I do not miss at all in Oz. One of them: the Viennese weather.
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Bloody goddamn fucking flying around - and I'm not even in the air yet, let alone done with the three flights it'll take me to VIE.
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Ah, the joys of Scottish anarchopunk by Oi Polloi; comes quite handy when you read the mags on what the bastards in Redmond and Hollywood are cooking up again.

Ed Felten has an interesting (if you want to puke) piece on the unholy alliance at work: your Vista PC would be their PC. (Of course, if you're foolish enough to run their hole-riddled pieces of bloat you might very much deserve it.)

This recent Boingboing article outlines another goodie: your monitor will show fuzzy crap unless you pay the Hollywood Hoodlums.

Well, to that I say 'fuck them all!'. The MS Weenies and the Hollywood Hoodlums will certainly be the first against the wall when the revolution comes...

The "Australian International University" is a brilliant spoof by some pissed-off Oz academic. (Not me!) He made it into a variety of papers already (owing to newspeople without brains, humour and/or the necessary academic cynicism).

Some pearls to follow:

"The Australian International University website is produced by an organisation called Academic Jihad. Academic Jihad has sleeper cells spread throughout the Australian university system and is poised to unleash a merciless firestorm of pedagogy on unsuspecting students, both local and international."

"Here at the Australian International University we have rationalised the normal system of different university faculties into a single faculty. We realised that most of the other faculties were not generating sufficient income and were having a negative effect on the overall marketing plan of the university. As a result, the Australian International University only has one faculty - the Faculty of Business."

Cynical, me? No way!

Source: the ever-brilliant samizdata blog

...and I'm off for a few weeks in Austria. The schedules for meeting people are firming up already :-)
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-- David Richerby on blacklisting blacklists

I don't like worms and other crap that hammers my ssh servers with nonexistant users and/or lousy passwords. Not that they would get in anyway, but it still pisses me off sufficiently to do something about it. This script *blam*s all such suckers for a while. Share and enjoy.

The script tails a logfile (preferrably something low-volume like your auth.log) and looks for failed ssh entries. If the other side is not whitelisted and tries too often in a time window, an iptables command is issued. After a fair while the block is removed. Obviously all this is adjustable and I'll certainly extend the setup for other annoyances, too.

The idea came from here but that implementation I didn't like very much. The clean tailing of a log (safely across rotations etc.) was snarfed from logtail (part of logcheck) and the parsing of syslog messages came from Parse::Syslog (which doesn't work on your local data, only on full files. Silly thing.)

Well, not just yet. But the data retention plans of the EU mean that all the things you do online would have to be stored and available to the uniformed fuckers unconditionally.

It would be a good idea to sign the petition against said lousy plan.

(However, realising that this world is currently in a very Kafkaeske downward spiral, signing won't help; we need something more like a plague that kills 99% of all politicians to improve matters. Gene tech wizards, that would be a good project for you fellows!)

"Satisfaction guaranteed - or your rubbish back"
Now that's going to make an unsatisfied customer happy...

The Sarah Blasko gig tonight was so-so: the two support bands were ok, nothing special, and unfortunately Sarah had a bad case of the flu and had to stop the gig after a few songs. Bummer. But (little consolation that it is) her voice is really as good and beautifully haunting as on her CD.

Kudos to Michael Lynn. Full Disclosure at its best and the corporate scumbags at Cisco and ISS deserve what they get.

So let's share this gem of corporate hushing up.
Links to Cryptome's comments and mirror, Bruce Schneier's comments and the latest Boingboing article on the topic

I think you must be Aussie to consider the above as a song title (unless you want to name a funeral march; northern Novembers are nothing short of suicidal).

Why am I pondering such silly questions? I'm just listening to Sarah Blasko's first CD, which contains a lot of cool stuff including a non-suicidal song of said weird name.

On Wednesday she's playing a gig in Coolangatta (which is nearby: 20-25 minutes per car). Hmm, maybe I can find the time.