][ stefano maffulli

Collabnet updated its discussion service on Funambol Forge so that now the archives hide the full email addresses of members using a simple obfuscation in the html code through a javascript function.  Apparently there is no silver bullet to stop 100% of spammers, but as in many cases ‘good enough’ is enough.  For curiosity and to test the method, I created an email account on gmail and posted a message to the Forge forums. After a month I still haven’t received any spam message on that account.

Today I setup another gmail address as control group. Lets see how long it takes for spammers to pick this secondparenchima@gmail.com. Bets accepted I think it will take 5/7 days for the first spam message to come. What do you think?

UPDATE: It took about 2 hours before I got the first spam message sent by a spammer (not by Mauro).

Delivered-To: secondparenchima@gmail.com
Received: by 10.140.207.6 with SMTP id e6cs5143rvg;
        Thu, 12 Feb 2009 02:08:48 -0800 (PST)
Received: by 10.65.197.16 with SMTP id z16mr383901qbp.25.1234433327837;
        Thu, 12 Feb 2009 02:08:47 -0800 (PST)
Return-Path: <edge@nb.sympatico.ca>
Received: from simmts12-srv.bellnexxia.net (simmts12-srv.bellnexxia.net [206.47.199.141])
        by mx.google.com with ESMTP id s31si1516262qbs.34.2009.02.12.02.08.32;
        Thu, 12 Feb 2009 02:08:47 -0800 (PST)
Received-SPF: pass (google.com: domain of edge@nb.sympatico.ca designates 206.47.199.141 as permitted sender) client-ip=206.47.199.141;
Authentication-Results: mx.google.com; spf=pass (google.com: domain of edge@nb.sympatico.ca designates 206.47.199.141 as permitted sender) smtp.mail=edge@nb.sympatico.ca
Received: from simip10-ac.srvr.bell.ca ([206.47.199.89])
          by simmts12-srv.bellnexxia.net
          (InterMail vM.5.01.06.13 201-253-122-130-113-20050324) with ESMTP
          id <20090212100552.CKPM1599.simmts12-srv.bellnexxia.net@simip10-ac.srvr.bell.ca>;
          Thu, 12 Feb 2009 05:05:52 -0500
X-IronPort-Anti-Spam-Filtered: true
X-IronPort-Anti-Spam-Result: AooIAIR9k0nOL8eg/2dsb2JhbACBboswiEPAbIFCBg
Received: from simfep5.bellnexxia.net (HELO smtpacout.sympatico.ca) ([206.47.199.160])
  by simip10-ac.srvr.bell.ca with SMTP; 12 Feb 2009 05:02:19 -0500
X-Mailer: Openwave WebEngine, version 2.8.10 (webedge20-101-191-20030113)
X-Originating-IP: [219.136.252.120]
From: Mrs Sarah Wood <edge@nb.sympatico.ca>
Reply-To: mrchristophermorgan@btinternet.com
To: <info@uknl.org>
Subject: claims of =?iso-8859-1?B?ozEsMDAwLDAwMC4wMA==?= pounds
Date: Thu, 12 Feb 2009 5:05:34 -0500
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
Message-Id: <20090212100552.CKPM1599.simmts12-srv.bellnexxia.net@simip10-ac.srvr.bell.ca>

send the following: Name,Age,Sex,Country to Email: mrchristophermorgan@bt=
internet.com for the claims of =A31,000,000.00 pounds which was won by YO=
UR ID in our Recent Compaq Bonanza for the use of internet service

Regards
Mrs Sarah Wood

smaffulli’s status on Thursday, 12-Feb-09 07:48:49 UTC - Identi.ca.

Twitter / smaffulli: lets see how long it takes ….

Tags: experiment, spam

I often find web-based forums difficult to participate to. Most of the times the graphic interfaces are too rich, clogged with unnecessary information, visually tirening and distracting. Usually they have too many categories to chose from the start page, threads are difficult to follow, most of the time you can’t really tell who’s answering to what. And they force to stay online to interact with others, there is no ‘offline’ support.

Method of Ubuntu Community Support

Compared to a local email archive from mailing lists I think that web forums are suboptimal for collaboration. That’s one of the reasons why I like Collabnet’s discussion services (as in Funambol Forge), that integrate a mailing list with a simple web forum UI: you can have the best of the worlds.

Reading Canonical’s Survey Results I was surprised to notice that their community prefers to use web-based forums to mailing list for community support. Is that because Google indexes forum archives better than mailing list archives? The  Ubunty forums entry page doesn’t look too inviting, so I imagine that the most common entry point is a search. From there on the user is engaged and starts posting. My feeling is that web forums have a lower barrier to entry and mailing lists have a higher retention rate of contributors. Does anybody have pointer to scientific studies about this topic?

Tags: community, forum, mailing list, support, survey, ubuntu

Patent encumbered standards are the worst because they seem legit, but instead they can easily become incompatible with Free/Libre Open Source Software.  Free Software Foundation campaign is alerting the community to act fast:

Last January, the Free Software Foundation issued an alert to efforts at the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) to sneak a patent-encumbered standard for “TLS authorization” through a back-door approval process that was referenced as “experimental” or “informational”. The many comments sent to IETF at that time alerted committee members to this attempt and successfully prevented the standard gaining approval.

Unfortunately, attempts to push through this standard have been renewed and become more of a threat. The proposal now at the IETF has a changed status from “experimental” to “proposed standard”. The FSF is again issuing an alert and request for comments to be sent urgently and prior to the February 11 deadline to ietf@ietf.org. Please include us in your message by a CC to campaigns@fsf.org.

Read more: Send comments opposing TLS-authz standard by February 11 - Free Software Foundation.

Tags: campaign, fsf, ietf, open standard, standards, tls

• Monty says: Time to move on
  MySQL founder leaves Sun. "The main reason for leaving was that I am not satisfied with the way the MySQL server has been developed"
  (tags: sun opensource development monty mysql)
• A job does not give life meaning | Brazen Careerist by Penelope Trunk
  People would be a lot happier with the job they had if they were happier with themselves outside of their job.
  (tags: carriera job career hbr work)

• Stimulus stimulates crowdsourced oversight, activism - Ars Technica
  We should setup something like this in Italy.
  (tags: government democrazia stimulus transparency democracy)
• Italian red-light cameras rigged with shorter yellow lights - Ars Technica
  Italians do everything better, scam included. "Italian red-light cameras rigged with shorter yellow lights"
  (tags: privacy italy scam traffic redlight t-red tred)
• 451 CAOS Theory » The Linux ‘weakbook’ bites back
  will the smartphone really kill the netbook, described as a ‘weakbook’ because it’s light and cheap?
  (tags: mobile netbook mobility smartphone)
• Sun's software results — a mixed bag |Open Sources | Rodrigues & Urlocker | InfoWorld
  Java and MySQL are bright spots in the quarter, while Solaris and virtualization sputter.
  (tags: business sun open+source)

• Ctrl-Z: a return to the Supreme Court's software patent ban? - Ars Technica
  Tim Berners Lee on software patents: "the Supreme Court actually declined to extend patent protection to software algorithms, preferring to leave the matter to congress. In this feature, we'll take a close look at the Supreme Court's classic trio of software patent decisions. We'll explore what the Supreme Court originally said about the patentability of software, how the court distinguished between software and non-software patents, and what the consequences would be if lower courts more aggressively applied the limits on software patents that the Supreme Court articulated a generation ago."
  (tags: software+patents patents tim-berners-lee)

• On Day One, Obama Demands Open Government | Electronic Frontier Foundation
  A good start: The President ordered federal agencies in a memorandum released today to approach the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) "with a clear presumption: in the face of doubt, openness prevails."
  (tags: freedom government eff obama usa politics)

Scott Mc Nealy, co-founder of Sun Microsystems, has been asked by the new Obama administration to prepare a paper about ‘open source’. From what I read on the BBC report, though, he is using a tired losing proposition:

The secret to a more secure and cost effective government is through open source technologies and products.

To me statements like these look too much like a “worn-out dogma” that open source is gratis, costs less, is more secure.  These arguments have been demolished by plenty of evidence in real life and by academic research. They can easily sink under the fires of the Microsoft, Adobe, IBM and Oracle of the world.

Probably there is a remote chance that the winds of change blowing in Obama’s sails will make Mc Nealy’s and OSI’s arguments float. What do you think?

via BBC NEWS | Technology | Calls for open source government.

Tags: fsf, mcnealy, obama, open source, osi

I still have Obama’s inauguration’s speech in my mind, so full of passion and hope. It’s such a powerful word, hope.  What most impressed me was his call to politicians to stop bickering and get to work to reform politics.  This morning I read a post of Mitch Kapor, about the interconnection between politics and architecture. This paragraph connected in my mind Obama’s speech and the Moonlight/Silverlight fiasco:

The decentralized architecture of the Internet minimizes the role of central authorities and maximizes the ability of any participant to offer or receive any information or service and to develop new capabilities and services. What keeps the Internet from descending into chaos and anarchy is not centralized authority, but that its activities, while decentralized, are highly coordinated through adherence to collectively developed open standards.

Emphasis added. So, just as to have a democracy you need a system architecture that is accountable and transparent, to have a democratic Internet you need to keep its decentralized architecture based on open standards.

Moonlight/Silverlight and Flash are neither open nor standards: they are tools developed by corporations to take and keep control of the Internet.  They are gates put in place to discriminate who, when and how we, the citizens, can access the digital archives of knowledge. They are like books written in obscure languages that can be translated only by holy scribes. They’re bad for Internet, they hurt freedom of the citizens.

We need to refuse Moonlight/Silverlight and Flash, we need to reclaim our right to read the books on our own. Because we can! The alternatives are just there, ready to use, developed collectively by the same people that made the Internet, the W3C. The new HTML5 standard is being held back by, quoting Obama’s inauguration speech, “the petty grievances and false promises, the recriminations and worn-out dogmas that for far too long have strangled our politics.” I wish one day we can too proclaim an end to these and have an Internet powered only by real Open Standards.

Tags: flash, fsf, html5, internet, kapor, microsoft, moonlight, open standard, silverlight

So, in the end, the Mono hackers have worked overnight to make it possible to watch the official Obama inauguration on Moonlight, the free software implementation of Microsoft’s response to Adobe Flash. Good or bad, I don’t really know. I pity the hacker that had to work overnight to overcome the bad choice of the Presidential Inaugural Committee (PIC) to use Microsoft’s proprietary tools.

What is really annoying though is this sentence from Ars report of the night of Novell’s employees:

Monday night’s collaborative effort by Microsoft and Novell on defies the assessments of these critics and provides some compelling evidence of the need for an open source Silverlight implementation.

No, dude, that’s not what we need. We need HTML5, we need an open standard to handle multimedia on the web. We don’t need yet another poor’s man implementation of a proprietary non-standard that copies other proprietary non-standards like Adobe Flash. Cloning Silverlight may make sense only for Novell, but for anybody else it’s a waste of time. Hacker’s energy is better spent on GNASH, the free software Flash implementation because at least that’s the dominant player and on Firefox 3.1. And advocacy energy should go on finalizing the specs of HTML5, removing all patent traps. Get it right.