Hard Workin’ George W

Nice remix by Sim Sadler of Dubya’s debate rhetoric. Reminds me of Ronald Reagan’s joke: “They say hard work never killed anyone, but I figured why take the risk?”

Hidden Wiring — audio

Lovely spoof by Carl Carter. The MP3 is best IMHO.

Happy Birthday OO!

OpenOffice is four years old today! Quite an impressive toddler. I mean to say, how many tots can drive an 800-lb gorilla wild with impotent rage?

You think I jest? Well, have a look at the marketing brief Microsoft wrote for its partners to assist them in dealing with customers who were thinking of defecting to Open Office. This interesting little hymn sheet used to be on the web, but seems to have disappeared. Just as well I archived a copy — in the public interest, naturally.

The hidden wiring (contd.)

Salon, which first raised the question of the mysterious bulge, has now published another picture.

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Plus an analysis by one Alex Darbut, a technical expert who designs and makes such devices for the U.S. military. His view is that the bulge is indeed a transceiver designed to receive electronic signals and transmit them to a hidden earpiece lodged in Bush’s ear canal. “There’s no question about it”, he says. “It’s a pretty obvious one — larger than most because it probably has descrambling capability,” Darbut speculates that the device Dubya wears is provided by the Secret Service. “They’re not going to have him driving around the countryside on his ranch without being in instant contact with him.”

So… we have the first electronically tagged president in history. No wonder David Blunkett is so keen on the technology.

Was Dubya wired (contd.)

CNN is claiming that there is a website devoted entirely to the question. But when I tried to reach it I got the “Service Temporarily Unavailable” 503 error. Has it been swamped by eager conspiracy theorists? Hmmm…

Later: Just discovered that I screwed up the link. Have now corrected it and it works fine. So much for conspiracy theory. Thanks to Angela Hegarty for her tactful note pointing out the mistake.

At last — common sense on patents

Terrific, level-headed article by Craig James.

George Bush’s CV — online!

Yep. Would you buy a used presidency from this man?

After SPIM (Spam over Instant Messaging), what?

Why SPIT of course — Spam over Internet Telephony. As VoIP spreads, spammers are seeing it as an opportunity to send unsolicited voicemail ads to your computer. Eric Hellweg has an interesting piece about it in the MIT Technology Review. Here’s an excerpt:

“Most of the industry leaders and observers I speak with acknowledge the threat of spam over VoIP, but knew of no wide-based industry effort to address it. That’s disconcerting. […] Jeff Pulver, CEO of Free World Dialup (FWD), says someone tried this summer to send spit to his company’s subscribers. He was able to thwart the effort, however, by blocking the IP address of the sender — similar to how e-mail spam is often stopped today. As a result of this attempt to send unsolicited advertising at FWD, Pulver created a new tool called the Pulver Communicator, which will be unveiled in about two weeks. The tool allows FWD users to select people who can call them from a buddy list of sorts. ‘Users can set rules as to who can call them,’ says Pulver. It’s a very smart approach, combining elements from social networking programs such as Friendster and instant message buddy lists. It’s the kind of endeavor that others in the industry would do well to replicate. But no one else seems to be talking about the issue much — and this is the time when such efforts should be underway.”

Hallweg does have some good news though — for example that certain VoIP services, such as Skype, AT&T’s Callvantage, Vonage, and Comcast, would be largely immune to such attacks because portions of those networks operate over a closed system that the SPITters would have to hack.

However, he concludes,

“FWD and others have only a brief window of time in which to create ways to block voice-spam. The laws of economics are on their side — for now. Simply put, there aren’t enough people using open VoIP right now to justify voice spammers’ efforts to pitch them. Until that critical mass is reached, voice spam likely won’t become a serious problem. But VoIP is marching toward widespread adoption; research firm IDC predicts that by 2008, the U.S. consumer market for VoIP will reach $5.6 billion, up from $320 million this year. And as VoIP becomes more commonly used, the window of opportunity for stopping spit will slam shut.”

The Blue Screen of Death — for real

Every Windows user is familiar with the ‘blue screen of death’ — what you see when Windows crashes. For most of us (well, most of you, dear readers — I don’t use Windows) this is irritating or infuriating, but not life-threatening. But now a Channel Four News investigation has revealed that Britain’s Royal Navy has chosen the Windows operating system for the war-fighting computers of its latest destroyers. And the Ministry of Defence is considering using Windows for the submarines which fire the UK’s nuclear weapons. So what will we do when a nuclear exchange is inadvertently triggered by a buffer overflow? Press the Start button? It brings an entirely new meaning to the ‘Fatal Error’ dialog. Thanks to Roger Houghton for the link.

How to censor the Web

I’ve been arguing for years that ISPs are ludicrously timid when faced with a lawyer’s letter, but this is ridiculous. Here’s the Slashdot summary of a fascinating — and sobering — experiment.

“Members of the Bits of Freedom group conducted a test to see how much it would take for a service provider to take down a website hosting public domain material, and have published their results. They signed up with 10 providers and put online a work by Dutch author Multatuli, who died over 100 years ago. They stated that the work was in the public domain, and that it was written in 1871. They then set up a fake society to claim to be the copyright holders of the work. From a Hotmail address, they sent out complaints to all 10 of the providers. 7 out of 10 complied and removed the site, one within just 3 hours. Only one ISP actually pointed out that the copyright on the work expired many years ago. The conclusion of the investigation is definitely worth reading. The three providers who didn’t take down the material are XS4ALL, UPC and Freeler. The company that came out the worst was iFast, who forwarded all the personal details of the site owner to the sender of the fake takedown notice without even being asked to do so.”