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I am upset. If you write quite a bit, you learn a rule: you must never, ever write when you are upset. In such a state, clarity simply goes and what you thought was a masterpiece in truth was in fact... a pile of incomprehensible, misspelled crap.

I am going to do it anyway. I shall add a disclaimer: I am going to publish this article "as is" - no spell check, no Dave guard which turns my atrocious English into... well, English.

I am deeply upset and saddened by O'Gara's article on Pamela Jones at GrokLaw. To the point that I am absolutely speechless. I mean it. I don't know what to say.

I don't share O'Gara's ways nor approach. She seem to hate Groklaw, and the secrecy around this web site. Hatred is not a nice nor constructive feeling; it doesn't help anybody, and in fact it often goes against you (as it's going against Maureen right now); unfortunately, we all experience it and we all act out our anger sometimes.

This "pill" is here for two reason. The first one, is to ask you to... to forgive Maureen O'Gara. What she did was vile; but it was out of frustration and anger. She is a human being; she has made a great mistake; and she will pay for it. I ask you to forgive her because she is unforgivable, and it is right now that we all have to take out the best of ourselves and feel that even the unforgivable is... well, forgivable.

The second, more important reason why I am writing this (dangerously) unedited "pill", is to ask the question: why is Maureen's article unforgivable? I asked this to myself. In a way, you can even see where she is coming from: there is this wonderful site which is helping the demolition of SCO's absurd case, and it seems unlikely that a single individual could possibly run it all on her own. It is also true that if Groklaw were run by a bunch of IBM's lawyers, well, it would loose at least some of its credibility. I think I have reasons to believe that this is exactly what Maureen wanted to find out. Again, then: why is Maureen's article unforgivable?

Because there is a chance (and for a lot of us that's a fat chance) that Groklaw is run by a wonderful 40 or 60 year old woman or man who is a Christian or a Jehovah's Witness or a Buddhist, who believes in what she does to the point that she is willing to put herself in a dangerous position by doing so. Yes, I said dangerous, and I mean dangerous. There is a (big) chance that Pamela is in fact a woman who lives her everyday life, has a job, does what she has to do, and runs Groklaw thanks to the support of the whole Free Software and Open Source Community.

This paragraph is for you, Maureen: if that were the case, Maureen, you hurt somebody beyond belief. You hurt somebody so much, that I can only hope you will never, ever find out quite how mad the damage was. Because if you did find out, you would never be able to forgive yourself.

Well, that's a big weight out of my chest. But I am not quite finished yet. I want to talk about myself for a minute.

I am an ex-cracker born in Italy and living in Australia. When I was 18 and 19, I cracked quite a few computers and nearly went to jail for it. My phones were tapped, and only an amazing series of coincidences saved me. I didn't go through a trial, but a lot of people around me did. I never destroyed a system, but I did read files I should have read. If one day I made somebody very powerful really angry, I can see how they would be able to dig in my past and find all sorts of things that I would find "embarrassing" at least, compromising at worst. They could pick on my past as a cracker, on my religion (I am a Buddhist), on the way I live my life (I don't shop and yet I am not stingy), or on another million things.

Maureen, this is another paragraph for you. I am sure you haven't been a cracker, but if I were to look very, very thoroughly into your l

I wrote up exactly such a system, although it's centered around Postfix and not Exim (but the concepts should be portable).

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I also worked those instructions into an article, "Filtering spam with Postfix" in last month's issue of Free Software Magazine.
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I wrote up exactly such a system, although it's centered around Postfix and not Exim (but the concepts should be portable).

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I also worked those instructions into an article, "Filtering spam with Postfix" in last month's issue of Free Software Magazine.
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I had an article published at http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/free_issues/is sue_02/focus_spam_postfix that might help you with the setup part.

I used a cast-off Pentium 233 box running FreeBSD and Postfix to build a frontline spam filter to protect my company's Exchange server. Then, we published MX records pointing to the Exchange server with the FreeBSD server as a secondary MX, and then blocked incoming port 25 connections to the Exchange server. In case of emergency, we can simply unblock that port and resume sending an unfiltered feed to the main server.

Good luck!

...as long as what you're planning to run software that needs lots of FLOPS. Personally, FLOPS are completely meaningless on my servers; infinite FLOPS aren't going to make buildworld, run my mail filters, or serve Zope pages any faster. You might find that to be a meaningful number but I have no interest in it, and such is the nature of benchmarks.

What about Linux assembly language?

http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/pgubook/

Or, you can buy a printed version from here.

The next issue of Free Software Magazine will likely have a list of many of the good free books available.

This is from http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/free_issues/ which has lots of other good articles too!

1. Filter the HELO messages. If the sender says "HELO yourownname.example.com", then it's lying and you can safely reject the connection.
2. Don't be overly picky about reverse DNS lookups, but do check that the domain of the From: address is resolvable. After all, what's the point of getting mail from "spew@nonexistentdomain.com" if you can't reply to them?
3. Selective DNS blacklists. Do your homework and find a couple that are picky about what they add. Remember: false negatives are much better than false positives!
4. SPF. It's not a cure all, but it works and it's available today.
5. Greylisting. Oh, how I love thee!
6. Finally, Spam Assassin, ClamAV, and other "expensive" defenses.

Since I implemented the above as a Postfix ruleset, I don't get spam anymore, and it's not exactly like I've actually kept my primary address secret. No, I'm not kidding or exaggerating - basically, my mailbox is my own once again. Viva Postfix! Viva greylisting!

1. Filter the HELO messages. If the sender says "HELO yourownname.example.com", then it's lying and you can safely reject the connection.
2. Don't be overly picky about reverse DNS lookups, but do check that the domain of the From: address is resolvable. After all, what's the point of getting mail from "spew@nonexistentdomain.com" if you can't reply to them?
3. Selective DNS blacklists. Do your homework and find a couple that are picky about what they add. Remember: false negatives are much better than false positives!
4. SPF. It's not a cure all, but it works and it's available today.
5. Greylisting. Oh, how I love thee!
6. Finally, Spam Assassin, ClamAV, and other "expensive" defenses.

Since I implemented the above as a Postfix ruleset, I don't get spam anymore, and it's not exactly like I've actually kept my primary address secret. No, I'm not kidding or exaggerating - basically, my mailbox is my own once again. Viva Postfix! Viva greylisting!

i'm sorry, i just had to point out how HILARIOUS this pic of monkey boy is!!!

See, that's where I would advise people not to use LaTeX (when lots of frames and stuff are involved). TeX (and LaTeX) where explicitly designed for linear, information-dense documents. The formatting is actually an important aid in reading these documents. I have to read many articles a day, and I am very happy that the major scientific journals still use TeX to typeset their documents -- they all look good and are easy to read.

When you start talking about graphical design and frames and whatnot, you are not really in the space that LaTeX was designed for (even though these guys used it for their magazine). I would likewise discourage people from using low-level PostScript code to do CAD drawings. Hammers for nails and screwdrivers for screws, ya know...

There will also be a printed magazine on free software in a few months:

Free software magazine