• Software as a service,
• End-users failing to grasp security,
• Brain-drain because of outsourcing,
• Governments confusing control and security.

Let it simmer for about ten years, and you’ve got the future of security.

• the electronic passport
• the electronic patient dossier
• the OV Chip card

These things are mostly being designed with good intentions in mind, to increase security (”stop terrorists!”), to facilitate healthcare, and to facilitate public transportation respectively. In order to achieve these noble goals a lot of information about people is being recorded in there, and it becomes a lot easier to access this data.

You can argue that information such as this was already always being recorded. However, the information was never in such a form that it was so easy to process. More importantly, the data was never automatically linked to a single identity: currently, you can gather information about how many people pass through a certain station, if you try hard, you can perhaps identify and track several persons. With an electronic OV Chip card you are automatically tracked, and this data is stored and archived for some time.

While hearing news about the above things, I am growing more and more concerned about my electronic privacy. The privacy legislation in the Netherlands seems to be lagging behind the (fast) evolving technology, and also relying on self regulation. On the other hand the government is also (ab)using the new possibilities of gathering private data, for example the legislation for saving traffic data. I am also concerned that the government is not looking hard enough at the security issues involved with projects such as the electronic passport or the patient dossier.

While discussing this with friends and colleagues, I learned that I am not the only one with these kind of concerns. It is unfortunate that only last year Bits of Freedom, a big anti-privacy organisation, shut down. At the moment, I am looking into other ways to voice my concern to the right politicians, both for myself, but hopefully also as a bigger group of concerned citizens. Of course I am also going to dig deeper into the issue, and will post my findings here.

“Lood om oud ijzer”, translates literally to “Trading lead for old iron”, roughly meaning “six or half a dozen”. And when you think about it: the candidates did not even have a poster campaign of their own…

The result of the referendum was kind of predictable, only 9.25% bothered to vote in this charade, and more than 16% of those votes was either blank or invalid.

The most sad thing of this whole situation is that based on this charade, the political parties are now concluding that the people do not care, and that the referendum should be abolished. What a great way to end the national week of democracy.

Could not find platform dependent libraries <exec_prefix> Consider setting $PYTHONHOME to <prefix>[:<exec_prefix>]

Searching on the web did not really give an answer, but luckily the MacPort Trac could help me, #9831 was opened over a year ago, but still not solved.

The solution is simple, but time consuming. You’ll have to rebuild your python installation (yes, again…):

mv ~/.pydistutils.cfg ~/.pydistutils.cfg.bak
port -f install python24

You may have to do a port -f uninstall python24 along the way, but it should speak for itself.

Then a couple of days later the same thing happened with someone else: mail did not get delivered to his Hotmail address. He also had a GMail address, which delivered instantly. So I started investigating what could possibly go wrong, since I did not get any failure emails back. The postfix’ log proved my suspicion, nothing went wrong on this side:

postfix/smtp[36741]: C9D372E03B: to=<***@hotmail.com>, relay=mx3.hotmail.com[65.54.245.72]:25, delay=25, delays=3/0.03/0.57/21, dsn=2.0.0, status=sent (250  <466406F3.6030701@ je-ju.net> Queued mail for delivery)

Then I checked sending to a test account of my own. The message got sent correctly, but nothing apppeared in the inbox, nor in the junkbox. Even adding the domain to the trusted senders did not help one bit.

So I turned to the Hotmail FAQ pages. They have some nice pages specificaly aimed at postmasters. The tips there include checking your own mail server, and implementing SPF/SenderID (with lots of disclaimers that SPF/SenderID itself will not guarantee delivery). There is also a form where you can contact their support.

A word of warning about their support: if you have read the FAQ (like you should) you can just as well ignore their first reply and restate your question again. The first reply you get will be a pure copy & paste of most of the FAQ. The second reply suggested that I implement SPF (with the disclaimer that SPF/SenderID will not guarantee delivery), while I had carefully explained that my DNS provider does not allow that. A more helpful suggestion was to send represenative messages to randomtestacct@hotmail.com, which would help training their spamfilters.

Note that my mailserver is for private use only. My girlfriend and I are the only people who use it, and we rarely send messages to Hotmail accounts, and when we do, this will purely be personal communication. We have never used the mailserver to do any kind of commercial messaging. So there was no reason for me to suspect blocking, nor has there been any kind of warning from Hotmail.

When I checked back a day later, my test messages had mysteriously appeared in my Hotmail inbox, even those sent before I sent a message to that test account.

So everyone with a Hotmail address is hereby warned: emails to you can and will be filtered at will by Hotmail, without anyone knowing about this. You should be very careful about drawing conclusions when you are not receiving emails you are expecting…

Another neat thing is that you can export the game using the PGN notation, which you can then import into the Fritz engine. Then it can analyse your play and point you at obvious flaws and other alternative moves which you might not have thought about.

Chess.ac also has teams, which can challenge each other. I have a team as well, with a couple of members, but we need more to be able to play team challenges.

All in all, it’s a pretty nice environment to play and learn. If you give it a shot, let me know, and we can play a game or two, or you can come join my team! Send a message to gobo on the chess.ac website.

I’m not 100% satisfied with Wordpress, I’m on the lookout for alternatives. My main problem was that it took a big chunk of cpu and memory, which my last machine did not have much of. The newer one is much faster and has more memory, so it is a little less pressing.

But now the blog is back up and expect some more stories soon!

• Change to Italics (⌘I) or Bold (⌘B)
• Change the font-size (Shift-⌘< and Shift-⌘>)
• Change the indentation level (Shift-⌥→ and Shift-⌥←)
• Insert a new slide (^M)
• Switch between slides (page-up and page-down)
• Switch between slide input and notes input (F6)

With the above things you can pretty much create a whole presentation completely using the keyboard. But there’s one very basic thing that compels you to use the mouse: there is no way to switch between the title text box and the main body text box!

I have searched and searched, but to no avail. Please LazyWeb, tell me that there is such a keyboard shortcut…

Update: A reader commented that in outline view, you can use the tab key to get from the title to the body of a slide. When I tried to test this, I found some really horrible usability problems.

First of all, there is only one way to get to the outline view, using the small button on the bottom-left of the window. It’s not listed in the “View” menu and if you switch to outline view, the “view” menu looks odd, because there is no checkmark next to the current view.

When I did get to the outline view, I tested the Tab key shortcut and the behavior of the tab key is really odd: If you’re on a line, it will indent the line like Shift-⌥→ and Shift-⌥←. However, if you are on a Title line, it will indent that line and move that line to the body of the previous slide!.

So yes, it does allow you to go from the title to the body of a slide, but to do so you need to create a new slide, enter the title of that slide, create another slide, type a line and press tab. But somehow I don’t think that this is the intended or recommended way to do this.

I will soon write a longer update and some interesting stories, but meanwhile have a look at an excellent post: Great Programmers Answer.

On another blogging related note: check out the blogging industry over at the World Series of Poker. There is blogs about this everywhere:

• Pokerstars has a whole team of bloggers,
• Absinthetics contains some updates from a players point of view,
• Pokernews has news about the WSOP in all kinds of languages,
• Cardplayer has the official chipcounts,
• and many many more blogs can be found from links from those sites.

Summary: the main event is well under way, about half of the 8500 players are left and they are playing for a first prize of $12,000,000 dollars.

Since the beginning of this blog I had some comment spam. At first it was only one or two a week, which wasn’t that much of a problem. I looked into some possibilities to have a user-friendly way of stopping this. I ruled out CAPTCHAs, while these may be “friendly” to users who can see, they are not for the visually impaired, and besides, there are already programs that can do them about just as well as humans.

Then I encountered the Hashcash plugin for Wordpress. It provides the browser with a simple mathematical puzzle, which solved correctly, allows for the comment to be posted. Most browsers can do this without a problem, so that looked to be the solution.

After a while, comments again started to trickle in, first once or twice a week and the last couple of days it became more than 20 a day. I have now installed the (SpamKarma)[http://unknowngenius.com/blog/wordpress/spam-karma/] plugin (see the footer of the page), which does some filtering and other smart stuff to figure out if a comment is spam or not, once it has been posted. This (and Wordpress itself) is turning out to be a pretty heavy load for my poor little server, so I might soon have to look into other possibilities.

To have a frame of reference of how fast things are going with the comments, at the time of writing it has caught 117 comment spams. Most of those are from before, which I had either forgot about or were in the archive but not displayed.