I appreciate the feedback, but, I stand by my original statement. Crimping RJ45 ends on cable should have been avoided. We wasted easily a couple of hours of scarce volunteer time on this. Yes, a $15 tester could have been used, and almost certainly wouldn't have detected either of the primary problems we had with the crimping.
However, the primary reason to avoid the crimping is not a technical one, it's a management one. We really didn't have the resources to be spending on the crimping. We should have been concentrating on things other than crimping RJ45 ends on cables.
Next year we *WILL* use the Leviton ends to terminate bulk cabling.
The Ubiquity radios were seriously considered, but I definitely wanted MIMO and simultaneous 2.4 and 5.2 GHz in one box.
Remember, this is all volunteer run, so doubling the number of APs to setup, tear down, and manage was something I wanted to avoid. Also, the Ubiquity gear mostly is not table-top form-factor. It's mean for pole-mounting. Not a good match for our needs.
As far as doing a crap job of serving both bands, that's been my experience with very cheap units. These units on the other hand, both the Netgear and DLink, have performed admirably.
As the article mentioned, we did *NOT* plan it this way. We *PLANNED* to use Leviton female cable ends and 1 foot patch cables, which would have eliminated the problems we had. But, one of the guys bought some gear without consulting me and this is what we ended up with.
These were for the runs that we didn't know how long they'd need to be, so buying tons of extra pre-molded 250' cables (long enough for any of the single runs we needed) just didn't seem like that great an idea.
Particularly when I had this other plan.
I spent $300 on pre-molded cables, some to work with these Leviton cable terminators. So, don't ding me for not using pre-terminated cables.
This is all sound advice that agrees with my experience. However, this year we really had much less of a problem with Ad-Hoc networks, this was a bigger issue in the past. Possibly some of this is the tools, one of the vendor wireless configurators I saw was basically impossible to tell that it was setting up an Ad-Hoc network, everything I saw in it indicated it was connecting to an existing network not setting up it's own, until I drilled down into the bowels of that software.
One thing I didn't really mention is that I think part of the problems we had with 2.4GHz was the interference of the conference center's wireless gear, they had the 2.4GHz spectrum blanketed.
That is a good point, but as the SXSW show has shown, you can't count on the cellular networks being able to handle a huge concentration of users either. PyCon probably isn't big enough (with reasonable local networking particularly) to need extra cellular resources brought in for the show. But for some shows it's probably worth trying to develop those contacts at the cell companies.
I'm sorry that this caused so much more gnashing teeth (:-), but that's just the way I roll. I use MB/sec for million-ish bytes per second and mpbs for megabits, so that it's much harder to mistake one for the other. I've never before had anyone confused that I meant millibits before. Thanks for the feedback everyone, I'll give it some thought but I won't guarantee that I'll stop using mbps.;-)
Just to clarify, the only compensation I get for the wireless at PyCon is that my company gets our sponsorship in trade. Usually I even pay for the conference attendance and definitely the hotel and travel. This year was slightly different because the Community Service award I got last year covered the conference attendance and about a quarter of the hotel. PyCon *does* pay for the wireless APs and the like, though I do supply the router from my stash (this year: Atom 330 mini-ITX system, performed admirably).
I've never driven a car that I couldn't put in neutral at speed. I've never driven a Prius though. Next time I'm around one of my friends who has a Prius or Camry hybrid, I'll have to check it out. I can't think of an automatic that I've driven where you couldn't just push the shift lever (without pushing the button), from D to N, and it would stop before hitting R. They're designed to shift easily between N and D because, and correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe your owners manual recommends that you shift between N and D when you are stopping and starting. It's just that most people don't do this, and the system handles being in D but stopped. Now, I'm talking mostly about traditional automatics and not the fancy hybrid systems.
I am in the habit, from driving a stick, to shifting into N when I stop and back into gear when I go. So, I do this in automatics as well. It prevents you from rolling into the intersection if your foot slips off the brake, unless you're on a hill. And if you're on snow or ice, I've found that being in N significantly helps with stopping. Which kind of makes sense, if the drive wheels aren't being driven by the engine (faster *OR* slower) at the same time you're trying to stop and possibly ABS is kicking in.
I'm pretty sure that it's standard on all cars to have brakes that are more powerful than the engine. First of all, it's relatively easy, compared to adding horsepower. I've tried it in several cars including high and low power cars and have never had brakes that couldn't easily hold back the engine. 300 ft/lbs is a pretty powerful engine, but when spread between 4 wheels it's relatively little torque for even fairly modest brakes to handle.
However, that's assuming they are operating properly... If they're defective, doesn't matter how powerful they were designed for... I used to have a 300ZX with rather beefy brakes, and when the master cylinder started leaking the brakes got rather weak. I probably would have had a hard time holding back the engine in the 5 miles or so I drove it after noticing it but before getting it fixed.
Now, if the car computer can disable the foot and parking brakes, that's another matter entirely. Usually the parking brake is an entirely different system from the brake pedal, using a cable instead of hydraulics. Because there's no booster it can take significant effort to get a lot of braking force, but I'd expect you could overcome the engine with the parking brake unless there are mechanical issues, though some may find it difficult or impossible to apply enough force to a hand brake to overcome the engine, particularly if going down hill. So there still could be some cases, particularly with a computer in the mix, where strong brakes can't be operated effectively enough to overcome the engine.
I'd agree that gamers are more of a threat to my family than biker gangs. But that's just because, as far as I have observed, biker gangs don't exist; or at least they don't exist in my world. However, gamers do exist, I've seen them with my own two eyes.
However, if they did exist and a biker gang were trying to break into my house, I'd want a bunch of gamers with me. I mean, if there isn't already a training simulation out there with that story, I'm sure there will be one soon.
Coming soon from Big Lizzard Entertainment: Bikers versus Gamers.
In November we got a bunch of G1s and then decided at the last minute we wanted to get the Droid instead. The restocking fee from T-Mobile was quite reasonable, I think around $10/phone. Then a few months later we got a bill for $50/line for the activation fee. I'm not really unhappy with the cost of canceling the service, we like the Droid much better than the G1 (it's just a much newer phone). It was just kind of surprising to get another $350 bill after I thought it was all taken care of.
Back when I was getting my first serious computer (the previous Vic-20 and loaned machines don't count:-), I looked seriously between the Mac and the Amiga. I ended up choosing the Amiga because it seemed to me to be more hacker friendly, and I am a hacker. The Mac seemed much more like a black box that you weren't intended to get inside. So, maybe at Apple II series was a fluke, I really don't know because I didn't get much opportunity to hack on them. It seems to me that Apple has always been targeted at a non-hacker audience. Which is fine, htere are a lot of non-hackers out there.
If you think it's a problem with these Toyotas, a couple of years ago I saw it happen to a supercharged F-150 Lightning. This is one of their high performance model trucks, which was apparently producing over 600BHP. And it had gone through a safety inspection earlier that day.
Throttle return springs are, I gather, a not entirely uncommon failure point. It's a specific line item check on Club Time Trials; I know this because the inspector and I had to try to figure out how to inspect the throttle return spring on my Audi, which also has a "fly by wire" throttle. It never came up specifically on Autocross, probably because they've seen it before (CTT had around 8 cars at it, AutoX has 200).
A lot of people have been pretty hard on the "computer control" aspect of this, which I believe is missing the point. There were some computer related issues that made this worse, like it being push-button start and just confusing people as to how to turn the damn thing off. But the reports are that this was a mechanical failure that is almost exactly like the common failure mode of a traditional, mechanical, throttle.
Unlike a mechanical throttle, the computer controlled throttle at least has the opportunity to say "Hey, I know the throttle is telling me to go, but I see that the parking brake has been pulled and/or the brake pedal, so I'm going to cut the throttle.
I've given this some thought and considering it all, I'd rather have the smarter computer-controlled throttle.
Why should the RIAA have to spend it's time and money pursuing Jack and Jane Internet users when they can instead sue the consolidation point of them: the ISPs they subscribe to...
Once it is allowed for ISPs to do this, the RIAA can start going after the companies that aren't, or (and this is important) aren't doing a good enough job, in addition to end users. They already have all the information to do this, it's just that the current attitude is that the ISPs don't do packet policing.
So, if the RIAA and MPAA can get this changed, it's a whole new revenue stream for them. It makes a lot of sense.
On the other hand, I would think this would make the ISPs more compelled for net neutrality. If it stays neutral, they don't pick up the liability related to policing the packets.
"Sir, I need you to type your cryptofs password here so I can inspect your laptop."
"I Forgot. It"
If you're using a good password, that's actually fairly plausible... In fact, why not just do a final rsync back to your backup server before you head out on your way to the border crossing, set a crypto password you don't know, and remove the one you do know. It takes way less time than wiping the hard drive. And when you get back home, you have the data on your backup server.
And with netbooks, the laptop I travel with is effectively disposable. When I get back home I want to be using my normal laptop so I'll sync down (or bzr pull) the data I need anyway.
Last I knew, the FCC was pretty clear that they were the only ones that had the power to regulate RF emissions. I wonder how easy it would be to get the FCC to tell the plaintiff to retract his case or face FCC fines.
I mean, hey, my neighbor was just fined tens of thousands of dollars by the FAA for launching a homemade balloon. They're serving jail time now. I don't want to mess with organizations matching the F[A-Z]{2} regex.:-)
DUI is a terrible thing, and I won't defend it. However, I also know that beat officers will sometimes abuse their power. I grew up around sheriff's deputies, my mother worked in the department (in administration) and most of her friends were beat officers. So I got exposed to a lot of their stories.
So, yeah, I'm sure that quite a lot of the people who get charged are guilty as hell. And I'm sure that some of the people who get cleared of the charges are cleared only on a technicality and they were guilty. If they have multiple tests
However, I can imagine also that there are officers who, for whatever reason, may wrongfully charge someone. "I saw him leave a bar." Truth is he was the designated driver but had to go home early. "He was staggering." Truth is he had an inner ear infection that messed up his balance, or maybe he was messing with his smartphone while walking to the car. "He had dramatic variances in his speed." The truth was that he was doing the speed limit just fine until the officer started tailgating him, where he slowed down to reduce the chance of getting run into. What may be overwhelming evidence to the officer -- say if his breathalyzer in his car is broken, may be later found by the court to have other reasons, like the stumbling.
This is why we have the courts hear the case before passing judgment, and the police don't do the conviction on the spot.
The speed change part above happened to my wife a few years ago. She was pulled over and asked if she had been drinking because she dramatically slowed down. She slowed down because there was a giant SUV following her less than a car length away 55MPH. It was the officer's SUV. Why he wasn't in the next lane over, which was empty, I can't imagine.
It is not the job of the "beat officer" to make a conviction -- it's the job of the courts to look at the evidence and make that determination. They can charge you with anything, and you can't make any defense of that charge to the officer. You have to make it to the court.
The world today, here in the US, has a reality where posting something on the Internet, particularly from an official source like the police, will probably follow you around forever. And you'll never know if you didn't get that job offer because of this search result (which is probably highly ranked), because HR will tell you they just had a better candidate, if they tell you anything at all, because they don't want to be sued for making a bad decision.
This is a common mistake people make -- I can't program therefore I can't contribute to open source.
There are so many other things involved in getting software out: project management, graphic design, testing, training, documentation, advocacy, support, system administration, bug triage, design, architecture, translation (from *AND TO* your language), releases, etc...
Surely there's something you can do to help...
Pick some of your favorite projects, pick what you like to do that could help them, and look for opportunities to help out. Chances are it will be very well received.
SPF is not an anti-spam measure, it's about preventing hijacking of domains. People often seem to say "but spammers publish SPF records", and that is true, but it doesn't mean that SPF is not effective.
SPF allows me to publish information about what systems will legitimately send e-mail using that domain. It also allows me to act on that information published by other third parties.
What this means is that I have to deal with dramatically less backscatter spam. Since implementing SPF, I have not woken up to find 100,000 messages in my box that were bounces or outraged replies to spam sent by someone else. Back in 1995 that exact issue happened to me, and to a lesser degree it happened regularly until SPF.
There are, of course, some difficulties with SPF, but despite those I have chosen to use and advocate SPF.
You do have to deal with legitimate third-parties sending mail from your domain. We use an outsourced accounting package and have had to include their servers in our SPF records. No big deal.
As a recipient, if you have one account forwarding to another, and the destination account implements SPF, then you either need to white-list the forwarding machine(s), or you need to implement SRS there.
DKIM and it's variants is, IMHO, useless because it only allows you to prove that e-mail came from an authorized sender for a domain, it does *NOT* allow you to tell if e-mail came from an UNAUTHORIZED system for a domain. You cannot use DKIM to tell if a sender address is forging the domain.
So DKIM is *NOT* a "better SPF". They *ARE* compatible though. If you get a message claiming to be from a specific domain which fails the SPF check, you probably still want to allow it if it passes DKIM. I don't know of any mail programs that do that though. The unfortunate thing about this is that SPF-only can be implemented entirely at SMTP time (RECV FROM) where SPF+DKIM would have to be implemented after receiving the message (after DATA).
Ok, sure, so the smart grid may leak private information...
But my bigger concern now is this whole social security number "thing" where it's used as a primary database key for all sorts of companies, both within and outside of the government, is one of the primary keys to identity theft, and the government requires it's use for government things (where it's well protected), but doesn't prevent it's use by third parties (where it's *NOT* well protected). The most the government says is that you don't have to give your SSN to a non-government entity, but they can refuse to do business with you because of it. So as long as you don't need insurance or healthcare, you can do a pretty good job of protecting against identity theft.
Oh, wait, this report is from Canada, where they *DO* have requirements about the protection of their equivalent to the SSN...
Crypto for the file-system. Then store your less than critical passwords in firefox, and/or use a master password system to generate a unique password for each individual site based off a single password. Really important passwords I store in a GPG encrypted file on this crypto partition.
Then I back this stuff up to a server that resides in a secure facility.
Whenever I think about enjoying an Apple product, I remember how they stole the domain newton.com from a guy who had the misfortune to have "Newton" as his last name and happened to get there first.
However, in this case the Woolworth application covers allowing them to make computing products and consumer electronics... Woolworth's logo is pretty, and clever and all, but if they want a mark to use for consumer electronics and computers, making it look like an apple is just a stupid idea. How can Apple *NOT* respond. I mean, this is a company that is already making mobile phones...
But, then again, I sided with Apple Records when Apple Computers moved into the music business.
The vast majority of the spam that makes it into my normal mailboxes is not this snowshoe spam. In fact, it's been quite a long time since I saw spam from one of those xhkjauts.com domains (which I believe is one of the examples of this snowshoe spam).
My biggest problem, by probably close to 10x, is the Nigerian scams, usually coming from Yahoo, Hotmail, and gmail, in order of descending frequency.
I've been thinking of forcing addresses from these domains which are not in our whitelist to bounce with a "release" URL in it. I already have the bounce+release URL implemented, so I guess I just need to turn it on for these domains, with an appropriate message. The biggest problem I've run into is that I bounce at SMTP time, not after receipt, and most users don't seem to read any part of those messages. I think that the less technical senders see it as just being computer-generated BS, and don't even try. Because I bounce at SMTP time, my message is usually buried under a lot of boilerplate generated by the remote system.
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks, fixed.
I appreciate the feedback, but, I stand by my original statement. Crimping RJ45 ends on cable should have been avoided. We wasted easily a couple of hours of scarce volunteer time on this. Yes, a $15 tester could have been used, and almost certainly wouldn't have detected either of the primary problems we had with the crimping.
However, the primary reason to avoid the crimping is not a technical one, it's a management one. We really didn't have the resources to be spending on the crimping. We should have been concentrating on things other than crimping RJ45 ends on cables.
Next year we *WILL* use the Leviton ends to terminate bulk cabling.
Sean
The Ubiquity radios were seriously considered, but I definitely wanted MIMO and simultaneous 2.4 and 5.2 GHz in one box.
Remember, this is all volunteer run, so doubling the number of APs to setup, tear down, and manage was something I wanted to avoid. Also, the Ubiquity gear mostly is not table-top form-factor. It's mean for pole-mounting. Not a good match for our needs.
As far as doing a crap job of serving both bands, that's been my experience with very cheap units. These units on the other hand, both the Netgear and DLink, have performed admirably.
Sean
As the article mentioned, we did *NOT* plan it this way. We *PLANNED* to use Leviton female cable ends and 1 foot patch cables, which would have eliminated the problems we had. But, one of the guys bought some gear without consulting me and this is what we ended up with.
These were for the runs that we didn't know how long they'd need to be, so buying tons of extra pre-molded 250' cables (long enough for any of the single runs we needed) just didn't seem like that great an idea.
Particularly when I had this other plan.
I spent $300 on pre-molded cables, some to work with these Leviton cable terminators. So, don't ding me for not using pre-terminated cables.
Sean
This is all sound advice that agrees with my experience. However, this year we really had much less of a problem with Ad-Hoc networks, this was a bigger issue in the past. Possibly some of this is the tools, one of the vendor wireless configurators I saw was basically impossible to tell that it was setting up an Ad-Hoc network, everything I saw in it indicated it was connecting to an existing network not setting up it's own, until I drilled down into the bowels of that software.
One thing I didn't really mention is that I think part of the problems we had with 2.4GHz was the interference of the conference center's wireless gear, they had the 2.4GHz spectrum blanketed.
All gear is definitely not the same.
Sean
That is a good point, but as the SXSW show has shown, you can't count on the cellular networks being able to handle a huge concentration of users either. PyCon probably isn't big enough (with reasonable local networking particularly) to need extra cellular resources brought in for the show. But for some shows it's probably worth trying to develop those contacts at the cell companies.
Sean
I'm sorry that this caused so much more gnashing teeth (:-), but that's just the way I roll. I use MB/sec for million-ish bytes per second and mpbs for megabits, so that it's much harder to mistake one for the other. I've never before had anyone confused that I meant millibits before. Thanks for the feedback everyone, I'll give it some thought but I won't guarantee that I'll stop using mbps. ;-)
Sean
Just to clarify, the only compensation I get for the wireless at PyCon is that my company gets our sponsorship in trade. Usually I even pay for the conference attendance and definitely the hotel and travel. This year was slightly different because the Community Service award I got last year covered the conference attendance and about a quarter of the hotel. PyCon *does* pay for the wireless APs and the like, though I do supply the router from my stash (this year: Atom 330 mini-ITX system, performed admirably).
I've never driven a car that I couldn't put in neutral at speed. I've never driven a Prius though. Next time I'm around one of my friends who has a Prius or Camry hybrid, I'll have to check it out. I can't think of an automatic that I've driven where you couldn't just push the shift lever (without pushing the button), from D to N, and it would stop before hitting R. They're designed to shift easily between N and D because, and correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe your owners manual recommends that you shift between N and D when you are stopping and starting. It's just that most people don't do this, and the system handles being in D but stopped. Now, I'm talking mostly about traditional automatics and not the fancy hybrid systems.
I am in the habit, from driving a stick, to shifting into N when I stop and back into gear when I go. So, I do this in automatics as well. It prevents you from rolling into the intersection if your foot slips off the brake, unless you're on a hill. And if you're on snow or ice, I've found that being in N significantly helps with stopping. Which kind of makes sense, if the drive wheels aren't being driven by the engine (faster *OR* slower) at the same time you're trying to stop and possibly ABS is kicking in.
Sean
I'm pretty sure that it's standard on all cars to have brakes that are more powerful than the engine. First of all, it's relatively easy, compared to adding horsepower. I've tried it in several cars including high and low power cars and have never had brakes that couldn't easily hold back the engine. 300 ft/lbs is a pretty powerful engine, but when spread between 4 wheels it's relatively little torque for even fairly modest brakes to handle.
However, that's assuming they are operating properly... If they're defective, doesn't matter how powerful they were designed for... I used to have a 300ZX with rather beefy brakes, and when the master cylinder started leaking the brakes got rather weak. I probably would have had a hard time holding back the engine in the 5 miles or so I drove it after noticing it but before getting it fixed.
Now, if the car computer can disable the foot and parking brakes, that's another matter entirely. Usually the parking brake is an entirely different system from the brake pedal, using a cable instead of hydraulics. Because there's no booster it can take significant effort to get a lot of braking force, but I'd expect you could overcome the engine with the parking brake unless there are mechanical issues, though some may find it difficult or impossible to apply enough force to a hand brake to overcome the engine, particularly if going down hill. So there still could be some cases, particularly with a computer in the mix, where strong brakes can't be operated effectively enough to overcome the engine.
Sean
I'd agree that gamers are more of a threat to my family than biker gangs. But that's just because, as far as I have observed, biker gangs don't exist; or at least they don't exist in my world. However, gamers do exist, I've seen them with my own two eyes.
However, if they did exist and a biker gang were trying to break into my house, I'd want a bunch of gamers with me. I mean, if there isn't already a training simulation out there with that story, I'm sure there will be one soon.
Coming soon from Big Lizzard Entertainment: Bikers versus Gamers.
Sean
In November we got a bunch of G1s and then decided at the last minute we wanted to get the Droid instead. The restocking fee from T-Mobile was quite reasonable, I think around $10/phone. Then a few months later we got a bill for $50/line for the activation fee. I'm not really unhappy with the cost of canceling the service, we like the Droid much better than the G1 (it's just a much newer phone). It was just kind of surprising to get another $350 bill after I thought it was all taken care of.
Sean
Back when I was getting my first serious computer (the previous Vic-20 and loaned machines don't count :-), I looked seriously between the Mac and the Amiga. I ended up choosing the Amiga because it seemed to me to be more hacker friendly, and I am a hacker. The Mac seemed much more like a black box that you weren't intended to get inside. So, maybe at Apple II series was a fluke, I really don't know because I didn't get much opportunity to hack on them. It seems to me that Apple has always been targeted at a non-hacker audience. Which is fine, htere are a lot of non-hackers out there.
Sean
If you think it's a problem with these Toyotas, a couple of years ago I saw it happen to a supercharged F-150 Lightning. This is one of their high performance model trucks, which was apparently producing over 600BHP. And it had gone through a safety inspection earlier that day.
Throttle return springs are, I gather, a not entirely uncommon failure point. It's a specific line item check on Club Time Trials; I know this because the inspector and I had to try to figure out how to inspect the throttle return spring on my Audi, which also has a "fly by wire" throttle. It never came up specifically on Autocross, probably because they've seen it before (CTT had around 8 cars at it, AutoX has 200).
A lot of people have been pretty hard on the "computer control" aspect of this, which I believe is missing the point. There were some computer related issues that made this worse, like it being push-button start and just confusing people as to how to turn the damn thing off. But the reports are that this was a mechanical failure that is almost exactly like the common failure mode of a traditional, mechanical, throttle.
Unlike a mechanical throttle, the computer controlled throttle at least has the opportunity to say "Hey, I know the throttle is telling me to go, but I see that the parking brake has been pulled and/or the brake pedal, so I'm going to cut the throttle.
I've given this some thought and considering it all, I'd rather have the smarter computer-controlled throttle.
Sean
Why should the RIAA have to spend it's time and money pursuing Jack and Jane Internet users when they can instead sue the consolidation point of them: the ISPs they subscribe to...
Once it is allowed for ISPs to do this, the RIAA can start going after the companies that aren't, or (and this is important) aren't doing a good enough job, in addition to end users. They already have all the information to do this, it's just that the current attitude is that the ISPs don't do packet policing.
So, if the RIAA and MPAA can get this changed, it's a whole new revenue stream for them. It makes a lot of sense.
On the other hand, I would think this would make the ISPs more compelled for net neutrality. If it stays neutral, they don't pick up the liability related to policing the packets.
Sean
"Sir, I need you to type your cryptofs password here so I can inspect your laptop."
"I Forgot. It"
If you're using a good password, that's actually fairly plausible... In fact, why not just do a final rsync back to your backup server before you head out on your way to the border crossing, set a crypto password you don't know, and remove the one you do know. It takes way less time than wiping the hard drive. And when you get back home, you have the data on your backup server.
And with netbooks, the laptop I travel with is effectively disposable. When I get back home I want to be using my normal laptop so I'll sync down (or bzr pull) the data I need anyway.
Sean
Last I knew, the FCC was pretty clear that they were the only ones that had the power to regulate RF emissions. I wonder how easy it would be to get the FCC to tell the plaintiff to retract his case or face FCC fines.
:-)
I mean, hey, my neighbor was just fined tens of thousands of dollars by the FAA for launching a homemade balloon. They're serving jail time now. I don't want to mess with organizations matching the F[A-Z]{2} regex.
Sean
I tried a beta version of this display with compiz and my windows set to transparent, and I almost blew my mind. Almost.
Sean
DUI is a terrible thing, and I won't defend it. However, I also know that beat officers will sometimes abuse their power. I grew up around sheriff's deputies, my mother worked in the department (in administration) and most of her friends were beat officers. So I got exposed to a lot of their stories.
So, yeah, I'm sure that quite a lot of the people who get charged are guilty as hell. And I'm sure that some of the people who get cleared of the charges are cleared only on a technicality and they were guilty. If they have multiple tests
However, I can imagine also that there are officers who, for whatever reason, may wrongfully charge someone. "I saw him leave a bar." Truth is he was the designated driver but had to go home early. "He was staggering." Truth is he had an inner ear infection that messed up his balance, or maybe he was messing with his smartphone while walking to the car. "He had dramatic variances in his speed." The truth was that he was doing the speed limit just fine until the officer started tailgating him, where he slowed down to reduce the chance of getting run into. What may be overwhelming evidence to the officer -- say if his breathalyzer in his car is broken, may be later found by the court to have other reasons, like the stumbling.
This is why we have the courts hear the case before passing judgment, and the police don't do the conviction on the spot.
The speed change part above happened to my wife a few years ago. She was pulled over and asked if she had been drinking because she dramatically slowed down. She slowed down because there was a giant SUV following her less than a car length away 55MPH. It was the officer's SUV. Why he wasn't in the next lane over, which was empty, I can't imagine.
It is not the job of the "beat officer" to make a conviction -- it's the job of the courts to look at the evidence and make that determination. They can charge you with anything, and you can't make any defense of that charge to the officer. You have to make it to the court.
The world today, here in the US, has a reality where posting something on the Internet, particularly from an official source like the police, will probably follow you around forever. And you'll never know if you didn't get that job offer because of this search result (which is probably highly ranked), because HR will tell you they just had a better candidate, if they tell you anything at all, because they don't want to be sued for making a bad decision.
Sean
This is a common mistake people make -- I can't program therefore I can't contribute to open source.
There are so many other things involved in getting software out: project management, graphic design, testing, training, documentation, advocacy, support, system administration, bug triage, design, architecture, translation (from *AND TO* your language), releases, etc...
Surely there's something you can do to help...
Pick some of your favorite projects, pick what you like to do that could help them, and look for opportunities to help out. Chances are it will be very well received.
Sean
SPF is not an anti-spam measure, it's about preventing hijacking of domains. People often seem to say "but spammers publish SPF records", and that is true, but it doesn't mean that SPF is not effective.
SPF allows me to publish information about what systems will legitimately send e-mail using that domain. It also allows me to act on that information published by other third parties.
What this means is that I have to deal with dramatically less backscatter spam. Since implementing SPF, I have not woken up to find 100,000 messages in my box that were bounces or outraged replies to spam sent by someone else. Back in 1995 that exact issue happened to me, and to a lesser degree it happened regularly until SPF.
There are, of course, some difficulties with SPF, but despite those I have chosen to use and advocate SPF.
You do have to deal with legitimate third-parties sending mail from your domain. We use an outsourced accounting package and have had to include their servers in our SPF records. No big deal.
As a recipient, if you have one account forwarding to another, and the destination account implements SPF, then you either need to white-list the forwarding machine(s), or you need to implement SRS there.
DKIM and it's variants is, IMHO, useless because it only allows you to prove that e-mail came from an authorized sender for a domain, it does *NOT* allow you to tell if e-mail came from an UNAUTHORIZED system for a domain. You cannot use DKIM to tell if a sender address is forging the domain.
So DKIM is *NOT* a "better SPF". They *ARE* compatible though. If you get a message claiming to be from a specific domain which fails the SPF check, you probably still want to allow it if it passes DKIM. I don't know of any mail programs that do that though. The unfortunate thing about this is that SPF-only can be implemented entirely at SMTP time (RECV FROM) where SPF+DKIM would have to be implemented after receiving the message (after DATA).
Sean
Ok, sure, so the smart grid may leak private information...
But my bigger concern now is this whole social security number "thing" where it's used as a primary database key for all sorts of companies, both within and outside of the government, is one of the primary keys to identity theft, and the government requires it's use for government things (where it's well protected), but doesn't prevent it's use by third parties (where it's *NOT* well protected). The most the government says is that you don't have to give your SSN to a non-government entity, but they can refuse to do business with you because of it. So as long as you don't need insurance or healthcare, you can do a pretty good job of protecting against identity theft.
Oh, wait, this report is from Canada, where they *DO* have requirements about the protection of their equivalent to the SSN...
Sean
Crypto for the file-system. Then store your less than critical passwords in firefox, and/or use a master password system to generate a unique password for each individual site based off a single password. Really important passwords I store in a GPG encrypted file on this crypto partition.
Then I back this stuff up to a server that resides in a secure facility.
Works very well.
Sean
Whenever I think about enjoying an Apple product, I remember how they stole the domain newton.com from a guy who had the misfortune to have "Newton" as his last name and happened to get there first.
However, in this case the Woolworth application covers allowing them to make computing products and consumer electronics... Woolworth's logo is pretty, and clever and all, but if they want a mark to use for consumer electronics and computers, making it look like an apple is just a stupid idea. How can Apple *NOT* respond. I mean, this is a company that is already making mobile phones...
But, then again, I sided with Apple Records when Apple Computers moved into the music business.
Sean
The vast majority of the spam that makes it into my normal mailboxes is not this snowshoe spam. In fact, it's been quite a long time since I saw spam from one of those xhkjauts.com domains (which I believe is one of the examples of this snowshoe spam).
My biggest problem, by probably close to 10x, is the Nigerian scams, usually coming from Yahoo, Hotmail, and gmail, in order of descending frequency.
I've been thinking of forcing addresses from these domains which are not in our whitelist to bounce with a "release" URL in it. I already have the bounce+release URL implemented, so I guess I just need to turn it on for these domains, with an appropriate message. The biggest problem I've run into is that I bounce at SMTP time, not after receipt, and most users don't seem to read any part of those messages. I think that the less technical senders see it as just being computer-generated BS, and don't even try. Because I bounce at SMTP time, my message is usually buried under a lot of boilerplate generated by the remote system.
Sean