Slashback: Matrix, Terminology, Topology

Slashback is back from a Thanksgiving hiatus with a bigger-than-usual collection of updates, corrections and followups to previous Slashdot stories, including pretty maps of the Internet, spammers' OS choices, stupidity in the wild, and more. Read on for the details. Of course, Red Hat didn't claim to be the first ... cmeyer writes in response to the news that Red Hat is expected to attain Common Criteria certification. "Linux achieved the first Common Criteria certification back in the beginning of August. It was a joint effort of IBM and SUSE." He points to this August Slashdot posting about the news and to a press release on SUSE's site.

Well, it's robust, stable and handy for networking tasks ... Linux and Unix users may be justifiably smug about our machines' resistance to viruses and trogans (including ones that send spam), since most of these things are aimed at Microsoft Windows. Maybe it should be no surprise that spammers like Linux, too:

Niels Provos writes "You might remember Honeyd? I have been using it since June to capture spam emails in an attempt to better understand how spammers operate. A recent feature in Honeyd is passive fingerprinting which allows Honeyd to passively identify the operating system that contacts it. For spammers, it turns out that about 43% seem to be running Linux. And mostly Unix, Windows ranks at around 0.7%. The unknown fraction is 52%, so there might be surprises lurking there."

Apple products must be ripened before consumption. Ipodlounge.com editor Dennis Lloyd was one of several readers to note that, rather than the November date named in the recent 2-year iPod retrospective in the New York Times, the device came out just a bit earlier. "The iPod's anniversary was in October ;) The iPod was officially launched on Oct. 23, 2001. The NYT article is incorrect."

May the tide be with you. Doc Searls writes: "Thought I'd direct your attention to the first half of a transcription of the talk Linus gave on the September Geek Cruise that got Slashdotted a few weeks ago. Can't find the link to the Slashdot item, but as i recall it didn't have the benefit of a real transcription." (Here's the Slashdot post about the cruise.) "This one is not only a full transcription (by yours truly, all disclaimers apply), but features pix of his slides and demos as well."

Searls also has up the second part: "That's the Q&A, which is even longer than the prepared part of the talk," as well as the third: "The third part is a transcription of a talk Linus and others gave to the Victoria Linux Users Group. Shorter than the first two."

Searls' three-part report on the cruise itself ran in Linux Journal.

This way to the Egress! Rick Chapman, author of the recently reviewed In Search of Stupidity , writes to point out that book excerpts are available at insearchofstupdity.com, along with some of the book's illustrations.

"Also, I recently was interviewed live on a local CT business show and I've had the session digitized and am mounting on the site today. It runs about 45 minutes and I discuss a lot of the stuff in the book as well as other issues revolving around software marketing and development. ... I have a lot of samples of really bad things I brought to the taping and I think you'll get a kick out of the session."

They should sell nice prints to buy bandwidth. An anonymous reader writes "From the New Scientist article: A project to create a comprehensive graphical representation of the Internet in just one day and using only a single computer has already produced some eye-catching images."

Back pedal, back pedal, baker's man, cover that label with tape if you can. Mr. Slippery writes "According to this Yahoo! News story, L.A. County did not ban the use of 'master' and 'slave' in labeling, but made more of a polite request to vendors. A subtle but important distinction.

'"I do understand that this term has been an industry standard for years and years and this is nothing more than a plea to vendors to see what they can do," said Joe Sandoval, division manager of purchasing and contract services. "It appears that some folks have taken this a little too literally."' (As, perhaps, did those who got offended in the first place...)"

The original memo called Master and Slave labels "not acceptable" -- how non-literally can that be taken? -- and as further news stories have reported, was prompted by an employee's workplace discrimination complaint against the city. That sounds to me like more than a polite request. At least the city has found that a little tape is enough to make the world safe from misinterpreted words.

I bet Bill is a better actor than Keanu. Karma Sucks writes "After some embarrassing PR backlash it seems as if Microsoft is clamping down on distribution of pictures or videos related to the Matrix Spoof that featured Linux and Windows at COMDEX. Even more interesting are the reports that Microsoft is systematically scouting Open Source desktop technology."

And this is what percentage of the industry's profits? dlh writes "Boston.com is reporting that a federal judge Thursday approved a $143 million settlement of a lawsuit that accused major record companies and large music retailers of conspiring to set minimum music prices."

Time to get a new watch. Krellis writes "DynDNS.org, a major dynamic DNS provider, has announced that they will shut off access to any customers using the Linksys WRT54G wireless router to update their service on December 8th unless the router is patched. See the story on ExtremeTech and the DynDNS Press Release for more details. Updated firmware can be downloaded from Linksys."

Comments

Linux and Spammers

[rf0]

Well taking that things like sendmail can send 1,000,000 mails and hour with the right spec its not overally surprising as they platform is quick and stable. Of course all spammers should be spit roasted.

Hmm spitroastedspammers.com

Rus

They should sell prints...

[Space cowboy]

They *do* sell prints. There's a part of the FAQ all about how you can use them for wallpaper, and, er, that's it.

Not that I have anything against that - they're very pretty, and they're entitled to sell them as much as they want :-)

Simon

Internet topology

[Anonymous Coward]

OK, the pics are great, but I'm not an expert in networking nor in internet topology... IP addresses have 4 dimensions but all internet topology pics seem to be in 3 dimensions with brightness showing the density... how are 4D addresses converted to 3D? Or are the internet topology maps spacial 2D traffic (the earth being, more-or-less, a curved plane which can be represented in 2D) projected on a sphere?

I would be very grateful if anyone could point me in te right direction.

Re:Internet topology

[hattmoward]

The maps aren't connected in terms of IP addresses as coordinates. It's a map of the links between hosts and networks. Very basically, they are doing traceroute/tracert to hosts and each host that gets mentioned is one dot, and it is connected to the hosts before and after it. If you haven't used traceroute before, run traceroute or tracert in a command window with a host name. The shorter one is used in windows. So to see the hops involved in talking to my website, you would run "tracert hattmoward.org"

Master/Slave taken too literaly?

[Bryan_W]

"It appears that some folks have taken this a little too literally."

It gives new meaning to the term "Hard Disk"

Mirror

[Sophrosyne]

Anyone have a mirror or bitorrent for Bill Gates Matrix spoof?

Trogans?

[CyberSlugGump]

I guess Linux is resistant to those dreaded "spell checkers," too.

When I saw that map of the Internet

[MsGeek]

I could only think of one thought..."My God! It's full of stars!"

Gorgeous. It's on one of my KDE desktops now.

Re:When I saw that map of the Internet

[pantherace]

there are bus, star, mesh & ring topolgies, both of which are created by links between 2 locations. (ex computer to hub)

Bus is for most things the worst, because everyone shares one connection, to everyone else.
Ring topologies (think token ring) pass things through the intermediate computers, and take reduce the bandwidth to each.
Star is by far the most common, and is arguably the best, because each computer has the full bandwidth available to it, to talk to other computers, presuming of course that each of them isn't already saturated. Hubs are examples of star network topologies.
Mesh topologies are very interesting. Seen on high performance clusters, where each computer can hit another with a jump or two (token ring like) when directly connected, or in wifi. Wireless mesh networks (rare, and usually rather custom & experemental currently) act in a way similar to a star network for the most part, but if something is out of range it contacts a node that can see it's target, and passes the information (or a series of nodes). I would really, really like to see a standard supporting this over all OSes. Currently most setups I have seen on the internet require an all (patched) linux setup to work, but can have other clients connect to it.

Don't ban the Matrix!

[Neop2Lemus]

No! They're banning the Mircrosoft Matrix?!

But it was better than either of the "official" Matrix equals

Filerush has it

[tycage]

Filerush has a torrent of it up. Also a traditional mirror, take your pick.

That's what I'm Tolkien about

[dswensen]

Mr. Slippery writes "According to this Yahoo! News story, L.A. County did not ban the use of 'master' and 'slave' in labeling, but made more of a polite request to vendors. A subtle but important distinction.

Now see... a lot of Slashdot folk, when they say "too much time on their hands," they're talking about G4s being made into aquariums, or dropping thousands of rubber balls down a stairwell, or ganging up to kill an unkillable Everquest monster, or something.

When I think of "too much time on their hands" I think of these people.

But what it needs...

[Soulfader]

...is a 'you are here' arrow.

"Hey, I can see my node from here!"

OPTE Project (the pretty Internet Maps) :)

[Anonymous Coward]

Greetings Slashdot Friends,

We've been extended a very generous bandwidth offer that will greatly benefit our project. However we're now also looking for a beefier box to run this stuff on.

We have made some "under the hood" technology changes and now have this theoretically scanning the entire net in 13 hours, leaving approximately 11 hours for rendering the image.

We're looking to either raise enough capital to purchase a 2-4 way machine with 4GB ram, or have a nice vendor (*cough* dell, HP/Compaq, Apple, etc) step up and donate one for us.

We should have T-Shirts and other paraphernalia ready to purchase sometime in the next week or so. If the machine donation doesn't come through, we'll take the cash from the merchandise sales to pay for it.

Thank you again everyone for your interest, your participation, and most of all your support.

-= The OPTE Team =-
http://www.opte.org
Efnet IRC: #opte
press@opte.org

Mirror mirror on the wall

[Adam9]

If you just want the images, I have them mirrored here

Here's a direct mirror to the video

My money's on misconfigured sendmail installations

[pr0ntab]

to be the explanation for the 43% of upstream spam sources. You have people installing older versions of Linux with everything enabled, then bungling the configuration turning it into a mail relay. For a person new to configuring sendmail, postfix, qmail, or whatever, you sort of enter a discovery phase where you make changes to the conf files, restart it, and see if you can send mail yet.
And you stop, pat yourself on the back, and don't change anything when it starts working. But what if that change was that got it to work was, well, relay for all? Whoops.

Then there's the unpatched systems that get r00ted and turned into spam zombies.

I don't think the spammers are installing linux that much. (At least not the BIG ones, and they may be knowledgable/paranoid enough to go with OpenBSD or something) The majority probably got some Alienware rig bought off a stolen CC, running a cracked 2003 server. It's just that they offload the mail to some other cracked Unix host to do the work. That doesn't surprise me.

Linux Spammers

[JLester]

I had a server that began sending undeliverable messages to my postmaster account that were obviously spams originating from the server itself. I use Debian with Exim set to disable relaying and could not figure out how this occurred. I finally found a couple of strange processes running that apparently were acting as an SMTP reflector of some sort. Computers were sending e-mails to it and it forwarded them out to the proper addresses.

I finally traced it back to an older CGI script on the server that had a few bugs. Luckily they only had access to the /tmp directory, so it was an easy fix after upgrading the script. I never did figure out exactly what the process was doing though and couldn't find anything about on the 'net. This occurred about a year ago.

Jason

Re:HOWTO

[Tony]

What kind of psychedelics are you on, man?

HOWTO install software on MS-Windows

1. Go to store. Find the software you want, or are told you want.
2. Stand in line to purchase software.
3. Pay $429.99 for office suite
4. Drive home
5. Unpack software. Break fingernail on impenetrable plastic carton. Curse. Wrap finger in Curious George band-aid.
6. Insert CD. Watch the extended edition of The Fellowship of the Ring while the virus scanner checks the CD.
7. When the setup program autoruns, click through licenses and questions both stupid and unintelligible. When the setup program asks for the keycode, look around your workspace. After 5 minutes of frantic searching, realize you through it away with the fingernail-hating packaging. Dig through garbage; find license under old coffee grounds.
8. While the program installing, watch the extended edition of The Two Towers.
9. Run the program for the first time. Dig through settings and configuration to figure out how to TURN OFF THAT DAMNED PAPERCLIP!
10. Done.

Of course, this is for an old version of MS-Office. The newer version is much simpler; since Clippy is no longer included, step 9 is not necessary.

HOWTO install program under Linux (Debian):

1. apt-get install openoffice.org

use color coding instead of Master and slave

[Lehk228]

I was thinking make the "master" device beige and the "slave" devices black, that way the master devices would stand out..... oh wait... that probably wouldn't reduce the offensiveness would it.... but it would be funny as hell in an extreamly offensive way and teach whoever started the whole thing not to be stupid.

Re:Political correctness

[Nucleon500]

creatively thin skinned

We prefer the term 'epidermally challenged.'