Municipal E-mail addresses – bonanza for spammers?

According to today’s Ma’ariv, the municipality of Tel Aviv plans to give all residents of Tel Aviv an E-mail address, in the domain telaviv.gov.il.
The E-mailbox will be used for sending various messages to the residents.

It is claimed that a similar service already operates successfully in Berlin.

I hope that residents can elect to receive legal notices (like municipal tax payment notices) via a different E-mail address, instead of the one issued to them. Otherwise, spammers will have helluva of feast spamming those E-mail addresses, which the residents MUST follow lest they be stuck with scandalous late payment penalties.

Software reliability according to Edsgar W. Dijkstra

Dijkstra (A position paper on Software Reliability) argued that the notion of software reliability is meaningless, because the environment in which the software is made to work cannot be dealt with in scientific ways. There is always a gap between the formal specifications and the behavior, which the software user really wanted from the software.

I agree with the meaninglessness of the notion. But I disagree that the environment cannot be treated scientifically.

Consider, for the example, software for controlling an airplane, which flies by wire. Let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that takeoffs and landings are 100% manually controlled. Let’s also assume that there is no issue of collision with mountains. Then, it is possible to specify all weather conditions, which the airplane might face while being en route. Thus, the control software can be fully specified to control the airplane no matter what air turbulences, rain or snow conditions the airplane might face as long as it is being flown in Earth’s atmosphere.

A discussion held in a far-away country with crazy legal system

The discussion at http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/default.asp?joel.3.75691.30
(titled “Excuse me: you are unsecure”) illustrates the situation in a country where people do not understand the difference between breaking mechanical locks and breaking into computers or Web sites.

I said it in the past and I am reiterating the point.

A burglar can break only one physical lock at a time. Therefore vulnerabilities in locks has a built-in limit on the possible damage to society. Working societies do not have enough burglars to exploit the vulnerabilities in locks. Existing laws are also adequate to deal with those who chose the careers of burglars.

On the other hand, a vulnerability in a widely-used software package can cause millions of computers to be broken into with a single sequence of keystrokes, once the hacker has figured out how to exploit the vulnerability. Therefore, vulnerabilities in software have no built-in limit to the possible damage to society. Therefore, liability must be assigned to software vendors, who leave vulnerabilities unplugged, rather than to hackers.

A bit of culture but surprisingly relevant to startupists

While going over one of the Israeli Deaf forums, I saw an announcement that a lecture by the author Amos Oz, to be held this evening in Chess House in Ramat Aviv, will be accompanied by Sign Language interpreting.

I needed to finish the financial details with the interpreter in question (she interpreted also in the Linux Accessibility lecture on last Sunday) so I decided to kill two birds with one stone – both finish the process of paying her and soak a bit of High Culture by listening to a cultured lecture by one of the most esteemed Hebrew language authors in Israel.

The author talked about the book “The tiger with patches” (in Hebrew: “נמר חברבורות” – I am not sure my translation is exact) by Yaacov Shabtay. The book was about an entrepreneur full of dreams and very slim contact with the ground. The portrait of the entrepreneur drawn by the lecture reminded me of some of the dotcom bubble startupists.

My special keychain specs

Following moshez’s and omerm’s examples, I too want a keychain.
My requirements, however, differ from theirs.
My keychain needs only to keep my keys and do well this simple job.

The keychains with which I have had the experience tend to lose keys after a while. I load them with several keys (my car, for example, needs as many as four keys, one of them is really an immobilizer). It seems that keychains are not really designed for holding more than 4 or 6 or so keys at the same time.

My temporary workaround is to be obsessive-compulsive, live like an anal retentive, and have repetitive disorder, and check that the keys are there every time I access the keychain.

The proud developers of AbiWord

Once upon a time, I translated into Hebrew part of the AbiWord GUI and beta-tested it on WIN32 platform.
I ceased to beta-test it when I stopped using MS-Windows 2000 altogether.

Recently, I saw a review of AbiWord in ynet (http://www.ynet.co.il/articles/0,7340,L-3042644,00.html) and told the AbiWord developers’ mailing list about it.

One of the developers then complained that neither he nor Babelfish understand Hebrew and can I provide a summary of the article?

I provided a summary of the article, which said that it is an excellent word processor, but is not fully stable.

The developers went ballistic. I reached the conclusion that they are very proud of the stability which they achieved during the last few months (and indeed version 2.2.3, the most recent one which made to Debian Testing, so far did not crash on me).

Lacking knowledge of the operational profile which the reviewer used, I could not help the developers pinpoint the scenarios which cause AbiWord to crash when working in Hebrew (if at all). But I did report a bug in handling of modifying Hebrew text by deleting and then inserting Hebrew characters and spaces (bug 8407).

The lecture in Telux is now behind me, at last!

With the exceptions of my car and Eddie’s absence, everything worked by the book.
My car misbehaved previously, so I didn’t use it to arrive at TAU.
Eddie notified us ahead of time that he’ll be unable to come and nominated Shlomif to act as his deputy.
The Sign Language interpreter arrived exactly on time for pre-lecture rehearsal with me, as my laptop was booting in preparation for rehearsal with her.

I started the lecture with few words about my “job” as Accessibility Coordinator.
Then I plunged into the general subject of accessibility and its division into six relevant categories.
Rafi Cohen, a blind software developer, told us how he works with a PC (by combination of Braille display and screen reader which voices the screen’s contents). He is about as oldtimer with computers as I am, give or take very few years. When I worked with IBM punched cards, he worked with terminals connected to mainframes.
The second blind lecturer, Gidi Aharonovitz, told us about the need for accessibility in Web sites and told us the scandalous story of the Web site of the Library for Blind in Israel. This Web site is not accessible to the blind, and the library’s manager advises the aggravated blind patrons to enlist their family members to help them surf the Web site.

After those lectures, I declared a break of 5 minutes. Shlomif declared a break of 10 minutes. He declined my offer to settle the difference by arm strength comparison, so I settled for 7.5 minutes. The actual break was closer to 12.5 minutes.

I breezed through my second lecture, which was about the accessibility provisions available from Gnome desktop. When I mentioned that Gnome has no easy way to set the minimum font size, someone from the audience told me the command to use (gnome-fonts-properties). I then pulled the trump card – I explained that I searched for the appropriate dialogs the way a naive user would search for. If I didn’t find the dialogs, this means that there is an usability problem, which needs to be fixed.

We finished the lectures a bit before 20:30, about 15 minutes after the ending time which I planned when budgeting the lecture times. Since we were allowed to be in the room until 21:00, this was not that bad timing.

Accessibility Coordinator in Hamakor

After complaining that I did not have real time access to the information about the winning number in the lottery which was conducted in August Penguin 2004, some people (notably ladypine) agreed that some attention should be paid to accessibility in future events organized by Hamakor (http://www.hamakor.org.il/).

So I volunteered to be the Accessibility Coordinator. My “job” has two parts:

  1. Provision of information to event organizers about the accessibility needs of people with disabilities.
  2. Education of the general population of Free Software users about computer usage by people with disabilities and their accessibility needs.

What I did so far was to give a lecture about accessibility in Linux, together with Ori Idan. The lecture was given in a meeting of Haifux (http://www.haifux.org/lectures/112/). Today in the evening, it will be given again in Telux meeting (http://www.cs.tau.ac.il/telux/ and press the “Advanced lectures” link).

The organizers of August Penguin 2005 are now looking for a place for the event, after having issued the CFP and making some silly arguments about dates. I provided them with information about the accessibility needs of wheelchaired people (hint: push your sensitive nose into the restrooms). Let’s hope they’ll be able to find a place with which everyone will be happy.

[HIGHLY POLITICAL] Letting Arab citizens of Israel use KKL lands

Recently there was a ruling, which requires KKL (Keren Kayemet Le’israel) to let Arabs use its lands.

KKL was founded by Theodore Herzl to buy lands in the territory known then as Palestine and now as Israel, and settle Jews on those lands.

The ruling is due to the need to cleanse Israel from discriminatory laws.

I believe that in this case this ruling is misguided.

The reason is that KKL is based upon the principle of affirmative action (in Hebrew – “aflaia metakenet” which literally translates into “corrective discrimination”). Jews can be safe in the world only if there is at least one country in the world, in which Jews are clear majority and have full control of their destiny. Currently, this special country is Israel.

For example, Auschwitz could happen only because at the time there was no independent country with overwhelming Jewish majority, ready and willing to absorb all Jews which the Nazis wanted to get rid of.

The Arabs around Israel do not accept the situation in which there is a country with Jewish majority in the Mideast, between Arab countries. They try to change the situation by several means. One of the means is by having the Palestinians insist upon the Right of Return, whose ultimate consequence would be that Israel lose its Jewish overwhelming majority and cease to be the protector of the rights of Jews worldwide.

Another means is by judicial challenges, like the one which resulted in the ruling that KKL must allow Arabs to use its lands.

My practical suggestion:
Accept the anti-discriminatory rulings as just, but pass another law, which would stipulate that the affirmative action based discriminations continue unchanged until all the following happen:
1. All Arab and Muslim countries grant Jews equal rights – to be citizens, to buy lands, to build synagogues of unlimited size (currently forbidden by Islam), to worship their God.
2. There are no antisemite attacks against Jews anywhere in the world.

There is no chance that (1) or (2) will happen, so Israel will be able to practice affirmative action and fulfill its role as the protector of Jews worldwide.