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Steven Poole dissects the revisions Microsoft made to their “Five Misunderstood Features in Vista” paper. As a company, their copywriting is roughly on par with their user interface design.

(links to this, which you may want to go to directly instead of via the Quote link above)

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As many of you know, Revision3’s servers were brought down over the Memorial Day weekend by a denial of service attack. It’s an all too common occurrence these days. But this one wasn’t your normal cybercrime – there’s a chilling twist at the end. Here’s what happened, and why we’re even more concerned today, after it’s over, than we were on Saturday when it started.

It all started with just a simple “hi”. Now “hi” can be the sweetest word in the world, breathlessly whispered into your ear by a long-lost lover, or squealed out by your bouncy toddler at the end of the day. But taken to excess – like by a cranky 3-year old–it gets downright annoying. Now imagine a room full of hyperactive toddlers, hot off of a three hour Juicy-Juice bender, incessantly shrieking “hi” over and over again, and you begin to understand what our poor servers went through this past weekend.

[..]

Along with where it’s bound, every internet packet has a return address. Often, particularly in cases like this, it’s forged – or spoofed. But interestingly enough, whoever was sending these SYN packets wasn’t shy. Far from it: it’s as if they wanted us to know who they were.

A bit of address translation, and we’d discovered our nemesis. But instead of some shadowy underground criminal syndicate, the packets were coming from right in our home state of California. In fact, we traced the vast majority of those packets to a public company called Artistdirect (ARTD.OB). Once we were able to get their internet provider on the line, they verified that yes, indeed, that internet address belonged to a subsidiary of Artist Direct, called MediaDefender.

[..]

So I picked up the phone and tried to get in touch with ArtistDirect interim CEO Dimitri Villard. I eventually had a fascinating phone call with both Dimitri Villard and Ben Grodsky, Vice President of Operations at Media Defender.

First, they willingly admitted to abusing Revision3’s network, over a period of months, by injecting a broad array of torrents into our tracking server. They were able to do this because we configured the server to track hashes only – to improve performance and stability. That, in turn, opened up a back door which allowed their networking experts to exploit its capabilities for their own personal profit.

Second, and here’s where the chain of events come into focus, although not the motive. We’d noticed some unauthorized use of our tracking server, and took steps to de-authorize torrents pointing to non-Revision3 files. That, as it turns out, was exactly the wrong thing to do. MediaDefender’s servers, at that point, initiated a flood of SYN packets attempting to reconnect to the files stored on our server. And that torrential cascade of “Hi”s brought down our network.

If the so-called “defenders” of intellectual property have no problem with breaking the law and abusing your property, why should you care about their property? They’re really asking for it to be copied with this behavior…

source

Spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, eggs, bacon, sausage and spam

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This flap is so chock full of objects of Internet scorn that it’s hard not to get a little dizzy: Right-wing nutcase Michelle Malkin has won a victory over baby-talking Food Network personality Rachael Ray, who was hawking obesity-causing products for fast-food company Dunkin’ Donuts while wearing what appeared to be a kaffiyeh, the cotton scarf that most Americans associate with Palestinian nationalists, especially the much reviled late Yasser Arafat.

Malkin called out Ray and Dunkin’ Donuts on the faux kaffiyeh being visible in the online ads and got the conservative blogosphere buzzing about a potential boycott of the donut chain. And guess what: Dunkin’ Donuts caved and yanked the ads.

It’s probably hard for many people to decide who deserves the lion’s share of their wrath: Malkin for ignorant (and, as always, borderline racist) demagoguery, the insipid Rachael Ray for aggressively embracing the role of foodie icon while shamelessly peddling nutritional nightmares, or Dunkin’ Donuts for manufacturing said fare in the first place and for backing down in the face of Malkin’s toothless swagger.

Just wait until somebody explains “arabic numerals” to Malkin…

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This then raises the question of what exactly you’re supposed to do when someone knocks on your door, and announces that they’re the police and that they have a search warrant. Don’t come to the door, and they’re going to break it down and come after you. Come to the door to verify it’s really the police (by no means a given)—and to let them in if it is—and your very movement toward the door can, also, be a trigger to break the door down and storm your home. Arm yourself and wait for them to come in? You’re practically begging them to shoot you.

Seems your only option is stand somewhere in your own house with your hands in the air, wait for the door to come down, and hope the raiding officers don’t mistake your t-shirt for a gun, or possibly trip or mistakenly fire and accidentally kill you. Be prepared to be thrown to the ground, stepped on, handcuffed, and have the barrel of a gun pointed at the back of your head.

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Yesterday, in his big non-proliferation speech, McCain took his gaffes to a new level. He actually invented 20 years of negotiations between the United States and Tehran. In his speech, McCain said:

“Today, some people seem to think they’ve discovered a brand new cause, something no one before them ever thought of. Many believe all we need to do to end the nuclear programs of hostile governments is have our president talk with leaders in Pyongyang and Tehran, as if we haven’t tried talking to these governments repeatedly over the past two decades.”

McCain has clearly forgotten what Max Bergmann points out: The stated policy of the United States since April 7, 1980 has been that we don’t talk to the Iranians. Never has the United States had communications, or tried to have communications, with the Iranian government on their nuclear program. Iran’s nuclear communications have been limited to working through the European Union (led by France and Germany, countries John McCain has referred to as “vacuous” and “posturing”).

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Another example of careless jurisprudence this week: on Monday a new law came into force requiring fortune-tellers, clairvoyants, astrologers and mediums to stipulate explicitly that their services are for “entertainment only”.

Well, trades descriptions legislation is anciently established; but in the realms of the spirit, prophecy, invisible worlds, ghosts and human souls, it has generally been felt that the whole thing is too cloudy for law. By bringing access to other spiritual dimensions into line with access to (say) a British Airways club class lounge, and by deeming in law – for that is what this measure does – that claims about worlds undreamt of in your philosophy, Horatio, are false, Parliament has taken a serious step in principle, even if the measure itself is trivial and most clairvoyants are only jokers anyway.

What, for instance, about the “faith” community? Perhaps it’s there in the legislative small print already. There will have to be an exception in law for “religions”. Whereupon clairvoyants will presumably rename themselves spiritualists. And spiritualists will presumably claim the status of a religion. Whereupon lawmakers will stipulate that a “religion” has to centre around a deity. Whereupon Buddhism will cease to be a “religion”; and…

…Well you see the philosophical marsh into which this new principle leads. Is Parliament aware of any harder evidence for the efficacy of faith-healing than for the reliability of clairvoyance? I’d like to hear it. Otherwise, let the collecting boxes in church display a sign “for entertainment purposes only” and let Catholics buy candles to light “for entertainment purposes only”; and let trips to Lourdes be sold “for entertainment purposes only”. And let the raiment of the priest administering the Sacrament be embroidered likewise.

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Me: “Thank you for calling, how can I help you?”

Customer: “Hi there, I got these promotional cheques at 3.9% for my Visa card. I was wondering if I can pay my Visa bill with them.”

Me: “No miss, the funds will be coming out of your Visa account. Therefore, you can’t pay the Visa with the same Visa account.”

Customer: “Why? I don’t see why not…”

Me: “… because the funds will be coming out of your Visa account. It doesn’t make it a lesser balance, it makes it a higher balance. Therefore, you can’t pay your Visa with the same Visa.”

Customer: “I think this is stupid. I should be able to do whatever I want with my cheques.”

Me: “Do you write yourself cheques with your bank account to yourself, and not have to pay for it?”

Customer: “Well, no… that’s just silly.”

Me: “Do you see how it works, then?”

Customer: “Yeah, I guess. But I should still be able to do it!”

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The invasion of Iraq by Britain and the US has trebled the price of oil, according to a leading expert, costing the world a staggering $6 trillion in higher energy prices alone.

The oil economist Dr Mamdouh Salameh, who advises both the World Bank and the UN Industrial Development Organisation (Unido), told The Independent on Sunday that the price of oil would now be no more than $40 a barrel, less than a third of the record $135 a barrel reached last week, if it had not been for the Iraq war.

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After CIA Director Michael Hayden publicly admitted that the CIA has, in fact, waterboarded detainees, the agency could no longer cling to its last excuses for covering up the use of the very word “waterboarding” in CIA records. As a result, yesterday we obtained several heavily redacted documents in response to an ongoing Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit brought by the ACLU and other organizations seeking documents related to the treatment of prisoners in U.S. custody overseas.

While the documents do, in fact, reveal the word “waterboarding” or some variation, they leave pretty much everything else to the imagination. The pages that haven’t been completely withheld (many of them contain the words “Denied in Full” instead of any actual content) have the clandestine blacked-out look that’s become a sort of trademark of this administration. This is my favorite:

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As our exclusive demo videos show, the Android team have been putting in some long hours bringing the user interface up to the standard people expect. The iPhone sets the bar high, and leftfield rivals like Samsung’s TouchWiz GUI really pile on the pressure.

(more video’s at the link – good competition for Apple!)

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Spotted today at 8:28 a.m. on westbound Interstate 80 and the Bangerter Highway exit: A semi-trailer truck with the company name “Husky Transport” on the cab doors. Emblazoned in bright red, 2-foot-high letters on the sides and back of the trailer was this message:

JESUS CHRIST IS LORD
NOT A SWEAR WORD!

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The butterfly-like object in this picture is NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander, as seen from above by NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. Credit: NASA/JP

Here’s a recent TV ad from the McCain campaign.

Did you see it?

No?

Let me get the frame for you:

Do you see it?

To be fair, we don’t see the full shirt. For all we know it’s a parody shirt that says something like “Osama for President”. But it sure does kind of look like this sweatshirt from Obama’s official store:

It looks like the only way McCain can get an African-American in his TV spots, is to use a Obama supporter…

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Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain’s national campaign general co-chair was being paid by a Swiss bank to lobby Congress about the U.S. mortgage crisis at the same time he was advising McCain about his economic policy, federal records show. [See sidebar.]

“Countdown with Keith Olbermann” reported Tuesday night that lobbying disclosure forms, filed by the giant Swiss bank UBS, list McCain’s campaign co-chair, former Texas Sen. Phil Gramm, as a lobbyist dealing specifically with legislation regarding the mortgage crisis as recently as Dec. 31, 2007.

Gramm joined the bank in 2002 and had registered as a lobbyist by 2004. UBS filed paperwork deregistering Gramm on April 18 of this year. Gramm continues to serve as a UBS vice chairman.

So while Gramm was advising McCain to let people lose their homes rather than get more favorable terms on their loans, he was active as a lobbyist for UBS. Sounds bad, right? Well, UBS was actively breaking the law at the same time:

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UBS has told members of its former private banking team responsible for rich US clients not to travel to America, the Financial Times reported.

The Swiss bank has also made lawyers available to the more than 50 bankers involved, many of whom have left UBS since it decided last November to wind down its cross-border private banking business for US customers.

The move follows the recent indictment of one of the unit’s former senior executives, Bradley Birkenfeld, who US authorities have accused of helping a billionaire client evade taxes. Birkenfeld has pleaded not guilty.

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The European Union assembly’s political establishment is pushing through changes that will silence dissidents by changing the rules allowing Euro-MPs to form political groupings.

Richard Corbett, a British Labour MEP, is leading the charge to cut the number of party political tendencies in the Parliament next year, a move that would dissolve UKIP’s pan-European Eurosceptic “Independence and Democracy” grouping.

Under the rule change, the largest and msot pro-EU groups would tighten their grip on the Parliament’s political agenda and keep control of lavish funding.

[..]

Nigel Farage, leader of the UK Independence Party, claimed that the move goes hand in hand with the denial of popular votes on the new EU Treaty.

”Welcome to your future. This shows an EU mindset that is arrogant, anti-democratic and frankly scary,” he said.

”These people are so scared of public opinion they are willing to set in stone the right to ignore it. Freedom requires the governing elite to be held to account. They must be getting very worried if they are enacting such dictatorial powers for themselves.”

Here’s what they are trying to get rid of:

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A US businessman has testified he gave envelopes full of cash to Israel’s prime minister but said he did not seek or receive any favours in return.

damn, I’m in the wrong line of work….

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The Dutch Council of State will let loose the software it uses to convert proprietary document formats created in MS Office into Open Source documents which follow the Open Document Format (ODF) protocol.

The software, which has been developed by Council employee Marcel Pennock and uses existing plug-ins, offers an icon which centrally converts documents to either ODF of PDF in the background.

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What they were looking for, Carroll says, was an informant—someone to show up at “vegan potlucks” throughout the Twin Cities and rub shoulders with RNC protestors, schmoozing his way into their inner circles, then reporting back to the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force, a partnership between multiple federal agencies and state and local law enforcement. The effort’s primary mission, according to the Minneapolis division’s website, is to “investigate terrorist acts carried out by groups or organizations which fall within the definition of terrorist groups as set forth in the current United States Attorney General Guidelines.”

So if you go to “vegan potlucks”, you’re probably a terrorist.

Because the war on terror won’t be truly won until we’re all terrorists.

If you’d ask me to name who I think is the smartest person I’ve ever known about, I’d answer “Richard Feynman”. Read this article for a few examples why:

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In the meantime, we were having a lot of trouble explaining to people what we were doing with cellular automata. Eyes tended to glaze over when we started talking about state transition diagrams and finite state machines. Finally Feynman told us to explain it like this,

“We have noticed in nature that the behavior of a fluid depends very little on the nature of the individual particles in that fluid. For example, the flow of sand is very similar to the flow of water or the flow of a pile of ball bearings. We have therefore taken advantage of this fact to invent a type of imaginary particle that is especially simple for us to simulate. This particle is a perfect ball bearing that can move at a single speed in one of six directions. The flow of these particles on a large enough scale is very similar to the flow of natural fluids.”

This was a typical Richard Feynman explanation. On the one hand, it infuriated the experts who had worked on the problem because it neglected to even mention all of the clever problems that they had solved. On the other hand, it delighted the listeners since they could walk away from it with a real understanding of the phenomenon and how it was connected to physical reality.

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If you want to get noticed, don’t be so polished.

This UPS truck has a haphazardly affixed SAFETY sign hanging from the back. Think that’s unintentional? UPS does it on purpose. You notice it because a human being did it.

via

I was reminded that next Wednesday is my birthday. I’m getting old (so get of my lawn already!)…

If you’re inclined to do something about this (usually, I’m not, but that doesn’t appear to stop anybody), you can visit this.