taint.org: Justin Mason’s Weblog

I needed to buy a new laptop for work a few months back, and after a little agonizing between the MacBook Pro and a Thinkpad T61p, I plumped for the latter. As I noted at the time, one of the major selling points was the quality of IBM/Lenovo’s after-sales warranty service, compared to the atrocious stories I’d heard about AppleCare in Europe. I was, however, taking a leap of faith — I had used IBM service to great effect in the US, but had never actually tried it out in Ireland.

Sadly, I had to put this to the test today, after the hard disk started producing these warnings:

/var/log/messages:Feb  7 11:21:13 wall kernel: 
[2075890.116000] end_request: I/O error, dev sda, sector 116189461
/var/log/messages:Feb  7 11:21:38 wall kernel: 
[2075914.824000] end_request: I/O error, dev sda, sector 116189460
/var/log/messages:Feb  7 11:24:18 wall kernel: 
[2076075.072000] end_request: I/O error, dev sda, sector 116189462
/var/log/messages:Feb  7 11:25:05 wall kernel: 
[2076121.932000] end_request: I/O error, dev sda, sector 116189463

It’s a brand new machine, and a Hitachi TravelStar 7K100 drive, with a good reputation for reliability — but these things do happen. :(

Interestingly, I thought this was a case of the Bathtub curve in action — but this comprehensive CMU study of hard drive reliability notes that the ‘infant mortality’ concept doesn’t seem to apply to current hard-drive technology:

Replacement rates [of hard drives in a cluster] are rising significantly over the years, even during early years in the lifecycle. Replacement rates in HPC1 nearly double from year 1 to 2, or from year 2 to 3. This ob- servation suggests that wear-out may start much earlier than expected, leading to steadily increasing replacement rates during most of a system’s useful life. This is an in- teresting observation because it does not agree with the common assumption that after the first year of operation, failure rates reach a steady state for a few years, forming the “bottom of the bathtub”.

Anyway, I digress.

I ran the BIOS hard disk self-test, got the expected failure, then rang up Lenovo’s International Warranty line for Ireland. I got through immediately to a helpful guy in India, and gave him my details and the BIOS error message; he had no tricky questions, no guff about me using Linux rather than Windows, and there were no attempts to sting me for shipping.

There’s now a replacement HD (and a set of spare recovery disks, bonus!) winging their way via 2-day shipping, expected on Tuesday; I’m to hand over the broken HD to the courier once it arrives. Fantastic stuff!

Assuming the courier doesn’t screw up, this is yet another major win for IBM/Lenovo support, and I feel vindicated. ;)

Update: the HD arrived this morning at 10am — a day early. Very impressive!

Tags: hardware, ibm, laptops, lenovo, service, support, tips

It’s interesting reading US weblogs when they wax enthusiastic about Ryanair, typically on the foot of this BusinessWeek article.

Here’s the thing — flying Ryanair is a deeply unpleasant experience. I’ve heard rumour that their staff are paid commission based on how many discretionary charges they can pile onto the basic fare — leaving you feeling nickled and dimed at every turn — and that certainly matches with my experience. I mean, I’ve had better service in train stations in Uttar Pradesh.

In our case, our “no more” moment was after a trip to Spain earlier this year, where we were humiliated for attempting to shift around luggage instead of immediately paying the charges liable once you exceed 15 kilos (33 pounds). (Naturally, there’s no weighing scales until you get right in front of the check-in desk…) Once it became clear we didn’t want to pay the fee, the check-in person screamed at us, and sent us to the back of the check-in queue – like bold schoolchildren!

This level of service is pretty standard, going by local word of mouth. Several of my friends have, like me, vowed never to fly them again, even picking more expensive flights to more distant airports to avoid it.

It’s certainly not comparable to JetBlue, or any other low-fare airline I’ve had the pleasure of dealing with — this is a level below. The BusinessWeek article ends with:

American long-haul discounters aren’t likely to go to the extremes Ryanair has gone to sell basic services, but they’re paying more attention to Ryanair these days. “They’re on the cutting edge,” says Tad Hutcheson, vice-president for marketing at AirTran, which recently assigned two marketing staffers to spend a week flying on Ryanair. “Charging for Cokes or snacks, blankets or pillows–I’m not sure Americans are ready for that.”

Well, I certainly hope not, for their sakes!

Tags: business, cluetrain, ryanair, service, travel

Web: a while back, I posted some musings about a web service to help authenticate users as members of a private group, similarly to how TypeKey authenticates users in general.

Well, Flickr have just posted this draft authentication API which does this very nicely — it now allows third-party web apps to authenticate against Flickr, TypeKey-style, and perform a limited subset of actions on the user’s behalf.

This means that using Flickr as a group authentication web service is now doable, as far as I can see…

Tags: api, authenticate, authentication, draft, flickr, general, group, service, typekey, web

Weblogs: there’s been a few attempts to mine ‘trend’ data from del.icio.us:

• trendalicious, a ‘near real-time view of website popularity trends as reflected by the del.icio.us social bookmarking service’
• grafolicious, which is similar
• hublog: gatherers of the month lists the ‘trendsetters’ who link to popular sites first

However, none consider how many links a user generates. A user who links to every single page on the web would quickly gain a good ‘trendsetting’ rating, and would also skew the website trends upwards, without actually providing useful data to others.

A look at the hublog top posters does seem to indicate they’re linking prolifically to any old crap that looks likely to be popular, which is a more humanly-possible way to do that. ;)

However, populicious new links is quite cool — popular sites that are new in the last 24 hours. Especially handy to find out where one could download Daily Show torrents these days. ;)

There’s also the venerable Hot Links, which unfortunately tracks a very small population, but still gets interesting stuff.

Tags: hublog, icio, mine, month, popularity, service, trend, user, view, weblogs, website

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

Spam: Should ISPs Be Profiting From Knowingly Hosting Spam Gangs? – a new article up on Spamhaus.org, well worth a read. Some snippets:

So where is this stealth proxy spamware sold and distributed from? For Send Safe the answer is, www.send-safe.com, hosted by MCI Worldcom.

… MCI executives have refused to stop providing service to these gangs, insisting that the sale and distribution of stealth spamming software is not against MCI’s policy.

… It’s no surprise therefore that MCI has consistently occupied first place in Spamhaus TOP 10 World Worst Spam Service ISPs chart, with over 200 spammers and spam gangs on the MCI network in full knowledge of the security managers and the General Counsel.

… MCI Worldcom’s official position on the issue is that MCI can’t stop their spam gangs selling proxy hijacking spamware from MCI’s network as that would be ‘censoring’ the distribution and sale of illegal proxy hijacking software.

Tags: distribution, isps, mci, proxy, service, spam, spamhaus, spamware, stealth, worldcom

Mail: Google announces new mail service. This is not an April Fool’s Day joke — just terrible timing. ;) It’s for real.

Diego has some good comments.

My thoughts:

• Privacy: ‘we do not disclose your personally identifying information to third parties unless we believe we are required to do so by law or have a good faith belief that such access, preservation or disclosure is reasonably necessary to … (c) detect, prevent, or otherwise address fraud, security or technical issues (including, without limitation, the filtering of spam)’. They’re going to build one hell of a spam-filtering corpus this way ;)
• A nice ToS clause: ‘Your Intellectual Property Rights. Google does not claim any ownership in any of the content, including any text, data, information, images, photographs, music, sound, video, or other material, that you upload, transmit or store in your Gmail account. We will not use any of your content for any purpose except to provide you with the Service.’

Tags: april, content, day, fool, google, information, joke, mail, service, timing

Ireland: Bad news from home.

A truly ground-breaking concept, the ‘Group Broadband Scheme’, has been watered down into a shadow of what it could be with a requirement that all community internet access schemes be operated in association with ‘an Internet Service Provider or Authorised Operator’.

In other words, rather than a radical new way to provide affordable non-profit, community-owned high-speed internet access in rural areas, it’s just business as usual:

‘With the launch of the 1st Call for Group Broadband Scheme proposals, it is clear the Minister intends to require that any application for funding under the group broadband scheme initiative be made in association with an Internet Service Provider (ISP) or Authorised Operator (AO)’, said (Ireland Offline) chairman Christian Cooke, ‘a so-called Broadband Internet Service Provider (BISP)’. …..

Experience in the UK has shown that the commercial provision of broadband in rural areas is not financially viable. Low population and wide dispersal lead to lower margins than can be supported by a profit-oriented enterprise. ….

Ireland Offline warned that the prerequisite of partnering with a BISP as a condition of GBS funding, there is a very real danger of companies cherry-picking more lucrative areas, leaving communities for which the funding should have been made available … without any services.

‘In short, in its current form, the group broadband scheme initiative bears no resemblance to the group water schemes, to rural broadband provision’, said Cooke, ‘and every resemblance to the packaging of subsidized local monopolistic franchises, monopolistic because no competitor could go head-to-head with a subsidized service. It is therefore better to think of them as not so much like group water schemes as ‘group coca-cola schemes’.’

IrelandOffline press release here.

In other EU news — the EU Parliament has approved the IP Enforcement Directive. The Greens report:

• Patents are included within the scope of the directive.
• only 3 parts of the directive are limited to ‘commercial scale’. This means that the provisions of Articles 7(1), 8 and 9 can potentially be used against consumers. In the US this kind of legislation has been used to target, amongst others, children and their parents for downloading music.
• there are concerns amongst ISPs that they can be attacked for ‘providing’ the means to download content which is protected by copyright.

James Heald: ‘Exactly what will now happen, and exactly what surprises it may lead to, will now depend on the different details of how the directive is now implemented from member country to member country across Europe.’

Tags: access, association, authorised, broadband, funding, group, internet, ireland, provider, scheme, service

Net: So it seems Kerry Packer has announced a Netflix-like service in Australia, Homescreen.

In essence, you pay a flat fee per month, log on to a website, select a whole batch of DVDs, and they post the first 3 out to you. You can keep them as long as you like, then post them back in pre-paid envelopes; once they arrive at the nearest depot, they post out the next 3 on your list.

This works very well — in the form of Netflix at least. I can vouch for the coolness of this; pretty much everyone I know who has a DVD player has joined Netflix. It’s just great having 3 DVDs on-hand for whenever you feel like watching one.

Of course, it requires that the serivce have a decent selection of goods, including some good ‘classics’. From the sounds of things, Homescreen may be failing on this point.

Also, it requires a reliable postal service. But if they can do it in the US, they can certainly do it in Australia or any European country ;)

And I’d bet Ireland has a whole huge DVD-player installed base, given the oft-quoted factoid that there are more PlayStations per capita in Ireland than any other country outside of Japan.

Irish entrepreneurs — get cracking! ;)

Tags: country, dvds, essence, homescreen, kerry, net, netflix, netflix-like, packer, post, service

Comedy: some Spinal Tap snippets:

• a review of a live performance, noting the demise of the band’s own Web-based music downloading service, Tapster — David St. Hubbins is quoted saying ‘they shut down Tapster out of force of habit.’
• Derek Smalls notes regarding Tapster, ‘It has to start with saying, ‘look we’re worried about being ripped off’, so we started TAPSTER ourselves…so we’re ripping ourselves off. If a problem comes up, we’ll sue ourselves and we’ll pocket the difference.’ (guess this was before the aforementioned shutdown.)
• The A-Z of Spinal Tap: ‘For U2’s Popmart tour, the show’s designer Willie Williams and the band decided the group should emerge from a giant lemon.’ … ‘The Edge comes down from the stairs, and to start his guitar he has to kick a switch on his foot-pedal. Well, he ended up on his hands and knees, feeling around for the pedal. Later he said to me, ‘There I was at the debut, the premiere opening night, and this voice came into my head: I’m Derek Smalls.”
• So, as mentioned in the movie, Nigel and David grew up in Squatney, East London. But did you know that Derek Smalls grew up in Nilford — ‘a ‘very small, very wretched, very dire little place’ on the River Null, near Wolverhampton. Also known as Nilford-on-Null.’

Tags: band, comedy, demise, music, null, performance, review, service, spinal, tapster, web-based

Trustic: ‘We regret to inform you that we are no longer taking registrations and will soon be closing the service. We have determined that the system as it currently is designed will not achieve the level of accuracy that we require, and an inaccurate system is worse than no system.’

‘The DNS blocklist will remain for a couple of weeks, but it has been configured to never return a match. Please reconfigure your mail servers to not query the blocklist.’

That’s a shame…

Tags: accuracy, blocklist, couple, dns, level, match, reconfigure, service, system, trustic

Gary Robinson points to an announcement of a new music service, BuyMusic.com — the announcement notes ‘users of the service will not necessarily have the freedom afforded customers of … iTunes … to transfer the music purchased to multiple computers and portable devices, or to burn it to compact discs.’

How do companies like this get funding? Surely it’s obvious that people are not going to sign up for services where they are stuck with crippled DRMware, and don’t actually get to own what they buy. ‘Here’s a car. Oh BTW — you’re only permitted to drive this within 5 miles of your home, it’ll conk out if you go any further.’

I suppose it’s hardly surprising, but BuyMusic.com informs me that my browser and OS are not welcome, in a surreal throwback to 1999. Ho hum, I’ll stick with EMusic, thanks…

In other news, I’ve just signed up for a mailing list called geowanking. Official: best name ever!

Tags: announcement, btw, buymusic, car, com, drmware, freedom, funding, music, service

So NetFlix have patented their business method; that is, subscribing to video/DVD rentals — where instead of being charged per disc, you are charged a monthly fee and can keep the rentals indefinitely without late fees. Patent here. Now, NetFlix is a very cool service, I’ve really been enjoying it. But this patent is a bit nasty.

Think about it: what’s difficult about the NetFlix setup? Is it thinking up the concept for how the business works, as described in the patent?

Or is it executing the details, setting up efficient shipping infrastructure, tracking, billing, stock management etc., efficiently enough to make a profit?

Bad news for these companies, who are now infringing:

• GameFly, which is the NetFlix model applied to games.
• GreenCine, a more indie- and anime-oriented DVD site.

As one commenter on the /. story noted, ‘imagine if McDonalds had patented the drive-thru’.

Tags: business, cool, disc, dvd, fee, method, netflix, patent, service, video

So I’ve signed up for EMusic. Just my luck — with perfect timing, they’ve instituted a new download policy, whereby one has to use a proprietary download application — and it doesn’t work on Red Hat versions after 7.3; to quote their install instructions:

The Linux version of the Download Manager 2.0 was developed for Red Hat 6.2, 7.3 and Mandrake 8.1. Any flavors of Linux outside of these may not support the EMusic Download Manager 2.0. If you are having issues, we recommend that you switch your Linux flavor or OS in order to download with the EMusic Download Manager 2.0.

There’s two workarounds: use the Red Hat 7.3 shared libraries for system libc and libnss, as described by John Anderson of genehack.org here; or apparently, a local proxy can be used as long as you use the IP address of the proxy in the emusicdlm app — not the hostname.

I’m conflicted now; I was about to go recommending this service to all and sundry, but

• it really makes the Linux version a hell of a lot harder to run. (I hope they fix that, at least). Previously, it was simply ‘right click to download’, which is insanely easy and simple.

• more worryingly — in my experience, this kind of ‘tightening up’ is often symptomatic of a company running out of cash and spiralling ’round the plughole, IMO. :(

On the good side, once I downloaded and set up the genehack hack^Wworkaround, it’s now working perfectly.

I’ve just downloaded an album from their service in about 3 minutes (at 400Kb/s), first try, and the tracks are all crystal-clear VBR MP3s. Now that’s nice…

(PS: -1 for whichever glibc genius decided to change the libnss API incompatibly.)

Tags: download, emusic, genehack, hat, linux, manager, proxy, red, service, version

Well, despite the covert bugging of the European Council offices of 3 major EU delegations, the apparatus of some states, at least, is bringing a smile to my face. The German federal secret service, the Bundesnachrichendienstes (BND), has just published Topf Secret, their official cookbook. Really. The Guardian notes:

The book consists of recipes sent in from around the world by German spies in the field. Thus, there are two recipes from Iraq, several from central Africa, the Philippines and Scotland.

Again, more questions than answers. The Germans have spies in Scotland? Do they really eat haggis? (’Attention: fill only 2/3 of the stomach since the oat flour will expand. If the stomach is too full it can explode while cooking!’) Do the two recipes from Iraq – for fattousch and tabouleh – have to be so boring (use only crunchy lettuce leaves for the fattousch)? Why are there German agents in Iraq? What are they doing in the US as well, and do they like that nation’s recipe for pumpkin pie?

Tags: apparatus, bugging, bundesnachrichendienstes, council, european, face, fattousch, service, smile, stomach

Taking a look at the referrers, I came across Mark O’Neill’s weblog, which lists taint.org on the blogroll; Mark’s the CTO of Vordel. They have a product called VordelSecure, which seems to be a SOAP firewall proxy, in the same way the Wonderwall product I wrote for Iona was a proxy for CORBA:

When a firewall examines a SOAP request received over HTTP, it might conclude that this is valid HTTP traffic and let it pass. Firewalls tend to be all-or-nothing when it comes to SOAP. A SOAP-level firewall should be capable of:

1. Identifying if the incoming SOAP request is targeted at a Web service which is intended to be available

2. Identifying if the content of the SOAP message is valid. This is analogous to what happens at the Network Layer, where IP packet contents are examined. However, at the Application Layer it requires data that the Web service expects.

Cool!

I hear Wonderwall is still around, but rewritten from the ground up. Sorry about that to whoever had to rewrite it ;)

Tags: firewall, http, identifying, layer, product, proxy, request, service, soap, web

BBC: An Irish republican song, A Nation Once Again, has been voted the world’s top tune according to a BBC World Service poll. ‘Following a late surge in votes, the Irish sing along crossed the finishing line ahead of a patriotic Hindi song, Vande Mataram.’

‘The poll had to deal with people trying to influence the vote through fan sites and spamming.’ No shit. The funniest thing about this poll was the way it suddenly stopped being about ‘the world’s top 10 tunes’ and suddenly became ‘how many ‘net users can each country mobilize to vote for a patriotic song’.

Still, I’m impressed the clicky fingers of the Irish net population (pop. 6 million) managed to beat those of India (pop. 1 billion)!

Tags: bbc, nation, poll, pop, republican, service, song, surge, tune, world

FTC: “Spam Harvest” Results Reap Help for Consumers Trying To Avoid Spam. Some good prosecutions (yay!):

The FTC alleged that NetSource One and James R. Haddaway, operating as WorldRemove, used spam and the Internet to sell a service they claimed would reduce or eliminate spam from consumers’ e-mail. The claims were false. In fact, using an undercover account to test the claims, the FTC found it received more spam after signing up for the service. The agency charged the defendants with violations of the FTC Act.

Plus some good official studies to back up our own, unscientific research:

In an effort to determine what online activities place consumers at risk for receiving spam, Northeast Netforce investigators seeded 175 different locations on the Internet with 250 new, undercover e-mail addresses and monitored the addresses for six weeks. The sites included chat rooms, newsgroups, Web pages, free personal Web-page services, message boards and e-mail service directories. One hundred percent of the e-mail addresses posted in chat rooms received spam; the first received spam only eight minutes after the address was posted. Eighty-six percent of the e-mail addresses posted at newsgroups and Web pages received spam; as did 50 percent of addresses at free personal Web page services; 27 percent from message board postings; and nine percent of e-mail service directories.

Plus, the lie of “targeting”:

Spam Harvest partners also found that the type of spam received was not related to the sites where the e-mail addresses were posted. For example, e-mail addresses posted to children’s newsgroups received a large amount of adult content and work-at-home spam.

Tags: ftc, harvest, internet, message, percent, plus, reap, service, spam, web

wow, seven to nine of the thirteen DNS root servers were flood-attacked on Monday, and nobody noticed. That’s cool.

… experts said the attack, which started about 4:45 p.m. EDT Monday, transmitted data to each targeted root server 30 to 40 times normal amounts. One said that just one additional failure would have disrupted e-mails and Web browsing across parts of the Internet.

Date: Tue, 22 Oct 2002 19:59:06 -0400
From: (spam-protected)
To: (spam-protected)
Subject: So like, a third of the rootservers went down and we didn’t even notice.

Yea, I certainly didn’t notice. Its cool and scary really — Cool that the whole net didn’t cease to be (even for an hour) and bad that 9 rootservers died period.

Scary mofo shit.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/news/archive/2002/10/22/national1907EDT0772.DTL

Powerful attack cripples majority of key Internet computers

TED BRIDIS, Associated Press Writer

Tuesday, October 22, 2002

(10-22) 16:07 PDT WASHINGTON (AP) —

An unusually powerful electronic attack briefly crippled nine of the 13 computer servers that manage global Internet traffic this week, officials disclosed Tuesday. But most Internet users didn’t notice because the attack only lasted one hour.

The FBI and White House were investigating. One official described the attack Monday as the most sophisticated and large-scale assault against these crucial computers in the history of the Internet. The origin of the attack was not known.

Seven of the 13 servers failed to respond to legitimate network traffic and two others failed intermittently during the attack, officials confirmed.

The FBI’s National Infrastructure Protection Center was “aware of the denial of service attack and is addressing this matter,” spokesman Steven Berry said.

Service was restored after experts enacted defensive measures and the attack suddenly stopped.

The 13 computers are spread geographically across the globe as precaution against physical disasters and operated by U.S. government agencies, universities, corporations and private organizations.

“As best we can tell, no user noticed and the attack was dealt with and life goes on,” said Louis Touton, vice president for the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, the Internet’s key governing body.

Brian O’Shaughnessy, a spokesman for VeriSign Inc., which operates two of the 13 computers in northern Virginia, said “these sorts of attacks will happen.”

“We were prepared, we responded quickly,” O’Shaughnessy said. “We proactively cooperated with our fellow root server operators and the appropriate authorities.”

Computer experts who manage some of the affected computers, speaking on condition of anonymity, said they were cooperating with the White House through its Office of Homeland Security and the President’s Critical Infrastructure Protection Board.

Richard Clarke, President Bush’s top cyber-security adviser and head of the protection board, has warned for months that an attack against the Internet’s 13 so- called root server computers could be dramatically disruptive.

These experts said the attack, which started about 4:45 p.m. EDT Monday, transmitted data to each targeted root server 30 to 40 times normal amounts. One said that just one additional failure would have disrupted e-mails and Web browsing across parts of the Internet.

Monday’s attack wasn’t more disruptive because many Internet providers and large corporations and organizations routinely store, or “cache,” popular Web directory information for better performance.

“The Internet was designed to be able to take outages, but when you take the root servers out, you don’t know how long you can work without them,” said Alan Paller, director of research at the SANS Institute, a security organization based in Bethesda, Md.

Although the Internet theoretically can operate with only a single root server, its performance would slow if more than four root servers failed for any appreciable length of time.

In August 2000, four of the 13 root servers failed for a brief period because of a technical glitch.

A more serious problem involving root servers occurred in July 1997 after experts transferred a garbled directory list to seven root servers and failed to correct the problem for four hours. Traffic on much of the Internet ground to a halt.

– Best regards,

bitbitch                          (spam-protected)

Tags: attack, cool, fbi, hour, internet, monday, root, service, traffic, tuesday

some history: my broadcast, by Jordan Hubbard (ucbvax!jkh), 2 Apr 1987. It seems the default configuration for Suns back then was that “everyone” really meant everyone — resulting in some fun when Jordan ran rwall (remote write to all) to the broadcast netgroup. Some good snippets in retrospect:

Since rwall is an RPC service, and RPC doesn’t seem to give a damn who you are as long as you’re root (which is trivial to be, on a work- station), I have to wonder what other RPC services are open holes. We’ve managed to do some interesting, unauthorized, things with the YP service here at Berkeley, I wonder what the implications of this are. …

(An) alternative (to getting rid of rwall) would be to tighten up all the IMP gateways to forward packets only from trusted hosts. I don’t like that at all, from a standpoint of reduced convenience and productivity.

Fast-forward to 15 years later: RPC services are almost all firewalled off due to insecurity, and packet filters on gateways — ie. firewalls — are standard kit. The internet has changed a lot since then.

Tags: apr, broadcast, everyone, history, hubbard, jkh, rpc, rwall, service, ucbvax

BB reports that “Russian entrepreneurs are spraypainting logoed advertisements for their products and services on stray dogs and releasing them as walking, starving billboards.” This sounds just a bit too Chris Morris to me, and considering it came via Ananova / Orange Today’s “quirkies” service – which is not exactly reknowned for doing the backup research first – I would say it’s pretty unlikely… let’s see what forteana make of it.

Tags: ananova, backup, bit, forteana, make, orange, research, service, today

The BBC World Service has for the last 8 years, apparently been broadcasting an Afghan version of The Archers, called “New Home, New Life”:

There is Nazir, the buffoon of a security guard based on Eddie Grundy, who in a recent episode set fire to his neighbour’s haystack. There is Rabiya Gul, the bolshie wife in the mould of Jennifer Aldridge who the Taliban routinely complain embarrasses their efforts to subdue women. And there is Rahimdad, the village barber, a solid Sid Perks type character whose shop is the meeting place – much like the pub in western soaps. In the seven years since the show’s birth, the fortunes of these characters have become so vital to national morale that it is thought not only to have saved radio from banishment, but to have encouraged the Taliban to soften their line on a range of other issues.

00.html

Tags: archers, bbc, home, life, nazir, new, service, taliban, version, world