Archive for April 2004
Sea and Tower
The Five Former Hostages
The most controversial issue now in Japan is about the five Japanese who had been abducted and were recently released in Iraq. Some people think they did nothing wrong and should not be blamed; others argue that they should have expected such a situation to occur and that they shouldn't have visited Iraq ignoring the warning issued by the Foreign Ministry.
My parents take the latter side and I'm a little bit influenced by their opinion, though I'm far from an extremist. I admit that the former hostages were brave and admirable for doing what they thought was the right thing. That's because many Japanese are sorry for the Iraqi people but most of them (I guess) don't know what they can do or don't have the courage to do something to make a difference.
They, however, went to Iraq on their own responsibility. The Foreign Ministry had already warned people not to go there. The reason is simple: it's dangerous in Iraq and we don't want any Japanese victims (and victims of other nationalities, of course).
The Japanese media seem to be severe on the five Japanese and some of their families. Perhaps the families didn't expect this situation. They may have thought that all the Japanese people would sympathize with them and share their joy once the hostages were released. A lot of Japanese, including me, actually did so, but this event left a bitter controversy in Japan.
Anyway, it's a pity that the people concerned cannot publicly express their joy of returning safely and meeting their families again.
Lost Consonants
A friend of mine has just sent me an e-mail, suggesting that my students try a long-time favourite of his, Graham Rawle's Lost Consonants. This is a series of cartoons that has been running for years in the weekend's print edition of the British daily The Guardian.
The cartoon has a fixed pattern. The caption, that's the text underneath the image, always consists of a sentence that has one consonant missing, thus resulting in a new, absurd meaning. The image, pieced together from various photos, illustrates this new meaning. Start with an easy one: The birds found some wigs and were building their nests.
For more of that, click on "more of this".
A word of warning, though: some of the cartoons are weird, and I'm not sure their humour always travels very well across cultural boundaries.
Thanks for the link, Pippo-san!
I need your help
From this April, I'm teaching a research class. There are sixteen high school students and all of them want to study things related to English.
One girl wants to correspond with someone in another country. Can you find somebody? And three of the sixteen students want to improve their English speaking skills. During this year, could you come to my school and join my class as a volunteer? Your first language doesn't have to be English.
Internet Usage in Japan
The day before yesterday a government statistic came out which said that Japan's Net user population tops 60% for 1st time in 2003.
Yesterday I taught the new freshmen for the first time, a group of nine delightful, wide-awake, responsive young Japanese. I asked how many of them used e-mail. All of them did, that's 100% in statistical terms. Then I asked how many of them knew how to view a page on the Web. One did, that's a little over 10%. I mentioned this fact to a professor here at the Department, and he responded with a wry smile: yes, he said, this shows that they're from good high schools, which focus only on the subjects that are tested for in university entrance exams.
The government statistic, in other words, needs to be taken with a grain of salt or two. In this country, Internet usage largely means cell phone e-mail, a cheaper alternative to using the keitai as a telephone. The Web can be accessed via the cell phone, but it's a radically pared-down version of the Web, fragmented between three mutually incompatible markup languages, with corporate gatekeepers controlling the content that users access.
Penguins
Linus Torvalds and his wife Tove disagree on who came up with the idea of using a penguin as a mascot for the operating system Linus created, Linux. She says she did. He says he did. However that be, it was Linus who in 1996 chose Larry Ewing's design, Tux the Penguin. Linus had to overrule many Linux developers who favoured a more corporate-looking logo design, but his choice was vindicated by the huge popular success Larry's fowl came to enjoy. By now, Tux the Penguin probably rivals the Penguin Books trademark as one of the most widely recognised birds in marketing.
Jennifer Mears' What's the Story With the Penguin? offers some background.
I've just finished redesigning the Web site of WCLP (Working Centre Linux Project), a Canadian Linux distribution for low-powered computers. No big shakes, but the design features a little penguin I drew a while ago. Here's a larger image of the toon (131 KB).
From the same series: Emperor Penguin (11 KB).
You Sent Me a Virus!
A lot of the junk that descended into my in-box during the past few weeks consisted of messages that accused me of sending out viruses and that advised me to do something about it, like, er, buy their anti-virus software. Most of these were, and are, machine-generated, but in one instance an upset professor sent me several messages with the same complaint and similar well-intended advice to clean up my machine.
In addition, I got questions from computer users (hi Mom!) who received similar messages and were upset about them. Then there was the chatter on a mailing list about one particular internet service provider that supposedly sends out virus-infested messages.
Most likely, the company never sent those messages. Most definitely, neither did I.
The problem isn't exactly new, but it seems a lot more widespread these days, so, just in case it puzzles you, let me explain some basics.
Every e-mail message that travels across the Net carries a certain amount of information about itself. This information includes the sender's and the recipient's e-mail address, the address to which a reply should be sent, the software used to send the message, the time and date when the message was sent, where it was sent from, certain information about the route the message travelled between the sender and the receiver, and a few other details. Collectively, this information is known as the "e-mail header".
By default, that's unless you ask it to do otherwise, most e-mail programs do not display this information, or only a small part of it. Yet any reasonably decent e-mail program can display the full header of any message. If you happen to use a Microsoft program such as Outlook or Outlook Express, you'll probably find you have to poke around a good deal before you finally find a way to display the header; Outlook does a very good job at hiding it from the user. Other, more reasonable programs will give you the information at a single click or two.
Now, here's the relevant bit in this context: header information can easily be forged (or "spoofed" -- a quaint old colloquialism that experienced a revival in computing jargon). And this is what many viruses spreading via e-mail actually do. A virus that sends itself from an infected system is likely to grab a random address from an address book on that system and put it in the "From:" header field of the message it is about to send. A naive recipient of such a message will then believe that the message actually came from that address. Which it didn't.
The problem is magnified by anti-virus software. Many such software packages automatically send a complaint to the apparent sender when they detect a message that carries a known virus. Given that the sender information is forged in many if not most cases, this isn't helpful at all: such alerts needlessly increase the traffic the Internet has to carry and they end up in the in-boxes of users who have nothing to do with the virus in question whatsoever.
Oh, and you'll remember, wont't you, not to open attachments, even if they come from people you regularly communicate with, unless you know exactly what these attachments are (photos in .jpg format are harmless) and what reason the sender has for sending them. And don't open an attachment either if it's supposed to contain the message with which you supposedly sent a virus, okay?