The Baltimore site and open to participants at all skill levels. It is not necessary to be a UMBC student to register. Thanks to generous support by Next Century , there is no registration fee for the Baltimore site, but you must register for this site in advance at www.globalgamejam.org. The jam will start at 5PM on Friday, January 29th in the UMBC GAIM lab, room 005a in the ITE building. At that time, the theme for this year’s games will be announced, and we’ll brainstorm game ideas and form into teams. Teams will have until 3pm on Sunday, January 31st to develop their games. We’ll have demos of each game and selection of local awards, wrapping up by 5pm Sunday.

Last year’s theme was “As long as we’re together there will always be problems”, and we had games developed using a combination of XNA, Flash, Maya, Photoshop, and the Unity Engine.

For more information, visit http://gaim.umbc.edu/jam/.

“Loterías y Apuestas del Estado, the government agency that runs El Gordo and other lotteries during the year, encourages mass participation by dividing each €200 ticket into décimos, or tenths, which sell for €20. This, in turn, allows players to improve their odds by buying small shares in many tickets, often by forming syndicates with friends and colleagues. … All this has transformed the lottery from a glorified tax on the poor, as it is in most countries, into part of the social fabric. Sharing tickets at Christmas has become a way to reinforce social ties, says Roberto Garvía, a visiting professor at Georgetown University. The practice of forming syndicates, which initially started in the 19th century when lottery tickets became too expensive for working-class folk, has become a tradition among all classes. As one banker says, “I don’t want to be the only idiot who has to turn up to work if the office number wins.”

If you are using Spamassassin, or think your mail server might be, check the source of mail you have received today. Here’s an example from one of my messages this morning.

X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.2.5 ... on mail.cs.umbc.edu
X-Spam-Level: *
X-Spam-Status: No, score=1.6 required=5.0 tests=AWL,FH_DATE_PAST_20XX
  autolearn=disabled version=3.2.5
Received: from mail-yw0-f142.google.com (mail-yw0-f142.google.com
  [209.85.211.142]) by mail.cs.umbc.edu (8.14.3/8.14.3) with ESMTP
  id o01DjJUn011187; Fri, 1 Jan 2010 08:45:19 -0500 (EST)

If the message exceeds the local spam score threshold for, you may find a block with more details in your message header, like this example.

Content analysis details:   (6.1 points, 5.0 required)

 pts rule name              description
---- ---------------------- ----------------------------------
 3.4 FH_DATE_PAST_20XX     The date is grossly in the future.
-4.0 RCVD_IN_DNSWL_MED   RBL: Sender listed at http://www.dnswl.org/,
    medium trust [130.85.25.80 listed in list.dnswl.org]
 1.8 SUBJ_ALL_CAPS  Subject is all capitals
 0.7 MSOE_MID_WRONG_CASE  MSOE_MID_WRONG_CASE
 4.2 FORGED_MUA_OUTLOOK  Forged mail pretending to be from MS Outlook

As a workaround until your server updates Spamassassin, the points that the rule adds to a message’s spam score can be lowered to 0.0 in Spamassassin’s configuration file (local.cf) or your own user-prefs file.

score FH_DATE_PAST_20XX 0.0

This is from the UMBC press release:

“Capping a near-flawless performance over the past four days at the tournament in South Padre Island, Texas, the Retrievers topped a team from the University of Texas-Brownsville today to secure the title outright for the first time since 2005.

Today’s win completed a perfect 6-0 match record for the tournament, known as the “World Series of college chess.” UMBC’s dominant performance is all the more impressive given the high quality of the 28-team field this year, said Alan Sherman, director of the school’s chess program.
…
Today UMBC topped UT-Brownsville’s “B” team, 4-0, to complete the march to the title. But the Retrievers most of the hard work yesterday, winning decisive matches over two of the strongest teams in college chess. The Retrievers topped UT-Dallas, 3 to 1, in the early match, and then got past UT-Brownsville’s “into today’s action. The tournament also included teams from Yale, Princeton, NYU, Stanford and University of Chicago.
…
The Pan-Am is the most celebrated intercollegiate chess tournament in the Americas. Since its 1946 inception, dozens of universities throughout the Americas have participated. The tournament is open to any college or university team from North, South, or Central America.

Since 2003, the teams representing the top four schools in the Pan-Am have met again in the spring to compete for the President’s Cup in an event sponsored by the U.S. Chess Federation — the “Final Four of Chess”. In 2010 the University of Texas Brownsville will host the final four, UMBC, UTD, UTB and Texas Tech, in April.

You can get information on the tournament and the games at monroi.

“A six-month study of how Roomba affected households, conducted by Ja-Young Sung at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, backs up that finding. “Some people saw it as a lifetime partner – they had a real emotional attachment to it.” Even those who returned to their previous cleaning routine didn’t blame the robot, instead saying it was their routine that was at fault.”

See their 2009 CHI paper, “Pimp My Roomba”: Designing for Personalization.

The little guy is pretty savvy — it knows how how to get ahead even if it doesn’t have the fastest cores on the block: manage expectations.

“One study by Jodi Forlizzi at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, highlights how popular culture can affect a robot’s reception. People she introduced to Roomba, a robotic vacuum cleaner made by iRobot of Bedford, Massachusetts, compared it with their knowledge of robots that explore Mars, forming low expectations of Roomba’s abilities. But making a bad first impression seemed to help Roomba; it invariably surpassed expectations, helping people bond with their machine.”

See How Robotic Products Become Social Products: An Ethnographic Study of Cleaning in the Home.

    Iranian Cyber Army
    THIS SITE HAS BEEN HACKED BY IRANIAN CYBER ARMY
    iRANiAN.CYBER.ARMY@GMAIL.COM

    U.S.A. Think They Controlling And Managing Internet By
    Their Access, But THey Don’t, We Control And Manage
    Internet By Our Power, So Do Not Try To Stimulation
    Iranian Peoples To….

    NOW WHICH COUNTRY IN EMBARGO LIST? IRAN? USA?
    WE PUSH THEM IN EMBARGO LIST  

    Take Care.

Since publishing your email address invites spam, many people use the foaf:mbox_sha1sum property instead of mbox. mbox_sha1sum is also inverse functional but doesn’t reveal your private information (i.e., email address).

Abell on developer.it has an interesting post, Gravatars: why publishing your email’s hash is not a good idea, that shows how to crack an MD5 hash of a person’s email address given a little information about the person. (note: The gravitar service supports globally recognized avatars.)

The idea exploits the fact that a few free email services (e.g., gmail, hotmail, yahoo, aol) account for a large fraction of email addresses and using a person’s full name, one can generate likely ‘username’ possibilities. Given an email hash and a persons first and last name, one can generate hashes of likely email addresses until a match is found.

Abell was able (!) to crack 10% of the email addresses for 80,871 stackoverflow.com users in an hour with a simple Haskell program.

The same attack can be used on foaf:mbox_sha1sum properties, especially since a foaf profile will very handily provide the other useful information about the person. Given the extra information available in many foaf profile (e.g., nick, school homepage) one might even expect better results.

As vulnerabilities go, this doesn’t seem like a very dangerous one. The use of mbox_sha1sum is usually justified as a way to avoid having your email address harvested by spambots. I doubt that spammers would think it productive to spend an hour of computing time to get 1000 email addresses.