linus.com

And Now for Something Completely Different

2006-02-06T16:39:00.000-08:00

I'm a bit overdue for an update... Last year the nice folks at Google offered me the chance to work full-time on Firefox. Who could say no to that?

This is my personal blog. The views expressed on these pages are mine alone and not those of my employer.

Computer Associates Acquires Qurb

2005-07-28T17:07:00.000-07:00

Here's the press release: Computer Associates Acquires Qurb.

The combination of Qurb's technology and CA's sales channel is very exciting. It's better than chocolate and peanut butter. We've been working with the CA folks for a while now and they've been great partners. Very professional. Easy to work with. As part of CA we'll be able to reach millions more users than we could on our own. Less spam for everyone!

Of course, when your company has an odd name like Qurb (pronounced 'curb') the press will get a little silly with the headlines announcing the deal: CA aims to curb spam with Qurb, Spam: CA plans to kick it to the Qurb, and my favorite: CA pulls up to Qurb.

The only downer in all this is that I'm no longer going to be working with the rest of Qurb crew (qrew?). I'd worked with them all before, it was great to work with them this time, and I'd do it again in a heartbeat. Most of the team is going to CA, but a unique opportunity has presented itself for me to do something a little different (not much, but a little). The details aren't sorted out yet, but odds are I'll be starting in a few weeks.

World Sunlight Map

2005-05-25T07:33:00.000-07:00

This is totally cool. Aaron Hopkins has a site where he composites current cloud data on top of clear sky day/night earth images in various projections. My favorite view is dusk/dawn from far away:

http://www.die.net/earth/hemisphere.html

Regulating Internet Pollution

2005-05-23T09:09:00.000-07:00

Handing externalized costs is a big problem for the internet. Spam, distributed denial of services (DDOS) attacks, viruses, and their infinite variations and combinations are bad now and have the potential to get much worse. As more commerce happens online the Willie Sutton effect only gets more powerful.

ISPs are in the best position to do something about these problems, but they have very little economic incentive to do so. ISPs don't bear enough of the costs of internet pollution. If ISPs want to avoid government regulation they're going to need some kind of industry-wide self regulation. Here's my suggestion:

When you get an internet connection it should come with a firewall. This might be a little box you install at your house (like most savvy internet users already have) or, even better, a big box serving lots of users on the ISP side of the network connection. I'm sure Cisco would love to sell these big boxes. The important bit is that this firewall should default to a reasonable, secure configuration. Users would be able to connect to their ISP's SMTP and DNS, use HTTP and HTTPS anywhere, but all other traffic (expect for the bits need to make IP itself work) would be blocked. Forged IP could be filtered out here as well.

With the right defaults very few users would need to ever change the firewall settings. For those users who need more freedom, they could get access to the firewall configuration settings for an additional $1 per month. If they wanted, they could turn the firewall off completely. Just by making it a tiny bit difficult to turn off the firewall, most zombies would be cut off.

If the ISPs don't decide to stop the flow of IP pollution flowing from their networks, some zealous congressman will.

Qurb 4.0 Beta

2005-05-05T11:00:00.000-07:00

The Qurb 4.0 Beta is out. We've also launch the Qurb Blog.

X1 = PointCast;

2005-04-30T14:05:00.000-07:00

From TechWorld: Microsoft VP Jim Allchin said the embedded search technology in the new version of Windows is aimed squarely at products such as X1 Technologies' search technology -- and others.

At Qurb we do an email search tool as well, but we always knew we were running in front of the MSFT steamroller. As a small, bootstrapped start-up we don't need to do a hundred million in revenue to achieve success. When you take $10M in VC your <pun>options</pun> are more limited.

Scobleizer wrap-up

2005-04-30T13:53:00.000-07:00

As mentioned previously, I attended at talk on corporate blogging by Robert Scoble at Tomlinson Zisko LLP, a Silicon Valley law firm. Jeff Clavier did a real-time write-up (posted shortly afterwards due to a lack of wireless coverage). For me, the take home points were simple:

Scoble talks just like he blogs
Bloggers crave net.fame as judged by their rank on Google
Getting the scoop in the blogosphere is even more important than in cable news
Good corporate blogs bring companies closer to their customers

That last point is, I think, deeper than it initially appears. Being new to all this, I'm still assimilating blogger culture and I'll need to chew on it a bit.

Vote Spam

2005-04-30T11:03:00.000-07:00

I generally assume there is no privacy online. However, this email caught me a bit off guard:

From: Jack Hickey [mailto:jack@capp.info]
Sent: Friday, April 29, 2005 9:43 AM
To: Voters in RCSD Tax Election
Subject: Mail in Ballot for RCSD Parcel Tax

You are receiving this e-mail as a courtesy of Citizen Advocates for Private Philanthropy, a committee of my creation.

My fellow voters, Measure V is an all mail ballot for a non-uniform parcel tax. The tax ranges from $85 for residential parcels (with a senior exemtion), up to $2500 for commercial properties with lot size > 45,000 square feet.

As of the close of business at San Mateo County Elections on 28 April, 2005 your mail-in ballot had not been received. More than 30% of your fellow voters have tendered their ballots.

I urge you to consider the information in your Sample Ballot, and vote in this election. The deadline is Tuesday, May 3, 2005 at 5 P.M.

If you have misplaced your ballot, contact San Mateo County Elections at (650) 312-5222

John J. "Jack" Hickey, Founder, Citizen Advocates for Private Philanthropy

Note: Your e-mail address was provided by the San Mateo County Elections Department from information which you provided on your voter registration form. I will not use it for non-election related purposes.

I didn't know it was possible to get a list of voter email addresses and whether or not they've voted. I write anti-spam software so I thought I'd seen it all, but this was a new one. Anyone have ideas on how these lists could be spectacularly abused?

Feeds + $ = More Feeds

2005-04-26T08:49:00.000-07:00

I'm not sure if I get blogging just yet. When do you do a Me Too post and when do you just lay off and assume anyone who cares will have already seen the original blog? Anyway, I'll throw my 2 nano page ranks behind this post about Google AdSense in RSS. If you want something to really take off, find a way for it to make money. When publishers can monetize their feeds, we're going to see A LOT more feeds.

The Story of Unicode Wide Chars

2005-04-23T10:55:00.000-07:00

I've done some poking around on the web, but couldn't find any good histories of the development of Unicode and the various encodings. In particular, I'd love to find out why the Microsoft guys (and the Java folks, etc.) chose to use wide characters (wchar_t*s or unsigned short*s) in their APIs. This broke every program on the planet and has inflicted great suffering on programmers ever since.

Where they not aware of the work that Ken Thompson and Rob Pike did with UTF-8? Did they not know that Unicode would eventually need more than 64K code points? All these things were going on around the same time so it is hard to know who knew what when. In the end we got the worst of both worlds: We got new API incompatible with all the char*s in existing programs and we didn't get a fixed width encoding.

UTF-8 is one of the most clever inventions in computer science since the hash table. There is a great story behind its invention. I'd really like to know the story about how those wide character APIs came about.

Scobleizer in the flesh

2005-04-23T10:23:00.000-07:00

I'm going to be attending a talk by Robert Scoble in Palo Alto next week. We're gearing up to launch the Qurb company blog, and while we've already got some strong ideas about what to do with it, I'm very interested what Scoble has to say.

X1 == PointCast?

2005-04-21T18:20:00.000-07:00

X1 just did a $10M round with USVP. It looks like X1 is going to stay and party instead of heading for the exit. I have a hard time believing that enterprise search is going to be worth the investment. The consumer side will definitely be "free" (ad supported). I suspect the enterprise side will be "free" too (MSFT bundled).

Image Scaling

2005-04-19T10:56:00.000-07:00

Why are we still tied to low-res bitmaps? All I wanted to do was add my photo to my blog but I ended up burning an hour fiddling with pixels. In the end, there are still scaling problems. The template for my blog is 80 pixels tall but the blogger profile page wants one that is 113 pixels tall. I can't give them two different bitmaps so I need to choose between a jaggy scaled-down version on my blog or a blocky scaled-up version on my profile. Why can't I just give them the 2MB original and have them do nice bicubic interpolation to take it to whatever size they need? Perhaps IE 7 and Firefox can do bicubic scaling for all IMG tags where the width and height attributes differ from the image source data.

If everyone knows there's a bubble, will it pop?

2005-04-15T16:05:00.000-07:00

The Economist has been fretting about rising home prices for a couple of years now, but the rest of the media has only recently jumped on the bubble bandwagon. The number of news stories about a home price bubble has recently exploded. Dan Gillmor references two articles that appeared today:

SF Chronicle: Homeowners find much to appreciate Homeowners find much to appreciate. Despite rising interest rates, sales and prices in the Bay Area rocket to new highs. How high? The annual increase in the median home price now tops the region's typical household income.

Mercury News: Home buyers 'flip'. Of the 1,882 houses and condos sold in the county in February, 4.5 percent -- about 84 homes -- had been purchased within the previous six months, according to DataQuick Information Systems. That's up from 3 percent in February 2004. The prior record for ``flipping'' in Santa Clara County was set in June 1989, when 3.5 percent of homes sold had been owned for less than six months.

If everyone knows there's a bubble, will it pop? Alan Greenspan spoke of irrational exuberance in 1996, but the market didn't top out until 2000. Will the cycle run its course faster this time?

The GMSV Feed Sux0r

2005-04-15T11:05:00.000-07:00

Good Morning Silicon Valley is a great email newsletter, but it isn't a very satisfying feed. For the humor to have full effect you need to read all of the posts together -- it wouldn't have the same vibe if the stories trickled in over the course of the day. At the very least they should do a full content feed instead of just the headline snippets.

Oh, and part of their feed is just broken: The link URLs oscillate between siliconvalley.com and mercurynews.com. This is a real pain if you're building a feed reader.

Why Didn't Blogging Happen in 1997?

2005-04-14T15:33:00.000-07:00

At lunch today we were talking about why blogging is just now hitting the mainstream. All the technology pieces were in place by '97 or so. Why did it take until 2002 for blogs to get rolling and 2004 to hit the big time? Felix had the best idea... The crash in 2001 created lots of web savvy unemployed .com-ers with too much time on their hands. It would be ironic if the popping of one bubble were the direct cause of the next one inflating.

Coolest Name App Ever

2005-04-14T13:51:00.000-07:00

In general I hate it when I hit web pages with Java. For me it's the web surfing equivalent of getting gum on the bottom of your shoe. However, if you like to explore names (growing up Linus has made a connoisseur of names) this Java app is worth loading:

http://www.babynamewizard.com/namevoyager/lnv0105.html

It allows you to see the frequency of names over time and has my favorite search feature: the results narrow as you type.

I'm a Bad Blogger

2005-04-14T13:45:00.000-07:00

For reasons that will become clear shortly, I'm trying to blog again. I doubt I'll stick with it, but since I'm not trying to quit smoking or lose weight I need to have something unachievable to occupy my thoughts...

Nifty Windows Tweak

2004-06-16T14:17:00.000-07:00

I'm fairly change averse when it comes to my computing environment. I spend most of my day in front of the computer so I develop comfortable habits and am reasonably productive. Recently I make a small configuration tweak to my Windows desktop that is down right nifty. Friends have been telling me to do this for years and I finally gave in.

This little box is the Address toolbar from IE. From it you can execute commands (the Run... option on the Start menu), type in URLs, and with the help of another nifty little tweak, quickly access your favorite search engines.

Here is how to set it up:

Right-click on an empty part of the Taskbar and make sure that Lock Toolbars is unchecked.

Right-click on an empty part of the Taskbar and select Toolbars > Address.

Carefully drag the Address bar to the left hand side of the screen. Be careful to keep your mouse cursor in the Taskbar or the Address bar will leap off and won't come back.

Right-click over the Address bar and uncheck Show Title.

Go to IE > Tools > Internet Options... > Advanced > Browsing and uncheck Show Go button in Address bar

Finally position the tool bars to taste and re-lock the Task bar if desired. I like to keep everything in the smallest, most tidy configuration possible. (Did I mention the comfortable habits?)

I wouldn't be surprised if Microsoft makes this the default configuration in the next version of Windows, except the label will change from the geekly "Address" to the hot and sexy "Search". Of course, the search box will default to use Microsoft's web search engine and will also search Outlook, your Office documents and the rest of your hard drive.

Windows as subscription software

2004-06-16T14:05:00.000-07:00

From Reuters: Microsoft on Track to Offer Anti-Virus Software

You heard it here first (actually, this has probably been predicted by thousands before me): Microsoft will use anti-virus software to effectively charge a subscription fee for Windows. Microsoft is finding it harder and harder to sell new OS licenses, PCs are near saturation and upgrade cycles are lengthening, a subscription fee for Windows makes lots of sense. Eventually I expect Microsoft will bundle the first year of anti-virus service with the OS license and then get people on the $30 per year plan after that.

Of course, anti-spam comes next but that is probably a couple years off.

Gambling on Voting

2004-06-15T16:36:00.000-07:00

There was a great editorial in the NYT this weekend comparing the security of gambling machines to the security of voting machines. The short version of the story is: The security of gambling machines is much better. Paradoxically, the situation is the way it is because large amounts of money are involved in both.

Email Authentication Update

2004-06-15T16:26:00.000-07:00

Things have come a long way since I first heard about various "Reverse MX" SMTP authentication schemes a little over a year ago. The various efforts have coalesced in to something called Sender Policy Framework or SPF.

Even Microsoft has agreed to merge its similar Caller ID effort in to a future version of SPF. I wouldn't be surprised if all of the major email senders are doing SPF a year from now.

The Yahoo! DomainKeys is the other interesting area of email authentication. While SPF works to authenticate the domain of the SMTP envelope sender (think, "mail server") DomainKeys uses cryptography to protect the From: header along with the contents of the message. Both techniques are useful; SPF is easier to roll out quickly while DomainKeys offers stronger authentication. They each have a different set of failure modes and ancillary features.

All of this is good news for Qurb. The weakness of any whitelist based anti-spam approach is that spammers can pretend to be someone they are not, such as order-confirmations@amazon.com, to sneak past the whitelist. Authenticated email plugs this hole.

Monitoring Elections

2004-06-07T12:51:00.000-07:00

A coworker, Dave Moore, suggested at lunch today a great way to improve election monitoring: Have volunteers from each party stand outside every polling place with a camcorder. Sure you'll go through a few tapes before the end of the day. Sure most of the tapes will be spectacularly boring. However, if something does go wrong you'll get a contemporaneous record of what happened. Just knowing that there will be video of any irregularities on the evening the news may keep everyone on their best behavior.

Realistically, camcorders and tapes are a bit expensive and cumbersome for this kind of project. I bet by 2008 digital cameras (which can also do video) and cell phones (which will soon be able to do video) will make it cheap and easy. Pipe the results directly to a blog and you have a wonderful way for citizens to monitor their own elections.

The first rule of Terrorist Club is you DO NOT talk about Terrorist Club

2004-06-01T14:29:00.000-07:00

I was always a bit confused when various public officials claim that nobody in the government considered that terrorists might use planes as missiles. I read about it in Tom Clancy's Debt of Honor in 1996.

Now it appears that alleged terrorists (or the interrogators, hard to know) also watch movies. From the NY Times:

"They would rent two apartments in each building, seal all the openings, turn on the gas, and set timers to detonate the buildings simultaneously at a later time," legal papers contended, according to The Associated Press.

Cool new CAPTCHA hack

2003-05-22T13:23:00.000-07:00

The CAPTCHA Project at CMU defines CAPTCHAs as a program that can generate and grade tests that most humans can pass but current computer programs cannot. CAPTCHAs are used to protect things from programmatic abuse (think spam). Not a bad idea, but I just got a note from Bryce Jasmer describing a cool new way to defeat them:

I just heard a story about some system that someone has created in order to pass the turing tests and create thousands of spam launching email addresses at hotmail.com, yahoo.com, etc.

You create a website with a bunch of porn on it. You serve up an image at the same time you try to try to create a yahoo email account. You snag the touring test image, put it on your page of porn and have the user type in the results in order to see the next porn image. You take the result and feed it back to yahoo, and you have your automatically created account.