Send spam, charge recipients, $profit

The Malsian Star reports on a company billing recipients fo its own SMS spam.

Needless to say the company says it is a mistake, the charges are being reversed, appologies provided &ct. But what are we going to do when the intentional criminals start exploiting these schemes? Premium number fraud is a major problem but the charges are outgoing so the user has to actually be tricked. With this spam the attack there was nothing the recipients could do to avoid the charge.

How Bookmarks should work

Bookmarks/Favorites lists have a habit of getting out of hand. The systems built into IE are next to useless when you have 1000+ favorites which is actually a small number when you think about it.

The new Google toolbar allows bookmarks to be easily shared between machines and kept in sync, it also supports labels rather than just folders. This is a big step forward but the interface for adding labels is clunky, it takes too many clicks to do it right and there is no way to customize the interface.

What I would like from a bookmark scheme is for clicking 'add' to bring up a simple, one click menu that allows any of my active labels to be applied. IE forces me to thread through nested layers of its folder tree. The Google interface suffers baddly from mouse/keyboard transitionitis. Even on a laptop with a trackpoint built in it is tedious to have to switch from one to the other.

None of the systems have a good interface for bulk editing. Being able to add a bookmark to faorites with a single click is useful but that only puts of the task of cataloging. There should be an interface that allows all the previously unfiled links to be cataloged in one go. Even on broadband having to wait for the server to respond to each and every change individually is tedious.

A deeper problem is that there is only one mechanism for 'favorites' and 'bookmarks'. These should really be two separate things. I want to be able to file away sites that I use regularly separately from pages that I have found and might want to revisit or use in citations later.

What I would like is a comprehensive citations system that allows me to add a paper to a citations db. It could then be catalogued acording to author, title, keywords, &ct. Citations could then be extracted as HTML or richtext markup as needed. The extraction process could be automated by tools, there could even be provision for exchanging citations collaboratively or doing group annotations Wikistyle.

BBC NEWS | Europe | Irving expands on Holocaust views

The attempt to avoid a long prison sentence by recanting having failed David Irving repeats his earlier holocaust denial.

I am pretty sure that this was the plan all along, get the publicity for recanting under duress, get more publicity for repudiating the recantation. Jailing Irving is only furthering the neo-NAZI cause.

There is a line that has to be drawn but the action against Irving is counter-productive. Suppressing argument over facts only draws attention to the side being suppressed. It is clear that nobody, not even the neo-NAZIs really believe the history they are concocting. Holocaust denial is just a code for anti-Semitism.

It is somewhat odd to see the prosecution of Irving taking place at a time when the Saudi-backed rent-a-mob is calling for the murder of Danish cartoonists with impunity. Even more surprising is the fact that Blair and co did not realize that failing to act would cost them in the Muslim community who regard the rioters as if they were football hooligans.

Educated Guesswork: MRE Menu 22: Jambalaya

What do meals ready to eat taste like? Eric and Fluffy find out.

Someone should get them a subscription to Zaggat.

Diebold paranoia continues

Kevin Drum blogs the standard left wing line on Diebold. How can we be sure the machines are secure when there are known serious flaws and the manufacturer's CEO has expressed strong partisan sympathies? Drum does not mention the last bit but in the leftiesphere Diebold is synonymous with 'known GOP hacks'.

Concern over voting machines in the US is largely confined to the left. In other countries, particularly Venezuela it is the right that is concerned. At some point there will be an election where the right feels that it has been unfairly treated (ie they lose an election narrowly). At that point expect concern over voting to become bipartisan.

What the concern over Diebold demonstrates is that the traditional academic treatment of voting scheme security is flawed at best. The primary concern is not the secrecy of the ballot, its the integrity of the count. No system is going to be acceptable in the long term without the ability to perform an independent audit of the count.

Gladwell gets blog

Malcolm Gladwell has got a new blog, a good time to review his book Blink.

Gladwell takes seriously the first litterary commandment: thou shalt not bore.

Taken as a scholarly thesis Gladwell's book does not score highly, but that is not the point. There are plenty of neuroscientists working on the problem of cognition, very few of them have the skill to explain their research in a form accessible to the ordinary reader and when they do have the skill the certitude with which the theories are presented suggest that they probably should not bother.

Gladwell's central thesis, that subconcious, split second thought can be as valuable, frequently more accurate than higher level concious reasoning is surely accurate at some level. We still know far less about how the mind works than we ought to, but few would dispute that learned skills become automatic, subconcious with practice. We recognise faces instantly, why not recognize the authenticity of a statue as in the opening chapter?

The capacity for learned skill might also bend the other way. Reading the book I had to wonder about Khune's structure of scientific revolutions: if your subconcious is making split second judgments according to the established view it is going to be hard to learn/accept a new conceptual framework which requires the established one to be abandonded. That would explain why the genuinely revolutionary theories tend to be conceived by people in their twenties and thirties. They know enough of the old view to critique it effectively but it is not so ingrained in them that it runs on autopilot.

The daVinci suit

Via the Huffinton Post the Observer writes about the forthcoming da Vinci Code plagiarism trial.

The case is going to be important for many reasons, not least the fact that if the plaintiff win it will mark a huge change in copyright law. And what a pathetically ungrateful lot they are.

Most people who sold an extra two million copies of a book because of another author would be only too pleased. Baigent and Leigh want a cut of the da Vinci code royalties.

Holy Blood/Holy Grail is an Oliver Stone history of the early church. Drawing on a range of wacky conspiracy theories the result is an entertaining read but definitely not a work of scholarship. That is not to say that all the conspiracy theories in the book are complete rubbish, even a stopped clock is right twice a day.

HB/HG was written at a time when the history of the early Christian church was being reexamined by serious scholars. The idea that Constantine's reasons for adopting Christianity might have been political rather than spiritual had considerable shock value as did the idea that St Paul's theology might have been radically different from that of Christ and his appostles. Today these are perfectly respectable scholarly positions, albeit ones that are not likely to be endorsed by the Vatican any time soon.

The rest of the HB/HG is considerably more specualtive, to put it mildly. But even here Baigent et. al. can hardly claim great originality, not least because when HB/HG went on sale they were claiming is as fact. The fact is that the core of the HB/HG conspiracy theory is lifted wholesale from Pierre Plantard, the French confidence trickster who started the Priory of Sion who later admited having fabricated much of the material. If Baigent et. al. are due royalties then what about Plantard's estate?

Dan Brown is not the only person to have borrowed from Plantard's imagination, one of the Lara Croft Tombraider games uses similar motifs.

The other feature of the da Vinci code that has received less comment than it should is the virulent anti-Catholicism. The Catholic church is certainly not above criticism: it covered up for pedophile priests allowing them to molest more children, it meddles in politics, it is reactionary and sexually repressed. There is however an important difference between factual and ficticious allegations. The attack on Opus Dei in particular has overtones of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

Discourse.net: French ISPs Found to Violate French Consumer Protection Law

Michael Froomkin blogs about an ISP having a tensy problem with the French consumer protection laws.

Although I seem to remember Wanadoo started in France the business practices are almost certainly copied from the US. Thats not a happy situation.

DoJ vs. the botnets

The DoJ recently annonced two successful cases against botnet herders. Both were in their early twenties, engaded in DDoS attacks and affiliate program frauds.

Anthony Scott Clark
Jeanson James Ancheta

It would be interesting to know how these perps were tracked down, the plea bargains mean the interesting details won't be comming out at trial. I suspect that it has something to do with the affiliate program fraud. DDoS attacks are hard to track to their origin. Affiliate programs are largely self correlating.

M4 Message Breaking Project

The M4 Message Breaking Project is trying to break three last unencrypted Enigma messages, one message has already been broken.

The fact that it takes 100 celeron processors 4 days to walk the key space demonstrates that the NAZI faith in the enigma machines was not entirely misplaced. The codes were broken because the machine had two relatively minor weaknesses and because the cipher clerks were sloppy.

It appears that Michael Smith's excellent Station X history of the Ultra project is out of print. But this book 'codebreakers' looks interesting, a collection of personal accounts of the project by the codebreakers themselves.