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my guess is that some self-appointed white knight found something disturbing on a porn site he "happened to stumble upon", and then took it upon himself to Sherlock his way, through whois and google maps, into thinking that these girls were being held at the physical location associated with the porn site through multiple cross-referenced databases.

this sounds insane, and it is, but people really are like that and always have been. everyone is looking to right someone else's wrong and be a hero, often because their own lives are cesspits of denial.

even technical people fall for versions of this. there are many forums where technically-savvy but otherwise irrational people wax poetic on why the DoD would be sending packets to their networks, when in fact it's a just tracking pixel/js hosted by ad companies on IPv4 address blocks which were once grossly over-allocated to DoD and then auctioned off. i'm sure they'll update the database eventually; it's not important, right?

http://mapper.acme.com/

It allows you to "mark" locations, and is pretty easy to use. You can also create links to pages/maps.

As a photog, one of the best features is the ability to toggle to USGS topo maps.

It won't do all of what you want, but may help.

Web designers who want to get a sense of what their web site feels like on dialup can download thttpd which supports bandwidth limiting; 5 kilobytes a second is a reasonable simulation of a dialup connection.

kilobit or kilobyte? Last I remember, it was around 45 kilobit per second... (long LONG time ago...)

Web designers who want to get a sense of what their web site feels like on dialup can download thttpd which supports bandwidth limiting; 5 kilobytes a second is a reasonable simulation of a dialup connection.

Now there may be a bug uncovered in Phoon or perhaps the more bugs have dependencies like that.

In addition to the complaints specific to SORBS, here's what the acme.com owner (who, more than half a decade ago, received an the order of a million spam mails per day) has to say about DNS-RBLs in his write-up on how to efficiently and effectively filter spam:

DNS-RBLs - Domain Name System Realtime Black Lists. In theory the idea is fine. You have a set of sites that you blacklist, and you want to let other folks use the same list so you distribute it using DNS, which is a nice efficient de-centralized database. What's not to like?

Well, I don't know why, but in practice every single DNS-RBL eventually comes under the control of power-hungry weenies. They start listing sites unreliably, and if you complain you find yourself listed. And there's usually no way to get off the list.

A lot of people tell me I'm wrong about this. They say that certain DNS-RBLs are ok, with objective criteria for inclusion and simple procedures for getting off the list. The thing is, they give conflicting recommendations for which lists are good and which are bad. Some of these folks recommend lists which I know from personal experience are bad.

This problem is really inherent in the way DNS-RBLs are set up. You cede control of your mail system to a third party, with no real possibility of checking how they are doing. The people running the lists get overwhelmed with bogus feedback from spammers and/or idiots, to the point where they assume all their mail about the lists is from spammers and/or idiots.

If the lists you use have not yet descended into corruption and chaos, consider yourself temporarily lucky.

Do not use DNS-RBLs.

As you can see, he addresses the specific problems with SORBS ("in practice every single DNS-RBL eventually comes under the control of power-hungry weenies. They start listing sites unreliably, and if you complain you find yourself listed. And there's usually no way to get off the list"), gives a reason for why this is ("the people running the lists get overwhelmed with bogus feedback from spammers and/or idiots, to the point where they assume all their mail about the lists is from spammers and/or idiots"), draws his conclusions ("this problem is really inherent in the way DNS-RBLs are set up. You cede control of your mail system to a third party, with no real possibility of checking how they are doing") and arrives at a recommendation ("do not use DNS-RBLs").

The Mapper at Acme.com was one of the earliest *useful* mapping services on the net/web that I am aware of. It is far different now than it was long ago, however.

The Mapper at Acme.com was one of the earliest *useful* mapping services on the net/web that I am aware of. It is far different now than it was long ago, however.

If you need more speed than apache, you run thttpd. I'm assuming they didn't test it.

    That's pretty much the way we did it. If you hadn't already done the work, I would have said to use mailscanner. :) I used an addon withit, that logged in a database for me. The iptables rules were done with another script that ran once a minute to block new spammer. Either way. :)

    You might want to check out graymilter. If I remember right, you could whitelist known good senders, and it would whitelist good ones on it's own. I believe it's rules were dropped (other than your defined whitelist) if it was restarted. Pretty much, there would be a little hiccup in mail delivery when you first start it, and then it would run fine forever, or until you restarted the graymilter daemon or rebooted the machine.

    I know I looked at a whole bunch of solutions for graylisting. Some worked well. Some worked terribly. This one worked just as I'd like.

    After I got everything set up and tuned perfectly, I did get complaints. People said they weren't getting anywhere near as much spam as they usually got, and to them that showed how well the mail server was working. :) Graylisting for 30 minutes is effective, but graylisting for 30 seconds makes it so people barely notice. The first message is delayed for a relatively short time (depending on the remote server), but usually only about 5 minutes on the initial message, and no delay after that.

    Now, I don't run anything near as robust as this, because I'm not in control over any mail servers that have a need like this. The biggest mail server I run now has up to a 15 second delay, as it scans every inbound message, drops the high spam score messages, and delivers the low score messages. If they're remotely spammy, it tags them, so the client can decide how to deliver it, with it's own filters.

If it reaches the ground, it's called a meteorite.

Exactly. As the song says "Shooting star or meteor, whichever name you like, the minute it comes down to earth it's called a meteorite."

What Is A Shooting Star?

So is the Knolls Atomic Power Laboratory:
http://mapper.acme.com/?ll=42.82034,-73.86572&z=17&t=S

Correct, but you have it backwards. The proxy sits in between the child and gmail. The proxy will poll the gmail inbox periodically (via either POP3 or SMTP), then apply the whitelist to those results. Anything that passes that then gets put in the proxy inbox. The child then connects with whatever client to the proxy to retrieve his/her e-mail. As a bonus you can apply other forms of filtering to the e-mail at the same time you perform the whitelisting. For a really great write up of how to setup filtering, read this.

Trust isn't the key problem with CAs.
The key issue is that CAs like Thawte or Verisign do not scale. They manually verify each certificate request, a very expensive and labor-intensive process. A customer ordering an SSL certificate for https://www.acme.com/ must provide CA with legal documents showing that (a) ACME corp actually exists, (b) he really works for ACME, (c) he is authorized to request the certificate, and so on..
All submitted documents are manually verified by the CA (at least in theory). Sometimes, they look up the company in a phone directory and call the public phone number to check that the requester really works for the company, etc.
That's why CA-issued certificates are so expensive; for example, 1-year Thawte SSL cert costs US $249. The certificate alone costs more than what a shared hosting with php5 and mysql would cost, per year!
Expensive, manual verification process is the key problem with modern CAs and "notaries" provide excellent solution to it.

Slashdot
http://rss.slashdot.org/Slashdot/slashdot

WWdN: In Exile
http://wilwheaton.typepad.com/wwdnbackup/rss.xml

Penny Arcade
http://www.penny-arcade.com/rss.xml

The Merry Corsetier
http://community.livejournal.com/corsetmakers/data/rss

T-Shirt Surgery
http://community.livejournal.com/t_shirt_surgery/data/rss

Winnipeg Bargain Barn Swap Meet and Flea Market
http://community.livejournal.com/winnipeg/data/rss

Post Secret
http://postsecret.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?alt=rss

XKCD
http://xkcd.com/rss.xml

National Post
http://feeds.feedburner.com/NP_Top_Stories.rss

Astronomy Picture of the Day RSS Feed
http://www.acme.com/jef/apod/rss.xml

Dilbert Daily Strip
http://feeds.feedburner.com/DilbertDailyStrip

We The Robots
http://www.wetherobots.com/feed/

Disclaimer: I have removed all of my friend's blog's feeds.

• Dilbert - do I need to describe this?
• Explosm.com - Cyanide and Happiness comic
• Fokke & Sukke - Dutch comic. Popular daily cartoon (yes, I'm dutch and the name is intentional)
• Little Gamers - gaming comic
• Penny Arcade - gaming comic
• FAIL blog - epic fail every day

Finance & Economy

• BusinessWeek Online -- Most Popular Stories
• Calculated Risk - general blog
• The Economist - News analysis and views
• NRC | EconomieDutch newspaper, economy section

Space

• Bad Astronomy - Phil Plait's blog about astronomy and skepticism
• Chris Lintott's Universe - Astronomer, Galaxy Zoo co-founder and co-host of BBC's The Sky at Night
• NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day
• New Scientist, Space - Astronomy section of New Scientist
• Space.com - More space news...
• Starts With a Bang! - Astrophysicist Ethan Siegel, tries to answer some common but very complex astronomy questions.
• Universe Today - One of the most well known astronomy blogs

Tech

• Engadget - THE gadget blog
• Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories - making crazy electronic stuff (and drooling over niche market product catalogues)
• Gametrailers' ScrewAttack - funny gaming videos
• Kotaku - THE games blog
• Reuters Science
• Reuters Technology
• Slashdot
• The Brainy Gamer - in-depth articles about (the history of) games in general
• Tweakers.net - the dutch Slashdot

Misc

• Greggman - American gamedev'er who lived in Japan
• Jort Kelder - Dutch dandy. Ex-editor-in-chief of Quote, a magazine about entrepeneurs and the life of the nouveau rich. Co-host of the dutch Dragons Den.
• Scalzi's Whatever - Sciencefiction author.
• The Sartorialist - Fashion photographer. If you'd like to dress like a man with some class, instead of a fake tan metrosexual...look here for inspiration.

Unix's select/poll mechanism avoids all that. See, e.g., here.

"Amazing the number of "ignorance is bliss" responses on this thread. What you don't know is not allowed to hurt you. Wish I lived in that world." - me too! But maybe some live in a very small world (their own?) and maybe I don't want any part of that?
Seriously, ORDB (a free service) did more than most, some just cut the service but they announced it a long time ago. If the administrators are too lazy (or worse) to handle their side - what can you say? Now - to the comments of the unmanaged mail services, ouch!! Why and who would do that? It really is asking trouble!
Now - I still don't get black/block lists managed by some, even commercial, company? Everyone has a bias and at least I have been hit with filters which were based on, not spamming or such, an administrators view of the world, just because someone didn't like what was in that IP address or range. Almost did cost our company a huge contract!
In todays technology and fast computers, for a good advice see acme : http://acme.com/mail_filtering/sendmail_config_frameset.html/ , there are some good advices and don't let the date of the site fool you.

Er, he mentioned in his other discussions on mail filtering better ways to do it (i.e. those not on the "shame" list):

http://acme.com/mail_filtering/background_frameset.html

Oldie but goldie: http://acme.com/mail_filtering/shame.html#dnsrbls

Oldie but goldie: http://acme.com/mail_filtering/shame.html#dnsrbls

Well, I don't know why, but in practice every single DNS-RBL eventually comes under the control of power-hungry weenies. They start listing sites unreliably, and if you complain you find yourself listed. And there's usually no way to get off the list.

How to block a few million spams per day without breaking a sweat. See? You can do it without RBLs. In fact, the guy's opinion on RBLs is quite strong - and quite convincing.

How to block a few million spams per day without breaking a sweat. See? You can do it without RBLs. In fact, the guy's opinion on RBLs is quite strong - and quite convincing.

Either you don't give out your address, meaning that you cannot make wide use of it, or you get too much spam.

Or you install dspam, and never have to worry about it again. I haven't seen a single spam in my Inbox IN OVER 3 YEARS now, nor have any of the users I host mail for.

Thousands of spam messages are blocked or quarantined every day, and I never see them, unless I decide to check the quarantine (which is web-based). I put graymilter in front of that, and the incoming malware connections on port 25 dropped significantly.

I have no problem sticking my public email addresses out anywhere, because I simply don't get spam anymore. Problem solved.

The calculation is not as simple as you imply. If you get a million spams per day (like this guy), then you're probably better off with the spam filter, since without it your chances of catching the one purchase order hiding in 1000000 spams is pretty slim.

Spam filtering becomes worth it when the error rate of the filter is lower than the error rate of a human sorting through the same mail. That level of performance is pretty easy to achieve.

Your description reminds me of the greylisting and "could you please try sending that again in an hour or so" approach of Jef Poskanzer. Read more about his troubles here.

Oh, and remember: address@example.com is a better choice for email addresses used in examples, as it uses one of the reserved domains from RFC2606.

Your description reminds me of the greylisting and "could you please try sending that again in an hour or so" approach of Jef Poskanzer. Read more about his troubles here.

Oh, and remember: address@example.com is a better choice for email addresses used in examples, as it uses one of the reserved domains from RFC2606.

I prefer the original version of "Why Does the Sun Shine" to the They Might Be Giants. It's a bit more wacky when it's supposed to be educational.

http://www.acme.com/jef/singing_science/

"This is a risk management practice, and you need to decide where you want to put your risk. Would you rather risk getting spam with lower risk of losing/delaying messages you actually wanted to get, or would you rather risk losing/delaying legitimate messages with lower risk of spam? You can't have both, no matter how loudly you scream."

Yes you can, its called dspam, and it works beautifully.

I, and none of my users, have seen an single spam email in over 3 years. I added graymilter and Project Zen from Spamhaus very recently, and its helped even more.

Sure, there are false positives that get caught and quarantined, but dspam has a nice webui that let's me retrain them and forward them on to my mailbox. The users have the same web interface and can manage their own false-positives in the same way. They can set it to catch more, or catch less with a few clicks in the interface. Some of my users love HTML email from online stores, and some do not. Everyone can tweak and train the heuristics for their own mail, however they wish.

I have no problem now making any of my email addresses visible on the Internet, on forums, wikis, mailing lists or webpages, because I simply do not get spam, so its not a problem anymore.

There are a few small webservers already in existence: thttpd and dhttpd to name two. thttpd is faster than Apache at serving static pages as its feature set is very small. It is also a useful power tool - you can instantly set up a webserver to serve any directory you want.

Someone could probably make a tidy piece of cash by making an instant webserver for Windows users. It's an easy way of distributing files that doesn't require any special software or configuration on the client side. thttpd + GUI + shell integration would do the trick nicely.

Also the tank farms on the Hudson close to Kingston, NY.
http://mapper.acme.com/?ll=41.92837,-73.96301&z=17 &t=H

You could always follow his advice or ask him about that...

A shooting star is not a star, is not a star at all.
A shooting star's a meteor that's heading for a fall.

A shooting star is not a star, why does it shine so bright?
The friction as it falls through air produces heat and light.

A shooting star, or meteor, whichever name you like.
The minute it comes down to Earth it's called a meteorite.


What is a shooting star? (.mp3)
in Space Songs from Ballads for the age of Science by Hy Zaret and Lou Singer.
Part of the Singing Science collection.

A shooting star is not a star, is not a star at all.
A shooting star's a meteor that's heading for a fall.

A shooting star is not a star, why does it shine so bright?
The friction as it falls through air produces heat and light.

A shooting star, or meteor, whichever name you like.
The minute it comes down to Earth it's called a meteorite.


What is a shooting star? (.mp3)
in Space Songs from Ballads for the age of Science by Hy Zaret and Lou Singer.
Part of the Singing Science collection.

It's just we've all been sitting "behind the wall" to see true increases. When the amount of mail that makes it past the filters doubles, total traffic may have increased 10 times or more.

I use dspam and haven't seen a single spam hit my Inbox in at least 3 years now. Not a SINGLE spam , and while a few false positives get trapped in the quarantine (JCPenny coupon emails for our daughter's photographs there or other vendor-specific offers), those are easy to retrain so any more go straight to the Inbox instead. My users love the interface and lack of spam, and I love not being involved in manually whitelisting every week.

I just recently added Graymilter in front of that, and now we see even less.. You can see the results to judge for yourself.

Not only do we no longer receive ANY spam in our Inboxes, but we also gain a huge amount of bandwidth and cpu cycles back because we're not accepting, processing and quarantining mail we are going to reject anyway.

I have no problem sharing and posting my email address in public, on mailing lists or anywhere else now because frankly... we've solved the spam problem.

The whole system works great, and I don't have to "reinvent the mail system of the Internet" to do it. Only those who can't properly configure their tools would suggest such an idea.

It's FEATURE(`greet_pause',5000) not FEATURE(`great_pause',5000).
The previously-referenced Acme page mentions it.

The only problem is that the customer never knows that his email is being droped. He things that the receiver got the email and choosed to ignore it, simply because it never got returned. And you know what? He is right to think like that, if an email has not returned it should be assumed as delivered.

The problem with those black lists is that is quite easy to get in one of those and is near impossible to get out. The number of false positives that those RBL produce is huge, and this means a huge number of people not receiving emails. I had a friend that almost could not get into an international congress because she did not got any replys from the congress email because it's university was in one of those black lists.

I do not advise anyone to use black lists. There are many good ways to get rid of spam that do not have false positives, like gray listing. Check this out , this guy has a very good analisys of the problem and the solutions he used.

If you're really interested in these matters, use this approach. At the very least, it's well written and an easy read.

Always mount a scratch planet.

For a good laugh in the same category, try: http://www.acme.com/software/thttpd/repo.html

The thttpd (a lightweight Apache alternative) author has a similar story, but with more stupidity involved (see email history in link): thttpd author's "Attack of the Repo Men"

I put a 50' tower up here and nobody complained.

or if you are thinking about running a mail server , you should take the time to read this page

http://www.acme.com/mail_filtering/

its not the be all and end all, but there are several very very good ideas.

OAM

I found a link to "Songs of Science" recently
http://www.acme.com/jef/science_songs/

Share and Enjoy

My favourites are 'The Ballad of Sir Isaac Newton' and 'Why Does the Sun Shine'.

Use something like libhttpd or thttp to embed a webserver. Using ideas based on REST, design a RPC system (can use XML-RPC or if you're bent on making it a web based frontend, then maybe JSON-RPC) to communicate with the GUI.

If you want simple, static content, thttpd is stupidly tiny, stupidly scalable, and way faster than Apache. Unfortunately it uses the old fork model for dealing with CGI scripts which make it quite slow as doing that (but no worse than the old NCSA httpd). It has a number of interesting features, such as per-filetype bandwidth throttling (so you can specify that MP3 files only get transferred at 10kB/sec), but also has some suprising omissions --- the MIME type database is hard-coded, and it only handles HTTP 1.1. But if you have a simple site based mainly around static pages, thttpd is probably ideal for your purposes.

For most distributions Apache is configured to work pretty easily. I do agree that a very simple webserver (single user, single threaded, no virtual servers...) should be the default desktop webserver. Anyway here is a comparison chart.