Quotulatiousness

August 6, 2009

Twitter under DOS attack

Filed under: Americas, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 13:58

Twitter users have been unable to access the site for most of Thursday morning, due to a Denial-of-Service (DOS) attack:

The extended silence in a normally noisy Twitterworld began around 9 a.m. Twitter later posted a note to its status update page saying the site had been slowed to a standstill by an attack.

In a denial-of-service attack, hackers typically direct a “botnet,” often made up of thousands of malware-infected home PCs, toward a target site in an effort to flood it with junk traffic. With the site overwhelmed, legitimate visitors cannot access the service.

“On this otherwise happy Thursday morning, Twitter is the target of a denial-of-service attack. Attacks such as this are malicious efforts orchestrated to disrupt and make unavailable services such as online banks, credit card payment gateways, and in this case, Twitter for intended customers or users,” co-founder Biz Stone said in a blog post. “We are defending against this attack now and will continue to update our status blog as we continue to defend and later investigate.”

Update: Service is back, intermittantly. More background on the attack here.

More threats to Royal Navy’s carrier plans

Filed under: Britain, Military — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:03

An interesting report in The Register discussing the possibility of abandoning the planned STOVL variant of the F-35 and switching to the more traditional catapult-launch and tailhook-landing variant being developed for the US Navy:

The UK Ministry of Defence (MoD) is set to make a major change to the design of the new aircraft carriers for the Royal Navy, according to a newspaper report. It’s suggested that the ships will now be equipped with catapults and arrester wires, allowing them to operate normal carrier aircraft rather than the complex, expensive jump-jets which had been planned.

According to the Daily Telegraph today “the MoD has indicated that it will drop the jump-jet… The Daily Telegraph has learnt from senior defence officials that an announcement is due this autumn.”

There would definitely be advantages to going with a more traditional aircraft: less mechanical complexity, greater weapons-carrying capability, and (probably most important in the MoD) lower per-aircraft costs. It’s not a slam-dunk decision, however:

Catapults and arrester gear aren’t a significant expense in themselves, but current catapults are powered by steam from the ship’s engines. The planned new Royal Navy ships will be propelled by gas turbines, however, and so have no steam (US and French carriers use nuclear propulsion, which can easily furnish steam from their associated turbines).

Adding powerful auxiliary steam boilers for catapults or upgrading the ships to nuclear propulsion would significantly increase their cost. There is an alternative option, the use of electrically-powered catapults, but these don’t yet exist. They are being developed in the States for the next US carrier, but as a new technology there is naturally some risk that they won’t pan out, or may be subject to delays and cost increases.

Of course, there’s always the risk that the MoD, under pressure from the government of the day would cancel the ships altogether, as a cost-saving measure (see this post from last year for further grim speculation on that topic).

China soon to be capable of settling the “Taiwan question”?

Filed under: China, Military — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 10:37

According to a recent report from RAND Corporation, unlike the last time they ran the simulation (in 2000), their current projections have the Chinese able to win an air battle over Taiwan:

In 2000, the influential think thank RAND Corporation crunched some numbers regarding a possible Chinese invasion of Taiwan, and concluded that “any near-term Chinese attempt to invade Taiwan would likely be a very bloody affair with a significant probability of failure” — especially if the U.S. raced to the island nation’s defense. But nine years later, a new, much-updated edition of the RAND study found that China’s improved air and missile forces “represent clear and impending dangers to the defense of Taiwan,” whether or not the U.S. is involved.

“A credible case can be made that the air war for Taiwan could essentially be over before much of the Blue [American and allied] air force has even fired a shot,” the monograph notes.

I’m not sure if this comment was intended to forestall the cancellation of the last part of the F-22 order, or if it’s a marker for a future “We told you so” debate:

It’s a potentially controversial assertion — and one that might have fueled the (now-resolved) debate over whether the U.S. Air Force should buy more F-22s. RAND found that F-22s flying from the relative safety of Guam could be surprisingly effective in blunting a Chinese air assault.

Remember that the air battle would only be part of the military equation . . . fighters and bombers still can’t overcome ground forces by themselves. A seaborne invasion would still be necessary, and the PLAN does not (yet) have sufficient lift tonnage to ensure a chance of success. Amphibious attacks are the hardest to accomplish (despite the Allied string of successes from 1942 to 1951), and always depend on both command of the air and command of the sea. China could, according to RAND’s latest study, win the air battle but still does not have the necessary preponderance of force to win control of the sea.

But the century is yet young . . .

H/T to Jon for the link.

“In his final act of betrayal . . .”

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Politics — Tags: — Nicholas @ 10:13

I suspected that the recent labour deal between the city of Toronto and their striking municipal workers would not be a particularly fair deal. Fair to the city and the taxpayers, that is. Apparently, from what Howard Levitt writes, I’m not pessimistic enough:

In his final act of betrayal, not only has Toronto Mayor David Miller agreed to the city’s inside and outside unionized workers retaining their sick leave benefits, he has prevented any future mayor from removing them. In doing so, Toronto’s mayor has provided the city’s taxpayers with a poisoned chalice.

What he has negotiated cannot be changed until the city’s next round of bargaining, more than a year after any new election. His new collective agreement, unlike the old, provides union members with the right to cash out their sick-leave provisions immediately rather than waiting until they retire.

The little-understood impact of that is that if, in the next election, any mayoralty candidate runs on the promise to remove that benefit and wins, union members will simply threaten to cash it out immediately, plunging Toronto into a profound financial crisis until that demand is withdrawn.

Now that was a slick move . . . from the point of view of the union. From the taxpayer’s viewpoint, not so much.

But it was still not the whole of the love showered on the union by the Mayor . . .

Almost as egregious as this sleight of hand is Miller’s amnesty for criminals. What I always do in strikes is warn the union that lawbreakers will be criminally prosecuted instantly and that there will be no ultimate amnesty. That warning usually curtails violence. Miller did not do that.

Instead, Miller’s agreement, which ended a 39-day strike last week, provides a message to all city workers that they can misbehave with impunity in any future strike. And what does he claim to have received in return? A promise by the union that no havoc will be wreaked against those employees that continued to work. In short, a benefit in return for the union agreeing not to indulge in illegal hooliganism.

Stepping into a minefield in Buckhorn

Filed under: Cancon, Wine — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:35

Michael Pinkus found some unexpectedly vocal critics after he criticized the organizers of Fiesta Buckhorn over their wine and beer selections:

For once I wasn’t trying to stir up controversy, honest . . . but somehow it found me. A little over two weeks ago I wrote about Fiesta Buckhorn in my On the Road with the Grape Guy blog; amongst the wine picks and new winery news was a paragraph entitled, “Shame on Buckhorn” where I chastised them for, once again, allowing Cellared in Canada wines to be poured at an “All Ontario” wine event. There was also an aside, 2-lines within that heading, about a Mexican beer being there amongst all the Ontario craft breweries — but my main focus was the wine, the beer issue had just been pointed out to me in passing during a discussion with another attendee; I hate to say it but I hadn’t noticed them. Well, let me tell you, the mess really hit the fan, so to speak; I received letters from past organizers, current organizers, wine writers and others, weighing in on the controversy.

[. . .]

Two comments made to me (one by past the other by present organizers) concerned me, and encapsulated what is truly wrong with the Ontario wine market and consumer: “. . . quite frankly, there isn’t anyone on the committee knowledgeable enough who can identify non-Ontario wine to us.” In my opinion, this should be rectified immediately and should have been identified as a problem years ago. But it is the next comment that shows a total lack of understanding with regards to the sensitivity of this issue these days when there are websites and petitions against Cellared wines: “How were we to know that this was the case with [the wine in question]? How are we to know what any content of any wine is? Are we to conduct a privately funded research program to do so? We are a NOT FOR PROFIT ORGANIZATION raising funds for a community center.” My comment to that was quite simply: “LEARN” (capitalization begets capitalization), after all, there are plenty of sources out there, use the resources available to you. Crying ignorance is no defense.

The problem stems from the belief that I was accusing Fiesta organizers of willfully deceiving the public, which I am not. Let me state again: I am not accusing Fiesta Buckhorn organizers of deception; I have and will continue to accuse the winemakers of “cellared” wine (who shall go un-named here because this article is not about their product — this time) of deceiving the public, until such time as labeling practices change. What I am saying is that Buckhorn was merely an accomplice or, more to the point, the facilitator. “We intend to offer wine lovers a chance to taste wines from Ontario Vintors [sic]. We do not intend to deceive anyone. We also don’t hire the RCMP to forensically verify every wine served.” I was angrily informed. “And yet,” I retorted, “you offend the Vintners who pour 100% Ontario product by allowing one company to bring in the fake stuff.” And saying nothing.

It’s absolutely inexcusable for the organizers of a Canadian wine event to be unaware of the differences between VQA and “Cellared in Canada” wines . . . in simple terms, VQA is guaranteed to be Canadian wine, CiC is guaranteed to be up to 70% foreign. The wineries that do their level best to disguise foreign wine as domestic deserve to have their deceitful practices exposed and shamed. One particular no-longer-Canadian-owned wine conglomerate is quite noteworthy for this kind of deceptive marketing.

QotD: Depression

Filed under: Health, Quotations — Tags: — Nicholas @ 00:01

I will meet October with a great weight off my chest. I will meet December with the novel mostly done. In between now and then I just want to be happy and content and useful. The last two weeks have been a bit unfortunate, with the Black Dog prowling and growling in the bushes outside the reach of the campfire light; I just lost enthusiasm for my enthusiasms. I think it’s lifted. The worst thing about Depression isn’t the sense that you’re ac-centuating the negative, it’s that you’re seeing things the way they really are, stripped of the illusions you use every day to divert yourself from the Yawning Maw of Futility. It’s the wind that blows off the snow and reveals the stone.

James Lileks, Bleat, 2009-08-04

August 5, 2009

Maybe there isn’t a lot of ruin in a nation? Or a civilization?

Filed under: Books, Media, Religion — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:47

Adam Smith remarked that there is a great deal of ruin in a nation, but he perhaps was speaking just of economical ruin? In culture, things seem to have the ability to change remarkably quickly … usually in a ruinous direction. Ghost of a Flea looks at an interesting — but depressing — phenomenon:

In less than a generation, we have come to an extraordinary pass. Once right thinking progressives lined up to purchase copies of The Satanic Verses — my first edition sits untouched and unread — and death chanting rioters in Bradford and elsewhere were called out for the barbarians they so manifestly demonstrated themselves to be. It was the thin edge of the wedge. 9/11 worked as it was intended by its authors, sending every weakling into a panic, lashing out at the men on the walls lest they provoke another raid from the borderlands.

These days, Salman Rushdie would most likely be charged with something by a Commission for the Promotion of Human Rights and Prevention of Hatred. In Ireland they would cut to the chase and press criminal charges. Under the new regime, all demons may be mocked save the one pretending to be God.

These Weimar conditions are a hot house for growing hatred against the people they are ostensibly meant to protect.

iPhone annoyances

Filed under: Technology — Tags: — Nicholas @ 12:08

Jared Newman offers a list of iPhone annoyances and some suggested fixes/workarounds for them:

Even the greatest gadgets have flaws, and the iPhone is certainly no exception. Praise it all you want, but the “Jesus phone” has plenty of little annoyances or nuisances that get under a user’s skin. Fortunately, technology is all about workarounds to common problems. So we’ve not only put together a Top 10 list of iPhone annoyances to vent about, we’re also offering solutions (where we can) to fix those pesky iPhone problems we hate so much.

10. Default Apps Can’t Be Hidden

Yes, that is an annoyance. Certain of the default applications are useful enough to keep, while others are merely a subset of what other third-party apps now offer (the WeatherEye app is much more useful than the default Weather app, even though it does have tiny ads running at the bottom of the window). It would be much more convenient to be able to remove the default app when you’ve found a more congenial replacement . . . but you can’t.

Organizing your apps is a pain in the butt, as there’s no Apple-supported way of creating groups of applications — something that Palm/Handspring had available several years ago. I miss the tabbed organization of my Treo, where I could create named pages to hold my different types of apps. I could tap a tab name to have that tab appear immediately, while on the iPhone, I have to page through all the other pages to get to the one I want. I would have thought functionality like this would be trivial, considering all the other programming wonders on offer, but I guess it’s part of the operating system that Apple doesn’t want to open to third-party development.

8. The App Store Is a Pain to Browse

It’s a victim of its own success: there are so many apps available now that it can take forever to find what you’re looking for. For example, if you check the App store “Photography” category today (on the Apple Canada version of the store), there are 51 pages of apps to view. At 20 apps per page, each of which has to try to sell itself to you — or at least to get your attention — with only a name, an icon, and a price. This is why one of the most commonly asked questions on the Apple-iPhone mailing list is “What apps do you recommend for x?”

Update, 6 August: J.R. Raphael chimes in with a long link-laden list of things Apple is doing that work to alienate their customers:

3. iTunes Control

The days of DRM may finally have ended this past April, but Apple’s practices surrounding iTunes continue to come under fire. The latest complaints center on — to put it simply — Apple’s refusal to play nice. The company recently updated its iTunes software to keep non-Apple devices such as the Palm Pre from accessing the program. Analysts tell The New York Times the move is reminiscent of AT&T’s early attempts to control what devices could be used on its phone lines.

4. That Whole Flash Thing

Folks have been begging for Flash support on the iPhone pretty much since the device’s debut. Yet, every time it seems the unthinkable might actually occur, the hope flashes back away before you can say “Steve Jobs juggles giant jugs of juice.” (Why you’d be saying that, I’m not sure. But still.) Countless Web pages are rendered useless without Flash enabled, and there’s no question it’s what customers want — so why, with each passing update, does it remain conspicuously absent?

Print me a gear

Filed under: Technology — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 12:07

3D printing was really cool when it was just wax or plastic. This moves it to the next level:

The future of fabrication is here: Shapeways announces stainless steel printing

Sure you’re not going to make a Hatori Hanzo sword — yet — but Shapeways, a 3D fabrication service, has just announced stainless steel printing, allowing you to make steel objects as easily as you would made resin or plastic prototypes. That’s right: something that took our ancient ancestors generations to perfect is now available to anyone with a CAD/CAM program and some Red Bull.

All-purpose material replication is still a long way down the road, but it’s closer . . . it is cool to be living in the future.

H/T to Virginia Postrel.

Blotting out Rorschach tests

Filed under: Health, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 07:50

Colby Cosh examines the furor around James Heilman’s posting of the original Rorschach inkblots to Wikipedia:

It is probably no great loss. Critics of Heilman complain that “decades” of research will have to be abandoned if the Rorschach test becomes impossible to use. But most of this research has been shown, in the last 20 years, to be flapdoodle. As soon as the test became popular — so much so that it became a staple of comedy routines about Freudian psychotherapists, along with couches and thick German accents — it had critics who pointed out that there was little or no statistically validated basis for its interpretation. After the psychiatric profession got around to trying to establish such a basis — and this happened disgracefully late in history — there was little or nothing left of what had once been perceived as the broad general usefulness of the Rorschach.

Much of the folklore that had grown up around specific elements of the test had to be thrown in the trash. It appears to have modest predictive or diagnostic power for a few very specific aspects of personality, and even this surviving foundation is shaky. Yet supporters gave, and some are still giving, the same indignant defences that pseudoscience always receives. Interpreting responses to Rorschach blots is more “art” than “science,” they have insisted. (The mating call of the quack.) Only those who are intimately familiar with the test — i. e., those who believe in it and have come to depend on it — are really qualified to judge whether it “works.”

But can the thousands of psychologists and psychiatrists who have considered the Rorschach test a useful item in the healing toolbox for generations really all have been wrong? Keep in mind that the same practitioners were eagerly recommending and performing lobotomies throughout the same period, and you have your answer.

QotD: It’s not about politeness

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Quotations — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 07:25

I really don’t think think this is a debate about politeness. I mean, I’m happy to have that debate, too, but it’s not as important. Is it polite to call someone a liar? Probably not; but if they are a politician, like Jennifer Lynch is, and they really are lying, as I’ve meticulously documented, and the lies are important lies, then I think that politeness must take second place behind public accountability. I think it would be unethical to elevate mere politeness for politeness’s sake ahead of responsible government. Those who think that one can expose the lies — and corruption and abuse and neo-Nazi activities(!) — of a 200-person, $25-million/year government agency without marshalling the full force of the English language are either naive and inexperienced, or — as Jennifer Lynch is doing — simply trying to change the subject from the Canadian Human Rights Commission’s bad behaviour.

When Canada’s censorship laws are finally repealed, and the abusive, corrupt staff at the CHRC and other HRCs are disciplined for their outrageous (and, in some cases, illegal) behaviour, we can then have a debate as to whether or not it is fair game to call their chief politician and spin doctor “haggard”. Until we have shut down the real and pressing menace to our civil liberties, I’m not too interested about whether or not I’m using the wrong fork for my salad, or other exquisite courtesies.

Ezra Levant, “More letters”, EzraLevant.com, 2008-08-04

August 4, 2009

California looking for all kinds of new sources of income

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Government, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 14:34

Neil Gaiman has some issues with the California tax department (individual Twitter messages, in sequence):

It wasn’t identity theft screwing up my credit rating. Twas the idiot state of idiot california deciding I lived there & wasn’t paying tax.

I know that California is bankrupt and stupid, but ohhhh the stupidness and ohhh the cupidity. Twerps.

They decided I lived there & wasn’t paying tax & took out a Tax Lien; then cancelled it when we yelled, but it lives on in the credit rpt.

Right. I just spoke to a nice man who pretended he wasn’t in India who said he’d get onto fixing it. We shall see what happens.

Libertarian paradise

Filed under: Africa, Humour, Liberty — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:25

Just in case you think that anarchy is great, here’s visual evidence to back up your theories:

Further adventures with CSS

Filed under: Administrivia — Tags: — Nicholas @ 08:35

I had to install a security update to WordPress yesterday. Remembering the last time this happened, I took a full backup of the site before running the install.

This time, I carefully downloaded the backup to my home machine, just to be sure. After running the installation (which, just like last time, blew away all my CSS modifications), I opened the backup, navigated to the location of my modified CSS file, and then hit a wall. I can see the file in the backup, but I can’t open or extract it. It’s rather frustrating . . .

So, once again, expect minor format tweaks as I try to reconstruct the last set of changes.

Update: Thanks to Jon, my former virtual landlord, the CSS and PHP modifications are back in place. If you notice anything still not working as expected, drop a comment on this post, please.

August 3, 2009

The twittering Tories

Filed under: Cancon, Politics — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 11:10

Victor Wong looks at some well-intended-but-bad advice offered to prospective Conservative candidates:

There are times when I wonder if, out of some misplaced maternal instinct, we’re teaching the next generation of politicians to be cowards.

Don’t know quite what I mean? Have a look at this story in this week’s Hill Times:

” ‘At least one of you is going to get disqualified for something you put on Twitter or on Facebook. I don’t know which one of you it’s going to be but it will be at least one of you,’ ” Jenni Byrne, director of issues management in the Prime Minister’s Office, told a group of candidates last week, according to a Conservative source.

The problem with this sort of statement is that it gives your prospective Tory candidate the impression of only two options: either pull out of things like Facebook or Twitter altogether (which cuts you out of at least 20 percent of the potential voting audience) or get your site vetted by Tory higher-ups (which, inevitably, leads to “cookie-cutter” sites, which would make your national campaign happy (so free of controversy!) but which make you look like a mindless clone.

Of course, from the point of view of the PMO, a pack of mindless clones is exactly what they want. Trained seals are so last-century.

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