Liudvikas Bukys

Phil Wolff: “a klog apart: The syndicated blogosphere will reach 300 million feeds in 3 years” covers the basic architectural scaling issues related to widespread adoption of RSS. Polling a single site can’t last forever. New protocols for publish, subscribe, multicast, flood will be invented. Old protocols (NNTP) may even revive.

This page gets rediscovered by the digerati every few years:
SCIENCE HOBBYIST: Traffic Waves, physics for bored commuters, by William Beaty.
It’s got great little animated traffic images, and a continuing intelligent discussion.

EFF: Federal Court Spurns Recording Industry Enforcement Tactics:

“Today’s ruling requires the recording industry to file subpoenas where it alleges that copyright infringement occurs, rather than blanketing the country from one court in D.C.,” said Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) Staff Attorney Wendy Seltzer, in a statement.

Grinnell Plans lives! after being shut down by college administrators and their newly-issued Academic Computer Use Policies.
Grinnell faculty include some analysis of
Why Did Osgood and Francis Take Down Plans?

[via Lawrence Lessig]

The inimitable Paul Graham has published his latest installment on anti-spam filters: Filters that Fight Back.

He summarizes today’s state of affairs, then plays out the next ply or so:
Spammers are trying to foil learning filters with chaff of various kinds. Once they get good at it (here’s one I haven’t seen yet: pick up the chaff during your web scraping), the spam text itself will need to try to look more bland and indistinguishable, and the distinguishing features will no longer be embedded but will lie one or two HTTP GETs away instead.

So PG expands on the auto-retrieval of web content as part of filtering.

But, in my view, he enters an area fraught with peril for both technical and legal reaons:

a “punish” mode which, if turned on, would retrieve whatever’s at the end of every URL in a suspected spam n times, where n could be set by the user.

While auto-retrieval will become part of the landscape as part of the machinery of automated personal assistants, it will be tricky to implement without unwanted side-effects. Spammers will try to create new legal cover by including “shrink-wrap consent” triggered by auto-retrievers. The mere suggestion of “hack-back” intent creates a legal vulnerability as well.

In this article, SurgControl:
tries to introduce its own catchy names (Hidden Agenda, Treacherous Tracks, Dodgy Domains, Random Ramblings, Counterfeit Characters, Elusive Illusions) for various common tactics.

Who profits from spam? Surprise: tracks down the connections between some reputable firms and the “affiliates” they buy leads from.

Primate Programming Inc: The Evolution of Java and .NET Training

Can Primate Programmers work at my location?

We do not recommend it unless you provide a separate work area. Primate Programmers need to be nearby the offices of IT managers to get questions answered, be managed, etc. However, since primates and great ape hominids have environmental needs that differ from that of humans, we recommend waiting until you have have experience with Primate Programming via offsite outsourcing. Thereafter, you can set up a leafy, comfortable workspace for your Primate Programmers at your site. We offer consulting in how to do this. Issues include menu planning, personal primate hygiene, air quality, daily primate exercise, and noise management.

Do you offer Primate Programming training, for my own Primate Programmers?

Yes. Please see our page on services. We do require that you engage us for at least 30,000 hours of billable time before we provide primate programming training services to your company. You must also sign a non-compete agreement, meaning your primate staff is for the use of your firm only. Our core curriculum includes training in teamwork, Human Great Ape (HGA) sensitivity training, and organizational skills training. Our technical curriculum includes Java training, .NET training including ASP.NET training, and some JSP training. The entire staff receives ongoing tech training in XML, ADO and other technologies that change often.

NY Times: First Test for Freshmen: Picking Roommates:

This summer, for the first time, Emory let freshmen pick their own roommates in an online roommate-selection system that works on the same principles as computer dating.

EcoTalk and
Scoop:
E-Voting Expert Ousted From Elections Conference:

Dr. Rebecca Mercuri, a leading expert in voting machine security, had her conference credentials revoked by the president of the International Association of Clerks, Records, Election Officials, and Treasurers (IACREOT), Marianne Rickenbach. …
David Chaum, the inventor of eCash and a member of Mercuri’s ‘voter-verified paper ballot’ group, had his credentials revoked on the first day of the conference. On the second day his credentials were partially restored. Chaum was allowed to visit the exhibitors hall, but not attend the IACREOT meetings.

If, as demonstrated above, the security strategy of the voting machine industry is security by obscurity, then it is doomed to perpetual failure. That’s not good enough!