taint.org: Justin Mason’s Weblog

Funny: AP: SoCal city falls victim to Internet hoax, considers banning items made
with water. It’s the old ‘dihydrogen monoxide’ hoax again:

‘It’s embarrassing,’ said City Manager David J. Norman. ‘We had a paralegal who did bad research.’

The paralegal apparently fell victim to one of the many official looking Web sites that have been put up by pranksters to describe dihydrogen monoxide as ‘an odorless, tasteless chemical’ that can be deadly if accidentally inhaled.

So — ha ha, stupid Aliso Viejo city officials. But seriously — why is a paralegal making decisions on scientific issues? Isn’t that what the EPA and their environmental scientists are there for? Tail wagging the dog, I think.

Tags: city, dihydrogen, funny, hoax, internet, monoxide, paralegal, research, socal, victim, water

Ireland: A while back, I posted ‘Room for an Irish Netflix’, which plugged the idea of opening a version of the Netflix concept for Ireland. Well, over on the taint.org QT forum, JCorbett says: ‘ DVDRentals.ie is what you’re looking for!’

Sure enough, it looks pretty good — 20 eurons a month, and a reasonable selection (considering they just started).

But it limits how many DVDs you can get out in a month to 8. IMO, that’s unnecessary — nobody can watch DVDs and turn them around through the postal system that quickly!

Also, the browsing interface is lousy — I’d suggest licensing some kind of metadata from IMDb or similar, so people can get third-party reviews, comments, ‘my favourite action movie’ lists, that kind of thing.

Can’t tell much more, as the FAQ page doesn’t work on Mozilla/Firebird for some damn reason.

Sick: Anger as contestants hungry for money go begging on TV (Irish Indo) (via forteana):

A reality television show in which 12 young Russian contestants have to scrounge, beg and even steal to win a pension for life, is being filmed in Berlin.

In a city already struggling with bankruptcy and large numbers of asylum-seekers, police and residents have been quick to condemn Golod, Russian for ‘hunger’. The contestants live in a container without money or food to survive; none of them speaks German. ‘Golod’ is proving a huge hit with Moscow television viewers, thousands of whom tune in at nine each evening to find out how Karina, Anastasia and 10 other photogenic contestants are faring on the mean streets of a foreign city.

Spam: Latest Pew Internet report on spam. Pew Internet surveys are very good. This one notes that ‘25% of America’s email users say they are using email less because of spam. Within that group, most say that spam has reduced their overall use of email in a big way.’

Mafia: A mafia hacker tells his story to Wired (Simson Garfinkel via FoRK).

Tags: city, dvds, email, golod, ireland, irish, kind, money, month, netflix, spam

Language: AussieInAmerica on {up,down,mid}town:

Something that is common here in Atlantic Canadian and northeast American small cities is to refer to the CBD (or city centre/downtown) as ‘uptown’, especially if coming to the city from its environs. BUT… once I am ‘uptown’ , I would then refer to my location as ‘downtown’. In other words, ‘uptown’ is the city centre/ CBD only if you are not there yet. ‘Uptown’ becomes ‘downtown’ once you arrive there. AND, since many smaller cities have one main street that leads in and out, if you head out of ‘downtown’ up that street you are going ‘uptown’. Follow? It works for us and I can’t recall any confusion.

(Author:) Hmm, I’m glad you folk have got it sorted out! I am reminded of Grover’s existential crisis on Sesame Street as he was coming to grips with ‘here’ and ‘there’. Every time he pitter-pattered over to ‘there’, it turned into ‘here’.

Great site. Some pretty good Strine, too — ‘Jeggoda Sinny?’ really is a common query!

Tags: aussieinamerica, but, cbd, centre, city, downtown, language, something, street, town, uptown

The Times: The secret city is a great reservoir of urban myth. Great article about the urban legend fodder that is ‘the city beneath the city’.

Date: Mon, 09 Jun 2003 15:19:37 +0100
From: “Martin Adamson” (spam-protected)
To: (spam-protected)
Subject: The secret city is a great reservoir of urban myth

The Times

June 09, 2003

The secret city is a great reservoir of urban myth

Richard Morrison

YOU know what worries me most about London? It’s how the buildings stand up. It seems miraculous that they aren’t wobbling like a contralto’s bosom. So many tunnels, bunkers, sewers, stations and vaults have been dug beneath the capital that the famous clay on which London is built must now resemble a Swiss cheese. Last week the Post Office closed its Mail Rail, the underground train that sped our epistles from Whitechapel to Paddington, or vice versa, for 75 years. Most Londoners were vaguely aware of its existence. But what else is down there? The answer is that nobody knows the whole truth, and most of us don’t know a hundredth of it. But that’s fine with me, because in the absence of hard facts this secret city-beneath-the-city is a wonderful reservoir of urban myth. And that’s much more entertaining.

Some things I do know. The Bank of England also has its own underground railway, presumably to cart sackfuls of dosh to fat cats in the Square Mile. So does Harrods, presumably to cart the sackfuls back to the Bank. Also lurking below ground are no fewer than 40 ghost stations: disused Tube stops, their eerily empty platforms briefly glimpsed from passing trains.

Or are they deserted? Some had — perhaps still have — very active afterlives, if rumour can be believed. The Down Street station, between Green Park and Hyde Park Corner, was used as an underground Cabinet Room during the war.

The never-officially-opened Bull and Bush, its entrance half-concealed on Hampstead Heath, is said to be the nerve centre controlling the floodgates that would be swiftly closed if the Thames ever broke into the Tube. But at one time it was also claimed to be the mysterious “Paddock”, the Government’s subterranean control room in the early 1940s. Two things fuelled this enduring urban myth: the reference in Churchill’s memoirs to a bunker “near Hampstead” (which would be a strange description of the well-known bunker at Dollis Hill, near Neasden); and the odd story of a man, walking on the Heath during the war, who was startled to see the unmistakable figure of the great Winnie emerging from what seemed to be a bush.

What’s certainly true is that some Tube stations were equipped at that time with deep-level “parallel” platforms, designed as bomb shelters on the understanding that London Transport would be allowed to convert them into express Tube lines later. Mysteriously, this plan was abandoned. Or was it? Again, urban myth declares that there is indeed a parallel, express Northern Line, but that commuters will never be allowed on it. It is reserved for when VIPs have to be whisked out of London quickly and stealthily. (The urban myth doesn’t reveal what they would do when they reached Morden.)

As for these deep-level parallel stations themselves, their fates are equally intriguing. Eisenhower’s secret wartime headquarters, a vast, 32-storey inverted skyscraper under Goodge Street Tube Station, is now used as secure storage — allegedly for confiscated pornography, among other things. The fate of the wartime shelter under Chancery Lane Tube Station is even more intriguing. During the Cold War it was apparently converted into a very unusual telephone exchange — one with a six-week supply of food, its own well, and 12 miles of tunnels extending across London. That would have withstood an atom bomb attack, but not an H-bomb, so it was scrapped. The saloon-bar experts tell me that something even vaster, deeper and spookier lies under Ludgate Hill. But the Chancery Lane “cavern” still remains off-limits.

So does the bulk of underground Westminster and Whitehall. Buildings such as the Ministry of Defence are said to resemble icebergs: seven-eighths below the surface, and all connected by a warren of tunnels stretching to Buck Palace, Charing Cross and God knows where else. Or so a man told me at a party.

Not all of underground London is secret. You can wade into the cathedral-like caverns of Joseph Bazalgette’s sewers if you want. And some resolute aesthetes do, admiring what is said to be the world’s best Victorian brickwork.

Unsurprisingly, however, there is no comprehensive map of subterranean London. Not in the public domain anyway. The engineers building the Jubilee Line Extension reputedly had to submit their proposed route under Parliament Square time and time again, never being told the reasons for its rejection, until by a process of elimination they found the one passage that (presumably) didn’t send trains crashing into Blair’s war room or MI5’s interrogation cells.

But what’s to become of the tunnel we do know about — the now mothballed Mail Rail? Call me biased, but I think it should be converted into a dedicated cycle track, providing us Lycra loonies with a safe, fast, dry route across London. Either that, or it will have to become the world’s longest, deepest bowling alley.

Tags: article, bank, cart, city, date, fodder, legend, myth, reservoir, times

Hmm. I don’t remember spotting a tiki bar in GTA3:VC… must go searching when that VGA adapter turns up. ;)

I’ve been repeatedly struck, while in California, what an incredible job the GTA3:VC designers did with the graphics and level design. It evokes so many visual aspects of US cities, perfectly, and this is pretty impressive when you consider they’re a Scottish games house. This interview details how they did it:

GS: Did you do any on-location studies of any areas to help with the design of Vice City? If so, where did you go, and how helpful was it?

AG: After the near-death experience that was the development of Grand Theft Auto III, the entire team flew out to Miami to recover and soak in the atmosphere of the area. While the rest of the team sunbathed or propped up the News Bar, the ever-industrious art team headed out onto the baking hot Miami streets armed with digital cameras. We split up and covered every area we were interested in using for Vice City. The animation team armed with digital camcorders spent time examining exactly how women in bikinis and roller skates moved, and the city modelers braved both the seediest, scariest parts of Miami and got kicked out of all the best places. By the time we returned to sunny Scotland, we’d amassed countless hours of video and close to 10,000 digital photos. When scouting locations, we tried to get a cross-section of shots — a good few were wide angle to remind us how the place fit together, and the rest were details to aid in modeling and texture usage. The guys in the New York office also sorted out some professional location scouts from the film industry for us who provided us with some really excellent locations for any areas we hadn’t managed to get enough detail on. I can’t imagine capturing the feel of a city without all this resource material, never mind actually spending time in the place. Sending the entire team rather than a few leads allows everyone to understand what it is they are trying to make. We couldn’t have done it any other way.

Tags: area, bar, city, design, gta, hmm, place, rest, team, time

just got back from a super-quick booze-soaked weekend visit to Ben in SF. It was so good to visit a city once again, and get the opportunity to paint the town red, hit the bars, eat in plentiful cheap restaurants, and generally enjoy city life (which I’ve been missing massively since the move from Dublin). But now back in post-suburban Irvine to cope with the hangover.

Also got to meet up with Komal, one of my co-workers up there — which was cool. Unfortunately it was a super-speedy weekend whistle-stop tour though, so having a good social meet-up with all the guys will have to wait until the next visit. ;)

Net: ‘The Canadian scientists who broke the genetic code for SARS … say they couldn’t have done it without the Internet. … The key to that collaboration was ordinary e-mail‘.

It also turns out the ProMED mailing list was the central point at which SARS reports were collated in the early stages, even despite evasion and cover-up by the Chinese state.

So there you go — as usual, SMTP is the killer app — or in this case, a life-saving app! All the more reason to figure out ways to deal with spam and return SMTP to its top spot in the protocol pantheon.

Good thing the FTC Spam Forum went so well, then. Sounds like there was unprecedented agreement between the non-spam folks, clear understanding of the issues by quite a few of the Washington denizens, and maybe even some good footage of the other side digging holes for themselves.

Health: US, Asian Airlines Disagree on SARS. Me, I just wish the airlines would stop being so bloody cheap, and bring in more fresh air rather than recirculating. ;)

Date: Sun, 04 May 2003 12:20:16 -0400
From: STEPHEN JONES (spam-protected)
To: (spam-protected) (spam-protected)
Subject: Internet is a good thing says Steve Jones clone

Internet played a key role in decoding SARS genome, scientists say

DENNIS BUECKERT

OTTAWA (CP) - The Canadian scientists who broke the genetic code for SARS just weeks after the disease appeared say they couldn’t have done it without the Internet.

Scientists from the Michael Smith Genome Sciences Centre of the B.C. Cancer Agency say their achievement relied on rapid communication with scientists around the world. The key to that collaboration was ordinary e-mail, said Steven Jones of the Vancouver-based research agency in a teleconference Thursday sponsored by Science magazine.

“Within a day of us having a press release announcing our participation in the sequencing we had an amazing amount of e-mail from scientists all around the world,” Jones said.

As soon as the sequence was decoded, the B.C. researchers posted it on the Internet.

“People were, within minutes of that, able to download the sequence and analyse it in their own laboratories and their own computers,” Jones said.

“The Internet has had a profound impact on how this data has been shared and how scientists have collaborated.”

A short time later, researchers at the Atlanta Centers for Disease Control published the sequence of a coronavirus taken from another SARS patient.

The genetic coding for the two viruses were virtually identical, boosting confidence that the coronavirus was in fact the causal agent.

Now both sequences are posted on the World Wide Web for the benefit of researchers in many countries racing to find a reliable test for SARS, and a vaccine to prevent it.

Scientists say the speed of the decoding was amazing.

The first reports of the new disease came from China in November, and on March 13 cases were reported in Toronto and Vancouver. The sequences were posted on the net on April 15.

By contrast, it took years to identify the agents behind diseases like AIDS and hepatitis C.

Mel Crajdon of the B.C. Centre for Disease Control said all evidence points to the coronavirus as being the cause of SARS, despite some seemingly contradictory findings.

Earlier this week Frank Plummer, who heads the National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg, said he was puzzled by the number of people who show evidence of the SARS coronavirus but not symptoms of the disease.

Crajdon suggested the apparent anomaly is due to imperfect understanding of how the disease presents itself, as well as lack of reliable tests for the presence of the virus.

“I’m not surprised by the results that have been obtained to date and I think that they will rapidly improve,” he said.

More than 5,400 cases of SARS have been diagnosed worldwide, with at least 394 deaths. In Canada, there have been 23 deaths, all in the Toronto area.

• - -

On the Net:

SARS sequences: http://sciencemag.org/features/data/sars

SARS data: http://aaas.org

SARS Comments: http://eurekalert.org

Tags: app, city, code, internet, sars, smtp, spam, thing, visit, weekend

Joe Haslam (hi Joe!) mailed about Aeronautics.RU, wondering if it’s a fake. I’m pretty sure not, and John Sutherland at The Guardian concurs, noting that it was big in the City of London:

You don’t factor news into your model, but intelligence. There is a surfeit of war news, but reliable intelligence is hard to come by. The canny (stock market) trader in these parlous days has a first port of call - GRU (Glavnoye Razvedyvatelnoye Upravleniye), the espionage arm of the Russian military.

GRU is the most sophisticated agency of its kind in the world. And, since Glasnost, the most transparent. GRU has thousands of agents worldwide (especially in countries such as Iraq, where Russia has traditional trade links). Intelligence has always been a top priority for Ivan. The number of agents operated by the GRU during the Soviet era was six times the number of agents operated by the KGB.

Russia, superpower that it was, still has spy satellites, state-of-the-art interception technology and (unlike the CIA) men on the ground. The beauty of GRU is that it does not (like the CIA) report directly to the leadership but to the Russian ministry of defence. In its wisdom, it makes its analyses publicly available. These are digested as daily bulletins on www.iraqwar.ru.

… and syndicated onto Aeronautics.RU as well. Sadly, since the Russians closed up their Baghdad embassy and got out of Iraq, just in time it seems, all the reports have dried up. Ah well.

The reporting was incredibly detailed, and modulo a big chip on their shoulder about US imperialism, pretty informative.

Joe also points to another Aeronautics.RU article, ‘how military communications are intercepted’. Venik, the author, notes that the US is using SINCGARS ‘frequency-hopping’ radios, which use a daily-broadcast shared secret as an initial vector for the algorithm which determines what frequencies to ‘hop’ through, throughout the day.

However, security afforded by frequency-hopping methods is very dependant on the strict adherence to protocols for operating such radios. The US troops and other operators of frequency-hopping radio sets frequently disregard these protocols. An example would be an artillery unit passing digital traffic in the frequency-hopping mode, which would enable an unauthorized listener to determine the frequency-hopping algorithm and eavesdrop on the transmission. (jm: sounds like a known-plaintext attack; similar attacks were used by the Allies on German use of Enigma during WWII.)

Even when proper protocols for using frequency-hopping radios are being adhered to interception and decryption of these signals is still possible. The frequency-hopping interceptors are special advanced reconnaissance wideband receivers capable of simultaneously tracking a large number of frequency-hopping encrypted transmissions even in high background noise environments.

It then details some seriously specialized equipment for breaking frequency-hopping radio transmissions, which can ‘process the complete 30 to 80 MHz ground-to-ground VHF band within a 2.5 ms time slot’.

So judging by all of that, the chances of finding one of those ‘FH-1 frequency-hopping interceptors’, ‘manufactured by VIDEOTON-MECHLABOR Manufacturing and Development Ltd of Hungary’, sitting in the Russian embassy in Iraq about 2 weeks ago, would have been pretty high I’d bet. ;)

He doesn’t detail why encryption the system uses, or how that is supposedly being broken. But I don’t doubt it was, personally. Given the ‘artillery unit’ hole noted above, there were probably quite a few ways to get hold of the day’s key, given enough time and thought; and from what I’ve read, it can only be very tricky to use good crypto, and keep it secure, in a battlefield environment. And those Russians have had plenty of time to think about US military systems after all. ;)

Tags: aeronautics, cia, city, fake, gru, guardian, intelligence, model, news, number

Reporters From Portuguese Television Tortured By US Military Police (Indymedia):

Two Western journalists have arrived safely back in Kuwait City after being arrested, beaten up and deprived of food and water in Iraq — by members of the US Army’s military police. ….

Despite possessing the proper ‘Unilateral Journalist’ accreditation issued by the Coalition Forces Central Command, both journalists were detained. …

Castro and Silva entered Iraq 10 days ago. They had been to Umm Qasr and Basra and were traveling to Najaf when they were stopped by the military police. According to Castro, their accredited identification was checked and they were given the all clear to proceed. ‘Suddenly, for no reason, the situation changed,’ Castro told Arab News. ‘We were ordered down on the ground by the soldiers. They stepped on our hands and backs and handcuffed us.

‘We were put in our own car. The soldiers used our satellite phones to call their families at home. I begged them to allow me to use my own phone to call my family, but they refused. When I protested, they pushed me to the ground and kicked me in the ribs and legs.’ ….

After being held for four days, they were transported to the 101st Airborne Division to be escorted out of Iraq.

Tags: castro, city, ground, indymedia, military, police, portuguese, reporters, television, tortured

Newsflash! Irish local newspapers come through with bizarre-ness yet again:

Fermanagh man Tom Daly (72) is a former schoolteacher and lecturer who spent 15 years working in the Middle East. In an interview with the paper Mr Daly told how in 1988 he arrived in Baghdad and was on his way to the city of Basra …

‘All these taxi drivers were coming down to me offering to take my bags and drive me down to Basra for 60 quid and I wasn’t sure what to do. Then a man in a long dark coat came over to me, put his hand up and said: ‘Don’t listen to them. Take a taxi (sic), it will cost you £10′. I thought this was a much better idea and was glad of the help. All the taxi drivers had also backed away so I asked some of them afterwards: ‘Who was that man?’

They said: ‘That was Mr Saddam Hussein’.’

Tune in next week, when Saddam helps out with some tricky carpet-buying negotiations…

Date: Mon, 31 Mar 2003 09:21:19 +0100
From: Joe McNally (spam-protected)
To: Yahoogroups Forteana (spam-protected)
Subject: And on the lighter side…

http://www.irishnews.com/access/daily/current.asp?SID=429949

Irish farmer is ‘a cut above the rest’

Paper Clips: A round-up of the weekly press

By Tony Bailie

MOST of the north’s regional papers again carried stories last week giving a local perspective on the war in Iraq, but the most remarkable was in the Impartial Reporter.

Fermanagh man Tom Daly (72) is a former schoolteacher and lecturer who spent 15 years working in the Middle East.

In an interview with the paper Mr Daly told how in 1988 he arrived in Baghdad and was on his way to the city of Basra to take up a lecturing post.

He told the paper: “I had just flown into the country and landed at Baghdad airport in the dead of night. I took a taxi to the bus station to make my way down to Basra which was about 60 kilometres away.

“All these taxi drivers were coming down to me offering to take my bags and drive me down to Basra for 60 quid and I wasn’t sure what to do.

“Then a man in a long dark coat came over to me, put his hand up and said: ‘Don’t listen to them. Take a taxi (sic), it will cost you £10′.

“I thought this was a much better idea and was glad of the help. All the taxi drivers had also backed away so I asked some of them afterwards: ‘Who was that man?’

and they said: ‘That was Mr Saddam Hussein’.”

According to the Larne Times the borough council found itself in an awkward position because of the war.

The town, which is due to host Iraqi athletes during the Special Olympics in June, had put up a sign declaring: “Larne Host Town to Iraq”.

However, according to the paper the wife of a serving British soldier, currently in southern Iraq, objected and called for the sign to be taken down.

The paper reported: “She said she felt the wording of the sign and the timing of its erection was ‘inappropriate’.”

“Others took more direct action, however, spray painting the head of the town sign ‘No Way’.” A few days later the words “Ulster Says No” where added.

According to the Larne Times the sign was subsequently removed, a decision described by Larne Borough Council chief executive Colm McGarry as “common sense”.

The soldier’s wife who lodged the objection stressed that she had no objections to the Special Olympics.

“It was the wording of the sign that annoyed me - I nearly crashed my car when I saw it,” she told the paper.

However, Larne’s mayor, Councillor Bobby McKee, told the paper that while he sympathised with the objectors he believed the sign should have stayed up.

“The war is against Saddam Hussein and his regime, not against disabled people. I find great difficulty in getting my head around any opposition to people with a disability,” he told the paper.

– Joe McNally :: Flaneur at Large :: http://www.flaneur.org.uk

Tags: city, interview, man, offering, paper, saddam, schoolteacher, taxi, way, week