April 2009 - cypherpunks-legacy

Classic of men's success
by Ty Staples 24 Apr '09

24 Apr '09

Potion for men, not boys   We need your click

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deep packet inspection could be outlawed in the US
by Eugen Leitl 24 Apr '09

24 Apr '09

http://www.techworld.com/security/news/index.cfm?newsID=114856&pagtype=all&… 24 April 2009 Deep packet inspection could be outlawed in US By Grant Gross, IDG news service US lawmakers are set to limit the way ISPs use deep packet inspection (DPI), even though no American service providers are using the technology. Representative Rick Boucher, a Virginia Democrat, and three privacy experts, speaking at a hearing before the House Energy Commerce sub-committee urged lawmakers to pass comprehensive online privacy legislation in the coming months. While DPI can be used to filter spam and identify criminals, the technology raises serious privacy concerns, Boucher said. "Its privacy-intrusion potential is nothing short of frightening," he added. "The thought that a network operator could track a user's every move on the Internet, record the details of every search and read every email ... is alarming." Boucher, chairman of the House Subcommittee on Communications, Technology and the Internet, said he planned to introduce a privacy bill for online users. That legislation could possibly prohibit DPI for use in behavioural advertising and other uses not related to security or network management, he suggested. Officials with Free Press, the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT) and the Electronic Privacy Information Center (ERIC) all spoke in favour of online privacy legislation. "In our view, deep packet inspection is really no different than postal employees opening envelopes and reading letters inside," said Leslie Harris, president and CEO of CDT. "Consumers simply do not expect to be snooped on by their ISPs or other intermediaries in the middle of the network, so DPI really defies legitimate expectations of privacy that consumers have." Comcast and Cox Communications, both cable-based broadband providers, have experimented with using DPI in conjunction with behavioural advertising, but panelists at the hearing said they knew of no US ISP now using DPI that way. However, there are about a dozen companies offering DPI services to ISPs, said Ben Scott, policy director at Free Press. With ISPs staying away from DPI, Congress should let ISPs self-regulate, said Kyle McSlarrow, president and CEO of the trade group the National Cable and Telecommunications Association. "Any technology can be used for good purposes and for bad," he said. "We recognise that no one would want us looking at the communication in e-mail. We don't particularly want to do that." The technology is changing so rapidly, it may be difficult to draft appropriate legislation, he added. "There are new models being created," he said. "It's fairly hard to freeze, in one point and time, a fairly immature marketplace. We should allow industry and all stakeholders to try to work together ... come up with self-regulatory principles that protect consumer privacy." Some Republicans on the subcommittee also questioned whether legislation should be targeted only at ISPs. "Our focus should ... look at the entire Internet universe, including search engines and Internet advertising networks," said Representative Cliff Stearns, a Florida Republican. "Consumers don't care whether you are a search engine or a broadband provider; they just want to ensure that their privacy is protected." Privacy advocates also urged lawmakers to go beyond rules that would force ISPs to get opt-in permission from customers before tracking their online activities. In many cases, customers don't completely understand what they're being asked to opt into, said Marc Rotenberg, EPIC's executive director. "I don't think [opt-in] is sufficient because it won't be meaningful unless consumers understand what data about them is being collected and how it's being used," he said.

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It's Time to Socialize, People!
by Darcy Lowry 24 Apr '09

24 Apr '09

i am so grateful for quiet time with the scriptures. and i love it (thanks, coco). and my wheels are turning with projects to put together for a locals knitting class. i am determined to get the house clean so i can relax and sew tomorrow. ok, i'm off to knit... simple is always prettiest to me. she wears birkenstocks to fashion shows. have you seen april's ms living yet? you've gotta love people with humor like that. my happy little life we are happily enjoying being able to play outside again. she's amazing. last minute trip to idaho to see my sister- so much better than home blogging! doesn't she look like lucy from chronicles of narnia? i recommend rounding your troops for a similar conversation, and a brainstorm session for how to prepare for what lies ahead. just sayin. i mean, look at her hair. the ms craft dept was featured in an article, and their personal crafting projects were shown. there's a tiny restaurant and a delicious coke. may the light always find you on a dreary day.

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Now you can have her even on the first date.
by Beverly Hood 24 Apr '09

24 Apr '09

cate (incredulously) what were you a child of adam and eve she is my best babysitter for cate she takes turns with me putting cate to bed and being her pillow all kits are shipped phew and then i realized i love her so much i thought id live there forever one day when i was 12 my dad quit his job and we moved to lake tahoe it rocked my stable world dear anne shirley its been a long time since i last wrote but i need your advice i am planning a primary activity for this spring since our theme for the year is my eternal family and we like to have our activities point the children to what they are learning i thought it might be nice if we have a picnic on or near the grounds of the mt timpanogos temple and let them bask in the beauty of that place and reflect on the importance of their own eternal family and i cheat like alot well usually i ease up on weekends but i feel so crappy and bloated again that i cant wait to start eating right on monday but i have kind of had to tell myself this is just the new lifestyle and if i want to indulge every now and again im going to cause id rather die than not be able to have some chips and guac or a slice of cake every now and again so if i eat like this 90% of the time then ive noticed that my body or the scale doesnt mind if i wander in my choices a bit the other 10% exercising everyday helps with this too i feel like its a great trade off- feeling great and a regular period for a little self control with that heres the stuff i eat salad with chicken a different salad with chicken repeat repeat this is the hard thing about it not a ton of delicious options im kind of kidding ive found a few other yummy things too where are neighborhoods like that anymore with bushes big enough to hide in and kids that go around the block together all afternoon and normal sized houses and the old winkfields next door ok i dont need the winkfields but id sure love to give my kids the rest from brora it makes me too happy drawers full of yarn too glorious a little note for my valentine one more thought about best friends what im listening to this morningagain acre of land is my favorite song of his me 1982 what an adventure it is

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Dont be afraid of unknown! Try new sensations, try new Cia!
by Isabelle Berry 24 Apr '09

24 Apr '09

it was the first time i realized that things dont always go how you think they will and that it all can turn out better than you imagined isnt life surprising i was laying awake thinking last night about how different my life has gone then what i thought (in a good way) i know some people dont love the whole valentines thing but it is so fun to me i dont care if the greeting card company made it up- any day where i get to be pretty treated with sweetness have a declicious dinner and some romance is right on in my book well just as we were making preparations to get moving grant was granted that job he wanted right here in utah i guess were staying put (sorry shellie i wanted to live by you and drive to see ray and the beach on weekends real bad) Yummy fabric ready to ship 1 make stuff knit 2 april 3 fond of 4 Crochet Stack 5 noon 8 6 layering 7 7mos 8 afternoon 9 sleepy mama 10 waiting for me 11 Theres only one captain on this boat 12 Very Special Scarves 13 Michelle Williams ♥ 14 new drawing corner 15 the other side 16 Untitled 17 pride and joy 18 steven alan imitation 19 atthestove 20 Untitled 21 film207 22 hi 23 Working 24 Lashes 25 s t i l l morning quiet time 26 anthem for a 17 year-old girl 27 Untitled 28 reasons for staying 29 Untitled 30 book girl 31 Untitled 32 ships ahoy 33 juk box 34 35 grapefruit & new curtains 36 gams Quilt kits finally all done i am given glimpses of the why and the good and the reasons and the plan the bigger picture and the necessity for some to not fit the mold she follows me around all day just in case she might be needed for something anything cute little penny is just a wee dog but she feels strongly that part of her duty is to scare the crap out of anyone who gets near our house just so they know no one is going to mess with her family not on her watch she is undeterred by bigger animals and scary men- they all get yelled at to stay away let me explain Buoy i really really need my bedroom to be simple and uncluttered and white for calming purposes you know what i mean when cate is too scared to go downstairs penny will go with her and everything is all right she lets cate dress her up for weddings or try to ride her or pull her by the tail almost daily and even knowing the torture she will soon endure she gets so excited when cate gets home from school my problem dear anne is that it is 2009 kids dont like to get all fussied up anymore and i dont think they would go to the trouble of making up stories about lost broaches to be able to go to a silly church picnic in my mind the little girls are wearing spring dresses and holding parasols with their gloved hands while the boys are eating biscuits and drinking homemade rootbeer with their hats and suspenders on but i live in a dreamland where i want everything stylized i know you understand me anne cate chose these pretty little traditional valentines cards from bunny cakes i love them i went to the fabric store tonight in search of prints to make some new spring scarves with some will probably end up in the shop too i just love this look also i love toast (the catalog and the cooked bread) cate and i went through some of the free options around the web for valentines to download and print

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Analyze This
by Jerome Mcneill 24 Apr '09

24 Apr '09

what an adventure it is she follows me around all day just in case she might be needed for something anything cute little penny is just a wee dog but she feels strongly that part of her duty is to scare the crap out of anyone who gets near our house just so they know no one is going to mess with her family not on her watch she is undeterred by bigger animals and scary men- they all get yelled at to stay away all kits are shipped phew well just as we were making preparations to get moving grant was granted that job he wanted right here in utah i guess were staying put (sorry shellie i wanted to live by you and drive to see ray and the beach on weekends real bad) if you eat like this people will give you crap because its so not trendy anymore but if it will help a woman who would do anything to ovulate and conceive do that (and i know personally quite a few that this was the key for) then who cares what anyone says and jennifer aniston doesnt eat carbs so there remember how i was so proud that my room was clean and i was knitting well i still am i love all the sweet artistically talented bloggers that offer free downloads around holidays for us readers i went to the fabric store tonight in search of prints to make some new spring scarves with some will probably end up in the shop too i just love this look also i love toast (the catalog and the cooked bread) say hi to gilbert and the kids with love km my problem dear anne is that it is 2009 kids dont like to get all fussied up anymore and i dont think they would go to the trouble of making up stories about lost broaches to be able to go to a silly church picnic in my mind the little girls are wearing spring dresses and holding parasols with their gloved hands while the boys are eating biscuits and drinking homemade rootbeer with their hats and suspenders on but i live in a dreamland where i want everything stylized i know you understand me anne a little note for my valentine i really really need my bedroom to be simple and uncluttered and white for calming purposes you know what i mean confession i miss saved by the bell cate what did you play on the computer then even more obsessed with flickr than usual of late i look for girls with purses that compliment mine one more thought about best friends the deal with pcos and carbs she didnt want to print off her name- signing was a must from the spring/summer 09 toast catalog

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How anonymity technology could save free speech on the Internet.
by Eugen Leitl 24 Apr '09

24 Apr '09

http://www.technologyreview.com/printer_friendly_article.aspx?id=22427&chan… May/June 2009 Dissent Made Safer How anonymity technology could save free speech on the Internet. By David Talbot "Sokwanele" means "enough is enough" in a certain Bantu dialect. It is also the name of a Zimbabwean pro-democracy website whose bloggers last year published accounts of atrocities by Robert Mugabe's regime and posted Election Day updates describing voter intimidation and apparent ballot stuffing. You can visit Sokwanele's "terror album" and see photographs: of a hospitalized 70-year-old woman who'd been beaten and thrown on her cooking fire (she later died, the site says); of firebombed homes; of people with deep wounds carved into their backs. You can find detailed, frequently updated maps describing regional violence and other incidents. You will be confronted with gruesome news, starkly captioned: "Joshua Bakacheza's Body Found." Because this horrific content is so readily available, it is easy to overlook the courage it took to produce it. The anonymous photographers and polling-station bloggers who uploaded the Sokwanele material remain very much in danger. In a place like Zimbabwe, where saying the wrong thing can get you killed or thrown in prison on treason charges, you take precautions: you're careful about whom you talk to; you're discreet when you enter a clinic to take pictures. And when you get to the point of putting your information on the Internet, you need protection from the possibility that your computer's digital address will be traced back to you. Maybe, at that point, you use Tor. Tor is an open-source Internet anonymity system--one of several systems that encrypt data or hide the accompanying Internet address, and route the data to its final destination through intermediate computers called proxies. This combination of routing and encryption can mask a computer's actual location and circumvent government filters; to prying eyes, the Internet traffic seems to be coming from the proxies. At a time when global Internet access and social-networking technologies are surging, such tools are increasingly important to bloggers and other Web users living under repressive regimes. Without them, people in these countries might be unable to speak or read freely online (see "Beating Surveillance and Censorship"). Video Unlike most anonymity and circumvention technologies, Tor uses multiple proxies and encryption steps, providing extra security that is especially prized in areas where the risks are greatest. Paradoxically, that means it's impossible to confirm whether it's being used by the Zimbabwean bloggers. "Anyone who really needs Tor to speak anonymously isn't going to tell you they use Tor to speak anonymously," says Ethan Zuckerman, cofounder of Global Voices, an online platform and advocacy organization for bloggers around the world. "You can't tell if it's happening, and anyone who is actively evading something isn't going to talk about it." That said, the -Sokwanele journalists "are extremely sophisticated and use a variety of encryption techniques to protect their identity," he says. Anonymity aside, Internet users in dozens of countries--whether or not they are activist bloggers--often need to evade censorship by governments that block individual sites and even pages containing keywords relating to forbidden subjects. In 2006, the OpenNet Initiative--a research project based at Harvard and the Universities of Toronto, Oxford, and Cambridge that examines Internet censorship and surveillance--discovered some form of filtering in 25 of 46 nations tested, including China, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Vietnam. In a new and still-evolving study, OpenNet found that more than 36 countries are filtering one or more kinds of speech to varying degrees: political content, religious sites, pornography, even (in some Islamic nations) gambling sites. "Definitely, there is a growing norm around Internet content filtering," says Ronald Deibert, a University of Toronto political scientist who cofounded OpenNet. "It is a practice growing in scope, scale, and sophistication worldwide." Tor can solve both problems; the same proxies that provide anonymous cover for people posting content also become portals for banned websites. When it officially launched five years ago, the Tor network consisted of 30 proxies on two continents; now it has 1,500 on five continents, and hundreds of thousands of active users. And its developers are trying to expand its reach, both abroad and in the United States, because digital barriers and privacy threats affect even the free world. In the United States, for example, libraries and employers often block content, and people's Web habits can be--and are--recorded for marketing purposes by Internet service providers (ISPs) and by the sites themselves. "The Internet is being carved up and filtered and surveilled," says Deibert. "The environment is being degraded. So it's up to citizens to build technologies to [counter these trends]. And that is where I see tools like Tor coming into play. It preserves the Internet as a forum for free information." Neutral Nodes The product of a small nonprofit organization with eight paid developers and a few dozen volunteer security professionals around the world, Tor takes advantage of the fact that Internet traffic consists of two-part packets. The first part contains data--pieces of a Web page you are viewing, or of the photo file or e-mail you are sending. The other consists of the Internet protocol (IP) address of the sending and receiving computer (plus other data, such as the size of the file). Tor uses the latter portion--the addressing information--to build a circuit of encrypted connections through relays on the network (see "Dodging Spies, Data Miners, and Censors" next page). The requisite relays (which collectively serve as proxies) are operated on a volunteer basis at universities such as Boston University and a few corporations, and by computer-security professionals and free-speech advocates around the world. (Many Tor users also use existing technologies, such as HTTPS--a protocol for encrypting and decrypting a user's page requests and the pages that are returned--to protect the content they are sending and receiving.) Tor, like the Internet itself, emerged from military research--in this case at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, which built a prototype in the mid-1990s. The military interest was clear: without a way to make Internet traffic anonymous, an agent's cover could be compromised the minute he or she visited .mil domains using the Internet connection of, say, a hotel. Even if the data were encrypted, anyone watching traffic over the hotel network could quickly figure out that the guest might be associated with the U.S. military. And the problem is hardly limited to hotel networks; IP addresses can be linked to physical locations by a variety of means (ISPs correlate such data with phone numbers, data miners can piece together clues from Internet traffic, and someone outside your house can confirm that you are the source of specific kinds of Internet traffic by "sniffing" data traveling over Wi-Fi). As a Tor presentation puts it, chillingly, what might an insurgent group pay to get a list of Baghdad IP addresses that get e-mail from a .gov or .mil account? The navy project never emerged from the lab, but it attracted the interest of Roger Dingledine, a cryptographer concerned about a different aspect of Internet privacy: the way ISPs and websites amass databases on people's browsing and search history. In 2000, at a conference where he was presenting his MIT master's thesis on anonymous distributed data storage, he met a Naval Research Lab mathematician, Paul -Syverson. The two men saw that tools for protecting military agents and tools for protecting Web surfers' privacy could be one and the same, and together they revived the project with funding from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the navy. The first public version of Tor, which came out in 2003, was available for anyone who cared to install it. But it worked only on open-source operating systems, and using it required at least some technical knowledge. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, the digital civil-liberties organization, funded development of a version for Windows, and soon a wider variety of users emerged. "Originally one ofocks many websites--including Facebook, YouTube, and Skype--from all Web users in the nation. I spoke about Syrian censorship with another blogger, Anas Qtiesh; he sat in an Internet cafi in Damascus as I messaged him from my living room. Qtiesh isn't worried that he'll be tracked down, because he tends to blog about pan-Arab politics, not about criticisms of the regime. But he wants access to more of the Internet than the government permits, so the Firefox browser on his laptop sports the Torbutton. Click the button, and presto--the same Internet that everyone in America sees. To access blocked sites, his computer negotiates a series of proxies, eventually connecting to an IP address somewhere else in the world. This intermediary fetches the blocked material. "Tor brings back the Internet," he wrote. Qtiesh has plenty of company: Tor was always of interest abroad, but word of mouth and the introduction of the easy-to-use Torbutton have helped accelerate its global spread. Zuckerman has been actively promoting Tor through his Global Voices network. So have other advocates of online free speech in Asia, China, and Africa. And these efforts have been working. Wendy Seltzer, who teaches Internet law at American University and founded Chilling Effects, a project to combat legal threats against Internet users, saw that firsthand when she traveled to Guangzhou, China, for a blogger conference last year. China is generally acknowledged as the most sophisticated Internet filterer in the world; it employs a variety of techniques, including blocking IP addresses, domain names (the text name of a website, such as www.google.com) and even Web pages containing certain keywords (Falun Gong, for example). According to one report, Chinese security forces have arrested several hundred Internet users and bloggers in the past 10 years. Seltzer says that many bloggers she met in Guangzhou were using Tor. And when she went to an Internet cafi there, she reports, the computers were automatically configured to run the software. In China, Tor is one weapon in wo years ago, Turkey piled on, with particular zeal for stamping out criticism of the nation's founding father, Kemal Atat|rk. Tor is preparing for the fight against relay blocking by creating a system of "bridge nodes"--a constantly changing list of IP addresses through which people can reach the main network of relays. A user can simply send an e-mail asking for a bridge address. Of course, an Iranian censor could also request and block such addresses, but the idea is to defeat such efforts by generating ever more bridges, donated by a wide range of Internet users. And Jonathan Zittrain, a Berkman cofounder and Harvard Law School professor, envisions going even further. "The next big moment that the Tor people haven't implemented--something in the background, something that would be huge--would be if your use of Tor, by default, makes you a Tor node yourself," he says. "At that point, it totally scales. The more people use it, the more people can use it." As part of a three-year effort to improve the software and expand its use, Tor's staff and volunteers will step up appeals for Tor users to let their computers serve as bridges to individual users elsewhere. But taking the next step--becoming a relay, or node, potentially available to any Tor traffic--would massively increase the traffic flowing through a user's computer. If users became nodes by default, it could defeat the purpose of using Tor to remain low key: once a user wandered into a cybercafi to blog anonymously, that terminal would soon stand out as a hub of Internet traffic. What's more, such a system "sets off an arms race with all the network providers and network administrators," says Andrew -Lewman, Tor's executive director. "It increases traffic, and we become something they might block, because that's their job." Tor would ultimately like to find safe ways to enlist distributed help, but for now, developers are pursuing intermediate goals, such as limiting bulk data transfers and improving the flow among existing Tor relays. One criticism leveled against Tor is that ior good purposes but for bad--protecting distributors of child pornography, for example. Dingledine's response is that Tor's protections help law enforcement catch criminals, too, while criminals may find it more effective to use neighbors' or public Wi-Fi links, or hacked computers, to mask their identities. Another concern is that circumvention tools--especially those that only use a single proxy, which holds information about who is talking to whom--can create privacy and security worries of their own. Earlier this year, Hal Roberts discovered that certain tools used widely in China--DynaWeb Freegate, GPass, and FirePhoenix--appeared to be offering to sell users' browsing histories. While there's no evidence that any individual's privacy was compromised, the point was made: in many cases, using anonymity or circumvention systems still means trusting an organization with your information--and trusting that its privacy policies can and will be honored. (With Tor, it's a bit different; since no single relay ever holds the information about the complete route, you must trust the integrity of algorithms that obscure connections between origins and destinations.) "I don't doubt the dedication of the people hosting these tools, but what I'm concerned about is whether they will protect your data," Roberts says. "The biggest takeaway is: they have that data." Dingledine thinks events will push people to seek the protections that Tor and other tools provide. In 2006, for example, AOL gave away millions of users' search terms for research purposes. Although the searchers were identified only by random numbers, bloggers and reporters were quickly able to identify individual users from clues based on the search terms. (Since Tor uses a different router pathway for each user each time, it's impossible to amass such aggregate data about even an anonymously identified Tor user.) Dingledine reasons that each time a national censor blocks news sites and YouTube, or an ISP or website loses or sells or gives away user data, people will seek solutions. "The approach we've taken so far is to let the bad guys teach people about it," he says. "Let the AOLs and the China firewalls screw up. Let everybody read about why they want privacy on the Internet." More and more people might just decide that enough is enough. David Talbot is Technology Review's chief correspondent.

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BullionVault.com - Gold with an open source soul
by Eugen Leitl 24 Apr '09

24 Apr '09

http://www.h-online.com/open/features/print/113118 22 April 2009, 08:33 BullionVault.com - Gold with an open source soul by Dj Walker-Morgan Gold and open source do not normally go together, but at BullionVault, the combination of both has created an innovative way of trading in the precious metal BullionVault Front Page ZoomThe BullionVault Front Page Back in 2003, Paul Tustain, founder of BullionVault[1], wanted to buy some gold and went to Switzerland to do so. It turned out that what was being sold wasn't actually the gold though, but a "promise of a promise" of some gold. This is what is called "unallocated gold" where there are various financial instruments between the buyer and the actual gold. Tustain thought that this wasn't what people wanted to do and inspired by the idea of online betting exchanges, brought together a team to create an online gold exchange which became BullionVault.com. Users can sign up and buy gold, which is physically held in secure vaults in London, Switzerland and New York, hold on to it for a storage fee or sell it, all through an online front end. This is called "allocated gold"; outright ownership of the physical metal. The vaults themselves are managed by another company and are so secure that it is almost impossible to get access, even for BullionVault. Users of the BullionVault systems, once they have bought gold, can offer to buy or sell at the price they select and the system matches up buyers and sellers. Now, with 100,000 registered users and 13,000 funded clients using the English, French, German or Italian translations of the site, the service is international and well established. BullionVault's "tame" Gold Bar ZoomBullionVault's "tame" Gold Bar Despite the large amounts of gold and money involved, at the heart of BullionVault is an open source soul. The systems behind BullionVault were created by Kris Jenkins, CTO and Alex Edwards COO and they say they couldn't have done it without open source. In late 2003, Tustain, Jenkins and Edwards started development on the software for the back office system for BullionVault. Some decisions were already made for them though; they had inherited a real time accounting and settlement system which used Oracle as the database. The real time nature of the accounting system was essential to the plan as they would need to be able to create financial reporting by the day and by the minute. But around this accounting system, open source would be used to develop the exchange. Next: Developing the exchange Developing The exchange software itself is Java based, using Apache Tomcat for serving web pages and Spring as an application framework. Originally, the system was developed using the Apache Struts[2] web framework, but over time, frustrations with Struts led them to move to SpringMVC[3] which has made development a lot easier. "When we started experimenting with SpringMVC, it quickly made Struts feel like a first attempt at a web framework" says Jenkins "SpringMVC doesn't take away any control - it's still fairly low-level - but it has made development much simpler and faster". As an example, Jenkins pointed to SpringMVC's flexible data binding "which became vital when we went multi-language as it made it possible to be more intelligent about number formatting styles across multiple locales". The switch reduced the size of the code base significantly and the change "just made life much simpler". "Spring has one of the cleanest architectures I've ever encountered" adds Jenkins. Kris Jenkins ZoomKris Jenkins, CTO of BullionVault For mapping their Java classes to the database, they went with iBatis[4] while for reporting, they use Eclipse BIRT[5] for creating internal reports. "It's great that we can go from a working SQL query to a web report with standardised formatting very quickly" which has allowed them to produce intranet reports like "How much gold have we sold each day in the past week?". BIRT's PDF generation is also used to generate statements and contract notes as it is fairly easy to integrate into batch processes; "It's also good at not getting in our way. Easy stuff's easy, hard stuff's harder". Jenkins says they recently looked at Oracle's Apex but found it "made easy stuff trivial, tricky stuff impossible ... even the set up was tricky". BIRT is not without it's issues though. "The documentation is patchy and almost always out of date. Compiling the source code is a real headache". >From the start, the developers had performance in mind, with ehcache[6] used to help speed response times for users. The developers contributions back to the open source community have typically been performance patches for libraries as a result of this work. Development, of course, is not just about code but also about maintaining the code. Open source plays its part here with the company using Bugzilla[7] to track issues with the software and ensuring quality by using JUnit[8] and Spring mocking to create tests for the system. The switch to SpringMVC made creating unit tests much easier. One element which isn't open source are the BullionVault bots. The company uses bots, software programmes which act as customers, to trade within the exchange on its behalf. Bots are used to create liquidity in the exchange by encouraging trade in gold to take place, using simple trading strategies. The bots are proprietary to BullionVault, but the company has an open API[9] to allow third party bots and applications to trade such as Bullionbetting.com[10]. The bots do have an impact on code quality though as they do exercise the system; often, the bots are the exchanges heaviest users. Jenkins recommends the use of automated bots as part of a quality strategy for online exchanges because of their ability to generate work for the system and report back on the systems' function. He adds that they have considered open sourcing the bots themselves, but it "hasn't happened yet". Next: The back and front office The back office Beyond the development of code, there's the deployment of the result of the code. Again, BullionVault have evolved their approach thanks to not being locked in by proprietary software. Initially, the servers ran the Fedora Core Linux distribution. As time moved on though, Fedora became more experimental, feeding back into Red Hat's Enterprise Linux, but always running ahead. With this in mind, BullionVault moved to CentOS, the Linux distribution which is compiled from the Red Hat Enterprise Linux source. This allows the company to use an operating system which is deployed as an enterprise operating system without having to subscribe to Red Hat's subscription offerings, keeping costs closer to zero. The move has also given them a more stable Linux and a more predictable roadmap for operating system deployment. Infrastructure management also relies on open source. The network is monitored with Nagios[11], systems are mirrored with Drbd[12], jobs are scheduled with Quartz[13], loads are balanced with Heartbeat[14] and the site content is managed with Subversion[15]. With Nagios, BullionVault contributed to the community with patches to add encryption to the Java/Nagios interface. Alex Edwards ZoomAlex Edwards, COO of BullionVault Not everything is part of the exchange system though. While the help and support pages are static HTML with Apache Lucene[16] based searching the BullionVault Gold News site[17] is managed using the open source Drupal[18] content management system. Edwards found Drupal "a good balance of open source, easy to set up and straight forward for our human editors", though there have been occasional frustrations with database and formatting problems. Jenkins points to the range of Drupal modules; "I've lost count of the times I've been asked to add a feature to Drupal and found there's already a module to do it for me". Drupal has also allowed them to create fully featured websites "in an afternoon" and then hand these on to someone non-technical to create content and maintain. "Drupal's not perfect", he adds, "I try never to look at the underlying database structure for fear it will haunt me at night - but as techies we can fire & forget and our editors almost never need sup requirement, for security purposes, is the recording of all calls. For this, BullionVault used the Asterisk PBX software; Edwards implemented this using the TrixBox[19] distribution, which bundles Linux, Apache, Asterisk, MySQL and PHP. Trixbox was simpler to set up than assembling their own Asterisk system and is already based on CentOS. Next: Lessons worth learning Lessons worth learning We asked what advice the BullionVault team would offer to other companies. Edwards suggested a process of constant change; "Evolve your systems, It's amazing how much you don't have to spend for good quality components". Jenkins added to that saying "Pick good active open source growing with you, even if they are in beta". As for architecture and deployment, Edwards offered "Plan for clustering and scalability and redundancy" while Jenkins offered the simpler "Plan for one machine blowing up". Both agreed on the importance of adopting open source as fundamental part of developing and deploying an online service, but also the open source is a means to an end, rather than an end in itself. Lego BullionVault Logo ZoomThe BullionVault logo, rendered in Lego The team at BullionVault are proud of what they have created with limited people resources. "For two of us to create a service this big using open source and banking technology is impressive", says Jenkins. The company now has fifteen employees, mostly in the front office dealing with customers. Asked what features they'd like to see in open source in the future, Edwards hoped to see Thunderbird expand its capabilities to include a customer relationship management extension and make the front office more integrated. Jenkins was looking for more real time accounting applications for the back office to handle the flow of transactions that a web site which manages money (or gold) needs to keep tabs on their financial status. Conclusion Using a pragmatic mix of open source and proprietary software, BullionVault has created a novel way to deal in gold twenty four hours a day. It's that approach which has seen them awarded a Queens Award For Enterprise for Innovation[20] this year. URL of this article: http://www.h-online.com/open/features/113118 Links in this article: [1] http://bullionvault.com [2] http://struts.apache.org/ [3] http://static.springframework.org/spring/docs/2.0.x/reference/mvc.html [4] http://ibatis.apache.org/ [5] http://www.eclipse.org/birt/phoenix/ [6] http://ehcache.sourceforge.net/ [7] http://www.bugzilla.org/ [8] http://www.junit.org/ [9] http://www.bullionvault.com/help/xml_api.html [10] http://www.bullionbetting.com/ [11] http://www.nagios.org/ [12] http://www.drbd.org/ [13] http://www.opensymphony.com/quartz/ [14] http://www.linux-ha.org/Heartbeat [15] http://subversion.tigris.org/ [16] http://lucene.apache.org/java/docs/ [17] http://goldnews.bullionvault.com/ [18] http://drupal.org/ [19] http://www.trixbox.org/ [20] http://live.bullionvault.com/Queens_Award_2009.do

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Taking the Email Plunge
by Robt Bridges 24 Apr '09

24 Apr '09

i swear nothing makes me happier than a peaceful space and some needles all kits are shipped phew valentines day preparations and then i realized i love her so much even more obsessed with flickr than usual of late a few months in the life of this infertile girl remember when the weather was warm and we would go to the park when daddy got home from work and we would bring homemade bread and fruit to eat for dinner and we would be drenched in golden light and the cousins would come meet us for some wild rides down the slide cate did you love disney games on the computer when you were five i went to the fabric store tonight in search of prints to make some new spring scarves with some will probably end up in the shop too i just love this look also i love toast (the catalog and the cooked bread) a conversation today again happy things we lived on a corner in a typical oc tract neighborhood what im listening to this morningagain did anyone else sustain life with saltines from the ages of 13-17 let me preface this by saying that there is no one size fits all eating plan for someone with hormonal issues for some women cysts irregular cycles lack of ovulation and too much testosterone and its effects are directly related to bad insulin regulation in their body for these women they may be able to restore better regularity with avoiding blood sugar spikes by not eating carbohydrates therefore eliminating the insulin problem that is why so many women can conceive with metformin or glucophage because these medicines work at that level im loving babies & mamas sunshine happy rooms and cool colors i thought id live there forever one day when i was 12 my dad quit his job and we moved to lake tahoe it rocked my stable world i bet that block is not nearly as big as i remember it being but i remember it being quite a trip i couldnt find a video of him performing it but listen to the lyrics and then that got me thinking that really its not just while laying in bed that she is watching out for me

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A Permission Marketing Primer: Picking and Choosing
by Isabelle Prather 24 Apr '09

24 Apr '09

dinner i kind of snack or have a lunch type meal again dinner is tricky because i still need to prepare dinner for my family so i do but im not super hungry at night so i just eat whatever broccoli a little of what theyre having or snacky stuff or chicken wings or crispy thin crust pizza but i always end the day with a low carb ice cream bar well as it turns out it was me who needed her the most i think if the test of the greatest among us is the one who will be the servant than penny wins in this houseok animal peoplei get it i really really get it 1 luce 2 Untitled 3 Working 4 Stove Top i bet that block is not nearly as big as i remember it being but i remember it being quite a trip what do you look for in a best friend like this one for instance my older brother uploaded it while reminiscing about the old buggie he rebuilt in the 80s from the spring/summer 09 toast catalog just a phone call one night she had an aneurysm and although this was a surprise of the worst kind it was the most spiritual time of my life much good and understanding has come through that loss what an adventure it is she follows me around all day just in case she might be needed for something anything cute little penny is just a wee dog but she feels strongly that part of her duty is to scare the crap out of anyone who gets near our house just so they know no one is going to mess with her family not on her watch she is undeterred by bigger animals and scary men- they all get yelled at to stay away i have never been an animal person i swore id never have a dog who wants to pick up poop not me but somehow in my baby hungry weakness i was convinced to relent by the other two mccalebs who said they desperately needed a puppy fine whatever just take care of her and pick up the poop i think they are so cute i love her litte handwriting and she is beyond excited to pass them out some other projects she and i looked at but didnt get around to (of course) from martha (of course) one more thought about best friends from toast different boyfriends came and went through all this some i thought i could marry some i was mad at myself for hanging around some that broke my heart project 31 is rolling along i have donations for every single item i need for the 31 newborn kits and lots of fabric donations and i will sew until there are 31 baby quilts too thank you SO much i was overwhelmed by the awesome response packages are starting to arrive i will be sure to post some pictures when i get it all together and ready to take to the humanitarian center my heart is happy do you have to be obsessed with yarn and needles and hooks like i am to think that is the most inviting little space youve ever seen i know some people dont love the whole valentines thing but it is so fun to me i dont care if the greeting card company made it up- any day where i get to be pretty treated with sweetness have a declicious dinner and some romance is right on in my book all the sudden im 30 i thought id be driving a mini van full of kids and happily decorating my own home but life has shown me again that i am not in control and as i wait for more children and a sense of being settled and i cheat like alot well usually i ease up on weekends but i feel so crappy and bloated again that i cant wait to start eating right on monday but i have kind of had to tell myself this is just the new lifestyle and if i want to indulge every now and again im going to cause id rather die than not be able to have some chips and guac or a slice of cake every now and again so if i eat like this 90% of the time then ive noticed that my body or the scale doesnt mind if i wander in my choices a bit the other 10% exercising everyday helps with this too i feel like its a great trade off- feeling great and a regular period for a little self control

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