As the UN climate talks continue in Bali, and many countries continue trying to make progress on international agreements on dealing with climate change, Canada’s conservative government seems to have a different plan - do the bidding of big oil and sabotage all progress at the climate talks, contrary to the wishes of most Canadians. So far has Canada slipped, under the current government, from its former position as bastion of international diplomacy at the Montreal negotiations two years ago, that at the weekend Canada won the “fossil of the day” award, for doing the most to block progress at the negotiations.

It’s time to make some noise, Canada: head on over to avaaz.org and tell Harper to stop blocking the UN climate talks. It only takes a minute.

Once you’ve done that, read on for more contact details. A phone call is worth a thousand emails…

read on

Google recently added Vancouver to Google Transit. This is extremely useful, as Translink’s own trip planner is so bad as to be almost unusable. However, one of my friends noticed something which I thought was rather amusing…

The system appears to think it is possible to walk on water.

Amazing.

The spam filtering setup on our server is pretty good - SpamAssassin with Bayesian filtering and the FuzzyOCR Plugin which I installed to deal with the rise of image-based spam last year. Still, a few email addresses that route to me are very public, and most days one or two spam messages get through the filters.

This morning I noticed a new phenomenon in my inbox. I almost moved it across into my “missed spam” folder without giving it a second thought (we train our filters with missed spam to improve the Bayesian analysis), but something caught my eye:

“That’s odd,” I thought, so I opened the pdf. (Note, in general unless you know what you’re doing, it’s a really bad idea to open attachments if you don’t know the sender or weren’t expecting something from them - it could be a virus.)

That’s right, it’s spam, in a pdf file. While spamassassin does a great job of analysing text, and even images using FuzzyOCR, no analysis is done of pdf attachments, so this one slipped through the net. (I’ve had seven copies of this so far today.)

What next? Well, if this type of spam continues (and there’s no reason to think it won’t) I expect we’ll see a pdf scanning plugin for SpamAssassin before too long. After that gains traction the spammers will undoubtedly adapt again with some new trick to avoid the filters. Rinse, and repeat.

The arms race continues…

This afternoon Phil and Toby, two friends of mine from Oxford, were found not guilty in a unanimous verdict at Bristol Crown Court. They were charged with conspiracy to cause criminal damage at an air force base in England in March 2003 when they tried to safely disable US B52 bombers in a non-violent and accountable action to prevent them from bombing Iraq. Their main defence, with which the jury agreed, was that they were acting to prevent damage to life and property in Iraq, and war crimes by the aggressors (the use of cluster bombs and radioactive “bunker-busters”).

I think Toby sums it up quite well:

Hundreds of thousands of Iraqi people have still suffered as a result of the Government’s actions. It shouldn’t have come to the point that people had to take direct action to try to check the abuse of executive power.

It shouldn’t, but it did, and I have a huge amount of respect for Phil and Toby for having the courage to take action trying to stop an illegal war. They both spent three months in jail after their arrest and the last four years fighting this legal battle. Thank you both. The verdict today has highlighted, once again, that the UK government acted illegally in supporting the US-led attack on Iraq. It will be interesting to see the coverage in the media tomorrow as the conclusion of Phil and Toby’s case thrusts this issue back into public view.

Read more at b52two.org or on their blog.

Here’s a small taste of what I’ve been getting up to at the weekends recently. Telemark skiing in the backcountry, staying at cabins without a chair lift in sight. This is still my first season skiing “free heel”, but I think it’s safe to say that I’m hooked.

Oh, and just for the record, no that is not me exclaiming “pow pow baby” in the audio.