a-cubed.info

I received a couple of emails today which I almost ignored as they looked like possible spam (adware/spyware infection sites looking to get me to visit their website, or meta-spam). However, there was a chance they were genuine and they were about someone misusing my portrait from my web page on a fraud site. So, I checked the site and found that the emails were legitimate and the site isn’t. They’re using my thumbnail portrait for a fake person called Curtis Andrew. They’re downloading the image directly from my University server, including making the picture a link to the larger copy of the photo. This makes them vulnerable to a counter-attack. Once I’ve made the complaint to their service provider (it’s a Lycos-hosted service on tripod.com) I’m going to replace the files they’re using with warnings that this is a fake, while moving the files to new names on my sites, A bit of work on my part but not too much to avoid helping out fraudsters. I think using live URLs on their part was a big mistake in a number of ways. Thank goodness for stupid criminals.

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I will be presenting a paper at EthiComp 2007 in March. This will be hosted by Meiji University in Tokyo, which will be very convenient for me. My paper, on the need for proper regulation of CCTV in the UK, was covered by online newspaper The Register today.

Wired’s blog is reporting that the insecure.org website’s DNS registration was suspended recently by GoDaddy following a complaint by MySpace that one of the mailing list archives on the site contained a file of passwords from a cracking attack on MySpace. Reports differ as to how long GoDaddy tried to contact the site’s maintainer Fyodor (they claimed they gave him an hour to respond, but his email logs suggest it was one minute). Leaving aside the question of how long they should have waited, the big question here is whether any registrar should be getting involved in such censorship. Removing DNS registration is a horrendously blunt instrument to be allowed to be employed in responding to complaints of inappropriate material hosted on a site. In particular, a complaint regarding a single file held on a site containing in excess of 250,000 pages, should not be subject to complete blackout.

There are procedures that have gradually developed for dealing with complaints about the content of a site and they involve contacting the abuse team of the ISP providing the connection (and possibly the hosting) of the site. If the material is indeed something that either violates the T&C of the ISP, or is illegal, then they should be able to selectively block the material rather than to take down an entire site. The only thing a DNS registrar can do is remove the entire site from domain name visibility. (more…)

An ode to the RIAA

Great stuff.

There have been a number of pieces I’ve read about the way English people behave on trains and the underground. The most detailed was Kate Fox’s “Watching the English”. The main rules for the English are:

• Don’t talk to anyone.
• You may ask for information about what stop it is, or may grumble (preferably in an ironic manner) about delays or maybe the weather, to each other.
• If you have travelled regularly (i.e. most days for years) with a particular traveller, then you might nod to them each day.
• Newspapers are for hiding behind.
• Never meet the gaze of someone else or if you do, break the eye contact as soon as possible.
• When using a mobile phone always shout, preferably starting the call with “I’m on the train!” or “I’m on the train! Yes, on the train! Can you hear me?”. Whenever possible make highly private phone calls and laugh often, loudly and annoyingly whenever feasible.
• Ignore the “quiet carriage” signs or even walk the entire length of the platform at Paddington to get on to the quiet carriage with a small child and a cat.
  OK, so I made this one up after the second time in a week in December finding people in the quiet carriage with a sub-5 yo child. The first family that did this had the mother tell the child to be quiet because it was the quiet carriage very early on in the trip and then herself became much louder than the child in a card game she instigated. It was the second family who had the cat, who was much quieter than the homo insapiens.
• When people ignore the quiet carriage signs sigh, tut quietly and look pointedly at the “quiet carriage” signs but under no circumstances verbally point out to people that it is the quiet carriage.

The Japanese clearly share some of these rules: (more…)