rants.org

Go see Jessica Ferris’s “Missing” in San Francisco on July 10th. Stop thinking — there is no decision to make. Just do it. Buy tickets. Tell your friends. Then show up. It’s that easy.

I saw Jessica perform in San Francisco a few years ago and it was mesmerizing. And that was for a show that she didn’t even particularly try to push. Now for Missing, she’s pulling out all the stops: in her 10 reasons to see “Missing” on July 10th, she outright commands her fans — of whom I am one — to rally, saying “this show is worth it”.

This smartly-constructed dark comedy is a mix of autobiography, physical theater, and social commentary. Says one audience reviewer: “I felt stimulated and energized by such a smart, quick, complex piece.” Says another, “It’s hilarious to the point of tears, touching, and close to the bone. How can she make me laugh till I cry telling such a dark story?”

The heart of the show is Ferris’s search for the truth about her father, who disappeared under mysterious circumstances when she was two years old. She portrays the many members of her family who tell their versions of the story of his disappearance. …

Here’s that tickets link again.

These two quotes from the June 10th New York Times beg for juxtaposition:

The first is from the article about the oldest leather shoe ever discovered:

…an Armenian doctoral student, Diana Zardaryan, noticed a small pit of weeds. Reaching down, she touched two sheep horns, then an upside-down broken bowl. Under that was what felt like “an ear of a cow,” she said. “But when I took it out, I thought, ‘Oh my God, it’s a shoe. To find a shoe has always been my dream.’”

The second is from Hidden Misery: A Glimpse Into North Korea, which draws on interviews with North Koreans who have escaped what may be the most isolated, oppressive country on the planet. One of the article’s sources is the wife of an official in the ruling Worker’s Party (for obvious reasons, no other identifying information is given):

Those North Koreans who have never crossed the border have no way to make sense of their tribulations. There is no Internet. Television and radio receivers are soldered to government channels. Even the party offical’s wife lacks a telephone and mourns her lack of contact with the outside world. Her first question to a foreigner was “Am I pretty?”

Saw another legitimate email bounced as spam today:

This message was created automatically by mail delivery software.

A message that you sent could not be delivered to one or more of its
recipients. This is a permanent error. The following address(es) failed:

  myfriend@myfriendsdomain.com
    (generated from myfriend@domain-on-shared-server.org)
    SMTP error from remote mail server after
    RCPT TO:<myfriend@myfriendsdomain.com>:
    host mx.service-myfriendsdomain-uses.com [216.122.171.54]:
    554 5.7.1 Service unavailable;
    Client host [67.152.129.89] blocked using
    hostkarma.junkemailfilter.com=127.0.0.2;
    Black listed at hostkarma

http://ipadmin.junkemailfilter.com/remove.php?ip=67.152.129.89

In other words, a completely legitimate mail was bounced because people who use the same mail server as the recipient receive too much spam.

Sound surprising? Here’s the scenario:

1. Sender spammer@spammyspamspam.com sends bad (even virus-laden) email to innocentvictim@domain-on-shared-server.com.
2. The innocentvictim@ account is configured to forward automatically to innocentvictim’s real email address, like ivictim@gmail.com or innovic@somepersonaldomain.com or whatever.
3. The recipient domain (gmail or somepersonaldomain) is protected by a spam-filter (in gmail’s case, their own custom filter, in the latter case, a filter like junkemailfilter.com’s service).
4. The spam filter simply sees spammy mail coming from the shared server.
5. The shared server gets docked points for sending spam!
6. Lather. Rinse. Repeat.
7. After a while, legitimate people get bounced for sending legitimate mail to innocentvictim@domain-on-shared-server.com, because the filtering service that protects the recipient’s final account treats all the forwards as spam, without unpacking them.

In other words, a server from which many people forward mail tends to get blacklisted not because that server originates any spam, but because addresses there receive spam. And who doesn’t receive spam? Right. You begin to see the problem . Furthermore, it’s very hard for the filtering service to do better: if the spam-filtering service were not to dock points in that scenario, then the spammers would get clever and structure their original mails to just look like forwarded mails. They don’t care. In fact, they already do that sometimes.

So as far as I can tell, blacklists are kind of inherently broken. I’ve personally had to deal with this problem many times. What I did in this case was go to the URL mentioned in the bounce message and removed our shared server’s IP from the blacklist, using the procedure offered by junkemailfilter.com. But they’ll just re-add us soon, because the source of the problem isn’t going away.

One solution would be for the forwarding source address to insert a special header (containing a unique code) into the mail before it passes the mail along to the final destination. Then on the junkemailfilter.com side, that person would configure their filtering to allow mails with that code through — never treat them as spam. However, that would be a lot of work for most email users, due to the heterogeneity of mail delivery software; I don’t see it as a generally applicable solution.

Another solution would be an interface at junkemailfilter.com whereby users could tell it “I’m auto-forwarding mail to you from domain-on-shared-server.com. Please keep that in mind when deciding whether domain-on-shared-server.com is an originating source for spam.”

Any other ideas?

Bob Ostertag has a short but lancing piece in the Huff Post today about how the New York Times got astroturfed by an organization calling itself the “Gulf of Mexico Foundation”. The NYT describes them as a “conservation group” when the evidence is that they are, essentially, an oil industry front.

I understand that the pressures of reporting a story as it happens are real and sometimes require cutting corners, but if you don’t have time to do fact checking, then why not simply avoid making any factual assertions you don’t have to make? Nothing about the story requires labeling them a “conservation group”. Just, you know, leave off the word “conservation” — that’s all it takes.

(Of course, doing some elementary digging into the group’s governance would have been even better, but failing that, the NYT could at least avoid doing their PR work for them.)

For folks in the SF Bay Area: I’m at speaking at WordCamp San Francisco this Saturday at 10:30am: Bodysurfing the Blogosphere: How an Audience-Distributed Film Won Big.

It’s an in-depth look at how audience distribution worked for Nina Paley’s freely-licensed film Sita Sings the Blues. The rest of the WordCamp speaker schedule looks great too: Richard Stallman, Scott Berkun, Matt Mullenweg, Scott Rosenberg (I’m just bummed my talk is at the same time as his), and more.

Come on by if you’re in the area!

This is going to be a short one, but I can’t go to bed without sharing the news:

PUBPAT (the Public Patent Foundation) and the ACLU have just won a major victory for scientific freedom: the US District Court for the Southern District of New York has ruled in favor of their argument that patents on genes that cause hereditary breast cancer and ovarian cancer are invalid. And the court made the ruling for the best of reasons: that genes are a product of nature and not patentable in themselves.

I’m not a lawyer, but it looks to me like Judge Robert Sweet examined the question about as thoroughly as one possibly could — start around page 101 of the judgment (marked as page 98 in the text) for the details. While the judge was unwilling to go so far as to rule the patents invalid on constitutional grounds, as the plaintiffs had asked, he made it clear that he was avoiding it only because there was no need to reach that conclusion to decide the case (constitutional questions are traditionally avoided if there is another way to reach a judgment).

Congratulations to PUBPAT and the ACLU! Both of them are non-profits; neither is swimming in money, the former probably even less than the latter. You know what to do (I just did).

I meant to post this sooner — my birthday was a month ago — but I just got busy. Anyway, these two wonderful objects came in the mail right on my birthday…

The first was a gift from Jim Blandy:

It’s a Lichtenberg Figure, that is to say, lightning captured in a solid medium. Whoa. They use a linear accelerator to bombard a block of acrylic (Polymethyl Methacrylate, which I can only assume is as cool as it sounds) with a beam of electrons. Eventually the negative charge builds up to a high enough level that the trapped charge surges out along branched pathways, I guess because the first bits of the surge create pathways that the next bits are more likely to follow, leading to the same kind of pattern — and for the same reason — as diffusion-limited aggregation. It is even more beautiful in real-life than it is in the photograph. Read more about it here here.

The other arrival was a gift from the choir I used to sing in in Chicago (and still miss every day): Golosá, the Russian Choir of the University of Chicago. Their second CD, Until Bright Day is out, and it’s absolutely beautiful — I can’t stop listening to it:

Listen to some tracks — you’ll be glad you did, and you’ll probably want to order the CD afterwards. If you live in Chicago, consider joining their mailing list (it’s low-traffic) to learn about upcoming concerts. They released the CD under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license, by the way — so please spread that music around, especially if you live near Chicago.

Thank you, Tammy, for sending the CD! Thank you, Jim, for sending the lightning! (Now there’s a sentence you don’t see every day.)

I meant to post this sooner, but the time when I took the photo was really busy because Winnie was moving in (!). While we were moving stuff from her apartment, we encountered a Snow Citizen:

Ah, Williamsburg. Whatever else you can say about it, it definitely has production values! (Well, except when it comes to sign painting — yes, that is the infamous sing language in the background.)

Breaking news: Rep. Bart Stupak (D-MI) will champion a new bill to provide more and better sex education to high-schoolers and even young adults, in a tactic designed to lower the number of abortions in America through improved access to information and counseling.

Rep. Stupak became famous during the debates leading up to the health care reform vote as the organizer of a group of anti-abortion Democratic representatives who withheld their votes until they were satisfied that the health care reform bill would provide no federal support for abortions. In fact, Stupak had earlier introduced a measure stating that explicitly. However, this was widely interpreted as merely a flare — a signal to his constituents about which side he’s on — since both existing law and the health care bill itself already contained language that had the effect Stupak and his group wanted. Nevertheless, they succeeded in wringing out of President Obama a further executive order stating that no federal money would be used for abortion.

Despite tensions between Rep. Stupak’s group and more left-leaning members of the Democratic Party, news of this latest educational initiative was greeted with enthusiasm across the liberal blogosphere:

Breaking news from James Vasile:

Scientists going back to Galileo have secretly abused corpses in the pursuit of knowledge. Researchers studying the Atlantic Ocean garbage patch have been throwing dead pigs into the sea just to see what happens next. Yes, that’s shocking and gross, but just like in the Whitewater scandal, it’s the coverup that is the crime.

National Geographic originally (maybe accidentally?) revealed the dead pig experiment in an article at nationalgeographic.com. You can clearly see references to the dead pigs in Google’s search results (see attached screen shot). The National Geographic url, though, makes no mention of the pigs at all. They scrubbed the record.

Why the coverup, National Geographic? Who are you protecting?!

Naturally, we had the rants.org crack investigative team look into this. James is right — something does smell funny here, and it’s not just dead pigs.

Let’s start with the Google search results. As you can see, at some point in the past the National Geographic article did talk about scientists using dead pigs to measure something about a newly-discovered Atlantic Ocean garbage patch:

The Google search results; red highlights the key words. (Original image here.)

The exact words in the Google preview snippet are: “After dropping dead pigs into the sea and watching via Webcams, researchers were…”.

Uh. What?

But if you visit the article now, it no longer mentions anything about dead pigs — the red arrow points to a failed search for the word “dead” in the page:

The National Geographic article; red arrow highlights the failed search for “dead”. (Original image here.)

The original article is no longer in Google’s cache, unfortunately; it’s been superseded by a revised version of the article. But the cached version does have a message at the top indicating that the word “pigs” appears only in links from other pages, not in the article itself, so obviously other people were on to this too:

Google’s cache of the page has already lost the mention of dead pigs. (Original image here.)

(The word “dead” doesn’t appear in the cached text of the article either; it’s just in the title of an unrelated sidebar news item in the cache.)

I know National Geographic isn’t the New York Times (then again, neither is the New York Times… but I digress). Still, silently removing a substantial fact from an article, leaving no notice of the change? That’s just not kosher.

National Geographic, the people have a right to know: what’s behind the dead pig coverup?