taint.org: Justin Mason’s Weblog

Security: the use of backscatter x-ray scanners has hit the US press now that the TSA are taking an interest.

These are interesting devices; unlike normal X-rays, they effectively render clothes invisible. That’s obviously got big privacy implications.

Quite a few of the press stories include images that have been blurred or obscured, presumably to render them printable. However, this image seems closer to the real results (not work-safe).

They were trialled in Heathrow’s Terminal 4 last year. One slashdotter’s experience:

Every Nth person in the line had to go through. They take you to a seperate are which is blocked off, make you lift up your arms and then move, facing three different directions. There was one operator and the screen was blocked off. The operator is always the gender of the person being scanned. Still I felt very offended for two reasons. First, even though it was enclosed it still made me feel exposed and my personal space violated, second, any questions I asked the operator with regards to their data storage, or if I could see the images that had been made were met with ignorance and my questions were ignored. However, turning down a scan you would probably get a strip search which would be even worse. I disliked airplane security checks before, but now it is incredibly annoying.

The Times has some passenger’s reactions to images from their scans:

‘I was quite shocked by what I saw,’ said Gary Cook, 40, a graphic designer from Shaftesbury, Dorset. ‘I felt a bit embarrassed looking at the image.’

A female passenger, who did not want to be named, said: ‘It was really horrible. It doesn’t leave much to the imagination because you’re virtually naked, but I guess it’s less intrusive than being hand searched.’

If these are installed more widely, I wonder how long it’ll take before we start seeing backscatter images of supermodels being saved to floppy by unscrupulous staff, and leaked?

Also, SpyBlog notes that images of children scanned with this device would constitute ‘making, distributing or possessing child pornography’ in the UK, presuming the machine stores them internally in electronic form. oops!

Tags: backscatter, image, interest, operator, passenger, person, press, privacy, security, tsa, use

Mapping: NASA’s Earth Observatory has put up a 4 MB high-res topographical image of Ireland. A rough calculation indicates that each pixel is under 0.1 of a mile on a side. It’s fantastic. ;)

Best of all, since NASA operate under the US’ enlightened copyright and licensing policies for government-funded data, it’s free — the masthead notes ‘Any and all materials published on the Earth Observatory are freely available for re-publication or re-use, except where copyright is indicated. We ask that NASA’s Earth Observatory be given credit for its original materials.’ Copyright is not indicated on this image as far as I can see. So go ahead and save a copy for future use, too.

(via EirePreneur in turn via Irish Typepad)

Tags: calculation, copyright, earth, image, licensing, mapping, mile, nasa, observatory, pixel, side

Tech: Bit of a long essay, this one.

World+dog have been linking to this interview with Flickr’s Stewart Butterfield on the O’Reilly Network, so I wasn’t going to bother. But I came across a great illustration of what I think is a very important point:

Koman: In the write-up for your web services session at ETech, you say, Capturing the creative energy of the hive can be scary. It requires giving up some control, and eliminating lock-in as a strategy. Tell me some more about that.

Butterfield: Ofoto is a pretty good example. I don’t want to pick on them too much, but they create a pretty artificial kind of lock-in. When you upload your pictures to them, you might upload a three- or four-megapixel image, but all you can get back from them is a 600-pixel image; if you want to get the original back, you have to buy it on a CD. There’s no way to get it out because if you got it out, then your friends and family could get it out and print it out at home, and they’re in competition with Lexmark and HP as well as the other online photo services. So that’s one aspect of it.

There’s also a tendency to want to capture all the value that’s being generated or will potentially be generated by new business. What I mean by that is, we don’t explicitly allow commercial uses of the API yet, but we definitely plan to. And we know that there are people working on products based on our API that we want to do, but outside developers will get to it first. What letting go in that context means is letting go of all the control you have over users by being the one who owns the database, because other developers can generate businesses and products that hook into you, and that takes some value away.

This is a point that still, to this day, most people miss.

The traditional viewpoint is that, if you’ve got something, you hoard it, and ensure you’re the guy who makes the money from it. So you do what Ofoto do — you keep the full-resolution images, and charge for access to them; or you don’t publish APIs, and keep the data to yourself; or in the world of source code, you hold onto the source so no-one else can see it, because it’s your ‘crown jewels’. Then, the idea goes, you can ensure that you’re the only one who can do prints, or add a feature to the source, or whatever.

But the problem is, you’re not always the one with the idea; or alternatively, every feature request has to go through you, and be implemented by you, on your time. And in the meantime, your users are considering the big question — ‘do I want to get locked in, here? what if he goes out of business? am I a small customer who’s going to be ignored?’

In fact, I’ve been guilty of this myself. When I started writing open-source software, I used the GPL as a license, which prohibits commercial use (mostly) — except by myself or through my explicit permission. I had no intentions of making it available for commercial use, because I couldn’t see the commercial uses.

But that was me being short-sighted — soon, people starting asking if they could license the code for commercial use, or hire me. I realised that I didn’t have the time, or inclination, to go the whole hog, and risk my livelihood on a piece of software — especially risky since I didn’t think that software could support me alone.

So when I wrote SpamAssassin, I picked the Perl dual license, a license that did permit commercial use, while still being an open-source license. By now, there are quite a few commercial versions of SpamAssassin, all making money (I hope!), I’m getting paid to work on SpamAssassin, and everyone’s happy ;)

Perhaps I should have kept commercial rights to myself. But I have no doubt that doing so would have ensured SpamAssassin remained a small-time solution, and would not have received the number of contributors, committers, and patches it has by now. (for example, Matt Sergeant, who was an SpamAssassin committer, joined the project explicitly to use that code in MessageLabs‘ product.)

Plus, at the time, there were already quite a few commercial competitors – and there’s a lot more to being a commercial success than the simple things required to be an open-source success; I’d be dubious that SpamAssassin would have been able to compete as a purely-commercial play, and I’m not sure I’d have been keen to risk my livelihood to do so, anyway. (I’m not really dot-com CTO material, anyway. I like hacking code too much.)

I think things have worked out well: the software’s better, I’m earning a livelihood from open-source software regardless, and the software’s usable for more people. As usual, Larry Wall was right ;)

Tags: api, bit, control, essay, image, ofoto, point, tech, upload, value, world

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

Web: Minor software announcement — after some time using HTMLThumbnail, album, and even WebMake to build photo galleries, I finally got peeved enough, and gave in to the temptation of ‘not invented here’. ;)

Presenting Uffizi, a CSS- and template-driven, themable perl script to generate photo galleries. Quoting the POD:

• it’s very self-contained, apart from dependencies on Image::Size and the ImageMagick convert command
• fast, efficient incremental rebuilding
• generates full CSS-styled, templated and valid HTML
• every part of the generated HTML can be modified through the templates
• generates reasonably-sized images as well as thumbnails, with a link to the full-sized image
• secure — all pages are static HTML, so your webserver won’t get r00ted through a silly photo album script

I am, of course, using it on my own photo pages, and I’m very happy with it; it’s been a while since I had to hack it. (I need to get it to thumbnail MPEGs as well, but apart from that it’s teh nifty IMO.)

Tags: album, announcement, html, htmlthumbnail, image, minor, photo, script, software, time, web

Architecture: For reasons which I won’t go into here, I wound up doing a Google Image Search for ‘toilet’ which turned up a link to this page: Toilets of the World. However, he’s missing one very important variety: the world-famous Goan ‘Hog Bog’.

Here’s a tasteful pic of an expectant pig waiting for lunch (local mirror) — and then, if your stomach can take it, a rather more graphic account here. (warning: not safe for lunch)

Tags: architecture, google, image, link, lunch, page, search, toilet, toilets, variety, world

Politics: Lest we get carried away with the beauty, grooviness and coolness-in-general of New Zealand — where 1 in 160 of the population was involved in the making of the LoTR trilogy — up pops this story. It seems racism and xenophobia is finally arriving on the shores of Aotearoa.

Under the headline ‘Whose country is it anyway?’ Peters’s leaflet rails against Asian immigrants, falsely claiming that hundreds of thousands are coming to New Zealand and blaming them for, among other things, traffic problems in Auckland. These immigrants are, according to Peters, simultaneously poor enough to be leeches on the welfare system, and rich enough to drive up the cost of housing.

It would be easy to dismiss all this as a piece of desperate populism. But, unlike the Australian One Nation party, New Zealand First is not a collapsing political joke: it is the third-biggest party in Wellington’s parliament, and until 1999 Mr Peters was the country’s deputy prime minister. Barring an electoral miracle, the opposition National party will have to take them on as coalition partners if it is ever to win another election.

‘Traffic problems in Auckland’? WTF? (found via Danny Yee)

Computing: Amazing. via GirlHacker, it turns out that a teapot has long been used as a demonstration of complex computer graphics techiques — with it’s curved surfaces, hidden surfaces and the like (don’t ask me, I’m no graphics guru). If you were around for the early 3-D graphics days, you’ve almost definitely seen the teapot.

Well, it turns out there was a real teapot. Here’s the history.

A related image is that of ‘Lenna’, a standard test image used when testing image compression schemes, which features a woman giving the viewer a rather saucy come-hither look. It turns out she was a Swedish model, who posed for Playboy in 1972, and that picture was scanned by an (unauthorized) researcher at USC. Piracy!

Playboy later threatened to prosecute over the unauthorized use, but by now has recognised the unique history this now has, and has relented. Cool.

Tags: beauty, country, image, lest, making, party, playboy, politics, population, teapot, traffic

Lest we get carried away with the beauty, grooviness and coolness-in-general of New Zealand — where 1 in 160 of the population was involved in the making of the LoTR trilogy — up pops this story. It seems racism and xenophobia is finally arriving on the shores of Aotearoa.

Under the headline ‘Whose country is it anyway?’ Peters’s leaflet rails against Asian immigrants, falsely claiming that hundreds of thousands are coming to New Zealand and blaming them for, among other things, traffic problems in Auckland. These immigrants are, according to Peters, simultaneously poor enough to be leeches on the welfare system, and rich enough to drive up the cost of housing.

It would be easy to dismiss all this as a piece of desperate populism. But, unlike the Australian One Nation party, New Zealand First is not a collapsing political joke: it is the third-biggest party in Wellington’s parliament, and until 1999 Mr Peters was the country’s deputy prime minister. Barring an electoral miracle, the opposition National party will have to take them on as coalition partners if it is ever to win another election.

‘Traffic problems in Auckland’? WTF? (found via Danny Yee)

Computing: Amazing. via GirlHacker, it turns out that a teapot has long been used as a demonstration of complex computer graphics techiques — with it’s curved surfaces, hidden surfaces and the like (don’t ask me, I’m no graphics guru). If you were around for the early 3-D graphics days, you’ve almost definitely seen the teapot.

Well, it turns out there was a real teapot. Here’s the history.

A related image is that of ‘Lenna’, a standard test image used when testing image compression schemes, which features a woman giving the viewer a rather saucy come-hither look. It turns out she was a Swedish model, who posed for Playboy in 1972, and that picture was scanned by an (unauthorized) researcher at USC. Piracy!

Playboy later threatened to prosecute over the unauthorized use, but by now has recognised the unique history this now has, and has relented. Cool.

Tags: beauty, country, image, lest, making, party, playboy, population, teapot, traffic

Art: Jason Salavon: Selected projects, 1997 - 2003.

Salavon operates by taking data from various sources (DVDs of late-night talk shows, homes for sale in various states, MTV’s 10 Greatest Music Videos of All Time, Playboy centerfolds, etc.), then statistically combining them and converting that into another image, movie, or whatever.

The results are excellent. Check out Homes for Sale and Every Playboy Centerfold, The Decades (normalized).

I remember somebody asking me what I thought ‘computer art’ (sic) should be like, after I dissed yet another lame pixellated Photoshop/Flash thingy. Now I have something to point at ;) I’m well impressed.

Tags: art, dvds, greatest, image, mtv, music, playboy, sale, talk, time, videos

Mozilla Firebird has this feature that obviously seemed like a good idea, but unfortunately isn’t really — automatic image resizing.

Well, while surfing about looking at the next-gen Bluecurve screenshots, I came across a screenshot with a link to linuxart.com, which had a top tip:

• type ‘about:config’
• scroll down to browser.automatic_image_resize, double click, change to ‘false’

Hey presto!

Tags: bluecurve, com, feature, firebird, idea, image, link, linuxart, mozilla, screenshot

More referrer spam stuff. As Mark states in the comments here, it seems that the referrer-spamming is using real browsers run by real people — no bots, no proxies.

The spammers create HTML pages which contain an IMG tag, using one of our pages in the SRC attribute. This causes the user’s browser to attempt to download the page — giving the correct referrer URL — but it’s not particularly visible to the user — since it’s a HTML page, not an image. All they’re likely to see is a ‘broken image’ icon, and more likely the image is hidden anyway using a hidden div or width=0 height=0 attributes.

Anyway, I took a look at the HTML for those sites. Interestingly, all of them use a distinctive HTML style, with a redirecting frame and some Javascript to load the following pop-up ad:

http: //pb. xxxconnex. com/pb.phtml? d=aporndomain.net &sc=EXPN &ip=9999999999 &c=preview

Where ‘aporndomain.net’ is a porn domain, not necessarily always the same one as you’re viewing, and ‘9999999999′ is a 10-digit number. This then loads a frameset containing another random popunder ad from a load of domains. It also throws a few hidden ones into the corner, loads them as pop-unders, loads a javascript timer to open new ones occasionally, etc. etc. etc. As you close ‘em, new ones open, and so on. Glad I don’t run IE ;)

I would bet these guys, xxxconnex.com — or one of their customers — are the ones behind the referrer-spamming as a result. Their WHOIS info states they are:

Admin, Domain  info@webfinity.net
1E Braemar Ave
Unit 19
Kingston 10, WI N/A
JM
876-357-8404

Interestingly, that phone number and address also shows up in ROKSO as well, listed under domain registrations controlled by the ‘Dynamic Pipe / Webfinity / Python Video’ spam gang, ie. one of the biggest sources of porn spam out there. They’re diversifying it seems!

Based on some suggestions on Kasia’s weblog, I think I now have a good comeback — still working on this though.

Tags: aporndomain, domain, html, image, javascript, page, porn, referrer, spam, user

I’ve just copied in a new image for the blog entry on the Joyce bridge; this one’s much sharper.

Ah, hell, might as well reproduce it here again, it is very pretty after all:

Isn’t that lovely?

Tags: blog, bridge, entry, hell, image

My try-out SpamAssassin bumper stickers from BumperActive just arrived, along with a hand-written note stating that they taken the liberty of trimming them down for me — nice touch ;)

The resolution isn’t great, but then the source image wasn’t either ;) Print quality, however, is a beaut. Recommended. Now to get sticking!

Tags: bumper, bumperactive, image, liberty, note, print, resolution, source, spamassassin, touch

wow, the FTC get so many reports of spam, they have to use this monster to deal with it! That’s serious volume.

(Image courtesy of spamNEWS and Neil Schwartzman — thanks Neil)

Tags: courtesy, ftc, image, monster, spam, spamnews, volume

The Reg: Do webcams break when Tony Blair walks by? A very interesting point; webcams, which provide perpetual surveillance by anyone who wants to, doesn’t quite fit in with modern political image control.

Tags: anyone, control, image, point, surveillance

This promo calendar for an Italian coffin manufacturer has been doing the blog-rounds recently — and the more eagled-eyed viewer might have wondered at the words MIKE LEAVE ME ALONE written on the back of the last model.

Well, wonder no more — an italian Forteana subscriber, Giuseppe de Nicolellis, has got to the bottom of it. Case closed!

Date: Fri, 20 Sep 2002 23:31:25 +0200
From: “Giuseppe de Nicolellis” (spam-protected)
To: (spam-protected)
Subject: Sex and death: mystery solved

> http://www.cofanifunebri.it/sexy-calendario.htm - somewhat unlikely
> promo calendar from an Italian coffin manufacturer.
>
> So do you fancy giving them a call and finding out why the last model has “MIKE
> LEAVE ME ALONE” written on her back?

The webmaster of www.cofanifunbri.it has just answered my enquiry. He published the image more than an year ago without the writing. A few months ago he received this e-mail from a website offering adult contents for webmasters:

Do you have a license to use this image? I do not have a license on file for:

Registrant: Matteucci Maurizio (COFANIFUNEBRI-DOM) Villa Bastilica, 30 Roma, 00148 IT

Please let me know if you have purchased the license under a different name, or please remove the image from your site.

Thanks, Mikey PhoenixContent.com

(spam-protected)

Our webmaster decided to suggest him politely to f..ck off adding the writing on the back of the lady.

(Our webmaster didn’t explain whether he really stole the image from the website or not, and I didn’t dare to ask).

Another Fortean Mystery solved!

denic

Tags: alone, calendar, coffin, image, license, manufacturer, model, promo, webmaster, website