Quotulatiousness

February 26, 2011

Spammers getting more clever

Filed under: Administrivia, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 13:02

I’ve noticed a significant shift in the spam comments being posted to Quotulatiousness lately: they’re less likely to be link-stuffed pharmaceutical spam and more likely to resemble real comments. I also notice that lots of the spam showing up now comes from .pl domains.

Just over the last 24 hours, there have been more than a dozen spam comments that almost qualified as real: they’re actually related to the blog post, they’re relatively well written, and they aren’t studded with links. If they’d arrived one at a time, I might well have approved them, but because they arrive in batches the pattern becomes too obvious to ignore:

  • They all have real-sounding user names, but the email addresses are all to the same domain.
  • They’re all from the same IP address.
  • They all have a link to something that looks remarkably like a commercial site, rather than a personal one.

Views of a future that didn’t arrive

Filed under: History, Railways, Science, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 11:35

The Future That Wasn’t: Failure to Perceive Hidden Costs and Risks

Two other entangled obstacles to technological inevitability must also be considered: unappreciated psychosocial reservations and genuine, but unappreciated hazards that either slow, or virtually inhibit the adoption of what would otherwise be hugely transforming technological advances.

As a child, I was told about what my future would be like and how much better it would be in almost every way, technologically, from the world I then inhabited. I was, literally, a child of the atomic age, and the molecules in the DNA of my brain still bear the 14Carbon isotope signature of the open-air nuclear testing era, just as surely as my bones, made radioactive in my infancy and childhood by the Strontium 90 (90Sr) in the milk I drank are still, ever so slightly, more radioactive today, than are those of people born before, or after, the era of atmospheric nuclear weapons testing.

But beyond these physical stigmata of the atomic age, my mind bears the stigmata of a world promised, but never delivered. Scientists and laymen alike were quick to understand the truly staggering potential benefits of what we now call nuclear power. Countless pronouncements were made that the arrival of an era of cheap, clean, safe, and virtually unlimited electric power was at hand. Electricity generated by ‘atomic power’ and nuclear fusion, we were told, would be so inexpensive to produce that it would not even be worth the expense of metering its use to bill the customer for. People would simply play a flat rate for the service, as is the case for long distance or computer telephony today. In a speech given by Lewis L. Strauss (1896-1974), Chairman of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission to the National Association of Science Writers, in New York City on September 16th, 1954, Strauss commented on how scientific research then underway would transform life for the next generation of Americans, the generation that would be born in then and in the coming decade, my generation:

“Our children will enjoy in their homes electrical energy too cheap to meter…will travel effortlessly over the seas and under them and through the air with a minimum of danger and at great speeds, and will experience a lifespan far longer than ours, as disease yields and man comes to understand what causes him to age.”

The Santa Fe Railroad, then as commercially important and as technologically credible as Apple or Microsoft are today, anticipated fission reactor powered trains within 20 years, and ran ads in national magazines featuring a youngster only a few years older than me, asking to buy a ticket on an atomic powered version of the Super Chief which was then the preeminent way to travel across the country from Chicago to Los Angeles, in both speed and comfort.

An excerpt from Cryonics and Technological Inevitability.

H/T to Andrew Coyne for the link.

February 25, 2011

What the large print giveth, the small print taketh away

Filed under: Britain, Law, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:03

Ever read the fine print of a contract to discover that the actual term of the contract contradicts the claims? Britain’s Office of Fair Trading is looking into this practice:

Companies whose small print changes the basis of consumer deals will face investigation by consumer regulator the Office of Fair Trading (OFT), it has said. According to the OFT, one in five consumers had experienced a contract problem in the last year.

The OFT has set out the criteria it will use to judge whether or not consumer contracts are unfair and should be investigated by it. The crucial factor determining the fairness of contracts will be the consumer’s understanding of what the contract means.

If the small print of terms and conditions alters the contract from what a consumer would understand it to mean from other claims made by a company, that is likely to be harmful and could be unlawful, the OFT said in a paper on unfair contracts.

“Our approach to identifying the potential for harm from a particular contract, before considering whether there is any breach of law, is to assess whether a contract term changes the deal from what consumers understand it to be,” said the OFT’s paper.

“One way in which a contract term can change the deal is where there are surprises buried in the small print,” it said. “Our research found that for 80 per cent of those who had experienced a problem with a consumer contract, the problem came as a surprise.”

February 24, 2011

The truth about software licenses

Filed under: Humour, Law, Media, Technology — Tags: — Nicholas @ 07:53

Dilbert.com

February 21, 2011

3D printing’s next trick: ears and skin

Filed under: Health, Technology — Tags: — Nicholas @ 11:10

In the gee-whiz world of 3D printing, the next new thing may well be printing skin:

Three-dimensional printing is a technique for making solid objects with devices not unlike a computer printer, building up line by line, and then vertically layer by layer.

While the approach works with polymers and plastics, the raw ingredients of 3D printing have been recently branching out significantly.

The printers have been co-opted even to make foods, and do-it-yourself biology experiments dubbed “garage biotech” — and has most recently been employed to repair a casting of Rodin’s sculpture The Thinker that was damaged in a botched robbery.

But at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington DC, the buzzword is bioprinting: using the same technique to artfully knock out new body parts.

Nun with 600 Facebook friends kicked out of convent

Filed under: Media, Religion, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:15

Another amusing story from The Register:

A Spanish nun has been kicked out of her closed religious order after clocking up 600 friends on Facebook.

After 35 years closeted at the 700-year-old Santa Domingo el Real convent in Toledo, Maria Jesus Galan is back living with her mum, and has declared she rather fancies visiting New York and London.

The convent reportedly acquired a PC 10 years ago, believing that by banking online and the like, it would help minimise the sisters’ contact with the outside world, presumably because ecommerce would enable them to avoid known dens of iniquity, such as banks and supermarkets.

[. . .]

However, things went awry when she joined Facebook and quickly built up a network of 600 friends. Her fellow brides of Christ apparently disapproved, and according to Sr Maria, “made life impossible”.

Facebook? Inconsistent enforcement of terms and conditions? Say it ain’t so!

Filed under: Liberty, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:05

Facebook is having another of its periodic mood swings on just what exactly their terms and conditions really mean:

Facebook has announced it is actively reviewing its policy of a total ban on all content relating to sexual activities.

The review follows the deletion on 4 February of Collared Events page following a complaint from a site user. This deletion angered and mystified many members and supporters of Collared, which operates Slaves and Masters Club Nights and which identifies itself as a community non-profit organisation with a focus on safety and socialization. It used the Facebook page merely as a means to communicate.

There was no explicit imagery or sexual content of any kind and the page was set to “secret”. The page strictly followed the Facebook Terms. Facebook initially cited its user condition (3.7) that: “You will not post content that: is hateful, threatening, or pornographic; incites violence; or contains nudity or graphic or gratuitous violence.”

However, following extensive dialogue with senior staff at the company, including Richard Allan, Facebook’s Head of Policy for Europe, Collared has apparently stirred Facebook into reviewing not just this ban but its entire policy. A wide ranging “internal dialogue” is now under way.

Simon, who runs Collared, told the Reg: “I feel that Facebook are in complete confusion on this issue. The problem is that their policy is inconsistent and whether a site survives or not depends on whether a site is able to lobby the right person in the company — and not offend the wrong one.

Last time it was non-pornographic breastfeeding information groups being banned, and now gay, lesbian, and transgender groups are worried that this new interpretation will have their Facebook pages banned without warning, too. Makes you wonder if there’s been a silent take-over by the religious right, doesn’t it?

February 19, 2011

When “hacker army” is not an exaggeration

Filed under: Britain, China, Government, Military, Russia, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:07

Strategy Page counts noses of the various semi-organized hacker armies out in the wild:

Despite spending over a billion dollars a year defending their government networks, Britain recently complained openly of hackers getting into the communications network of the Foreign Office. The government also warned of increasing attacks on British companies. The recent attacks government and corporations were all targeting specific people and data. While China was not mentioned in these official announcements, British officials have often discussed how investigations of recent hacking efforts tended to lead back to China. There is also a strong suspicion, backed up by hacker chatter, that governments are offering large bounties for information from foreign governments. Not information from China, but from everyone else.

China one of many nations taking advantage of the Internet to encourage, or even organize, patriotic Internet users to obtain hacking services. This enables the government to use (often informally) these thousands of hackers to attack targets (foreign or domestic.) These government organizations arrange training and mentoring to improve the skills of group members. Turkey has over 45,000 of hackers organized this way, Saudi Arabia has over 100,000, Iraq has over 40,000, Russia over 100,000 and China, over 400,000. While many of these Cyber Warriors are rank amateurs, even the least skilled can be given simple tasks. And out of their ranks will emerge more skilled hackers, who can do some real damage. These hacker militias have also led to the use of mercenary hacker groups, who will go looking for specific secrets, for a price. Chinese companies are apparently major users of such services, judging from the pattern of recent hacking activity, and the fact that Chinese firms don’t have to fear prosecution for using such methods.

It was China that really pioneered the militia activity. It all began in the late 1990s, when the Chinese Defense Ministry established the “NET Force.” This was initially a research organization, which was to measure China’s vulnerability to attacks via the Internet. Soon this led to examining the vulnerability of other countries, especially the United States, Japan and South Korea (all nations that were heavy Internet users). NET Force has continued to grow. NET Force was soon joined by an irregular civilian militia; the “Red Hackers Union” (RHU). These are nearly half a million patriotic Chinese programmers, Internet engineers and users who wished to assist the motherland, and put the hurt, via the Internet, on those who threaten or insult China. The RHU began spontaneously in 1999 (after the U.S. accidentally bombed the Chinese embassy in Serbia), but the government has assumed some control, without turning the voluntary organization into another bureaucracy. The literal name of the group is “Red Honkers Union,” with Honker meaning “guest” in Chinese. But these were all Internet nerds out to avenge insults to the motherland.

You have to wonder how many script kiddies ever thought they’d end up being government operatives.

“If you’re not embarrassed when you ship your first version you waited too long”

Filed under: Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 00:03

An interesting look at the epic battle between the perfectionist urge and the first-mover advantage:

There is a dark time in WordPress development history, a lost year. Version 2.0 was released on December 31st, 2005, and version 2.1 came out on January 22nd, 2007. Now just from the dates, you might imagine that perhaps we had some sort of rift in the open source community, that all the volunteers left or that perhaps WordPress just slowed down. In fact it was just the opposite, 2006 was a breakthrough year for WP in many ways: WP was downloaded 1.5 million times that year, and we were starting to get some high-profile blogs switching over. The growing prominence had attracted scores of new developers to the project and we were committing new functionality and fixes faster than we ever had before.

What killed us was “one more thing.” We could have easily done three major releases that year if we had drawn a line in the sand, said “finished,” and shipped the darn thing. The problem is that the longer it’s been since your last release the more pressure and anticipation there is, so you’re more likely to try to slip in just one more thing or a fix that will make a feature really shine. For some projects, this literally goes on forever.

[. . .]

Usage is like oxygen for ideas. You can never fully anticipate how an audience is going to react to something you’ve created until it’s out there. That means every moment you’re working on something without it being in the public it’s actually dying, deprived of the oxygen of the real world. It’s even worse because development doesn’t happen in a vacuum — if you have a halfway decent idea, you can be sure that there are two or three teams somewhere in the world that independently came up with it and are working on the same thing, or something you haven’t even imagined that disrupts the market you’re working in. (Think of all the podcasting companies — including Ev Williams’ Odeo — before iTunes built podcasting functionality in.)

By shipping early and often you have the unique competitive advantage of hearing from real people what they think of your work, which in best case helps you anticipate market direction, and in worst case gives you a few people rooting for you that you can email when your team pivots to a new idea. Nothing can recreate the crucible of real usage.

February 18, 2011

The internet in China: hidden powers of persuasion

Filed under: China, Government, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:52

A look at how the internet in China has the power to (sometimes) punish corrupt officials and influence the government:

Corruption and viral marketing has provided the Chinese government with a powerful tool for controlling public opinion. It all began when Chinese companies realized that they could hurt competitors by planting damaging rumors on the Internet. This, even in China, is illegal. But the corruption in China being what it is, there was little risk of getting the police to hunt down and punish the perpetrators. This was partly because the marketing firms, hired by companies to burnish their image, or defame competitors, was careful to have other small outfits get on the Internet to actually do the work, and be careful to not be traceable. So the cops, when forced by companies to do something (often because the owner of the offended firm was well-connected politically), were stymied at first. But the police, declaring it a national security issue, eventually discovered how this was done. But this did not stop all these negative campaigns. To defend themselves, companies that were attacked by these Internet disinformation campaigns, fought back.

This use of negative tactics soon fell out of favor, as all those tarnished companies lost sales. So these Internet based opinion manipulation turned to praising your own products. About this time, the government discovered what was going on, and began to use these marketing companies, and their subcontractors, to change opinions towards government policies. There was a pressing need for this, because all this Internet opinion manipulation had started out, over the last decade, as a popular uprising against government corruption, mistreatment and media manipulation. This “online army” was not organized, except by outrage at government, or individual, wrongdoing. For example, many government officials, and their high-spirited offspring, injure or steal from ordinary citizens, and get away with it. These officials have enough political clout to make the police leave them alone. But once the online army gets onto these stories, everyone in the country knows, and is angry. There are over 400 million Internet users in China, a country of 1,400 million. When a lot of people on the Internet get angry enough, the story, and anger, explodes through the Chinese Internet community. China carefully monitors Chinese Internet use, and tries to block unwelcome information or discussions. But when the outrage on a particular item becomes too large, it’s better to just arrest and punish the guy whose misbehavior got the online army going in the first place.

Who knew that sockpuppeting would be such a valuable online tactic in China? It might not just be limited to China, however:

If the Chinese wanted to use this tool in other countries, they would require posters who are familiar with the language and culture of the target population. That’s difficult skill to acquire, especially for at least a few hundred posters required (to hit, regularly, hundreds of message boards, chat rooms and so on). Done right, you can shift opinions among millions of people in a few days. Done wrong, you fail. And if you’re operating in a foreign country, you might get found out. But the opportunity is there.

How to view PDF documents natively in Chrome

Filed under: Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 08:42

Royce McDaniels provides step-by-step instructions for installing the PDF reader plug-in for the Chrome browser:

Hello, everyone, and welcome to today’s How To segment here at The Walrus Says! Today we’re examining another useful feature of the Chrome web browser from Google, namely the ability to display Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF) files directly in the browser rather than via an external application like Google Docs which has been necessary before. The instructions below not only show you how to activate this feature of Chrome, but show you an interesting way to access Chrome functionality not part of the standard configuration menus! (Chrome itself is an Open Source project sponsored by Google; you can get complete information about the browser’s development at The Chromium Project. Enjoy!

I’m still (barely) sticking with Firefox as my primary browser, although it’s becoming a pain to use these days: for example, as I’m typing this line, the letters I type are appearing several seconds after I type ’em. It’s a bit like using an old 300 baud line with a small buffer. If the next major release of Firefox doesn’t fix this problem, then I’ll be switching to Chrome as my primary browser.

Ron Hickman, inventor of the ubiquitous Workmate

Filed under: Randomness, Technology, Tools — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:23

Many people have bought and used the Workmate collapsible workbench . . . 30 million or so. The inventor, Ron Hickman, Ron Hickman, died recently:

Hickman, who lived in Jersey, was 78. His design for the wood-and-steel foldable workbench and vice was rejected by several tool companies that believed the bench wouldn’t sell.

Tool company Stanley told him the device would sell in the dozens rather than hundreds, while other companies told him the design would not sell at the necessary price. It has since sold about 30 million units around the world, and 60,000 were sold in the UK last year alone.

Hickman sold the benches himself when he couldn’t find a backer through trade shows direct to professional builders. Black & Decker saw the light in 1973 and began producing them. By 1981 it had sold 10 million benches.

He came up with the design when he accidentally sawed through an expensive chair while making a wardrobe. He had been using the chair as a workbench.

His designing skill wasn’t limited to tools: he also is credited with the design of the Lotus Elan.

February 17, 2011

Building an (even better) army helmet

Filed under: Military, Technology, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 08:45

The US Army and USMC like the latest combat helmet even more than they liked the next-most recent improved model:

The U.S. Army and Marine Corps have found that their new Enhanced Combat Helmet (ECH) is even more bullet proof than expected. While testing the ECH, it was discovered that the machine firing metal fragments at the ECH (to represent shell and bomb fragments) could not fire fragments fast enough to penetrate. The ECH was supposed to be invulnerable to pistol bullets, and it was, but some types of metal fragments were expected to still be dangerous. So ECH was tested to see how well it could resist high-powered rifle bullets. ECH was not 100 percent invulnerable, but in most cases, it would stop anything fired from a sniper rifle. Overall, it was calculated that the ECH was 40 percent more resistant to projectiles and 70 percent stronger than the current ACH helmet.

The ECH is made of a new thermoplastic material (UHMWP, or Ultra-High Molecular Weight Polyethylene). It is lighter and stronger than the Kevlar used in the ACH and earlier PASGT and, it turned out, provided much better protection as well. The ECH will begin replacing the current ACH later this year, with 200,000 being eventually purchased. The ECH costs $600 each, twice as much as the ACH. But for troops under fire, the additional cost is well worth the additional protection.

Combat helmets, which appear to be low-tech, have been anything-but over the last three decades. Advances in the design and construction of helmets have been accelerating, especially in the last decade. For example, the current ACH (Advanced Combat Helmet) recently underwent some tweaks to make it more stable. That was required because more troops are being equipped with a flip down (over one eye) transparent computer screen. The device is close to the eye, so it looks like a laptop computer display to the soldier, and can display maps, orders, troop locations or whatever. If the helmet jumps around too much, it’s difficult for the solider to make out what’s on the display. This can be dangerous in combat.

The Pirates of Oz

Filed under: Australia, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 07:15

According to a recent study, piracy in Australia has become the biggest industry: one third of all Australians are accused of piracy in the last twelve months.

The study, released by the Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft, claims that piracy sucks $A1.37bn out of the Australian economy.

Direct effects claimed by AFACT amounted to $A575m, the study claims — including $A225m attributed to “secondary piracy”, in which an individual either “views or borrows” pirated material (presumably whether or not the viewer knows the full legal status of what they’re watching).

[. . .]

The economic multiplier effects, for those willing to get past the press release, include reduced spending on recreation, clothing, housing and household goods. So, freetards, hang your heads in shame: not only were more than 6,000 jobs lost due to piracy, but the victims of your crime are now homeless, naked, hungry and bored.

February 16, 2011

Another, safer, table saw design

Filed under: Technology, Tools, Woodworking — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 08:31

Table saw injuries can be quite gruesome — amputation of fingers, for example — so any new technology that might make woodworkers more safe is welcome. The first innovator in the field was the SawStop, a device that could stop the spinning blade of the saw whenever it detected human skin. Mighty impressive, but none of the major manufacturers wanted to buy the technology: it increased the cost of existing saws beyond what they thought their customers would be willing to pay. The inventor had to form a company to build his own table saws instead.

A post at the Popular Woodworking blog looks at a newer device to make table saws more safe:

Ten years ago, table saws were about to change. In 2001, you could buy a cabinet saw, such as a Delta Unisaw, a Powermatic 66 or a clone of the Unisaw made in Taiwan. Or you could get a contractor’s saw, a heavy but relatively portable table saw. Benchtop saws were not a significant part of the market, and things hadn’t changed much since the end of World War II. All the saws at the time had one thing in common: awful guards that were rarely used. Things were changing on two fronts. Underwriter’s Laboratories and the Consumer Products Safety Commission (CPSC) were looking into bringing American saw’s guard systems into the modern age, spurred in large part by a pesky woodworker from Berea, Ky., named Kelly Mehler.

Mehler was the author of “The Tablesaw Book,” and he questioned why European saws had more effective and user-friendly guards. At about the same time, Stephen Gass, an amateur woodworker and patent attorney with a doctorate in physics invented the SawStop, an imaginative and revolutionary device that could stop a spinning blade in less than a heartbeat if a flesh came in contact with it. These two ideas caught the attention of CPSC, and the long saga of what to do about the problem of table saw injuries began.

A couple weeks ago, this story was mentioned in the national media, in a brief story with scary-sounding headline in USA Today. As has happened many times in the last few years, this set off a round of emotional debate among woodworkers.

[. . .]

In the next few months the discussions and meetings between manufacturers and the CPSC will probably resume. One thing that will likely factor into this round will be alternatives to SawStop’s “flesh-detecting” technology. Last spring, the joint venture of member companies of the Power Tool Institute filed patent application 12769396. This describes an electronic detection system and a mechanism to fire an explosive trigger (similar to that used in automotive airbags) that would drop the blade below the table. An important difference to this approach is that it wouldn’t force anything into the blade, thus avoiding an expensive replacement due to an incidental firing. Also interesting is the mention of this system’s ability to tell the difference between wet wood and human flesh.

And there are several new patent applications from the SawStop inventors covering detection and deployment systems for table saws, and the possibility of using similar devices in miter saws. Will this mean new, less-expensive and less-destructive systems for table saws and other tools that will make woodworking safer, or will it mean years of waiting while the lawyers battle over intellectual property issues?

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