Order of the Bath

Configuring the Firewall on MacOS X 10.5.1+ (Leopard)

2 Feb 2009 11:23 by Rick

Confession: Until last week, I had it switched off. It didn’t make a lot of difference but I should have been more careful. It was just that when I first switched it on, nothing worked and I didn’t understand how the Mac worked enough to fix it; then I forgot. It ought to be switched on by default then this wouldn’t happen.

Anyway, it is all actually quite straight forward. There are guides available to show you how to do it. The problem is that they are a bit too technical in language and also are not clear on how to decide what to put in the table of allowed programs. The answer is don’t put any in manually, let them ask you first and then decide if you want to allow it.

The sort of programs which will ask and need it are IM/VoIP (iChat, Adium, Skype) and Download/Upload services (µTorrent, iPlayer, CyberDuck). Your browser may also ask, it rather depends on what sites you go to. Some applications ask more than once but eventually they remember. The ones that don’t ask and shouldn’t need it are Mail/RSS/News (Thunderbird, iMail), Text (NeoOffice, TextWrangler, TextEdit, MS-Office) and (to my surprise) Virtual Machines (VMware Fusion, Crossover and probably Parallels). In any case, you ought to run a local firewall in virtual machines.

Posted in Mac, Security, Technical | Comments Off on Configuring the Firewall on MacOS X 10.5.1+ (Leopard)

Flag Etiquette

30 Jan 2009 14:53 by Rick

Like many large companies, the place where I work has three flag poles out side which they like to use for a bit of decoration. Usually they get this right and fly the Union Jack from the middle one and two company flags, one at each side. When they get distinguished overseas visitors they like to honour them by flying their countries flag—and I think they get this wrong—they replace the Union Jack with the visiting flag.

I like to think of it as if it were a ship. You fly your countries flag from the main mast. If a French admiral comes on board you fly the Tricolour from a place of honour—I think it is the foremast. You don’t take the Jack down otherwise you are saying it is now a French ship.

I think the correct procedure (at the office) is to leave the Jack where it is and fly the visitor’s flag at the pace of honour, the right hand pole when looking from the road. If you get two visiting countries then you forgo your corporateness and fly the second one from the left hand pole. More than that and you have a party so I think you revert to just the national and company flags so no one is offended.

Posted in Miscellaneous | 1 Comment »

Lorelle on Church Website Design

21 Jan 2009 20:59 by Rick

Lorelle van Fossen talks to Church web designers—and discovers that she knew nothing about the issues. Good article.

Posted in ChurchTech, Technical, WordPress | 3 Comments »

Fake reviews for Belkin products

20 Jan 2009 15:13 by Rick

A practice known as Astroturfing is where someone affiliated to a product or party writes reviews in glowing terms and pretends that they are spontaneous from members of the public.

It looks like a Belkin employee has been doing just that to products that previously only had poor reviews at Amazon. If you follow the links through you get to a statement from the president of Belkin which, although admitting there is a problem, doesn’t fully answer the charges. Others have investigated and found many more suspicious reviews under various names, some very thinly disguised.

Posted in Miscellaneous | 1 Comment »

iTunes-DRM=(not quite) freedom

14 Jan 2009 10:43 by Rick

When Apple announced that it was no longer going to include Digital Rights Management on songs downloaded from the iTunes store, it all looked rosy—but there is a hidden catch. The AAC (.m4a) files still have your iTunes account id embedded in them so it can still be determined who bought them. That is unless you can find a way to edit the file to remove this information. Mediamonkey says it can edit AAC tags but I don’t know if it includes this one.

Posted in Hi-Fi & Music, Technical | Comments Off on iTunes-DRM=(not quite) freedom

Intercept Modernisation Programme

13 Jan 2009 13:53 by Rick

Information is slowly leaking out about what this government initiative will actually mean. The EU Data Retention Directive provides for member states to require Communication Service Providers to collect and retain data for a period of between 6 months and 2 years. There are hints that the Home Office are going to not only specify the maximum period but also to set up a system to record it all centrally.

Some sources suggest that the recording of phone call information (that is source and destination numbers and timestamp, not content) is already being done (but probably not Skype calls).

Extending this to email could be problematic. The source address of an email is known to be highly unreliable (look in your spam box to see examples) and, anyway, if the ISPs are to do it then what about those people who use international web mail services like Hotmail and Google plus there are those (ahem!) who use an off-shore host. But then, other sources suggest that, to make things easier for the smaller ISP, the intercept will be done further upstream on the trunks. To do this they would have to filter on the port numbers (POP, SMTP & IMAP). Even then it wouldn’t catch the web mail services.

Extending it further to monitor other internet traffic such as web sites generates a huge quantity of data. Just viewing one page can easily generate dozens of requests and downloads, a busy portal can require hundreds, so some serious data reduction techniques would have to be used. But as a side effect, the data is unreliable in intent even if comprehensive in actuality. The user is not in control of side content on the web pages they view and not even the main content when the referrer information is vague or misleading.

We already know that the return on investment for video surveillance is very poor to the extent that some authorities are leaving them unmanned. Sifting through the archives looking for incidents retrospectively is enormously time consuming and frequently a waste of police time. I don’t suppose this new idea will be any better.

Posted in email, Security, Technical | 1 Comment »

TV Licence Change

12 Jan 2009 11:53 by Rick

It always used to be the case that you needed a licence to watch live TV or to watch recordings made from live TV. e.g. if a friend gave you a tape of a program that they had recorded, then you needed a licence to watch it (unlike hiring a film from a video shop).

This seems to have changed. The BBC now says that a licence is only required for viewing “at the same time (or virtually the same time) as it is being broadcast.” Catching up via iPlayer is specifically excluded and by clear and unquestionable implication (in my opinion), also in the case I outlined above.

Posted in Miscellaneous | Comments Off on TV Licence Change

The lunatics are running the asylum

7 Jan 2009 12:28 by Rick

One is brought up with the assumption that those in charge are reasonably intelligent and to achieve government office you would need to be very bright indeed. I am sure that some of them are very smart, though don’t ask me to name one just at the moment.

So how did someone like the Rt. Hon Andy Burnham MP become Culture Secretary? I refer you to this interview in the Daily Telegraph late last year. Now, I don’t expect him to know everything, not even in his own portfolio, but the mark of intelligence is knowing when you don’t know and finding out by asking someone who does.

He clearly knows nothing about the internet; in fact, it looks doubtful if he has ever used it. So, just to help him out, here are some facts.

The government doesn’t control the internet. No government does, how ever much they would like to; it is amorphous. The ISPs don’t control it either, they just provide the end user connectivity. Even restricting it to English language sites doesn’t narrow the problem.
There is no reliable way to prove your age, especially online. Not even that you are an adult.
The computer or whatever is being used belongs to the user, not the ISP. The way they work also belongs to the user; it is a bit late to back track on that and try to implement some sort of DMCA controls on them now.
There are too many web sites out there to be content rated manually and any automatic method is unreliable, hence trying to control access to it that way doesn’t work. Any attempt to do so will certainly miss some very bad places, stop access to some very good ones and give people a sense of complacency. ISPs did try offering Child Safe services but they were not popular because parents found them limiting for all but the very youngest of children.

“It worries me – like anybody with children,” he says. “Leaving your child for two hours completely unregulated on the internet is not something you can do.

Right! It is not something you should do either. Learn to spend some time with your children.

To further support my argument, note that Andy Burnham previously worked for David Blunkett and Ruth Kelly when they were drafting the ID card ideas.

Posted in Politics | Comments Off on The lunatics are running the asylum

Bible Verse Plugins

2 Jan 2009 18:01 by Rick

While developing the new church website (which, by the way, is now online) I came across a couple of plugins that automatically link a bible verse reference to the text. I was reminded to write about it today, ironically, by a spam which linked to a very crude online bible using free web space from Blogspot. I am not sure which version has been bootlegged.

eBibleicious

eBibleicious was the first plugin I investigated. It links to eBible.com and seemed to be simple and efficient but for some reason does not work at all if the visitor is on Virgin Broadband. bweaver.net has a review with some screen shots which show what could have been, but the developer blog has been quiet since March 2008 so I think it has all but died.

The Holy Scripturizer

The Holy Scripturizer is a plugin that I found later. It is also not well advertised and the developer blog has not been updated since june 2008 but perhaps there is nothing more to do; it works fine on WP 2.7. There are a lot of the same ideas as eBibleicious using the ESV website as source, but has the added benefit of multiple versions in link only (i.e. not popup) mode. The NRSV comes from Oremus Bible Browser which is the one we normally use. Almost every English language version is covered and a lot of others as well, mostly via the Bible Gateway. It parses most standard bible references and is working brilliantly on the web site with virtually no training needed.

[Update 7 Jul 2017]

Wow, yes, I am still using it!

And all was going well – some time ago I modified it to v1.8.5 to a) support NRSV-UK from bible.oremus.org and b) change target=”_new” to target=”_blank” to conform to current practice. This is ok right up to WordPress v4.8. However we migrated servers recently to one that supports PHP7, though we have downgraded it a bit to v5.6 because of other problems. This plugin started to give us grief—it was blocking login and whenever it was activated it said

The plugin generated 3 characters of unexpected output during activation. If you notice “headers already sent” messages, problems with syndication feeds or other issues, try deactivating or removing this plugin.

It took a lot of effort to track down what the problem was but it turned out to be the encoding of the main PHP file—it was UTF8 with BOM (Byte Order Mark) and it was the latter which was causing the problem as it was pushing the BOM 3 characters out before the headers and causing the error. So I have removed the BOM from the file and all is well again. I suspect that it was self-inflicted and I had edited it at some time using Windows Textedit which is known to do this sort of thing.

In the process of trying to trace the problem I also created a stripped down version which I have called RJP-BibleRef. This is pure plug and play, it requires no options setting but it ONLY generates NRSV-UK links. You are welcome to give any of them a try.

The Original The Holy Scripturizer v1.8.3
My Modified The Holy Scripturizer v1.8.5
The Stripped Down RJP-BibleRef v1.0

Posted in ChurchTech, WordPress | 1 Comment »