geek

A series of tubes

The Balko formerly known as Gort — Fri, 21 Jul 2006 23:59:00 GMT

Nudity is not always in bad taste

The Balko formerly known as Gort — Thu, 02 Mar 2006 01:34:00 GMT

The people at Secure Computing make software, called SmartFilter, that is used by corporations, libraries and countries to block network traffic that contains, among other things, nudity. They are so smart that if they find one picture of a classical naked man on a site, they earmark that site as containing nudity, and then the software blocks all traffic from that site. For instance, the almost complete Safe For Work site boingboing is blocked from viewing in Qatar because of the existence of this picture on their site.

One way to fight this kind of censorship is to screw with the system. BoingBoing reader Kurt von Finck invented a way to do so.

What happens when the blogosphere uses so much tasteful nudity that the web is unusable for SmartFilter users? What happens when SmartFilter blocks so much content that the web is crippled for its users?
So, I have created the attached button (standard 120x90 size) that BB readers can put on their sites. It features the pubic region of Michelangelo's David sculpture, uses fairly neutral colors, and is taken from public domain stock photography. I release this work into the public domain, relinquish any claims over its use, and encourage BB readers to put it on their sites.
Maybe if enough of us do so, SmartFilter will just collapse under the weight of its own odious censoring.

The boingboing team does their thing to help put Secure Computing out of business. They do this in three ways:

First, we're publishing a guide to evading the SmartFilter censorware. There are hundreds of ways to defeat these censorware apps, and we're going to catalog as many of them as possible.
Link to "BoingBoing's Guide To Evading Censorware."
Next, we're compiling a list of SmartFilter's dumb classifications. Send us your misclassified SmartFilter sites so we can add them to the list.
Finally, we're producing a guide to convincing your employer to ditch SmartFilter. It consists of parts one and two above: a list of bad SmartFilter classifications and a list of ways that SmartFilter can be shredded like wet kleenex. Why spend money on bad technology that doesn't work?

I, for one, welcome our new censoring overlords, and to please them I've added the penis picture to my "stuff" bar.

rootkit

The Balko formerly known as Gort — Sat, 03 Dec 2005 18:16:00 GMT

Most people don't even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?, said Sony BMG president Thomas Hesse. If you care what can happen to your PC if you play a Sony CD, boingboing has rounded up all news about it here, here, here and here.

In the roundup I found this nice 'No Xmas for Sony' protest badge, linked to Mark Russinovich's account of the Sony rootkit debacle. I for one won't be buying Sony stuff this season.

Well-known songs performed by dictionaries

The Balko formerly known as Gort — Tue, 02 Aug 2005 02:45:00 GMT

dic·tio·nar·a·o·ke.org: This site features parodies of popular songs using karaoke-style backing music with vocals provided by audio pronunciation samples from online dictionaries. All of these songs are available for download in MP3 format on their main index page.
Pronunciation:'dik-sh&-"ner-A-O-ke dOt-Org

Sample:

The Most Beautiful Machine

The Balko formerly known as Gort — Tue, 19 Jul 2005 14:37:00 GMT

Clicky

Via Fark

Userfriendly

The Balko formerly known as Gort — Sun, 08 May 2005 18:23:00 GMT

Userfriendly

Interweb

The Balko formerly known as Gort — Mon, 02 May 2005 00:07:00 GMT

Progress: Since its inception almost 30 years ago, the internet has been transformed from a primitive device for sharing thoughts and ideas, into a massive network where people pay to connect and read advertisements they don't want, while calling each other "asshats".

Link found on Fark.

Boring

The Balko formerly known as Gort — Fri, 01 Apr 2005 12:48:00 GMT

April Fool's parody of Boing Boing
Always difficult to link to a news item on a day like today. This one is a certified rip-off of Boing Boing, my favourite geek blog. Certified because Xeni Jardin blogs about it.
Link to "Boring Boring: A Directory of Dull Things", link to partial screenshot, link to Boing Boing post.

Stop Euro Software Patents

The Balko formerly known as Gort — Fri, 11 Feb 2005 02:19:00 GMT

We urge the European Patent Office as well as national patent offices to immediately stop granting patents on business methods and data processing methods in whatever verbal clothing, and to apply Article 52 of the European Patent Convention correctly according to conventional methods of interpretation of law.

We urge the members of the EU Council of Ministers to refrain from any counter-proposals to the European Parliament's version of the draft, unless such counter-proposals have been explicitely endorsed by a majority decision of the member's national parliament.

We urge members of national parliaments to formulate clear national policies on the limits of patentability and to make sure that their government's representatives in the European Council are faithfully implementing these policies.

We demand that all legislative proposals, including those from the European Parliament and the member states, be rigorously tested against a test suite of sample patent applications to see whether they would beyond any doubt lead to the desired results and would not leave room for any more misinterpretations

I know, Brussels is far away, but you can at least Join the list of supporters of the Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure.

The Register: European software patent law hangs in the balance

WTF??? LJ Temporarily Unavailable.

The Balko formerly known as Gort — Sat, 15 Jan 2005 15:54:00 GMT

Following some link I just arrived at LiveJournal and all I got was the message: LiveJournal is currently down due to a massive power failure at our data center. We'll provide updates at /powerloss/ as they're available.

Sometimes life sucks bigtime for a Netadmin, I symphatize with these LJ guys who are now working their asses of to get LJ back on line. Here's their progress report:

Our data center (Internap, the same one we've been at for many years) lost all its power, including redundant backup power, for some unknown reason. (unknown to us, at least) We're currently dealing with verifying the correct operation of our 100+ servers. Not fun. We're not happy about this. Sorry... :-/ More details later.

Update #1, 7:35 pm PST: we have power again, and we're working to assess the state of the databases. The worst thing we could do right now is rush the site up in an unreliable state. We're checking all the hardware and data, making sure everything's consistent. Where it's not, we'll be restoring from recent backups and replaying all the changes since that time, to get to the current point in time, but in good shape. We'll be providing more technical details later, for those curious, on the power failure (when we learn more), the database details, and the recovery process. For now, please be patient. We'll be working all weekend on this if we have to.

Update #2, 10:11 pm: So far so good. Things are checking out, but we're being paranoid. A few annoying issues, but nothing that's not fixable. We're going to be buying a bunch of rack-mount UPS units on Monday so this doesn't happen again. In the past we've always trusted Internap's insanely redundant power and UPS systems, but now that this has happened to us twice, we realize the first time wasn't a total freak coincidence. C'est la vie.

Update #3: 2:42 am: We're starting to get tired, but all the hard stuff is done at least. Unfortunately a couple machines had lying hardware that didn't commit to disk when asked, so InnoDB's durability wasn't so durable (though no fault of InnoDB). We restored those machines from a recent backup and are replaying the binlogs (database changes) from the point of backup to present. That will take a couple hours to run. We'll also be replacing that hardware very shortly, or at least seeing if we can find/fix the reason it misbehaved. The four of us have been at this almost 12 hours, so we're going to take a bit of a break while the binlogs replay... Again, our apologies for the downtime. This has definitely been an experience.