taint.org: Justin Mason’s Weblog

Web: I’ve been doing a little thinking about group-based networking and services.

Here’s the situation. Let’s say you have a small group of people, and want to offer some kind of online service to them (like a private chat area, mailing list, etc. etc.) That’s all well and good, but maintainance of ‘who’s in the group’ is hard. You need:

• the ability to let other ‘admins’ add/remove people
• a nice UI for doing so
• a nice UI for people to request to sign up
• possibly, multiple groups
• privacy for group members
• possibly, some public groups
• decent authentication, username/password
• the usual stuff that goes with that — ‘I’ve forgotten my password, please email it to my listed address’
• did I mention a nice UI?

The traditional approach is to code all that up myself, in my copious free time presumably. Urgh, talk about wheel reinvention on a massive scale.

I’d prefer to use something like TypeKey, a web service that exposes an API I can use to offload all this hard work to. Initially, I was in the ‘ugh, Typekey 0wnz my auth data’ camp, but I’ve eventually realised that (a) they’re not quite as evil as MS, (b) they’re not quite as stupid as MS (deleting Passport accounts if you don’t log in to Hotmail, which is only one of the supposedly many services, including third party services? hello?!), and (c) it’s actually really convenient having a single-sign-on for weblog commenting after all.

Having said all that — TypeKey’s out. Unfortunately, it only does authentication, without dealing with group maintainance.

However, social networking services are all about groups and group maintainance.

Running through the options — LinkedIn, Friendster and Orkut are all grabby and gropy and ‘my data! mine!’, so they’re out immediately.

The next step was to take a look at Tribe.net, which seems kind of nice and had a good rep for open APIs — but as far as I can see, all they’ve got really in that department is FOAF output, and a simple server-side-include thing called TribeCast. I could list all the group members in a FOAF file, but without authentication, that’s pretty useless since anyone could claim to be one of the FOAFs.

That leaves Flickr, which has a great set of APIs. Using that is looking quite promising. If you’re curious, I’ve gone into detail on this at the taint.org wiki.

Tags: authentication, group, kind, maintainance, networking, password, service, situation, thinking, typekey, web

Patents: wow, this is amazing news! ‘IBM today pledged open access to key innovations covered by 500 IBM software patents to individuals and groups working on open source software. IBM believes this is the largest pledge ever of patents of any kind and represents a major shift in the way IBM manages and deploys its intellectual property (IP) portfolio.’

Even better, they are hoping to begin a ‘patent commons’ for other companies to join, and the OSI definitions of which licenses are judged ‘open’ apply.

More details:

• IBM’s press release
• PDF list of patents
• the list, as plain text (fixed!)

Of course, it would be better if it were also safe for commercial software development. But this is a valuable bulwark against Microsoft-style patent tactics.

Tags: access, ibm, kind, list, news, patent, patents, pledge, software, source, today

TV: RTE’s ‘Prime Time’ secured a fantastic interview with GWB, with Carole Coleman asking a few very pointed questions. Watch it with RealPlayer, or listen to the audio in MP3 (2.7Mb).

There’s a pretty accurate transcript here:

Let me finish! How many times do I have to tell you how to do your job? See, I gotta insult France at least once. Then I gotta claim ‘merica to be the most generous nation in the whole wide world, even though it’s not true. And listen, let me mention that democracy in Pakistan, too. And guess what? I’m the first president to ever call for a Palestinian state and I’m damn proud of it - just look at the size of my smirk now. Listen, as long as I keep repeating myself and mouthing empty platitudes, you won’t have a chance to call me on any of the bullshit coming out of my mouth.

OK, the official one is here.

It appears that the White House just dropped the ball on this one; reportedly, they had her list of questions three days in advance, but given that they suggested that she ‘ask him a question on the outfit that Taoiseach Bertie Ahern wore to the G8 summit’ (!!!), they weren’t paying attention, and expected some kind of giggling moronic schoolgirl, or something.

Hilariously, the White House has since complained to RTE, the Irish Embassy, the Irish Government, and the reporter herself. Probably God, too. I doubt Prime Time will ever get a White House interview again, but given what they clearly expect from the poodles in the White House press corps, that’s hardly much of a loss.

(I’d love to see what’d happen if he had to deal with Paxman ;)

Also, went to see Fahrenheit 9/11. Fantastic movie, and best of all, incredibly well-attended.

My favourite moment: the reminder of just how easily the US news media sold itself out during the war. Seeing Katie Couric blurting ‘Navy Seals rock!!’ like some kind of starstruck 5-year-old with an Action Man toy, was a classic. It’s good to see that this will be immortalized in celluloid, as it was truly shocking at the time. (Not much has changed; Judith Miller is still writing for the NYT.)

Tags: gotta, gwb, house, interview, irish, kind, prime, rte, time, tv, white

Funny: EFFector Vol. 17, No. 11a April 1, 2004. Some pretty funny gems in this one: USPTO to Start Granting Indulgences, Microsoft Wins Patent for Software Industry Monopolization, and SCO to Sue Over Unauthorized Use of Earth’s Resources:

Lindon, UT - On the heels of its campaign against users of the Free Software program Linux, the SCO Group today announced that it will begin a new round of lawsuits against users of other free resources, including fire, water, air and land.

‘People think they can just use free things without paying for them,’ said SCO CEO Daryl McBribe. ‘This kind of ’socialism’ is anti-American and a violation of the Constitution. It’s up to corporations like SCO to crush that kind of idealism.’

Tags: april, effector, funny, granting, indulgences, kind, sco, software, start, uspto, vol

Ireland: A while back, I posted ‘Room for an Irish Netflix’, which plugged the idea of opening a version of the Netflix concept for Ireland. Well, over on the taint.org QT forum, JCorbett says: ‘ DVDRentals.ie is what you’re looking for!’

Sure enough, it looks pretty good — 20 eurons a month, and a reasonable selection (considering they just started).

But it limits how many DVDs you can get out in a month to 8. IMO, that’s unnecessary — nobody can watch DVDs and turn them around through the postal system that quickly!

Also, the browsing interface is lousy — I’d suggest licensing some kind of metadata from IMDb or similar, so people can get third-party reviews, comments, ‘my favourite action movie’ lists, that kind of thing.

Can’t tell much more, as the FAQ page doesn’t work on Mozilla/Firebird for some damn reason.

Sick: Anger as contestants hungry for money go begging on TV (Irish Indo) (via forteana):

A reality television show in which 12 young Russian contestants have to scrounge, beg and even steal to win a pension for life, is being filmed in Berlin.

In a city already struggling with bankruptcy and large numbers of asylum-seekers, police and residents have been quick to condemn Golod, Russian for ‘hunger’. The contestants live in a container without money or food to survive; none of them speaks German. ‘Golod’ is proving a huge hit with Moscow television viewers, thousands of whom tune in at nine each evening to find out how Karina, Anastasia and 10 other photogenic contestants are faring on the mean streets of a foreign city.

Spam: Latest Pew Internet report on spam. Pew Internet surveys are very good. This one notes that ‘25% of America’s email users say they are using email less because of spam. Within that group, most say that spam has reduced their overall use of email in a big way.’

Mafia: A mafia hacker tells his story to Wired (Simson Garfinkel via FoRK).

Tags: city, dvds, email, golod, ireland, irish, kind, money, month, netflix, spam

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

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

Joel writes about a canonical Windows UI mistake: ‘unequivocally the most moronic ‘wizard’ dialog in the history of the Windows operating system. This dialog is so stupid that it deserves some kind of award. A whole new category of award.’ It is, of course, the Find Setup Wizard dialog:

The first problem with this dialog is that it’s distracting. You are trying to find help in the help file. You do not, at that particular moment, give a hoot whether the database is small, big, customized, or chocolate-covered. In the meanwhile, this wicked, wicked dialog is giving you little pedantic lectures that it must create a list (or database). There are about three paragraphs there, most of which are completely confusing. There’s the painfully awkward phrase ‘your help file(s)’. You see, you may have one or more files. As if you cared at this point that there could be more than one. As if it made the slightest amount of difference. But the programmer who worked on that dialog was obviously distressed beyond belief at the possibility that there might be more than one help file(s) and it would be incorrect to say help file, now, wouldn’t it?

It’s a great article; there’s also some fantastic examples of stupid UI tricks that shouldn’t be possible, like detachable menu bars. Read it here.

Tags: award, database, dialog, help, history, kind, mistake, system, windows, wizard

Ho hum… SCO staggers on. Snore. Quick links:

• • Analysts to SCO
  : ‘don’t drag us into this’. Also, a good quote from Linus: ‘Quite frankly, I found it mostly interesting in a Jerry Springer kind of way. White trash battling it out in public, throwing chairs at each other.’

Tags: kind, linuxtag, quick, quote, sco, snore, suit, trash, way, website

(of the phone variety). I’ve been driven mad by telemarketers; one of the more irritating local innovations (thankfully ’sales cold calls’ are pretty hard to operate with European privacy laws, so it wasn’t a problem back home).

Well, Congress over here recently passed a ‘do not call’ list, so you could ring up the maintainers and ask for your number to be added, and hey presto, no more phone spam. Well, CalPundit writes:

The federal law doesn’t cover banks, airlines or phone companies or calls made within a state.

Wow. That’s like saying ‘the law doesn’t cover calls made on a day ending in ‘y’.’ In my experience, those companies make 95% of the calls. Great.

Think I’ll stick with the tried-and-trusted ‘ring through to answerphone during the afternoon and early evening’ filter…

DMCA: IP: Using treaties to lock in DMCA enforcement:

On May 6, President Bush and Prime Minister Goh of Singapore signed the U.S.-Singapore Free Trade Agreement (the ‘FTA’). President Bush has termed the FTA ‘the first of its kind’ - apparently meaning that it is the first free trade agreement between the United States and an Asian nation.

But the FTA is also the first of its kind in another sense, as well. It is the first international trade agreement to demand that the signatories implement anti-circumvention provisions similar to those of the hotly controversial Digital Millennium Copyright Act (’DMCA’).

It’s Naomi Klein meets Slashdot ;) Hopefully it’ll be blocked though, since it has serious domestic results too:

This step will have international, as well as domestic consequences: If Congress approves the FTA, it will not able to alter the DMCA without violating its obligations to Singapore.

Of course, according to some correspondents, Ireland’s copyright regime (reformed in 2000) quietly inserted its own DMCA provisions. Of course, nobody noticed, except for the legal lobbyists who were hoping this would happen. Doh. Is nowhere safe for freedom-to-tinker these days?

Tags: agreement, congress, copyright, course, dmca, fta, kind, law, phone, trade

Rael: secrets of the XML gods:

In response to Tim Bray’s dirty little habit of parsing XML with regular expressions, Jon Udell writes: ‘If the XML gods are resorting to Perl and Python hackery to shred documents, are we just spinning our wheels? I don’t think so. But this is, perhaps, an unusual case. … I can, however, make excellent use of the text stream underlying XML abstractions. So, which way to regard a document becomes a kind of Necker cube puzzle. The bad news: it’s confusing. The good news: it’s useful.’

…. I just co-authored a book, 1/4 of which relied heavily on the availability of not only an XML parser, but a SOAP stack. Faced with the reality that more than a handful of readers wouldn’t have either at their disposal, I wrote a hack sure to turn the stomach of any XML purist while turning many a hacker frown upside-down… ‘NoXML, Another SOAP::Lite Alternative’ for the Google Web API. ‘… NoXML is a drop-in alternative to SOAP::Lite. As its name suggests, this home-brewed module doesn’t make use of an XML parser of any kind, relying instead on some dead-simple regular expressions and other bits of programmatic magic. ‘ Elegant? Depends on your definition. Pure? As the driven beach sand. Work? You betcha!

And I thought it was just me. ;)

Tags: alternative, kind, lite, news, noxml, parser, rael, soap, use, xml

as everyone knows by now, the space shuttle Columbia has exploded on re-entry over Texas. It’s an extremely sad occasion, and a terrible thing to happen.

Lots of people look on space exploration, and the astronauts who do it, as something mundane. No way — it takes a certain kind of bravery and heroism to do this. Every astronaut (from what I’ve read) is clearly aware of the odds that the vehicles they use have a large likelihood of suddenly exploding beneath their feet — and is therefore taking a huge risk on behalf of humanity, and the expansion of human knowledge. They should be viewed as heroes, as a result.

I just hope the ISS project, and manned spaceflight in general, continues…

Some off-beat news links you may not have seen:

• Times of India: Kalpana Chawla did India proud.

• Iraqis Call Shuttle Disaster ‘God’s Vengeance’. Pretty tasteless story all-round, right down to the journalism; ask a random ‘government worker’ and a local Baghdad mechanic what they think, and present that as ‘official’ Iraqi opinion!

• and finally, a big fat oops for Boston.com, with a story entitled Columbia streaks toward Florida touchdown to end successful 16-day science mission still up on their website. Oh dear oh dear oh dear…

Tags: everyone, exploration, kind, occasion, shuttle, something, space, story, thing, way

“I am Mr Brunce Anthony, the bill exchange director at the NATIONAL WESTMINSTER BANK PLC.” Yes, it’s a 419 from that well-known third-world country, the UK.

(PS: Brunce?! what kind of name is that?! Everyone knows only Americans have that kind of ludicrous given name ;)

Date: Wed, 13 Nov 2002 10:40:51 +0100
From: “Brunce Anthony” (spam-protected)
To: (spam-protected)
Subject: FROM: BRUNCE IN UK

Dear Sir,

I am Mr Brunce Anthony, the bill exchange director at the NATIONAL WESTMINSTER BANK PLC, 135 BISHOPSGATE LONDON EC2M 3UR.

I am writing this letter to solicit for support and assistance from you to carry out this business opportunity in my department. Lying in an inactive account is the sum of

Thirty Million United States Dollars($30,000,000.00)belonging 

to a foreign customer(Stanley Heard),the former President(Bill Clinton’s personal physician) and Chairman of the National Chiropractic Health Care Advisory Committee who happens to be deceased.

He died with his wife and two children in a plane crash on Board a small airplane that plunged into a river. Ever since he died the Bank has been expecting his next of kin to come and claim these funds.

To this effect, we cannot release the money unless some one applies for it as the next of kin, as indicated in our Banking Guideline. Unfortunately he has no family member here in the UK or America who are aware of the existence of the money as he was he was a contract physician to the Chairman of Royal Bank of Scotland.

At this juncture I have decided to do business with you in colloboration with

officials that matter in the Bank, to this effect we solicit your assistance, 

in applying as the next of kin, then the money will be proccesed and released to you, as we do not want this money to go into the Bank, Treasury as an unclaimed bill.

The Banking law and guideline stipulate that if such money remains unclaimed for a period of Five years the money will be transfered into the Bank s’ Treasury as unclaimed bill. Our request for a Foreigner as a next of kin is occassioned by the fact that the customer was a Foreigner and a British cannot stand as next of kin.

Sir, 15% of the money will be your share as a Foreign partner, while 5% will be for any expenses incured during the transaction, thereafter we would visit your country once the money hits your account for disbursement and investment.

Please reach me at the above email or fax if willing to do business with us.

Best regards,

Mr. Brunce Anthony

Tags: bank, bill, director, exchange, kin, kind, money, name, national, westminster

I just dug up this classic piece of lunacy from the Montauk UFO contingent. Highly recommended if you like reading this kind of wierdness…

DA: Hmmm. Who do these aliens eat?

AC: They specifically like young human children, that haven’t been contaminated like adults. Well, there is a gentleman out giving a lot of information from a source he gets it from, and he says that there is an incredible number of children snatched in this country.

DA: Over 200,000 each year.

AC: And that these children are the main entree for dinner.

yum yum!

Tags: contingent, gentleman, highly, hmmm, kind, lunacy, montauk, piece, ufo, yum

The Evil Gerald strikes again, with Mystery Arab warns commuter of possible attack:

We both got off the train at Shankill, and he took me aside in a mysterious fashion. Then he told me in a very hushed voice, “I probably shouldn’t be telling you this, but you’ve been so kind to me. I’ve had this briefcase for three years and I’ve never been able to open it. The sandwiches my wife made for me in 1998 have gone off, but that’s not the point. I’m going to give you a warning, but you must promise to not tell anyone unless you don’t want them to die, in which case it’s fine, I’ll understand that. Listen: Don’t eat so many fatty foods. You’ll clog up your arteries and run a greater risk of suffering a fatal heart attack later in life. It’s only common sense.”

Tags: attack, briefcase, commuter, evil, fashion, kind, mystery, shankill, train, voice