Month: September 2003

Hey, remember that advertising-laden Segway from that earlier post of mine?

You don’t? Perhaps it’s time for a gratuitous re-posting of the woman in pleather pants on the Segway, don’t you think? I think so.

Ohhhh yeah.

Ahem. Anyways, raku from the #joiito IRC channel found the company that provides them: Chariot Media. Your company can rent these Segways, which will have your logo screened onto them.

I predict that someday, some really eccentric guy with a little extra money to burn will rent one of these, get “WILL YOU MARRY ME” silkscreened on it, and circle his intended bride going “Willya? Willya? Willya?”

Oh, who am I kidding? It’ll probably be me, and I’ll be playing the damned accordion too. You lucky, lucky girl, whoever you are.

Oops. I got the link to Kung Fu Christ wrong. It’s fixed now.

In BoingBoing, Cory pointed out Al Franken and Don Simpson’s The Gospel of Supply Side Jesus, featuring who bears a suspicious resemblance to the funhouse-mirror Jesus worshipped by large chunks of the Canadian Alliance Party. He’s an Ayn Rand-flavoured Jesus; a Jesus who was only kidding about kindess to the poor, dirty foreigners, the diseased and scoiety’s outcasts, a Jesus who’d never hang out with prostitutes and longshoremen.

There’s the theory that went around the Web a little while back — that Jesus healed using cannabis. Hey, He could turn water into Jagermeister, so why not hummus into hoolies?

But here’s one that combines Jesus with martial arts, pointed out to me by Lisp dude and roboticist (really!) John “Lemonodor” Wiseman — Kung Fu Christ! Here’s an excerpt from the famous “any one of you chumps who’s never done anything bad before, feel free to chuck a rock” scene:

A crowd of unruly journalists, lawyers, and businessmen was pummeling a woman. Jesus leapt between the woman and her attackers, applying a quick series of hand immobilizations to defend her. The mob fell back, and the chairman of the chamber of commerce stepped forward to address him. “This woman is an adulteress. The law says we’re supposed to pound her to death with rocks.” Jesus stooped to the ground and began tracing a figure in the sand, sketching the arm and leg positions for a basic defensive stance. “Hey,” said the chairman, “what’s the hold up?” Jesus stood up. “Look,” he said, “if there’s one of you who has never sinned, let him begin the stoning.” “I’ve never sinned,” said a well-muscled scribe, picking up a rock and adding in a low voice, “and I’m a better fighter than you, too.” “You’re lying on both counts,” Jesus said as the challenger stepped forward. Jesus knocked the rock from his hand with a crescent kick.

Jesus’ kung-fu is the best, you know.

I owe lots of people either a phone call or email. I’m ploughing through a large to-do list as quickly as I can, and if I owe you a call or email message, rest assured you’re on my list. Thanks for your patience.

This morning, Boss Ross read my blog entry explaining the whole Verisign / Site Finder fiasco. He came up to me and said, “Hey, I was going to suggest that you write a blog entry on that topic. You know, why don’t you write an entry for The Farm [the developers’ blog run by Tucows] that provides examples of how this could break certain types of software?”

The funny thing is that I already had a little example program that I wrote when I first started noodling with networking in Python. The only problem is that it’s a little too tasteless for an official Tucows site (although changing a little text fixes all that). However, here at The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century, we believe in the maxim that avant-garde typographer Harley Parker put in McLuhan’s book, Counterblast: “Good taste is the first resort of the witless.”

So here you have it: the unaltered, if somewhat tasteless, example program…

So what do I mean by “The internet is over”?

In this case, when I say “over”, I don’t mean “not functioning”; the very fact that you’re reading this blog proves otherwise. What I mean is “over” as in “no longer relevant”, the way the word is used in lines like “grunge is over”.

Back when I worked at OpenCola, my friend and co-worker Chris Cummer worked some pretty late hours trying to get an application ready in time for the DefCon 8 hacker conference. During the very end of one of those all-nighters, Chris, in a sleep-derpived fit of giddiness checked and found that the domain name drinkyourownpee.com was still available. I remarked that when that domain name got taken, the internet would, in my humble opinion, be officially “over”.

I wrote a little Python script that I could run every now and again to see if the internet was over. You’ll need to get your paws on Timothy O’Malley’s timeoutsocket.py script (a very handy thing that once imported makes every TCP connection support a timeout).

import timeoutsocket

  import urllib

  timeoutsocket.setDefaultSocketTimeout(30)

  print "Checking to see if the internet is over..."

  try:

      theURL = urllib.urlopen("http://drinkyourownpee.com")

      print "The internet is over."

  except IOError:

      # (Of course, I'm assuming that the user's

      # net connection is working properly.)

      print "It's still good."

  except timeoutsocket.Timeout:

      print "Ask again later."

  

Until yesterday, this Python script, when run, would output the line It’s still good.

However, as a result of Verisign’s re-directing all non-existing .com and .net URLs to their Site Finder site, all domain names now resolve, including drinkyourownpee.com. When you run it, it outputs either The internet is over or occasionally Ask again later.

So there you have it: the internet is over. The program said so.

I think we should make Verisign drink their own pee.

C’mon, he was a musician who didn’t quite fit in. How could I not comment on his passing?

He wore all black before the goths and punks did. He wrote about poppin’ caps in guys’ asses before gangsta rap (Ice-T once said of Johnny’s lyric: “‘I shot a man in Reno, just to watch him die’…that sounds like something Bushwick Bill would say!”). He recorded a concept album about the plight of Native Americans before it became cool to be concerned about them. He performed in prisons not to make himself look tough (unlike those poseurs, Metallica) but out of concern for the lowest members of society.

And hey, who else could take both Shel Silverstein’s wonderfully goofy A Boy named Sue and Nine Inch Nails’ goth anthem Hurt in his own voice and style and make amazing singles out of them? What other country star would Carson T. Foster, host of Kickass Karaoke, have paid tribute to or who’d be mourned by country and western fans, goths, rockers and punks alike?

Johnny Cash was an influence on me. On the “about” page of my old blog, he’s one of two musicans — as opposed to genres — that I cite as influences. Ring of Fire was one of the first songs I learned how to play on the accordion. When I bought my trademark cowboy hat, I asked myself “Would Johnny Cash approve?”

My favourite Johnny Cash memory is from shortly after new year’s 2000. I was in the James Joyce pub in the Old Town in Prague. The barman had just shut off the sound system and climbed onto the bar, where I was already standing. He announced to the crowd — a mishmash of Czechs, Irish, Scots, Germans, Swedes, Italians, Poles, French, English and Americans and introduced me to the crowd. I then squeezed out the opening chords to Ring of Fire, and when I started singing, it looked as though everyone — even those for whom English wasn’t their first language — knew the words.

Why’s Johnny flipping the bird? The story is here.

Thanks for everything, Johnny.

Suppose while typing the URL for this blog, you missed the “o” key and typed “blgware” instead of “blogware”. Until today, you’d get an error message because the domain “blgware.com” doesn’t exist.

That changed today. Here, try visiting accordionguy.blgware.com. You no longer get an error message, but a search engine page.

The page you get is Site Finder, a search page owned by Verisign. Verisign is the 800-pound gorilla of the internet, a for-profit company that by virtue of buying Network Solutions, who were originally in charge of domain name assignment, are in charge of all domain names that end with “.com” or “.net”. Every registrar pays Verisign a fee for every .com and .net domain name they register.

(Full disclosure: my employer is Tucows, Inc. and it is, among other things, a domain name registrar.)

Now they’re using their monopoly power over internet’s infrastructure to generate profit. One of the companies providing the search engine technology for Site Finder is Overture, which is a “paid placement” search engine: advertisers bid for placement in their search engine and pay each time their search result is clicked. According to this article, Verisign stands to make about US$100 million per year off Site Finder.

This is probably going to break a lot of software. While error messages aren’t necessarily pretty, a lot of software that accesses the ‘net uses the “there’s no domain by that name” error as its cue that a given domain name does not exist. Electronic Frontier Foundation Chairman Brad Templeton says:

E-mail delivery will be interfered with. Scores of other applications will also break. In some cases, there will be security problems, where users running applications that should have given them an error now connect them to a distant Internet site.

Worse still is the fact that Verisign, probably anticipating the outcry, didn’t give anyone much warning that they were going to pull this stunt. This, as Salon’s Andrew Leonard observes, is not the way things are normally done:

Once upon a time, when engineers were considering making major changes to the way the Internet worked, they asked other engineers whether what they were proposing was a good idea. They even came up with a nifty way to solicit feedback, the “Request for Comments” system. If you had a good idea, you would write it up, post an RFC to the Net, and then enjoy the fun as the proposal was constructively ripped to shreds.

This was a good thing. For example, if implementing your proposal would have ended up breaking parts of the Net, your colleagues would get the chance to tell you, instead of discovering all the wreckage after the fact.

There is a fix in the works. The ISC (Internet Software Consortium) is going to distribute a patch to BIND (Berkeley Internet Name Domain, software used to convert domain names into numerical internet addresses) that blocks Site Finder. To paraphrase a classic line about the internet, it will see Site Finder as damage and route around it.

Want to find out a little more about what all this techno hoo-hah means? Check these out…

Layperson-friendly

• Today’s User friendly comic sums it up in three panels.
• Salon has an article called Thanks, VeriSign, for breaking the Internet
• Wired.com article: ISC to cut off Site Finder

Techier

• Verisign condemned for domain-system changes
• Adam Langley has all kinds of Verisign countermeasures on his site, ImperialViolet
• Paul Vixie in response to Site Finder controversy
• Domain Names Gone Wild!
• Boss Ross has been in this domain name business for years and is commenting regularly on the whole thing on his blog.

I just wanted to say “hello” and “thank you” to the YULBlog folks (YUL is the airport code for Montreal’s Mirabel Airport) for holding a gathering for me and Paul during our visit.

If any of you come to Accordion City, I’ll arrange for a gathering of the GTABloggers to greet you!

(More stuff about our Montreal trip tomorrow.)