Jon's Notes
First steps with AIM-based social networks
Here you can see a
early example of what I
talked about earlier. A line shows a relationship between two users. Arrows signify message direction. Diamonds represent local users.
Eventually line lengths will show message traffic. More messages will result in shorter lengths—showing the closeness between people. Bubbles and diamonds will change size to show which proportion of messages came from that particular user.
The whole graph enhancement thing will be slightly delayed while I track down some input validation bugs.
And now, a bit of complaining about
Symantec's web filtering product,
Symantec Web Security.
I have come across two cases of blatantly false blocking in the past week alone. The first was the
Mozilla browser site. It is
blocked under the “Sex/Act” category. I’m willing to consider that this was a case of accidental blocking, since it was blocked in only one category.
The second improperly blocked case is more interesting. I discovered this case while researching different technique for anonymous network communication. The
ONR site on
onion routing is being
blocked in every possible category.
There is really no way to excuse blocking the site on technical grounds. The WHOIS records for onion-router.net clearly show that the site is registered to the Navel Research Laboratory until 2007. The primary name server is in the .mil domain.
There are no jokes on the onion-router site. They are not advocating drug use. Nor is there any content which could be even remotely considered Occult or New Age. The only category that might remotely apply would be Anonymous Proxies, since they link to
privoxy.
The site in question just has papers on a technique for anonymous communication. By blocking in all categories Symantec is trying to censor research into areas which would make their life as a security company much more difficult.
Symantec: Making Network Research a Thought Crime
I'd like to thank the Concordia network admin for promptly unblocking mis-blocked sites.
This past week has been quite interesting.
Russ and I rebuilt the CUW BadgerNet room. Quite a bit of cruft had been plugged in here and there over time. We rebuilt the system from the original wiring diagrams. We also tried to lock down the cabinets in an effort to prevent things from being tacked on in the future.
On of my coworkers seems to have left a
wire stripper on top of a soda machine…. I'll return it on Monday.
The
Concordia Pep Band left for Hawaii. I'm still not sure why they are going to Hawaii to deliver phone books.
The
cover story in
<interactions> is interesting.
I'm nearly done writing a toolkit that generates graphs from
AIM Sniff logs using
GraphViz. Actually, I'm converting from AIM Sniff's odd hash delimited log format to XML. Then I'm converting the XML formatted logs to GraphViz format. The intermediate state (XML) is needed because I'm going to insert the data into a database and want to spend as little time as possible dealing with AIM Sniff's log format. Progress and source can be viewed
here.
Well, I can check one more thing off of the
Heinlein list.
Now if I can just clean my room…
