What am I up to right now:

What a great city Sydney is. Very nice. It reminds me of San Francisco a lot. Maybe it is because I am staying in a hotel in China Town. Everyone around the hotel is Asian. Great food, though. Right next to the hotel there is a Vietnamese noodle place, and since I had not had good Viet noodles for a long time and I was so hungry, I went in there and some some Pho Ga. It was just was I expected and I wanted. The hotel is clean and well situated, so I think I got a good deal. The trip was very eventful though. There was a big delay in Osaka of more than 7 hours and in SFO we had to get off the plane after they had closed the door and we were ready to leave. It took another 3 hours before we departed. I was very tired when we arrived in Sydney at 9am, but I am doing fine now. I am just about to go out for a stroll. The weather is a bit cooler than I expected.

After writing my blog below I came across this news. It is really scary! I guess with the economy in shambles we get more people turning to crime.

You must read this: http://tech.yahoo.com/news/ap/20081008/ap_on_hi_te/tec_techbit_youtube_spoofing

It is a constant cat and mouse fight between security software and malware. The fight has recently become really aggressive. One particular approach I have found from the unscrupulous malware community is to increase the medium of delivery to ever-more tricky methods. Even for veterans like me who have been attacked by viruses since their inception in the mid 80s during the early days of the Internet, when their preferred medium of delivery was through shared floppy disks, it has become harder to keep safe from these constant threats. One particular instance which I thought was really tricky came in the form of an email claiming to be an eCard. Fortunately, I made it a rule long ago not to open eCards, but looking at the URL made it obvious in this case I was right to have made that decision. Here is a partial copy of the email:

Good day.

You have received an eCard
To pick up your eCard, choose from any of the following options:
Click on the following link (or copy & paste it into your web browser):

http://...../e-card.exe

Your card will be aviailable for pick-up beginning for the next 30 days.
Please be sure to view your eCard before the days are up! We hope you enjoy you eCard.
Thank You!

Let's see what is wrong with this email.

For starters, the greeting itself is suspicious. Most phishing emails begin with this greeting. Sure! "Good day"! What this means is good day for them if you are stupid enough to open the link or reply to the email with your bank information; or worse your passwords.

The second thing that comes to mind is the obvious unsophisticated, lower-than-fifth-grade composition of the email. For example, notice that although it suggests more than one option to retrieve (pick up) the card, it does not enumerate them. It gives only one and then places the other in parenthesis.

The most important indicator that this is a virus is the extension .exe of the URL. Also, I substituted "....." for the original URL because I don't want to become a medium of delivery for this virus, but usually you can tell from the URL itself that this is just someone to pretend to be someone else.

There are also misspellings in the email, such as aviailable and some things don't even make sense grammatically such as "beginning for the next 30 days". Also, notice that the next sentence "Please be sure... " is also grammatically wrong.

One good thing about this email is that it can serve as a warning for students who are not paying attention during their English classes and who think they it will be fine if they get anything less than an A in their classes. My warning to them is to watch out as they could unwittingly end up in the malware line of business and they would not even be able to do that well enough to fool those who do pay attention in class and do your homework.

I arrived at King Fahd University yesterday night after a very exhausting trip. There was a big delay in Dubai and the whole trip about 28 hours door to door. I did my first presentation today. I have about 4 more to do. I am right next to the World's largest Oil company in the world, Saudi Aramco. There is lots of security. The people are very nice here. It is as hot as Arizona, with a little more humidity because of the proximity to the Gulf. The landscape is very similar to Arizona, but without the cacti and the red rock hill. Come think about it, I haven't seen any mountains. It is pretty much desert with lots of small bushes. The air is very hazy because of the dust. There are only men in the university and therefore I notice that most restrooms only say "Toilets". I thought that was curious. The food is very similar to South American food, but they just use more curry. Not spicy, though. Everybody speaks English, but I am learning some basic Arabic. The house where I stay is fine. The windows on the west side are covered with aluminum paper to shield it from the sun. The house itself is a one bedroom house with basic facilities. Nothing fancy, though. There isn't much to do. They deliver dinner and breakfast directly to the house, so I don't have to go out or anything. The house is close to the mosque and I find the calls to prayer, very relaxing. The weekends here are on Thursday and Friday.

For those of you interested in creating a chatbot inside of Pandorabots, I was able to hack the following LSL script in about an hour. It is by no means complete. Notice that if you don't get rid of the question mark (?) in the chat window, then the POST method will interpret it as an additional question mark and it will fail to connect. Remember this is just a hack. Use it at your own risk. If you make any modifications, please let me know. I'll try to create a more robust version and post it later in this blog. BTW, I definitely need to create a better XML parser. You might want to check the following URLs which contain more information on the Pandorabots XML-RPC interface, and on the llHTTPRequest function in the LSL Wiki. Enjoy it.

integer channel = 0;
key req_id;
integer listen_handle;
string BOTID = "9d752aa0fe36e178" ;
string URL = "http://www.pandorabots.com/pandora/talk-xml?";
string input;
key id;
string str_replace(string src, string from, string to)
  { //replaces all occurrences of 'from' with 'to' in 'src'.
    integer len = (~-(llStringLength(from)));
    if(~len)
    {
      string buffer = src;
      integer b_pos = -1;
      integer to_len = (~-(llStringLength(to)));
      @loop; //instead of a while loop, saves 5 bytes (and run faster).
        integer to_pos = ~llSubStringIndex(buffer, from);
        if(to_pos)
        {
          buffer = llGetSubString(src = llInsertString(llDeleteSubString(src,

          b_pos -= to_pos, b_pos + len), b_pos, to), (-~(b_pos += to_len)), 

          0x8000);
          jump loop;
         }
    }
    return src;
  }
  default
  {
    state_entry()
    {
      llWhisper(0, "I'm chat robot!");
    }
    touch_start(integer total_number)
    {
      id = llDetectedKey(0);
      string name = llKey2Name(id);
      llWhisper(0, "Hi " + name + ", I am alive! Now you can talk to me by

      typing on the chat field!.");
      listen_handle = llListen(channel,name,id,"");
    }

listen(integer channel, string name, key id, string message)
{ // Strip question marks
message = str_replace(message,"?","");
//llWhisper(0,"You said: " + message);
if (message == "sayonara")
{
llWhisper(channel, "Goodbye "+name+ ". Nice talking to you");
llListenRemove(listen_handle);
}
//llWhisper(0,"my ID = "+ (string)id);
req_id = llHTTPRequest(URL+"botid="+BOTID+"&input="+message,[HTTP_METHOD,"POST"],id); }
http_response(key request_id, integer status, list metadata, string body)
{ //Create a list with two items. First item is a string from
//beginning of XML response file to tag.
//Second item is the contents of either the ... or
//... tags.
string resp = llDumpList2String(llParseString2List(body,["","","",""],[]),"");

// Get to the start of the Pandorabot response by ignoring everything before the tag.
string respStart = "";
integer startIndex = llSubStringIndex(resp, respStart) + llStringLength(respStart);

// Get to the end of the Pondorabot response by finding the beginning of the tag.
string respEnd = "";
integer endIndex = llSubStringIndex(resp,respEnd) - 1;

if (req_id == request_id)
{
if( startIndex >= 0 && endIndex >= 0)

llWhisper(channel,llGetSubString(resp,startIndex,endIndex));
else
llWhisper(channel,"No message returned by bot");
}
else
{
llWhisper(channel,(string)status+" error");
}
}
state_exit()
{
llWhisper(channel,"Leaving the conversation");
llListenRemove(listen_handle);
}
}

Back in December 1997 I was applying for a job with OZ Interactive, which was the new kid in town in the San Francisco Avatars movement of the 90s. I had already talked with Skuli Mogensen at an event at the Exploratorium near the Golden Gate and had gone for an interview at their office South of the Market. While I was on a party in New York where OZ Interactive was launching their much anticipated OZ Virtual product, I believe at a place called The Palace, but I might be wrong. Anyway, while in the hotel I saw a CNN news about a virtual idol called Kyoto Date 96, which a talent company -HoriPro Inc- had developed a year earlier. She looked very real and the music was kind of catchy. I mentioned to Skuli that I should contact them once an employee to see if we could have her do a concert using OZ Virtual. Once in the company, I did and had great success. To make a long story short, I met several time with the Hori brothers at HoriPro Inc and was able to negotiate rights to have Kyoto Date on OZ Virtual. We created a music store with Kyoto Date's music and an avatar with Kyoko Date. We also had a concert and all. Although not very successful in Japan, the concept of a virtual idol caught the imagination of many people abroad and Kyoko Date had hundreds if not thousands of fun web sites in many different languages. I used the same concept to contact Takara, a Japanese toy maker that markets the Transformers and a Japanese version of Barbie called Licca. I also pitched a similar idea to Hello Kitty. We even tried to do a Gothic City with batman and its characters as avatars in the city. We were planning an economy in the city and to sell or rent real estate. It was a very fun project and they would have been successful, where it not that by 1998 the South of the Market and the avatar companies started melting down. I decided that it was time to move on in 1999.

Now here we are 10 years later. The avatar movement was moribund for severals years after I left as it was one of the hardest hit by the meltdown, so I guess I made the right move back then. But since last year, I started hearing news about a company called Linden Labs and its product Second Life. My junior students at Kwansei Gakuin University where I work have been very interested in the concept and have been developing several projects since. Most recently students from another school within the university are also very interested in Second Life to develop virtual characters. They asked me for help on the subject and put together the following links which might be of value:

Links about virtual human research, companies and efforts:

• http://www.red3d.com/cwr/characters.html
• http://www.quvu.net/interactivestory.net/links.html
• http://www.virtual-human.org/start_en.html
• http://www.washedashore.com/Humans/index.html
• http://vhil.stanford.edu/

A couple of articles that mention the history of Kyoko Date

• http://www.wdirewolff.com/jkyoko.htm
• http://www.akadot.com/article.php?a=99

Link to a chatting bot platform I think would be cool to combine with Second Life avatars and in which I am currently working on a Japanese version.

• http://www.pandorabots.com/

Link to a Flash based talking head that has been already integrated with the chatting bot above.

• http://www.oddcast.com/

Second Life avatar animation link:

• http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Animation

Second Life avatar gestures link

• http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Gestures

Second Life plans that might affect the future of characters or idols:

• http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Talk:Linden_Lab_Bounties

I think that what we will do is use what is currently available in Second Life to animate the avatar and give it movements. We will also finish the Japanese version of AIML and then do research on various aspects of idols within second life. This might lead to concerts, albums and so on. Maybe we can even start a dating business with Second Life idols. Who knows where all of this might lead, but one thing is for certain. It will be fun.

I just got off the phone with Mr. Kubo a technical rep with K-Opticom. The reason I called was that I am now unable to send email from own SMTP server, which I have been using for over 10 years when using EO Home Fiber. I was pretty upset after the conversation and went as far as threatening legal procedures for braking their contractual obligations. Here is a summary of the conversation:

MY CLAIM: When I signed up with K-Opti.com about 2 years ago for their Fiber Optics Internet service, I explicitly asked whether I could use my own SMTP server. I was told that it would not be necessary and thus I signed up with them. I had not problem while living in Japan, but somehow earlier this year I noticed that I could no longer send email using my SMTP server.

THEIR CLAIM: The company has decided that it is best to stop SMTP forwarding to avoid junk mail. They took this decision after following similar moves in the industry in Japan. Therefore they want all their clients to use K-Opticom's email servers and email addresses to send email when using their service.

MY COUNTER CLAIM: This accomplishes exactly the opposite results from the client's point of view. Most servers at reputable organizations with sound security policies keep a black list of server that constantly send junk mail, so they would be able to stop the junk mail flow. At the same time, most sensible people, which in large part are the people I do communicate with, have a white list of trusted email accounts and mail headers. Since K-Opticom wants me to use their email server and email address, then all of my associates will have to add my NEW email address to their white list, but this would not prevent the mail servers at the destination to add K-Opticom's server to their black list when some unscrupulous hacker figures out a way to send junk mail from their server. Thus the whole thing is a sham.

THEIR PROPOSED SOLUTION Buy additional services from K-Opticom by adding a fixed IP address to my account. This would cost an additional 2,500 yen to setup and about 4,000 yen to maintain. This would allow me to use my own SMTP service.

MY OPINION K-Opticom is abusing their clients by braking their promises and the contractual obligations. In my opinion, the whole thing is just a way to use K-Opticom power to push advertisement on their clients by forcing them to buy additional services. This is an outrageous attitude and needs to be stopped. I am willing to spend more on a lawyer and bring this case to court, than to bend overs for them. They have broken their contract and are abusing their position of power as a utility company. This needs to be stopped.