August 2007 Archives
Our children of three and eight have a computer in their room that our oldest child has had since she was three years old. It's a very popular toy, and they actively seek out educational software. They also seem to stay within safe pages (both in terms of computer security and child safety) on the net.
At the time we gave our daughter her computer we equipped her with a 15" CRT monitor. CRT monitors were still prevalent at that time, and CRT monitors have a unique feature that is required in children's rooms: no matter how much you touch the screen, the marks left by the perpetually dirty child fingers can easily be wiped off, and more importantly, the screen doesn't break.
Put a TFT flatscreen monitor in a child's room and have the child point at the screen a few times, and it will be broken within minutes. Children's way of pointing at a screen is a highly physical interaction with the hardware. And, as any parent will know, children cannot be told not to touch it.
The CRT screen wore out eventually, in part because of the hostile environment of a child's playroom, and in part because it was getting rather old.
This left us in a somewhat awkward situation. Our children needed a new monitor, of course, but flatscreen monitors had replaced CRT monitors in the stores.
I decided to buy an inexpensive 15" flatscreen monitor and harden it a bit with the help of acrylic plastic.
A store specializing in mirrors and windows half a block from where we live was happy to cut a sheet of plexiglas about 1/10" thick in the size of the monitor for a few bucks.
I had thought about fastening the acrylic plastic to the monitor with velcro, double-sided tape, or perhaps super glue but decided that this wouldn't look good.
Instead I drilled four holes in the corners of the acrylic plastic with a #65 drill (.35" or about .9mm) and got hold of some black steel wire with a diameter a little less than that.
I bent the steel wire so that the end of the wire would just grab the acrylic plastic when inserted into the upper hole, and drew the steel wire over the back of the monitor, to the front again, and into the bottom hole of the plexiglas.
The difficult part was to measure the steel wire so it fit very tightly onto the monitor. I had to plug the steel wire into the holes in the plexiglas sheet before I attempted to snap it onto the monitor; it would probably have been impossible to get the steel wires tight enough otherwise.
The monitor doesn't look too great from the behind, but the back end is facing away from the room anyway and isn't seen. On the front, only about 2/10" of the steel wire is seen, and the plexiglas is cut to size of the monitor and looks like it was always there.
The plexiglas was full of dirt from the children's fingers within minutes, proving that this little project had probably both saved the monitor's life and made it possible to use a TFT monitor in a child's room.
At the time we gave our daughter her computer we equipped her with a 15" CRT monitor. CRT monitors were still prevalent at that time, and CRT monitors have a unique feature that is required in children's rooms: no matter how much you touch the screen, the marks left by the perpetually dirty child fingers can easily be wiped off, and more importantly, the screen doesn't break.
Put a TFT flatscreen monitor in a child's room and have the child point at the screen a few times, and it will be broken within minutes. Children's way of pointing at a screen is a highly physical interaction with the hardware. And, as any parent will know, children cannot be told not to touch it.
The CRT screen wore out eventually, in part because of the hostile environment of a child's playroom, and in part because it was getting rather old.
This left us in a somewhat awkward situation. Our children needed a new monitor, of course, but flatscreen monitors had replaced CRT monitors in the stores.I decided to buy an inexpensive 15" flatscreen monitor and harden it a bit with the help of acrylic plastic.
A store specializing in mirrors and windows half a block from where we live was happy to cut a sheet of plexiglas about 1/10" thick in the size of the monitor for a few bucks.
I had thought about fastening the acrylic plastic to the monitor with velcro, double-sided tape, or perhaps super glue but decided that this wouldn't look good.
Instead I drilled four holes in the corners of the acrylic plastic with a #65 drill (.35" or about .9mm) and got hold of some black steel wire with a diameter a little less than that.
I bent the steel wire so that the end of the wire would just grab the acrylic plastic when inserted into the upper hole, and drew the steel wire over the back of the monitor, to the front again, and into the bottom hole of the plexiglas.
The difficult part was to measure the steel wire so it fit very tightly onto the monitor. I had to plug the steel wire into the holes in the plexiglas sheet before I attempted to snap it onto the monitor; it would probably have been impossible to get the steel wires tight enough otherwise.
The monitor doesn't look too great from the behind, but the back end is facing away from the room anyway and isn't seen. On the front, only about 2/10" of the steel wire is seen, and the plexiglas is cut to size of the monitor and looks like it was always there.
The plexiglas was full of dirt from the children's fingers within minutes, proving that this little project had probably both saved the monitor's life and made it possible to use a TFT monitor in a child's room.
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Ages ago, when I was still in high school, one of my family members had just begun working as a high school teacher. We happened to discuss the typical subjects given for the written exams, and my view on the subjects was that they were so thematically predictable that one could probably create a generic, pre-written exam paper and simply replace words and phrases according to the specific subject given. The teacher agreed, and we almost set out to develop some software that could auto-generate such a report.
Fast-forward to 2005 where a group of MIT students basically did just that using a context-free grammar to auto-generate an article that, at first glance, would appear to be a scientific paper detailing a computer science topic. Except, of course, that the paper would be complete bogus consisting of phrases that sound right only to someone that doesn't have a clue.
And that's the point. It really looks valid to someone that doesn't have a clue. It looks like a valid scientific paper in the eyes of those people that try to make quick bucks by organizing "fake" conferences, for example.
A "fake" conference isn't all fake, because it actually exists, accepts submissions, and lets the attendees present their speeches. The submission standards are so low, however, that anything qualifies as long as it motivates the would-be attendees to pay the conference registration fee that serves as the organizer's income. The organizer has no interest in scholarly standards and contents and is interested only in profiting from the conference. So by scientific and most ethic standards it's a scam, but one might argue that from a capitalistic point of view it adheres to principles of supply and demand and isn't illegal.
I've received my share of call for submissions from a variety of conferences, which sometimes appear to find prospective candidates by visiting the attendee list of more respected conferences. It's tempting to use the scientific generator to create a bogus paper and get the chance to present my "research" in the same manner as the MIT students did in their video footage from the WMSCI 2005 conference wearing mad-professor wigs and lab coat and all.
To be fair, the MIT students did not give their presentation as part of the conference, and were in fact disinvited from the conference. The fact that their paper was nonetheless accepted as a "non-reviewed paper" is strong enough indication that the conference--which receives suspiciously little mention in academic circles on the web, except about its acceptance of the bogus paper--is a scam.
It is not only fake conferences that can be exposed by honeypots in the form of fake content submissions. "Awardmestar" is a piece of software that does absolutely nothing at all, and is intended as an experiment to see how many shareware awards it would get. If it gets any awards at all, presumable the award is worthless.
"Awardmestar" misses its mark, however, because visitors to the shareware directories find the idea so hilarious that they vote for the software and thus boots its rating in the directory. The rating certainly doesn't reflect the use value of the software, but it doesn't imply that the hosting shareware directory is a bogus site. At best, it illustrates that the site does not attempt to review the submissions, which in case of software would be both prohibitively complicated and dangerous for security reasons.
Fast-forward to 2005 where a group of MIT students basically did just that using a context-free grammar to auto-generate an article that, at first glance, would appear to be a scientific paper detailing a computer science topic. Except, of course, that the paper would be complete bogus consisting of phrases that sound right only to someone that doesn't have a clue.
And that's the point. It really looks valid to someone that doesn't have a clue. It looks like a valid scientific paper in the eyes of those people that try to make quick bucks by organizing "fake" conferences, for example.
A "fake" conference isn't all fake, because it actually exists, accepts submissions, and lets the attendees present their speeches. The submission standards are so low, however, that anything qualifies as long as it motivates the would-be attendees to pay the conference registration fee that serves as the organizer's income. The organizer has no interest in scholarly standards and contents and is interested only in profiting from the conference. So by scientific and most ethic standards it's a scam, but one might argue that from a capitalistic point of view it adheres to principles of supply and demand and isn't illegal.
I've received my share of call for submissions from a variety of conferences, which sometimes appear to find prospective candidates by visiting the attendee list of more respected conferences. It's tempting to use the scientific generator to create a bogus paper and get the chance to present my "research" in the same manner as the MIT students did in their video footage from the WMSCI 2005 conference wearing mad-professor wigs and lab coat and all.
To be fair, the MIT students did not give their presentation as part of the conference, and were in fact disinvited from the conference. The fact that their paper was nonetheless accepted as a "non-reviewed paper" is strong enough indication that the conference--which receives suspiciously little mention in academic circles on the web, except about its acceptance of the bogus paper--is a scam.
It is not only fake conferences that can be exposed by honeypots in the form of fake content submissions. "Awardmestar" is a piece of software that does absolutely nothing at all, and is intended as an experiment to see how many shareware awards it would get. If it gets any awards at all, presumable the award is worthless.
"Awardmestar" misses its mark, however, because visitors to the shareware directories find the idea so hilarious that they vote for the software and thus boots its rating in the directory. The rating certainly doesn't reflect the use value of the software, but it doesn't imply that the hosting shareware directory is a bogus site. At best, it illustrates that the site does not attempt to review the submissions, which in case of software would be both prohibitively complicated and dangerous for security reasons.
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Movable Type 4 doesn't come with blogroll support right out of the box unless you're willing to perform a few tricks. You can wait until MT-Blogroll is ported to MT4, but if you desperately need your blogroll right now, there is something else you can do.
The secret is that your default MT4 installation includes the MultiBlog 2.0 plugin, which lets you include contents from another blog in your blog. By creating a new blog and using that for blogroll entries, you can include that blog in your current blog, and voila: you have your blogroll.
Create the Blogroll
Create a new blog named, say, "blogroll". In "blogroll," use an entry for each link, entering your blogroll links as follows:
In your existing blog, add the following section to your template where you want the blogroll to appear; I recommend creating a new widget template. This section includes the following lines of code, which will copy your "blogroll" entries and present them as links ordered by category and title:
In the above, change include_blogs="3" in line 1 to use the ID of your new "blogroll" blog.
Finally, go to your blog's plugin settings for the Multiblog plugin. Create a new trigger and select the "blogroll" blog, choosing to rebuild indexes when the blog publishes an entry.
You're all set! You can always modify the style sheet template for your blog to fine-tune the appearance of your blogroll.
The secret is that your default MT4 installation includes the MultiBlog 2.0 plugin, which lets you include contents from another blog in your blog. By creating a new blog and using that for blogroll entries, you can include that blog in your current blog, and voila: you have your blogroll.
Create the Blogroll
Create a new blog named, say, "blogroll". In "blogroll," use an entry for each link, entering your blogroll links as follows:
- Use categories to divide your blogroll into categories.
- Each entry is a blogroll entry, where:
- The title field is the title of the link.
- The body is the actual link.
- The extended body is a piece of non-linking text that appears together with the link.
- The excerpt is a description of the link appearing when the visitor hovers the mouse over the link.
- Then fill your blogroll with links.
In your existing blog, add the following section to your template where you want the blogroll to appear; I recommend creating a new widget template. This section includes the following lines of code, which will copy your "blogroll" entries and present them as links ordered by category and title:
<MTOtherBlog include_blogs="3">
<div class="blogroll widget">
<h3 class="widget-header">Blogroll</h3>
<div class="widget-content">
<MTCategories>
<div class="category"><$MTCategoryLabel$></div>
<ul>
<MTEntries sort_by="title" sort_order="ascend">
<li>
<a href="<$MTEntryBody convert_breaks="0"$>"
<MTIfNonEmpty tag="EntryMore">title="<$MTEntryExcerpt$>"</MTIfNonEmpty>
><$MTEntryTitle$></a>
<MTIfNonEmpty tag="EntryMore">
<span><$MTEntryMore convert_breaks="0"$></span>
</MTIfNonEmpty>
</li>
</MTEntries>
</ul>
</MTCategories>
</div></div>
</MTOtherBlog>
In the above, change include_blogs="3" in line 1 to use the ID of your new "blogroll" blog.
Finally, go to your blog's plugin settings for the Multiblog plugin. Create a new trigger and select the "blogroll" blog, choosing to rebuild indexes when the blog publishes an entry.
You're all set! You can always modify the style sheet template for your blog to fine-tune the appearance of your blogroll.
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Jesus Christ could be reborn any day. This is the astonishing news from the University of Dallas where a team of researchers have analyzed the mystical Shroud of Turin for genetic material. According to legend, the Shroud of Turan covered the face of Jesus Christ, and the research team led by Dr. Martin Dickens has discovered human hair among the shroud fibers. The researchers are convinced that these hairs belonged to Christ.
Researchers have found the hair of Christ in the Shroud of Turin. The hair contains enough genetic material to allow a cloning of Christ, Dr. Dickens concludes. I met Dr. Dickens at his office at the University of Dallas, and Dr. Dickens agreed on a brief interview.
Wolf: Congratulations on this amazing discovery. What do you think the new Jesus can tell us?
Dickens: That is hard to tell, of course. Christian theologists have discussed for centuries what Jesus meant, but we're convinced that Jesus could be persuaded to tell us which one of the about 30,000 different kinds of Christianity around the world is the correct one, or maybe he could offer his own version.
Wolf: How do you think other religions will react on the rebirth of Christ?
Dickens: I think this is a very important question, and we have already consulted Jewish and Muslem experts, asking them how they would react if one day Christ was to be reborn. They were actually surprisingly positive towards the thought. The Muslems thought that since Jesus was just person within an array of prophets, he would simply applaud Muhammed's teachings. The Jews didn't quite consider the theological implications; the rabbi that we spoke with just shrugged his shoulders and said that they could just kill him again if he started any kind of trouble.
Wolf: Excuse me, but I thought you said the Jewish reaction was positive?
Dickens: Ha ha, yes, you might say that their reaction was a bit hostile, but keep in mind that we could just clone another Jesus. So it wouldn't matter if they killed him. Each time they killed one of him, we would just create a new one.
Wolf: That sounds like a strong theological defense. You could actually create an entire army of Christs?
Dickens: Well, we are scientists, and we prefer to focus on protecting our research subjects. We prefer to leave the political aspects to others. But yes, we have in fact decided to create several clones of Christ and place them in different environments to determine whether they will develop the same thoughts of Jesus if they are not aware of their divine identity. It will be very interesting to follow their development. I'm sure you can imagine that their school teachers will believe they are cheating at their exams, ha ha!
Wolf: When do you intend to begin the cloning of Christ?
Dickens: Um, er, this is where we have a somewhat awkward problem. You see, we obviously scrutinized the genetic material meticulously, and while they are surprisingly complete and intact, they are... not so fortunate based on a number of considerations.
Wolf: What are those considerations?
Dickens: Yes, er, theological interpretations have provided us with certain expectations of his perfection and beauty, and the genes do not necessarily support this view. We are also not completely certain that Jesus would be able to engage in deep, theological or philosophical discussions. We do not feel that we can allow ourselves to clone Jesus until we have discussed the problem with leading Christian theologists.
Wolf: I'm not sure I follow you. What is this problem?
Dickens: It... you see, circumstances unfortunately indicate that, ... er ... the genes indicate that Jesus had Down's syndrome.
Wolf: You mean, he was a mongoloid?
Dickens: We prefer the clinical diagnose, but yes, he had Down's syndrome. He was simply mentally retarted. This obviously puts the entire Christian world-view in a somewhat unfortunate light, and we are not sure how to deal with this problem. From a scientific point of view we should perhaps acknowledge that Jesus was mentally retarded, and I'm sure we could explain quite a few Christian thoughts based on this fact. On the other hand, if we were to somehow alter the genes to remove this syndrome, perhaps we could create a Jesus without Down's syndrome and obtain theological information that would otherwise not be accessible. We have not yet decided, but I am hoping that we could create a number of Christs with Down's syndrome and a number of Christs without Down's syndrome and leave it to theologicians to determine who should be the authority on Christianity.
Wolf: Thank you for your time!
Dickens: No problem. Have a great day.
The Christian right in the US has denied funding for research in Down's syndrome, stating that no science should receive funding if it threatens the Christian mind.
Researchers have found the hair of Christ in the Shroud of Turin.
Wolf: Congratulations on this amazing discovery. What do you think the new Jesus can tell us?
Dickens: That is hard to tell, of course. Christian theologists have discussed for centuries what Jesus meant, but we're convinced that Jesus could be persuaded to tell us which one of the about 30,000 different kinds of Christianity around the world is the correct one, or maybe he could offer his own version.
Wolf: How do you think other religions will react on the rebirth of Christ?
Dickens: I think this is a very important question, and we have already consulted Jewish and Muslem experts, asking them how they would react if one day Christ was to be reborn. They were actually surprisingly positive towards the thought. The Muslems thought that since Jesus was just person within an array of prophets, he would simply applaud Muhammed's teachings. The Jews didn't quite consider the theological implications; the rabbi that we spoke with just shrugged his shoulders and said that they could just kill him again if he started any kind of trouble.
Wolf: Excuse me, but I thought you said the Jewish reaction was positive?
Dickens: Ha ha, yes, you might say that their reaction was a bit hostile, but keep in mind that we could just clone another Jesus. So it wouldn't matter if they killed him. Each time they killed one of him, we would just create a new one.
Wolf: That sounds like a strong theological defense. You could actually create an entire army of Christs?
Dickens: Well, we are scientists, and we prefer to focus on protecting our research subjects. We prefer to leave the political aspects to others. But yes, we have in fact decided to create several clones of Christ and place them in different environments to determine whether they will develop the same thoughts of Jesus if they are not aware of their divine identity. It will be very interesting to follow their development. I'm sure you can imagine that their school teachers will believe they are cheating at their exams, ha ha!
Wolf: When do you intend to begin the cloning of Christ?
Dickens: Um, er, this is where we have a somewhat awkward problem. You see, we obviously scrutinized the genetic material meticulously, and while they are surprisingly complete and intact, they are... not so fortunate based on a number of considerations.
Wolf: What are those considerations?
Dickens: Yes, er, theological interpretations have provided us with certain expectations of his perfection and beauty, and the genes do not necessarily support this view. We are also not completely certain that Jesus would be able to engage in deep, theological or philosophical discussions. We do not feel that we can allow ourselves to clone Jesus until we have discussed the problem with leading Christian theologists.
Wolf: I'm not sure I follow you. What is this problem?
Dickens: It... you see, circumstances unfortunately indicate that, ... er ... the genes indicate that Jesus had Down's syndrome.
Wolf: You mean, he was a mongoloid?
Dickens: We prefer the clinical diagnose, but yes, he had Down's syndrome. He was simply mentally retarted. This obviously puts the entire Christian world-view in a somewhat unfortunate light, and we are not sure how to deal with this problem. From a scientific point of view we should perhaps acknowledge that Jesus was mentally retarded, and I'm sure we could explain quite a few Christian thoughts based on this fact. On the other hand, if we were to somehow alter the genes to remove this syndrome, perhaps we could create a Jesus without Down's syndrome and obtain theological information that would otherwise not be accessible. We have not yet decided, but I am hoping that we could create a number of Christs with Down's syndrome and a number of Christs without Down's syndrome and leave it to theologicians to determine who should be the authority on Christianity.
Wolf: Thank you for your time!
Dickens: No problem. Have a great day.
The Christian right in the US has denied funding for research in Down's syndrome, stating that no science should receive funding if it threatens the Christian mind.
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I receive about 250 spam messages each day, but virtually none of them ever reach my mailbox thanks to a rather aggressive spam filter.
Our mail server and spam filter setup is comprised of the following applications:
TMDA and the various scanners are highly effective and are sufficient for a near-complete elimination of spam messages. However, network bandwidth is a problem when your network is bombarded with spam messages. This is where Spamdyke can help, because it sits in front of the mail server listening to incoming connections, and is capable of rejecting spam messages before the contents ever reach the server.
The setup may seem a bit involved, but when each of the antispam measures have been installed, only Qmail-Scanner, Spamdyke, and TMDA require special setup. SpamAssassin, Pyzor, Razor, DCC, and ClamAV are all detected and invoked automatically by Qmail-Scanner. The result of this setup is that with very few exceptions, no spam finds its way to my mailbox.
Our mail server and spam filter setup is comprised of the following applications:
- Qmail - the mail transfer and mail delivery agent. It's the mail server software.
- Spamdyke - performs connection-level graylisting and blocking of bad IPs. Graylisting is a relatively new mechanism that pretends that there's a temporary error on the mail server the first time it encounters an email address. A proper mail server will re-transmit the mail within minutes, but spam software doesn't, and the email will spam therefore never be received.
- Qmail-Scanner - scans the contents of each incoming mail on its own, and more importantly invokes a variety of mail scanners to catch viruses or spam.
- SpamAssassin - scans the contents of each incoming mail for spam characteristics.
- Pyzor - scans the contents of each incoming mail for spam characteristics based on a spam "signature." The signature is a "compressed" version of the mail, and if this signature can be found as marked by spam on a central server, then it means the message is spam.
- Razor - applies the same principle as Pyzor.
- DCC - applies the same principle as Pyzor.
- ClamAV - a very capable virus scanner.
- TMDA - "tagged mail delivery agent," which assumes that all senders are spammers until they've confirmed that they're sending legitimate mail; a confirmation that they only need to provide one time.
TMDA and the various scanners are highly effective and are sufficient for a near-complete elimination of spam messages. However, network bandwidth is a problem when your network is bombarded with spam messages. This is where Spamdyke can help, because it sits in front of the mail server listening to incoming connections, and is capable of rejecting spam messages before the contents ever reach the server.
The setup may seem a bit involved, but when each of the antispam measures have been installed, only Qmail-Scanner, Spamdyke, and TMDA require special setup. SpamAssassin, Pyzor, Razor, DCC, and ClamAV are all detected and invoked automatically by Qmail-Scanner. The result of this setup is that with very few exceptions, no spam finds its way to my mailbox.
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Curvaceous is a plug-in (formerly known as a "mambot") for Joomla, a popular, free open-source content-management system (CMS).The plug-in is a visual component that detects the background color of your images. If an image has an irregular contour, such as the flower in the Curvaceous logo to the right, the Curvaceous makes the surrounding text flow nicely around the contour.
Get the plug-in here: plugin_curvaceous-1.1.2.zip. Note: please do not host this plug-in on your own site, but feel free to link to this blog entry.
This is the official home of the Curvaceous plug-in. Please use the comments for support and suggestions.
Installation Instructions
- Install the plug-in via Joomla's mambot installer by browsing to the Curvaceous zip file that you downloaded, and press the "Upload and install" button.
- Go to the site mambots menu, and publish the mambot.
- If you want to, you may configure the Curvaceous parameters by clicking the Curvaceous plug-in in the site mambots list. The margin specifies the margin (in pixels) between text above and below the image. The sandbagMargin specifies the margin (in pixels) between the text to the left or to the right of the image. The sandbagHeight specifies the height of the horizontal bars used to divide the picture into rows of different widths according to how much background color each row contains to the left or to the right of the image. You probably don't need to tweak this setting unless you're using very small or very large text.
- Insert the image as a MosImage. Consult your Joomla documentation on how to do that.
- Replace the {mosimage} tags in your content with {curveimage}, and left-aligned or right-aligned images with transparent backgrounds will have the text flowing around them.
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Let's just admit it: Usenet, or "News," had its heyday in the nineties before the age of web-based discussion boards and forums. There's certainly still a huge user group using Usenet for debates, however, probably because discussion boards are many and distributed rather randomly throughout the Internet while the Usenet groups are kept at a reasonably small number accessible from just one place: your news server. Directories of discussion boards that all users agree to use have yet to surface.
Google has supported Usenet searches and posting for a long time under the name "Google Groups," which is an excellent source of information since many mailing lists publish their activity in Usenet groups that are picked up by Google. If you don't find your information using the vanilla Google, try and click "Groups," and your luck is almost guaranteed to increase, especially on technical issues.
Other web services also provide access to newsgroups, often with little concern for legality or content. Easynews is one such service. The service does require its users to abide by the law, but also seems very concerned about its users' privacy, taking great care not to disclose anything that might point others towards the identity of a user. Easynews is basically a news server, but that's not its main feature.
Easynews provides a web front end to newsgroups, but unlike most news readers you install on your own computer, Easynews decodes the multi-part messages usually found in the so-called binary newsgroups and combines them into single files. For example, a 50 MByte file is often split into hundreds of individual articles when it is posted to a newsgroup, and not all news readers are readily capable of combining the messages and decoding the file. By combining and decoding for you, Easynews avoids having to shown hundreds of individual newsgroup articles, and instead shows you just the decoded file.
Many people that send files to newsgroups add "parity" files with redundant information used to recreate the files if some of the potentially tens of thousands of individual articles comprising the files are lost or damaged, as often happens when news servers across the world exchange information. Easynews locates parity files and automatically recreates damaged files for you so you don't have to mess with the parity files yourself.
The front-end is simple, and each newsgroup can be searched for your desired files. Your front page includes your favorite newsgroups, or the option to view newsgroups with video, audio, or images.
Each newsgroup list is essentially just a list of author names, subjects, and files. You can add a checkmark or a range of checkmarks to the files, and then "queue" them for convenient download later. The download area allows you to download your selected files combined into a .zip file, or as a .nzb file so that you can download the files from any news server via Newsbin or compatible products.
An Easynews subscription will cost you $10 per month, which will give you 20 GBytes of transfer, plus 1 GByte for each year of membership, per month. If you exceed your download limit, you can instantly buy another 20 GBytes.
So to summarize, you have a news server that combines files for you, ready to download as video, audio, images, or any other file format you may desire. You can download 20 GBytes per ten bucks, and Easynews hides your identity, also if you chose to use Easynews to post files to your preferred newsgroups.
In other words, welcome to Easynews, pirates. Newsgroups are a very popular sharing place for illegal copies of anything that can be represented electronically. Books, expensive applications, audio, early releases of DVDs in original quality, you name it. They're found in the "binary" newsgroups, and although Easynews has policies for removing content that violates copyright, and states explicitly in the terms of service that illegal file transfer is prohibited, in practice Easynews does not appear to perform any significant filtering to prevent users from illegally downloading or uploading content.
Google has supported Usenet searches and posting for a long time under the name "Google Groups," which is an excellent source of information since many mailing lists publish their activity in Usenet groups that are picked up by Google. If you don't find your information using the vanilla Google, try and click "Groups," and your luck is almost guaranteed to increase, especially on technical issues.
Other web services also provide access to newsgroups, often with little concern for legality or content. Easynews is one such service. The service does require its users to abide by the law, but also seems very concerned about its users' privacy, taking great care not to disclose anything that might point others towards the identity of a user. Easynews is basically a news server, but that's not its main feature.
Easynews provides a web front end to newsgroups, but unlike most news readers you install on your own computer, Easynews decodes the multi-part messages usually found in the so-called binary newsgroups and combines them into single files. For example, a 50 MByte file is often split into hundreds of individual articles when it is posted to a newsgroup, and not all news readers are readily capable of combining the messages and decoding the file. By combining and decoding for you, Easynews avoids having to shown hundreds of individual newsgroup articles, and instead shows you just the decoded file.
Many people that send files to newsgroups add "parity" files with redundant information used to recreate the files if some of the potentially tens of thousands of individual articles comprising the files are lost or damaged, as often happens when news servers across the world exchange information. Easynews locates parity files and automatically recreates damaged files for you so you don't have to mess with the parity files yourself.
The front-end is simple, and each newsgroup can be searched for your desired files. Your front page includes your favorite newsgroups, or the option to view newsgroups with video, audio, or images.
Each newsgroup list is essentially just a list of author names, subjects, and files. You can add a checkmark or a range of checkmarks to the files, and then "queue" them for convenient download later. The download area allows you to download your selected files combined into a .zip file, or as a .nzb file so that you can download the files from any news server via Newsbin or compatible products.
An Easynews subscription will cost you $10 per month, which will give you 20 GBytes of transfer, plus 1 GByte for each year of membership, per month. If you exceed your download limit, you can instantly buy another 20 GBytes.
So to summarize, you have a news server that combines files for you, ready to download as video, audio, images, or any other file format you may desire. You can download 20 GBytes per ten bucks, and Easynews hides your identity, also if you chose to use Easynews to post files to your preferred newsgroups.
In other words, welcome to Easynews, pirates. Newsgroups are a very popular sharing place for illegal copies of anything that can be represented electronically. Books, expensive applications, audio, early releases of DVDs in original quality, you name it. They're found in the "binary" newsgroups, and although Easynews has policies for removing content that violates copyright, and states explicitly in the terms of service that illegal file transfer is prohibited, in practice Easynews does not appear to perform any significant filtering to prevent users from illegally downloading or uploading content.
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You may have seen biometric recognition products such as Microsoft's fingerprint reader, which remembers your passwords for you and inserts the appropriate passwords in the appropriate password fields when you visit a web page.
I returned Microsoft's fingerprint reader to the store the next day after learning the hard way that it worked only with Microsoft's Internet Explorer which I had long since replaced with Firefox, and after learning that it remembered the Windows login password for domain logons only.
Many other products feature biometric recognition. For example, Lenovo's T-series ThinkPad notebooks include a built-in fingerprint reader that helps remember passwords.
Certainly it's easier to tap the fingerprint reader instead of maneuvering the cursor to the password box and remembering and subsequently entering the password. Well, that's unless you consider trust your browser's browser password storage security with remembering the passwords for your various web pages, in which case your browser automatically inserts your user name and password for you, eliminating the need to either type the password nor tap the biometric reader. At least Firefox can do that; I'm not sure whether Internet Explorer can do it.
Still, you may not want your browser to do that, say, if occasionally you leave your computer while logged in and don't want to risk having others sneak up and visit one of your password-protected pages.
Perhaps the fingerprint recognition is a secure and convenient solution in some situations.
I'd agree on the convenience, but as security guru Bruce Schneier once said, if you think technology will solve your security problems, then you don't know about technology and you don't understand security. If you think biometric recognition is safe, perhaps it's time to think again.
I'm not talking about flaws in the accompanying software, which (true to Microsoft tradition, one might add) does appear to contain serious security holes according to Wikipedia, but about trusting that your fingerprint will remain your own personal property.
This YouTube video demonstrates how you can easily copy someone else's fingerprint and use it on the fingerprint recognition device that he or she is using to load passwords. The audio track is in German, and I haven't been able to locate a similar video with English audio or captions. However, with a little explanation I think it's reasonably straight-forward to follow what's going on:
The video shows a member of the German computer club "Kaos," which has experimented with security issues for years. To successfully copy someone's fingerprint for use in a biometric sensor, you need:
The user's fingerprint is found on a bottle that the user has touched. This could be any smooth surface that the user has touched, of course.
The narrator applies a few drops of superglue in the lid from the plastic bottle and presses it against the fingerprint left on the bottle. The superglue leaves a visible white pattern on the fingerprint when the plastic lid is removed, and the narrator takes a picture of it with his digital camera.
Next, the narrator transfers the image from the camera to the computer and cleans it of irregularities. The size is also adjusted to match that of the original fingerprint. The narrator then prints the image onto a sheet of transparent.
The printer ink leaves a three-dimensional structure, which is covered by the hobby glue. When the glue has dried, it can be removed from the plastic transparent, since the glue won't stick well to the smooth plastic. The glue is now a copy of the user's fingerprint.
The glue fingerprint is cut into an appropriate size and glued to the imposter's finger with cosmetic glue.
The fingerprint copy can now be used on the computer mouse, and voila: the fingerprint copy is recognized as the user's own printerprint.
"Kaos" demonstrates that copying a fingerprint is so easy that in practice you'll be leaving the biometric equivalent of yellow notes with your password written down on them everywhere. With biometric recognition finding its way into our daily lives and being hyped as much more secure than simple experiments disprove, perhaps it will soon be glove season all year as people realize that they leave their passwords on anything they touch.
I returned Microsoft's fingerprint reader to the store the next day after learning the hard way that it worked only with Microsoft's Internet Explorer which I had long since replaced with Firefox, and after learning that it remembered the Windows login password for domain logons only.Many other products feature biometric recognition. For example, Lenovo's T-series ThinkPad notebooks include a built-in fingerprint reader that helps remember passwords.
Certainly it's easier to tap the fingerprint reader instead of maneuvering the cursor to the password box and remembering and subsequently entering the password. Well, that's unless you consider trust your browser's browser password storage security with remembering the passwords for your various web pages, in which case your browser automatically inserts your user name and password for you, eliminating the need to either type the password nor tap the biometric reader. At least Firefox can do that; I'm not sure whether Internet Explorer can do it.
Still, you may not want your browser to do that, say, if occasionally you leave your computer while logged in and don't want to risk having others sneak up and visit one of your password-protected pages.
Perhaps the fingerprint recognition is a secure and convenient solution in some situations.
I'd agree on the convenience, but as security guru Bruce Schneier once said, if you think technology will solve your security problems, then you don't know about technology and you don't understand security. If you think biometric recognition is safe, perhaps it's time to think again.
I'm not talking about flaws in the accompanying software, which (true to Microsoft tradition, one might add) does appear to contain serious security holes according to Wikipedia, but about trusting that your fingerprint will remain your own personal property.
This YouTube video demonstrates how you can easily copy someone else's fingerprint and use it on the fingerprint recognition device that he or she is using to load passwords. The audio track is in German, and I haven't been able to locate a similar video with English audio or captions. However, with a little explanation I think it's reasonably straight-forward to follow what's going on:
The video shows a member of the German computer club "Kaos," which has experimented with security issues for years. To successfully copy someone's fingerprint for use in a biometric sensor, you need:
- The lid from a plastic bottle
- Superglue (the kind that glues within seconds)
- A digital camera
- Hobby glue (for gluing wood and such)
- Skin friendly cosmetic glue
- A computer with an image processing program
- A regular office printer that can print on transparents.
- A sheet of plastic transparent.
The user's fingerprint is found on a bottle that the user has touched. This could be any smooth surface that the user has touched, of course.
The narrator applies a few drops of superglue in the lid from the plastic bottle and presses it against the fingerprint left on the bottle. The superglue leaves a visible white pattern on the fingerprint when the plastic lid is removed, and the narrator takes a picture of it with his digital camera.
Next, the narrator transfers the image from the camera to the computer and cleans it of irregularities. The size is also adjusted to match that of the original fingerprint. The narrator then prints the image onto a sheet of transparent.
The printer ink leaves a three-dimensional structure, which is covered by the hobby glue. When the glue has dried, it can be removed from the plastic transparent, since the glue won't stick well to the smooth plastic. The glue is now a copy of the user's fingerprint.
The glue fingerprint is cut into an appropriate size and glued to the imposter's finger with cosmetic glue.
The fingerprint copy can now be used on the computer mouse, and voila: the fingerprint copy is recognized as the user's own printerprint.
"Kaos" demonstrates that copying a fingerprint is so easy that in practice you'll be leaving the biometric equivalent of yellow notes with your password written down on them everywhere. With biometric recognition finding its way into our daily lives and being hyped as much more secure than simple experiments disprove, perhaps it will soon be glove season all year as people realize that they leave their passwords on anything they touch.
If you liked this post, share it with others: