The copyright cops strike again. Two researchers at a computer security conference are served cease-and-desist orders moments before they’re scheduled to speak. [Salon.com] [[ t e c h n o c u l t u r e ]]

Career opportunities for the Iraqi Information Minister

For example, as a spokesman for Apple. This from Ars Technica:

“Do not believe the lies of the PC infidels. The PC chips have not reached 3GHz. It is Apple that is at 3GHz. Our initial assessment is that the PC is still at 250MHz, and we will slaughter Microsoft in the server market and in the home. Our market share is at 90%.”

We are in control. The PC users are in a state of hysteria. They do not even have control over themselves! Do not believe them! Losers, they think that by building fabs and plants and chips and trying to distort the feelings of the people they will win. I think they will not win, those bastards.”

“NO! We have retaken the education market! The infidels attacked the education market but we have killed them all with bullets and shoes. There are NO PCs there. I will take you there to the public schools and show you. IN ONE HOUR!”

More on Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf…

The Guardian reports that WeLoveTheIraqiInformationMinister.com is online and working fine after taking a time-out on Friday. “The group’s contract with its Web host called for a limit of 2,000 hits a month ? but the site was getting 4,000 per second, putting other businesses sharing that host in jeopardy. The group looked for more powerful servers and decided to shut down after crashing four,” according to AP.

Mosaic 1.0 anniversary coming up next week

And News.COM is publishing a nice series leading up to the anniversary itself (which is on April 22). Mosaic was the program which triggered the explosive growth of the Web. It was the most infuriating program ever written — because it promised (and sometimes delivered) wonderful things; but at the same time it often crashed for inexplicable reasons and required a system reboot.

Incredible picture: London by night

Thanks to Karlin Lillington for this. What’s amazing about it is how ‘organic’ the light pattern is.

Sauce for the goose, sauce for the gander…

Larry Lessig finds two articles in The Hindu [India’s leading English-language newspaper] indicating the interesting world we’ve entered in the Bushie era. “In the first, India’s Union Minister for Civil Aviation says that the doctrine of ‘pre-emptive war’ (relied upon by the United States to justify its war in Iraq) should be used to justify a war against Pakistan to counter its allegged support for ‘terrorism.’ In the second article, Pakistan says that there is ‘ample proof that India possesses biological, chemical and other weapons of mass destruction’ and of the ‘massacre of innocent civilians in Ahmedabad and Kashmir’ and therefore is a fit case for ‘pre-emptive strike’. ”

The Microsoft stealth tax

I had to order four new PCs for a project last week, and went to a local firm which builds systems to order. When I got their quote for the job I realised something that I should have twigged years ago: the hardware is now the cheap bit. 21% of the cost of the ‘raw’ machine (i.e. just with an OS installed) goes to Microsoft. If you add in the cost of the Office suite, 55% of the total cost of the system constitutes the Microsoft ‘tax’. I wrote a column about it. Lots of feedback already from astonished business folk.

Why was I so surprised? Probably because I was conditioned by my early experience of computing 30 years ago, when hardware was expensive….

Snail-mail spamming

Amazing — and scary –account in Bruce Schneier’s Newsletter about how you could bury someone’s house in physical junk mail. Quote:

“In December 2002, the notorious “spam king” Alan Ralsky gave an interview. Aside from his usual comments that antagonized spam-hating e-mail users, he mentioned his new home in West Bloomfield, Michigan. The interview was posted on Slashdot, and some enterprising reader found his address in some database. Egging each other on, the Slashdot readership subscribed him to thousands of catalogs, mailing lists, information requests, etc. The results were devastating: within weeks he was getting hundreds of pounds of junk mail per day and was unable to find his real mail amongst the deluge.

Ironic, definitely. But more interesting is the related paper by security researchers Simon Byers, Avi Rubin and Dave Kormann, who have demonstrated how to automate this attack.

If you type the following search string into Google — “request catalog name address city state zip” — you’ll get links to over 250,000 (the exact number varies) Web forms where you can type in your information and receive a catalog in the mail. Or, if you follow where this is going, you can type in the information of anyone you want. If you’re a little bit clever with Perl (or any other scripting language), you can write a script that will automatically harvest the pages and fill in someone’s information on all 250,000 forms. You’ll have to do some parsing of the forms, but it’s not too difficult. (There are actually a few more problems to solve. For example, the search engines normally don’t return more than 1,000 actual hits per query.) When you’re done, voila! It’s Slashdot’s attack, fully automated and dutifully executed by the U.S. Postal Service.

If this were just a nasty way to harass people you don’t like, it wouldn’t be worth writing about. What’s interesting about this attack is that it exploits the boundary between cyberspace and the real world. The reason spamming normally doesn’t work with physical mail is that sending a piece of mail costs money, and it’s just too expensive to bury someone’s house in mail. Subscribing someone to magazines and signing them up for embarrassing catalogs is an old trick, but it has limitations because it’s physically difficult to do it on a large scale. But this attack exploits the automation properties of the Internet, the Web availability of catalog request forms, and the paper world of the Post Office and catalog mailings. All the pieces are required for the attack to work.

And there’s no easy defense. Companies want to make it easy for someone to request a catalog. If the attacker used an anonymous connection to launch his attack — one of the zillions of open wireless networks would be a good choice — I don’t see how he would ever get caught. Even worse, it could take years for the victim to get his name off all of the mailing lists — if he ever could….”.

Photoshop isn’t killing photo shops after all

According to the NYT, the inexorable rise of digital photography may not wipe out the traditional photo retailer after all. And this is not just because consumers buy their digital gizmos from photo retailers, but because many of them find the business of editing and printing digital pictures just too fiddly. So they bring in their cameras and get the pics printed in store. It’s a bit early to say for sure, but maybe Jessops have a future after all…

Robert Fisk on the looting of Baghdad

As ever, the best reporter on the Middle East conveys a more vivid picture in prose than all the video clips I’ve seen. Example:

“It is a scandal, a kind of disease, a mass form of kleptomania that American troops are blithely ignoring. At one intersection of the city, I saw US Marine snipers on the rooftops of high-rise building, scanning the streets for possible suicide bombers while a traffic jam of looters — two of them driving stolen double-decker buses crammed with refrigerators — blocked the highway beneath.

Outside the UN offices, a car slowed down beside me and one of the unshaven, sweating men inside told me in Arabic that it wasn’t worth visiting because “we’ve already taken everything”. Understandably, the poor and the oppressed took their revenge on the homes of the men of Saddam’s regime who have impoverished and destroyed their lives, sometimes quite literally, for more than two decades.

I watched whole families search through the Tigris-bank home of Ibrahim al-Hassan, Saddam’s half-brother and a former minister of interior, of a former defence minister, of Saadun Shakr, one of Saddam’s closest security advisers, of Ali Hussein Majid –“Chemical” Ali who gassed the Kurds and was killed last week in Basra — and of Abed Moud, Saddam’s private secretary. They came with lorries, container trucks, buses and carts pulled by ill-fed donkeys to make off with the contents of these massive villas.

It also provided a glimpse of the shocking taste in furnishings that senior Baath party members obviously aspired to; cheap pink sofas and richly embroidered chairs, plastic drinks trolleys and priceless Iranian carpets so heavy it took three muscular thieves to carry them. Outside the gutted home of one former minister of interior, a fat man was parading in a stolen top hat, a Dickensian figure who tried to direct the traffic jam of looters outside.

On the Saddam bridge over the Tigris, a thief had driven his lorry of stolen goods at such speed he had crashed into the central concrete reservation and still lay dead at the wheel.

But there seemed to be a kind of looter’s law. Once a thief had placed his hand on a chair or a chandelier or a door-frame, it belonged to him. I saw no arguments, no fist-fights. The dozens of thieves in the German embassy worked in silence, assisted by an army of small children. Wives pointed out the furnishings they wanted, husbands carried them down the stairs while children were used to unscrew door hinges and — in the UN offices — to remove light fittings. One even stood on the ambassador’s desk to take a light bulb from its socket in the ceiling.”

Violate the DMCA: go to gaol

Xbox mod chip man gets 5 months. America’s Digital Millennium Copyright Act strikes again, with David Rocci from Virginia getting a five-month prison sentence and a $28,500 fine, as The Inquirer reports. It could have been worse. The DMCA allows for up to five years inside and a fine of $500,000.
[onlineblog.com]