RSS for beginners

Terrific how-to article by Search Engine Watch.

To hat or to hat not? — that is the question

Not sure if this is a sartorial question or one for a psychiatrist. Like many ageing hippies, I do not have as much hair as hitherto. My friends look at me going about hatless in the sun and mutter warnings about melanoma. So I need a hat. (Or should that be an hat, as in ‘an hotel’?) But what kind of hat? Not a baseball cap, surely, because that would be absurd for a father with young children who have baseball caps welded to their heads in the summer. They woiuld think I was trying to be ‘cool’, which in their eyes would be very Sad. [Note: ‘sad’ in this context is a technical term signifying behaviour too embarrassing and pathetic for words.]

Two years ago I bought a Tilley hat which is wonderful. It has brass ventilation holes and floats if it should fall off during white-water rafting and the brim can be snapped up to make one look like an Australian crocodile-hunter etc. But there are several problems with it from my point of view. (a) It’s a bit heavy in really hot weather; (b) I’m not the white-water rafting type; and (c) it’s not quite the thing to wear on days when one has to put on a suit and meet bankers and other men in suits (which, for my sins, I sometimes have to do).

So, in a fit of madness the other day, I went out and bought a Panama hat.

This is an echt-Panama too — the kind you can roll up and put in a tube while awaiting embarkation to some colonial outpost. It’s wonderfully light and comfortable, but…

The problem is that the Panama’s not really my kind of hat either. In fact, it’s the kind of headgear my grandfather would have worn in the summer if there had been any summers in Ireland. (Grandpa wore a homburg in the winter, as befitted a dominant male of his status.) So what to do? Hmmm… Perhaps I’ll seek the advice of my friend Quentin, who has almost as little hair as me. Perhaps he has a secret hat habit?

Afterthought: of course it could be that what’s really going on is that I am turning into my grandfather…. Deep waters, eh?

How to preach the (We)Blogging Gospel

Interesting Harvard Gazette piece about Dave Winer’s evangelising within Harvard. Dave is very good at explaining what a weblog is — and isn’t. Quote:

“A blog is like a personal newspaper,” says Winer. “It’s sort of publishing on a small scale.” Blogs are generally chronological, updated regularly with the most recent posting at the top, and relative: “You’re often writing about something other people have written,” he says. A recent post on Scripting News, for instance, refers readers to The Crimson’s article describing Dean Harry Lewis’ efforts to crack down on students caught sharing copyrighted songs and movies online, as well as to Palfrey’s blog that comments on that matter. Palfrey’s blog, in turn, points readers to resources for copyright law.

A blog is not, Winer is quick to note, a mail list or a discussion group, where many parties can participate equally. Indeed, he says, this autonomy of voice gives blogs what he feels is a distinct advantage.

“Mail lists often grind to a halt because they have to get consensus. Blogs don’t have to get consensus,” he says. “The magic of a Weblog is that it can move.” Indeed, Winer’s and other Weblogs are unabashedly personal in their editorializing, commenting without abandon on everything from technology-related rulings to new products to Boston’s harsh “spring” weather.

“It really is what a personal Web site is in 2003,” says Winer.

John Palfrey (also from the Berkman Center) has added his own distinctive take on this, citing historian Bernard Bailyn.:

“The American Revolution, Bailyn tells us, was really about the preservation of political liberty.  Blogs, no doubt, are about the preservation of political liberty in the online environment, in a digital era.  Rick’s analogy rings true to me, given a recent experience testifying against the mini-DMCA proposed in Massachusetts.  In a centuries-old hearing room, dozens of technologists had come to testify against a lousy bill, with one special interest lobbyist representing the other side.  How did the techies know to show up in that hearing room off Nurse’s Hall?  They read today’s online pamphlets, just as our forebears read paper pamphlets.  The spirit, it seems to me, is precisely the same.  Blogs are just faster, more powerful, with greater reach.  We should learn how to use them, yet better — not just in Massachusetts, either, but in other states and in the world at large.  It’s no time to claim victory, of course, but rather to celebrate a new means of political organizing and figuring out how to put it to yet greater use.

Prof. Bailyn was on the committee that reviewed my work as an undergraduate in History and Literature and grilled me at my orals.  He is a so-called University Professor, which is probably Harvard’s highest honor; it means, some say, that he’s so smart that he can teach in any discipline.  He is a giant of an historian and a wonderful man.  To be able to claim him on our side would be quite a coup.  Perhaps we should invite him to one of Dave’s blogging sessions here at the Berkman Center on Thursday nights.”

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….”.