taint.org: Justin Mason’s Weblog

DRI’s formal launch is next Tuesday:

December 6th sees the formal launch of Digital Rights Ireland, with a press conference in the Conference Room, Pearse St. Library, Dublin 2 at 11.30am. We would like to invite to you to come along - we’d welcome your support, and the chance to chat with you about your concerns after the main conference. Please feel free to invite anyone else who you think would be interested in digital rights. To give us an idea of numbers, we’d appreciate an email to <contact AT digitalrights.ie> to let us know if you’re planning on coming along.

Tags: conference, december, digital, dri, launch, pearse, press, rights, room, tuesday

Spam: if you work in anti-spam, especially in filtering, or even just in working with email in general, it’s well worth going to CEAS 2005, the Conference on Email and Anti-Spam, on Thursday July 21st and Friday 22nd in Stanford:

The organizers of the Conference on Email and Anti-Spam invite you to participate in its second annual meeting. This forum brings together academic and industrial researchers to present new work in all aspects of email, messaging and spam — with papers this year covering fields as diverse as text classification, clustering and visualization of email, social network analysis applied to both email and spam, spam filtering methods including text classification and systems approaches, game theory, data analysis, Human Interactive Proofs, and legal studies, among others. The conference will feature 26 paper presentations, a banquet, and two invited speakers. See http://www.ceas.cc for details of the current program, as well as on-line registration.

Registration runs out on July 10th.

I went last year, and it was excellent — several very interesting papers were presented. I’m going this year, too, along with quite a few SpamAssassin committers, and I’m looking forward to it.

Tags: analysis, classification, conference, email, going, july, registration, spam, text, year

Patents: So the Conference of Presidents has ratified the JURI decision to throw out the flawed software patents directive text. Phew! That’s a lot more pressure on the European Commission. Charlie McCreevy could still carry on his attempt to steamroller European democracy on this one, but it looks likely that he wouldn’t get away with it now — possibly facing sanctions as a result.

Found in a Slashdot comment — an amazing quote from Michel Rocard (former French Prime Minister, now European Deputy), recounting a meeting with Microsoft representatives on the software-patent issue:

“We never could (speak) a common language with the companies representatives we met - in particular those from Microsoft. Speaking about (the free circulation of ideas), free access to knowledge, was like speaking chinese to them. In their way of thinking, everything that is not usable for immediate profit ceases to be an engine of growth. They don’t seem to be able to understand that an invention which is a pure spirit creation (sic) can’t be patented. It’s simply terrifying. Many of us, at the Parliament, agree to say that they never have know such a pressure and such a verbal violence during their parliamentary work. It is a huge case.”

In addition, he takes aim at the Irish Presidency’s tactics:

“To adopt it formally, there is an expeditious procedure — the (A-item) at the Council of Ministers, where the it is adopted without discussion. The Irish and Dutch presidencies attempted this tactic three times, twice at meetings of the (Fisheries Council)! This is simply scandalous.”

Blimey, he’s really pissed off. Great! Go Rocard! ;)

See here for the original interview (in French), and here for a bad Babelfish translation.

In happier news — take a look at some pictures from the presentation of 30,000 verified signatures (and flowers!) from people around the world, thanking the Polish Government for their repeated stands against the flawed directive in December.

Tags: conference, council, decision, directive, european, microsoft, patents, phew, pressure, software, text

Conferences: I’m going to LayerOne; it looks interesting, and I’ve been hoping to bump into Danny O’Brien (who’s there doing his Life Hacks talk) for a couple of drinks and a blather for quite a while. Other speakers look similarly interesting, in an ‘offbeat hacker conference’ way, so I think it’ll be fun.

Conflicts with The Streets playing the Wiltern though, but c’est la vie ;)

Tags: blather, conference, conferences, couple, hacker, hacks, layerone, life, talk, way, while

Spam: Guardian: Incredible Bulk, by Danny O’Brien. A great article from the
‘Spam and the Law’ conference. ‘This is why people such as Richter are appearing from the shadows. They have a choice: turn legit, or risk an increasingly criminal lifestyle.’

Also spam-related: Code Fish Spam Watch, which lists and dissects phishing attacks, in great detail. Some of those trojans are exceptionally sophisticated – such as this trojan targetting Barclays online banking, which actually takes screenshots of a CAPTCHA-style login protocol. Scary!

Tags: article, bulk, choice, conference, guardian, incredible, law, richter, spam, the

Spam: So, next Friday I’ll be in Cambridge, MA for the Spam Conference 2004, a one-day extravaganza of probabilistic classifiers, spam-bashing, and hopefully, some socializing too.

Anyone else planning to attend? If so, see you there!

Tags: anyone, conference, extravaganza, friday, planning, spam

Health: Revealed: how drug firms ‘hoodwink’ medical journals (Observer) — an
amazing attempt to mislead scientific progress for short-term commercial gain. (via forteana):

Hundreds of articles in medical journals claiming to be written by academics or doctors have been penned by ghostwriters in the pay of drug companies, an Observer inquiry reveals. The journals, bibles of the profession, have huge influence on which drugs doctors prescribe and the treatment hospitals provide. …

Estimates suggest that almost half of all articles published in journals are by ghostwriters. While doctors who have put their names to the papers can be paid handsomely for ‘lending’ their reputations, the ghostwriters remain hidden. They, and the involvement of the pharmaceutical firms, are rarely revealed. …

(One) email, seen by The Observer, said: ‘In order to reduce your workload to a minimum, we have had our ghostwriter produce a first draft based on your published work. I attach it here.’ The article was a 12-page review paper ready to be presented at an forthcoming conference. Healy’s name appeared as the sole author, even though he had never seen a single word of it before. But he was unhappy with the glowing review of the drug in question, so he suggested some changes. The company replied, saying he had missed some ‘commercially important’ points. In the end, the ghostwritten paper appeared at the conference and in a psychiatric journal in its original form - under another doctor’s name.

Tags: attempt, conference, drug, health, hoodwink, mislead, name, observer, paper, revealed, review

IrishWAN are holding a national conference:

IrishWAN the networking group with the goal of building a community owned and run island wide area network infrastructure, will be having a national conference in Limerick on Saturday 28th of June 2003.

There will be IrishWAN members from all across the country, with presentations about wireless technology, updates of activities in many areas, and presentations from Irish wireless suppliers.

Full text here.

Date: Thu, 19 Jun 2003 10:58:15 -0000
From: Robert Fitzsimons (spam-protected)
To: (spam-protected)
Subject: IrishWAN National Conference

IrishWAN National Conference

IrishWAN the networking group with the goal of building a community owned and run island wide area network infrastructure, will be having a national conference in Limerick on Saturday 28th of June 2003.

There will be IrishWAN members from all across the country, with presentations about wireless technology, updates of activities in many areas, and presentations from Irish wireless suppliers.

The conference is open to anybody who has an interest in building or using the IrishWAN network, and is an ideal opportunity for existing and new members to get together to talk about wireless technologies. There will be a 5 Euro charge at the door to pay for the room.

The conference will start at 12:00 and should finish up at 17:30 on Saturday 28th of June, the location will be The Two Mile Inn, Ennis Road, Limerick.

More up-to-date details and the agenda are available at <URL:http://www.irishwan.org/board/showthread.php?threadid=996>.

Hope to see you all there.

Robert Fitzsimons DublinWAN Chairperson (spam-protected) http://wwww.irishwan.org/

ISOC Ireland members mailing list (spam-protected) http://ireland.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/members

Tags: community, conference, goal, group, irishwan, island, june, national, network, saturday

Looking for an old mate, Alan Toner, and it’s turning out to be tricky; the last mail address I had for him now bounces.

• is he in a social centre for ‘casualised workers’ in Rome?

• or in NY as ‘the man with no bio’?

• or speaking at the Oekonux conference in Berlin on ‘Commons, Criminalization, General Intellect and the Politics of Technology and Culture - Direct Payments from Users to Producers as an Alternative to Intellectual Property Rights’?

It seems all three. He gets around!

Tags: address, bio, centre, commons, conference, criminalization, mail, man, mate, oekonux

Oliver Schmelzle has done up a timeline for the webcasts from the Spam Conference.

Tags: conference, spam, timeline

Who knew relocating with a cat could be so tricky? Well, actually, I did. He hates travel. I’m considering just putting him in a crate and handing him off to a courier to do it.

Paul Graham’s Spam Conference seems to be doing great; they’ve moved to a bigger room, and are expecting 480 (!!) attendees.

I still can’t make it due to all this movage, but thankfully there’s a few SpamAssassin folks going, so we’ll still be able to snarf some good tricks with any luck.

In other news, the public mass-check submission run for SpamAssassin 2.50 is about to start; with the new with-bayes and with-net-tests dimensions in the matrix, it’s going to be the biggest run yet. Should be fun.

Tags: cat, conference, courier, crate, movage, room, run, spam, spamassassin, travel

thanks to blogs, wifi and the web, bullshitting a keynote at a conference isn’t quite as easy to pull off as it used to be! From Dan Gillmor’s keynote at Supernova, via BoingBoing:

At PCForum, Joe Nacchio, the CEO of Qwest was on-stage, doing a Q and A. Joe was whining about how hard it is to run a phone company these days. Dan (Gillmor) blogged, “Joe’s whining.” A few moments later, he got an email from someone who wasn’t at the conference, someone in Florida, with a link to a page that showed that Joe took $300MM out of the company and has another $4MM to go — gutting the company as he goes.

Esther Dyson described this as the turning point. The mood turned ugly. The room was full of people reading the blog and everyone stopped being willing to cut Joe any slack.

Tags: boingboing, ceo, company, conference, keynote, pcforum, someone, supernova, web, wifi

Bernie Goldbach is currently blogging live from the floor of OPEN_HOUSE_001, Media Lab Europe’s inaugural conference.

I’m impressed — by the technology, that is ;) . He’s blogging via email from a Nokia 9210i Communicator, to a Radio weblog, then via XML-RPC to the Kirbycom New Media Cuts Movable Type blog. cool!

Anyway, that’s enough of that — gotta get back to work!

Tags: communicator, conference, email, floor, house, lab, media, nokia, open, technology