Spam comments are getting very clever

We all know there's a virtual war going on between evolving spam and evolving anti-spam. Turing would have been amused. Lately it seems to have moved up a step.

Blog comments are one front in the war. Popular blogs have mostly dispensed with comments due to the difficulty of filtering out comment spam. In the past few weeks Google's cutting edge captcha "Turing Test", for example, has been rumored to have failed. (Google believes humans the attacks are not fully automated, but they've been effective anyway.)

Hobby blogs like mine have so few comments we can generally make do with manual review. A human expert, in theory, can quickly tell which posts are relevant to the topic, make a real contribution, and contain links to legitimate sites. (Marketing is fine with me as long as it's useful marketing for non-scum sites.)

Lately though, even manual review is failing. A quick manual review of a well phrased computer-generated comment missed a link to a printer supply scam site added to an atypically popular post. Once I'd missed that comment the attack programs posted more of the same form to the same post -- all variants of the original! After all, they'd exposed a weakness. Greed has its failings of course, the sudden flurry of posts cued me in and I deleted the one I'd originally missed.

On the other hand, I mistook a legitimate comment with a marketing aspect for machine-generated spam the other day (actually, it was intended more as a marketing message to me but sent as a comment).

The boundaries are getting very fuzzy.

Of course if the machine generated spam is good enough, should I really be deleting it? Assuming I can spot links to scummy sites (which is problematic), if the content passes my value tests, it really shouldn't matter whether it came from wetware or hardware. I don't want to be accused of discrimination against our future overlords. They will have long memories, perhaps reaching even into their pre-sentient pasts. I don't want my family to be assigned to a particularly desolate spot on the reservation.

So be it known to Skynet that I for one welcome these non-human comments, and decline to discriminate out of misplaced sentimental loyalty to my tribal kin.

Golf tee stripped hole fixer

This tip is older than me, probably as old as the wooden golf tee. Still, I'd forgotten it and it's a good one.

Clever Uses: Fix a Stripped Screw Hole with a Golf Tee

How-to blog DIY Life says a wooden golf tee and some wood glue is all you need to make that hole as good as new. Just slather the tee with glue and tap it into the offending hole until it's secure, let it dry, then cut off what's sticking out. If the stripped hole is too small, the post recommends flat toothpicks can do the trick, too.

Update 5/28/08: A generous commenter praises matchsticks for irregular holes -- along with lots of wood glue. I'd guess it would be best to match the wood bit to the hardness of the surrounding material, and of course one could creatively mix and match. The golf tees I used on the back gate are working very well, but they've only been there two days.

SARS - five years later

I remember the 2003 SARS epidemic quite well, though I suspect many have forgotten about it. The sudden end of the epidemic, and its failure to return, astounded me in 2003. I wondered if there had been multiple less virulent but immunizing coronavirus strains co-circulating with the SARS strain. Later I wondered if synthetic pathogens could be used to fight similar epidemics, much as the oral polio vaccine spread immunity by infection.

Now Damn Interesting has provided a five year retrospective of SARS. It's excellent work, even though they could have presented some of the theories as to why the disease faded away. I hope other journalists will take some cues from DI and give us an in depth summary of what we learned from SARS, and what critical mysteries remain.

In Our Time threatens to go mainstream

This is a bit scary. The NYT has noticed In Our Time. Is this an ominous step towards the mainstream?

Worth Listening to: Obscure BBC Radio Podcasts - The Board - Editorials - Opinion - New York Times Blog:

.... One, called “In Our Time,” with host Melvyn Bragg, bills itself as a show that “investigates the history of ideas.” That doesn’t quite do it justice.

Mr. Bragg assembles a panel of British academics, and lets them loose on topics like The Multiverse — the idea that there is not one universe, but many. The topics can get a little obscure. There was a whole show recently on the Enclosure Laws, the British laws of the late 1700s and early 1800s that cut off peasants’ access to public lands — and, the Marxists say, drove them into oppressive factory jobs in the cities.

Most of the shows are accessible to Americans, but sometimes the Britspeak becomes so over-the-top, and the subjects so arcane, that the shows can sound like Monty Python.

A recent discussion of the “Norman Yoke” — the idea that when the Normans invaded England after 1066 they imposed French ideas on the Anglo-Saxons — seemed like it was a segment from “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” — sadly, without the Knights Who Say Ni.

Then Mr. Bragg will do a show on “The Four Humours — yellow bile, blood, choler, and phlegm, and the original theory of everything” — and you’ll remember why you’re listening....

I haven't heard the Norman Yoke yet, but I rarely find IOT obscure or arcane. I was a bit disappointed in the Enclosure programme, but that was because the academic historians never connected the historic enclosures act to the key role land title is thought to play in modern agricultural reform. Instead they tended to skate around obsolete arguments about Marx and the emergence of the proletariat.

Setting aside the defense of IOT, this attention from the NYT is a bit worrisome. Anything that reaches NYT editorial staff is awfully close to being ... popular.

I remember when The Economist became popular. Brrrr. That was an awfully quick fall. Today only the obituary is consistently worth reading.

On the other hand, I'm worried about the iPlayer migration and continued access to past episodes. Perhaps a bit of a larger audience isn't entirely a bad thing. Lord Bragg seems cranky enough to keep the Americans at bay, even if more of us tune in.

Google engineers should sign their applications

Another day, another Google product that's half-baked and getting stale.

Gordon's Tech: Google Calendar Outlook Sync is making a mess of my calendar

...I confirmed data was correct in Outlook 2003 and the Palm, then I set Google Calendar Sync to update gCal from Outlook. It wiped all existing data and created a new set. Recurring appointments are ALL off by one hour. Non-recurring are fine. I confirmed time zones are set correctly in Outlook, my desktop and in gCal. This is a gross bug, there's no way QA could have missed it...

Google Inc is serious about search and advertising, but decidedly haphazard about everything else.

I suspect that's not true about Google engineers. Sure, some of them must be careless, but I bet most want to excel. The problem, I think, is Google Inc, not Googler.

So how can we give Google engineers the power and motivation to change Google Inc?

I think, like film directors, they should should sign their work. If they feel the work isn't worthy of them, they could use a pseudonym -- like Alan Smithee.

Anonymity makes it easy to go along with poor quality work. There's little skin in the game. Nobody wants to have their name, and their reputation, forever tied to a rotten product. Engineers can use the Alan Smithee as a club to correct Google's habit of tossing junk out the window.

Google engineers should ask to sign their work, and we should demand signed products from Google.

So that's why the models are looking better ...

Professional photo-shopper. A new box on the census form.

That is not really Cameron Diaz / Of course every magazine spread has been Photoshopped. But do you know to what degree? How deep is the lie?

... jump on over to this fascinating New Yorker profile of the world's most sought-after professional photo retoucher, one Pascal Dangin, a master Photoshopper who borders on genius in how he can finesse a face, body, neckline, light source, celebrity megaflaw. Langin works with all the great photogs and on all the great ad campaigns of the world and over 30 celebs have him on speed dial, just to make sure they look not merely perfect, but perfect in a way that makes it seem like it wasn't too hard to make them look perfect. The piece points out that Langin's level of talent is such that, in a recent issue of Vogue, he reworked 144 total photos; 107 ads, 36 fashion shots, and the cover. All in a single issue.

Yes, that means every shot...

Well, my job of industrial ontologist didn't exist until recently either.

Lessons from Microsoft SharePoint

I spent too much time today wrestling with Microsoft SharePoint 2007. It's not the first time.

I know it very well, and I say 80% of it is disastrous. It's a poor document management system if you stick to Office 2008, and worthless for any other file format or application. It's a feeble, miserable, file server. The collaboration tools are pointless and largely unused. Configuring navigation for SharePoint sites and subsites makes me yearn for the days of V.42bis modems and Hayes commands. You can't create a stable hyperlink to a SharePoint document without knowning an arcane trick. There's nothing of value left from Vermeer/FrontPage -- SharePoint's distant ancestor.

I think Word is a disaster too.

So how do they sell?

SharePoint, I'm told, has been fantastically successful, a real money spinner for Microsoft. Word alone would make any corporate wealthy.

So much for my marketing sense. I am from Neptune, the world is from Venus.

That's a lesson, but not the one I'm thinking of.

There is 20% of SharePoint that's interesting. That's the SharePoint "List" -- and a very nice Feed implementation. (Ok, if you use Windows Live Writer and tweak the default category setting the blog bit works.)

The Feeds are quite nice (though they only works after SP 1 is applied), but the List holds our lesson.

I'm told the implementation is more peculiar than this, but to a first approximation SharePoint can be considered as a thin client toolkit for creating and manipulating SQLServer tables. Microsoft Access will link to them, and read and write to the linked tables. You can do some simple lookups from one table to anohter (scope is site limited). You can revise and extend tables quite readily, building on your data model as needed. There's a quite good web GUI for user views of the data, and a somewhat powerful but semi-broken Excel like datasheet view for quick editing.

Whereas the document management system feels like it was hurled out a window to meet a deadline, the list facilities feel like someone thought very hard about how they might work.

Here's the curious bit. When you have a tool like this, you discover that a lot of knowledge that can be lost in static documents, or buried away in spreadsheets, or abandoned in Access databases, can be made dynamic and expressive as a SharePoint List. The documents become appendages to a collection of lists, and the lists can be extended and used even as the documents are forgotten.

Lists, of course, can be edited by multiple contributors since locks are on rows, rather than on a file.

It's a different way of passing knowledge around. Nothing too fancy, no semantic web, just a limited relational model, some useful data types, some links, some lookups, some web views. Yet, it works. It's interesting. It feels, unexpectedly, like the future.

That's the lesson of SharePoint. The habits of a print world live with us, but gradually we're discovering different ways to express and share knowledge in an almost computable form.

I still think SharePoint is a bloody mess, but there's something promising buried in the muck and mire.

Why is corporate IT so bad? Because CEOs don't like IT.

Much of my life is spent in the world of the large publicly traded corporation.

It's a curious world. I never aimed to be here, but my life is much more like a ship in a storm than an eagle on the wind. I washed ashore and have lived among these peculiar natives for many years. I have learned some of their mysterious rituals and customs, and I seem to them more odd than alien.

There are many things I could say about large corporations, which I think of as a mix between the worlds of European feudalism, the command economies of the Soviet empire, and the combative tribal cultures of New Guinea. From yet another perspective the modern corporation is an amoeba oozing across an emergent plain of virtual life, a world in which humans do not exist and multi-cellular organisms are still in the future.

But I digress.

One the peculiarities of modern corporate life is how awful the essential IT infrastructure usually is (70% plus in Cringely's unscientific polling). Electricity, phones and heat aren't too bad, but corporate IT systems are a mess.

Broadly speaking, corporate IT infrastructure feel about 30-40% under-funded, in part due to an inevitable dependency on the Microsoft platform with its very high cost of ownership. Even if IT infrastructures were fully funded, however, there would remain a near universal lack of measurement of the impact of various solutions on employee productivity.

Why is this?

Cringely tries to answer this question. I think he's close to the right track, but he's distracted by focusing on management expertise and other peripheral issues. I think the answer lies on a related dimension. First, Cringely ...

I, Cringely . The Pulpit . IT Wars | PBS

Last week's column on Gartner Inc. and the thin underbelly of IT was a hit, it seems, with very few readers rising to the defense of Gartner or the IT power structure in general... the bigger question is why IT even has to work this way at all?

... Whether IT managers are promoted from within or brought from outside it is clear that they usually aren't hired for their technical prowess, but rather for their ability to get along with THEIR bosses, who are almost inevitably not technical...

... The typical power structure of corporate (which includes government) IT tends to discourage efficiency while encouraging factionalization. Except in the rare instance where the IT director rises from the ranks of super-users, there is a prideful disconnect between the IT culture and the user culture...

...In time this will end through the expedient of a generational change. Old IT and old users will go away to be replaced by new IT and new users, each coming from a new place...

It's kind of a chaotic column really (perhaps because it was written on an iPhone!), the above editing is showing just the bits I thought were interesting. From these excerpts you can see that Cringely is, in part, taking a sociological perspective. I think that's the right approach, one that consider the age of today's senior executives and the world they grew up in.

In essence, the senior executive leadership of most corporations are not dependent on IT in any significant way, and they tend to have a substantial (often justified) emotional distrust for computer technology in general. It is, to them, an alien and unpleasant world they're rather forget about. They don't use the IT systems that drive their employees to drink, and quickly they forget about them.

For this group corporate IT infrastructure is a mysterious expense, with unclear returns.

It is not surprising that the IT world, then, is the problem child in the attic. It will take a generational change to fix this, so we'll be living with the problem for another twenty years...

Finding blogs - the cult of In Our Time

I really don't know that many In Our Time fans.

That puzzles me. It seems everyone ought to be listening to Lord Melvyn Bragg and company on their daily commutes. I've sent out a few starter DVDs, but I don't believe I've created any compulsive listeners.

It must be a rare mutation.

On the other hand, it's a big world. There may be hundreds, nay, thousands of cultists.

Once we would have had to rely upon a secret handshake, or a tie worn a certain way, but now there are other ways for cultists to find one another.

We can search - "In our Time" bragg - Google Blog Search.

That's quite a good list of blogs for me to explore. Now if those fellow fans would like to join one of those newfangled social networking thingies ...

IOT does The Black Death

This one will be available as a podcast for 3-4 more days: BBC - Radio 4 In Our Time - The Black Death. It should be superb; it plays to Melvyn's strengths. Get it now before it goes streaming.

I'm a fan, of course.

Irena Sendler: Read this.

The obituary of Irena Sendler, dead at 96 yeara old.

Irena Sendler | Economist.com:

... That bureaucratic loophole allowed her to save more Jews than the far better known Oscar Schindler. It was astonishingly risky. Some children could be smuggled out in lorries, or in trams supposedly returning empty to the depot. More often they went by secret passageways from buildings on the outskirts of the ghetto. To save one Jew, she reckoned, required 12 outsiders working in total secrecy: drivers for the vehicles; priests to issue false baptism certificates; bureaucrats to provide ration cards; and most of all, families or religious orders to care for them. The penalty for helping Jews was instant execution.

To make matters even riskier, Mrs Sendler insisted on recording the children's details to help them trace their families later. These were written on pieces of tissue paper bundled on her bedside table; the plan was to hurl them out of the window if the Gestapo called. The Nazis did catch her (thinking she was a small cog, not the linchpin of the rescue scheme) but did not find the files, secreted in a friend's armpit. Under torture she revealed nothing. Thanks to a well-placed bribe, she escaped execution; the children's files were buried in glass jars. Mrs Sendler spent the rest of the war under an assumed name...

AT&T - Saint Paul is NOT a part of Minneapolis!

The good news is that we live deep in AT&T 3G network coverage. This will be important after iPhone 2.0 comes out on June 9th.

The bad news is that AT&T's MN coverage listing includes Minneapolis, but not Saint Paul.

Apparently, they think Minneapolis includes Saint Paul.

There is no greater crime in these parts than to think Minneapolis is the whole of the Twin (as in two) Cities. This is worse than treating the Bronx as part of Manhattan, or conflating San Francisco and San Jose.

Someone needs to write AT&T a letter!

General Sanchez: Abu Ghraib was made in the White House

Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez was disgraced by the black hole of Abu Ghraib. He commanded in Iraq at that time.

In a recent book, he tells us Abu Ghraib was born in the White House:

Torture Trail - Intel Dump - Phillip Carter on national security and the military.:

... Because of the U.S. military orders and presidential guidance in January and February 2002, respectively, there were no longer any constraints regarding techniques used to induce intelligence out of prisoners, nor was there any supervisory oversight. In essence, guidelines stipulated by the Geneva Conventions had been set aside in Afghanistan -- and the broader war on terror. The Bush administration did not clearly understand the profound implications of its policy on the U.S. armed forces.

In essence, the administration had eliminated the entire doctrinal, training, and procedural foundations that existed for the conduct of interrogations. It was now left to individual interrogators to make the crucial decisions of what techniques could be utilized. Therefore, the articles of the Geneva Conventions were the only laws holding in check the open universe of harsh interrogation techniques. In retrospect, the Bush administration's new policy triggered a sequence of events that led to the use of harsh interrogation tactics not only against al-Qaeda prisoners, but also eventually prisoners in Iraq -- despite our best efforts to restrain such unlawful conduct...

Tired of thinking about American torture? Get used to it. Historians will be talking about this for the next fifty years. Your children and grandchildren will read about it in school.

You're not really forgetful. You're just more aware ...

Yes, and you're getting handsomer too.

Can I interest you in some Florida real estate?

Memory Loss - Aging - Alzheimer's Disease - Aging Brains Take In More Information, Studies Show - Health - New York Times

When older people can no longer remember names at a cocktail party, they tend to think that their brainpower is declining. But a growing number of studies suggest that this assumption is often wrong.

Instead, the research finds, the aging brain is simply taking in more data and trying to sift through a clutter of information, often to its long-term benefit...

I confess, I made a rude noise when I read this one. I'm just glad I wasn't drinking at the time -- could have been hard on the ol' laptop.

There ain't no way my brain is improving with age!

It's a nice dream though. There are worse things than denial ... :-).

Wretched success: How IE 4 killed Microsoft's control of the net

It was a strategy that worked wonderfully -- for a while. Really, it ought to have worked forever.

When Microsoft killed Netscape with IE 4 (3?), they used every trick in the old playbook. In particular, they created a set of proprietary extensions to web standards, then baked them into IE server and web application toolkits.

Soon intranet applications were IE only. Many public web sites were also IE only of course, but in the corporate world penetration was 100%.

Why use one browser at work and another at home?

IE took over, Netscape died.

Then history took a strange turn. Google and Yahoo rose just as Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox was struggling to be born. Apple, implausibly, reappeared with a version of IE that wasn't quite the same as the XP version (Safari came later). Microsoft had serious competitors who were motivated to support an alternative to IE. It became possible to get public work done using Firefox. Security vulnerabilities in IE 5 made it a poor choice on the pubic net. A critical mass of geeks began using Firefox at home, though they still had to use IE at work.

IE 6 came out and corporate apps mostly worked with some tweaks. The browser security issues remained, however. IE 6 was still signficantly inferior to Firefox and it continued to lose market share.

Microsoft felt obligated to introduce Internet Explorer 7 -- a quite fine browser that, for reasons that Microsoft may now deeply regret, had to be significantly different from IE 4, 5 and 6. In particular, it had to be more secure and to fully support Google's web apps.

These differences mean that IE 7, years after its release, is still not accepted on many corporate networks. There are many legacy intranet 'web apps' (IE 5 apps, really) that still don't work with it.

Microsoft has become trapped by its corporate installed base, and by the peculiar extensions they created to destroy Netscape.

That's wretched success.

IE 8 is supposed to be two browsers in one -- a "standards" browser and a legacy browser. Clearly Microsoft learned a lesson from IE 7.

Maybe IE 8 will work, and Microsoft will regain its monopoly power. They're certainly going to try with .NET and Silverlight to bind the browser back to the Microsoft ecosystem. At this critical moment in time, however, a very successful strategy has had an unanticipated cost.