Tuesday, 17th of February, 2004

Via Ken MacLeod, an article from The Nation by Michael Lind, former neoconservative, on the liberal origins of neoconservatism, and what it’s become today: A Tragedy of Errors. Worth reading for the historical perspective, and for perhaps an unravelling (slightly) of how the neocons are related to hard-line pro-Likud Zionism (and why it’s not the case that to criticise the neocons is to be anti-Semitic…)

Lind contends that the neocons see themselves as latter-day Churchills, battling against liberal appeaser Chamberlains on the one hand, and totalitarian anti-democracies on the other. Now, as criticism of the neocons’ New World (Dis)Order grows (not least because of the lies and mistakes revealed in the WMDs fiasco), their strategy is on the one hand to accuse all critics of using the term “neoconservatism” as a smokescreen for anti-Semitism, and on the other hand to claim that there is no such thing as neoconservatism (recalling a similar strategy with postmodernism: Claim that po-mo encourages sloppy thinking, raising cool-sounding verbiage above reasoned argument and disallowing any criteria for assessing different theses, and the retort will often be that “there’s no such thing as postmodernism anyway” - which is entirely beside the point.)

Quote: “David Brooks and his colleagues in the neocon press are half right. There is no neocon network of scheming masterminds–only a network of scheming blunderers. As a result of their own amateurism and incompetence, the neoconservatives have humiliated themselves.”

Friday, 13th of February, 2004

Here’s what seems to be an excellent item of contemporary Jewish horror short story, disguised as an eBay item! Bidding has finished, so I’m not sure how much longer it’ll stay up - go read!
I particularly like the fact that there’s the eBay “Purchase protection” link there - do you think they’ll protect you against infestations of evil spirits?

Via Neil Gaiman’s journal

Fuck! I thought I’d waste some of my unlimited downloads (technically after 10GB they can throttle us down to 64k but I doubt I’ll get up to that anyway) by downloading some Linux distros. I might as well get rid of the Mandrake-Linux installation I have on a separate partition of my lovely laptop’s hard drive and put some kind of Debian there…

So I went and had a look at the DeMuDi site and thought I’d download the ISOs from there. (ISOs are disc images of CDs, ie the entire content of a CD as one file which you can burn using something like Nero…)

I’m currently sucking down all four ISOs at once - The first at 130k/sec, the second at 141.1k/sec, the third at 140k/sec and the fourth at 115k/sec (all approx). That’s a combined speed of 525k/sec, and no discernable effect on email downloading, web browsing etc… Insane!

[Bigpond currently have a rather bizarre pricing scheme in place for their cable plans - see here: our old plan, the 3GB one, is $87.95/month with uncapped downloads and 128k capped uploads, and 13.9 c/MB after the 3GB limit. Of course, with Bigpond’s pongy service, a good half the months we’ve been subscribed so far they’ve given us money back because of downtime… But anyway.
Compare the 3GB plan with the new Unlimited plan. Uncapped download speeds (see above…), 128k capped uploads, and UNLIMITED downloads (potentially slowed to 64k after 10GB), and it costs $69.95. Do the maths - does this make sense? Well, it made sense to me! I swapped to it as soon as possible, even though I’ve been having trouble even getting much over 3GB since I started in January… Fun and games.]

Wednesday, 11th of February, 2004

Terasa Nielsen Hayden, editor at Tor (whose husband Patrick Nielsen Hayden is also an editor at Tor - in fact he is the enlightened editor of Cory Doctorow), posted a fantastic riposte, or rejoinder, to a bunch of authors’-responses-to-rejection-letters from RejectionCollection.com. Her long and involved post, found here, contains much wisdom, much hilarity, and a little bit of horror, and should be read by anybody interested in becoming an editor, or indeed an author! (Or indeed a slush-pile-reader…)

There are two really annoying things about the MyDoom virus that’s currently doing the rounds, and similar viruses to it.
The first is the obvious, and has been discussed a fair bit in the blogosphere/geeksphere and elsewhere: It’s hard not to get irritated, because the only reason we’re receiving these virus-emails is that some idiot who has our email address has clicked on an attachment that they shouldn’t have. Or they’re running Outlook Express, and worst of all they’re not running an up-to-date virus protection program.
I’m a PC user, even though I love Linux, and quite like MacOS X, so I won’t complain that it’s only Windows users who are vulnerable to these viruses anyway. But I’ve been inspecting the headers of the current virus emails, trying to work out who would use the Griffith Uni SMTP server for instance. It’s very hard to work out who’s the culprit though.

Annoyance 1.5, by the way, is that bloody Microsoft and various other email programs have a habit of ingesting every email address they ever see, as if you automatically want them in your address book. So I’m sure I end up in people’s address books often just because I’ve been CC’d on someone elses’s email…

Annoyance 2 is perhaps the most annoying one though. Because MyDoom spoofs the sender, it means that (as you surely must know, reader?) the seeming sender of the virus email is practically never the sender. Usually they’re a poor innocent victim, just like the recipient, of someone else’s stupidity.
Given that, why would you setup a virus detection program on an email server that bounces a virus email back to the apparent sender? I can’t tell you how infuriating it is to not only be getting the virus from some idiot’s computer but also to be getting bounces from email servers that have been sent the virus with my email address spoofed in the header! I got so pissed off I sent a reply back to one of these. Probably nobody will read it (although it was “admin@ISP” and “abuse@ISP” so you never know) but it was fun anyway:

Hi there,

Just in case there's a person who reads email at this address...

I just received a bounce message regarding the MyDoom virus. I have to say

that bouncing an email that you've confirmed is a virus is REALLY SILLY.

Surely everyone knows that this virus spoofs the sender? In the headers

of the message you bounced, observe:

Received: from unknown (HELO fourplay.com.au) (165.165.100.3)
The IP address given is nowhere near the real IP address of

fourplay.com.au.

Therefore it's rather disingenous to have your virus system send ME

a message saying "A virus was found in an Email message you sent."

I didn't send it! I'm getting bombarded with bounce messages like this

AS WELL AS getting the virus first-hand from people who do have it on

their system.
Setting up an anti-virus system in this way only increases the amount of

unwanted mail clogging up the inboxes of people like me. Please change

something... Please?
Best regards,

Peter < (my real email address)>

            
	

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Thursday, 5th of February, 2004

This adaptation of a Jack T. Chick tract is teh funny.