taint.org: Justin Mason’s Weblog

This is pathetic. As noted in the link-blog a couple of days ago (as well as everywhere else), TiVo’s new DRM features have been spotted ‘in the wild’, protecting the valuable Intellectual Property that is Family Guy and Simpsons reruns.

The icing on the cake is that TiVo have come up with a hilarious hand-wavy explanation — apparently it was line noise. Marc Hedlund of O’Reilly and Cory Doctorow are having none of it, and rightly so; as a bonus, Cory asked a group of DRM experts, who ‘burst into positive howls of disbelief’ that line noise could corrupt the DRM bits and the corresponding checksums to match.

From my angle, though, there’s another noteworthy factor:

“During the test process, we came across people who had false positives because of noisy analog signals. We actually delayed development (of the new TiVo software) to address those false positives.” (– Jim Denney, director of product marketing for TiVo)

Interesting use of the term ‘false positive’ there. Sounds more like a good old-fashioned bug if you ask me ;)

Anyway, I’m glad I went for the home-built option. It was pretty obvious that TiVo are in the cross-hairs, and their product is only going to get worse as the DRM industry push harder…

Tags: cory, couple, drm, family, intellectual, line, noise, product, property, tivo

Tech: One of the first online periodicals I started reading regularly, when I first got access to USENET back in 1989 or so, was comp.risks – Peter G. Neumann’s RISKS Forum. Since then, I’ve been reading it religiously, in various formats over the years.

It appears that RISKS has just celebrated its 20th anniversary.

Every couple of weeks it provides a hefty dose of computing reality to counter the dreams of architecture astronauts and the more tech-worshipping members of our society, who fail to realise that just because something uses high technology, doesn’t necessarily make it safer.

I got to meet PGN a couple of weeks ago at CEAS, and I was happy to be able to give my thanks — RISKS has been very influential on my code and my outlook on computing and technology.

Nowadays, with remote code execution exploits for e-voting machines floating about, and National Cyber-Security Czars, I’d say RISKS is needed more than ever. Long may it continue!

Tags: access, code, comp, computing, couple, forum, online, risks, tech, technology, usenet

Perl: at last, a perl-related posting! I’ve released IPC::DirQueue 0.04; details of what’s changed (summary, a couple of bugs fixed) are at that link.

BTW, thanks to Ask and Robert at perl.org, who are providing free SVN repository and list hosting for CPAN modules! And don’t overlook the fact that the mailing list/newsgroups each have their own RSS feed, woot!)

Tags: btw, couple, dirqueue, ipc, link, list, org, perl, summary, svn

Meta: I’m back in Dublin for a couple of weeks over xmas, so I won’t be updating this weblog very much. See you in January!

BTW I flew back via Chicago, which is obviously the stopover of choice to Dublin from Silicon Valley — surrounded by 1 iBook per every 8 passengers. ;)

PS: looks like they forgot Poland!

Tags: btw, choice, couple, ibook, january, meta, stopover, weblog

News: Selves and Others is a site that cropped up a couple of months ago, tracking the output of many of the left’s strongest voices, for example:

• George Monbiot
• Sidney Blumenthal
• Seymour Hersh
• Greg Palast
• Tariq Ali

Well, one feature they were missing was RSS feeds, allowing users to track new articles by a specific author as they’re published. They’ve just added it; the good old orange XML button now appears on each author’s page. Excellent!

Tags: author, couple, example, feature, left, news, orange, output, rss, selves, site

Web: My Dad runs a couple of websites — his architectural photography business, and Andalucia Photo Gallery, a side project selling some lovely photos from the Andalusia region of Spain.

Needless to say, as the family geek, guess who coded all that up? Using WebMake, naturally ;) This was the main reason I wrote the ‘thumbnail_tag’ plugin.

You’ll note, however, that the image to right is watermarked, quite small, and encoded with a low quality setting. It turned out after a couple of years of operation, that the images were being downloaded and used in print all over the place — from both sites!

It seems photo piracy is rampant. Even with terms of use clearly linked on the sites, it’s still commonplace for print publications to swipe the images — and not just the little guys, either — some big commercial names have apparently used the images without asking (or paying licensing fees).

The Andalucia gallery site was a favourite; being a good hit for ‘travel photos spain’ meant lots of images being used for holiday pages in magazines, newspapers, and so on.

Needless to say, digital watermarking software doesn’t work — it’s trivial to load an image into Photoshop, resize or crop, and resave, apparently. Even if PS did respect the watermarks, netpbm doesn’t, and a watermarked image isn’t identifiable as such once it appears in print anyway! So we went for the blunt-tool approach, adding visible watermarks to the images.

It’s pretty easy — pamcomp allows you to overlay one image on top of another, using a third as an ‘alpha mask’ to control transparency. The results are pretty nice and not too intrusive.

It’s a shame it has to be done, though… :(

Tags: business, couple, dad, gallery, image, photo, photography, print, project, side, web

War: A couple of war links, I’ll keep it short. ;)

High-profile air strikes ‘killed only civilians’. ‘The American military launched some 50 air strikes designed to kill specific targets during the Iraq war, it emerged yesterday, but none of them found its mark. Instead the air strikes had a high civilian toll, according to military officials serving at the time.’ Still, it sounded good, like as if CSI were doing all the war strategification and stuff ;)

And: the
Pentagon ‘Torture Memos’ took some tips from the torture techniques used in Northern Ireland in the 1970s.

Music: Licensing row mars iTunes launch. UK indie labels report that ‘where Apple has spoken to labels the terms on offer have been commercial suicide’, and as a result, they won’t be selling their tunes via iTMS Europe.

I agree with Mark Twomey on this one — bad move. This (and the prices!) reduce the Euro-iTunes offering to about the usefulness of whatever that one is that Real.com have (you know, the one you can’t even remember the name of) – and nobody in Europe buys major-label music online anyway.

Tags: air, couple, high-profile, mark, music, none, time, toll, war, yesterday

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

Mail: I’ve dusted off my old e-mail usability wishlist, made a couple of changes to reflect the current situation now that GMail has implemented some of them, and Wikified the page.

There’s still a couple that I think would be valuable, so anyone looking at new usability ideas for email is welcome to take a look ;)

Tags: anyone, couple, email, gmail, look, mail, page, situation, usability, wikified, wishlist

Linux: wmctrl and Devil’s Pie — two nifty tools for window control. Both are command-line tools that use NetWM, a standard for X11 window managers, to hook into window manager policy and apply scriptable control to windows as they appear (in the Devil’s Pie case) or to pre-existing windows (in the wmctrl case).

I’ve just reverted back to sawfish from KWin recently, in order to get this control back; I probably wouldn’t have if I’d found these in time.

(In case you’re wondering why I reverted: specifically, sawfish allows the user to control window position very efficiently from the keyboard using corner.jl, and the KWin folks weren’t interested in a patch to do the same there. In addition, sawfish has wclass.jl , which allows windows to be controlled by name; it’s very handy to say ‘Show Mail’, and have xvoice de-iconify your mailreader in response. Both are killer features for rodent-free use of a UNIX desktop.)

Funny: Dr. Evil’s monologue about his childhood from the first Austin Powers movie. Sheer genius. ‘Sometimes he would accuse chestnuts of being lazy, the sort of general malaise that only the genius possess and the insane lament.’

Open Source: Tim Bray goes through a couple of open-source studies; first is the clueless ‘Where do you want to go, Aiden?’ essay I mentioned here a couple of days ago, but the second is a study from a couple of French economists I hadn’t heard of. I’ll just reproduce the translation:

Choosing software is not a neutral act. It must be done consciously; the debate over free and proprietary software can’t be limited to the differences in the applications’ features and ergonomics. To choose an operating system, or software, or network architecture is to choose a kind of society. We can no longer pretend that free and commercial software, or Internet standards and protocols, are just tools. We have to admit at least that they are political tools. After all, fire and the printing press are ‘just tools.’

Ireland: Some new Irish weblogs:

• The Invisible Acrobat — who is this mysterious acrobat? hmm! A Goon Show fan, I’d reckon.
• Eirepreneur

Tags: case, control, couple, devil, kwin, linux, pie, sawfish, software, window, wmctrl

Green: There’s been a bit of chat on the intarweb recently about a new high-tech fuel source that avoids the fossil-fuel trap, namely thermal depolymerization. Here’s a couple of links that are relevant:

• MeFi: original post
• MeFi: thinking about the figures
• BioDieselNow forums

Sounds possibly useful although: (a) is there enough biomass produced to produce fuel in useful quantities, and (b) I bet it stinks downwind of that. ;)

Tags: biodieselnow, bit, couple, depolymerization, fuel, green, intarweb, mefi, post, source, trap

Ireland: Looks like I was wrong about that Samuel L. Jackson quote — it really did happen!

Tom did the heavy lifting, and asked the production company; here’s the scoop:

Anyway in answer to your question, similar comments were indeed made on the TV Special ‘SWAT - The Movie’. In the programme Colin is considered a very successful ‘fish out of water’ in LA and the line of questioning was exploring how the Americans view him. Kate was ‘claiming’ Colin as our own in an ‘inclusive’ way. It was meant as a mark of comradeship rather than thievery and being of liberal mind I can assure you Kate has no intention of staking any real claims! It went like this.

KATE THORNTON:
Now lets talk about Colin because in the UK he’s become the man of the moment.

SAMUEL L.JACKSON:
Really? Only in the UK?

KT: Well everywhere but we kind of claim him as our own because he’s from Ireland.

SLJ: You can’t claim him because he’s from Ireland.

KT: Well we do because it’s close by. (laughter)

SLJ: Ok. That’s the source of all the conflict over there. You people always claiming the Irish as yours. We got a little problem just like that here called slavery but that’s ok we don’t need to talk about that so lets go. (more laughter)

KT: Well Colin is a very well paid slave.

SLJ: Ok good.

KT: As are you.

SLJ: Yeah all right.

KT: What did you know about him before you came to work with him on this project?

SLJ: I knew he was a hot, young, Irish actor who was good looking and I talked to a couple of people about him. I talked to Bruce about him and I talked to some script supervisors that had worked with him on a couple of things and they all loved him.

KT: So you checked him out?

SLJ: Yeah

The programme was an irreverent promotional vehicle for SWAT and it’s cast and I must say that Colin gave the most honest interview I’ve ever heard on a junket. Long may his attitude prevail. Does this answer your question and win you the bet?

Yours sincerely,

Rufus Roubicek
Executive Producer
matchboxtv.com

Tags: answer, couple, ireland, laughter, lifting, looks, programme, question, quote, slj, swat

Looks like I was wrong about that Samuel L. Jackson quote — it really did happen!

Tom did the heavy lifting, and asked the production company; here’s the scoop:

Anyway in answer to your question, similar comments were indeed made on the TV Special ‘SWAT - The Movie’. In the programme Colin is considered a very successful ‘fish out of water’ in LA and the line of questioning was exploring how the Americans view him. Kate was ‘claiming’ Colin as our own in an ‘inclusive’ way. It was meant as a mark of comradeship rather than thievery and being of liberal mind I can assure you Kate has no intention of staking any real claims! It went like this.

KATE THORNTON: Now lets talk about Colin because in the UK he’s become the man of the moment.

SAMUEL L.JACKSON: Really? Only in the UK?

KT: Well everywhere but we kind of claim him as our own because he’s from Ireland.

SLJ: You can’t claim him because he’s from Ireland.

KT: Well we do because it’s close by. (laughter)

SLJ: Ok. That’s the source of all the conflict over there. You people always claiming the Irish as yours. We got a little problem just like that here called slavery but that’s ok we don’t need to talk about that so lets go. (more laughter)

KT: Well Colin is a very well paid slave.

SLJ: Ok good.

KT: As are you.

SLJ: Yeah all right.

KT: What did you know about him before you came to work with him on this project?

SLJ: I knew he was a hot, young, Irish actor who was good looking and I talked to a couple of people about him. I talked to Bruce about him and I talked to some script supervisors that had worked with him on a couple of things and they all loved him.

KT: So you checked him out?

SLJ: Yeah.

[....]

The programme was an irreverent promotional vehicle for SWAT and it’s cast and I must say that Colin gave the most honest interview I’ve ever heard on a junket. Long may his attitude prevail. Does this answer your question and win you the bet?

Yours sincerely,

Rufus Roubicek
Executive Producer
matchboxtv.com

Tags: answer, couple, laughter, lifting, looks, programme, question, quote, slj, swat

Environment: (the built one, that is): LA Observed links to a couple of stories about kayaking the grim concrete trench that is the Los Angeles River. Well worth a read, and don’t miss the 1999 LA Weekly story, in which the journalist makes it to the sea before being picked up by police.

The LA river was once a real river, but due to its tendency to flash-flood, was turned into a trickle in a concrete trench back in the 1930s. Since then, it’s starred in a wide variety of movies and TV; the ones I can remember from the top of my head are Terminator 2, Earthquake, and V (which hilariously stole the river scenes directly from Earthquake, the cheapskates).

BTW, one interesting factor of living in the LA area is that you realise just how much of the TV and film of your childhood is taken directly from these surroundings; last time I was at the local train station, I looked out over a patch of sun-baked scrub and a couple of warehouses, and could clearly see The Six-Million Dollar Man running across it in my mind’s eye — wakka-wakka-wakka.

All along, I’d assumed these great sets were chosen for a particular reason, not just because they were right around the corner from the studio ;)

Talking of my local train station, here’s a good article about a very Irvine situation; it seems people keep a second, clunker car at the train station, due to the shortcomings of the Southern California public transit system.

Tags: couple, earthquake, environment, observed, read, river, station, story, train, trench, weekly

Spam: Taughannock Networks has a couple of very good spam whitepapers up on their site.

Technical approaches to spam is recommended if you’d like a good overview of the current state of various filtering techniques; An overview of e-postage is also generally correct, although I still think there’s some room for Hashcash to prove useful — after all, we do plan to add it to SpamAssassin (eventually!).

Tags: couple, hashcash, networks, overview, room, site, spam, spamassassin, state, taughannock

Music: I’ve just stumbled across Ladytron on EMusic a couple of weeks ago, and they’ve totally taken over my playlist.

They’re kind of over-cool electro stuff in the style of Air, but with much more in the way of 80s-style synth noises. Massively over-cool: it seems the name is from a tune from Roxy Music’s first album, this interview has them namechecking ‘The Andromeda Strain’ and ‘Logan’s Run’, and virtually every tune is heavily Kraftwerky.

Still, I’m hooked… one note though: IMO, the first album, 604, is much better than the difficult second. AudioGalaxy seems to have a copy of ‘ Play Girl‘ from 604 — give it a listen.

Recommended tracks: I’m With The Pilots and Discotraxx – Paco! is worth a listen too, it includes the theme tune to Are You Being Served, believe it or not. ;)

Tags: album, couple, electro, emusic, kind, ladytron, playlist, stuff, style, tune

Trustic: ‘We regret to inform you that we are no longer taking registrations and will soon be closing the service. We have determined that the system as it currently is designed will not achieve the level of accuracy that we require, and an inaccurate system is worse than no system.’

‘The DNS blocklist will remain for a couple of weeks, but it has been configured to never return a match. Please reconfigure your mail servers to not query the blocklist.’

That’s a shame…

Tags: accuracy, blocklist, couple, dns, level, match, reconfigure, service, system, trustic

SenderBase is a cool site which lists email traffic volumes for specific senders and organisations.

This will make for some very cool spam tests. As you can see, several of the top ten sending domains are ISPs that, shall we say, may have a few ‘issues’ with customers’ open proxies. They’re scattered in amongst the Yahoo!s and Hotmails ;) Then there’s a couple of well-known domains that, let’s say, have a habit of appearing on the SBL.

Well, not quite as practical, but useful nonetheless, is Alexa’s ‘traffic detail’ feature for the web.

Very nifty; a log-scale graph of traffic as measured by pageviews from Alexa’s toolbar, and you can pick 2 sites and compare their hitrates. For example, according to this, SpamAssassin is bigger than Jesus ;)

Thanks to ‘Mr. FoRK’ on the FoRK list for this URL…

Tags: cool, couple, email, hotmails, isps, senderbase, site, spam, traffic, yahoo

A couple of handy links for while I’m on the road:

• SquirrelMail at jmason.org

• MindTerm SSH applet

Saves me typing — consider these recommendations ;)

Tags: applet, couple, jmason, mindterm, org, road, saves, squirrelmail, ssh