Ah, IT commentators, some of them are so young. About Microsoft:

They’ve got this new “consumer” bug where they think they’ve got to be a player in every consumer market. I think they would be better served sticking to their enterprise roots and not chase every consumer trend.

Enterprise roots? Microsoft may be the company that ended up changing how enterprises (I don’t like the term and it hurts me to use it but it’ll have to do) implemented IT but it took a long time to happen and they definitely didn’t start there. Indeed, the enterprise fought against Microsoft and their silly PCs for quite a while, and even when they let PCs in to the front office they still weren’t prepared to let Microsoft into the datacentre.

If you had to pick a term, “hobbyist roots” would probably be more accurate.

In an earlier post I complained about Vodafone’s rapacious pricing of casual data rates ($11000 per GB).

Now in the comments at this post from Rob Drury we get the Vodafone PR guy Paul Brislen boasting that “The front page of Stuff alone would cost a fortune to open…”

So, he’s using his company’s unconscionable pricing model to justify providing their own limited walled garden (Vodafone Live) that they just happen to make lots of money with.

They really do have no shame.

Microsoft have included the IDT High Definition Audio CODEC as an optional update within Windows Update. Installing it killed my audio as it has done for a number of other users.

I’d recommend not installing it for now.

(I ended up fixing it by uninstalling it and reinstalling the Dell audio drivers from scratch. Other options would be using System Restore to go back to before you installed it.)

I’m kind of disappointed because Windows Update has always been so amazingly solid for me in the past.

Some time ago I subscribed to eMusic.com for a number of reasons. Firstly, no matter how much I like my old favourites I crave the novelty of listening to music I haven’t heard before.

Secondly, I have completely and utterly lost the habit of buying CDs and I’d hardly know what to do with one once I got it. Thirdly, I can’t really be bothered with the hassle of finding and downloading music illegally. (RIP Oink, I miss you and your universal catalogue of well-ripped and properly tagged music.)

Fourthly, and in some ways most importantly to me when it came to actually signing up and paying money, eMusic did it right. The music you download from them is unencumbered moderately high-quality MP3s. No silly Apple or Microsoft enabled controls on what you could do with it or where you could listen to it.

I enjoyed using the service and got some good music to listen to (we’ll ignore the album of death-metal I downloaded by accident). But last year it didn’t seem worth it to me any more as I had no income and no decent internet connection, so I let my subscription lapse.

But eMusic is cunning and every so often they’d send me a little reminder email, “Come back! We has musics! Join us!” And then they got even more enticing and offered me 75 bonus downloads if I signed up again - so I did.

But there’s a new twist on the old service. eMusic’s catalogue was always a bit patchy and it was often a case of finding something good to download rather than going there with a particular artist or album in mind. But now it’s got even harder as:

We’re sorry. This album is unavailable for download in your country (New Zealand) at this time. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.

Even worse, eMusic is sending me titillating emails that are promoting the very albums that I’m not allowed to download!

Yes, the music industry is back to its old tricks of trying to impose their will on their customers, saying that they’d rather not take our money so that their “product/marketing geniuses” can continue to play their consumer segmentation games.

I thought they’d learnt, that the invisible hand of the marketplace had given them a good slapping around and that they had resolved to not be so stupid any more. Apparently I was wrong and we’re going to have to go through another round of watching the music industry indulge in self-destructive behaviour. Maybe one day they’ll finally get it and they’ll actually make it easy for me to give them money in exchange for music.

I can still remember the event that made me really want wireless networking. I was sitting in a very boring developer meeting that had nothing of any interest or relevance for me. I day-dreamed about important things like lunch.

Then things went from bad to worse as the meeting started one of those silly go-nowhere arguments. It was at this point that I realised that the developer next to me wasn’t earnestly taking notes on his shiny TiBook (they were new and cool at the time) but was reading some website about digital cameras. This looked far more interesting than a pointless debate about code check-in comment style and I had to resist the urge to read over his shoulder. I then knew that I wanted the flexibility of that be-anywhere portable connection.

I’ve had wireless at home since soon after that meeting, starting with 802.11b at 11Mbps, then upgrading to the faster 54Mbps 802.11g when that was released. This upgrade was partly spurred by buying a new digital camera - loading 400kB photos over the old conenction wasn’t too bad, but the new camera’s 2000kB files just took too long.

We’ve been waiting for the next standard (802.11n at ~300Mbps) for some time now and it’s still not finished. That hasn’t stopped a number of manufacturers releasing equipment based on the draft standard, including Dlink and the DIR-655 that retails for just under $300. Of course you also need your computer to support 802.11n (many modern laptops do).

There has been some scepticism about the real performance advantages of using 802.11n, with some people reporting disappointing results that are hardly faster than 802.11g. Here’s the results from my simple test of copying a 1GB file (distance of a few metres from the access point, 802.11n network using mixed g/n).

That’s roughly 2.5 times faster. I’m happy with that.

Are there any IT sites with more than a few servers that don’t have at least one named after a Simpsons character? I’m writing up the servers at my current job and the names are a wonderfully typical cross-section of geek culture. Here’s a list of some of the names along with what I believe the reference is to (corrections welcome):

AGENTSMITH - The Matrix
BASIL - Fawlty Towers
BLUESTEEL - Zoolander
BORAT - Ali G/Borat
CORLEONE - The Godfather
CYBERTRON - Transformers
DRGONZO - Hunter S Thompson
MAGGIE - The Simpsons
PEDRO - Napoleon Dynamite
RAOUL - The Addams Family
RATCHET - Transformers rather than the Ratchet & Clank video game
REN - Ren & Stimpy
RIVENDELL - Lord of the Rings
SHELOB - Lord of the Rings
SHOCKWAVE - Transformers rather than The Shockwave Rider
STARSCREAM - Transformers
STIMPY - Ren & Stimpy
VERBAL - The Usual Suspects

Notable omissions:

• Star Wars
• Star Trek
• Buffy/Angel/etc

(I did consider whether there were any confidentiality or security implications of posting this and I couldn’t think of any.)

Hallelujah, it’s only another week until we move and get real internet again! Since moving to Auckland we’ve been relying on Vodafone’s 3G data service (UMTS up to 384kbps) accessed through our phones.

The Good Bits

• Sweet, sweet internet, how I love thee (or, the internet you have is always better than the internet you don’t have).
• No on-site installation required.
• You can take it with you. We’ll probably be travelling over summer so this’ll be very useful.
• Receiving and making phone calls didn’t interfere with the data connection.
• Having paid for a proper data plan on the phone means that I can happily use it for internet access while out and about, without having to pay the horrendous casual data rates of $10/MB ($10000/GB!). In particular I’ve liked uploading photos straight to Flickr, navigating using Google Maps, and just general web browsing.

The Bad Bits

• We had some issues with the USB/phone connection on Kim’s computer. Rob kindly lent us a bluetooth adapter and this fixed things up.
• Bluetooth itself can be more ‘fun’ to configure than it should be.
• Windows Vista doesn’t cope with internet coming and going as well as it should.
• The speed is just good enough at best, and it often drops well below best.
• Take your phone away from the computer (bluetooth range of ~5m) and you lose your internet connection.
• Providing access for other people and devices, while possible, is too much of a pain. (I could use internet connection sharing on the laptop but really, having your internet tied to your personal phone means that it’s a personal connection.)
• We’re paying $60/month each for 1GB of traffic.

Using the newer HSDPA data standard would have been better for performance, but I didn’t want to spend the money to buy a Vodem or a phone that supports HSDPA (although the Sony Ericsson k850i has finally come out in New Zealand - parallel imported only, of course). And, as posted earlier, I found using the Vodem to be quite frustrating at times.

Conclusion

Of course, someone in South Korea or other civilised countries would probably sneer at me equating Telecom’s ADSL service with real internet. “What? It’s not even 10Mbit!” That said, I’m still looking forward to being able to:

• Watch videos from YouTube and similar sites.
• Get back into my eMusic subscription and download some more music (although I’ll miss Oink).
• Download the latest TV shows.
• Browse the web at a reasonable speed.

In summary, Vodafone’s 3G data service is definitely good enough for roaming use and as a backup service for transient people, but it doesn’t really substitute for a real internet connection for general usage.

In years gone past I had an extensive collection of bookmarks (aka favorites), stored links to a variety of pages and websites all over the internet. They were hard-won spoils from the search for useful information and I looked after them, backing them up and carefully moving them across whenever I got a new PC.

These days? These days I don’t even use them and my carefully maintained collection is lost amongst the digital detritus somewhere on my storage server. So far I’ve managed to come up with the following list of reasons (technological and behavourial) that caused this change.

• Domain names are easier to remember (there’s a general consensus on the grammar and patterns of domain name choice) and because I use them so much I’m better at remembering them. It reminds me of how I used to be very good at remembering phone numbers because I used them so much, but then I lost that ability when I started storing them in my mobile phone.
• I recently spent 8 months travelling around Central America without a laptop. Internet usage was reserved for internet cafes so I just got in the habit of not having my bookmarks available (I never got into using any of the sites that store your bookmarks for you).
• Searching on Google is a good substitute. Don’t bother remembering the site, just google for the relevant search terms and there it is.
• I use an RSS aggregator (a fancy term for website reader). This not only makes it easier to keep track of news from multiple sites, it also means I don’t have to enter their URLs.
• My web browser remembers the names of sites I visit a lot so I only have to type in the first few letters and then choose the relevant site from the drop-down list.

Of course, there is one exception to my rejection of bookmarks, and that’s my mobile phone. Using a standard phone keypad to laboriously type in long URLs is definitely something you try and avoid!

I imagine we’ve all been annoyed by spam selling viagra, watches, penny stocks and penis enlargement creams, but at least they make a certain sort of sense. Spammers send out millions of ads, get tens of sales, and make some money while annoying everyone else.

But what about the spam that isn’t selling anything? What is the point of sending out spam with a string of unrelated words that doesn’t even mention a product name, let alone claim that it will make your stock portfolio larger and more satisfying? To understand this kind of spam we need to think about the entire spamming process and how it has developed over the years.

Sending Spam

Originally spam used to be sent fairly directly. You’d sit (virtually at least) at your internet server or PC and send out your ads to unsuspecting mail servers all over the world. This approach didn’t work for long - blacklists were created to block known spam servers, anti-spamming clauses were written into internet service providers’ contracts, and anti-spam laws were passed in a number of countries. The spammers had to go under the radar.

At the same time this was happening, PCs all over the world were being infected by spyware, trojans, adware and other malware (a catch-all name for ‘malicious software’). Some of these were just annoyances that generated popup ads everywhere, but others would take over your PC and hand control of it to someone else.

The spammers saw this happening and realised that they could write malware that would send out spam - what could be stealthier then getting someone elses PC to send your spam for you? You’d infect their PC with spam-bot software, the spam-bot would connect to the spam server to get the latest ad campaign, and off it would go merrily sending spam out to all and sundry. If you could infect thousands of PCs with your software it didn’t matter if some got shut down, there were always plenty more to keep pumping it out. Spam was not only back, it was back in enormous volume.

Blocking Spam

However, the battle against spam wasn’t solely concentrated on stopping spam being sent. The other major front was stopping spam getting in by blocking incoming email that met certain rules. Originally these rules were fairly simple, looking for key-words like “viagra” in combination with links to websites. These worked somewhat, but they weren’t very effective (”Hey, let’s spell it as v1agra!”) and blocked too many real messages.

The anti-spam filters had to get more sophisticated and the new technique was something called bayesian filtering. Simply put, this technique works by taking a large body of email that has already been sorted into spam and non-spam. When a new email arrives, the bayesian filter is used to ask a simple question - does this new email look more like the emails in the spam group or more like the emails in the non-spam group? This method proved to be much more effective at filtering out spam and the anti-spammers were once again winning the battle.

Naturally the spammers fought back, this time by adding extra bits and pieces to their ads. A typical spam message would have the ad followed by a few paragraphs of pseudo-random generated text, with the hope that the email would look more like a real email and therefore get past the bayesian filters. (The pseudo-random text was quite surreally pretty at times and some geek-literateurs got quite excited and ran off to write learned papers about it.)

Tying it All Together

So the pieces are in place now but how does this explain the nonsense spam? Simply put, the spam-bot software isn’t very well written. It works something along these lines:

1. Infect PC.
2. Connect to spam-server and download the latest ad campaign.
3. Add nonsense text and other anti-anti-spam measures.
4. Start sending spam.

I believe that the nonsense spams happen when step 2 fails, either because of a bug in the spam-bot or because the spam-server has itself been shut down.

Well written software would just stop at this point, but spam-bots don’t have to be good and the software just marches on, adding the anti-bayesian text to the non-existent ad and sending the resulting ad-free nonsense spam out to the world.

And, for a final ironic twist, because the nonsense spams don’t have ads in them they’re more likely to get through the bayesian anti-spam filters and end up in your inbox!