Slashback: Spambots, Retroism, VoIPhooey

Slashback -- another round of updates and errata for your reading pleasure follows. So read on for more information on spambots, Flash memory for your slightly-outdated Apple systems, Linux (not quite) running on the GP32, publicity (including a security problem) from Mozilla, and more.

Let's find the spamsters and turn them over to Hormel. Neil Gunton writes: "Further to my previous article about stopping Spambots with Apache, Perl, MySQL and ipchains, it appears that the spambots have evolved somewhat. They seem to come in using a search engine to find promising pages, and then spoof the User-Agent field and generally try to behave as much like a real person as possible. Here is an update to my original article. This is something that anyone who runs a website and dislikes spambots should be aware of..."

If I ever have children I might let it go at that. jamie writes: "'If I ever have children,' says Rich Dreher, 'I would want them to see and touch one of the very first 'real' personal computers, not some simulation of an Apple in a window on a Pentium VIII running Windows 2012.' Over the last few months he's put together a CompactFlash/IDE adapter card for the Apple //e and IIgs, and now he's taking orders. The largest hard drive that ProDOS supports, as flash RAM, costs $14! Seeing the card really brought back memories..."

We mentioned this a while ago, before the pressing need of Apple ][ owners was quite so evident.

What's a little $80 million mistake among friends? Sinjun writes: "In what is believed to be one of the first prison sentences given to the creator of a virus, David L. Smith of the infamous Melissa plague recieves 20 months in federal lockup. I would have thought he would recieve more, seeing the massive amount of money lost by corporate America resulting from Melissa. Oh well, this is the precedent that has been set."

Smith should be grateful that his victims weren't allowed to each pluck one hair from his body per Melissa message received.

But what about the GBA? bobbydigitales writes: "A while back someone suggested porting linux to Samsungs GP32 handheld games console. As I own one, I did a bit of 'googling' and found a post from a guy at Samsung about a problem he was having with his linux port to the s3c2400x chip (this constitutes most of the GP32's hardware). It seems he finished his port as he sent me all the patches and instructions needed to compile the kernal for the s3c2400x.

As I dont have any experience porting linux i thought I'd share this information with the world and see if anyone could offer help and/or suggestions on how to proceed. Here are the files and info.

Samsung have completed the following drivers:

• LCD
• Serial
• USB Host (with mouse driver),
• Sound
• Keyboard
• Network (not actually on the GP32 chip)

Things that are missing:

• bootloader,
• SmartMedia Card driver"

I knew I should have ordered a few. Alex Law writes "Only days after Slashdot's article about Creative Labs great deal on VoIP Blasters, it appears that they are no longer in production or available from Creative's web site. Shame; mine arrived yesterday, and we were all quite impressed."

From the Mozilla front: Lots of good reports and an oops. The good stuff -- reaper20 writes "With 1.0 around the corner, it seems like the folks over at Mozilla.org have their hands full. Between interviews and last minute security bug fixes, it seems like the Mozilla is poised for the big push to 1.0. David Hyatt brings up the IE Advantage, and the death of user-experince based browsers. Mozilla.org itself has stood firm on some of these marketing driven issues - yet some changes have caused some interesting developments in the Mozilla community. The recent context menu revisions and personal toolbar recommendations by Netscape have caused a bit of controversy. (Bugzilla entries ommitted for obvious reasons)

Recently, the mozilla/browser and Chimera projects have been started to address certain usability problems and the desire for OS X native widgets. With Galeon and other Mozilla derivatives getting better and better, it seems that Mozilla 'proper' will serve as a platform for derivative browsers customized for the target platform. Lots of standards-compliant clients each tailored to user needs, sounds like what web was originally designed for."

And the oops -- An Anonymous Coward writes: "An Israeli software firm has discovered a flaw in Netscape and Mozilla software that allows code hidden in a Web page to read files from the user's PC. The bug is a more serious variant of one patched in Microsoft's Internet Explorer in February."

Comments

Only 64MB? I don't think so...

[ncc74656]

Over the last few months he's put together a CompactFlash/IDE adapter card for the Apple //e and IIgs, and now he's taking orders. The largest hard drive that ProDOS supports, as flash RAM, costs $14!

I have a 1GB hard drive hooked up to my IIGS right now...and all the space can be used. ProDOS 8 only allows 32MB partitions, but RamFAST and Apple rev. D SCSI cards provide various methods for mapping more than two drives to a physical slot. (ProDOS 8 itself allows for four drives if the controller is in particular slots.) The number of slot/drive combinations limits you to somewhere around 300-350MB maximum online storage with ProDOS 8 (the RamFAST will let you mark partitions active or inactive). If you're using a IIGS and its GS/OS, though, you just create a couple of 32MB ProDOS partitions (to boot and to run your 8-bit apps) and one big HFS partition to use up the entire drive. (The only downside to HFS is that you'll need a Mac to fix the partition if it's corrupted.)

Re:What's the Mozilla-Netscape flap?

[JanusFury]

Back and Forward were removed from most context menus, except the one for the page itself, slowing down navigation.

Of course, this was to simplify and shorten the menus, so there are valid arguments for both sides, but personally I like having Back and Forward on all the menus.

I hate when people criticize Opera

[inerte]

Opera and Omniweb are funded by smaller companies, companies that don't have deep pockets like AOL or Microsoft, so in some small way they can be forgiven for the steps that they take to make money to support themselves. These browsers at least offset their nagging with the ability to block popups and images.

Now, how about saving sets of opened page to continue browsing them anytime. I have several of them, one for each subject I commonly browse for. And continue to browse the last opened pages if your browser/operating system crashes. Import and Export bookmarks and email contacts. Browse offline content, delete every personal info left on your computer by your browser with two clicks (for the privacy freaks), multiple languages supported, pre defined texts to fills forms, 13 search engines available in a tab. Skins, layout customization, modify settings of html text and link tags, load your own css, zoom, block frames, load only cached images, report Javascript errors. Identify the browser as being another (right, "you must use IE to view this page" crap). Full control over cache and cookies. And password protection. Not to mention fully functionals email and newsgroup clients, low comsumption of computer resources, all in 3.2 megas.

And if everything here didn't catch your attention, two words:

"Mouse gestures".

That alone is worth a thousand dollars. Hover a link, right click and up+down with mouse. Page loads at the background. Open 25 links this way, hold mouse button, down+right, close current window. Do it for every page you have found. Hold mouse button and press another, back to pages you previously visited. Another way of buttons, forward the pages.

Opera was worth every cent I paid for. With it, my productivity raised so much I can't live without anymore. I do programming for living, and if having +20 windows opened at the same time, searching for information with Google, discussing at newsgroups, and reading mailing lists, weren't delivered so fast and nice over the last years that I am using Opera, I know a lot of work would not have been done.