What We Owe the Men and Women Who Serve

Posted on November 11, 2011 by ErgoOne

Today, November 10, is the anniversary of the creation of the U.S. Marine Corps. I didn’t know that. Elizabeth Moon, a science fiction and fantasy writer I know, posted about it on her newsgroup at SFFNet. In addition to being a rather fine writer, Elizabeth is a former U.S. Marine herself, one who joined and served at a time when the armed forces in the U.S. were just beginning to accept women in their normal ranks rather than only in special “women only” units. I posted to thank her and the other current and former members of the armed forces for their service.

Her response to that post nearly blew me out of the water, although it wasn’t really directed at me. In it, she addressed the issue of what she believes that we the people of the United States owe to those who serve in our military forces. At my request, she posted her response on her blog. You should read it. This is especially true if you tend to see the military strictly in terms of the harm it does, or if you’ve simply never served in the military yourself and see it as just another job.

Learn, people.

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Ding, Dong, Rove Digital is Dead! And EstHost! And EstDomains! ;)

Posted on November 9, 2011 by ErgoOne

Today the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) announced the takedown of a major cybercrime organization, known among antispam activists as Rove Digital. The FBI surprisingly gave significant credit to a number of other organizations, including Estonian police and several non-governmental organizations. I rather suspect that the non-governmental organizations did a great deal of the heavy lifting in this investigation.

Feike Hacquebord at Trend Micro wrote an excellent blog on the investigation that goes into significant background information that he and Trend Micro amassed on Rove Digital. Spamhaus has a collection of information on Rove Digital in its Register of Known Spam Operations (ROKSO). Hopefully Spamhaus and Team Cymru, another fine group of security researchers, will have their own statements about the takedown posted later today.

Way to go, guys! :-)

(A few minutes later):

I hit Publish too fast. The Spamhaus statement is live.

Posted in Internet, Security, Spam | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Not Such a Stretch to Reach the Stars

Posted on October 18, 2011 by ErgoOne

There’s a wonderful story in today’s New York Times about a symposium held as part of the DARPA 100-Year Starship Study. The meeting took place for a few days at the end of September and beginning of October, and consisted of a group of unapologetic spaceflight nuts, many with with important skills for any such project (such as science and engineering). Robert A. Heinlein passed away 23 years ago, but he must have been present in spirit.

Given the grim necessities that so much of the U.S. defense budget must pay for, it is wonderful to see a bit of the money going to something as far-fetched and farseeing as this. :-)

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The Great Anti-Spam Locker Room Contest

Posted on October 18, 2011 by ErgoOne

I just about died laughing after I read the following thoroughly disrespectful and marginally safe-for-work blog on All Spammed UP, a site that comments on email and spam issues. Let nobody tell you that the people involved in the spam wars have no sense of humor. T’ain’t true.

The straight story: last week UK-based antispam organization Spamhaus blocklisted a large IP range belonging to a smallish Dutch ISP, A2B Internet. The reason given was that A2B Internet had ignored repeated SBL listings and complaints about a customer, Cyberbunker aka CB3ROB, and continued to route internet traffic for them. Spamhaus stated that Cyberbunker had a track record of hosting malware and the worst kinds of criminal spam and that SBL listings for this site had been increasing for most of 2011. A2B claimed it had blocked the IPs that were sending spam, but refused to quit routing traffic. Spamhaus said this was not good enough and constituted spam support, and as is their longstanding practice, listed a larger IP range in the SBL until A2B complied. (Spamhaus calls this an escalation listing.) A2B complied, and the escalation SBL was removed. All of this occurred within, I am told, a 48 hour period.

You’d think that this would be the end of the matter. It wasn’t. A2B’s managing director, a party by the name of Erik Bais, complained bitterly on Twitter, and then (perhaps because he failed to get a response from Spamhaus) filed a police report with the Dutch authorities accusing Spamhaus of “extortion”, “DDoS” (distributed denial-of-service-attack), etc. I really can’t improve on All Spammed Up’s take on the whole situation after that. Enjoy!

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False Alarm: General Relativity Confirmed

Posted on October 15, 2011 by ErgoOne

Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity is safe. The most probable, but least interesting, explanation for the OPERA results (the “faster than light” neutrinos) now looks likely to be true: there was a fundamental flaw in the experimental methodology. In short, the experimenters forgot to include relativity itself when using GPS satellites to calculate the distance traveled by the neutrinos, and the time it took. Since neutrinos travel at least very close to the speed of light, after they left the CERN accelerator in Switzerland, from the point of view of the GPS the distance to the OPERA site in Italy shrank, so the neutrinos didn’t have as far to travel as the researchers calculated. This accounts for the sixty nanosecond gap between the measured speed of the neutrinos and the speed of light.

The new, mundane, and likely correct explanation was provided by Ronald A. J. van Elburg, a Dutch post-doc working with the sensory cognition group in the Artificial Intelligence department at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. Dr. van Elburg posted his explanation on Cornell University Library’s Arxiv.org web site. A good reasonably technical article can be found on the Wired Magazine web site. A less technical story that non-scientists with no technical background or inclinations may find easiest to understand is posted on Syfy’s DVice web site.

Darn. I was hoping for a physics breakthrough. But science is about finding out what the facts are, not forcing our wishes on the universe.

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Proud to Be a Texan (Expatriate, but still)

Posted on October 7, 2011 by ErgoOne

At least, when I read this blog describing how two east Texas women set up emergency services for firefighters fighting a local wildfire. With a little bit of help from their friends and (I hate to admit it) Facebook, they provided the firefighters with a place to sleep, showers, food, drink, repair services for their equipment, and a lot else. Despite a few (IMHO deserved) swipes at FEMA, this blog isn’t about how government fails. It’s about how a few ordinary (IMHO extraordinary) individuals and a community did what needed to be done on their own.

Thank you, Kenna and Tara. You’re an inspiration. And thank you, Robert Langham, for blogging about this.

Posted in Charity, Culture | Leave a comment

Was Einstein Wrong — Part 2

Posted on September 24, 2011 by ErgoOne

The researchers at the OPERA project, which conducted the experiment that showed neutrinos exceeding the speed of light, have posted a PDF of their paper. You can download it for free from the Cornell University Library’s Arxiv.org site. I skimmed it, and then set it aside for a thorough reading with physics and mathematics texts at hand so that I can look up all the physics and math principles and equations that I’ve forgotten over the years. :-)

The story also came to the attention of the fine folks at XKCD, a superb web comic.

Posted in Physics, Science, Space | Leave a comment

Breaking: Was Einstein Wrong?

Posted on September 22, 2011 by ErgoOne

Put down your drink. Remove any cats or children from your lap. Take a big breath.

Today researchers at the CERN physics laboratory announced that a three year study has shown “with a high level of confidence” that neutrinos can travel faster than the speed of light. I first saw this story in Al Jazeera, which is a good news source. I thought that they *must* have got it wrong, however, and went to Google. I found a number of other reports, most of them reprints of a Reuters article, but these were better:

Yeah. I’m in shock too. While the Dow plunges, scumbag rulers in Syria and Bahrain kill their own people, and many in America and elsewhere can’t find jobs, I can understand why this hasn’t seized all the attention. But it should. If the findings of this highly reputable group of researchers who did what appears to have been an exemplary experiment multiple thousands of times over a three-year period are confirmed, then the foundations of modern physics just went *poof*.

And the great adventure — “finding things out”, as physicist and Nobel Laureate Richard Feynman put it — just got even greater. What next?

Posted in Physics, Science, Space | Leave a comment

David Linhardt Snatches Defeat from the Jaws of Victory

Posted on September 2, 2011 by ErgoOne

And I couldn’t be happier. Here’s a link to the judgment (PDF File), which is posted on the Spamhaus web site. The final judgment: $3 to E360, costs for defending the lawsuit to Spamhaus.

In my personal and strongly-held opinion, Linhardt is a spammer, a liar, and something approximating a complete waste of protoplasm. Spamhaus is none of these things. Without them and other groups doing substantially similiar work to document where spam is coming from and provide people with a means to block it, spam would long since have killed off email as a viable means of communication. I would happily pay the $3 for Spamhaus myself. I hope that their pro-bono lawyers, Jenner & Block, go after Linhardt for every penny of the costs that they can legally recover.

The U.S. courts are insanely slow to deal with many civil issues, but they do get it right sometimes. This was one of those times. :-) Here are some other blogs on the subject:

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Re-establishing the Correct Role for Police in a Free Society

Posted on August 28, 2011 by ErgoOne

For some time, I’ve been concerned at the deteriorating relationship between the police and citizens in the United States. While this isn’t happening everywhere, in entirely too many cities large numbers of police have been credibly accused and often convicted of committing crimes that would land an average citizen in prison for decades rather than years. An exaggeration? I don’t think so. I was going to list a few, but searching Google just about cases that I had heard of personally and that involved criminal convictions tossed up so many that I got depressed. Wikipedia has a page listing police brutality cases: check it out.

Twenty years ago I worked for the local sheriff’s department as an administrative assistant and general computer factotum for almost a year, still one of the most interesting and educational jobs I ever held. I also have two brothers-in-law and a number of friends who work for various police agencies. As far as I know, the police that I have worked with and for are honest, decent individuals committed to protecting the public and doing an extremely difficult job well despite distractions from abusive or corrupt coworkers on one side and false and often malicious accusations on the other. But I am increasingly convinced that the second of these is a significant problem because of the first: true instances of police brutality, corruption, and misconduct lead to an environment where false accusations are widely believed and therefore become common. :/

My husband pointed me to an excellent blog that discusses this issue in depth and reviews the roots of policing and how it is supposed to function in a free society. In particular, he points out that the police are first and foremost fellow citizens in a free country, hired to protect the public and thereby free the rest of the public to do other things. Police do not gain special privileges or special immunities because of their role.

The writer of this blog appears to be Libertarian. I’m not, but our (presumable) differences on other political issues aside, I find little to disagree with in this article. I hope other people, and particularly police and government officials responsible for police, read this and learn from it.

Posted in Human Rights, Law, Politics | Leave a comment