taint.org: Justin Mason's Weblogincoherent ramblings about Apache SpamAssassin, anti-spam, perl, software development, and the webLinks for 2008-08-18- August 18, 2008 2 Stage Transfer Drawing (advancing to a future state) on Vimeo : some great performance art from Irish artist Joan Healy; the installation appears to be a kiosk with a screen, and a touch pad. The pad itself is supposed to have a warm, soft, fleshy feel that &8216;adds to the bond between people and machines&8217;. However &8212; in reality, it&8217;s the artist&8217;s back; she&8217;s inside the kiosk, Mechanical Turk-style. Super-creepy (tags: art creepy cool ireland joan-healy...http://taint.org/2008/08/18/220503a.html Irish gang skims 20,000 bank cards through retail POS terminals- August 18, 2008 Wow, this is pretty massive. The Irish Payment Services Organisation has again released details of a credit-card breach, this time on retail Point-of-Sale card terminals. Quoting the Irish Examiner story: Una Dillon, head of card services at the Irish Payment Services Organisation, said the criminals went into the shops pretending to be doing maintenance work on behalf of the banks. We have discovered only in the last 48 hours that a number of retailers have been affected by a...http://taint.org/2008/08/18/135843a.html Links for 2008-08-15- August 15, 2008 The Evolution of Pre-Launch Gmail In Screenshots : fascinating! They really did a good job improving the UI, early revs were quite uninspiring (tags: gmail google history email web ui) SealSkinz : waterproof socks and gloves &8212; come recommended by Dublin&8217;s cycle-couriers to avoid wet feet in all this bloody rain. lots and lots of good testimonials (tags: dryness feet comfort clothing rain weather cycling outdoors socks gloves)http://taint.org/2008/08/15/220503a.html Links for 2008-08-14- August 14, 2008 Emergent Chaos: Certifiably Silly : Adam Shostack tells the truth re Firefox 3&8217;s stupid self-signed cert bug. &8216;imposing yet another security tax, based on a static analysis of attackers and some certificate authority pixie dust, isn&8217;t going to help things for very long.&8217; (tags: firefox firefox-3 security certificates ssl tls ca pki adam-shostack ui usability) Image Cerberus: a SpamAssassin plug-in against image spam : a new plugin, subject of a paper at this year&8217;s...http://taint.org/2008/08/14/220503a.html Links for 2008-08-13- August 13, 2008 Federal Circuit Says Open Source License Conditions are Enforceable as Copyright Conditions : &8216;the conditions of the Artistic License are &8220;enforceable copyright conditions.&8221;&8216; hooray (via Nat Friedman) (tags: via:natfriedman open-source artistic license licensing software law us-law) joshua confirms the &8220;Yahoo dropped the del.icio.us ball with a pointless 3 year rewrite&8221; story : &8216;The writer is accidentally correct - we were told that it had to be in PHP to...http://taint.org/2008/08/13/220503a.html Links for 2008-08-12- August 12, 2008 Dublin bike scheme billboards threat to drivers : JC Decaux&8217; &8220;free&8221; bikes are now delayed another 6 months &8212; to next spring. in the meantime, the ads are up all over Dublin. what a rip-off (tags: jc-decaux bikes cycling dublin advertising spam civic ireland) Return Path to Acquire Habeas : that&8217;s the two main legit-email whitelisting reputation dbs merged into one (tags: return-path habeas ssc bsp bonded-sender spamassassin anti-spam dnswl dnsbl reputation...http://taint.org/2008/08/12/220503a.html VodaFAIL- August 12, 2008 A friend writes: &8216;I switched my Vodafone bill to &8220;online&8221;, to cut down on junk mail. When I tried to log in to view my bill, I was asked for a second level password, specifically: &8220;your password is the last 4 digits of your customer number (which appears at the top of your phone bill). &8220; So, I can&8217;t see my phone bill because I can&8217;t see my phone bill.&8217;http://taint.org/2008/08/12/162019a.html Links for 2008-08-11- August 11, 2008 The Trifecta of FAIL : ah, the hazards of monkey-patching core classes illustrated perfectly; a Ruby point-release upgrade broke Rails (via chromatic) (tags: ruby rails monkeypatching ouch programming coding oo subclassing apis) best intranet form ever : &8216;The software my employer uses for booking holidays has recently been &8220;upgraded&8221; and we now need to specify an absence reason.&8217; there are several hundred reasons, including &8216;Abortion&8217;, &8216;Stroke&8217;,...http://taint.org/2008/08/11/220502a.html Links for 2008-08-10- August 10, 2008 Cycle Helmets and Other Religious Symbols : there appears to be a lack of published research suggesting that bike helmets help avoid serious injury and death &8212; in fact, research seems to suggest the _opposite_. (tags: cycling helmets safety research bikes equipment) Clever method of near duplicate detection : &8216;SIGIR 2008 paper, &8220;SpotSigs: Robust and Efficient Near Duplicate Detection in Large Web Collections&8221;&8216;. may be useful, although we&8217;ve pretty much stopped...http://taint.org/2008/08/10/220503a.html On Threading- August 10, 2008 Luis Villa, in a post to FoRK: I have found that mail threading is overrated, in part because I&8217;ve realized that any conversation so baroque as to actually require threading probably isn&8217;t worth following. Even though I wrote a threader for MH, I have to admit by now that he has a point ;)http://taint.org/2008/08/10/103734a.html |