Aehso’s Output

Dis is where I live.

Overheard in Dublin. Well, we’re well able to laugh at ourselves, that’s for sure…

The anonymous classical piano player.

A touching story, a man in psychriatic care in Kent since April - who has not communicated with his carers - has turned out to be a classical piano player, yet noone can identify him. The police may “get expert people working with him who are able to use his music and get his identity.”

What an interesting way to figure out who someone is!

Adam Curry, the “podfather”?!

I didn’t hear what Adam Curry said in his first Sirius broadcast but it looks like he is taking the credit for inventing podcasting and gone and annoyed the hell out of Dave Winer

Of course you’ve got to wonder what Curry is doing in the first place - if podcasting is so great, why is he back broadcasting? Would it be because he can reach a broader audience? That whole “push” vs “pull” thing again, eh.

To quote Curry himself:

Podcasting is a lot more difficult than dashing off a post on a weblog. Podcasts take time. You have to record and create in real time, and invest more time editing. There are a lot of people who’d love to do this part time or full time, but that takes money.

Podcasting is a good idea because it enables timeshifted receipt of content, not because its an “ultimate network”(whatever that is supposed to be).
Another:

We really need more listeners to come in, to make podcasting in general more attractive for advertising.

Ah, so advertising is the driving concern. Now the move to Sirius makes sense.

And lastly:

…with podcasting, now there’s an opportunity for anyone to create (an) audio show and distribute it worldwide, efficiently

(Emphasis mine). Now see, traditional podcasting is inerently bandwidth inefficient for the content producer - you know, the geek in his home studio with a standard hosting service provider. If you’re looking for an efficient way to distribute podcast media maybe promote use of bittorrent, or some streaming protocol rather than downloading huge mp3s over plain old HTTP.

Meanwhile I’ll stick with my podcasts of real content that have no commercial concerns, but only when I’m stuck somewhere that a) there is noone to talk to and b) I have an hour to spare to listen to the whole program. I don’t have hours to spare to listen to people prattle on about how cool podcasting is.

BBC Backstage.

A subtle, but catchy name, BBC have opened a Developers Network, of all the things. WikiProxy looks interesting - it links BBC News article content to Wikipedia definitions (for an example click here and notice the underlined links.

Spam, not from me.

Recently the volume of spam email hitting my (hosted) SMTP server has started to become a real nuisance. Incoming spam of the “buy viagra”, “amazing stock opportunity” and “exiled prince of ” variety are old school, and my hosting service’s SpamAsassin gateway flags a lot of that on the way in. That’s a good start, although I have no inclination to go through 500 of these a day looking for false negatives so I’d almost prefer if they were just deleted on receipt - if you’re listening Justin!

What is really starting to bug me are the 1000s of mailer daemon responses I’m getting every day from other SMTP servers for emails that were never sent through my relay. My hosting service uses rock solid BSDUnix so it’s safe as houses and isn’t being used to send these emails in the first place. It would appear that my domain seems to have made it onto some spambot’s “acceptable from” domain list and they are using it with impunity to try get through other spam filters, no doubt via compromised Windows hosts on broadband connections.

So I have to applaud the Spam Prevention Early Warning System’s recent action to blacklist all 700,000 of Telewest’s subscribers - compromised hosts on Telewest’s network were generating 90.4 million emails per day. I’m sure Telewest would debate the “on Telewest’s network” statement above since it was Telewests customers machines that were generating the emails but Telewest have to recognise they have a responsibility to the rest of the network to keep their house in order. This is the only way the spam filters can push back on the ISPs and it is a fair reaction, given the inconvenience imposed. I had a minor concern that my domain would be blacklisted but I’d imagine SPEWS do some more checking than just the From: address!

I’d be interesting to find a measurement of the load the global SMTP servers are under at the moment - they must be red hot, bouncing junk emails around 24×7. I expect to soon see ISPs identify and take compromised customers hosts offline from their networks - or else they’ll start advertising “premium” services on clean subnets, away from the unwashed masses that have all been blacklisted. (Why, oh, why do I expect the second to be the option they go for?)

All in all, unless they can put a stop to this soon, email will become an all but useless tool.

U.S. Bill prohibits judicial review?!?!

The Real ID Theft Act is being voted on in the U.S. Senate tomorrow and according to Ars Technica, it contains a astonishing section that has been attached to this bill (which in turn has been attached to a large military appropriations bill):

H.R. 418 [the Real ID Act of 2005] would provide additional waiver authority over laws that might impede the expeditious construction of barriers and roads along the border. H.R. 418 would require the Secretary of Homeland Security to waive any and all laws that he determines necessary, in his sole discretion, to ensure the expeditious construction of barriers and roads under IIRIRA ‘ 102…

Section 102 of H.R. 418 would amend the current provision to require the Secretary of Homeland Security to waive any law upon determining that a waiver is necessary for the expeditious construction of the border barriers. Additionally, it would prohibit judicial review of a waiver decision or action by the Secretary and bar judicially ordered compensation or injunction or other remedy for damages alleged to result from any such decision or action.

Incredible, the bill prohibits the judiciary from reviewing any decisions made by the Dept of Homeland Security - they could kill people while building that wall and nobody could do anything(like sue the state) for it. There goes one of their 3 Pillars of democracy, freedom my ass.

Hell hath no fury like a drunken blog.

Whether he’s drunk or not, I would seriously not like to get on the wrong side of drunkenbatman. I’ve been following his angle of the CherryOS/PearPC for some time and todays blog entry is not only the longest blog entry I’ve ever read, it’s also a riviting story - one very clued in techie vs a group of fools.

Kudos to drunkenbatman, the man should be paid for the service he has done us all - he’ll get ./’ed first though! I’m looking forward to the “Happy Ever After” conclusion to this one…

Times: U.K. & U.S. had to “create” conditions to go to war.

No need for me to quote the article.

Amazing how under-reported this has been, heck there was only a general election last week in the U.K.