotiations to get Chavez returned from custody etc.; his cabinet are right there, on screen, talking to the generals on the phone while you watch and listen. Incredible footage, right from the thick of it.

As far as I could tell, it’s called Chavez - Inside The Coup, and is by Power Pictures, Irish lads from Galway, no less.

I’ve never seen anything like it. If you get a chance, don’t miss it.

Tags: april, coup, custody, day, documentary, etat, night, overthrew, palace, rte

It seems a 3-metre-across meteor exploded over the Pacific on 23 April this year.

Date: Mon, 03 Sep 2001 15:02:23 +0100
From: “Tim Chapman” (spam-protected)
To: forteana (spam-protected)
Subject: Big bloody meteor detected

http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci/tech/newsid_1522000/1522932.stm

Monday, 3 September, 2001, 13:27 GMT 14:27 UK Low sounds detect meteor blast By BBC News Online science editor Dr David Whitehouse

One of the first stations of what will be a global “infrasound” listening network, has detected a meteor that exploded over the Pacific Ocean with the force of the Hiroshima nuclear blast. “Infrasound” refers to sound waves that fall below the 20 hertz lower level of human hearing. The new detectors record signals that are too faint, and vary too slowly, to be detected by humans. The global network is designed to monitor clandestine nuclear tests but scientists say it will have many scientific uses as well. It will be able to detect previously unsuspected meteor entries into the atmosphere, volcanic eruptions, and the formation of hurricanes. Hiroshima blast One of the first significant signals received by the infrasound array built by the Scripps Institute of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego, was of a meteor that came crashing into the Earth’s atmosphere on 23 April. Estimated at between 2-3 metres (8 - 10 feet) across, it exploded with a yield of a few thousand tonnes of TNT, nearly the force of the atomic weapon that was dropped on Hiroshima. “If this rock had come into the atmosphere at a slightly different time, it might have exploded not over the Pacific, but over a large metropolitan area,” said Dr Michael Hedlin of the Scripps Institute. “With this global listening network we can develop much better statistics on large meteors and get a better idea of how often these massive objects enter the atmosphere.” Large explosions send part of their acoustic energy into the audible range, but those signals dissipate rapidly. But they also emit large amounts of energy into the infrasonic range in signals that decay slowly across vast distances. The 23 April explosion occurred 1,800 km (1,118 miles) away from the Scripps detector. It was also detected by an infrasound array in Germany, 11,000 km (6,835 miles) away. ‘Unprecedented opportunity’ As well as meteors, infrasonic sound is generated by supersonic aircraft, tornadoes, earthquakes and volcanoes. According to Hedlin, scientists have already discovered that volcanic eruptions produce strong infrasonic signals, “seismic and infrasound data taken together give a much fuller account of activity inside the volcano that might be indicative of an impending, significant eruption.” Scientists are also planning to build a new infrasonic array at Cape Verde in western Africa, near to a region where hurricanes develop and emit infrasonic signals. “There is a lot going on in the atmosphere that we need to know more about. The infrasound network will offer us an unprecedented opportunity to better understand these phenomena on a global scale. “We anticipate that this global network of listening posts that monitors Earth’s fluid exterior shell where we live will someday become as indispensable as the global seismic network that monitors the Earth’s solid interior for seismic activity.”

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Tags: april, atmosphere, blast, force, infrasound, institute, meteor, network, scripps, year

Eircom gets beaten up by regulator. Check out this quote: “As eircom has failed to supply all the relevant information, I have set interim prices [...] Eircom’s approach with respect to costing and the level of response and co-operation on this issue is not acceptable.”

MEDIA RELEASE For Immediate Release April 30th 2001 Telecoms Regulator sets prices for Local Loop Unbundling.

Etain Doyle, Telecoms Regulator today (Monday 30th April 2001) cleared the way for implementation of local loop unbundling. In a Decision Notice today the regulator set prices for access and directed changes to eircom’s Reference Access Offer. Monthly line rental is fixed at €13.53, or £10.66.

According to the Regulator ” while there has been an LLU reference offer available from Eircom since the due date of 31 December 2000, this was incomplete and non compliant in several respects. In order to ensure that consumers are in a position to derive the benefits that Local Loop Unbundling can bring I have decided to intervene and set prices.”

Local Loop unbundling has to potential to increase significantly the range of competitive services available to businesses and consumers. It requires the network owner to provide access to the copper pair connecting an individual telephone subscriber to the nearest point of interconnection with the main telephone network at the local exchange. This allows new entrants to offer a full range of broadband services directly to the customer.

The regulator continued “As eircom has failed to supply all the relevant information, I have set interim prices based on the information available to me. Despite repeated requests and the clear direction that the 30th April was the final date for the determination, there are still very substantial gaps in the material provided to me by eircom. Eircom’s approach with respect to costing and the level of response and co-operation this issue is not acceptable.” These charges set are based on data from eircom, benchmarking and other reviews and analyses by the ODTR of efficient operator costs. They are within the range of pricing in other EU countries. The line rental at €13.53 is within the EU range from €8.23 to €19.51, and connection at €119.73 compared with €47 to €221.69.

The setting of these prices does not relieve eircom of its responsibility to address the deficiencies in its pricing proposals and to make a comprehensive re-submission to the ODTR on all matters.

Tags: access, april, eircom, information, local, loop, regulator, release, respect, response