Jonathan Hitchcock - Vhata Vas Hyah

This is where I agree that SCO are indeed litigous bastards.

If you don't fancy huge corporations sneaking around your machine sniffing for stuff they can sue you for, you need to block them from doing it.

The RIAA and the MPAA and their little friends are scanning P2P networks for illegal versions of their copyright material. While this is all well and good, I'm sure they're entitled to protect what they own, but I don't fancy them sniffing around my computer. It's a bit of a violation of privacy, what?

P2P networks are not all about pirating music and suchlike. Recently, Windows XP Service Pack 2 was distributed with huge success over the BitTorrent network. However, in a great show of how much they care about their users Microsoft shut it down.

Herewith, the HOWTO for implementing blocklists for various mules and donkeys.

There is a fairly detailed, but slightly out of date, explanation on the EMule Project homepage on what to do, and Bluetack have a lot of resources, but it breaks down like so:

For Windows, method 1:

1. Download and install the Bluetack Blocklist Manager. (You will need something that will open RAR files.)
2. Configure it. Go to Options, and then to Sources, and choose the lists of sources that you want to use to block - the recommended ones have stars next to them. You will also need to tell it where to store the lists it creates. Go to App Locations, and fill in the boxes. If you're using EMule, you need to tell it to store it in ipfilter.dat in the directory where you installed EMule (probably C:\Program Files\EMule, innit). You can fiddle other stuff, if you like, according to these odd instructions (See under How To, Set up the BLM). This is not all that necessary, however. You can fiddle.
3. Click on Check Sources. This should grab all your sources. I had some proxy problems, which sort of went away after a while. Sorry, can't help there. There's nowhere to define what proxy to use. I think it gets the values from Internet Explorer, so make sure that that is set up properly. Have a look through the Blocklist Manager FAQ if you have problems. One thing that is useful to know is, if the Blocklist Manager just hangs when you press Check Sources, then click on the Options button, click OK straight away, and then click on Check Sources again, and it should work.
4. Clear the cache (Edit menu -> Clear Cache), and then click on Download Blacklists. This will download them all.
5. Now you need to export the lists to your apps. Go to the Export menu, and find the app you want to export it to, and click on it. If you're using EMule, it's under P2P. Now load up EMule, and it should have the new blocklist. I did find that EMule didn't automatically load ipfilter.dat. To make sure, go to Preferences, then to the Security tab, and click on Reload in the "IP Filter" box.
6. You're done.

Note: You can apparently use WinE to emulate the Blocklist Manager in Linux. Even if you can't, you can get somebody with a Windows Box to do it for you, export the list to some file, and copy the file to your Linux machine. XMule and AMule automatically read the ipfilter.dat files in your ~/.xMule or ~/.aMule directories.

For Windows/Linux, method 2:

1. Go to the Bluetack Blacklist Converter.
2. Select Peer Guardian plain text as your source format.
3. Select the output format you want. You'll notice some rather nice ones like iptables bash script, but you probably just want eDonkey (eMule, cDonkey).
4. Fiddle with any other options you feel like
5. Go to the source lists, select the ones you want, or paste in your own, get them, download them, etc.
6. Click on Convert
7. Get the output from the Output tab, and place it in the ipfilter.dat file (or a bash script, or whatever you've done), and go for it, as above.

Important: You need to update these lists often. IP addresses change, baddies come and go. Blocklists that worked three months ago may not be sufficient any more. Keep up to date with your blocklists, as with everything else

A final note: Using the above method will stop the arrogant American corporations from sticking their noses into your machine, where they don't belong, but you should still be aware of what copyright is, what the law of the land is, and what the law of your service provider is.

This posting is a community experiment that tests how a meme, represented by this blog posting, spreads across blogspace, physical space and time. It will help to show how ideas travel across blogs in space and time and how blogs are connected. It may also help to show which blogs (and aggregation sites) are most influential in the propagation of memes. The dataset from this experiment will be public, and can be located via Google (or Technorati) by doing a search for the GUID for this meme (below).

The original posting for this experiment is located at: Minding the Planet (Permalink: http://novaspivack.typepad.com/nova_spivacks_weblog/2004/08/a_sonar_ping_of.html) --- results and commentary will appear there in the future.

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Everybody else has mentioned this furore. Here's my take.

For the facts on what is going on, check out what Russell and Guy have said on the matter. They have both done excellent detective work and written it up very well.

For my part, what is most interesting about this is the part that we, as small-time bloggers and interested geeks, have had. Dominic has a similar take - the blogger is gaining credibility, and taking on a role that, while not the same as that of a journalist, has a similar position in society. Nobody else has done much in the way of investigations, or if they have, they haven't done anything with their results. Already, the blogosphere has started linking to Russell's writeup, and people are using it as the source for their discussions.

I'll be interested to see what happens.

(For more examples of bloggers gaining credibility, see this article in the New York Times about bloggers being given press passes to the Democratic Party's conference thingy.)

I got my confirmation-of-receipt from the SATNAC dude, today. In effect this means:

1. email is a viable method of communication
2. I can read basic instructions on a website that tell me how to submit a paper

No more, no less.

Now we wait to see whether it was actually accepted

Corrections made, title re-thought out, paper submitted.

Very tired.

I shall collapse for an afternoon and then write up an idea I've had this evening.

Soylent Red:

http://www.boingboing.net/2004/07/18/russian_scientists_t.html

Since my paper was eight pages long, and I'm submitting it as a Work In Progress (even though it's basically finished), and WIP papers are only supposed to be two pages long, I've had to more or less rewrite it.  I've finally finished it, and sent it off to Alf for a read, we'll see what he says.

An article on the Register about the proliferation of blogs, and an excellent (if badly spelled) Wired article about Hacktivism and the Cult of the Dead Cow.

With 8000 new bloggers every day, and almost half of the blogs out there being idle for the last three months, what does that say about blogging as a "phenomenon"? I know that I've started about three or four blogs myself - this current one being the most successful attempt so far. I suppose time will tell?

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/07/13/8000_bloggers_per_day/

The Cult of the Dead Cow recently turned 20 years old, and have managed to turn themselves from a l33t bunch of hax0rs who churn out scriptkiddie tools into a well-respected grass-roots activism organisation. Restecp:
http://www.wired.com/news/infostructure/0,1377,64193-2,00.html

Well, I finished my paper.

And Alf liked it so much that now he wants me to change my thesis topic?!


My paper was about a user interface I wrote for Jason's software PBX.  I used Flash as the main frontend, but it needed a number of ways to communicate with the actual PBX - it needed to do database lookups, and all sorts of things.  Since Flash is not that powerful a language, I used what it had, and plugged it into my own scripts, written in more powerful languages - PHP, Python, Perl, and so on.

Apparently, when I write about my open source languages, and their benefits, and why I chose them, and the scripts I wrote in them, my writing is "much more mature" and "focussed". Possibly because I actually give a damn about it.  Anyway, because of this, Alfredo wants me to do my thesis on something like "wrapping a core system in user-friendly interfaces using open source tools", or some similar topic.  Frankly, it doesn't sound much like a Masters thesis to me, but we'll have to see.

Anyway, the paper is completed.  It was way too long, and now I have to slim it down substantially before I submit it, but the main slog is over.