Emme har travlt med at danne nye danske talem?der for forskellige m?der at score p? og forskelligt udkomme af scoringen. Hun 'danner med spredehagl' - for nu at parafrasere - men der er st?rke bud iblandt som f.eks. nydannelsen "Bage spurve med kanoner".
En uge i dansk politik:
- Den st?rkest profilerede ekspert regeringen har hyret efter det ber?mte 'smagsdommere!' angreb p? al ekspertise - Bj?rn Lomborg - kritiseres endog meget kraftigt (dvs. det institut han leder kritiseres). Tendenti?st, udokumenteret, politiserende arbejde er kritikken. Enkelte detaljer roses i "sm? rapporter" (om f.eks. filtre p? lastbiler og d?se?l), mens de "store rapporter" (om milj??konomi som s?dan og f.eks CO2-begr?nsning) sables ned. Interessant nok er der - i mods?tning til debatten om Lomborgs videnskabelige redelighed - ingen der beklikker bed?mmelsesudvalgets faglighed i denne lodrette nedsabling af Institut for Milj?vurderings arbejde. Regeringen drager ingen konsekvenser af kritikken.
- Anders Fogh Rasmussen selv f?r med lidt beh?ndighed forbundet frihedskampen med de danske styrkes tilstedev?relse i Irak. Der er naturligvis ingen historisk forbindelse, men efter den seneste tids virak om Irak i ind- og udland var det n?dvendigt at g?re noget
- Brian Mikkelsen n?r at anklage "medlemmer af DR's ledelse" for d?dstrusler - muligvis sp?gefulde s?danne, men dog d?dstrusler, og mener i?vrigt at DR i de sidste 20 ?r har v?ret befolket af lutter r?de lejesvende. Anekdoten om d?dstruslerne viser sig at v?re forkert (Mikkelsen fastholder dog historien med et argument a la det amerikanske h?jres 'It fits into a pattern' argumenter) og de 20 ?r i kommunismens tjeneste er en liges? grotesk generalisering som noget DR i de sidste mange ?r har pr?steret.
Summa summarum: Foghs regering er liges? r?get som den tidligere regering var speget. Det s?rligt slemme ved den k?rende v?rdikampagne er p?standen om at have et moralsk forspring af en slags. Der er intet.
Fogh, hans ministre, og deres politisk udn?vnte eksperter fors?ger ikke at rette op p? nogensomhelst balance i den offentlige meningsdannelse. De vil bare have ret i alt i de n?ste par ?r, og s? l?nge de har flertal til at sikre det, s? vil de g?re det.
I previously mentioned the AlwaysOn network - where Tony Perkins went after The Red Herring Folded as a usable resource. Seing the strong backing strong backing the these people are giving the 'Arnold for Governor' campaign I have to hold that endorsement.
Based on the premises that 'The recall is a good and democratic process', 'Arnold is a moderate' and 'It's a fresh start for California' a lot of AlwaysOn regulars and high profile tech businessmen endorse Schwarzenegger. A good idea? If the ability by 12 percent of voters (actual not registered) to stifle all political action for half a year was widespread we wouldn't have democracies at all. Surely the christian right would have had the ability to throw out Clinton. Surely Gore supporters would have been able to get together considerable recall momentum after the flawed presidential elections in Florida. Its like having democracy, but then having an escape mechanism if somebody is unhappy with that democracy. Moderate? Based on his campaign team - made up of republican veterans and even drawing on members of the current ruling republican faction -one should expect as little moderation as is exhibited by the Bush administration and its supporters. A fresh start? See previous answer. If it is such good news why all the republican veterans.
Isn't Arnold just a front for the same republican caste that currently runs the Bush administration?
This script will write itself. A spammer obsessed with time travel - not with the usual greed, leading to the endless porn and penis-enlargement mail onslaught - has sent out over 100 million email messages in earnest search for time travel machinery, as reported by wired news. Some people took the bait and started sending mock time travel devices to him, but he is not looking for mock time travel devices but for real ones.
The facts of the spammers life would make excellent movie material. And a fascinating read.
I can't really think of a lower form of advertising than blog comment spam. I think regular spam is less annoying. At least you know they're just carpet bombing the globe with 25 mill emails. You were not singled out, just careless with your emailaddress. Blog comment spam is different. I am not talking about the robo-spam I have previously mentioned - that's just more of the same, and it was actually more of a prank than actual spam. No, recently I have been receiving an increasing number of lowgrade comments to my blog, vaguely topical to the posts they comment on, but from the looks of it mainly there in order to promote the attached URL. These things are very hard to do automatically I should think. Unless of course it is just a very specific search on google and then some 'blogware URL pattern recognition' on top of that to find places to post.
They seem a bit too topical to be that automated, but maybe that's just my skills at cold reading that are failing me.
Tim Bray tells a story on how bad the job market is.
136 applicants for a non-descript job managing a computer room and maybe teach users about the stuff on the computers. Doesn't say where, but presumably we're in Canada.
It makes Bray think about getting out of tech-jobs (not personally, but the general idea) - BUT the sad news is that this same story could have been told about so many other lines of work currently. There was one case here in Denmark of 2000 applicants for a public relations job (1 position to fill) at BMW. Assume a cursory 5 minute examination of just half these applications and the first 83 man hours zip by, a little more than two weeks worth, and you haven't even begun to consider the applications seriously. You basically have to just throw most of them away and consider the luck of the remaining applicants a qualification.
The linux source code SCO claims is stolen is finally being shown (to make people pony up the money required by SCO's recently announced ransom scheme I suppose). Bruce Perens shoots down the claims ownership. Elsewhere, the developers of Samba criticize SCO's hypocritical stance on the GPL in general. Apparently Darl McBride, CEO of SCO, has picked up a page from the Microsoft playbook, namely the one in which open source is evil and un-american. This hasn't stopped SCO from taking advantage of the GPL (just as it hasn't stopped Microsoft from doing so).
Let's hope SCO burns up fast.
Once again Microsoft is busy shafting consumers. According to 10 pieces of identical spam in my hotmail inbox (which is my spam only email address anyway, so not a problem) MSN messenger "as part of Microsofts initiative for trustworthy computing" (translated from Danish - wording may not accurately reflect the English version of this message) will be updated in a non-backwards compatible fashion. The trustworthy computing line is as believeable as the now standard 911 defence for the Bush administration's policies on any issue. Reports in the news indicate that it is not a security update but just an attempt to throw all the MSN capabable IM clones off the MSN network.
In short, they're at it again - and inspired by the "take no prisoners, answer no questions, money is power" style of the Bush administration we can expect a lot more of incidents like this in the near future. Attacks on Google. Tying the optional MS Office add-on to Windows even closer to the OS. More use of MSN from the OS.
If only "avoid their products like the plague" was a real option.
As an aside, the Danish arm of Microsoft translates "trustworthy computing" as "pålidelig beregning" - which means something more along the lines of "dependable computation" (with "beregning" in danish being unmistakeable as anything but adding numbers together).
S?dan er den mundrette titel p? Ole Stig Andersens oversigt over mulige pinligheder med dansk i udlandet
Selv de uskyldigste ord er farlige. Man kan dog undre sig over at han har glemt s? n?rliggende muligheder som den gode gamle "Set og sket" fra TV (p? svensk er 'sket' noget med 'at skide'), Cheasy (som p? det engelsk man fors?ger at ramme betyder noget i retning af 'billigt og d?rligt') og selvf?lgelig Spies' gamle Conair - som p? engelsk betyder Fup-fly og p? fransk noget meget v?rre.
I?vrigt f?r artiklen mig til at t?nke p? Borges' ber?mte novelle "Biblioteket i Babel", for i Borges' babyloniske bibliotek st?r der jo blandt andet ogs? for hvert eneste danske ord en ordbog for et eller andet sprog (fiktivt eller virkeligt) hvori ordet indg?r som opslag, og hvor betydningen af ordet er 'r?v'.
It is fitting of course - now that wired is tired and everyone wants to be untethered instead - that Wired news has also dropped completely behind as a news source. To wit; the feature today on newsreaders and other aggregators. This story is at least 2 years old. But then I guess wired probably did it before as well. There seems to be a pattern of recycling the tech news at wired news, making sure everybody gets it.
Han var besat og gik p? kur, kvittevittevit bom bom
p? jobbet fik han tit en lur, kvittevittevit bom bom
han f?rhen kun drak Cola light, kvittevittevittevittevit bom bom
nu slanker han sig med en Sprite, kvittevittevit bom bom
er kun et af mange guldkorn som kan findes hos festsangskriverfirmaet Vokabularia. Teksterne st?r fint til den rigelige clip-art.
Now that the Blaster worm is spreading it is once again time to think about biologically inspired anti-virus defences. The absolutely coolest way to combat a virus like Blaster is to spread the security update that protets against blaster by USING the security hole the patch is to fix. i.e. spreading a benign worm.
If Microsoft did this there would be a public outcry of course - the two problems involved is the possible invasion of privacy (pirated windows versions would NOT have the automatic Windows Update enabled and would therefore be particularly susceptible to the worm) and of course the difficulty in distinguishing benign viruses from non-benign ones. Viruses that pose as security updates are already out there. And last but not least a benign virus would be a colossal liability for the spreader. People might not agree on what constitutes benign after all.
From what I understand this is a problem with spam also: Spamblocking software by its very nature may block what some consider ligitimate email which could both cause legal problems for the blocker and of course raises freedom of speech issues. With paper mail I think it is the law (at least in Denmark) that a sender has the right to insist on delivery, regardless of the opinion of the intended recipient.
This is only now being limited wrt mass email.
580 people attended a conference on spam (well, on stopping it actually - it was not an email marketing conference). That's quite a number.
Among the speakers was a Microsoft researcher - Joshua Goodman (Warning: PowerPoint at end of link). Among his points was one of those lines you've been hearing a lot about a almost anything - namely that open source software helps evil spammers learn how to get past anti-spam filters. To his credit, he knows people will attack this point, but one has to wonder, if they teach you to say this in Microsoft School or is it just something PowerPoint inserts automatically when it sees the words open source?
No empirical evidence shows open source anything to be more vulnerable to security threats.
As to gold standard spam filters (like SpamAssasin) being the thing to beat: A gold standard is the thing to beat no matter whether it is open source or not. With spam it is very simple. Keep writing spam until you're not filtered.
Spam filtering seems to be the latest craze for computer scientists looking for interesting jobs. You get to apply classical CS and a little math. There's plenty of test material to train on. The only drawback to this jop option is that the available free solutions are already very good - but of course for another year or so, not everybody will know this....
And what did I mean exactly with the "hearing a lot" quip above: It seems in this economic crisis post 911 world that people find the argument "Freedom X also applies to malicious agent Y leading to consequence Z - therefore freedom X is bad" compelling regardless of what X, Y and Z is. The opposite is true of course. It takes very particular qualification of X,Y and Z to make the statement true.
Thanks to the pioneering efforts of among others Paul Graham (with the now classic A Plan for Spam) bayesian filters have reached the mainstream, to the point of AOL implementing bayesian filters (annoyingly Hotmail hasn't yet and there are known holes in their filtering approach - so Hotmail should be avoided even as an MSN messenger identifier).
Graham has identified what could be the next frontier in anti-spam, namely raising the cost of spam by fighting back: Hitting the advertised websites with traffic proportional to the number of emails they send out. When spam success rates are low enough this will raise the cost per sale significantly and could be an efficient way to stop the sending of spam, not just filtering it.
Details in "Filters that Fight Back".
The possible problem if the approach becomes standard is of course that rabid anti-spam activists will be able to abuse this notion in the way they are abusing the open relay databases today. The idea amounts to making DoS attacks common and accepted practice. In contrast to spam filtering, this is close to vigilante justice, and I am never in favour of that - the annoyance of spam notwithstanding.
It turns out Mel Gibson may actually believe in some of the nonsense his character believes in Cnspiracy Theory. At least his father does and now the Gibson family is under fire for anti-semitism:
Mel Gibson and his parents are under fire today from a leading Jewish group for reportedly anti-semitic impulses in the former's new film and the latter's denial that Al Qaeda executed the Sept. 11 attacks.
It appears that at least Gibson's parents are holocaust deniers, and more recently and implausibly 911 deniers. Gibson has apparently not commented on this, but is busy making an 'accurate' ,'bible-true' account of the Passion of Christ - which of course means a film depicting (some) jews as evil and wrong.
A few PR friendly messages that "Mel loves everybody" will be a completely insufficient reply to criticism, considering the views of Gibsons father.
Yes, American politics has gone dark. Arnold Schwarzenegger will run for governor in California. And he is not by a wide stretch the craziest candidate to announce his candidacy. Of course there are joke candidates in elections in any country - it's part of democracy - but there seem to be a lot of them in this particular election. With only a very brief election campaign for all the unknowns and poor candidates to put together a campaign, and Arnold currently being promoted at 1910 theaters of course he looks good in the campaign, unless of course voters find his bid for office a bit too opportunistic.
Samtidig med at supermarkedsprisen p? desktop PC'er er droppet til 2000-3000 kr er prisen p? sm? laptops droppet tilsvarende til 6000 kr
Tilf?j lidt WiFi og lidt BlueTooth og man kan blive en fullyfledged roadwarrier for < 7000 kr.
Claus
A funny (if morbid) quiz :malevole - Programming Language Inventor or Serial Killer? tests your ability to separate a group of photos into hackers (programming language inventors) or slayers (serial killers). I think my quiz title is more ingenious than that used by the inventors.
Here's a movement we're happy to support at classy.dk: The Thin Book Movement:
At 213 pages, this isn't the longest technology book you'll buy this year. I'm a big fan of thin books; I'd rather get five thin books' worth of quality information on five separate subjects than spend all that time on one subject, slogging through a massive, 1000-page tome. I purchase dozens of computer books a year for myself and my team, and I've found that fewer and fewer of them are phone-book fat.
The books he doesn't like seem to be Wrox books. I couldn't agree more. And by the way, it's not really their bulk it's their flabbyness. They are in the words of Philip Roth: '10% whale and 90% blubber' (he was talking about 'Moby Dick' if you're confused by the reference).
These books that we don't like aren't just big, they're fat and lack exercise and nutrition.
I think the campaign needs one of those button gif's - like the one we have for the Warnock campaign - so I made one using the button generator. Grab it now!
One lousy week you're too busy to follow the news and you end up missing the best April Fools joke of the year, the Policy Analysis Market
The elevator-pitch for the idea is: "It's like The Hollywood Stock Exchange, only it's about stuff that really matters". Of course the notion that people would discuss on market terms the likelihood of actual political events was a bit too much for polticians to stomach and the exchange is now gone.
It all took 1 (one) week. And I missed it due to a busy work schedule. A year on internet time is truly a very long time.
That the game is still being played - only not so overtly - can be seen from the frequent 'google mindshare' or 'memewatch' jokes on the web.
UPDATE
And once again Google's cache proves its worth by enabling full reconstruction of the website.
This underlines that everybody - including Google - has got it wrong on the policies and rules that should apply to the cache. The ability of the public to hold on to content that once was there is essential and absolutely necessary to meaningful digital free speech.
The alternative - an Orwellian edited continuously edited reality - is not an alternative but a nightmare.
Instapundit talsk about digital voting
Election bureaucrats dismiss this as "paranoid," but (1) I trust professors of computer science more than courthouse hacks; and (2) Even to the extent that's true, a voting system that inspires paranoia is hardly a good thing.This should be so obvious to everybody. It is similar to the old adage "Justice must not just be done, it must also be seen to be done". We simply cannot allow any doubts about the legitimacy of the vote. And this is likely to mean that we need a bi-partisan group of people to sit down and count X'es on pieces of paper.
Paul Boutin is also concerned.
While I'm sure the republicans would have you believe that they are the true keepers of the flame of freedom, they are also engineering more and more totalitarian schemes curbing that freedom, among the more serious are the secret no-fly lists. These non-published (as well in size as in actual content) list are banning thousands from the flying from American airports. Seeing as flying is the only reasonable means of transportation out of America this is a pretty clear violation of an individual's right to freedom of movement, one of the really old and really basic and uncontested human rights. It's is beeing used not just for clear dangers but also simply to stop some people who are merely 'inconvenient'
A 71-year-old Milwaukee nun and peace activist was stopped from boarding a flight to Washington, where she and a group of students planned to lobby the Wisconsin congressional delegation against U.S. military aid to Colombia. An art dealer who'd been a high-ranking staffer in Ralph Nader's 2000 presidential campaign had been barred from a flight to Germany after telling other passengers in the check-in line that President George W. Bush "is dumb as a rock." And two journalists, Rebecca Gordon and Jan Adams of the antiwar magazine War Times, were told by an airline clerk that the were on "the FBI no-fly list."
This is not just nearly as bad as policies in the socialist Eastern Europe, but in fact exactly as bad as socialist Eastern Europe. It would have been unthinkable without the Bush administration.
SD Times has done a reader survey on choice of development platform.
Non-comittal surveys on these things are notoriously bogus - everybody is eager to say they are using the hot technologies of the moment, and nobody is saying that they are stepping up their investment in COBOL.
The examples for this survey is that it says we're supposed to see a drop in the use of SQL and HTML based technologies in the next year. As if.