I caught the reports that the Sécurité du Québec and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police raided 12 locations early wednesday, and arrested 16 “hackers” who allegedly were running through a botnet more than one million PCs tlocated in Manitoba, US, Brazil and Poland.

If you go through the news reports, this is all very spectacular. “Hackers” were aged from 17 to 26, and allegedly made up to $45 million through ID theft and phishing. Police is said to have begun investigation since the summer of 2006.

Bot networks are created through trojans, worms, or “malware”, propagated from PC to PC through backdoors. Worms creators for instance craft messages for the Valentine’s day or any other special event that might deceive innocent users. Upon opening the message, the worm is installed and begins to replicate by going through the user’s address book for instance.

Bot networks are rented to send spams. They can also be used for denial of service attacks, like the famously known attack on Estonian government websites in May last year. A few of them are also used for phising and Identity theft, although the latter use is stupid, because it’s always possible to retrace the creators of the scheme through DNS and investigations, which is what the SQ and RCMP did.

I find though that the official figures in this case were overblown. I’ve done some research and couldn’t find the name of the group, which is surprising for a botnet running 1M+ bots. It just seems a random group of teenagers who downloaded a couple of trojans and worms generators. It’s also funny to hear a SQ rep saying that they were guilty of “hacking”, a word I am sure he doesn’t really understand.

Yesterday, over 30 people attended MontrealPython’s first meetup at standoutjobs’s offices. Having all these Python developers gathered was a good surprise, as many thought previously that there weren’t that many people using the programming language in Montreal. Arach Tchoupani, and to a certain extent Akoha, launched the event nonetheless, and it was undeniably a success.

We had one presentation by David Goodger, who invited developers to come to Pycon 2008 in Chicago. He then followed to present his deep interests in polyforms puzzling, which is more or less fitting geometric pieces into a predefined geometric complex shape. He showed how he was able to find solution thanks to a paper by Donald Knuth.

This presentation was quite intriguing and esoteric for me. There is some irony on trying to find solutions on problems you have configured yourself, instead of say, solving mathematical problems that can be found in Nature.

At the end, I also presented Blitzweekend, and invited people to register for the event. I believed that went well. We should have more than our fair share of python wranglers at the weekend and the 5 à 7.

Arach Tchoupani said at the end that they should have a meetup every 6 weeks, and should have presentations on Django.

More pictures at flickr (ok forgot to use the flash - but still interesting pictures)

Station C is Montreal’s new coworking space, and it finally opens today. It’s located 5359 St-Laurent, #430, and offers 16 working stations for freelancers and consultants, mostly graphic designers, web entrepreneurs, coders. The space also has a meeting room, a conference room, a bar, a lounge area and various utilities like wifi and a shared printer.

The project is the brainchild of Patrick Tanguay and Daniel Mireault, who started thinking about the concept 2 years ago, and who wanted to offer a “professionnal” alternative to coffee shops for freelancers.

In practice, members can be either residents, which mean they will have full access to the space, with a permanently assigned desk, or they can also be “flex”, with a basic plan starting at 14h./week, which is charged $130.

I am currently at the place, which was just renovated, repainted in red and white, with new furniture, and it looks great. They’ve got also a nice set of sofas and bean bags. It’s definetely a better place to work than being in a coffee place/library/home. It will be interesting how the dynamics will be here in the upcoming weeks.

oboro, which is a center focusing on interaction between art and new media, is starting a workshop mysteriously named : “Du tangible à l’intangible et vice-versa: un laboratoire ouvert sur les artefacts sonores”

The goal of the workshop is to make interactive stuff that responds to human interaction, via sound. If any of you is into hacking electronic and audio components, this is a fun way to interact with artists. Oboro is also getting a toy designer from LA to support soft interface making.

James Golick has setup a “reddit” for ruby-related news and articles. It follows reddit’s last week announcement that they will allow its members to create sub-reddits centered around “niche” communities. In practice, this means ruby.reddit.com will stay focused and on-topic, contrary to the main reddit page or other social news websites, such as digg.com, which inevitably begins to feature jokes, news specifically crafted for digg, and sensationalist items, in order to cater to its mass audience.

I’ve comed to the page and it’s already filled with news, blog posts and announcements. No doubt it will turn into a main reference for developers who use Ruby and Ruby gems, beginners and pros alike, from all over the world.

It’s a great initiative, and this comes after James was quoted in the latest Rails Envy podcast, for his ingenuous tips for Ruby on Rails programmers. In the last week, I have also seen him starting zookeeper, a project management software, which leads me to think we now have another Ruby guru. I know he also made plugins (attribute_fu and resourcecontroller) for the Rails framework, although I tend to use other alternatives like make_resourceful. This also shows how strong and innovative the Ruby and Rails community is in Montreal.

If there is an expertise that should shine in Québec and in Montréal, then it should be translation applications. The city’s diversity and heritage makes it an ideal setting for projects targeting the translation problem blossom.

I have already mentionned The Code Kitchen’s efforts in building a tool for localizing applications and how they provide multiple languages for their main product, CakeMail.

Today, Alain Désilets from the National Research Council of Canada presented Wiki-Translation.com at CodeFest’s 2nd day. As he explained in detail (Slides), translating content in wiki is a challenge, as there is never a definitive version or reference to work on. Worse, we might have several references, as the wiki’s contributors might have users in each country working on the same document and adding content on the same time. His presentation was in fact a kick-off meeting whose goal was to invite attending developers to participate in the project. Stephane Daury filmed his presentation today

I am not sure if the project would be successful, but, hey, I love challenges. Think about all Wikipedia content translated in each language, and all of this being done by harnessing massive collaboration.

Marc-André Cournoyer has released a new web server called Thin. Thin is built upon Mongrel and 2 other ruby packages, Event Machine and Rack, and is promised to be much faster than mongrel, which is no small feat. Thin gets the extra-speed by being 100% single-threaded and could be used to serve pages from ruby web frameworks, like Ruby on Rails.

Ruby on Rails’s speed and scalability has been questionned, especially before mongrel appeared; everyone would point out for instance Twitter’s frequent errors to highlight Rails’s “fragility”. As I see it, Thin, in theory, has lots of potential and kill the speed problem, although I am still wondering how it serves concurrent requests in production mode.

Marc-André Cournoyer previously released refactormycode, a place where programmers could get help from other members for their code, as well as multiple plugins for Rails. His track record is impressive, and he is raising the bar very high for the rest of us. I am not sure what he is going to do next. Maybe a framework? Oh wait, it’s already done too. Here’s an idea: create a new programming language.

A codeFest is a weekend sprint where programmers gather to add features to web applications. Last year’s codeFest theme was openID, and was reported to be very successful. The upcoming codeFest is planned Jan 5th and 6th, and the topic is to add microformats to your favourite applications. It is hosted at La Bande Passante, 8655 St-Denis.

A microformat is a web-based data formatting approach that seeks to re-use existing content as metadata, using only XHTML and HTML classes and attributes. This approach is intended to allow information intended for end-users (such as contact information, geographic coordinates, calendar events, and the like) to also be automatically processed by software.

While microformats have generated a lot of interest amongst the open source community and developers, it hasn’t yet gained any public traction. However, it’s easy to imagine tools, applications and software that would make microformats (re)usable and make it as popular and useful as the RSS/atom format. I am myself working on a microformat project with other montréalers, and will come at the event.

Furthermore, the event is focused on php and on Free / Open Source applications. For more info, there is an event page on facebook.

CakeMail, which was presented at StartupCampToronto last week, has unveiled a new package for developers who wish to extend their platform.

Duncan Moore writes that they offer the package at $99, but the value of a package is worth between $3,000 and $12,000 annually. It gives access to the API and developers can also send 5000 monthly emails. Developers willing to join the program must be willing to contribute to the community and provide feedback to CakeMail.

This is a great way for the Code Kitchen team to increase the adoption rate of their service, while getting more tools, plugins, and interfaces for CakeMail. If you are working with emails, you can sign up now.

QuebecTorrent.com, a local torrent tracker, is entagled in a lawsuit started last month by the Canadian music industry. They received first a cease&desist order, but eventually won this first attempt and are still online. The case is just starting though, with ongoing developments.

Of course, record companies like Sony BMG, EMI, Universal Music Canada are describing themselves as victims, and the website’s owner and administrator as pirates who ripped off hard-working artists. On the other hand, QuebecTorrent’s owner, Sébastien Brulotte, changed the website’s “mission” for personal uses only, is calling his community’s members’ help, and is asking for help on various websites, notably digg. Furthermore, he was alarmed that the case would make a jurisprudential case and make thus all p2p websites like IsoHunt or TorrentBox in Canada illegal.

I have no knowledge of Québec&Canadian law about peer-to-peer sharing and fair use, but here is nonetheless a comment by a Canadian who owns a web hosting company:

I’m not sure what is going on in Quebec But I believe it is more to do with the law not understanding what a torrent site is and the plaintiff’s trying to say the site holds the media itself. That here in Canada is 100% illegal. Though hosting index files related to a site is not. Therefore any torrent site that does not (Seed or Upload from the server) can not be charged with committing a crime. There even was a ruling by the supreme court of Canada in regards to downloading mp3’s that it is the same thing as going to a library and photo coping a page out of a book which people have been doing for decades. I’m sad to hear other company’s are not willing to defend their clients rights in a matter that is 100% ill legit. I do hope Quebec Torrents holds their ground and their host step up and help them instead of bowing to pressure that is unjust.

Surprisingly, the case has little to no press in the local press. I stumbled upon an article at La Presse which describes QuebecTorrent administrators as criminals who are about to be busted by the GRC. Other media groups in the province, like Québecor, are known to work hand-in-hand with the music industry.