Category: Internet matters

Posts about the internet

Still in the wilderness

Human shapes and fire engines

Unfortunately, I am still sans internet. It seems the only way to get DSL is to pledge an entire working day, then wait to discover what time the installation team cares to show up. They don’t do evenings or weekends, naturally, and they certainly cannot commit to a time more specific than ‘probably am’ or ‘probably pm.’

To anyone who has sent messages to my personal email accounts, I apologize. I simply cannot check them until I get access at home or lug my laptop to a coffee shop downtown. The latter, I may undertake tonight.

[Update: 31 July 12:05pm] At least my July 21st issue of The Economist has finally managed to wander to the right place. I am not entirely isolated from the goings on in the world outside the TLC complex.

[Update: 1 August 2007] By midnight on August 3rd, I will have a DSL connection through TekSavvy – one of the local ISPs that seems to be well liked by people on web forums. Thankfully, someone who lived in my flat previously had DSL set up; as such, I don’t need to spend an entire day waiting for Bell to show up and make hardware adjustments.

Botnets

The rise of the botnet is an interesting feature of contemporary computing. Essentially, it is a network of compromised computers belonging to individuals and businesses, now in control of some other individual or group without the knowledge or permission of the former group. These networks are used to spread spam, defraud people, and otherwise exploit the internet system.

A combination of factors have contributed to the present situation. The first is how virtually all computers are now networked. Using a laptop on a plane is a disconcerting experience, because you just expect to be able to check the BBC headlines or access some notes you put online. The second is the relative insecurity of operating systems. Some seem to be more secure than others, namely Linux and Mac OS X, but that may be more because fewer people use them than because they are fundamentally more secure. In a population of 95% sheep, sheep diseases will spread a lot faster than diseases that affect the goats who are the other 5%. The last important factor is the degree to which both individuals and businesses are relatively unconcerned (and not particularly liable) when it comes to what their hijacked computers might be up to.

Botnets potentially affect international peace and security, as well. Witness the recent cyberattacks unleashed against Estonia. While some evidence suggests they were undertaken by the Russian government, it is very hard to know with certainty. The difficulty of defending against such attacks also reveals certain worrisome problems with the present internet architecture.

The FBI is apparently on the case now, though the task will be difficult, given the economics of information security.

A fax is not more secure than email

The way complex organizations assess technology and security is often very silly:

A: “Here is the signed document, as a PDF file that I scanned and emailed.”

B: “No good. We need a hard copy.”

A: “Well, I can mail one to you within about a week.”

B: “That’s far too long. Why don’t you just fax it?”

A boots laptop

A opens PDF file

A clicks ‘print,’ plugs laptop into telephone, sends the fax.

Result: a lower quality version of precisely the same thing is transferred, at greater expense.

James Burke’s Connections

Bike wheel

I have mentioned it before, and may well mention it again. James Burke’s Connections is a television series worth seeing. Each episode wanders through history from one invention to another, with fascinating asides along the way.

As of this evening, someone put a stack of them on YouTube. The series was made at taxpayer expense by the BBC, so there is really no reason for which it shouldn’t already be available online for free. Watch a few episodes and you will learn a wealth of interesting (though often very esoteric) facts to break out at dinner parties.

As is generally the case when I am busy and need to come up with a blog post idea in a hurry, this was yanked from MetaFilter.

PS. By the end of each exam, I was coughing my lungs out. Now, I am taking little sips from my bottle of nasty tasting (and ineffective) cough syrup every three hours or so. Now, I feel like I have an especially nasty cold, with all the ill effects involved therein.

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.