Dumb Phishing Attempt

This was in my spam folder today, dummied up to look like it was from a major New Zealand bank

This wasn't pretending to be from my bank, but even if I did bank with the company that was being impersonated there is no way I would believe a message with such poor grammar would have been from them.

If, as we are constantly told, phishing is a profitable business, why can't they afford to have their pitches translated or at least proofread by someone who actually speaks English? I wonder if it is arrogance or stupidity?

Study shows just how complex cancer tumors can be

From "Not Exactly Rocket Science" by Ed Yong: "

Cancer isn’t a single disease, so we can dispense with the idea of a single “cure”. There are over 200 different types, each with their own individual quirks.

Even for a single type – say, breast cancer – there can be many different sub-types that demand different treatments. Even within a single subtype, one patient’s tumour can be very different from another’s. They could both have very different sets of mutated genes, which can affect their prognosis and which drugs they should take. Even in a single patient, a tumour can take on many guises. Cancer, after all, evolves. A tumour’s cells are not bound by the controls that keep the rest of our body in check. They grow and divide without restraint, picking up new genetic changes along the way. Just as animals and plants evolve new strategies to foil predators or produce more offspring, a tumour’s cells can evolve new ways of resisting drugs or growing even faster.

Now, we know that even a single tumour can be a hotbed of diversity."

Full article

Aussie Kids Believe Yoghurt Grows On Trees.

Australia once rode to prosperity on the sheep's back, but nowadays children are so divorced from rural life many believe yoghurt grows on trees and 40 per cent of the Year 10s believed cotton came from an animal. NZ Herald

NZ and Auckland Linux User Group mailing lists down

The list maintainer, Mark Foster, has reported that the virtual machine that normally runs AuckLUG & NZLUG mailing lists has suffered a misfortune.

As a temporary measure he has set up a new mailing list at http://lists.nzoss.org.nz/mailman/listinfo/nzlug.

If you are a subscriber to either of these lists and Mark hasn't subscribed you to the temporary list you can subscribe there. Equally if you're interested in Linux and you'd like to subscribe, you'll be made most welcome.

Indian call for affirmative action on Free Software

Erosion of privacy and personal freedom on online media drew worried mention at the just-concluded Fourth International FOSS (free and open source software) Conference-Kerala (FOSSK4). [...]

It demanded affirmative action by Governments around the world - especially in the Global South - to promote the use of FOSS as a cost-effective, customisable and robust technology option.

The Hindu, Business Line

Linux package dependencies show predator/prey relationship

Computer people often talk about a "software ecosystem" on various computer platforms, but it's rare to see someone take the terminology seriously. Evolutionary biologists Miguel A. Fortuna, Juan A. Bonachela, and Simon A. Levin of Princeton University have used the tools of ecosystem analysis to look at the evolution of Debian releases, examining things like package dependencies and software incompatibility.

"Overall, the key feature of the modularity the team identified seems to be that the decreasing number of conflicts across modules means that more of the software available for the operating system can install, since it's rare that a conflict will completely block an entire module from installing and running. The authors suggest that we might learn something about biology by studying software, but they don't actually provide examples of how this might work; at this stage, then, it's not an especially compelling argument. "

Full Article at Ars Technica

Facebook engineer talks about how they made FB mobile run everwhere

Facebook has the most downloaded smartphone application ever and over 350 million users accessing their website from both smart and dumb phones.

This is a talk by Dave Fetterman of Facebook on how they evolved their smart phone interface from fairly thick client to a progressively thinner one with more Html 5 features in the mix.

How Facebook Mobile Was Designed to Write Once, Run Everywhere:

Zurker A New Social Network

Over recent days Zurker a new social network has gone into alpha test.

For the benefit of anyone who has been trapped in a windowless room for the last 7 years, social networking is a web phenomenon where individuals interact with other individuals through sharing information. Usually there is a way for businesses to spread their message as well.

Today the 800 kg gorilla of social networking is Facebook who took the mantle from Myspace and Bebo in 2008. They are being challenged by Google, but look to be weathering that storm. They are also challenged to an extent by special purpose social networks like linked-in for business connections.

Previous social networks have had privacy issues as people didn't really trust the corporations to whom they gave all that personal information. Zurker has turned that on its head by allocating a portion of their ownership to be owned by their members. Currently these are "Virtual shares" but they say that when they launch their corporation they will be turned into real shares.

Zurker is being rolled out on a country by country basis and today it's New Zealand's turn! A couple of days ago I was approached by one of the founders I've had previous dealings with and asked to help with the Kiwi operation, which I agreed to. Just after midnight I registered the .nz domain name zurker.co.nz and today it's live.

Technically it's invite only at the moment but they make it pretty clear that they welcome invites via blog posts, so here's yours ... Click here ... send me a "Convo" when you sign-up. Yes, like all the others, they have their own jargon, but it translates fairly easily to the terms you are used to.

As alpha quality software you can expect a few glitches, and so far I've found a couple of fairly minor ones, but the quality seems pretty good.

Disclaimer, I'm not an executive but subject to negotiations, I intend having a personal stake in Zurker.

13 Ways To Think About And Crush Your Competition

I've been thinking about Internet start-ups a bit recently and was impressed when I stumbled across this article
13 Ways To Think About And Crush Your Competition by Jason L. Baptiste who is the co-founder and CEO of a growing venture backed startup.

He's got thirteen points and they are all different, but if I had to produce a summary it would be under two headings:

• Be your own business - leave the competition to make their own mistakes and don't copy them.
• Make sure you have sufficient funding in place to survive.

There's a lot more and I have no qualms recommending reading and thinking about this article.

Tis the season ... for cute rescued animal stories

First-up this report from the Herald: A dog in remote north-eastern Bangladesh has become a local celebrity by breastfeeding a baby monkey back to health after it was rescued from angry villagers. The monkey sleeps with foster mum and rides around town on her back. It shows no interest in returning to the wild.

Then this report: on how a cat napped in a car's engine and was found 300km later, with a few minor burns but otherwise unharmed. It wasn't even the car of the cat's owner.

Merry Christmas everyone.

Virgin TV's Sunthorpe Problems

In the UK a new system, which automatically checks the Virgin TV programme guide, went into over-drive over the weekend with programmes such as The History of Canals showed up as ‘The History of Ca**ls’, the Will Smith film ‘Hancock’becoming ‘Hanc**k, ‘Charles Dickens’ became ‘Charles D***ens’ even the name of London football club, ‘Arsenal’, was blocked out in a bid to remove inappropriate language from the TV menu. Full article at the Telegraph

Isn't it amazing how they just don't learn? The UK, after all, contains the place that gave its name to the generic name for this effect as the Scunthorpe Problem way back in 1996.

You'd think they'd an*lyse their software better before deploying it.

Give poor children computers and walk away

Interesting opinion piece in New Scientist. The One Laptop per Child (OLPC) founder Nicholas Negroponte is interviewed on his new idea ... give kids a tablet computer and leave them to it.

"OLPC, even after giving out nearly 3 million laptops, is still criticised along the following lines: "Negroponte believes that you can give a child a laptop and walk away." Whether I ever believed that or not is now secondary. It became such a refrain that I finally asked myself about a year ago: "What if you could?" [...]"I am really going into this with an open mind. It is an experiment, and one outcome could be "no, they cannot"."

More at New Scientist

Sounds like a very interesting experiment. Negroponte & the rest of the OLPC team have already proved they could do what the naysayers said they would never achieve. Now they are advancing the experiment further. If they succeed the world will be a very different place in 20 years time.

Apple's Lawsuits Made Galaxy Tab A Household Name

From Tom Holwerda's blog on OS News

This is, of course, a tasty and delightful serving of karma for Apple. The company clearly set out to use software and design patent lawsuits as an anti-competitive club, but instead of reducing competition, they may have actually made the competition stronger. In the end, we can only hope all these anti-competitive offensive software and design patent lawsuits turn out like this. Sure, there's a lot of wasted money here on both sides, but at least the defendant gets rewarded with more sales, and the aggressor punished with lower sales

Full Article:

Killer Snake

Something out of nightmares ... 7 metre long snakes that hunt people :( Ed Jong blogs in discover magazine

"Giant snakes frequently attack people in fantasy and science-fiction stories, but such attacks are not merely the stuff of fiction. Through his extensive work with the Agta, Headland has found that a quarter of all the men have been attacked by pythons. The reticulated python is the world’s longest snake. Females typically weigh 75 kilograms (165 pounds) and grow larger than 7 metres (23 feet). The Agta, by contrast, are a small folk. Adults reach around 1.4 metres (4.5 feet) in height and weigh around 44 kilograms (97 pounds). For a snake that can swallow an entire pig, an Agta would make a mere medium-sized mouthful."

Full text at Discover Magazine:

Chrisco guilty over unfair Xmas hamper fees

Tessa's a great believer in them, but I've long been a bit suspicious of hamper companies like Chrisco and this article from the Herald just helps confirm my feeling

"Quite a lot were hit by huge cancellation fees - not huge by most people's standards, but something like $50 which is huge for our clients," Chrisco charges up to $150 to $200 more for its hampers than the individual items cost in low-priced supermarkets. A Consumer NZ survey in March found that the items in Chrisco's "traditional" hamper could be bought online from Woolworths for $327.84 - about $83 less than Chrisco's price of $10.53 a week for 39 weeks ($410.67). NZ Herald News

Add to that, on the day they will deliver your hampers in early December they refuse to give the customer a time of delivery, expecting their customers to waste a day waiting around for Chrisco to deliver. I don't think this is acceptable in today's busy world.

Canterbury earthquake first anniversary

Today is the first anniversary of the September 4 Canterbury earthquake. The one where there was property damage and we congratulated ourselves on how lucky we were that nobody was killed, largely because it was at 4 AM and nobody was on the normally busy shopping streets where there was damage, that and people whose homes were damaged were just plain lucky.

Sixth months later a smaller earthquake in the same area killed 181 people. Like all New Zealanders I still think about where I was when I first heard about these two earthquakes and still mourn the 181 strangers who died.

We were still lucky. On the 12th of May 2008 there was a massive earthquake in Sichuan, China that caused 69,195 deaths, and even that did not match the 2006 Boxing Day earthquake and tsunami that killed at least 230,210 people. My thoughts, although a little dimmer, are also with the victims of those and other natural disasters.

Kia kaha, Christchurch

Kia kaha, Aotearoa

Kia kaha

Indians call centre training teaches Australians are stupid

In this morning's Herald was a piece on how trainee Indian call centre staff are taught that Australians are the world dumbest people who drink constantly and are touchy about animals.

The trainees are told to speak slowly as according to the trainer, Australia is the dumbest continent. I'm wondering if the trainer just didn't like being called a "Brown Bastard" (Apparently the Australian name for Indians) or if they have just been closely studying what Kiwis, Yanks and Poms say about Australia.

More on NZ Herald

Heads up to the Indians: The comments about Australians being dumb are just a joke. There are a large number of intelligent, cultured, articulate people in Australia. They crossed the Tasman Sea to get away from here; what's India's excuse?

Google ranking algorithm no longer secret

Or, if you prefer, Black boxes have hair

A "black box" is something that is known only by its inputs and its outputs, in principle nothing is known about what is actually inside the box. It's reasonably well known that if you allow someone to analyse a sufficiently large set of inputs and outputs of the box then they can analyse it. This is the principle behind the belief held by most cryptographers that there is little point keeping the algorithms secret and now this has happened to Google's search ranking algorithm.

Researchers took a limited number of ranking criteria and a set of search results and fed them to a machine learning algorithm. After a bit of churning the machine learning algorithm spat out a formula that gives a reasonably close match to Google's actual ranking. They only used 17 factors while Google actually uses over 200, but they have proved the point that this type of reverse engineering can reveal what's going on inside the black box that is the Googleplex. More Here

 I can see others taking their work forward and doing the analysis on many more factors. Maybe they will publish, maybe they won't but either way the genie's out of the bottle.

It will be interesting to see what Google's reaction is.


Thanks to Leo Kobes for the pointer.