Category: Internet matters

Posts about the internet

Itchy trigger finger

Every day, I get about 150 spam email messages in my main account. As a result, I tend to empty my GMail spam folder every few hours, giving the messages inside only the most cursory of glances. Sometimes, this means that I spot a non-spam message in the split second between clicking the button and seeing the column of messages (most of them hocking dubious pills) vanish. Sometimes, I get so superficial a glance that I can only barely perceive that the message is not spam, without being able to note who sent it.

Such a thing happened a minute ago. I think the name on the message was ‘Eva,’ which could be someone who I knew a long time ago. Given the situation, if you are someone who recently tried contacting me out of the blue, please try again. In the battle against spam, there will always be some false positives mixed among the false negatives.

Map fusion

Annoyed that whichever mapping / aerial photography site you prefer doesn’t have a particular area in detail? Flash Earth may be helpful. The site compiles data from a number of mapping providers, including Microsoft, Yahoo, and Google. Switching between them is as simple as clicking a name in the list that hovers on the left-hand side of the page.

It also makes it easier to find the latitude and longitude of a place than any of the competing services do. Wadham College is 51˚ 45′ 21.0 ” N and 1˚ 15′ 15.8″ W. Our flat in Church Walk is 52.2″ N, 48.5″ W. My favourite Japanese restaurant is at 49˚ 17′ 18.8″ N and 123˚ 7′ 50.1″ W.

This ability to seamlessly and usefully combine data from multiple sources is one reason why open access to information can be so valuable.

Now at eye level

Google Maps has added street level views. Check out Times Square or the Golden Gate Bridge. People in major American cities may now switch from looking at their roofs from space to looking at an archived image of their front door from across the street.

For a general collection of interesting things that have been spotted using Google Earth and Google Maps, see Google Sightseeing.

Document metadata

It remains somewhat amazing to me that governments and major international institutions so frequently forget what it means to distribute documents in Word format. In particular, people are surprisingly ignorant of how Word tracks changes: making documents into a palimpsest of revisions, not all of which you want the outside world to see. You don’t want the comment about how pointless one of the ‘key items’ in your ‘corporate vision’ is making it into the file that gets passed to the New York Times. Even the early copy of the Summary for Policymakers of the 4th Assessment Report of the IPCC that I have includes a few notes about edits that still need to be done.

Hopefully, closed standards like Word documents will fall by the wayside during the next decade or so. It is insane to be distributing so much information in a proprietary format for no good reason (just one more manifestation of monopolistic dominance). Hopefully, whichever open document format eventually comes to be standard will have better means for assessing and controlling what information you are inadvertantly embedding in your press releases, reports, spreadsheets, etc. Until then, lax security is likely to keep offering some interesting glances into the drafting processes of such publicized documents.

PS. One other thing to remember is that the standard jpg images produced by Adobe Photoshop include thumbnail files that are not edited when you change the image. As such, a face blurred out of the large version may still be recognizable in the embedded thumbnail version. The same goes for areas that may have been cropped from the image entirely. I am sure Cat Schwartz isn’t the only person who has suffered public embarassment because of this. No doubt, many other pieces of software include such counter intuitive and potentially problematic behaviours.

Spam egg sausage and spam

Radcliffe Infirmary

As time goes by and Google indexes more and more of my content, I get more spam of every variety. I get spam emails, spam comments on the blog, and spam added to the wiki. Of the three, the email spam is the most common, but also the most easily dealt with. It has existed for so long that good systems exist for dealing with it: whether based on Bayesian reasoning or on group filtering processes. The former are largely centered around word usage. If an email contains the word ‘Viagra’ the chances of it being spam are high. If it includes the string of characters ‘V1agr4!!!’ it is virtually certain to be spam. The latter are based on user reporting. Most spam isn’t very original. As such, if GMail has 1000 people report that a particular message is spam, it can pretty reliably block it for everybody else.

I cannot get too far into how this blog’s anti-spam system works. This is because automated systems seem to have become capable of determining which system or combination of systems a site is using and then launching an appropriate attack. Suffice it to say that the blog uses a variant of both approaches above, plus one more special thing. Since the system was implemented, it has dealt with spam from 9188 different IP addresses. Security through obscurity may not be intelligent or rubust in many circumstances, but it works well enough when you are somewhat better defended than most sites, not of much value to attack, and surrounded by sites with much worse systems.

The wiki is the most vulnerable, precisely because the intended purposes of a wiki requires easy editing. Given that so few users contribute to mine, the best solution might be to lock it down so that only those with approved accounts can access it.

One possible lesson to be drawn from this is that technology eventually evolves the ability to deal with abuse. The older the system being attacked is, the more likely a sensible and effective set of countermeasures will be developed. Alternatively, it is possible that the more open approaches used by blogs and wikis are fundamentally more vulnerable to abuse.

Only time will tell.

Obviousness and patents

This week, the US Supreme Court issued a ruling related to the ‘obviousness’ test in patent filing. The case – KSR Int’l Co. v. Teleflex Inc. (PDF) – hinged on whether an automatic adjustment device for an accelerator pedal created by KSR infringed upon the patents of Teleflex. KSR argued that the combination of technologies was obvious, and that Teleflex could not claim royalties.

In order to maintain a fair and beneficial system, the condition that patents cover non-obvious innovations is highly important. The whole reason for granting patents is to foster innovation by granting temporary monopolies to innovators. Patents are meant to include enough information to allow a skilled practitioner to actually make the thing being patented. Under this system, inventors are meant to be willing to disclose the nature of what they have accomplished so that it might serve to aid the investigations of others. In exchange, they get legal rights over their invention for a defined period of time. This trade-off hardly makes sense when companies are permitted to patent trivial innovations, such as the much ridiculed patent awarded to Amazon.com for ‘one click shopping.’

Recently, there have been a good number of cases where the patent system is accomplishing something quite unlike this ideal. ‘Patent trolls‘ acquire patents of a broad and obvious kind, then wait for another company to release a successful product that arguably infringes on them. More often than not, the objective is simply to receive some kind of payment in return for ending the legal hassle. Of course, this interferes with the processes of innovation, as well as undermining the general credibility of the patent system. RIM and Vonage have both recently been targeted by such suits.

It seems sensible that patent offices should be more aggressive in their interpretations of what it means for an invention to be ‘novel’ and ‘non-obvious.’ As such, they would reduce the occurrences in which someone is unfairly granted rights over an idea that many other people have likely come up with, but not bothered to go through the process of trying to patent. It would also reduce the danger of patent trolling, particularly if the courts recognize that such behaviour can be predatory, and that the patent system ultimately exists to serve the public good.

PS. Slashdot has commented on the Supreme Court ruling. Most of these entries are also relevant.

Browser considerations

This post, which was linked to on Tony’s blog, got me thinking about web browser choice. All I want is something that displays pages properly without eating too much RAM. Good RSS handling is an advantage. I am likely to stick with Firefox for now, but it is good to assess the state of competition every once in a while.

Continue reading “Browser considerations”

Important OS X update

Mac users, make sure you get the latest security patch from Apple. It covers some distinct vulnerabilities in terms of wireless networking, as well as patching several dozen general system and application vulnerabilities. You can read more about it here.

To get it, just click the Apple icon in the upper-left corner of the screen and then choose ‘Software Update’ from the menu that comes down. While being on a Mac does make you safer, it certainly does not make you invulnerable.