The "only legitimate successor of dotcomtod" and "leading provider and distributor of exit-oriented company reports" boocompany.com has fallen victim to its enemies. Still unknown people achieved the blocking of the boocompany.com domain and blustered to obtain its cancellation from the Google search index. All in all, the website and its forum seemed to be offline, but were still available via IP address. The well-known but anonymous face of boocompany.com, Lanu, initiated an appeal for funds to get the domain back. Obviously, this campaign shows first results: the Boocompany is available under a new gTLD: www.boocompany.my, the forum can be found at forum.boocompany.my. Hopefully, the .com domain also will be back soon. The riff-raff that gained the domain by trickery already got a painful kick in the pants; whatever they tried to accomplish: it doesn't work out. (Source)

We've had it all: Spam that promised millions of Dollars, widows of dictators trying to save their money, c1111alis and v1aaaaagra to bring the lost youth back, lonely hearts seeking for wealthy men - the world of Spam is colourful and because those bandits want your money, they usually do it polite, telling you their "friend", their last hope etc.

Seems that a new trend emerges: rant spam is -at least for me- a relatively new development. What did happen? Commenter "Pua" (with a faked? googlemail address) writes:

I'm trying to keep away from reading posts like this. It is totally meaningless. Ain't it shame to post rubbish like this?

Well, thank you, Pua, for these wise words! You probably want me to click that link you declared as your homepage and that's in turn located at a server stephanie-from-lazy-town-naked. rowgod.nx.cn. Folks: playing games is okay, every fool has one free try, but don't make me angry. I told you.

Whoever is looking for a reason for not joining a social community website now can find a convincing solution in this little 'accident': obviously unhappy with their working conditions, employees of a hotel in East Germany complained about their employer in a StudiVZ forum. Members of this group made fun of the handicapped hotel boss, cracked jokes about a still uncleared gas accident and pretended a plan to blow up the hotel. Now they got the sack.

Lessons learned: First, these guys were incredibly dumb. Even if working there was a nightmare there would be better means to overcome their trauma. Second, they felt secure within a discussion group of a big online community. They were not. (Source)

Never change a running system!

MadScientists corollary: Never unplug a system that is meant to run!

The man who has called the 'movie axiom' passed away. One of the last strong straight guys, I'll never forget his roles in Planet of the Apes, The Omega Man, and Soylent Green. (Source)

"Strong Labor Market for Scientists and Engineers" yesterday, "IT job security plummets five times faster than nationwide average" today. Hire & fire in IT is becoming mainstream - at least in the U.S. And politicians and deans still wonder why young people are still unwillingly to start a career in IT. The discrepancy between the self image of universities and scientists on the one, the always hand-wringing economy allegedly searching for IT professionals and the daily routine in the workplace gets more and more obvious.

They know how to water your mouth (if you are into electronics, engineering, or any other scientific discipline): IEEE digitized several historic proceedings, starting with 1913's Proceedings of the IRE, and made them accessible through IEEEXplore. Read everything about the hot new stuff of our fathers and grandfathers, learn about the history of our now common gadgets and have insight into the very first articles on TV, the transistor and many other things. Only for IEEE members and only if you subscribed to the accordings journals! Great stuff! (Source)

Blogs and bloggers were subject of several studies so far, however the readers and commenters were still unknown - until now. A recent study of University of California, Irvine, discusses the blog-reading habits of 15 participants (if 15 blog readers are enough to draw a complete picture and if there are cultural differences among the nations is another question that would be wort considering).

Maybe the fact of having done that study itself is more interesting than its results: so the researchers (led by Eric Baumer, doctoral candidate at UCI’s Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences; Mark Sueyoshi, international studies and East Asian cultures undergraduate student; and Bill Tomlinson, informatics professor) found out that there are "lurkers" as well as savvy commenters, that there are different opinions about what makes a blog, that reading a blog has become a habit, like checking e-mails or reading the news, and, mostly surprising, that readers feel a "responsibility to make insightful contributions". In other words: all quiet on the western front. (Source)

And another article about the question "Where have the girls [in IT] gone?" Much more interesting than following the assumed reason for this well-known phenomenon of the dramatic loss of female IT workers in the last few years are the reader's comments. For example this one from an anonymous reader:

Having been in IT for 30 years, I have encountered lack of support, devaluation of my contributions, endured comments like "software is now so good even a girl can do it" (from someone ignorant of Grace Hopper, and lately, with a large influx of foreign-born male programmers, I have had to put up with cross-cultural snubbing as well and the looks of "just let her talk, we'll decide out how we'll do it later when she's not here;" and watched in disbelief as I moved from job-to-job and was always replaced by several people, all of which were male and each of which was paid more than myself. "Girls" aren't dumb - they are learning from their mothers' and aunts' mistakes and looking for more fertile ground.

That sums it up for me.

A spammer's life must be awful and boring. Awful because spammers always have one foot in prison, boring because sending all these silly stories to bazillions of artless Internet users and gaining no love for this.But today I found something really funny. The "Internet Maintenance" writes:

Dear Email Users,

This is from the internet maintance services in the united state of America.

Due to this continous arising of internet scams and fraud,Google have
decided to take appropriate maintance of our Email address.

You are hereby advise and notify to send your username and password to this
email address below:

internetmaintainancekeeping1@gmail.com

This will ensure the protection of your Email Address against scam and
fraud mails.

Please you are advise to follow this format....

Example username.........sh*ron@gm*il.com
password..........123456

Sincerely Yours
Sharon Jones

Well, Sharon: I linked your address with a mailto: tag and hope that the usual harvesters soon will fill your mailbox with a lot of useful information and mail addresses! :-)

Much rumor on the next generation Internet: the Grid, a recent development at CERN, will be "10.000 times faster than a typical broadband connection" (Source) but there are still many questions left: considering recent headlines about German providers (Source 1, Source 2, Source 3), canceling their flatrate customers I wonder how these masses of data that would be stored in the "grid" would be available if your download rate would still be limited. Additionally, storing data in a datacenter somewhere in the grid immediately raises security and privacy questions that wouldn't emerge if you would store your data locally. A discussion about the costs of this new technology (any details?) would also be nice.

Never being mainstream, Genetic Programming (GP) has though interesting applications in various fields, like financial mathematics, process control, signal processing and computer graphics, among other things. I noticed a short hype in the early 90s, but GP soon became a valid and reliable tool. I remember a big plate of GP-built graphics programmed by Karl Sims hanging on a wall at one of my former employers. His website shows many of his works that are beautiful as well as scientifically interesting. For all of you who missed the basics (and for me as a reminder) the authors of A Field Guide to Genetic Programming (Riccardo Poli, Bill Langdon, Nic McPhee) provide a fine book about GP on their website: 200+ pages about Genetic Programming, pure information science and no-nonsense. For free. Simply great!

Much work to do for SEOs: Google announces extended crawling by handling HTML forms on websites in order to get to those pages that would be reachable only by user interaction. This is a try to make these parts of the web visible that are still unavailable to crawlers that simply follow links and don't know how to handle things like the target attribute of forms. It will be interesting to see how Google handles the result lists, because the offered links would possibly result in HTTP POSTs and GETs and I don't know if every web application out there in the wild will tolerate this. But for SEOs this will be the next bonanza, that's for sure! (Source)

MERL's (Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories) presentation of a new surveillance system that doesn't use video but that tracks every footstep in a building you do would be more effective and would protect the privacy of people even better than CCTV, says Yuri Ivanov, one of the developers of the motion detection system at MERL. This system doesn't make pictures of you when you enter rooms and hallways, but it records your footage with several sensors thus enabling the controller to have a 'god's eye view' (Ivanov) on evereybody's movements in a building.

Certainly there are advantages of this system compared to older systems: facility management might improve escape routes based on the collected data, saving energy could be made easier by tracking people's stay times. But also every break somebody has and every walk to the toilet will also be detected to name just a few. Surveillance will be total, it will be possible to identify each one's position in no time. So this system won't 'preserve privacy' but it will just be ignored, or: more convenient, while scanning its data. Maybe most people will forget they're being tracked with every step they do. Maybe they think it isn't surveillance at all. I don't like the idea. (Source)

If you have read more than one post of this blog, you certainly know my attitude towards surveillance and the unsatisfiable greed of our politicians for data and even more data. This includes surveillance on the workplace as well. Today's headlines once more show a sorry sight of employee's rights where widespread surveillance measurements are introduced in a call center and employees are immediately fired who don't want to accept this. Initator of this campaign - as was so often the case - is a major German food discounter. Similar stories are common in the retail sector, so this is nothing new. Quite new indeed is the willingness to obedience against this discounter, because the company starting to snoop their people is a call center, a service provider of the mentioned discounter.

After having fired 20 brave folks who were unwilling to support surveillance at their workplace, this company is looking for new employees. Surveillers. I wonder what type of person will apply for that job. (And I wonder what makes decision makers and company heads so damn sure that they are immune to rebellion and assault. How depressive can the working class be?)

Recalling actual trends in online advertizement, researchers at the University of Washington found out that already one percent of all web pages requested by users are changed in content during their transit from web server to the user, sometimes with harmful content. The study has been executed with 50.000 clients and discovered the mentioned altering phenomena, including ad injections and problematic security features like ad-blocking that sometimes were even increasing trouble than eliminitating it. In their study, the authors present an alternative to switching to https, what would be a costly solution to prevent ad injections. Whether web tripwire is the measurement of choice is yet to be seen. (Source)

...on open source, multicore architecture, literate programming, and reusable code.