Oblomovka

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!)

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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.”

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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.

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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.

Comments Off on Fri Jul 18 23:22:00 2003

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!

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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?

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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.

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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?)

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2003-07-15»

rog took my haiku program, and created a blog->haiku add-on for Moveable Type. Nice!

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It had to be all moblogging from the back of the car, as we were in transit all yesterday. And all last night and most of today thanks to Amtrak running Coast Starlight around four hours later than advertised.

It’s odd stumbling across really bad government-run, customer-facing bureacracy in the US. It’s not the way things are usually done here – which is a shame because when they try, they’re really good at it. Amtrak had it all: weird seventies decor, bad timekeeping, a dining area with a waiting list (you had to sign up for breakfast in advance). But what I really had to admire was how the bureacratic strictures were both contradictory, and arbitrarily enforced. Surely the sign of a great Brazil theme trip.

I should have taken the hint when they wouldn’t sell me tickets in advance, but did give me a special secret code number that I had to give the conductor before I’d be allowed on the train to buy a ticket. A security measure, apparently.

As it was, when I finally stumbled aboard at 6AM, having waited at Redding station since 2AM, the conductor didn’t want my secret code. What he wanted me to tell him was how much I should pay for a ticket to San Jose. “Don’t you know that?”, I said, poorly hiding my surprise. Nobody had implied that I was enjoying any special offers. Or indeed, was supposed to remember how much I intended to pay. He grumbled, got out a big book and looked it up. “$60”. Now, I couldn’t remember the price I’d been quoted, but it was definitely less than that. “You’re lucky,” he said when I questioned him, “if you look here it actually says $69 for train-bought tickets. But I usually ignore that.”

What? I was beginning to feel like maybe this was some complex haggling and/or bribing manoeuvre. “Well, you have the advantage of me,” I began to say… and the conductor grew quite frenzied. “I do not! It was you who chose to get on the train!”. I pointed out that there was not much else to do in Redding at 6AM in the morning, having waited four hours for the pleasure. “Well, that’s the nature of trains, sir,” he replied, delivering some sort of coup de random flail.

What? What? It’s the nature of trains to arbitrarily choose the time and their fare structure? I’m terrible at fashioning snappy comebacks to surreal arguments, but I do pride myself on re-engineering odd bureacratic strange-loops. I told him that I had now remembered – perfectly – what price I was quoted, as was expected of me. I revealed that I was to pay $51. He grumpily announced that he wasn’t going to argue with me (which was nice) and let me write down my chosen price and credit card number on his carbon paper and moved on. In retrospect, I think I could have got him down to $30.

I still don’t know what the secret code number was about. Oh, and if you do go on the Coast Starlight , the laptop outlets are on next to seats 19/20 upstairs on the coach carriages. Bring a two-plug adaptor, and I bet you could share with whoever is sitting there.

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