How To Spot A Psychopath

Herewith, a site with a reasonably complete archive of scans of old Australian Commodore and Amiga Review (back to the Commodore Review days, up to the Amiga Review days) and Professional Amiga User magazines.

I can’t remember when I started writing for ACAR. January ‘92 might have been my first issue (sound sampler review, page 16), but I suspect I did a piece or two before that. After a while, I was the Assistant Editor, and stayed in that job until the publishing company went broke.

(Entertainingly, I was listening to this, one of the few MODs lurking in my large MP3 collection, when I turned up my review of ProTracker in the March ‘93 ACAR.)

Last night I watched, or at least attempted to watch, an episode of The Human Mind (subtitled “And How To Make The Most Of It”; this debut episode is reviewed here by someone less annoyed than me).

The Human Mind managed the remarkable feat of being staggeringly dumbed down, yet also, frequently, incomprehensible.

Robert Winston’s made some great documentaries, but this sure as hell wasn’t one.

For me, the high point was a guy who can flawlessly remember ten consecutive shuffled packs of cards. We were told that he did so by walking around London, looking at landmarks, associating mental images of things like teddy bears and cakes with suits and numbers, and then associating, say, a teddy bear eating a cake with Tower Bridge in order to be able to remember that this point in his walk was the Jack of Diamonds.

Just do that 519 more times, and you’ve got it!

It’s just that simple!

Yes, that really was all the explanation we got. Perhaps something that’d make sense of it got left on the cutting-room floor.

As it stood, though, I found this part of the show very much like watching Look Around You, but without the humour.

The episode also featured a fireman, whose story was told over about three hours of brightly coloured stock footage of fire and explosions and men with big hoses, without which the audience was presumably expected to go and watch the football instead, or just drool until we all died of dehydration.

This fireman once saved a bunch of other firemen by ordering them to leave a burning building where, a mysterious intuition told him, something awful was about to happen. Which it did.

After eight or nine more hours of stock footage - and interview footage of the fireman, who was interviewed in a slightly smoky room, to make sure we didn’t absent-mindedly start thinking he was a pastrychef - we were told that he’d actually seen very clear evidence that a backdraft situation was developing. And then he just got a bit of a hunch before he added it all up consciously.

This doesn’t sound like a very big deal to me.

But apparently it was worth a third of the episode, all by itself.

Oh, and the beginning of the episode sang the praises of the Durham fish oil trial, in which omega-3 oils apparently made kids smarter.

Except that study is complete bollocks [latest update here!]. There is no reason whatsoever to suppose that fish oil supplementation does anything for brain development in otherwise well-nourished children.

I suppose Winston’s just phoning this one in from the voice-over booth and trousering the proceeds.

You wouldn’t think he’d need the money, but I don’t know why else anyone’d want to put their name on crap like this.

“Mjlawson29″ is one of eBay’s most famous users.

Search for most eBay usernames and you’ll just get a few hits from actual eBay pages. As I write this, though, mjlawson29 has “about 537” Google hits, from all over the Web. Pretty good for someone who isn’t actually an eBay user any more!

A cursory examination of those hits will reveal that mjlawson29’s fame comes almost entirely from the work of a tireless phisher, who’s been sending phish-spam about allegedly unpaid items from that seller forever and a day. I get one of them every couple of days, if not more often. Have been for months.

Apparently this phisher thinks this repeated strategy is like playing the same lottery numbers over and over.

It is, of course, actually more like approaching the same annoyed commuters every single day with the same story about how you just need money for a bus ticket because otherwise you won’t be able to make it to your grandma’s funeral this afternoon.

Mjlawson29 was a real eBay user, with good feedback, but isn’t any more. It looks as if they chucked it in at the end of September 2006. Coincidentally, the first mjlawson29 phishing spam that someone bothered to post to Usenet is from the start of October, 2006.

It feels as if I’ve been getting these phishes for a lot longer than that, but I don’t archive my spam (only so many hard drives in the world, folks…) so I’m not sure.

I’m inclined to suspect that the sudden wave of undeserved abuse generated by the phishes drove mjlawson29 away from eBay. But who knows; maybe they just decided to take up a new and exciting career in stealing people’s logins.

Project Honey Pot has a couple of entries for the phishers responsible for this particular crap-stream, and also ties them to several other repeated eBay-name phishes.

Have you also heard from “babyphat96″, “loriweiss”, “nascar*stuff*” or “selectiveseating”, over and over again? I know I have!

(Loriweiss was a real user but is now gone; I don’t know whether babyphat96 or nascar*stuff* were ever real, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they were. Selectiveseating is real, and still trading.)

It’d be simplicity itself for these phishers to harvest a new eBay ID to broadcast with each phish-run, but instead they stick with just a few, and use them over and over and over again.

Now, you would get repeated messages from the same user if that user genuinely did think you hadn’t paid them for something. But you wouldn’t get ‘em for a year. And, as I said the last time I mentioned the output of these particular phishers, sending the same spam to millions of recipients ensures that the identifying features of that spam will become famous.

Phishers don’t want to be famous. It’s like being a famous secret agent.

The Error’d series on what-used-to-be-TheDailyWTF occasionally features some magnificently huge error boxes. I think the second one in this post has to be the record-holder: A standard Windows error box, 401 by 737 pixels in size.

I, however, quite often see one with 3.8% more area, and even less usefulness.

When the server that supports the excellent Pennypacker Penny-Arcade-indexing Firefox extension is down, the extension becomes unhappy.

It, then, serves you up with not one but two of these petite little beauties…

…every time you look at a PA comic page.

That’s 683 by 449 pixels, folks.

And feel the quality!

It’s great to see such impressive strides being made in the important field of protecting children from boobies.

Back in the day, there was software that confidently classified the Mona Lisa as porno. And also classified porno as being perfectly squeaky clean.

Nowadays, there’s software on which my very favourite Australian Federal Government ever has apparently spent 84 million Australian dollars (about $US69 million, as I write this).

This software can, it is said, be bypassed by a kid in a matter of minutes.

(I see no reason to change my conclusion from the end of 2000: It doesn’t matter, to the people who make it or the people who pay for it, whether censorware works or not.)

The news.com.au piece doesn’t actually tell you how the pictured smirking 16-year-old bypassed the NetAlert suite of programs (while leaving them apparently running!). I presumed it was something rudimentary, like killing a couple of processes in Task Manager. Maybe a few seconds with regedit, too.

This ITWire piece details an inelegant way of temporarily and invisibly disbling Optenet, one of the three programs, by… killing a couple of processes in Task Manager.

This page mentions ways to prevent people from “tampering with Integard”, which are hilarious enough that I’ll leave them as a surprise, but which include not letting anybody boot the computer from CD.

That is, of course, well beyond the capabilities of the average parent (change boot order in BIOS setup program, set BIOS password, and then just hope your kid doesn’t know how to clear the CMOS, which wipes the password and resets the boot order to default in one hit).

Just booting from BartPE or a Linux disc and nuking the nannyware isn’t, of course, the sort of elegant and undetectable hack that’s being advertised here. So there’s probably something neater out there.

I’ll be pretty surprised if you even need Process Explorer to nobble the rest of these marvellously enterprisey programs so wisely purchased from their skilled authors with my tax dollars. But who knows?

You mission, gentle readers, is to Outflank the Nanny, in as few keystrokes as possible. The software’s a free download.

Our Government’s dedication to quality software extends to the “Required” e-mail address and postcode on the download page. The postcode can be any four digits, and the e-mail address just needs to have an @ and a . in it, with two or three characters following the .

(The Safe Eyes download requires some kind of further account creation folderol. I also don’t know whether they check to see if you’ve got an Australian-looking IP address.)

Flail Supreme, the Supreme Commander video clip I mentioned months ago, now has a sequel.

You’re obviously missing out if you only watch the YouTube version. 1024 by 768 Xvid AVI version here, 512 by 384 version here.

Apropos of my passing mention of that brilliant Hays/Efros scene completion technique, here’s “Seam Carving”, a very crafty image resizing technique:

PDF with more info here, home page with MOV version of video here.

(Via.)

I only yesterday got around to watching Luis von Ahn’s excellent Google TechTalk from last year on Human Computation.

It’s very interesting, though like totally the outside scoop, man, for people who follow the world of human-versus-computer data analysis.

I was pointed to it by comments on the Coding Horror post on whether Amazon’s Mechanical Turk is a failure. Von Ahn’s insight is that you don’t have to pay people to do many seemingly tedious tasks which humans can do better than computers. If you can make a game of it, they’ll do it for free.

The comments also, of course, point to von Ahn’s The ESP Game, a perfect example of the theory in action in which anonymous pairs of people play a timed game of “Snap” in their attempts to type the same word when shown the same image, as a result creating a database of labels for those images. Later on, there’s a mention of Google Image Labeler, which is an exact (licensed) copy of The ESP Game. The difference is that Google Image Labeler appears to be working on the actual Google Images database. It’s therefore doing real image-labelling work, as well as providing the entertainment that can only be gained when you boggle at your partner’s apparent complete inability to recognise a picture of a shoe.

The ESP Game is more of a research tool, so it only works on a more controllable 30,000 image database. That database has to be about as well-labelled as it’s ever going to get, by now.

(My own lame take on this idea is this piece. I don’t think it’ll be long before we see a game like Left 4 Dead or Natural Selection in which paying customers can play either side, but freeloaders can only be zombies/aliens/kobolds.)

While I’m linking to cool new information processing ideas that most of you dorks have probably already seen, allow me to highly recommend Scene Completion Using Millions of Photographs. The 11Mb PDF is well worth downloading.

This post on the bitter and twisted Coding Horror alerted me to two significant problems with this blog.

I had a Useless Calendar Widget, and no way for readers to figure out who the heck I was.

Both fixed now.

I’m pretty light on the rest of the Web 2.0 bingo stuff, but perhaps your own beautiful and unique snowflake of a blog is not.

(And actually, I always figured that Phil Greenspun punctuated his writing with random pictures just to make sure that his readers never forget how many photos he’s taken of naked women.)

My recent reinstall reacquainted me with the delightfully varied places in which Windows programs keep their configuration settings.

In the olden days, you knew where the config files were. Old DOS programs didn’t necessarily have config info; you just gave ‘em parameters on the command line, as the Great Beards intended.

When there were enough persistent settings to require separate configuration storage, you’d just have a text file called progname.cfg or something in the program directory. Easy.

Some programs still do this, even today. Blessed be the name of those programs, for you can often just run ‘em from their directory and have everything work, whether or not you’ve ever run an installer for that program on your current Windows install.

But there are so many other places where Windows programs, in this modern age, may keep settings.

Some of them make their own directory in Documents and Settings\username\Local Settings\Application Data\, for instance.

Others use Documents and Settings\username\Application Data, just to keep you on your toes.

(Documents and Settings\username\Local Settings\Application Data also contains the XP IconCache.db file, deleting which can cure some weird icon problems. Or at least change them.)

And some programs, of course, tuck their settings away in the registry. Typically in some branch that’ll have a different name when you reinstall, so you’re thwarted even if you get all clever and “Export” that branch from regedit.

(I was quite proud of myself when I successfully edited the exported .reg file to put the settings for that one awkward program in the new long-nonsense-named registry branch.)

Some programs even decide to strike a blow for individualism by putting config files in the parched wasteland of My Documents. Cunning!

(Yes, I am aware that Mac OS X has one place where all of this stuff Must Be Kept, and Often Is. I agree unreservedly that just switching to a lovely trouble-free Mac would make settings transfer a great deal easier, by relieving me of many of the programs whose settings I would otherwise have to transfer, not to mention a substantial amount of the employment that so tiresomely requires me to use said applications.)

The whole installation-transfer adventure did have some bright patches. Some applications that look as if they ought to be a mass of horrible encrypted untransferable setting info actually aren’t at all. Valve’s “Steam” game download system, for instance, can trivially easily be ported from one Windows installation to another. Just install Steam on the new computer, then copy the (huge) steamapps folder from your old install to the new one. Done.

I even successfully exported and then re-imported the security certificates for the Australian-Government-issue Goods and Services Tax software, which isn’t as legendarily bad as you might think but still doesn’t inspire confidence that such a feat will actually be possible.

Oh - I’m also sure I’m not the first to be annoyed by all of the software companies who insist on making their install directory not Program Files\ThisProgram, but Program Files\CompuGlobalHyperMegaNet\ThisProgram, apparently because they assume you’re going to be so impressed with ThisProgram that you’ll buy a whole suite of other Compu-Global-Hyper-Mega-Net software, which must be kept in one directory for, um, neatness. Or something.

Later on, if you’re trying to find the ThisProgram install directory (or even its entry on the Start menu, which will of course also be a company-named subdirectory), your eye will slide right over the CompuGlobalHyperMegaNet directory, because nobody outside CompuGlobalHyperMegaNet has any idea what the company is called.

The most outstanding example I’ve seen of this approach is from one Juan M. Aguirregabiria, whose programs, that’s right, want to install themselves in Program Files\Juan M. Aguirregabiria\…

(And then the program of his that I tried had some DLL error or other and didn’t even freakin’ run.)