raisama.net

4a7d3d609129a9296bf7ac0608c2097

Can somebody explain to me where this hex string comes from?

It has lots of matches on Google. Most of them are on blog comments. But they appear on valid comments, so I don’t think it is some marker string being used by spam bots.

Getting a mailing-list archive URL from a Message-ID

It happens often to me: I am reading a mailing list on mutt and I want to send a pointer to the message to somebody.

I always wanted to be able to press a key on mutt, and a script would query mailing list archives and find a URL for the message on a mailing list archive. Today I have found this to be possible. Gmane has a “Message-Id” URL format tha allows you to do it. Just point to http://mid.gmane.org/<message-id> and it will redirect to the message on the archives, if it is present.

Now, getting a URL for a mailing list message is as simple as piping the message from mutt to this small script:

#!/bin/bash
mid="$(grep -m 1 -i ^Message-ID: | cut -d: -f2 | sed -e 's/^ *//')"
kfmclient openURL 'http://mid.gmane.org/'"$mid"

And this can be bound this to a keystroke under mutt by simply using something like this on .muttrc:

macro pager U "msg2url\n”

There are other mailing list archives with similar features. But they are more specific to some mailing lists, so they are not as comprehensive as Gmane. Some examples:

• http://kerneltrap.org/mailarchive/message-id/<message-id> (for KernelTrap mailing list archives)
• http://www.red-bean.com/threadfind (mostly Subversion-related mailing lists)

Brazil insisting on Internet Censorship

After the first fiasco, the brazilian judiciary insists that Internet Censorship is a good thing.

I haven’t found any news articles about it in english yet, but you can read the news in portuguese (or an automated translation). A court ordered the major brazilian ISPs to block another site. Now the target is not a big site, but a tourism agency that got some attention from the brazilian media recently, in news related to sexual tourism in Brazil.

It seems that at least the ISP I am using right now (BrasilTelecom) haven’t implemented the block yet. But considering that on the YouTube blocking case they have done this immediately after receiving the court notification, I think it is just a matter of time until ISPs receive a notification and implement the new block.

This blocking was also ordered because of a “public image protection” lawsuit. Not by a celebrity in this case, but somebody whose picture was taken and published on the site. The sad part is that probably most brazilians will not care this time because it is a small site not targetted to brazilians, and then we have a legal precedent for further Internet blocks caused by stupid reasons.

Google is Smart

This surprised me:

How Google knows that “mandriva” was formerly called “mandrake”, to be smart enough to highlight “mandrake” on the results as if I had also searched for “mandrake”?

I don’t think they have added this to a “synonyms table” manually. I believe this was somehow detected automatically. My question is: how the Google software could have detected this automatically?

Update (Feb 2nd 2006): I think I’ve found how this was done. I’ve described my theory in the comments.

Internet Censorship caused by a judge that doesn’t know how to write

The conclusion of the Internet censorship story is that the judge that ordered the blocking of YouTube cancelled the order. In the document that cancels the previous blocking (in portuguese), he alleges that he never asked the complete blocking of the YouTube site, but only the videos showing Daniela Cicarelli. But this is not what was written on the order he sent to ISPs (in portuguese). The order doesn’t mention any specific video, and asks explicitly that ISPs implement filters to block packets from reaching the YouTube servers, or block packets coming from YouTube servers.

So, now we can say that this country is in another list: the list of countries where judges don’t know how to write.