Oblomovka

2003-07-23»

My friend Louise is like one of those brilliant cold-sell salesmen, only the other way around. If she buys something and it turns out to be a bit rubbish, she harasses the company into doing anything she wants. Here's how she got a free replacement part for her Dyson vacuum even when it was outside the guarantee.

Coinage I'd not heard before, but will now overuse: ad hominid

Well, apparently somebody requested slashdot's front page two thousand times - although it's unclear whether it's from my IP (in which case, why are none of the other browsers behind my NAT banned) or from my user login (in which case, why would do a DOS with cookies set? Maybe to force a dynamic page?).

They've unbanned me, in a minimally helpful way - which I don't begrudge them much, since they must get this sort of thing thirty or forty times a second in a normal working day. I wish they'd given me more hints as to what happened though - this could be a symptom of something more profoundly messed-up with my security, or it could just be an error on their part. It's really difficult to tell with no information. And you'd think that we'd both benefit from more of that.

The random UIDs is a bug, apparently. Which doesn't, I have to say, fill me with hope for their analytic forensics.

2003-07-22»

Or me. I get this little message when I try to visit the site.

Your user account has been banned from Slashdot

Due to questionable activity from this user account, it has been temporarily disabled. Actions that would cause this ban are posting comments designed to intentionally break comment rendering for other users, or running some sort of script or program that loaded an unacceptable number of pages in a short time frame.

If you feel that this is unwarranted, feel free to include your UID (465212) in the subject of an email, and we will examine why there is a ban. If you fail to include the UID (again, in the subject!), then your message will be deleted and ignored. I mean come on, we're good, we're not psychic. Send your email to banned@slashdot.org.
 

I know what you're saying: I've been naughty, haven't I? Well, in general, yes, but not to slashdot. And you see that UID there? It's random. Every time I hit reload, a new one appears.

In the meantime, how will I ever discover what SCO is saying this hour?

2003-07-21»

    me:     (about a new acquaintance) he writes open source software. he is
            spanish.  he dislikes capitalists.
    q:      (unimpressed)
    me:     i have a file on everyone, you know.
    q:      you mean you use google.
    me:     well i'd be a fool to keep them locally, wouldn't i?

2003-07-20»

They've revamped the bit of the Sunday Times I wrote my column inside (for nearly four years!), and there's no more room for me in the new, smaller section. So I'm away.

Perhaps I should be more worried than I am - only yesterday we were talking about our paycheque-to-mouth existence around here. But truthfully, I'm relieved. We've parted on good terms, so I think I'll still be writing features for the paper. And although weekly column did wonders for my discipline, it also made me soooo lazy. You get very spoilt when you can pay your rent one five-hundred word piece at a time.

Before I got the Virtual Life gig, I presented a TV show, and before that I was producing a TV series, and before that I helped start an ISP, and before that I manhandled a baby magazine to death, and before that I was doing a one-man show, and before that I was in a bedsit in London, staring at the stains on the ceiling. Each time I had to scare myself into trying the next job, like a series of squeaking bunny-hops. I have no ambition. I just look over my shoulder a lot.

And I was, as I think I've mentioned, getting a bit peeved with the writing-about-others-excitement instead of wreaking-excitement-on-others. I've been toying with new things for four years now, but haven't really taken any of them seriously. Now I get to look serious again.

gulp

(I'm still in the Irish Times though. This Friday, if you can evade their subscription guards, I ponder on why Perl people drink so much and why everyone in Python land has a funny European accent. It's true!)

Judith Milhon, or as everybody (like me) who never met her knew her, St. Jude, died, they say. It could just be a rumour: cypherpunks (which she named) hasn't mentioned it, I haven't heard anything on the cracker mailing lists either. Death travels slowly online. People are hesitant to believe.

"My own definition of hacking is the clever circumvention of imposed limits, whether imposed by your government, your own skills or the laws of physics."

2003-07-19»

Collated statistics on Bush approval/disapproval ratings. The site's obviously a bit biased, but the figures are straight and quite fascinating. It's amazing how jittery opinion is about Bush, especially when compared to other presidents.

2003-07-18»

I was NTKing late Thursday night, and watched the David Kelly story develop. It was sad sitting on my own, reloading Google News, watching the reports get bolder, grow from rumour to suspicion to the front-page coverage of his death, even as the sun rose.

Kelly was suspected of being the source for the BBC's claims that a key government Iraqi dossier was "sexed up" for the press. Protecting sources is a tricky game - particularly in the UK where its legally unclear how much protection journalists can realistically provide. Courts can comply editors to reveal sources and have done so in the past. Newspapers have threatened to appeal to the European Human Rights Court in Strasbourg on this issue recently. NTK has a slightly simpler approach: we let people know we'll squeal like little piggies in court, so don't tell us anything you wouldn't want the world to know - and for God's sake, send it to us anonymously.

That's not ideal. Anonymity protects the source, but doesn't help the journalist much - because anonymous sources aren't that much use. Cryptography protects the message, and authenticates the source (if they digitally sign it), but leaves a damning paper trail if the journalist is forced to hand over their records.

What you really want is an encryption system which would allow that the journalist and the source to communicate privately, allow the journo to confirm who the source is, but provide complete deniability on the source's behalf should the messages be obtained at a later date. That's what Nikita Borisov, Ian Goldberg and Eric Brewer propose in this paper, "Off-the-Record Communication, or, Why Not To Use PGP". They plot out the flaws in using standard crypto, and implement an instant messanger extension that will let parties talk in a confidential, authenticated manner that cannot be decoded - even by each other - at a later date, and is fully deniable if intercepted.

A neat solution, although it doesn't stop Parliament calling you in on the merest suspicion you might be the source, then having the rest of the media follow you around with sixty-suns-worth of spotlight until the end of your poor life. But then, even crypto has its limits.

2003-07-17»

Dan Catt (who with Modesty B. Catt was responsible for the WAP version of Elite) has written a scraper for the UK traffic site, and spooled it all out in WAPPish. I have no idea if it's useful or not because I don't have a WAP phone, can't parse WML very well, and live in America now. Still, cool!

So I'm trying to nip this one in the bud before Andrew Orlowski writes another one of his rants about how Google is being paid off by corrupt blogger billionaires eager to control the minds of the unawakened lumpenproletariat or something.

Do a google search for "cook an artichoke". The top hit is pretty funny. It contains, as the friend who pointed it out says, "the most colorful discourse I've seen yet in an epicurial conversation".

Now I'm sure that this will eventually get back to Andy, who will ponder publically why it is that a meagre blog, full of swearing, managed to get top billing on Google, when there are many authoritative cooking sites out there simply begging for hits.

To save time, I'll point out that a) all the swearing comes from google searchers, so the site must have bubbled up before the fights began, that b) it is now far more entertaining than any cooking site (short of an episode of Iron Chef presented by Sweary Mary) so I imagine will stay up there forever, and c) does actually link to several sites that tells you how to cook an artichoke. Because it has comments - filthy disgusting comments - there's even a correction to the first link which is now broken.

So we have a top link is funny for a sizeable number of people, and which still compactly and briefly explains how to cook an artichoke. What's not to love?

2003-07-16»

The UK Highways Agency provides real time traffic information that let's see how bad London's M25 is, and what all the signs on the M1 look like right now.

This is begging to be scraped into something more mobile browsable.

DeCSS is now illegal to distribute in Germany. ( I can't believe they had the gall to pass this law on my birthday. Have they no sense of decency?)