Binary file parsing is difficult. There is a lot of byte swapping, offset computation and magic bit mask handling involved. Add to that the fact that many binary formats were reverse-engineered and do not even have a public spec, are so convoluted that there is no way to write a decent parser, or have so many buggy writer implementations that the readers need to accommodate for that. Media players, web browsers and email clients are probably the most exposed ones. These programs are full of bugs, not more than any other program, but more dangerous bugs. Admit it, you just play any video you find on the Intarweb, click any image link and read your email (seriously, even mutt uses antiword to read .doc attachments). It is no longer necessary to have network listening services to be exposed to security issues, the users themselves listen to the world. Using my fuzzing tool zzuf that I eventually decided to release, I found more than 40 bugs in common Unix tools, popular media players and other utilities, simply by reading valid files and slightly corrupting them. The most scary ones are the media player bugs:

	VLC	MPlayer	xine	FFmpeg (ffplay)	GStreamer (gst-launch)	mpg321	ogg123
MP3	robust	SIGSEGV	robust	robust	robust	robust	N/A
Ogg Vorbis	robust	SIGSEGV	robust	SIGSEGV	SIGSEGV	N/A	robust
MPEG-1	SIGSEGV	SIGSEGV	SIGSEGV	SIGSEGV	robust	N/A	N/A
MPEG-2	SIGSEGV	SIGSEGV	robust	SIGSEGV	SIGSEGV	N/A	N/A
MPEG-4 AVI	SIGSEGV	SIGSEGV	SIGSEGV	SIGSEGV	deadlock?	N/A	N/A
FLAC	robust	SIGSEGV	robust	heap corruption	robust	N/A	SIGFPE
Ogg Theora	robust	SIGSEGV	robust	SIGSEGV	robust	N/A	N/A
WMV	SIGSEGV	SIGSEGV	N/A	SIGSEGV	robust	N/A	N/A
AAC	heap corruption	SIGSEGV	SIGSEGV	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A
AC-3/A52	SIGSEGV	robust (I KID YOU NOT)	robust	SIGSEGV	N/A	N/A	N/A

Each of these segmentation fault bugs is a potential security hole in Debian. zzuf also found bugs in Firefox, Openoffice.org, antiword, ImageMagick and even objdump. And there is more to come.

In short, Erich says that XML, plus the right editor, Just Works(tm). Well, yes. But when you are over a slow link, or when you are desperate with a b0rken system, you just don't have Eclipse at hand to edit a config file. Of course, you could use the half-existing XML support you talk about in vim (I have not tested it, cannot be sure of it), but it is still a PITA if your /usr is not working fine or if your termcap is too dumb to manage. Yes, there are each time less of those situations, but anyway...
I won't start ranting on how YAML is the right tool for every situation where XML is used - It's clearly not. XML is, after all, a standard. Some configurations can be done by XML, say, if you have any of those Java frameworks (I've only suffered^Whated^Wgot despaired^W^Wset up JBoss), but still... Configuration files, at least the important ones, should be editable by using a lightweight, easy and available tool like nvi, pico, or even cat sed.
Oh, and about YAML's site being valid YAML: Of course, it only looks like it. But cut and paste it - It works for me :) Of course, it is not meant to replace or work over HTML. I would never dream of using YAML as a web-services language or anything of that sort. There are better tools for that.
But please, leave config files hand-editable. With common, light and hard-to-break editors.

I have been told that qemu-system-mips(needs cvs version), qemu-system-mipsel(needs cvs version), qemu-system-ppc(non-free video.x is not included in Debian) do not work.I am yet to be told that qemu-system-sparc doesn't work, but it apparently doesn't.qemu-system-arm, qemu, qemu-system-x86_64 seem to be the only ones that work at the moment.

Gordon Haff: “Imagine, if you will, that it s the late Nineties. A certain software company based in Redmond, Washington has recently released Visual Studio 97 thereby bundling together many of its development tools for the first time. Now imagine that the company decided to release those tools for free. What do you think the general reaction would have been? Applause for Microsoft s generosity? Or widespread condemnation for using its market power to make such a transparently anti-competitive attack on other makers of development tools?” Thought provoking observations. Note, however, that “open source as competitive weapon” isn’t limited to large vendors—it works equally well (and, in many ways, better) for the upstarts (see Red Hat, MySQL, JBoss, etc.). In fact, it works so well for the upstarts that even the upstarts have upstarts (see, e.g., Canonical). Can something that levels the playing field so dramatically be called predatory? Predatory has one-sided, unfair advantage connotations. In open source, it goes both ways. With Eclipse, it was IBM doing the disrupting; but with MySQL and JBoss, IBM is on the other end of it. At the end of the day, the real winner is all of us—after all, who can argue that the state of IDEs and middleware isn’t better today than it’s ever been?

Every project has its story. Every war has its winner, and its casualties. They were 20 millions men, fighting for their freedom. And you'll never know their story. Because during last week, I was looking why my Web server was so heavily loaded. And I discovered that my blog was attacked by spammers trying to post comments. They were stopped by a great plug-in named spamplemousse, which use spam keywords and DNSBL to drop spam comments.
However, this plug-in is written in PHP, like the rest of my blog, so it loads Apache and MySQL in a way that is no more acceptable: the page have still to be rendered for this !@#$ spammers. Consequently, I decided to write a Apache 2.x module which will just drop a 403 Forbidden error page in the spammers' head using DNSBL servers. Here it is, and it is called mod_defensible. I'm using it since 3 days now, and I got some pretty interesting result and less load on my Web server, so c'est tout bon^[1].

... for the problems delivering your mail, Jordi. The failure you got came from my (old) backup mx. Don't know what the problem was, or why someone should phone him to deliver mails. My old ISP was some kind strange regarding spam... However: I removed the backup mx. Sorry, that shouldn't have happened.

Here it’s a top-10 list of really important things, created by M dicos Sin Fronteras in Spanish. directhex, from #debian-offtopic (thanks!), provided a grammar/spelling check on my original English translation.

1. Central African Republic: Resurgence of the conflict. In 2006, its civilian population was a victim of violence again. During these months, confrontations have taken place between government troops and rebel groups. Civilians, suspected of supporting one or the other, have stuck in the biddle. Around 100,000 civilians have been forced to leave their homes. Several children, under 5 years old, have become ill of malaria, worms and serious respiratory infections.
2. Chechnya: Physical and psychologic scars. The consequences of a conflict that has lasted over 12 years so far are still present. Large numbers of Chechens that were displaced during the most serious phases of the crisis have already returned. However, the majority still lack housing and has to live in temporary shelters. Violence, kidnappings and abuses are still rampant. In the rural zones, medical infrastructure is almost nonexistent.
3. Sri Lanka: Civilians caught in the middle. Combat between government forces and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam have intensified since the summer, causing displacements of tens of thousands of people. Other are still imprisoned and cannot flee.
4. Democratic Republic of Congo: Violence and permanent deficiencies. Deprivation and violence suffered by millons of Congolese is still happening unnoticed by the rest of the planet. Eastern Congo is a battleground for fights between several armed groups, included government forces that use force against civilian populace, leading to brutal living conditions.
5. Somalia: War and natural catastrophes. Even though its current situation has temporarily attraced media attention, the terrible living conditions of the Somali population are still largely forgotten. The country has one of the worst levels of sanitation in the world, and a quarter of the infant population dies before reaching 5 years old.
6. Colombia: Living with fear. Massacres, executions and fear are a daily life of thousands of Colombians. So far, almost three million have fled their homes because of a conflict marked by the drug trafficking that involves government forces, paramilitary groups and armed guerrillas.
7. Haiti: Extreme urban violence. The violence and insecurity is a daily breakfast in its capital city, Port-au-Prince, with confrontations between armed groups, the Haitian police and the UN Stabilization Mission on Haiti. Since December 2004, more than 3,000 people have been registered with bullet wounds, including more than a thousand women and children.
8. India: 25 years of conflict. Confrontations between Maoist insurgents, government forces and anti-Maoist military services have caused the displacement of 50,000 civilans in several areas of the country. The population still lives with fear and violence, with little or no access to sanitary conditions.
9. Tuberculosis: Obsolete and insufficient treatments. Against popular opinion in the West, tuberculosis is not an “obsolete problem”. Each year, it causes the deaths of two million people, around nine million people contract the disease, and new multiresistants variants are appearing.
10. Undernourishment: Thousands of avoidable deaths. Whilst in Spain the Ministry of Health tries to fight one of the major problems of the decade, obesity, millions of children die of hunger around the world and more than 60 million people show signs of acute undernourishment.

I guess not everything around is a top ten contest on popularity of who’s the hottest, who’s the prettiest, who has the longest penis or the biggest breasts, or whose farts smell better, geek, eh?

Today I woke up with a strong determination to do some badly needed house cleaning. A series of rushed travels have left a few rooms full of stuff all over the place, after I emptied a bag or two to be able to pack on time. Just before going to Tunisia, I decided my wallet was way too fat so I got rid of shopping receipts and other random shit I had in it. That included quite a few PGP keys from people I had been collecting in previous travels, and I had forgotten about. So, armed with my willingness to get rid of all of those dust puppies, first thing I find in the living room is the pile of wallet papers, and my clever procrastinating mind apparently thought it was time to postpone real cleaning; instead I needed to sit down and sign all of those really old PGP keys. Many of you reading this will have got a few emails from me this morning. It was about time! Some of the silly strips of paper dated back to the Open Source World Conference 2004 in M laga, when a decent group of Debian Developers gathered in a really small hacking room and talked about some Debian topics. Signing the keys has let me identify a few non-revoked ids which really should be, as the accounts are no longer valid, etc.; many others have greylisted me for a while and finally accepted my email. There was one mail recipient which may have gone a bit too far with the anti-spam policies, though:

9323170A74B     4007 Sun Jan 14 17:55:38  jordi@nubol.oskuro.net
(host mail-dtag.reichmann.net[62.104.43.214] said: 421 call 09001000057 for admin support (in reply to MAIL FROM command))
                                         alexander@schmehl.info

Alexander, I'm not doing calls to Germany to send your key, but I can resend if you want, once you open up your mail server... (my tries to knoepix.org also failed). It seems I have misplaced a few keys from the Ubuntu Summit in Sydney, but I think I know where to find that sheet. More in 2 or 3 years! PS: dust puppies are alive and well, they managed to survive yet another tough day.

Has anyone experience with DoSing spammers by deliberately flooding them with incorrect email addresses? I mean, it should be easily possible to put new (fake) email addreses up on web pages in a huge scale (actually this is an old idea of deterring spammers). Any spammer grabbing them will have his database grow somewhat out of control. At some point they'll probably notice that you have been providing them with bad data, and maybe drop all of your domains' email addresses harvested? Or do they just not care?

Just as I was blogging about my trip to Prozac Land and how I got my health back, after working for a week and a half I started feeling sick again. Very sick.

I was having these ups and downs, one day I felt I could fly and the next I felt I was down in a hole. I was throwing up every morning and I had stopped eating anything but fruit already quite some time ago. I was smoking like a truck driver (Spanish saying) and drinking coffee like a mad hatter would drink tea in every Unbirthday Party.





My psychiatrist then withdrew all my medication at once, which was sweet and sour. This crap fucks up your brain chemistry, and on one hand, you feel like yourself again, but on the other hand, the down is scary. I have been dizzy, clumsy and sleepy at all times since I am off the happiness pill.

My endless doctor trips have not finished yet, but I made an unexpected stop in ER last Thursday. I was on the verge of a nervous breakdown, delirious that I am going to loose my job because of my terrible health and, subsequently, lack of accountability, stressed as hell about it, and physically feeling like crap, I landed in ER Land, and stayed there for 6 hours. I felt frivolous taking this picture, my arm feeling numb and foreign from the Peripheral IV line, which is what I was first given upon arrival, it felt too tight, slightly painful, and I was terrified to move or bend my arm. It just lay there, beside me, as if it were no longer part of me, out of my control.

All kind of tests were performed on me, blood was taken to feed the lab vampires, I don't even want to think about the urine, x-rays documented my piercings locations, physical exploration, endless questions, talking to two different, unfriendly, tired and overworked, doctors, and nothing was found, all looked normal. All but me, I was despaired. If all is fine, and I am not dying from bladder cancer, why do I feel like this? I felt stupid, I was looked at as I was there wasting their scarce time. Nobody could tell me what is wrong with me.

It looks like Prozac played an important role in killing my health completely. My psychiatrist has been on the phone with me all weekend, calling me every couple of hours. Why is he so worried about me? Why doesn't he want me to sleep alone at my place and wants me to sleep at my parents? Is it because of people committing suicide closely related to Prozac? Why, if he is aware of this, which I do not know, did he give it to me? I am not suicidal, dear doctor. I am just feeling very sleepy, very clumsy, I can barely manage to press the right keys in Mutt, my email client of choice since 2000, which I know how to use by heart, my fingers just do their job, but not anymore. But how can I explain that to you?

My friends, again, are here, close to me, keeping an eye on me, calling me on the phone, feeding me, letting me take a nap in their couch.

Dear doctor, you have mentioned the latest groovy drug to replace Prozac with, I am sorry, it is not going to happen. I am going to deal with whatever is wrong with my brain, mind and body in a natural way, with therapy, and healthy living habits. I trust you and respect you, but I do not trust these drug makers, and they are already making enough money. If it is going to be painful, I want to feel it. Please do not numb me and then make feel it all at once like this. Let me deal with it the way I choose to.

I choose the hard way. Can we agree that I am strong enough?

Uphold, maintain, sustain: life in the trenches Now that I have a baseline filter, how do I continue to train it, without putting too much of an effort? There are two separate activities here, firstly selecting the mails to be used in training, and secondly, automating the training and saving to the mail corpus. On going training is essential; Spam mutates, and even ham changes over time, and well trained filters drift. However, if training disrupts normal work-flow, it won't happen; so a minimally intrusive set of tools is critical Selecting mail to train filters There are three broad categories of mails that fit the criteria: 1. Misclassified mail This is where human judgement comes in, to separate the wheat from the chaff.

• misclassified Spam. I do nothing special for this category -- I assume that I would notice these mails, and when I do, I just save them in a junk folder, for latter processing. The volume of such messages has fallen to about one or two a month, and having them slip though is not a major problem in the first place
• misclassified ham is far more critical, and, unfortunately, somewhat harder to get right, since you do want to reject the worst of the Spam at the SMTP level. A mistake here is worse than a false negative: all that happens with a false negative is that you curse, save to the junk folder for later retraining, and mode on. With missed Ham, you never know what you might have missed -- and hope it is nothing important.
  • If one of the two filters did the right thing, then the mlg script can catch it -- more on it below. The only thing to remember to do is to look carefully at the grey.mbox folder that is produced. While this is not good to have misclassified ham, at least this sub-category is easy to detect.
  • If both filters misclassified it, this would then mean a human would have to catch the error. The good news is that I haven't had very many mails fall into this category (the last one I know about was in the late summer of 2005). How can one be sure that there are not ham messages falling through the cracks all the time? The idea is to accept mail with scores one would normally discard, and treat this as a canary in a mine: no ham should ever show up in these realspam messages. My schema for handling Spam is shown in the figure below.
  I try and keep all the mail that I have rejected in quarantine for about a month or so, and so can retrieve a mail if informed about a mistaken rejection. I also do spot checks once in a while, though as time has gone on with no known false positives, the frequency of my checks has dropped.

2. Partially misclassified mail This is mail correctly classified overall, but misclassified by either crm114, or spamassassin, but not both. This is an early warning sign, and is more common than mail that is misclassified, since usually the filter that is wrong is wrong weakly. But this is the point where training should occur, so that the filter does not drift to the point that mails are misclassified. Again, the mlg script catches this. 3. Mail that crm114 is unsure about This is Mail correctly classified, but something that mailreaver is unsure about -- and this category is why mailreaver learns faster than mailtrainer. Spam handling and disposition . At this point I should say something about how I generally handle mails scored as Spam by the filters. As you can see, the mail handling is simple; depending on the combined score given to the mail by the filters. The handling rules are:

• score <= 5.0: Accept unconditionally
• 5.0 < score <= 15: Grey list
• 15 < score: reject

So, any mail with score less than 15 is accepted, potentially after grey-listing. The disposition is done according to the following set of rules:

• score <= 0: Classify into folder based on origin
• 0 < score <= 10: file into Spam (some of this survived grey-listing)
• 10 < score: file into realspam (Must have survived grey-listing)

In the last 18+months, I have not seen a Ham mail in my realspam folder; chances of Ham being rejected are pretty low. My Spam folder gets a ham message every few months, but these are usually spamassassin misclassifying things; and mlg detects those. I have not seen one of these in the last 6 months. So my realspam canary has done wonders for my peace of mind. With ideally trained filters, spam and realspam folders would be empty. mail list grey I have created a script called mlg ("Mail List Grey") that I run periodically over my mail folder, that picks out mails that either (a) are classified differently by spamassassin and crm114, or (b) are marked as unsure by mailreaver. The script takes these mails and saves them into a grey.mbox folder. I tend to run them over Spam and non-Spam folders in different runs, so that the grey.mbox folder can be renamed to either ham or junk, in the vast majority of the cases. Only for misclassified mails do I have to individually pick the misplaced email and classify it separately from the rest of the emails in that batch. At this point, I should have mail mbox folders called ham and/or junk, which are now ready to be used for training either crm114 or spamassassin or both. Processing these folders is the subject of the next article in this series.

The New York Times reports that the Pentagon has gone on the offensive against the pro bono attorneys representing Guantánamo detainees. Although there is a lot to criticize in U.S. detainee policy, these attacks represent a new low:

The senior Pentagon official in charge of military detainees suspected of terrorism said in an interview this week that he was dismayed that lawyers at many of the nation’s top firms were representing prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and that the firms’ corporate clients should consider ending their business ties. … The same point appeared Friday on the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal, where Robert L. Pollock, a member of the newspaper’s editorial board, cited the list of law firms and quoted an unnamed “senior U.S. official” as saying, “Corporate C.E.O.’s seeing this should ask firms to choose between lucrative retainers and representing terrorists.” In his radio interview, Mr. Stimson said: “I think the news story that you’re really going to start seeing in the next couple of weeks is this: As a result of a FOIA request through a major news organization, somebody asked, ‘Who are the lawyers around this country representing detainees down there?’ and you know what, it’s shocking.” The F.O.I.A. reference was to a Freedom of Information Act request submitted by Monica Crowley, a conservative syndicated talk show host, asking for the names of all the lawyers and law firms representing Guantánamo detainees in federal court cases. Mr. Stimson, who is himself a lawyer, then went on to name more than a dozen of the firms listed on the 14-page report provided to Ms. Crowley, describing them as “the major law firms in this country.” He said, “I think, quite honestly, when corporate C.E.O.’s see that those firms are representing the very terrorists who hit their bottom line back in 2001, those C.E.O.’s are going to make those law firms choose between representing terrorists or representing reputable firms, and I think that is going to have major play in the next few weeks. And we want to watch that play out.”

Perhaps the worst part is the following statement, which as best I can tell has no basis in truth:

When asked in the radio interview who was paying for the legal representation, Mr. Stimson replied: “It’s not clear, is it? Some will maintain that they are doing it out of the goodness of their heart, that they’re doing it pro bono, and I suspect they are; others are receiving moneys from who knows where, and I’d be curious to have them explain that.”

Deval Patrick, the recently-elected governor of Massachusetts, endured similar attacks for his work representing criminal defendants. Fortunately, that strategy backfired and Patrick was elected in a landslide. Although others in the administration have attempted to distance themselves from Stimson’s comments (including the Attorney General), the suggestion that large corporate clients should boycott these attorneys as punishment for representing detainees remains disgusting. The right to counsel is not a political issue. You could hold the unlikely belief that each and every Guantánamo detainee is a confirmed terrorist and still advocate for fair treatment. These attacks represent a new brand of McCarthyism. I hope that this strategy is as unsuccessful nationally as it was in Massachusetts. It strikes me that attacking the partners of some of the largest firms in the country is also bad political strategy. These attorneys are the type of people who may be major campaign donors and well-connected in both parties. I would think twice before attempting to vilify them. They are unlikely to drop their representation (and might be ethically barred from doing so) in light of these statements. If anything, I suspect their determination to ensure the detainees are accorded due process will intensify. Update: abovethelaw.com speculates that this may be an intentional good cop/bad cop strategy.

Gunnar doesn't like the idea of recommending XML for configuration files, why do you need to be able to edit a XML-file with a non-XML-aware editor if you don't like the raw syntax? If you don't like the raw syntax, use an editor that gives you a different representation. Or use some transformation. Write a tool that converts YAML to XML and back, if you like YAML better. (Btw, this is another reason to use a common library for configuration file handling - let people choose their configuration file formats!) Writing XML in the raw with a good schema-aware editor with syntax highlighting is actually quite nice. Have you ever edited an XML file with eclipse? You really should do that... I once opened my Openbox (a rather minimalistic window manager) configuration file in eclipse. Guess what, it was giving me useful syntax completion! It had loaded and used the referenced schema file. It's not as if I think XML is the ultimate thing; (nor is Eclipse an editor I'd use for configuration files; startup takes years and it frequently crashes for me. vim also has some XML support...) IMHO there is a lot in XML that should be stripped (such as attributes); I like JSON syntax better, except it's in turn lacking essential information such as character encoding, namespaces and schema information. I also don't thin JSON allows comments. But when handling information from multiple sources (and multiple schemes), XML is really useful. It removes most of the quessing needed for handling other formats. And that is what I'm precisely advocating: use standardized formats. Consider for example the apache configuration. Do you know of any tool that can parse the apache configuration files other than apache? Some parts look like SGML/XML, but they don't have much more in common than using < and >. When you are in need of automating something with apache, you'll be annoyed by this. If apache would be using something where you have a reliable parser ready for - that would be nice. Have a look at the xchat.conf configuration file. It uses "key = value", but they have these extra spaces there and don't use quoting, this means the file can't be loaded by many parsers, e.g. bash. Now lets use at buttons.conf - compeltely different syntax, "KEY value" blocks, separated by empty lines... Btw, note that configuration handling with XML to me means also keeping comments somehow... most applications will nuke any comments in their configuration files; which is funny since most configuration syntaxes do have a notion of comments, but did you ever come across an application using sh-style configuration (i.e. that you could source in bash/dash/zsh), that keeps comments? P.S. The YAML homepage is not YAML. It's valid XHTML. Only if you strip out all the tags and attributes and use only the text content within the /html/body/pre tag, then you have something which probably is YAML. This compatibility with HTML is probably why XML was at all successful.

Stratus asks Where's Amaya?

I m right here! But I am so RC buggy that, of course, they must have found out ;)

I missed women like Carla Schroder in that list. She s been my inspiration since I started translating her articles for the Spanish version of Linux Magazine.

Anyway, in a list with 10 people, there are always many missing. And I warmly congratulate Erinn for making it into the list. She sure deserves it!

Visibility is what it is all about. And this makes all of us, even the ones not on the list, more visible.

5 days ago I started my journey to Australia on monday afternoon by going to Hamburg airport. The security at London Heathrow was disgusting and silly as expected, but I won't go into much more detail here, just one thing: the memory of losing my beloved Free Software Foundation pullover last summer at a security checkpoint at LHR made me kept checking my stuff all the time, which somehow fitted very well in the paranoia... But I should also mention the one plus thing in Terminal 4: a nice smoking lounge with power sockets and comfy chairs. Anyway...

The flight entertainment system in the 747 was very cool, with lots of movies and documentaries on demand, so that I didnt bother to read any of the books I packed nor used my laptop batteries completly, though the latter was mostly due to the lack of space in the plane and having worked quite a bit prior to leaving. So I watched four movies to not fall asleep in the (european) night and get into australian timezone, which worked more or less quite well. Not sleeping is a good way to switch timezones, but the side effect is sleepiness, doh!

Out of those four movies the only one really worth mentioning is "Little miss sunshine", a really great movie, very funny and quite insightful as well. See it! On my way back I might even choose to see it again :) I didn't really understand much of the english in "the black dahlia" but it was quite interesting to see how smoking once was ubiquitous as the war on terror is today :)

The flight itself was not as bad and boring as expected, they even thought about the poor smokers and made the whole plane get out in Bankgok, only to enter it again 30min later. Needless to say that it took those 400 people a bit longer...

BTW, and in case the famous lazyweb is reading: Kolkata (formerly called Calcutta) from 10km above really looked like it was swamped, but according to wikipedia this only happens in summer. Any ideas what I saw / why it looks liked this?

When I arrived in Sydney, I was not only welcomed by the sun and summer (yaaaaaay!!), but also by Sylvia, the (main) FOMS organizer, who was so very kind to come to the airport at 7.30 AM to pick me up (yaaay!). More about FOMS in another blog entry very soon to come.

I came across a very nice story by Leonel Rubio (Leonel, please correct me if I'm misattributing this to you), licensed under the Creative Commons license. It's in Spanish, but quite worth a read - Aquellos que Pose an la Biblia (Those who owned the Bible). It starts with the supposition that Disney, at the end of the ever-recurring cycle where they ask the US Congress to extend the duration of copyright (so that Mickey and Donald don't fall into the public domain), they push boldly for a new record: Not just 20 more years, but 500.
Of course, this would be easily torn apart in little pieces in the laxest of law courts, but still, a nice read :) Thanks, Leonel! :D

I am ansiouxly waiting for the Second Season of The IT Crowd. The first episode was supposed to have been aired on January 5th, but so far, no news. In this case, no news is not good news (at least for me).

In the meantime, feel free to explore pics from the IT Crowd set, and peek at the shelves, and see what treasures you recognize or find there. Here is a short, but to the point interview with Graham Linehan, its creator, which I want to partly quote:

Is the show an attack on 'geeks'? No way, no how. I know that's how some will take it but in the end it's very much a celebration of geekdom, geekery, whatever. I consider myself a geek and I'm proud of it.

They even want to know what your IT Crowd looks like. So send your pics to Aunt Irma!