taint.org: Justin Mason’s Weblog

Why San Francisco’s network admin went rogue an “eyewitness account” with allegations about the SF network admin in question — no documentation, passwords kept to himself instead of shared with his team, the entire network maintained by 1 person, never took holidays, bad tempered and stubborn — sounds like a recipe for classic BOFH disaster

Yehrin Tong Illustration cool, hyper-detailed hand-drawn tiling patterns

working around installation bug in File::Scan::ClamAV running the test suite results in “ERROR: Can’t open/parse the config file clamav.conf”; looks like File::Scan::ClamAV is now unmaintained :(

ALIFE Conference to reveal bio-inspired spam detection ‘this bio-inspired spam detection algorithm, based on the cross-regulation modeal of T-cell dynamics, is equally as competitive [sic] as state-of-the-art spam binary classifiers and provides a deeper understanding of the behaviour of T-cell cross-regulation systems.’

Tags: admin, alife, antispam, art, bofh, bugs, clamav, conferences, cpan, graphics, illustration, immune-system, install, modules, networking, oh-dear, patterns, perl, presentations, san-francisco, southampton, sysadmin, t-cells, tiles, war-stories, workarounds, yehrin-tong

Security: Educated Guesswork forwards a great illustration of real-world security-measure subversion.

Public places with relatively unattended and un-secured toilet facilities, like train stations, have historically had a problem with intravenous drug users using the cubicles to inject. So about 10 years ago, some bright spark came up with the idea of lighting these places with ultraviolet lights, under which the blue blood in someone’s veins cannot be seen.

Apparently, this works — or at least worked until recently, when the IV drug users figured out an ingenious circumvention technique – highlight your veins beforehand using a UV marker. In normal lighting, the ink is invisible — but once in the UV-lit area, it shows up, apparently better than the veins show up under normal lighting anyway!

As EKR says: ‘remember, folks, your opponent will change his behavior to oppose you. That’s why he’s called your opponent.’

Health: An oldie from 1998. City Limits: 7 1/2 Days. An undercover investigative reporter gets incarcerated as a mental patient in Brooklyn — for a lot longer than he planned. Horrific.

Life: yesterday, I saw Mohammed Ali in the flesh. I was totally star-struck.

Tags: drug, educated, guesswork, illustration, lighting, opponent, problem, security, subversion, toilet, train