taint.org: Justin Mason’s Weblog

Security: Ross Anderson, crypto and security guru extraordinaire, moonlights as – wait for it — a street bagpipe player:

I play the pipes (the Great Highland Bagpipe and the Scottish smallpipes). I played competitively as a teenager, and thereafter paid my way through university by working as a street musician in Germany, France, the Netherlands and Denmark.

NOOOOOO! ANYTHING BUT THE BAGPIPES!!!

Only joking. But yes, he really does play the bagpipes. And that submission to the EU’s consultation on the management of copyright and related rights is worth a read, to get an idea of how the new increased enforcement of music copyright has had chilling effects on the viability of the UK’s folk music scene. (found via Karl-Friedrich Lenz.)

Tags: bagpipe, copyright, crypto, extraordinaire, great, guru, music, player, security, street

Politics: Kerry in Colorado:

“Just to put your minds all at ease, I have four words for you that I know will relieve you greatly,” Kerry told the fund-raiser. “How does this sound? Vice President Hunter Thompson.”

Travel: Great posting on culture shock and ‘going native’ at Yankee Fog.

Hacks: Dan Kaminsky’s LayerOne presentation hits Slashdot. Definitely one of the highlights of that conference.

Spam: confession for two: a spammer spills it all. Interesting — especially since the spammer winds up earning less than he would have working for Starbucks.

It’s also worth noting this posting from Gary Smith on the sa-users list, in which Gary filled out a spam form with some not-entirely-valid info — with hilarious results!

So I did talk to some of these lenders. Apparently they buy leads from www.lendergateway.com . One guy that I talked to was irritated because it costs him $100 per lead they sell him and it’s supposed to only be sold to him. He apologized quite a bit and was nice enough to give me the information on who sold him the names. The number he game me goes to voicemail which I’m going to try later. A couple other people told me what I can do with myself and one lady kept saying that she couldn’t give me information on who provided her with my information.

The stupid thing is each time I talk to them I tell them I’m on a cell and that I need their name and number and I’ll call them right back. They give it to me… So when they hang up I start calling again and again. I’ve been irritating the hell out of them…

Anyways, that’s the fun storing of what happens when these forms are filled out.

$100 per spurious ‘lead’ would make a serious dent, if enough spurious leads showed up… ;)

Tags: ease, fund-raiser, great, information, lead, number, politics, sound, spam, spammer, travel

Net: Great NYTimes article interviewing Bram Cohen about BitTorrent (u: sitescooper p: sitescooper). Good to see that it landed him a job with Valve, but let’s hope that’s not the last piece of free software from Bram…

One of the best things about the article, BTW, is that it does take notice that BT isn’t a tool for piracy. Refreshing, given how these things are often covered.

Tags: article, bittorrent, great, hope, job, net, nytimes, piece, sitescooper, software, valve

Tech: Great. More on the ‘prevention of banknote scanning’ thread; Ed Felten notes that the European Central Bank is

considering recommending legislation to the EU to require inclusion of currency recognition into digital imaging products. Predictably, the ECB’s proposal is wildly overbroad, applying to ‘any equipment, software, or other product’ that is ‘capable of capturing images or transferring images into, or out of, computer systems, or of manipulating or producing digital images for the purposes of counterfeiting’. As usual, the ‘capable of’ construction captures just about every general purpose communication technology in existence — the Internet, for example, is clearly ‘capable of … transferring images into, or out of, computer systems’.

Let’s hope that proposal gets shot down in the way it deserves.

Tags: bank, banknote, central, computer, european, great, prevention, proposal, tech, the, thread

Funny: The latest MIT ‘hack’: a replica of the Wright brothers’ biplane on top of the MIT Great Dome. Nice work!

The model was dismantled Thursday by Barber and Cunha, the Institute’s hack evaluation and removal team, who salvaged a completed FAA certificate of airworthiness form for the MIT Museum.

Tags: barber, biplane, dome, funny, great, mit, model, replica, thursday, top, work

Spam: Great NYT article; well worth a read.

‘For the spammers to actually manufacture and release a worldwide virus specifically to attack you, you’re probably making quite some impact on them,’ Mr. Linford said.

Tags: article, great, impact, nyt, read, spam, virus, worldwide

Weblogs: Great — now I can figure out who my political neighbours are in blog-space. No wonder I like reading Crooked Timber – they’re fellow ( -8–6.01 , -8–6.01 )-ers! (Catchy.)

Tags: catchy, crooked, fellow, great, reading, timber, weblogs, wonder

SoCal: some great pictures from Derek Balling down in San Diego. Check out those skies!

Nukes: Great! The OC Weekly reports ‘the much-maligned San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station (SONGS) has finally gotten some recognition — but probably not the kind it wants: it now ranks (third) among the U.S. facilities most likely to suffer a meltdown, according to the Union of Concerned Scientists, a scientific group that monitors nuclear safety.’

A serious meltdown at SONGS would result in a massive release of radioactivity that could immediately kill more than 100,000 people in South County and northern San Diego County and ultimately cause hundreds of thousands of cases of cancer and genetic defects.

That’s 15 miles away from me, fact fans. Mind you, having grown up directly west of Sellafield’s discharge pipes, I’m used to a bit of radioactivity ;)

Tags: great, kind, meltdown, nuclear, nukes, onofre, radioactivity, recognition, socal, songs, weekly

Software: Great LWN weekly edition last Friday; not only is there a very nice article about SpamAssassin, debunking the ‘open spam filtering rules considered harmful’ myth, but there’s a great tool tip: Meld, a new graphical merging tool.

Basically, when you have two pieces of text, and want to merge them together into one, you need a merge tool. This is a tricky job; most people just get the tool to stick them all in one file, CVS-style, and try to figure it out visually. It’s fraught with problems.

Hence the idea of using a GUI to ease the task. There have been other graphical merge tools before; I know of the proprietary one bundled with ClearCase, and tkdiff. However, both of these just aren’t very good — it’s quite simply too hard to figure out exactly what direction which piece of text came from.

Looks like meld is a fantastic effort to fix this; take a look at the screenshots. The key is the approach they’ve taken of having a drawable area in the middle between the two differing texts; this is used for lines and graphical indications of what came from where. It really seems to work, from what I can see.

Tags: article, edition, friday, great, lwn, software, spam, spamassassin, text, the, tool

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I amAzathoth! Known as the Blind Idiot God, the center of all cycles known as Azathoth is the great void itself, infinite creation and inescapable oblivion made one. The Great God is without ego, as it has been embodied in a seperate consciousness as Azathoth has cast off the curse of self-awareness. Surrounded by the host of flautist servitors, piping the songs of the unknowable, Azathoth is not to be known by his aspirants. That is the purpose of another God…

Which Great Old One are you?

Tags: amazathoth, azathoth, blind, center, creation, god, great, idiot, infinite, void

Wow. An incredible shot up at Astronomy Pic of the Day, taken by an unnamed astronaut on-board the ISS with a digital camera. Hyde Park, Regent’s Park, and the M25 are all very clearly visible.

So I guess that means the Great Wall is no longer the only man-made structure visible from space then ;)

Tags: astronaut, astronomy, camera, day, great, iss, pic, regent, shot, wall

BBC - the Great Smog of 1952 recalled. “Fifty years ago, a choking cloud enveloped much of London and the Home Counties - a toxic fog which killed at least 4,000 people. Here, Barbara Fewster, 74, recalls the Great Smog of 1952.” A very Ballardian tale of this environmental disaster:

After a long time we arrived at Kew Bridge - that’s at least 10 miles from Hampstead - when my fiancé called out to me, ‘I’ve lost you, where have you got to?’ I must have veered off out of range of the sidelights.

At that point, a milk float passed by and my fiancé told me to get in so we could follow its taillights. He put his foot down. Well, then the milkman disappeared and we could hear the float bouncing over the grass on Kew Green. All I could do was get out of the car and continue walking. We later came across a car that had overtaken us earlier on in the journey - it was up a tree, crashed, and no sign of the occupant.

Tags: bbc, car, cloud, fianc, fifty, float, great, home, kew, smog