Icelandic Espionage, perhaps

There's something not quite right in my mind about the recent computer bugging reports from the Icelandic parliament, Althingi. See, for example, the report in Iceland Review Online. As reported, a computer was found attached to the parliamentary LAN in an empty room next to the offices of two minor parliamentary parties, The Movement and the Independence Party. This was back in February 2010. Some key "facts" that have been revealed include

• “All identifiers had been wiped off the computer, all numbers and such, so it couldn’t be traced back to the owner. It was a very suspicious computer but we just couldn’t figure it out and neither could the police,”
• "When the computer was disconnected a program automatically started which deleted all data on the hard drive."
• There has been speculation that Wikileaks may have been behind it (denied by Birgitta Jónsdóttir)

Personally I doubt the Wikilinks speculation. Their style isn't to plant bugs, but to accept data leaked by others, nor was it likely to be a serious attempt to bug Wikileaks collaborators. According to this time-line Wikileaks wasn't to publish the Apache Helicopter video for another two months. At this time very few outside Iceland knew much about the link between Wikileaks and Birgitta Jónsdóttir. Sure the CIA, FSB, MSS, and so on would have had a pretty good idea what was going on, but I can't believe they would employ such a crude bugging attempt ... unless they wanted to send a message.

Next question, if a program started which deleted all data on the hard drive (presumably including system logs) how do they know there was ever anything there to delete? Did it give a nice little "Deleting files" progress bar?

I also find the whole business of the computer wiping its disk when it was found suspicious in the extreme. Any computer forensics worth its salt wouldn't give the rogue computer time to change anything on its disk. I would have thought any parliamentary IT service would have standing instructions to immediately take steps to prevent the computer taking any further activities, naively cut the power ... but I'm not an expert. Perhaps the IT "experts" are genuinely clueless, perhaps they were in on it.

So, who are the culprits? Perhaps an insider in The Movement or Independence party, wanting to monitor their own party, perhaps someone in one of the other minor parliamentary parties, perhaps the whole computer was a dummy designed to send a message and if so, why weren't the affected parties informed for ten months?

This whole thing raises far more questions than have been answered.

Edited to fix some badly worded text regarding knowledge of Birgitta Jónsdóttir - 24/1/2011 07:39 NZT

Unwashed jeans don't get any dirtier

In his book The Naked Civil Servant Quentin Crisp famously remarked "There was no need to do any housework at all. After four years the dirt doesn’t get any worse."


The Herald is reporting that the same applies to denim jeans, only more so "Great news for students - jeans left unwashed for a year are no dirtier than those that have been worn for a fortnight."


There is, of course a gotcha ... the wearer's personal hygene becomes very important to the process and the jeans need to be aired.


Seems to me it would just be easier to wash them

Real Physical Security

This photograph is a brilliant metaphor for security mistakes - TechNet Blogs.

Bicycle Typogram

This is absolutely brilliant.  Aaron Kuehn has drawn this typogram of a bicycle. Every element of the bike is made of the name of the element as text (although he does stretch it a little with the front forks). The S of the saddle is superb.

He offers it in a limited edition screen printed form or you can download the PDF from his site and print it yourself.

He even allows re-use of the graphic, with credit.

Way to go Aaron.

Squishy Circuits

Fantastic and fun-looking play to learn idea for kids. Squishy Circuits: "The purpose of this project is to facilitate electronics education to younger students. Our hope is that through the use of this tool, students will better understand electronics concepts, become more interested in engineering, and ultimately participate in playful learning techniques. This page is dedicated to sharing out research and guiding the further use and creation of squishy circuits."

The 2010 New Zealand Ice Cream Awards

The New Zealand Ice Cream Manufacturer's association has called for entries to the 14th New Zealand Ice Cream Awards which are to be judged in Auckland from Monday, 26th APRIL 2010.

The specific objective of the Awards is the raising of standards and promoting the quality of New Zealand Ice Cream.

They have 12 separate categories including Standard, Premium, Low Fat, Gelato and Sorbet. Last year’s supreme award was won by a Licorice Gelato.

The closing date for entries is Wednesday the 14th of April 2010

Full information at The New Zealand Ice Cream Awards:

Frasers Café - Great Customer Service

7 PM on a Sunday night and Tessa and I felt like going out for breakfast. Tessa really felt like bacon and eggs while for me there was no special reason, but on a day that started with cheese and tomato sandwiches, and had cupcakes and Easter biscuits for lunch, having bacon and eggs for dinner seemed somehow logical.

We went up Mt Eden Road and ended up at Frasers Café where we've been several times before and always enjoyed the fare, but it was well past the time when they stop the day menu and switched over to the night menu.

When we asked if they could do us the meal from the day menu, the waitress immediately checked with the kitchen and agreed to our request. So it was a "Power breakfast" at 8PM, cooked to their normal high standard and greatly enjoyed by both Tessa and I.

Full marks to Frasers, both for the food and for the excellent service.

Hush my dear, the bunny's near

It seems like only yesterday were doing Valentine's and now we are only 2 weeks out from Easter. This year seems to be vanishing even faster than last.

It's the first full year of my fiancé, Tessa's, gourmet baking business Sweet Expectations and as each special occasion comes around she needs to do a brand new special page on her site for Les petites gâteries de la saison. Tonight we added the page with her list of Hand made gourmet Easter treats.

 So if you're in Auckland and want some delicious hand made Easter treats,

check out her web page and get on the phone.

Remember, there's only 14 shopping days 'til Easter.



Photos by Tessa Clement (née Shoebridge) and Copyright © 2010. All rights reserved, used by permission.

Musings on change

On Saturday Tessa and I went up to the top of Mt Albert and looked across to what had once been my teenage home, just as I had stood there and looked across a many times when I was a teenager in the 1970s, before I moved away from first home, then Auckland and now back. The trees are taller and it is harder to pick out the house among the trees, but the mountain is the same and in many ways the house. All around there is change, the new motorway, changed buildings, but the basic layout of the roads is unchanged and so is the geography.


Businesses aren't like that, many of the iconic businesses of my youth and early adulthood are still around but merged or changed beyond recognition. I have a life insurance policy taken out in the late 1970s with Norwich Union, this afternoon out of curiosity I visited their web site to discover they are now Aviva and I vaguely remembered hearing of some merger, perhaps it's middle age, but I feel nostalgic for the old name.


Tonight Tessa and I went to another of my old haunts, Albert Park, for the Chinese lantern festival which I really enjoyed. Again things had changed, when I was in my late teens and early twenties and frequently visited the park it was different, Central Auckland was very much a city for the English descendants, now it is a much more vibrant, truly multi-cultural city the festival was attended by a truly multi-ethnic mix of people, another change that has made Auckland better and stronger, just as the business changes make them better and stronger. While we were there we saw the first fresh durian I've seen in Auckland (canned and frozen don't count) we bought some and ate it as we walked ... a middle aged Asian couple stopped and remarked that they thought Europeans didn't like durian.

The mountain and the stream remain, the people change and those of us remaining change with them.

Cool pictures of feathered dinosaurs from New Scientist

Ten artist's drawings of feathered dinosaurs discovered by Chinese Palentologist Xu Xing ranging from the 34cm, 4 winged, Anchiornis huxleyi to Guanlong, a feathered ancestor of Tyrannosaurus rex and the 1.5 Tonne Gigantoraptor, Fossil finds by Xu Xing and his team have helped show the evolutionary link between dinosaurs and birds. See gallery at New Scientist

Chocolate eggs threated by witches' broom

With Valentine's day this weekend and Easter just around the corner, I Ggoogled a bit and found out that New Scientist reported a year ago that supplies were threatened by a fungus named witches' broom and a virus called CSSV (cacao swollen shoot virus). Cacao is the plant that grows the beans that we grind, ferment and roast to make cocoa ... the raw stuff of chocolate.

Site Cloning Experiment

A few months back I had a few of my domains developed into mini-sites, but for various reasons I didn't switch on Adsense monitoring until a few days back so I didn't actually understand how well or poorly they were doing – silly mistake that I always advise other people against.
Because there's some related keyword pairs I might go after, I've decided not to publicly say exactly which domain name I'm talking about.
While doing some research last night I noticed that one of my better performing minisites that has it's name formed CompoundnounNoun.co.nz (XxxyyyZzz.co.nz) was receiving a lot of hits for the search term Xxx Zzz. It was on the front page of Google for this search but near the bottom.
For an experiment I decided to see what would happen if I cloned it to XxxZzz.co.nz for a perfect match to the keyword. Already I'm seeing some things that surprised me.

Day 1

Log

Here's my log and results (All times NZDT):

9-Feb-10 22:20

Registered the domain name

9-Feb-10 22:20-23:00

• Cloned the XxxYyyZzz.co.nz site to XxxZzz.co.nz on my server
• changing all occurrences of XxxYyy to Xxx and fixing a couple of grammatical errors.
• Added links to the new site on 3 of my sites.
• Registered it with Google Analytics and placed the link code in the pages.

9-Feb-10 23:09

.nz zone file reloaded, DNS resolving and site live. Visited the site and checked it out. The Adsense Mediabot spider visited all the pages I visited.

10-Feb-10 07:28

Googlebot visited the site retrieving robots.txt, and / (Index.php)

10-Feb-10 09:06

Googlebot returned retrieving all the pages linked from index.php.

10-Feb-10 14:08

Yahoo! Slurp retrieved robots.txt, /, and /default.css

10-Feb-10 18:24

Googlebot returned and re-read / (NB: Did not read robots.txt)

11-Feb-10 00:01

Waking up to having missed something I created a Google Alert for Xxx Zzz inurl:.co.nz

Analysis of day 1.

• Mediabot is practically real-time (expected).
• Googlebot found the site fairly quickly. Not sure if this was because of Analytics, Mediabot, or from scanning my other sites. Having read the first page it came back and read the rest fairly promptly.
• Yahoo! Slurp is none too shabby on the initial read either. It didn't have the extra aid I gave Google, yet found a brand new domain in only 15 hours.
• Either Slurp didn't like what it found, or is a lot slower than Googlebot in reading the other new pages. I find it a mystery that it gave priority to reading the css file over reading the other php files though.

Based on experience with adding pages to Tessa's Sweet Expectations site where it took 8 or 9 days for Google to notice an added page to an existing site I'm not expecting anything for a few days. I'll check periodically and update this blog with news of how it progresses.

Day 2

Very Quiet day. The only activity on the site was a return visit by Googlebot at 01:45 which just requested robots.txt - a 404. No sign of Yahoo Slurp or Microsoft's Bing spider.

Day 3

A couple more spiders visited: ScoutJet and Yandex, with a return visit by GoogleBot. In each case they fetched robots.txt and the homepage. Still no sign of Yahoo Slurp or Microsoft's Bing spider.

Day 4

A ScoutJet returned and spidered the site. So far Google and Scoutjet have both spidered the site, Scoutjet's directory isn't publicly usable yet, and Google isn't showing any pages for the site, yet.

Day 5

Yandex returned and read the robots.txt (I'm going to stop reporting minor search engines now, they've obviously found the site). Google re-read the index page and robots.txt only. A ScoutJet returned and spidered the site. So far Google and Scoutjet have both spidered the site, Spandex's directory isn't publicly usable yet, and Google isn't showing any pages for the site, yet.

Google sent its first real traffic today (1 visitor), and it was on the search I expected, I need to wait a few more days to check it wasn't just an aberration before declaring success, but for now at least it's looking hopeful.

Interestingly enough, this is only day 5 on a newly registered site, nearly twice as fast as day 9 on an existing site as in the Sweet Expectations Valentine's day page.

Day 6

Google revisited and re-spidered the site. They also sent another visitor and I received a notification from Google Alerts that the site exists. The visitor sent by Google was on a bit of a long tail keyword phrase that it matched up against the privacy page or all places, still the web browser went to a couple of other pages in the site; not ideal, but better than nothing.

Day 7

Quiet day, Yahoo! Slurp visited today and spidered the site. No sign of Google or any traffic from them but this doesn't matter as they have obviously decided to accept the site. Interestingly enough, still no sign of Bing. Bing sends traffic to one of the sites where I posted a link to the new site so it's either not interested in this site or has just given it a low priority for its spider.

As I've partially achieved my objective, and want to watch things for a few weeks I'm going to shut down this log now, with just occasional updates as significant changes occur.

Summary

Google was very fast off the mark indexing the site, and added it into the index faster than I expected. Slurp indexed the front page pretty fast but was quite a sluggard indexing the rest of the site. Bing has been noticeable by its absence, and I'm wondering if they are sharing their spidering with Slurp already.

Google has also sent traffic a lot sooner than I expected. Given that it's a brand new site (The one I cloned had been registered since 2006 and been in its current form as as a mini-site for 3 months) and there are almost no incoming links I'm surprised it got out of the sandbox at all. The only question in my mind now is will I get enough traffic to justify the registration fee?

Living beach ball, another giant single cell

A while ago I bloggged on Giant Single Cells. Here's another one courtesy of New Scientist The single-celled xenophyophores shun the convention that single cells are microscopic. Syringammina is a brute, growing to a width of 10 centimetres, sometimes even twice that. The cell branches and splits into hundreds of tubes, which ramify and interconnect in a hugely complex network. It also bends the single-cell convention of having only a single nucleus: Syringammina has many, scattered throughout its tubes.

Masterworks in Petri dishes gallery

Ten photos of "Art" made out of growing bacteria at Gallery - Masterworks in Petri dishes - New Scientist Described as "Einstein in E. coli, an apple tree grown from fungi and a fluorescent Mario are just some of the masterworks cast in agar jelly by creative microbiologists, on display at www.microbialart.com". In my opinion, 7 of them are great images, even if manipulated (false colour etc), I won't say which ones left me cold as I'm sure everyone will have their own list.

Why did our species survive, not the Neanderthals?

Interesting article in New Scientist on Neanderthal extinction. It directly contradicts something I thought about Neanderthals and technology / tool creation so I must have a look into it to see if this is something under debate or if I should be changing my mental model.

"The history of the Neanderthals isn't a Brothers Grimm fairy tale, but much of what has been written about the ancient human species may as well be, says evolutionary ecologist Clive Finlayson in his informative monograph...

"None of these just-so stories quite add up, Finlayson says. There is no clear indication that Neanderthals were any less intelligent than H. sapiens, and genetic evidence has shown that they share with humans key changes in Foxp2, a gene involved in speech and language. The distinction between Neanderthal and human technology isn't as clear-cut as palaeoanthropologists sometimes suggest, and Neanderthals hunted smaller game and seafood where it was available. Meanwhile, a first-draft sequence of the Neanderthal genome offers no sign that they contributed to our gene pool."

Article - 08 November 2009 - New Scientist.

Creationism and Islam

In a very similar way to how some extreme fundamentalist Christian sects reject evolution, so do some Islamic people. I haven't watched it recently, but Auckland's Triangle Television community station used to run anti-evolution programs made by these Muslims and I found them fascinating ... not because I agree with them, but for the way they were nearly identical to Christian anti-evolution films.

The biggest single difference was the the Islamic ones would have sound-bites from Jewish and Christian scholars -- presumably to show that their word-view was shared.

In 2008 New Scientist interviewed Salman Hameed an American academic who makes a number of pro-evolution points from an Islamic viewpoint including

• "The Koran itself does not provide a single clear-cut verse that contradicts evolution."
• "One of the big evolution problems from the US creationist perspective is the age of the Earth. Logically speaking, if you believe in a 6000 or 10,000 year-old Earth, then you have to reject evolution"
• "The Catholic church and Anglican church are not, as far as I know, atheistic organisations. These are religious organisations, but they accept evolution as a working principle behind the diversity of species. I think the same argument can and should be made in the Islamic world."

The interview is well worth a read.

Jon Haworth - Mission statement generator

Want to make your small business spout nonsense to compete with government agencies and big business? Mission statement generator is a tool that effortlessly produces prose like "Our goal is to professionally and synergistically fashion economically sound and cost-effective information that provide key differentiators between us and our competitors." and "Our company exists to collaboratively create economically sound, emerging and competitive products to meet the needs of an ever-changing marketplace."

Google's Halloween Joke

When the Web was new, the first search engines were created and listed every page they could find. Often site owners were unhappy with this for a number of reasons:

• Confidential information could be displayed (Actually an indication of a misconfigured website, but blame the messenger)
• Inner pages could be displayed bypassing "guard" pages
• The spiders could consume a lot of (then) expensive bandwidth

AltaVista which was the first popular search engine, designed a special file "robots.txt" for webmasters to include. This file could be used to instruct robots not to index part of a site. Most people never see this file as it is usually uninteresting, but it's often there and creating it is one of the less interesting parts of creating a website

Tonight is Halloween and Google has added these lines to the bottom of their robots.txt file

User-agent: Kids
Disallow: /tricks
Allow: /treats

Another stupid crook leaves name, number

Dumb robber leaves name, number: "A regular customer of Penny Lane Records in Sydenham, Christchurch took his opportunity just before closing on Friday to reach over the counter and grab a wad of cash and flee.

According to the owner, just a few minutes earlier, the man had put a CD on lay-by and had left his name, address and phone number with staff. In addition, he is a regular customer and well-known to staff." Doh!

Orwell and Shakespeare. Hamlet and 1984.

This is of necessity a draft. I want to talk about the artistic process and the way we misinterpret the art of past ages by imposing on the work of former eras the values and standards of our times. I haven't yet figured out all I want to say on the matter, so I will revisit this theme at some future time.

In his Ab Urbe condita (Literally “From the founding of the city”, but usually rendered as Early History of Rome) Titus Livius had historical or semi mythical people from the early days of Rome speaking and acting like Romans of the late republic, his era.

Most English speaking people today, and for at least the last century, regard William Shakespeare as a genius in writing plays. To the modern ear his language has dated and his political world view and concerned are that of a bygone age. If you ask a modern person what was so great about Shakespeare they will usually say that it is the originality of his plots.

In this they couldn't be more wrong. Shakespeare's plays usually retold well known stories and the Elizabethan audience expected to be presented with familiar plots and scenes. Romeo and Juliet was from earlier Italian tales ultimately named Giulietta e Romeo and presenting much the same plot, according to the Wikipedia article on Romeo and Juliet “The Merchant of Venice, Much Ado About Nothing, All's Well That Ends Well, Measure for Measure, and Romeo and Juliet are all from Italian novelle.” Shakespeare's greatest play Hamlet, Prince of Denmark is based on earlier stories, including the Roman legend of Brutus, Scandinavian legends and an earlier “Ur-Hamlet” possibly by Thomas Kyd (See Sources of Hamlet on Wikipedia ) . To the Elizabethan mind, Shakespeare's greatness wasn't the originality of his tales, but how well he told them; by the standards of the day he was a great playwright. Normally we never get to hear this, today we demand novelty, especially originality in plots, and Shakespeare was great, so we must think of him as conforming to today's standards of greatness which requires original plots so Shakespeare must have had original plots. so the antecedents of Shakespeare's plays are conveniently forgotten.

A similar thing has happened with George Orwell, one of my favourite authors. Today Orwell is primarily remembered for his dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty Four and occasionally for Animal Farm, his Satire of the Russian revolution and the early USSR, most of the rest of his writings are conveniently forgotten.