There's going to be a demonstration against abuse of Lex Karpela, the new Finnish copyright law based on the EU copyright directive. Tomorrow, at 13:00, in front of the parliament building. For more information, see Mikko Rauhala's EUCD page.

The Weston Mercury - Tropicana vote - where was your councillor?

Fantastic work by Archant's local newspaper, actually calling councillors and asking them to account for the way they voted on a controversial seafront development. I'm surprised so many of the Worle councillors failed to vote for various reasons. I also think it's a bit poor that the vote was so late at night.

BBC NEWS England Cornwall Row over response to overcrowding

An amazingly brutal and probably honest answer about the local rail company's approach to commuter trains.

BBC NEWS England Train company says sorry to users

Train company admits "too much capacity was removed from the timetable".

Sustainable Building Sourcebook Contents

A book about green building in Texas USA. The whole thing seems to be online (sponsored) and it has some useful explanations about things like thermal mass.

The Weston Mercury - Town centre demolition

Dolphin Square is ugly, but I think it's actually one of the better examples of 60s rectangular town centre building. It's not listed or anything and it's so near the beach, I don't doubt it will be demolished. What will happen to our supermarket there? I hope there will still be one in the town centre area.

RADBURN, NJ

A recent planning process commented that my part of the village is a 'Radburn-style' development and that's why some parts have parking problems at the moment. I didn't know what that meant, so I looked it up. It means that the main access to our houses are footpaths and cars are left in cul-de-sacs around the edge of the development. That explains some of the apparently-confusing naming/numbering decisions. This is the site of the original Radburn.

Top 10 annoying commuting issues

Martyn in top form, ranting about his trip to work. I'm so glad my commutes are mostly cycling across countryside now.

Everyday Cycling - British Cycling Confirms Major Cyclosportive

Want to ride the TdF London-Kent route on 1st July?

Bagel Belly Blog: Travel trouble

Savs's long lane to Leicester. My comment: don't ever believe the route planners. Every one I've seen so far optimises for theoretical speed or distance, when what we really need is resilience and fuel economy too. The A47 vs A11/A14 choice is an extreme example: A11/A14 has far more free-flowing junctions and dual-carriageway than the A47.

I just had some spam from "Kingpin Intelligence" about Sun's London Tech Days '07 A Worldwide Developer Conference 13th - 15th March 2007 - Central Hall, Westminster SW1. It seemed to include some filter-defeating random strings. Why are Sun using spam to promote their events? I've obsoleted the email address from LWCE2004 that it was using. Please use the enquiry form to contact me at work.

Elections, for Profit

Basic problems in the e-voting systems of Denver, Colorado, USA

German people: do you care about democracy and your right to vote? Uwe Hermann

I wonder what happened to this petition?

The Open Rights Group : Taking the lid off e-voting

So, given that e-voting is known buggy and considered harmful, what does the UK do? Follows the other sheep into the abyss, looking ahead as little as possible. Here's ORG's explanation of the situation.

Open Voting Foundation @ SPI

Open Voting Foundation sounds like it should be a project to stop the spread of the e-voting problem, but it isn't.

European Commission endorses open source - ZDNet UK

A lengthy EC report (is there any sort besides lengthy?) summarises the benefits of free software. I think one important way that more partner organisations can help SPI-like groups is by helping to inform about this sort of local development.

LWN: The end of the Fedora Foundation

When you see that Red Hat can't/won't start a foundation around its distributions, you realise what an amazing thing SPI is.

2007-02-16

Agenda for this evening's board meeting. I seem to be having difficulty staying connected.

I saw the Flax Bourton greenway consultation (available on http://www.n-somerset.gov.uk/Transport/Travel/Cycling/flaxbourtongreenway.htm) includes a railway bridge with what looks like a maximum-radius corner on one side, but a tight corner emerging from behind a fence on the other. I wonder whether there's any reason for that, because it looks dangerous to me. Check Sustrans plans carefully. One one hand, they've got the money and planning authority respect to get dumb stuff built, but on the other hand, they've got the money and respect to get good stuff built. Use 'em.

Jimmy Kaplowitz commented:

"The text "the board to confirm SPI's view of debian" goes to a 404 not found error page. If you are referring to this post: then I certainly had no idea what correspondence you were asking the secretary to report, and he may well not have known either if he wasn't up on the latest posts to debian-vote."

I'm not referring to that post. I sent a later message to board cc:general. I got bored waiting for it to appear, so I linked to where the next message will appear. I'm surprised it hasn't appeared yet. That's probably something to do with SPI's email-hostile server config, which I asked the board to address last month and they deferred.

"Please don't attribute a lack of response to a desire to avoid questions and add red tape when it can mostly be explained by a simple lack of understanding of the question. (Yes, if Neil had acted perfectly he would have replied to your mail asking what correspondence you meant, and if you had acted perfectly you would have included a link to the correspondence in the first place. Nobody's perfect.)"

I don't know what correspondence has been received, so how can I link it? I could link one example from me, I guess, but presumably there is more.

"I also can't find the correspondence to which you refer in any of my SPI list archives, private or not. If it was a direct mail to the secretary, then maybe Neil should have replied, but Neil is no more able to speak for the board in these matters than any other individual director. We'd need to pass a resolution if you wanted an official statement to end any confusion. Personally I think that SPI would act on a GR that overrode a DPL decision in keeping with the Debian Constitution, but as I just said, neither I nor any board member who spoke up on debian-vote can rightly express an opinion of the board on this matter in the absence of a resolution. Certainly a resolution would be reasonable."

I thought Neil is no more able to speak for the board than Joey or any other director. However, when I asked Joey to show proof that SPI only views the DPL, Neil posted. Neil's SPI secretary, so should know whether some proof exists, right? Now it seems a no-op resolution is needed to sort this out, as neither Joey or Neil agreed that SPI would follow non-DPL decisions. In a word: argh.

SPI's February meeting (agenda) on Friday is approaching and the board seems to have gone all evasive and yeti-like. For yet another month, I've heard nothing in response to simple questions and over on debian-vote, board members posted a bizarre claim about how SPI acts for debian and a direction back to SPI so I've asked the board to confirm SPI's view of debian but this is all yards too greasy, really. I'm getting quite irritated with the question-avoiding and red tape from the board, as you can maybe tell from the tone of:

"In case anyone hasn't noticed, it seems very difficult to get anything like a straight answer out of most of the current SPI board lately. Try it for yourself. Fun for all the debian family. Knock one over, win a coconut and five tons of flax!"

There only seems to be one responsive sane board member at present and that's just not enough to ensure SPI members can exercise their right to oversee the board's work. SPI seems to be going delinquent again. Please correct it before it does much damage. Please, debian, postgresql and GNUstep developers in particular, please request your contributing membership and help get this organisation back on track. Post title is from cult advert Me ears are alight

Or: Collateral Damage by the Cult of Celebrity. Or: The Hidden Costs of Downloading Porn. (No, I've not seen the film filked in the post title.) I got a work call from the advertising manager of one of my customers. They are just starting out with pay-per-click adverts. I understand that it's been working OK for the last few months, increasing their number of sales and general interest by enough to cover the cost. In general, each time they refined their campaigns or spent a little more, they saw a positive result. I got a call because since the start of February, they were suddenly spending a lot more money, without any corresponding results. Was there foul play? Had a competitor noticed their adverts and kept clicking them from different browsers? In short, was someone running a click-fraud attack on them? This is the sort of question I enjoy. (I did a statistics degree, but I don't use it directly in most of my work.) I massaged the logs and computed some general-purpose statistics. First, I looked for obvious attacks: were any particular machines or domains responsible for most of the clicks? Most non-IT people use the same ISP at home and at work, in my experience, so if it was a particular competitor, I'd expect to see lots of clicks from one domain. Nothing really stood out. The next thing I looked at was the geographic locations, very roughly. The pay-per-click adverts are targetted at European users on European sites. If it was some sort of distributed denial-of-service attack, I'd expect to see some increase in American and Asian traffic. Where were visitors coming from? I looked up locations by the first part of the IP address, which is crude, but good enough for this. You could even do something similar with the the xkcd ipv4 map - it looked like most of the addresses were in Europe, which is what I'd expect. There was one interesting US grouping, but that turned out to be one of the ad networks checking their ad links were still valid. So, I compared the time distributions of clicks now with clicks a month ago (when the ads were working fine). There were increased numbers of clicks just before 9, just after 17 and midnight-4 local time. I could dismiss the clicks just outside 9-17 common work hours as people looking to buy for their hobbies, but midnight-4 is a bit strange. Looking in more detail, the midnight-4 clicks were coming mostly from ad placements on one site. Looking at that site, it seems they specialise in 'sexy videos' of celebrities. Needless to say, that was not my customer's intended target market! I used that information to look at the whole dataset and see how much of the increase was due to that one site. Almost all of it was from there. Scores per night. Did any of those visitors stay long? Nope. It even looked like some of them were just private web spiders, downloading a page and all links from it, which I guess people might use to bulk-download videos overnight. So those results were sent to the advertising manager and they've updated their campaigns to exclude that site and any others related to sexy videos. It reminds me of the John Wanamaker quote

"Half of my advertising is wasted, I just don't know which half."

Maybe by working out statistics from the logs, we can reduce it from half for web ads - or at least limit it to half?

After being told by a few people that it rarely snows on this coast, here's my view at 9am today (2007-02-08): Naturally, this means travel chaos, school closures, horsemen of the apocalypse and so on. Got to love England's reaction to snow. It's all melted now (noon), of course.

Last Monday (5 Feb), I observed a meeting of Kewstoke Parish Council I mentioned the forthcoming North Somerset Cycle Forum but most of the public contributions were about the Cygnet Hospital. The hospital was accused of breaking promises given last year to the village and the police, namely:

• letting patients roam the village without supervision;
• chopping down screening trees they said would be left to grow and leaving dead wood on obstructive trees they said they'd cut; and
• now seeking to take drug rehab patients.

They also have some faulty light timers, floodlighting neighbouring houses from 1am to 6am every day. That's both antisocial and wasteful. A terrible way for Cygnet to keep their neighbours awake. Is it any wonder that there's an outcry? Regardless of what I think about the above promises, Cygnet should do what they said and not behave antisocially, or be punished. Fine them a century per night per house for the lights and they'd soon fix them, I'm sure! There was also some comeback on the Kewstoke toll road farce. The district council's panel has asked the officers to reexamine the options, after they noticed the creative accounting of including road maintenance (which must be done whether or not the road has a toll) in the toll cost. There was a reporter from the Mercury present, so maybe this will appear in their edition later this week.

It's the Fourth Safer Internet Day which is fine in itself, but it also seems to be an excuse for politicians and journalists to say stupid things about the internet. Example 1: Interior Minister John Reid suggests making sex offenders register all email addresses and internet nicknames - seems fine at first reading, but then you realise that anyone can have an infinite number of email addresses and nicknames and wonder how the hell the police will cope with a denial-of-service attack that enumerates each address and nickname in turn. a@mydomain, b@mydomain, ... z@mydomain, aa@mydomain, ab@... you get the idea? Example 2: BBC Five Live asks 'Should websites that promote anorexia be shut down?' which was also subject of an ITV news programme called 'thinternet' yesterday evening - There are practical problems shutting down any web site (censorship is often seen as damage and the internet can route around it) and if it's not on the web, it will be passed from person to person. It's shameful that Eating Disorders Awareness Week is getting hijacked by this futility. Can someone get these people to realise that banning and controlling things on the internet is about as easy as controlling radio waves? The radio laws are mostly unenforced against small offenders because they are mostly unenforceable without a huge police force. The solutions will come from addressing the problems (sex offences, eating disorders) not the symptoms (email addresses, web sites).

And the award for worst-addressed post yet goes to COLT Telecommunications for:

"TTLLP
Qewstoke (should be Kewstoke)
Summerset (should be Somerset)"

The dangers of using foreign call centres for data collection, I guess. At least they got the name, street and postcode correct, so it arrived. The post itself was pretty interesting. It said that 0870 numbers will stop being revenue-shared from February 2008, which seems to be confirmed by this Ofcom press release from April 2006 which I hadn't noticed. TTLLP trades its revenue-share for hunt, voicemail, fax termination and so on, so I wonder what will happen to that service after Feb 2008? We recently signed up for numbers where we get outbound SIP to PSTN calls too. I was undecided about which number to use in future, but I guess this means TTLLP will switch to 0844 or 01934. There's a bit of flaming going on at Say Not to 0870 which reminded me to update our entry there. The COLT mailshot came with a calendar to try to persuade you to move your 0870 numbers to them and you can order your own calendar on their site - pictures are holding hands, walking under an umbrella, Brussels Grand-Place (I think), tulips, rowers maybe on Lake Ontario, a diver, a boardwalk, dandelion seeds, walking through fallen leaves, the Millenium Wheel with fireworks, illuminated pine tree, starting an avalaunche and London commuters. Can anyone spot a theme there? I don't.

"Guidelines for the Secure Operation of the Internet" (RFC1281)

Read it and weep.

Techblogging: DoSing spammers

I've done this in the past, by having a CGI rabbit-hole in a semi-hidden link near the start of the page which just generated 1000s of invalid email addresses. For bonus points, use addresses with MX servers which will never be online again, or maybe with a MX that tarpits and rejects all mail eventually. Get enough points and the spammer will either stop scanning your site or waste a lot of time on you.

Google scanned by spammers [Techblogging]

I don't use pingomatic, but a few of my pages are ranked high enough to attract spammers every time I update them. I think blog spammers probably are using subscription tools to find the most active/most syndicated sites to spam. Can we redesign the tools to defeat them?

BBC News Technology UK Edition: Ads help Google profits triple

But hey, why should Google care about spammers when their externalisation to date is making Google rich?

Techblogging: Web 2.0 security issues incoming

I dislike Web 2.0 so far because it is often inaccessible - this suggests it's often insecure too.

Software Patents Petition

Need more brains... come on, sign the petition, even if it has a bit of hyperbole/invective and a typo or two. Last I heard, it's behind adopting Spandau Ballet's Gold as national anthem, for crying out loud!

The Irascible Professor-commentary of the day 06-07-06. Calculator dependence.

Parents, don't let your children grow up to be calculator junkies!

Zugschlusbeobachtungen: Which kind of software suspend?

I think I heard Matthew Garrett give an interview somewhere (LUG Radio?) which summarised the suspend situation as something like "it works well except when it doesn't." My computer usually software-suspends, but sometimes it crashes and sometimes is often enough to deter me from suspending it often. I really ought to debug it, but it's not a priority yet.

'Cheap and tacky' wedding email that went global - 19 Nov 2006 - National

"The marquee company's CEO, Klaus Jorgensen, said he had sacked the employee responsible - who turned out to be his wife"

NoDaddy.Com - Exposing the Many Reasons Not to Trust GoDaddy with Your Domain Names

"They didn't give me a chance to dispute or resolve the problem -- just a voicemail saying my domain was scheduled for suspension , followed up by a Domain Suspension Notice exactly 52 seconds later. Note that neither of these included a phone number for the abuse department or a reason for the shutdown."

The 'Ow' starts now / freedom bits / greve / Fellows / The Fellowship - Fellowship of FSFE

FSFE's Georg Greve won't be upgrading to Vista, which I saw called "Windows Fista" on the BBC's site - disgruntled journo, over-aggressive MS PR or typo?

BBC NEWS Have Your Say Will you be getting Microsoft Vista?

Nearly 2000 comments, most "No" AFAIS

Microsoft files for patent on "modular operating system"

Microsoft patents Linux?

Hacking gadflies: Marechal, A dystopian future''

Another comment on the MS patent.

BBC NEWS Technology Triple threat targets Word users

While I'm boggling at Microsoft, I hope all their customers saw this little Christmas present from 20 December.

BBC News Technology UK Edition: Sony CD compensation agreed

No Christmas for Sony, remember? They pay out a year or so late.

BBC Trust - On-demand Services' consultation

A remarkable consultation that includes a question "How important is it that the proposed seven-day catch-up service over the internet is available to consumers who are not using Microsoft software?", but the questionnaire doesn't work in all browsers. Do you think this biases the responses? Yes, yes or yes?

Digg - Pressure the BBC to embrace open standards, not just Microsoft technology!

Digg is the new slashdot. Just add hot grits.

BBC News Technology UK Edition: Vista has speech recognition hole

"for the flaw to be exploited the speech recognition feature would need to be activated and configured and both microphone and speakers would have to be switched on." Well, my speakers are embedded in the screen, my microphone doesn't have an on/off switch and I leave it switched on in the mixer so that I can answer the softphone quickly... I doubt I'm the only one who doesn't switch the mic off after every use. Are Microsoft living in the real world any more?

I reject the unconstitutional honorary membership allocated by debian.ch and I have not made the mistake that I made with DUS, of possibly accepting membership by conduct. You can tell debian.ch is nothing to do with me: its director can't even print my name right. Will debian.ch continue to be used for personal abuse? Will the next DPL actually defend the debian name against unethical enterprises? Update: To madduck, because you don't even have comments on your blog: Yes, the debian user database is wrong. I don't know why my gecos is different from my GPG key, most of my IDs and my AM report and I've asked for it to be corrected for years, as readers of debian lists may remember, but it's well-known how responsive admin@db.d.o can be sometimes. IIRC, Ian Jackson once refused to sign my key because my IDs and db.d.o disagree. Seeing as it was posted to another blog, I'll delete the similar comment, but that's fairly unusual for me.

Milton Country Park

This park near Cambridge is under threat, partly due to council mismanagement.

Climate change prompts Cabinet change in Canada - CNN.com

Carry on flying, says Blair - science will save the planet Special Reports Guardian Unlimited Politics

Weston and Worle News: Recycling Service Branded Rubbish

"A Weston resident has branded the town's recycling service rubbish and joined calls for it to be investigated.Carolyn Jones, who moved to Weston Village from south Gloucestershire 18 months ago,..." I've had to telephone and get Biffa to come back after they missed my collection every time since New Year. What's going on?

Linux Ecology-HOWTO

Nuclear Power?

Cycle Parking Farcility of the Month

CTC - Cyclist who refused to stay in the gutter wins

So you are allowed to cycle on the roads in Telford, despite what the police there think. More coverage:

Cyclist's conviction thrown out : Shropshire Star

BBC NEWS England Shropshire Cyclist wins road blocking appeal

Cycle-lanes - epetition reply

A relevant reminder from Tony Bliar's office that cyclists don't have to use useless cycle lanes.

Trains Swindon - Melksham - Westbury - SLASHED by the DfT and First

Campaign site about the government-enforced cuts to Great Western services in the Wiltshire/Somerset/Bristol area.

EDP24 - Dangerous driver in cyclist death jailed

BBC NEWS England Norfolk Tired motorist jailed over death

High-res plans of the TdF London stages

As far as I can tell, I was not getting any email from debian.org because master cached a bogus MX record for phonecoop.coop. Update 2: superstar DSAs stroked the right widget so email should start flowing again. I think I can't email anyone at debian.org or lists because debian uses sender verify. Update: It seems that debian.org's use of sender verify means debian will get blacklisted. An anonymous commenter posted:

"I'm arguing against Debian admins using Sender Verify because it's evil. Even uceprotect will list them if they caught a mail from them: http://www.uceprotect.net/en/index.php?m=10&s=0"

Update: Steinar H. Gunderson - Sender verify says we shouldn't care.

I've just noticed that some debconf7 registrations close this week. Yes, this week - a full two months before national rail advance tickets go on sale. What's that about? [...] Jon Dowland replied

"MJ, the debconf7 travel page has far more flight information on it than anything else because it has been put together primarily by people who are figuring out international travel arrangements which will require flights."

International travel does not necessarily require flights. Intercontinental travel probably does, due to time constraints, or maybe even cross-continent, but I've seen DDs from nearby countries posting about booking their flights, and putting the deadlines before land tickets are even on sale is really shameful.

"It could certainly use some more information for people travelling more locally. If you have some advice on how to get there from Europe or the UK without flying, please contribute it: the site is a wiki, you can sign up for an account and edit the page yourself."

As I've posted elsewhere, it's a mediawiki rather than a wiki, so once I get around to installing mvs, I can sign up and edit it. (Bring back patches in the mail...) However, I'm not sure how best to get to Edinburgh without flying yet, because most tickets aren't on sale yet, which is where I started, remember? David Moreno Garza replied

"in 3rd world countries, some things like technology, travelling or taking care of the environment are not a matter of choice, unfortunately. [...]"

Sure, if people are travelling from 3rd world countries to Edinburgh, then flying is probably the only practical way, but surely people from nearby countries can get to Scotland without dumping CO2 into our sky?

MJ, in 3rd world countries, some things like technology, travelling or taking care of the environment are not a matter of choice, unfortunately. When some of the basic needs for humans to live are easily covered and people do not have to worry about, suchs as daily eating, it’s way more easy to develop a country and have people concerning about unimportant stuff. Even free software is a luxury matter on some countries! You know, human beings have an stupid custom acquired since they were born, most of them, and that’s the need for eating, how weaks! I think you get my point. Yours, an international traveller flying between the UK.