taint.org: Justin Mason’s Weblog

Voting: None Dare Call It Stolen - Ohio, the Election, and America’s Servile Press, by Mark Crispin Miller.

Miller and many others have obviously been spending a lot of work chasing down each incident in Ohio since last November, and there’s quite a lot of them. It’s impressive the degree to which recounts were evaded, if these allegations are true. There’s many shocking cases alleged than I could really fit here — but here’s some of the lowest points:

On December 13, 2004, it was reported by Deputy Director of Hocking County Elections Sherole Eaton, that a Triad GSI employee had changed the computer that operated the tabulating machine, and had “advised election officials how to manipulate voting machinery to ensure that preliminary hand recount matched the machine count.” This same Triad employee said he worked on machines in Lorain, Muskingum, Clark, Harrison, and Guernsey counties.

it strongly appears that Triad and its employees engaged in a course of behavior to provide “cheat sheets” to those counting the ballots. The cheat sheets told them how many votes they should find for each candidate, and how many over and under votes they should calculate to match the machine count. In that way, they could avoid doing a full county-wide hand recount mandated by state law.

In Union County, Triad replaced the hard drive on one tabulator. In Monroe County, “after the 3 percent hand count had twice failed to match the machine count, a Triad employee brought in a new machine and took away the old one. (That machine’s count matched the hand count.)”

The willingness to throw away functioning, reliable election systems, and replacing them with new, easy-to-subvert ones, is astounding. But on top of that, when concerned parties investigate and find danger signs, it’s easily buried:

Miller emphasizes that, even after the National Election Data Archive Project, on March 31, 2005, “released its study demonstrating that the exit polls had probably been right, it made news only in the Akron Beacon-Journal,” while “the thesis that the exit polls were flawed had been reported by the Associated Press, the Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, USA Today, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Columbus Dispatch, CNN.com, MSNBC, and ABC.”

Miller’s conclusion: ‘the press has unilaterally disarmed’.

Tags: count, dare, election, employee, hand, lot, machine, none, recount, triad, voting

Spam: recently, I’ve been getting a lot of spam bounces; that is, messages sent by people’s autoresponders, in response to forged spam claiming to come from my domain. (I have an SPF record, but these autoresponders naturally don’t bother to check that before replying.)

I have a SpamAssassin ruleset which catches these, and it gets rid of the vast majority — but the odd wierd one gets past. This one caught my eye before I deleted it:

On October 5, 2004, I will be going to the Illinois Department of Corrections for approximately 18 months. If you wish to contact me, please snail mail me at: (address deleted)
Your letters will be forwarded to me and I will reply as soon as I receive them! Thanks…and please do write! Mail is vitally important! :-)

… ouch. Good luck to this guy, whoever he is…

Tags: domain, lot, mail, majority, record, response, ruleset, spam, spamassassin, spf

Spam: The Business Software Alliance, a UK anti-piracy body representing many of the major software vendors, recently issued a spam-related press release which got a lot of attention in the UK press (they have great press contacts!).

To quote John Graham-Cumming’s newsletter on the subject:

1 in 5 British Consumers Buy Software from Spam: that’s according to a survey by the Business Software Alliance. I find that a pretty surprisingly high number and considering it comes from an advocacy group that tries to get people to buy legitimate copies of software I expect it’s not totally accurate. The one thing I find really surprising from the survey are these two statistics: 23% of spam is read by the person receiving it and 22% of people have bought software. Apparently, 11% of people surveyed like the idea of buying through spam because the software is cheaper.

It’s still an interesting figure, but the BSA has come up with some pretty suspect statistics in the past, so pinch of salt applies. As jgc points out, the BSA have a vested interest in making the problem sound worse than it may be in reality.

Still, the survey PDF can be read here, and is worth a look.

Tags: alliance, body, bsa, business, lot, press, release, software, spam, survey

Trips: So I’m just back from ApacheCon 2004, which took place in the lovely Alexis Park building site ;)

Good fun was had — very interesting to meet all the faces behind the names from various mailing lists and blogs, and get the inside track on how the ASF really works… there’s quite a lot you don’t get to understand from the outside, or even from being a committer. So, a useful trip.

Most of the talks were, naturally, very web-oriented — we’ll have to see what we can do about that, next time around! One useful tidbit: I didn’t realise, but found out at the conference, that the ASF ConCom are very generous with paying speakers’ expenses. So maybe next time I’ll join the speaker line-up, too.

A major goal, one we achieved, was an impromptu SpamAssassin developer summit, 5 days sitting down together hammering on bugs and plans, with 4 of the main developers present (myself, Daniel, Theo and Michael). Pretty much achieved, although there were some thorny bugs to deal with… one interesting factor is that we may now be moving towards emulating the Apache httpd’s preforking model to deal with a memory/performance issue we’re seeing in 3.0.x.

Finally — this sequence of photos has been cropping up all over the internets. When I saw it, I immediately thought it looked a lot like Ireland — and Roundstone, Co. Galway, in particular. Sure enough, it appears it is! I guess the Connemara landscape of Roundstone’s bay is pretty memorable, after all…

Tags: apachecon, asf, building, fun, lot, mailing, place, roundstone, site, time, trips

Web: Bernie Goldbach points to a site that’s news to me: AnotherFriend.com. It’s an Irish dating site.

I’ve had the odd discussion comparing dating culture in the US (organised ‘dating’) and Ireland and the UK (where it’s a lot more casual), and I must say, I was really convinced that the Friendster/craigslist-style organised, web-mediated dating just wouldn’t fly.

Seems I was wrong! Right now, there’s 157 people online on the site, with a good half of those being logged-in, chatting users, and about 75% of those in turn being premium, paying members. Wow, not bad.

Politics: TheyWorkForYou.com is a triumph. The most incredibly detailed, and web-aware, hypertextual database of political activity I’ve seen yet. The web-awareness — full of scraping, links, RSS and even community — is what makes it amazing; the concept of being able to read news of your representative’s latest speeches and voting record in your RSS aggregator is incredible. We need to get this out there for every country in the world.

It certainly beats Today in Parliament, that’s for sure ;)

Aside: nice choice of username for the ‘Site News’ weblog:

Some sites linking to this entry

An error occurred: Connection error: Access denied for user: ‘fawkesmt’@'localhost’ (Using password: YES)

Wierd: Incredible footage (WMV stream) of a guy who went nuts, converted a caterpillar earthmover into what is essentially a tank, and went on a GTA-style rampage through the streets of Granby, 15 miles west of Denver, Colorado. In the process, he destroys the local bank, the newspaper, and several stores, seemingly working on the basis of (several) personal grudges.

Tags: anotherfriend, com, culture, discussion, error, friendster, lot, news, rss, site, web

Web: Plain text, transparently turned into nice markup, is an idea that’s clearly never going to go away.

Setext has been around for over a decade, I wrote EtText myself for use in WebMake and elsewhere (including this very weblog!), Zope came up with StructuredText, and more recently, there’s been Textile and reStructuredText. Now welcome the newest arrival: Markdown.

First impressions: looks an awful lot like EtText, TBH, but I’d presume that’s the shared heritage from Setext. ;)

My feedback: I’d recommend supporting ‘-’ (dash) for list bullets — it turns out that’s a whole lot more widely supported than ‘*’ (asterisk), including in Vim. Also, automatic link inference is very handy; picking up http: URIs and turning email addrs into mailto: links may not look super-pretty, but saves a lot of typing, and EtText Auto links are pretty handy for stuff that’s never going to be anything other than a link (take uncommon nouns like ‘SlashDot‘, for example).

Tags: decade, ettext, idea, link, lot, markup, plain, setext, text, use, web

Linux: Doing my backups — it’s a good feeling to know your data will (probably) be safe if your computer suddenly carks it.

This time around, I have way too much data to actually back up the lot – so I’m being selective. Filelight is very helpful here; I can see exactly where my disk space is going, spot tmp files that I should have cleared up long ago, and so on.

One thing is clear — I have too many MP3s. How am I supposed to listen to all of those?

Tags: computer, disk, feeling, filelight, linux, lot, space, spot, time, tmp, way

Politics: WorldChanging.org on open source: ‘we pay a lot of attention to it here, so much so that several worldchangers have asked why. Outside of the realm of computing, they ask, what does collaborative software have to do with changing the world? With sustainability? With democracy? With justice?’

‘… as William Gibson reminds us, the future is here, it’s just not well-distributed yet. The answer to our problems is not to redistribute wealth, it’s to redistribute the future. In very practical terms, that’s what the open source (OS) movement is doing.’

Great article — and great picture from the CSMonitor (copied above) to illustrate it!

Tags: attention, computing, future, lot, org, pay, realm, software, source, worldchanging

Politics: Hey, Sarge, Why Are They Shooting At Us with American Guns? (Three-Toed Sloth).

An interesting article, with one central thesis that had never occurred to me before; why should exports of guns, automatic weapons, and landmines be as free and easy as they are now?

In recent weeks, small arms have brought down several U.S. helicopters in Iraq, killing dozens of soldiers. Given the historically unprecedented military strength of the American armed forces, it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to be flooding the world with weapons that could someday be used in guerilla warfare — arguably the only kind of war that an enemy can successfully wage against the U.S. military.

Sanchez cited Afghanistan as a perfect example of this phenomenon. ‘No sale of weapons is ever completely safe,’ he said, ‘as yesterday’s allies become today’s terrorists.’

Environment: excerpts from Markers to Deter Inadvertent Human Intrusion into the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (via NTK). Eek! Check this out…

Tags: american, article, hey, lot, politics, shooting, sloth, strength, thesis, three, toed

Patents: Slashdot gets a lot of stick for cluelessness. Now and again, though, you find well-presented arguments you won’t read elsewhere. Try these:

An excellent summary of James Burke’s book, The Day the Universe Changed; I haven’t read it, but it sounds good. Reportedly, there’s a section covering a period in British history when patent law was extended to cover 100 years; ‘Like copyright today a person could not extend on a process developed on the day of their birth - they and their children (and even many of their grandchildren) would be dead long before the patent expired.’

Meanwhile, Germany refused to respect these terms, and their industry flourished — ‘a backwards agrarian society became an industrial powerhouse that far exceeded the capabilities of the British industry they ’stole’ from, within a working lifetime.’

Details of how Lowell, Massachusetts became an industrial-era milling powerhouse through the US ’stealing’ British patents: ‘an English immigrant, Samuel Slater … had worked his way up from apprentice to overseer in an English factory using the Arkwright system. Drawn by American bounties for the introduction of textile technology, he passed as a farmer and sailed for America with details of the Arkwright water frame committed to memory.’

Games: GameChronicles on the GTA:VC - Scarface connection. A nice summary of all (or at least, most) of the Scarface homages in the game.

Tags: arkwright, day, english, industry, lot, patent, patents, powerhouse, scarface, slashdot, summary

Software: A big-contract software dev horror story from the University of Cambridge. KPMG and Oracle come out of it with a lot of egg on their face. (found on Simon Cozens’ blog).

Lee Maguire notes an interesting artifact on the W3C site: ‘Benoît Bézaire’. This is encoded UTF-8 — which was then turned into HTML entities! Oops…

Tags: cambridge, dev, egg, horror, kpmg, lot, oracle, software, story, university

Great news from the European Parliament — the good amendments have been passed and it looks a lot better. James Heald of FFII is quoted as saying ‘the directive text as amended by the European Parliament clearly excludes software patents. It hangs together incredibly cohesively.’

Congratulations to our MEPs who grasped the highly technical nuances of the issue, and voted the right way, and to the groups who advised them so well. No congrats to me who went on holidays just before this vote. ;)

Now, all that remains is to ensure that the Council of Ministers also do the right thing; unfortunately FFII note that ‘in the past, the Council of Ministers has left patent policy decisions to its patent policy working party, which consists of patent law experts who are also sitting on the administrative council of the European Patent Office (EPO). This group has been one of the most determined promoters of unlimited patentability, including program claims, in Europe.’ Not encouraging.

Meta: still catching up and getting through the jetlag…

Tags: council, directive, european, ffii, lot, ministers, news, parliament, patent, policy

So for the past few weeks, I’ve been getting a lot less spam – like about 1/3 to 1/4 of the normal volume — to my jmason.org account.

I didn’t have a clue why; occasionally I mused that some spam gangs must have figured out that I needed all that spam to develop SpamAssassin, and cutting down on my volume would mean that I’d have to schlep stuff out of the spamtraps (which is a bit of a chore), so they’d unsubscribed me to cause some minor hassle ;)

In reality, what had happened was that my old secondary MX — which was secondarying for me because nobody had gotten around to updating it — had finally been updated, and was no longer accepting mail for jmason.org. So I had only one MX, and the erstwhile backup was bouncing anything it saw, immediately.

Lots of spamtools relay spam via the secondary MX — not sure why, we think it’s working on the assumption that secondaries are less likely to have effective filters.

So basically a good 2/3 to 3/4 of my spam was being sent to a machine that immediately bounced it ;)

The upshot: if you get a lot of spam, and don’t really care if you might occasionally lose real mail if your primary MXes are down, you could always set up a ‘fake’ secondary MX record. The spamtools will happily attempt to send spam to you via that machine (which may not even exist), and then give up after the first bounce – missing you entirely.

Big caveat: I wouldn’t suggest this for situations where your mail delivery needs to be reliable, though. Primary MXes do go down occasionally ;)

Tags: account, clue, jmason, lot, machine, mail, mxes, org, spam, volume

Congrats to Craig and Erica! Sounds like there was quite a lot of work involved for Erica — ouch — but the end result looks very cute.

Good choice of name, too — my friends Tom and Colette will be tickled by this one, given that they’ve named their son ‘Evan’, and their daughter ‘Alice’ ;)

Tags: choice, congrats, daughter, end, lot, name, ouch, result, son, work

‘Greylisting’, as described here, has received a lot of attention recently. However, I don’t think it’s a goer; here’s why:

• Firstly, as Alan Leghart pointed out on the SpamAssassin-talk list:

  This method proposes to delay EVERY SINGLE MESSAGE until a database match is found for sending IP, FROM, and TO. So…we punish everyone in the world, and hope that a delay of one or more hours is considered ‘acceptable’?

  Read his message for a sample typical daily scenario which shows how bad this can be. Maybe some people already expect a mail to take several hours to reach a recipient. In that case, you need to fix your mail server. Even the 300Mhz SpamAssassin spamtrap server gets through mail faster than that, and it’s seeing an absurd mail load ;)

• Secondly, many VERPing mailing lists and newsletters will need manual whitelisting. Requiring manual intervention == work == what spam filtering is trying to reduce == bad.

• Thirdly, it assumes spammers would never introduce retries into their spam-tools if it took off. Tempfailing, what this is based on, is effective right now because spamtools don’t retry. But every proposed solution has to consider what would happen if every server admin in the world implements it, and spammers then want to subvert it.

  IMO, ‘greylisting‘ would work fine until the spamtools start retrying, then we’re back to square one — except some legit mail takes a long time to get delivered, and the bandwidth wasted by spam has doubled due to all those retrying spams.

Tags: attention, firstly, goer, greylisting, lot, mail, message, server, spam, world

a good interview with nmap’s Fyodor on /. Snippet:

1. During your time running Honeypots, you’ll have seen a lot of compromised systems. Is there any incident that’s really stuck in your mind because of the audacity of the attempt, or the stupidity of the person attempting the breakin?

2. On the humorous front, one attacker was was running a public webcam during his exploits, so we were able to watch him crack into our boxes in real time :). I will resist the urge to link a screenshot. His rough location was determined when we noticed Mrs. Doubtfire playing on his TV and correlated that with public schedule listings. He was working with a Pakistani group, but was actually on the US East Coast.

   In the ‘disturbing audacity’ front, this year we found that a group of crackers had broken into an ecommerce site and actually programmed an automated billing-sytem-to-IRC gateway. They could obtain or validate credit card numbers by simply querying the channel bot! Expect a more detailed writeup soon.

Tags: audacity, front, group, honeypots, incident, interview, lot, nmap, snippet, time

Tim Bray’s weblog is a great read; I’ve added it to my daily list. Today, he’s provided a fantastic article about the drugs problem in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside.

Dublin has historically had a serious of up-and-down swings with a heroin problem; at one stage, it was one of the worst in Europe. It improved quite a lot during the 90’s, but it’s going downhill again, apparently; maybe the legislators need to read this article.

(The big problem as far as I can see is that treatment centres are horrifically underfunded, it being a lot easier, and — while not cheaper – at least already budgeted for, to ship the junkies off to prison. Business as usual. Of course, while they’re there, they’re (a) off the streets (out of sight, out of mind), and (b) learning all the latest criminal techniques, and getting well hooked on all the cheap heroin in there.)

(BTW did you know that one reason heroin is massively popular in prisons, is due to drug-testing? Apparently, marijuana can be detected a month after use, whereas heroin is undetectable 48 hours afterwards. So prison drug-testing regimes indirectly encourage heroin use. Oops!)

Linux: Linux Journal: report from LinuxWorld Ireland. Sounds like a great talk from maddog and Michael Meeks. And if you look carefully at the photo on that article page, you can see Proinnsias in the background!

Mind you, I would probably have just done my ‘incomprehensible question about software patents’ schtick with the IBM guy again…

What with this and GUADEC coming to Dublin, I’m missing all the good piss-ups^Wevents it seems ;)

Tags: article, bray, heroin, linux, lot, prison, problem, tim, use, weblog

wow, the Beeb fed 29,200 simultaneous RealMedia streams at one point today; that breaks down to 18,400 listeners in the UK, 12,800 elsewhere in the world.

Since getting back to bandwidth, I’ve been listening to a lot of Radio 4, waking up to the Today programme in particular. Definitely recommended; nothing like a few clipped RP tones to fill you in on all the details.

Also recommended: the Beeb’s live streams collection, featuring all the FM and digital-radio stations streamed with excellent quality. Who needs Napster when you’ve got internet radio ;)

Tags: bandwidth, beeb, lot, particular, point, programme, radio, realmedia, today, world

Andrew McGlinchey writes about a Fly UI: ‘I have seen one of the finest instances of user interface design ever, and I saw it in the men’s room at Schipol airport in Amsterdam. In each of the urinals, there is a little printed blue fly. It looks a lot like a real fly, but it’s definitely iconic - you’re not supposed to believe it’s a real fly. It’s printed near the drain, and slightly to the left.’

I’ve heard of this one before, and yes, it is an aiming-improvement UI. It started in France around the turn of the century, if I recall correctly. One important fact: it’s not a fly — it’s a bee. You see, it’s also a visual pun — the french for ‘bee’ is ‘apis’, geddit?

(I’d have commented on the blog, itself, but it’s one of those ‘create an account to comment’ places — too much trouble!)

He’s also spot-on about why tea is big in Ireland: ‘The climate is cool, grey and damp. Steady doses of warm drink with a nice gentle caffeine push really keeps you going.’ Hey, works in the Himalayas too ;)

Tags: airport, bee, design, drain, fly, interface, lot, room, schipol, user

http://www.uncontrol.com/ — a flash applet which provides a good collection of nature-imitating mathematical eye candy. Number 16 is beautiful.

I used to write graphics demos on the C-64, which used a lot of this kind of stuff (although a hell of a lot simpler for obvious reasons). It occurs to me that Flash makes writing demos a lot easier; it provides a decent language (scripting as opposed to 6502 assembly), it gives you a good set of drawing tools (anti-aliasing, alpha blending, and 24-bit colour), the hardware no longer limits what you can do in 2-D graphics, and you can even buy software which takes care of the text effects like zooms, scrolling, bouncing etc. In other words, all the cool tricks are done for you ;)

I wonder what demo writers are doing nowadays, as a result? One side seems to be what these guys have done — actually go for really interesting, good-looking effects, rather than just the “how did they do that” factor. I would imagine the other side of the demo “bleeding edge” is doing a hell of a lot of 3-D stuff. (By hand. In assembler. ;)

Tags: applet, candy, collection, demo, eye, flash, hell, lot, side, stuff