Following news a month ago that it’s easy to hack into nuclear reactors, news that another experimental attack caused a generator to self-destruct. The US government and the power industry fear what might happen if such an attack were carried out on a larger scale. Thanks to Jan Whitaker for the pointer.
70% spam, situation normal
70% of the email processed by my business’ mail server is spam, at least according to this morning’s stats.
8990 messages Scanned by MailScanner
253.5 Total MB
6341 Spam messages detected by MailScanner
1117 Messages forwarded unscanned by MailScanner
8 Viruses found by MailScanner
18 Banned attachments found by MailScanner
401 Content Problems found by MailScanner
6361 Messages delivered by MailScanner
That’s pretty much the same as last year. And the vast majority of inbound email connections are rejected for being from known spam sources before they even get a chance to be processed by MailScanner!
IT/Internet election issues?
For my sins, next Friday 5 October I’m covering for Crikey a panel discussion between ICT minister Senator Helen Coonan and her Labor counterpart Senator Stephen Conroy, in front of members of the Australian Computer Society.
What do you reckon the key IT, Internet, media and communications issues will be for this federal election?
For me, I think it’ll be facing the Raccoonan’s hairstyle at 0730. But maybe it’s, what? Broadband rollout? Protecting the kiddies on the Internet? Suggestions please!
Two quick reads, and a quote
Yes, I’ve been busy. I don’t want to fall off your radar entirely, so here’s a couple of things I’ve read recently which will be good for your brain.
- All bloggers can now stop writing. The erudite and exceptionally English Stephen Fry has joined the blogosphere. His first post is an astoundingly detailed and well-informed essay on the evolution of the Smartphone. Anyone who can talk intelligently about Project Dynabook is worth masturbating over, IMHO. Pass the tissues please, Stephen?
- “Karl Rove could put faecal matter on his lapel and call it a boutonnière. Goodbye and good riddance,” said the redoubtable Garrison Keillor in No wonder they called him Turd Blossom. OK, not recent news, but a fun read. Thanks to Perceptric Forum for the pointer.
And the quote?
Admit it — back in the 20th Century, none of you imagined that World War III would be Robots vs Muslims. Seems obvious now.
The quote is from Gizmodo’s coverage of this video of a Packbot robot getting blown up by an IED. Thanks to The Long Tail for the pointer.
And now, to find time to write some more…
Facebook bans breastfeeding photos
Social networking website Facebook is boldly taking the Internet into the 19th Century by banning photos of breastfeeding as “obscene”.
Look, I know Facebook is American, and America is (a) a Puritan nation at heart and (b) pig-ignorant of the fact that the other 96% of the world’s population might think differently. I mean, their own president can’t tell the difference between APEC and OPEC, between Austria and Australia. When he’s standing in it. But quite frankly, a society which thinks photos of mothers feeding their children are “obscene” has deep, deep problems.
And not just that your president is dumb as a stump-post.
The protest group Hey, Facebook, breastfeeding is not obscene!(Official petition to Facebook) has almost 8000 members already. And while I generally don’t pay much attention to the needs of the breeders, this one I’ve joined.
Did the PM’s office edit out “Captain Smirk”?
“On the Internet nobody knows you’re a dog,” says a classic New Yorker cartoon. True, perhaps. But we do know who owns you and where your kennel is.
The Prime Minister’s office denies that one of their own edited the Wikipedia article about Peter Costello to remove the nickname “Captain Smirk”. But IP address 210.193.176.115 belongs to the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet — at least it did until the reference was changed a few days after the accusation.
If you dig through all IP addresses starting with 210.193.176 you find that most of them for which data is available are front ends for a pile of government agencies — everything from innovation.gov.au and biotechnology.gov.au to coagbushfireenquiry.gov.au and search.investaustralia.gov.au. Sitting right on 210.193.176.19 is the PM’s very own website.
Assigning an IP address in the middle of this block to anyone but another government agency doesn’t make sense — from a network engineering or an administrative point of view. You reckon someone’s telling porkies?
Wikipedia has since nominated the Peter Costello article as their Australian Collaboration of the Fortnight. “Please help improve it to featured article standard,” they ask. Anyone at the PM’s office wanna lend a hand? Woof.
[A more detailed version of this article was originally published in Crikey a couple of days ago.]