Global Toad News

I was reading an article by Paul Drockton about Glenn Beck and some scandal involving Goldline where people called this company that Glenn Beck promoted and ended up overpaying for common European gold coins.

But so what, Glenn Beck wasn’t directly involved in the operation of the company, and frankly people shouldn’t rely on a radio show host’s endorsement for investment advice.

What I found way more interesting was the Better Business Bureau and it’s rating system.  To me, it seems a lot like a scam.   Basically if you pay the BBB, you can get a much better rating than if you don’t.  One example was that someone paid for Hamas (which is considered by some to be either a terrorist organization or the lawful government of the Palestinian National Authority) to have a membership and it got an A- rating, while Starbucks, a real company, but not a BBB member, earns an F.

In other words, if you rely on the BBB rating for something, then you might be getting taken for a ride, because there a rating from the BBB just means how much the BBB likes that company, not how good the company really is.

Share on Facebook

Colonel Lawerence Sellin recently wrote an article ripping into the International Security Assistance Force command that he is attached to in Afghanistan (also known as the IJC).  He starts out with:

Throughout my career I have been known to walk that fine line between good taste and unemployment. I see no reason to change that now.

From there he goes on to say how while they don’t do anything that he feels is useful, they do a lot of it.  From numerous PowerPoint presentations to other inane briefings, where people send out large emails with lots of pictures, hoping to just bore their way into a promotion (or at least a good OER).  Basically it sounds like if he was a lazy officer, it would be a great gig, unfortunately for him, he actually thinks that he is supposed to be doing something productive, and quite frankly he isn’t.

Now the sad thing about this is that there are other commands in the military that are mostly just excuses for officers to get combat pay without actually being in the middle of combat.  It allows the officers who haven’t done anything up to then, to continue doing nothing, but get awards for being in the middle of a combat area.  In fact one of the things that Gen. McChrystal had tried to do was make the IJC more like a military post than a place to kick back, apparently now that he is gone, things are slipping back again.

What will happen is that Col. Sellin will get sent away from the IJC, and things will continue to go from stupid to insane there.  Because there are too many REMF’s in the Army who know how to play the political game and generate useless paperwork that makes them look good to people who know nothing.

Share on Facebook

If it was April (or March) I would think it’s a practical joke, but a small company that is called “Teachbook” is being sued by Facebook because, according to a quote in the LA Times:

If others could freely use ‘generic plus BOOK’ marks for online networking services targeted to that particular generic category of individuals, the suffix BOOK could become a generic term for ‘online community/networking services’ or ‘social networking services,

So for instance having an “eBook” website would be an infringment of Facebook by this reasoning.  Or SportsBook.com is an infringer.  Strange that Facebook would go after a company with almost no users but leave SportsBook.com alone.  Of course there is the fact that SportsBook.com has been in business for 14 years, compared to Facebook being in business for only 6 years, so if Facebook wins it’s case against TeachBook.com, I think that SportsBook.com can use the exact same argument against Facebook.

That would be poetic justice.

Share on Facebook

Apparently some people are getting hit for having ads on their blogs.  According to the Philadelphia City Paper, the city of Philadelphia is sending out demand notices to people who have blogs with ads on them demanding a $300 business tax, and a cut of the profits, even if the profit is as  little as $11 in 3 years.

In other words, if you have ads on your blog, you had better have a real business behind it.   Now I have long eschewed adverstising because I am aware that there is a big difference between non-commercial and commercial speech, and even having one ad on a page (or some other revenue generating scheme) associated with a blog means that you have now transitioned into commercial speech and can be regulated and litigated against accordingly.

People in Philadelphia are upset, but I think that the right answer is to NOT have advertising if you don’t want to be treated as a business.  What is the point of having advertising, if not to make some money, and if you are making some money, then it’s a business.   (Donations might be a different story).

I am not a fan of the way taxes are handled in the United States, and I think the city of Philadelphia is probably going a little too far, it could give people the option to just remove the ads and no longer have them, but once you cross into commercial speech, don’t expect to be protected (to the degree that there is any protection for speech).

Share on Facebook

At least that is what I gleaned from the exchange reported between Spamhaus and NIC.LV as reported in TheRegister.co.uk.  Spamhaus maintains a free list of spam ip addresses that other Internet services use to keep garbage out.  It seems that there are large groups of spam bots in Latvia, and Spamhaus had tried repeatedly to contact the Internet Server Provider (ISP) that it originated with, with no response.   So SpamHaus added their ip addresses to it’s blacklist.

SpamHaus then contacted the abuse address for the ISP that supplied the connections to the smaller ISP, again no response.  So again SpamHaus added some more ip addresses to it’s blacklist.

It seems that the people responsible handling the abuse finally started paying attention, as it was the Latvian Computer Emergency Response Team.  It seems to me that they only took action to tell Spamhaus that Spamhaus has no right to add anyone to any blacklist without comprehensive proof.  In other words, stop interfering in our business model.  Apparently the fact that it took a couple of hours to clear up something that WOULD NOT HAVE BEEN AN ISSUE if the Latvian ISP had bothered to respond to any of the numerous warnings, is causing the Latvian people great distress.

Of course doing something about spam, that’s not their problem.

Share on Facebook

There is a misconception that I run into from time to time that if you link, team, bond or whatever to put a group of network cards together as single managed unit you can increase the speed of the network connection.

This is not really true.  While it makes sense to have two network cards bonded (which for this conversation will be taken to mean the same as teamed and linked), it provides an automatic fail-over more than anything.  While some of the traffic and load can be distributed, it seems to me that when watching the load on my Linux server that IEEE 802.3ad link aggregation pushed most of the traffic onto just one card (unlike what I expected from this IEEE presentation).  That isn’t saying that 802.3ad link aggregation isn’t good, it just is not necessarily going to give you any additional bandwidth than a single network interface.  And that is true of other types of link aggregation methodologies, at least when implemented on top of a tcp/ip network.

As one Network Administrator wrote, after spending large sums of money on link aggregation:

Long story short, we’ve had to find out the hard way that it SEEMS like in MANY, MANY hours of my own testing and extensive research, it seems that in our case of wanting to INCREASE BANDWIDTH between the new Database Server and new Terminal Server (what I call a ‘ONE to ONE Scenario’), the connection maxes out at using only 1GB (25%) of the 4GB aggregate link.

In other words, if you expect 802.3ad link aggregation (or any other scheme) to improve your throughput you are likely to be disappointed.  The best performance I could see was with the Linux is adaptive load balancing.  But before you decide on any one methodology, you should test to make sure that you are getting what you think you are getting.

Otherwise, you are just wasting resources (as in the example where the machines had 8 network cards in two “teams”).  More than two cards bonded together yields diminishing returns.  I am sure that there are solutions that can do an amazing job of putting multiple network interfaces into a whole, but you might want to just look at a fatter pipe in the first place.

Share on Facebook

Apparently a group of priest are under attack for using the phrase “God Squad”, while I might have expected ABC to pursue them for the use of the term since it is so similar to the Mod Squad television series, the attack comes from Best Buy which claims that “God Squad” is confusingly similar to “Geek Squad“.  Can we expect to see Best Buy suing the God Squad Show as well, since the word Geek and God are so confusingly similar in the minds of Best Buy (or at least it’s attorneys), or is it because this group was a bunch of Catholic priests?  Only Best Buy’s lawyers know.

Share on Facebook

I am just speculating here about the current Oracle lawsuit against Google.  I don’t think it’s just about the fact that Google will run programs that were written in the Java programming language using a non Java virtual machine called Dalvik.   One of the things that Dalvik is not is a Java emulator.  It instead an entirely different platform that programs written in Java can be compiled for (just like you can compile programs written for Windows to run under a different platform).

In other words, it’s similar to being able to run Windows programs on your Mac, or Linux box (there is a difference, but it’s fundamentally the same thing).  Oracle claims that anything that says the word Java belongs to them (it seems), or it might be that if Oracle can win against Google, it can collect fees from ANY compiler that implements what it claims is infringing technology.   And while this seems like the kiss of death for the already struggling Java revenue stream the bigger target might be to get people to use something other than the other product that Oracle acquired with Sun, MySql.

MySql is a very popular open source database system, that is used by many hosting providers.  It has a weird dual licensing model that has worked well for many years (or at least there were no serious complaints) but all that might change with the new litigation happy owners.

In other words, Google is a test case.  If Oracle can prevail against Google (and there is a chance it could, because it really is up to the whims of the judges) it could spell the end of emulation software (or even software that is remotely like emulation software).  It also would potentially open up hosting companies to various and sundry lawsuits for offering MySql hosting in some way that Oracle feels might be in violation of some clause in it’s license agreement.  In other words, Oracle is perfectly willing to scorch the earth with it’s Java and MySql products, because both were competing against it’s more profitable Oracle Database product line.

But these are just my ramblings, and might have no basis in what Oracle is really doing.

Share on Facebook

The new EU Ambassador has taken over from the EU vassal states, announcing that he will be leading the show in Washington DC when it comes the vassal states of the EU.

Of course, this is something I expected, as the EU has it’s own UN ambassador as well.  Of course this was all played down before the sheeple in Europe agreed to this.

Share on Facebook

While full body scanners are great for looking at nake pictures of childern, they might not really do much for security.  Apparently scientists have announced that there is a material available that makes things invisible to the terahertz radiation (the kind used in the full body scanners).

It apparently was developed with a grant of 4.9 million Euros, so it doesn’t seem  too hard.  But we will keep the full body scanners, because pedophiles love them, and the scanners destroy your DNA, all things that make the government happy.

Share on Facebook

In what seems to be complete insanity, the same people who worked to outlaw vitamins in the European Union, now are proposing that Statins (which have harmful side effects) be put on menus to reduce the risk of heart attacks.

Some of the wonderful benefits risks of Statins include, but are not limited kidney failure, cataracts and liver problems.  So much better for you than taking a multi vitamin.

Share on Facebook

Actually Oracle has declared war on Google.  It seems that Java (like DotNet) has patents associated with it, because in America we like to have patents on abstract things (for instance the famous 6368227, method of swinging on a swing patent).  Now patents used to be required to be a physical thing, then they used to be just specific, now they can be whatever the lawyers can get away with.

While this has been covered at Groklaw, they point out that Oracle once told congress that:

Oracle Corporation opposes the patentability of software. The Company believes that existing copyright law and available trade secret protections, as opposed to patent law, are better suited to protecting computer software developments.

Patent law provides to inventors an exclusive right to new technology in return for publication of the technology. This is not appropriate for industries such as software development in which innovations occur rapidly, can be made without a substantial capital investment, and tend to be creative combinations of previously-known techniques.

Even if patent law were appropriate for protection of software, due to the large volume of recently-granted software patents and the rising number of new applications, the current patent process would continue to be troublesome for the software industry. Software patent examinations are hindered by the limited capability of searching prior art, by the turnover rate among examiners in the Patent and Trademark Office, and by the confusion surrounding novelty and innovation in the software arena. The problem is exacerbated by varying international patent laws, which both raise the cost and confuse the issue of patent protection.

Unfortunately, as a defensive strategy, Oracle has been forced to protect itself by selectively applying for patents which will present the best opportunities for cross-licensing between Oracle and other companies who may allege patent infringement.

Now Google has not sued Oracle but that doesn’t matter, because what a company says they will do and what they actually will do are different things.  This unfortunately taints the whole legacy of Sun (which developed Java) and also threatens MySql (and popular open source database) because both of these entities are now owned by Oracle.  Some people say that Oracle brought this lawsuit because Steve Jobs (CEO of Apple) and Larry Ellison (CEO of Oracle) are great friends and they both hate open software, and Android is beginning to eat into Apple’s iPhone market share.

It seems that Google wanted to use Java on their mobile device, but alas, there wasn’t a free version of Java that ran on mobile devices.  Most people don’t realize it, but many Microsoft powered mobile devices do NOT have a Java virtual machine, because even though Sun had released an open source version of Java, they made it almost impossible to implement it on a mobile device (see this article).  Google in trying to embrace Java (instead of just using C++ with some extensions like many would have like) opened the door to a potential lawsuit from Sun/Oracle.  While Google developed their Java interpreter (otherwise called a Java Virtual Machine) from scratch, I would argue that they did infringe on the very broad patents that Oracle aquired when it bought Sun, the question to be decided by the courts are broad patents valid.

Unfortunately the lawyers will be laughing all the way to the bank while the rest of us watch helplessly as incredible amounts of money (and it could be billions) are spent on this venture.

In any case, there still is C++ for people who want to use an unencumbered language.

Share on Facebook

According to an article at the Huffington Post, Coca-Cola has responded to a lawsuit that their vitaminwater makes unwarranted health claims that “no reasonable consumer could have been misled by vitaminwater’s labeling” into thinking that there were any real health benefits!

Of course, that might be true if people actually go and read the label, which has 33 grams of sugar, and very little vitamins.  From the judge’s order (pdf) here are the claims that are being litigated:

1.  The description of the product as a “Nutrient-Enhanced Water Beverage”;
2.  The phrase “vitamins + water = all you need” on the product label;
3.  Flavor names such as “rescue” and “defense”;
4.  The name “vitaminwater” itself;
5.  The statement “vitamins + water = what’s in your hand” on in-store advertising materials;
6.  The statement “this combination of zinc and fortifying vitamins can . . . keep you healthy as a horse” on the label of vitaminwater’s “defense” flavor;
7.  The statement “specially formulated to support optimal metabolic function with antioxidants that may reduce the risk of chronic diseases, and vitamins necessary for the generation and utilization of energy from food” on the label of vitaminwater’s “rescue” flavor;
8.  The statement “specially formulated to provide vitamin [A] (a nutrient known to be required for visual function), antioxidants and other nutrients [that] scientific evidence suggests may reduce the risk of age-related eye disease” on the label of vitaminwater’s “focus” flavor;
9.  The statement “specially formulated with bioactive components that contribute to an active lifestyle by promoting healthy, pain-free functioning of joints, structural integrity of joints and bones, and optimal generation and utilization of energy from food” on the label of vitaminwater’s “balance” flavor;
10.  The statement “specially formulated with nutrients required for optimal functioning of the immune system, and the generation and utilization of energy from food to support immune and other metabolic activities” on the label of vitaminwater’s “defense” flavor;
11.  The statement “specially formulated with [B] vitamins and theanine.  The [B] vitamins are there to replace those lost during times of stress (physical and mental).  Theanine is an amino acid found naturally in tea leaves and has been shown to promote feelings of relaxation.  This combination can help bring about a healthy state of physical and mental being” on the label of vitaminwater’s “B-relaxed” flavor;
12.  The statement “specially formulated with nutrients that enable the body to exert physical power by contributing to structural integrity of the musculoskeletal
system, and by supporting optimal generation and utilization from food” on the label of vitaminwater’s “Power-C” flavor.

So there you go, just because the advertising for something claims that “it’s all that you need” doesn’t mean that it’s true.  In fact most of what you see and here on television doesn’t have to have any basis in reality.  The sad thing is that Coca-Cola while having lost a summary motion to dismiss could still win this case.

And that’s a sad statement about the America (so-called) justice system.  It’s really about how much money the litigants have, more than anything else (there is some judicial bias, but everyone pretends there isn’t).

Share on Facebook

I am not a big fan of YouTube videos (mostly because people tell me that they can’t view them at some locations).  In the video below a retired U.S. Army Colonel goes on television to warn that there is a real risk that Israel might attack Iran this month.

This comes on Israel detaining the former Health and Human Services Secratary, Donna Shala, who had gone to Israel to attempt to STOP a boycott of Israel, even though she was part of an official delegation.  With friends like this…..

Share on Facebook

Recently I’ve been using Outlook to work with an Exchange Server.  Now the “recommended” setting for the connection was to use “Cached Exchange mode”, what this gives users is the ability to view their mail when the Exchange server is not available, or the connection is down.

However, for me at least, it caused nothing but problems.  Outlook would hang, and other imap type connections (e.g. to Gmail) using Thunderbird worked much better.  Cached Exchange mode was introduced in Exchange 2003, and Microsoft has been promoting ever since.  That said, cached Exchange mode actually means that more connections to the Exchange server are made, and that the connections are not maintained!  In other words, with a good network connection, cached Exchange mode might actually be slower, though if you work disconnected you see nothing.  Also when you send an email, you don’t really know when Outlook will send it (because it has to reestablish the connection).

The thing is that some of these problems are on the server side, specifically with a 32 bit server running Exchange and users using cached exchange mode, each user will be using a minimum of 10 connections (4 synchronization threads, with 2 connections each, and a fast thread with another 2).  So the users using cached Exchange mode sometimes get stuck to the end of the line for getting data from Exchange.  Now since I try to keep the infromation in Exchange to the calendar and about 10 important emails, it makes no sense for me to use cached Exchange mode, and whether it does for other people should be for them to figure out, but I do not believe that cached Exchange mode is the magic solution to performance problems with Exchange that Microsoft has pushed it out as.  Some installations throttle the Outlook Address Book in Exchange to limit the performance issues that are caused by the cached Exchange mode on the server side as well.

Now some things don’t work if you don’t use cached Exchange mode, the junk mail filter doesn’t work (and if you rely on it, then you really have problems, imho).   Of course Microsoft actually recommends disable the client side junk filter (see this) that article also addresses that the primary use (scheduling) I have for Outlook and Exchange, actually works worse in cached Exchange mode, so for some users (e.g. me!) cached Exchange mode actually degrades performance.

Share on Facebook

The German government, after being ignored by Apple, has issued an unprecedented public warning about exploits that “ allows potential attackers access to the complete system, including administrator rights“.  It warns that users should only go to sites that they trust until Apple issues a fix.

I am sure Steve Jobs will say that every platform has issues.  And that is true, but the iPhone/iPad is a walled garden device where Apple controls (or at least wants to control) all the software that people can put on their device.  Whereas Android, and Windows Mobile devices allow people to put whatever silly software they want on them.

In fact the Apple Developer License includes a Non-Disclosure Agreement, which means that developers can’t even talk about the agreement that they agreed to (at least that is what I heard, I would have to sign up for it to read it, a catch 22 situation).  Some people even say that the Apple Developer license is incompatible with the license that many free software programs use, call the Gnu Public License (it’s the license that Linux uses for example).

But don’t worry iPhone users you can still use your phone as a phone, that is if you can get a signal.

Share on Facebook

        string strFilter = "*.exe;*.dll";
        string folder = Directory.GetCurrentDirectory();
        string[] filters = strFilter.Split(';');
        ArrayList files = new ArrayList();

        foreach (string filter in filters)
        {
            files.AddRange(Directory.GetFiles(folder, filter));
        }        

        foreach (string file in files)
        {
            BaseCoffReader reader = new ManagedCoffReader(file);
            CoffHeader coffHeader = reader.Parse();
            DateTime timeStamp = new DateTime(1970, 1, 1, 0, 0, 0).AddSeconds(coffHeader.TimeDateStamp);
            FileInfo fileInfo = new FileInfo(file);
            bool readOnlyflag = fileInfo.IsReadOnly;
            if (readOnlyflag)
                fileInfo.IsReadOnly = false;
            try
            {
                fileInfo.CreationTime = timeStamp;
                fileInfo.LastWriteTime = timeStamp;
            }
            catch (Exception e)
            {
                Console.WriteLine("Exception: {0}\nFile name:{1}\n - TimeDateStamp: {2}", e.ToString(), file, timeStamp);

            }
            if (readOnlyflag)
                fileInfo.IsReadOnly = true;
        }

Share on Facebook

I am not a fan of Blackberry, but I do think that there is something good about it when you have many governments complaining that the devices should be outlawed because the messages can’t be easily intercepted.

Which only tells you just how much information the governments routinely intercept if they are going nuts over the blackberry devices.  Personally I strongly encourage people to use encryption, but since it’s not integrated into most communincation systems (email, texting, etc), most people find it “too burdensome” and so refuse to use it.  It’s not that I am doing anything, it’s just that I believe that people should have the right to privacy, though that may be a quaint idea that the courts will override to protect us from evil invaders (not from Mexico though).

Share on Facebook

It seems that America loves rich pedophiles, or at least, doesn’t want to make them suffer.  Jeffery Epstein, a billionaire hedge fund manager, allegedly had girls as young as 12 flown all around the world to satisfy his desires.   He served a one year sentence in house arrest in his Palm Beach mansion with trips to go out allowed.  He also was allowed to travel to his private island while under “arrest”.

Of course what might have helped is that some of the flights that were shipping the under age girls around for sexual favors also had other highly placed politicians on them.

In other words, it’s easy to get away with a crime when you have dirt on high level politicians.

Share on Facebook

Christopher Story, the editor of International Currency Review, who had long been reporting on the underhanded financial dealings involving the highest officials in the United States has passed away.  This is sad news for those who believe that the people in positions of public trust should be held accountable.

Share on Facebook