Sensible Italians

Haaretz interviews Magdi Allam. Sort of an Italian Hirsi Ali, but well... less sleek.

Civil Liberties Abroad

Americans are rightfully concerned about the state of civil liberties. With the NSA mining phone records and judicial approval for wiretaps being undermined, people feel that the government is insufficiently protecting our right to privacy. However, today we learn that in Holland wiretapping of journalists requires no more than ministerial approval and a healthy suspicion of wrongdoing! No doubt the bar is set lower for wiretapping of ordinary citizens - a really good reason should suffice.

Fast Infection Detection

A new Israeli invention that holds astounding promise:

SMARTube enables antibody production, in a small blood sample, within days from infection, without having to wait for the body to produce antibodies weeks or months later.

Members of NAFTHE will no doubt abstain from using this device.

British Academic Boycott Part 2

Haaretz reports that the British Academic boycott of Israel is back on the tracks:

Israeli leaders and academics Monday slammed a vote by the largest university and college lecturers' union in Britain in favor of a motion recommending that its members boycott Israeli academics and institutions that do not publicly declare their opposition to Israeli policy in the territories.

The motion passed with 106 in favor and 71 against. There were 21 abstentions.

However, as NATFHE is supposed to amalgamate with the AUT (which rejected the boycott last year), its not clear how this play out.

Still, anybody interested in writing to NAFTHE's National Executive will find a list of their email addresses here. I wrote to the General Secretary explaining that NAFTHE members have excluded themselves from the scientific community and asking that he publish a list of their names and affiliations to ensure that respectable scientists don't accidentally find themselves collaborating with them.

If true - Fantastic!

Star Wars in 3D coming to take over a galaxy near you!

Dairy Hormones

Interesting

... women who consume animal products, specifically dairy, are five times more likely to have twins.

The reason may be insulin-like growth factor (IGF), a protein that is released from the liver of animals, including humans, in response to growth hormone, circulates in the blood and makes its way into the animal's milk.

IGF increases the sensitivity of the ovaries to follicle stimulating hormone, thereby increasing ovulation. Some studies also suggest that IGF may help embryos survive in the early stages of development.

The concentration of IGF in the blood is about 13 per cent lower in vegan women than in women who consume dairy.

"The continuing increase in the twinning rate into the 1990's, however, may also be a consequence of the introduction of growth-hormone treatment of cows to enhance their milk and beef production," said Dr Steinman.

Why Blue Security Folded

Interesting - Blue Security did indeed hire Prolexic to fend off the massive DDoS against it. Prolexic is a hosting company with cables the size of sewage pipes supplying its servers, making it extremely resilient to denial of service attacks. In response:

We understand that once customers of Blue Security started receiving real threats of viruses/worms/DDoS/etc. attacks against their own networks, Blue Security realized that they were putting many other businesses in jeopardy by continuing the fight with the spammers.

Fortunately, it seems that the Frog is to become Phoenix and resume breathing fire shortly.

There's Civil War in Gaza and It's All Israel's Fault

Reuters reports the beginning of civil war in Gaza, yet triumphantly manages to insinuate that the Enemies of Peace are really behind it all...

A spokesman for the Interior Ministry said fighting subsided after contacts between the forces. He accused unidentified 'suspicious gunmen' of opening fire to instigate the clash

Suspicious gunmen sent by the Mossad, lurking until just the moment when Fatah and Hamas sharp shooters are, by the purest of coincidences, facing off on opposite sides of the street. Then... Kaboom! The Jewish Conspiracy Striketh Again.

However, strangely for a Reuters piece, it concludes with a suggestion that Israeli occupation may not be the most malign fate the denizens of Gaza could suffer:

Gaza has grown accustomed to bloodshed during years of clashes with Israeli forces, who withdrew from the territory in 2005, but internal strife is a more horrifying prospect for many residents.

Disaster

Blue Security Ceases Anti-Spam OperationsThey gave in to bullying by the spammers. Some people who feel similarly upset are using a vampire proxy script to kill the spammers discussion board.

Computerized Voting Machines Hacked

Diebold voting systems critically flawed

...critical vulnerability in Diebold Election Systems' touchscreen voting systems that could allow any person with access to a voting terminal the ability to completely change the system code or ballot file on the system.

How hard would it be for these machines to spit out a 'receipt' for the voter, which would then be put in a regular ballot box. This way, after the election, the results could be challenged by a normal, manual count. It's infuriating that these arrogant voting machine makers dismiss such a commonsense option.

Light and the Physical Universe

Scientists at the University of Rochester demonstrate how light can be tweaked to travel backwards. This is much more bizarre than merely changing the speed of light, because it seems to involve 'spooky action at a distance' - the establishment of a lightwave propogating backward from the end of the fibre, without proximate causality.

Boycotts Unlimited

Haaretz reports that the British lecturers are about to consider boycotting Israeli academics... again. Is this going to be an annual event?

Gumption Ranking of American Universities

After downloading the file containing email addresses of Blue Security members who have been marked by spammers for 'special treatment', I thought it would be interesting to take a closer look at the data. After all, this is a rare accounting of public spirited individuals with the initiative to actually try to do something about spam.

It strikes me that a simple way to derive a 'Gumption Index' for different institutions, is to simply count the number of people affiliated with them on this list. So, as an aid to young scholars, considering which school will best prepare them to approach life with vigour and creativity, I present:

The Gumption Index of American Universities

MIT - 23
UCLA - 22
Harvard - 16
Stanford - 16
Duke - 13
U Penn - 13
Cornell - 13
Johns Hopkins - 10
UCSD - 10
NYU - 8
Washington U - 8
Tufts - 6
Yale - 6
U Chicago - 5
Columbia - 5
Northwestern - 5
Dartmouth - 4
Drexel - 4
Rice - 4
Brown - 3
Princeton - 3
Caltech - 2
Brandeis - 1

The clear winner however is Berkeley. With a remarkable 32495 entries (representing about half the email addresses in the file), its clear that someone at the university decided to register pretty much the entire university with Blue Security. I think this calls for an adjustment to their Gumption Index - clearly there is 1 person at Berkeley with a really enormous amount of Gumption.

Berkeley is of course also famous for its hostility to Israel. Somehow it's a rather delicious irony that they should now be the major collateral target of a massive spam war directed against an Israeli company.

Israel Tips the Scales for Whales

Israel has joined the International Whaling Commission and will provide the crucial vote in thwarting Japan's evil plans to resume murdering these beautiful creatures.

Spammers Messageboard

From Digg, here is a copy of the message board where the spammers planned their attack on Blue Security. It's fascinating because the Blue Frog people are clearly participating (under several pseudonyms), trying to persuade the organizers to drop the attack.

One of the postings is particularly illuminating:

Ginsta, they didn't do anything to you YET, but they are attacking many sponsors, some you might even be promoting. They aren't just attacking sponsors, they're attacking our community by the hypocritical position of justifying their means by the end

It's just a matter of time (if we don't take action now) before they have a botnet of which we would have no chance of stopping, you have to understand that. If they built their userbase to say 2+ million, 1 request command to each of their "frogs" would drop the host in a minute. No point letting someone gain power without being challenged. If they want to be on top they'll have to show they have the balls to undergo some deep shit.

As far as I can see, Blue Security only has about 10% of the number of users right now it would need (571,000 emails protected, but I guess most people protect 3 emails).

Another interesting thing - the spam thread links to megafile up/download sites where you can get the list of emails that the spammers 'extracted' from the blue frog database. I did so. It contains exactly 74,184 email addresses - less than 20% of those in Blue Securities database - so its pretty clear they didn't crack the encryption on the database.

The list contains two of my emails. The third I had listed with Blue Security isn't on it (and indeed, it hasn't received any of the threatening emails from the spammers). I consider this to be a true badge of distinction, a great honor.

By the way, the Digg thread contains a link to this site which repeatedly loads images from the spammers message board. It's for people who like *really* fresh images. Unfortunately it seems to have the side effect of slowing the spammer's message board to a grinding halt. Probably better not to click on that link...

Nazi Plans in Palestine

New evidence of Nazi - Palestinian collaboration in WWII.

People in Illegal Glass Houses Shouldn't Throw Stones

Trying to remove three families from an illegally occupied home in Hebron, Israeli police faced yet more settler violence

One of the injured officers sustained head wounds after being hit by a paint-filled bottle. Another officer sustained eye wounds after being hit by an egg. Later in the evening, settlers began hurling stones at the troops.

Israeli settlers behave like an organized crime ring. And like other organized crime, they don't shirk from the use of force. The injuries sustained by dozens of border police at Amona are testimony to the sad fact that a significant faction of the Israeli settlement movement rejects the rule of law as an organizing force in civil society, and believes only in the code of violence.

Return of the Frog

At last - the Blue Security website is coming back online. This article reports conflicting descriptions of why it went down. Most people seem to think it was a standard DoS attack. However the Blue Security people claim it was something more sinister. Also, a very interesting link to Prolexic a company that specializes in combating DoS attacks. I'm very curious to hear what really happened these last few days.

PharmaMaster - Evil Spam Emperor

A Press Release from the Blue Frog. This is getting really bizarre. Apparently he's in contact with bluesecurity via ICQ?!

Eran Reshef, CEO of Blue Security, said, 'Six out of the top 10 spammers worldwide have stopped sending spam to the Blue community recently; as such, PharmaMaster is determined to prevent this change in the spam economy. After a barrage of threatening letters this week that only made the Blue community stronger, PharmaMaster resorted to sophisticated attacks on Blue Security.'

Reshef continued, 'The attacks started with a strike on the Internet backbone itself, causing the Blue Web site to become inaccessible to visitors outside Israel, while remaining available for Israeli visitors. How exactly this attack was carried out is still unresolved, but what is clear is that PharmaMaster boasted that it was he who was able to make a top-tier ISP's staff member to block Blue Security's former IP address (194.90.8.20) at the backbone routers.'

Also, Blue Security (at least for the moment) has a blog here.

Spam Wars Spread

This is fantastic - after the Blue Frog site collapsed under a massive zombie bot attack, they redirected visitors to the bluesecurity.com website to a blog entry explaining what was going on. But apparently, the bot attack was so massive, that it actually wiped out TypePad and LiveJournal, two of the largest blog hosting services on the net. Whoever Blue Frog has upset is pretty powerful. My only hope is that they are powerful in computer geek sort of way, not in a Russian Mafia sort of way. I think we can take this as evidence that the spam lords see Blue Security's strategy as a genuine threat. Of course, as long as my frog can't communicate with the mother ship, its all pretty pointless. Hopefully the Blue Security people can come up with a creative way to neutralize the bot attack.

The spam-fighting service Blue Security has been under siege by spammers and digital attackers in recent days. On Tuesday it wound up sharing its pain with a large chunk of the blogosphere. When Blue Security's web site was hit by a distributed denial of service attack attack (DDoS), the company temporarily repointed www.bluesecurity.com to a blog on Six Apart's TypePad service. The DDoS traffic appears to have followed www.bluesecurity.com to its new home, overwhelming Six Apart's network and knocking its TypePad and LiveJournal services offline for nearly eight hours.

Update on BBC's Inexplicable Lack of Prejudice

A comment on this blog entry gives a little background on the four members of the panel that exonerated the BBC from charges of bias.

Impressively, one of the four, Philip Stephens wrote an article for Salaam News arguing that Arafat and Sharon were equally culpable for the stalemate. Actually, apart from demonstrating that the author has strong views on the conflict (which some might think would exclude him as an impartial adjudicator of the BBC's coverage) - its mostly remarkable for its lack of prescience.

BBC Not Biased!

The Jerusalem Post has its own problems, but it knows when to use sarcasm:

A paper released Tuesday found no evidence of systematic bias in the British Broadcasting Corporation's coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, The Guardian reported.

Phew! Now we just need someone to reassure us that the Guardian isn't systematically biased either!

Desperate Spam

Blue Security, the Israeli startup with strategy of hitting back against the Evil Spam Lords, is apparently now enough of a nuisance that the spammers are trying retaliation tactics of their own. As of yesterday, I started receiving bucketloads of spam along the lines of the one below.

It was always a danger that anyone with an enormous list of email addresses could determine who was a Blue Frog user by comparing their database before and after it was washed by Blue Security. So what this spammer is really saying is

I'm one of the bastards who's been sending you spam these last five years. I'm planning to keep sending you this crap until a Russian Mafia boss gets sick of Viagra ads and makes an omlet out of my intestines. In the meantime, I'd appreciate it if you'd sit quietly and let me use your inbox as a cash machine. Any false moves and ... I'll not only send you spam about mortgages, penis enlargement, stock indexes and biotech companies - I'll also write you whiney messages about how displeased I am with your behavior.

So its a no brainer. I'm not leaving the Blue Security register until the last spammer is locked in a small cell somewhere under the Kremlin.

Forunately, there's nothing easier than to setup a spam filter to deal with unusual and very specific messages like this one.

Hey,

You are recieving this email because you are a member of BlueSecurity (http://www.bluesecurity.com).

You signed up because you were expecting to recieve a lesser amount of spam, unfortunately, due to the tactics used by BlueSecurity, you will end up recieving this message, or other nonsensical spams 20-40 times more than you would normally.

How do you make it stop?

Simple, in 48 hours, and every 48 hours thereafter, we will run our current list of BlueSecurity subscribers through BlueSecurity's database, if you arent there.. you wont get this again.

We have devised a method to retrieve your address from their database, so by signing up and remaining a BlueSecurity user not only are you opening yourself up for this, you are also potentially verifying your email address through them to even more spammers, and will end up getting up even more spam as an end-result.

By signing up for bluesecurity, you are doing the exact opposite of what you want, so delete your account, and you will stop recieving this.

Why are we doing this?

Its simple, we dont want to, but BlueSecurity is forcing us. We would much rather not waste our resources and send you these useless mails.


Its simple, we dont want to, but BlueSecurity is forcing us. We would much rather not waste our resources and send you these useless mails, but do not believe for one second that we will stop this tirade of emails if you choose to stay with BlueSecurity.
Just remember one thing when you read this, we didnt do this to you, BlueSecurity did.

If BlueSecurity decides to play fair, we will do the same.

Just remove yourself from BlueSecurity, and make it easier on you.

Edwardo Pineda

UPDATE: I was reading comments about the situation over at the Blue Security community blog. I think this tactic will backfire on the spammers. People over there are quite pleased with the situation. I guess anybody with enough gumption to install the frog in the first place is likely to be stubborn enough to see this as a challenge. Moreover, its quite any publicity is good publicity - Blue Security will probably see a spike in members after this episode!