Today I got a letter from the Mathematical Association of America inviting me to join. Only it was addressed to “Professor Alastair Houghton”!

Well my professorship is news to me :-)

It does make you wonder though, quite how the MAA got my details. I’m betting that they were given them by the ACM, who have also (I think) given my name and address to the IEEE. I don’t mind, because these are all the kinds of organisations I might actually want to join, rather than the more mundane junk mail asking would I like a credit card, or a loan, or perhaps a nice new Audi…

I’d love to know why they thought I was a professor though. Still, it gave me a laugh when I saw it, and I’m sure my family probably already refer to me as a “mad professor” type behind my back, so it’ll come as no surprise to them.

You may have noticed that I’ve reverted all of my site’s templates to the MovableType defaults. This is because the templates I had before were getting old and it was tricky upgrading them to work properly with recent MovableType versions.

Of course, this means I have some more web design work to do. Oh well…

I’ve just removed all of the trackback pings that had previously been sent to my site. Most of them were junk, but a few were useful, however there were something like 12,000 junk pings in the database that I didn’t have time to deal with.

Now that there’s some level of spam filtering for them, I’m going to re-enable trackbacks on my blog, but spammers take heed: there are terms and conditions here; if you blindly post trackback pings to this site, you could end up owing me thousands of dollars, and if the amount gets high enough, I’m going to be quite tempted to try my luck in court (particularly if I get sufficient backing from the blogging community).

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It seems that Apple Corps, the Beatles’ record label, has failed in its wholly unjustifiable attempt to extract money from Apple Computer over the iTunes music store.

It’s a shame that the people managing Apple Corps have drifted so far from the original principals under which their firm was established; here’s a quote from Paul McCartney:

“It’s just trying to mix business with enjoyment. We’re in the happy position of not needing any more money. So for the first time, the bosses aren’t in it for profit. We’ve already bought all our dreams. We want to share that possibility with others.”

I for one would love to hear an explanation of how suing Apple Computer in an attempt to derive an income from the latter’s innovative music download service fits with not being in it for profit or not needing any more money. Apple Computer certainly doesn’t need to derive any publicity based on the Apple Corps label—if anything, confusion is much more likely to arise in the other direction, so the only possible motive is rent-seeking.

What’s more, the entire dispute was about their use of the Apple logo. I’ve put both logos in this post; do you think anyone would ever mistake one for the other?

Update: Apple Corps say they will be appealing the decision.

Apparently, “The secure stuff uses https port 81.” Well that’s news to me, as well as most of the rest of the Internet, I think. Try port 443, Bob.

Now, what was it I was saying about journalists and facts… :–)

Blog entries, it seems to me, are like busses. You wait ages until you have something interesting you want to say to the world, then two come along all at once.

Well there’s been something of a storm (see here, here and here for starters) about an Israeli company called Blue Security. Their idea is very simple; the reason spam is easy to do is that most people don’t respond to it. Everyone knows that sending opt-out requests to spammers just confirms your e-mail address and means they can sell it on for more money.

Well, Blue Security came up with the idea of running a service to do the tedious job of posting complaints on your behalf. You send them your spam and they contact the owners of the websites advertised in it, as well as their ISPs and any law-enforcement agencies that may be relevant to complain and ask that all members of their “Do Not Intrude Registry” (the “Blue Community”). So far, so good.

The sting in the tail is this; every member of the Blue Community runs a program called “Blue Frog”. If a spammer refuses to comply with Blue Security’s requests for their members to be removed and continues to send spam to Blue Community members, Blue Security’s technical department write a script for the Blue Frog that causes it to go to the spamvertised website and fill-in forms with complaints demanding removal. For every spam sent, one complaint is generated, but because this happens all at the same time, the volume of complaints received can be tremendous.

Some people complain that this is basically a Distributed Denial of Service attack on the spammer, and that all attacks should be banned. But the reality is that the typical spammer is woefully under-provisioned by comparison to the number of spams they send out. If all of the people who receive a typical spam decided to respond in any way, most spammers would be swamped. It isn’t Blue Security that’s responsible for the spammer’s under-provisioning, it’s the spammer, and it’s what makes spam profitable. If you had to have a huge data centre all of your own in order to handle the traffic from a single spam, nobody would bother.

Moreover, because the people who work at Blue Security are technically literate, their solution doesn’t require the general public to understand how to track down the actual spammer and avoid pounding innocent people with e-mails about spam they never sent. Spammers often forge details and have even been known to mount attacks on others by sending spam purporting to come from them, so it’s very important that you take care to complain to the right people.

The point is this: all Blue Security are doing is making it easy to complain effectively and with a significantly reduced risk of “collateral damage”. Spammers are warned that they will receive bulk complaints if they don’t comply with the initial request, but the level of bulk that they receive is far smaller than the level that they send. There’s nothing unfair or immoral about it.

As for the fact that Six Apart were knocked over, well, that’s very unfortunate. We all like Six Apart and a lot of people use their services to run their blogs, so Blue Security have attracted a lot of flak from bloggers for moving their site over to LiveJournal. But look at it this way; Blue Security knew they were being targetted, but only in the same way that an Iraqi policeman knows that he is a target for terrorists. Do you blame the policeman if they blow-up a shop he frequents, killing innocent people? Do you say that policemen should only shop in special shops, away from everyone else, just in case? No, you blame the terrorist and rightly so. That’s what happened in this case, and we should blame the spammer; it was his fault and he almost certainly knew full well that he was attacking Six Apart.

It’s been ages since I’ve posted anything on my blog. To be honest, I’ve been much too busy, and I’m still trying to do five things at once, although employing my mum to do the basic day-to-day admin has certainly helped to take the load off a bit.

Anyway, the reason I’m posting this now is that I want to congratulate John Gruber. Not only has he had the courage to quit his job and take-up blogging full-time, but he’s also posted a number of excellent articles since doing so, including an excellent and quite damning indictment of some extremely poor journalism from Associated Press.

Why does this matter to me, you ask? Well, I’ve been thinking for some time that there are too many journalists who have forgotten what their job is supposed to be about. Journalists are supposed to present balanced, plain accounts of the facts, and in recent times both balance and fact seem somewhat lacking from some quarters.

Even the BBC, who historically were pretty trustworthy, have been shamelessly promoting issues such as “radiation” from mobile phones, using phrases like “genuine concern” to legitimise what basically amounts to a load of pseudo-scientific claptrap based largely on the fact that the general public are hysterical about the word “radiation”.

Of course, if you’re a journalist, sensationalism is much more fun. What’s the point in being accurate if you don’t get the ratings, right?

That’s what I like about John Gruber. He might not be a professional journalist, but he tells it straight and checks his facts out.

More about radiation

If the BBC were in fact responsible, accurate, journalists of the type we all wish they were, they would be careful to explain that mobile phones emit radio waves, a type of non-ionising electro-magnetic radiation. They would go on to explain that electromagnetic radiation formed a spectrum, going from the lowest energy end (very low frequency radio waves) through radio and microwaves to infra-red, then visible light, ultra-violet light and on up to x-rays, gamma rays and finally cosmic rays at the very high energy end. They would also point out that the term “radiation” is very general and applies to many different things—even things like sound or waves in the sea—.

They would point out that light waves contain more energy than mobile phones’ radio bursts, that people have lived near the Crystal Palace television transmitter, which has been around since 1950, puts out well over 4 megawatts, which is over a million times the output of many mobile phones, with the highest power outputs at frequencies not dissimilar to those used by mobile telephones (487.25MHz for ITV up to 567.25MHz for BBC Two). Do we have significant incidence of cancer or “brain injury” in the area nearest to the transmitter? If we do, it’s been kept extremely quiet.

What really riles me about the “radiation” thing, though, is the way that journalists are claiming that their ridiculous position is based on some desire for “balance”, because in this case it’s a balance between fact (which journalists are paid to report, right?) and clap-trap. Balance between viewpoints is one thing. Balance between fact and lie is quite another.

My company uses Google Adwords to advertise its products. Adwords is quite good and had until recently been working well for us. Until, that is, some cretin at Google Ireland (who are responsible for Adwords in Europe) decided that, in the EMEA, they would no longer run any advert containing a third-party trademark.

Now, the products my company makes are disk utilities (specifically, a partioning tool and a disk defragmenter). If I remove all mention of the words Mac, Tiger and Apple, then Google will run our ads again. Which will be clicked on by 100 million PC owners, costing me more money, and wasting their time. They will also not be obvious to the Mac owners we are trying to target.

Google, when they came up with this idea, did realise that some people would be licensed to use other peoples’ trademarks, so they provided a mechanism to allow this. The mechanism is that the trademark owner must fax Google with a statement that the advertiser is allowed to use their trademarks.

But, of course, there are lots of people in Europe (or outside of Europe) who want to advertise Mac software using Google. And a lot of them are licensed to use the word Mac. So Apple, understandably, aren’t keen on sending thousands of faxes to Google to resolve this problem.

So I tried to find a telephone number for Google Ireland. They make it quite difficult, but if you look around enough on the web, you’ll find that Google Ireland’s phone number is +353 1 436 1000. None of their menu options seemed to fit, so I pressed zero for the receptionist. Who wasn’t there.

Then I sent an e-mail, which I imagine will be replied to using a stock answer, and otherwise ignored. 10 out of 10 for customer service so far.

I hadn’t completely given up on speaking to somebody about this yet, so I tried the phone again. This time I got through to the receptionist (yay!), but I was told that there was nobody I could speak to about Adwords, although yes, Google Ireland were in charge of Adwords in Europe, but no, I couldn’t speak to whoever was responsible for it. Instead, I could use e-mail. Could the receptionist give them a message for me, I asked, hopefully? No, apparently even their receptionist can do nothing but send e-mail.

Fact is that unless Google sort themselves out soon, we’re going to stop using them. It isn’t acceptable to simply pull your customers’ adverts, without warning, for using trademarks that many of us are actually licensed to use, and then expect a third party in another country to expend significant time and effort faxing Google to resolve the problem that Google have created.

I used to think Google only employed intelligent people. Apparently I was wrong.

Update: There’s a post on TidBits covering the same kind of problem, as well as more on MacSlash and even more elsewhere.

It looks like it might have been partly Apple’s fault (apparently they have filed a complaint about their trademarks in Google ads, and have since withdrawn at least a part of it). I have to say that Apple gave me the impression it was Google’s fault.

The Google library project strikes me as an excellent idea. I read today on CNET an article suggesting that some publishers were upset with the idea. I think that’s sad. I also think they’re wrong to be upset, because chances are that they will sell more books.

My experience of books on-line suggests that on-line scans or PDFs of books are quite inconvenient—even web pages constructed from the text of a book are often hard to navigate—and I have certainly bought paper copies of books available freely on-line (a recent example being the Subversion book, Version Control with Subversion). I don’t think books are like music, in that downloadable music is a perfectly good format—nobody really needs a CD, LP or cassette—whereas books are much less convenient in electronic form, except that the electronic versions are easier to search, and it is this, I think, that Google has hit upon.

I think this is certainly the case for reference books, and to be honest I think it’s probably true for other types of books as well; for instance, I’m pretty certain that I’ll buy a copy of Peter F. Hamilton’s next book, Judas Unchained, regardless of whether I found an electronic copy beforehand. In fact, I probably wouldn’t read an electronic version because it’d be a pain and it’d spoil the story for me when I got a real book to read.

So, I think that Google should be able to scan all the world’s books. I also think that publishers should probably give Google permission to display all the pages from them (why not—after all, most places have public libraries, which facilitate a similar purpose) but obviously that there should be restrictions on what the end user is allowed to do with them. I don’t think it’s worth worrying about people printing them out… it’s expensive, time consuming and the resulting mass of (unbound) paper is hard to deal with. Indeed, with an inkjet printer, it could easily cost a lot more than the equivalent print book, even the hardback editions (consider—a 500 page book, at 10 pence per page, would cost £50 to print!). OK, laser printers might make printing a book cheaper than buying it, depending on the printer and paper in use, as well as the number of pages you’re talking about, but it’s still going to take ages to print and it’s still going to be a nuisance to use.

I’ve just finished looking at a PC World article on Microsoft’s upcoming (and much trumpeted) Longhorn operating system. And I have to say, they should have called it Mongrel. They’ve succeeded in designing what is quite possibly the ugliest and most counter-intuitive user interface to date, in spite of the fact that they’ve copied Apple’s idea of a composited graphics system. The Explorer window screenshots from the article look pretty confusing, with at least two lots of things that look like menus, two toolbar-like things and a number of other controls; plus part of the interface is metal, part is blue (why?), and there’s a wierd-looking blue thing in some sort of drop-down well at the top left (what could that possibly be?!). But what I really can’t believe they’ve still got that stupid two-column Start menu, which fails the “My Mum” test (“If my mum can’t use it, it’s a bad user interface”), let alone any formal test on usability; hell, even I have trouble with it, and it isn’t as if I’m an inexperienced user.

More to the point, they’ve decided not to include WinFS! This loses Microsoft all of the extra features WinFS was supposed to provide, although they still have search and smart-folder type features in their new Explorer. Still, at least they’re finally putting the NTFS attribute forks to use to hold metadata (although that is likely to herald a new wave of malware… not that NTFS fork-based malware is entirely unknown at present, of course).

Plus, Microsoft say they aren’t extending their operating system search facility to developers. At least, not until WinFS débuts (and who knows when that will be).

I must say, I’m surprised. I would have thought that, with the new graphics interface, and all of the hype from Microsoft, they were on the verge of releasing something really special. It isn’t exactly as if they haven’t had long enough to do it.

I’m just looking forward to seeing what Apple do with their next OS release.