Meet the Italian income agency

The Italian income agency decided to publish online all the income levels for each and every single citizen and company in the country.

I did not manage to see the actual data, because the entire income agency website was swamped with request and timing out all the time. You should have heard the comments of my accountant, who every day needs to access other parts of the website for work.

That service is supposed to have been taken offline now, after the Italian privacy watchdog issued a polite What The Fuck! Why Didn't You Tell Us Anything About This? sort of note. The minister defended himself by saying "I can't see what is the problem, it's the same in all the world: if you want proof just watch any American TV series". What a wise man. I should watch some of The Greatest American Hero again.

Since I could not see the actual data, I could not verify if what people were saying was actually true, that is that income information were published together with the full home address, providing a nice shopping list for house robbers, kidnappers and the other kind of professionals that would politely wait next to your door for you to come home late in the night.

But fear not, the website was protected from bots: it used a captcha.

Not only that: in order to comply with standard accessibility rules, the website used a perfectly accessible captcha:

You can't get more accessible than that: the captcha is displayed in plain text, so any accessibility technology will be able to read it. Plus, anyone can easily copy and paste it into the text box. And if someone needs to do it often, it's even trivial to write a script that does it for you!

But it's unfair to say that it was just plain text: it was cleverly encrypted:

<div class="educaptcha"><label for="educaptcha">I<!-- id9113507 -->nser<span>ire </span><span>nel c</span><span>ampo</span> di <!-- id5058508 -->v<span>erific</span><span>a suc</span><!-- id2643358 -->ces<span>sivo i</span><!-- id2500023 -->l valore <span>695</span><span>8571</span>4<!-- id3588853 -->:</label>
<input id="educaptcha" type="text" name="ucaptcha" value="" maxlength="10" size="20" /></div>

For your convenience, here is the version cracked with a malicious :%s/<[^>]\+>//g in vim. If you do not speak Italian, you can still look for this phrase in the screenshot above:

Inserire nel campo di verifica successivo il valore 69585714:

The meaning is of course:

Insert the value 69585714 in the following verification field:

It's been a fun day for Italians online.

Glitches in the Matrix

Korean car with Taiwanese license plate (edited to anonymise it) over EU license plate with (Portuguese??) numbers on the right, and Korea as country code.

Italian pasta sold by a British supermarket, in Taiwan.

Also, "Messicani" is not a kind of Italian pasta. Google for it, and you'll only find it mentioned in British websites.

How to freak out a Frenchperson

The way to freak out an Italian, instead, is to show them a bottle of "Lambrini" in the UK.

Italian National Anthem

Christian mentions that he likes the Italian National Anthem, although not the words.

No Italian in their right mind likes the words; luckily we are generally not forced to learn them, so we can allow ourselves to not give a damn about it. Which is our general strategy to deal with all the insanity we get every day.

What's the point of a nationalist anthem anyway, when the people who care most about the country are wishing for the Germans to invade us?

Anyway, here's my attempt at national anthem lyrics that suck less, for the benefit of those, like Christian, who like the music but not the words.

Fratelli d'Italia
L'Italia s'è desta,
Chi cazzo è sto Scipio
Che ci han messo in testa.
Non c'è la Vittoria
che porge la chioma,
Siam schiavi di Roma
E del Vatican.
Scongiuri alla sorte
Si rischia la morte
Si spera di no.

Noi siamo da secoli
Calpesti, derisi,
Perché siam mafiosi
ladroni e collusi.
Si rischia di nuovo
di aver Berluscone
Dell'emigrazione
Già l'ora suonò.
Scongiuri alla sorte
Si rischia la morte
Si spera di no.

Uniamoci, amiamoci,
l'unione, e l'amore
Ridanno alla gente
Il suo buonumore;
Giuriamo far sesso
sul suolo natío:
Chiaviamo, perdío,
Chi dice di no?
Scongiuri alla sorte
Si rischia la morte
Si spera di no.

Dall'Alpi a Sicilia
Noi ti condoniamo,
Ogn'uom di Bettino
Ha il core, ha la mano,
I bimbi d'Italia
Fan calcio balilla,
Bastardo chi frulla
Gancin non si può.
Scongiuri alla sorte
Si rischia la morte
Si spera di no.

I nostri politici
Son tutti venduti:
Si sente dall'Austria
L'odor dei rifiuti.
Lavora in Italia,
Il nero, il Polacco,
In nero, perbacco,
Io lo pagherò.

Scongiuri alla sorte
Si rischia la morte
Si spera di no.

Leonardo's "Last Supper"

A lovely article mentions that:

superimposing the Last Supper with its mirror-image throws up another picture containing a figure who looks like a Templar knight and another holding a small baby.

Apparently all the websites showing the resulting image were heavily slashdotted, but superimposing a mirrored image is not rocket science, so I gave it a try.

The result has nothing to do with Templar knights, but is shows very clearly that Jesus becomes Chtulhu:

Excited by this finding, I looked for more. I could not find much in the Mona Lisa:

But indeed the Vitruvian Man after superimposing a mirror image shows incredibly large balls:

Leonardo was Italian, and in Italy "growing big balls" means "getting very tired and sick of something". This is clearly a very deep message from Leonardo.

But why stop at Lenoardo?

Absolutely wonderful.

Servizio Abuse Tiscali

Ricevo spam spedito tramite Tiscali e lo forwardo al loro servizio di abuse:

From: Enrico Zini <...>
To: Servizio Abuse Tiscali <...>
Subject: Spam da un vostro utente

Buon giorno,

ve la giro cosí come mi è arrivata.

Cordiali saluti,

Enrico

Brillante la risposta (top-quoting, X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express, e contenuto inutile su almeno due livelli: cosa chiedere di piú?):

Gentile Cliente,
le posso consigliare, per bloccare l'arrivo di ogni mail dai mittenti
indesiderati, di utilizzare le apposite funzioni del nuovo tiscali mail. Più
precisamente, dopo aver avuto accesso al tiscali mail dalla pagina
http://mail.tiscali.it/cp/sso/Login.jsp , dovrà inserire il flag sul
messaggio indesiderato e cliccare sulla voce "Blocca"
Tutta la posta in arrivo da tali indirizzi verrà inserita nella cartella
spam.

I like the Debconf logo

I like the Debconf logo. There's something familiar in it:

My ballot for the DPL 2007 voting

Everyone is posting their votes on Planet Debian, as if lots of Debian Developers vote by copying and pasting random votes from their web browsers.

I wondered for a minute how come on Planet Debian we tend to see the weirdest votes ever; but then I thought: if one has a perfectly normal, sane vote to vote, why blog about it?

Is this a competition for the weirdest vote?

I want to play.

- - -=-=-=-=-=- Don't Delete Anything Between These Lines =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
3c0-b5723☔dc4dc5f-aea02-d0fe
[ 0 ] Choice 1: Wouter Verhelst
[ 6 ] Choice 2: Aigars Mahinovs
[ 3 ] Choice 3: Gustavo Franco
[ 8 ] Choice 4: Sam Hocevar
[ 8 ] Choice 5: Steve McIntyre
[ 0 ] Choice 6: Raphaël Hertzog
[ 7 ] Choice 7: Anthony Towns
[ 0 ] Choice 8: Simon Richter
[ 7 ] Choice 9: None Of The Above
- - -=-=-=-=-=- Don't Delete Anything Between These Lines =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

(get it from http://people.debian.org/~enrico/polygen-debian/)

Fourteen ways in which you can avoid starting a flame war on a Debian mailing list

On an IRC brainstorming on what talk I should give at FOSDEM, liw suggested:

"Fourteen ways in which you can avoid starting a flame war on a Debian mailing list".

In the end I went for something more technical, but I've never stopped thinking about liw's challenge.

I ended up writing talk notes about such a potential talk.

Here they are.

The classics

• Unsubscribe
• Killfile
• Ignore

The radicals

• Configure mail server to drop all incoming mail
• Configure mail server to drop all outgoing mail
• Pipe all incoming mail bodies through chef before delivery
• Pipe all incoming mail bodies through dadadodo before delivery
• Replace all incoming mail bodies with polygen-generated messages before delivery

The radicals, applied selectively

• Configure mail server to drop all incoming mail from people you don'tlike
• Configure mail server to drop all outgoing mail from people you don't like
• Pipe all mail from people you don't like through chef before delivery
• Pipe all mail from people you don't like through dadadodo before delivery
• Replace all incoming mail from people you don't like with polygen-generated messages before delivery

The From tricks

• Hack mutt's display to swap From names randomly
• Hack mutt's display to use polygen to replace all From names with randomly generated ones
• Hack mutt's display to replace all From names with "Vorlon"
• Hack mutt's display to hide all sender names

The naggers

• Hack mutt to disallow replying to a mail for 30 minutes after it gets read for the first time
• Hack vim to tell workrave to interrupt hard and often when you are editing mail replies

The conscience ticklers

• Reread the last 5 mails in your sent-mail folder before replying
• Google search old mails of yours before replying
• Consider what Joey Hess would think of you if he ever read your mail

The subtle

• Write in your TODO list that you definitely need to reply to that mail

The subtle, 1 week later

• Write a TODO-list application to keep track of all that mail you definitely need to reply to

Igiene pubblica

Stamattina:

• Andare in via Gramsci 12
• Andare alla porta 10 piano terra
• Prendere il numero bianco con bordo blu
• Aspettare (due ore)
• Fare vaccino
• Andare alla porta 22 piano terra
• Pagare
• Tornare alla porta 10 piano terra
• Consegnare la ricevuta
• Ritirare il certificato

Mi sono sentito come la tartaruga del logo.