I was actually around when the Morris worm hit. The vulnerability in sendmail that the Morris worm used only after failing to exploit rsh and finger (most systems, as I recall, were taken over via the finger bug) was not introduced by the authors of sendmail.
The distro vendors (Sun, for example) were shipping sendmail compiled in DEBUG mode. Which is not Eric Allman's fault; sorry to spoil your sendmail FUD, but that's the vendor's fault.
Do you ship code to your customers with all the developer debug hooks turned on? If you do, do you blame the people who wrote the code when somebody exploits a debug hook, or yourself since you're the one who compiled it stupidly?
If you are saying "rich people should get more breaks" I disagree big time. Rich people have proved they can get rich in the current system and therefore don't need any breaks - they are already successful and the system is working for them despite the disgusting crybaby attitude so many of them seem to have.
If you are saying "people who build houses and do woodwork don't contribute to profitability" I still disagree. Wealth is the product of labor - people like yourself (and illegal mexican migrant laborers, for that matter) are the root source of wealth, and should therefore get some profit. Fat cats smoking dope in penthouses shouldn't get all the profit at the expense of their employees.
As for "billion dollar corporations", they aren't people and so I don't give a rats ass about their whining. Why should I? They are already successful and everything's going their way. They don't need me (or anybody else) to give them any "breaks". I applaud their success, sure, but I'll give them a hearty "fuck you" when they ask for more tax breaks and more government handouts.
Go to your preferences page and check the boxes for simple design, low bandwith, and no icons. Then turn off all the other extraneous sections and features you don't like.
What you will get is the equivalent of the old "light mode". Works fine in text browsers.
If sendmail is so egregiously evil, how come most alternatives to sendmail are basically less functional sendmail clones?
Wietse Venema's Postfix and Eric Allman's Sendmail X are API-compatible total rewrites of sendmail. Postfix is currently stronger, but sendmail X implements pretty much the same shite as postfix, so the advantage is code maturity - right now postfix is arguably better than sendmail 8 (which is what NetBSD ditched, incidentally) and when sendmail X gets its legs it will probably be even better. Each one incorporates lessons learned from its predecessor.
Run postfix if you are starting from scratch; it's easier to learn. If you already know sendmail, or you need antique transports, run sendmail 8; it is more flexible. When sendmail X is mature, run that (run it now on your test machines). When the next evolution of MTAs arrives, with telepathic agents and antigravity packaging, run that.
Remember that the criticisms being leveled against sendmail 8 are equally valid when applied to old-school unices like NetBSD. Ancient codebase, long history of security problems, tough learning curve, etc. But *nix still has its uses (particularly the newer rewrites like linux).
The bridge has specific requirements which the engineer is supposed to meet. If, under the conditions CLEARLY STATED through his contract he fulfills them, he's clear. He doesn't need to think about people transgressing the boundaries of these conditions- or typhoons - because they fall outside his responsibility. The operating company must make sure no overload happens, otherwise..their shit is ruined.
Sadly, that is true these days.
But we used to just build the best damn bridge possible. That's the old way. It works better.
Another thing, engineers design their buildings/bridges/etc. to withstand known threats, or specific levels of specific threats (i.e. a "100-year flood").
The 200+ year old bridge at the north end of my property was built for horses and ox-drawn wagons, and today it handles 10-wheel concrete trucks just fine, because it's built of Brandywine blue granite hewn into suitcase-size blocks and founded on the bedrock. It's only 18 feet wide, but it's built right.
And failure to meet those specifications can sometimes be life-threatening.
Even when you meet the spec, if the spec is unrealistic then engineering failures can be life-terminating, not just life-threatening. But if you meet the spec you get off in court, so why bother to do a better job? Never mind that we've had three 500-year floods (OK, really Henri was a 1000-year flood) in the last four years!
A Real Engineer builds the best damn bridge he can, and to hell with the specs. Real Programmers write code the same way. Building to spec is for politicians and PHBs.
Of course, for OpenOffice it's conceivable that speed improvements might take precedence over introducing new features in future versions. And you don't actually have to pay for OpenOffice software if you don't want to. And you get OS and format independence.
Seems like a reasonable trade-off to me, when's the last time a company went out of business because their word processor was too slow?
The article's worth reading, if you're not already familiar with currently popular cluster interconnects, but the title of "Data center networks often exclude Ethernet" is totally bogus.
I guess "Some Tiny Percentage of Data Centers use Something Faster than Ethernet in addition to Ethernet" didn't fit on the page.
No, I meant like products people actually buy, not products that have over 90% of their users downloading them for free. You've linked FOSS projects not commercial vendors.
I think your point's still valid, though... open source projects (especially GPL projects) benefit from people knowing about bugs in their code, because that increases the likelihood that somebody will fix them and send in a patch. Closed source, on the other claw, has commercial incentive to hide bugs as much as the customers will allow.
Your suggestion doesn't work because it would have to be implemented simultaneously by every software maker in every nation on the globe, which is not feasible in the current economic and political environment.
Otherwise, Joe Sixpack will always buy the product that does not tell him about the known bugs. "Gee, Mable, the Microsoft version has 1000 bugs listed, but the Happy Lucky Kitty version doesn't have any bug list at all. I guess we better buy the one with no bugs!" The first company that advertises its bugs probably goes out of business or has a stockholder revolt leading to new management.
FOSS projects publish their known bugs in order to encourage outsiders to fix them and feed back the code. Different ecosystem.
Having been the target of mac fan-boy hatemail myself (I had the unmitigated temerity to say that I choose not to use iTunes because of the EULA; what was I thinking!) I'm sure that the lawyers only gave the hatemail a target. They didn't have to do anything to create it.
There are apparently an obscene number of people who have nothing better to do with their time than to attack anyone who does not worship at the altar of Jobs. If you mention Apple in a critical way in public, you can expect the email equivalent of molotov cocktails and flaming crosses on your lawn.
Mac zealots make the linux and OpenBSD zealots seem relatively sane.
"video/pictures of PEOPLE HANGING OUT OF THE GASH IN THE BUILDING where temperatures hot enough to melt steel are supposed to be present"
Straw man. The steel didn't melt. It was hot enough to significantly weaken it (ask a blacksmith), but not to melt it.
OK, speaking from my personal experience as an (amateur) blacksmith: your argument doesn't make any sense. The kind of steel you are talking about does not "weaken" from the kind of temperatures you are talking about in such a way that you'd get sudden shear and downward collapse. As heat is absorbed by the metal, it gets more plastic and begins to bend along the path of least resistance (in the case of a loaded vertical beam it'd bow in some direction, possibly inwards) and eventually it will bend, twist or shear to shed load. The load (even if it's only the weight of the beam itself) will almost certainly be pushed *away* from the beam when this happens, so "straight down" collapse is extremely unlikely, and should only occur if the diameter of the beam exceeds its height.
If you set a cinder block on a set of steel pins and heat all the pins perfectly evenly, long before you get to the point where they melt or shear the cinder block will hit the ground as the pins turn to sphagetti. The block may end up on its side, or several feet away from the original position, but it is incredibly unlikely that all forces would balance perfectly and it would collapse straight down (unlikely in the sense that it WON'T HAPPEN in the real world).
If you supply enough heat that steel can instantly combust, puddle, or shear, there is no way you can have humans anywhere in the vicinity. I suspect you are talking center-of-the-sun type heat to accomplish this in a real-world environment. Researching the firebombing of Dresden might be illuminating.
The rest of this is to show I have some clue of what I'm talking about (in regards to metal, not architecture or politics). I'm not cribbing wikipedia or ABANA, this is out of my head.
Different steels have different optimum working temperatures. Generally, though, you can determine the correct temperature for the operation you want to perform (drawing, punching, bending, welding, etc.) by color. Exotic steels that do not color normally are not used for skyscraper construction as far as I know (I am not an architect or structural engineer). Forges are dimly lit so that color is apparent.
At dull-red, pressure "packs" steel, making it harder. This effect is more pronounced the closer you get to the point where the hammer struck, so the effect can be similar to other types of surface hardening. At mid-to-high-orange you can bend, draw, upset, or otherwise shape the metal - it will be extremely plastic, which is not the same thing as being weak.
At high-yellow-to-white you can weld. You can cheat a little with fluxing; this will be required in most gas forges but not in a coking forge. The highest yellows are extremely close to melting temperature for practical purposes - if your fire is hot enough to achieve a welding heat in some reasonable time frame, it is able to increase the temperature of the work very rapidly and the metal will either burn or melt if you leave it in the fire just a minute too long.
Depending on the carbon content of the steel, and the oxygen available in the airflow over the metal surface (which is related to how you are supplying air to the fire - blower, bellows, sandia wizardry, whatever) at some point right around white the metal will burn (usually) or melt (rarely). If you are an expert who is using metal you are very familiar with (I am not an expert and I use found metal) you will know how white you can get - possibly cheating with a flux that prevents air reaching the metal - before burning begins.
We'll leave tempering, case hardening, and annealing for another day. Suffice it to say that I-beams are not tempered as far as I know, every one I ever worked with had a slightly work-hardened surface rind (probably from the manufacturing process) and a soft center.
The way SenderID basically works is that if you have a CallerID record, Exchange will use it, if not and you have a classic SPF record, it will use that. The last time I checked, incidentally, the MS SenderID wizard generated totally broken records that do not conform to any spec (not even Microsoft's). Probably that's been fixed by now?
"Classic" SPF was (also last time I checked, about a year ago) the most widely deployed anti-forgery system in the world. DomainKeys is technically better but much harder to implement. I'm told that when Microsoft's Exchange group says SenderID is "widely adopted" they are counting all SPF records as SenderID records, because SenderID uses SPF as I mentioned above. Non-SPF SenderID has vanishingly small penetration among the dozens of MS Exchange admins I regularly communicate with - nobody actually turns it on, the most they do is use it in a point-scoring system. Perhaps that's just my circle of associates, though.
I'm not normally a "Microsoft basher" (I like Windows on the desktop, although I prefer more cost-effective solutions in the server room) but in this case they really engaged in some incredibly self-destructive stupidity. Meng Wong, the inventor of SPF, bent over backwards to try to help them and was willing to re-engineer the entire spec to suit their needs, but the whole effort was sabotaged by Microsoft's greed and duplicity.
Anyway, an interesting thing about anti-spoofing technology is that the spammers are very aware of it - probably because AOL honors it on their incoming.
As I'm sure you know, spammers use fake return addresses that they steal from web pages or people's Outlook address books. Since their "business model" (if you can call it that) works off small percentages of success, it makes sense for them to avoid spoofing domains that have SPF records published. Why use a fake address that is guaranteed to be rejected by AOL, after all?
Since you're publishing an SPF record for your outgoing mail, you probably have fewer problems from spammers faking email addresses from your domain than you would otherwise. I recently advised a small research lab that was getting hundreds of "bounce" messages every day (from spam that was spoofing their users) to publish SPF. They did so, and within two weeks the problem completely went away. They don't check incoming SPF at all, they just put up the one DNS TXT RR!
Obviously, that's purely anecdotal; I'm not a confidant of spammers. But it's widely reported to work, and it worked for me on two separate occasions.
I recommend "Classic" SPF for now, and DKIM for the future... mostly because that's what Eric Allman was pushing at Linuxworld.:)
Oh, and BTW, if you are looking for an Exchange replacement check out Scalix - they are based off HP's deceased OpenMail source base and they can provide Exchange- and Outlook-compatible calendaring.
"We have heard loud and clear from our larger enterprise customers, some of whom are using more than 400 open source products, that they want one throat to choke for open source support," said Steven Grandchamp, CEO of OpenLogic.
People having been using this phrase a lot lately. I always ask them "Are you quoting Carl Panzram or Caligula?"
"I wish you all had one neck, and my hands were around it." -- Carl Panzram
"Utinam populus Romanus unam cervicem haberet!" (I wish the Roman people had one throat) -- Caligula
"senderID" was an unsuccessful non-standard created by Microsoft hijacking SPFv2 with submarine patents and other deceits. Read up on MARID and see what I mean. senderID is dead, do not try to implement it, do SPFv1 or domainkeys if you want the current gold standard.
DKIM is the successor to domainkeys, and it's looking pretty good.
There is no "easy" involved in crypto, however. If you want "easy" do SPFv1... spoofing prevention with 5 minutes of work by any competent DNS administrator.
Try here.. I believe #1, "Set Internet Explorer security level to High" is the recommendation that disables JavaScript.
Use the power of the market. Browse without ActiveX, use ffox's javascript restrictions, refuse to take cookies for anything but shopping-cart sites, use flashblock. That makes it profitable to build better websites, and helps run the crappy websites that require bad security on the user PC go out of business. You can be part of the solution, and all you have to do is ignore shitty sites!
Conservatives are the people alarmed by this administration's willingness to disregard traditional values and re-interpret the constitution.
Too bad that didn't stop them from re-electing him.
Well, for a modern election you probably only need two or three conservatives. Bob and Todd Urosevich and Alfredo Anzola can probably get 'er done for ya.
Didn't Bush & Co. argue in Rumsfeld.vs. Padilla that the CinC has the power to legally strip US citizens of their constitutional protections? The judge disagreed, but my point was that this government thinks they can get away with this crap (and in the case of Padilla, they certainly did get away with it, for years).
I use lots of different opsystems all the time, so I'm probably jaded. Anything with a superuser and a 3-class file security model looks like a bad joke to me.
You do realize that the Patriot Act II hasn't been passed, right? Yes it's a very scary proposed bill.. but it doesn't belong in a conversation about what the US government can do... since the US government can't do it...
I wasn't talking about what the government can or can't do, I was talking about what this government thinks it should have the right to do. Which is scary enough for me right off - I should wait until they actually make it legal to torture me to death for complaining before I complain? How's that again?
Second of all, talking about my "right-wing" heroes when I voted for both Kerry and Clinton is a bit presumptious, isn't it? Maybe you know something I don't.
They called me a "radical lefty", and I wouldn't vote for Clinton or Kerry if my life depended on it. Sometimes the slashbots just want to make you into either a cartoon liberal or a cartoon conservative, so they can shoot down some cartoon stereotype and pretend they won an argument without ever engaging in actual thought.
I'm not sure what makes an anarchist rational (or otherwise). I'm a religious conservative, myself, but since I'm not a Christian I don't have to check my brain at the door when I go to church.
Anyway, hmmmm you axed:
Care to explain why Bush is acting in so dastardly a fashion? I mean, you liken him to Big Brother, stamping on the face of humanity, so when is he going to start taking advantage of his illegal behavior?
I'm afraid I haven't a clue. His actions are not predictable or even sane. The immediate goal, obviously, is the keep the price of Texas oil high, but that doesn't really explain his disregard for traditional American freedoms or his love for Saudi fundamentalists.
Your other statements make me think we don't have a lot of viewpoint in common. I pretty much stopped slamming Clinton when he left office; I don't understand the obsession. And I don't think it's actually possible to wage war on a technique, so to me the "war on terrorism" is just another insane Bushism.
I'd very much like to see a "war on the people who attacked us" (and I'd even settle for a "war on the people who funded the attacks") but since the Wahhabists in Saudi Arabia and the UAE are George Bush's friends and business partners, I guess that won't happen.
"Oil is a drug producing madness" -Anacharis of Scythia, ~590 BC
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I was actually around when the Morris worm hit. The vulnerability in sendmail that the Morris worm used only after failing to exploit rsh and finger (most systems, as I recall, were taken over via the finger bug) was not introduced by the authors of sendmail.
The distro vendors (Sun, for example) were shipping sendmail compiled in DEBUG mode. Which is not Eric Allman's fault; sorry to spoil your sendmail FUD, but that's the vendor's fault.
Do you ship code to your customers with all the developer debug hooks turned on? If you do, do you blame the people who wrote the code when somebody exploits a debug hook, or yourself since you're the one who compiled it stupidly?
The article you linked explains this.
I don't think I understand what you are saying...
If you are saying "rich people should get more breaks" I disagree big time. Rich people have proved they can get rich in the current system and therefore don't need any breaks - they are already successful and the system is working for them despite the disgusting crybaby attitude so many of them seem to have.
If you are saying "people who build houses and do woodwork don't contribute to profitability" I still disagree. Wealth is the product of labor - people like yourself (and illegal mexican migrant laborers, for that matter) are the root source of wealth, and should therefore get some profit. Fat cats smoking dope in penthouses shouldn't get all the profit at the expense of their employees.
As for "billion dollar corporations", they aren't people and so I don't give a rats ass about their whining. Why should I? They are already successful and everything's going their way. They don't need me (or anybody else) to give them any "breaks". I applaud their success, sure, but I'll give them a hearty "fuck you" when they ask for more tax breaks and more government handouts.
Make your own cheese, you freeloading rodent!
Go to your preferences page and check the boxes for simple design, low bandwith, and no icons. Then turn off all the other extraneous sections and features you don't like.
What you will get is the equivalent of the old "light mode". Works fine in text browsers.
Thanks, Crow!
If sendmail is so egregiously evil, how come most alternatives to sendmail are basically less functional sendmail clones?
Wietse Venema's Postfix and Eric Allman's Sendmail X are API-compatible total rewrites of sendmail. Postfix is currently stronger, but sendmail X implements pretty much the same shite as postfix, so the advantage is code maturity - right now postfix is arguably better than sendmail 8 (which is what NetBSD ditched, incidentally) and when sendmail X gets its legs it will probably be even better. Each one incorporates lessons learned from its predecessor.
Run postfix if you are starting from scratch; it's easier to learn. If you already know sendmail, or you need antique transports, run sendmail 8; it is more flexible. When sendmail X is mature, run that (run it now on your test machines). When the next evolution of MTAs arrives, with telepathic agents and antigravity packaging, run that.
Remember that the criticisms being leveled against sendmail 8 are equally valid when applied to old-school unices like NetBSD. Ancient codebase, long history of security problems, tough learning curve, etc. But *nix still has its uses (particularly the newer rewrites like linux).
But we used to just build the best damn bridge possible. That's the old way. It works better.
A Real Engineer builds the best damn bridge he can, and to hell with the specs. Real Programmers write code the same way. Building to spec is for politicians and PHBs.
Pot, meet Kettle.
Unbelievably slow, meet excruciatingly slow.
Of course, for OpenOffice it's conceivable that speed improvements might take precedence over introducing new features in future versions. And you don't actually have to pay for OpenOffice software if you don't want to. And you get OS and format independence.
Seems like a reasonable trade-off to me, when's the last time a company went out of business because their word processor was too slow?
The article's worth reading, if you're not already familiar with currently popular cluster interconnects, but the title of "Data center networks often exclude Ethernet" is totally bogus.
I guess "Some Tiny Percentage of Data Centers use Something Faster than Ethernet in addition to Ethernet" didn't fit on the page.
I tend to assume the person talking is very young or extremely ignorant when I hear that kind of stuff...
No, I meant like products people actually buy, not products that have over 90% of their users downloading them for free. You've linked FOSS projects not commercial vendors.
I think your point's still valid, though... open source projects (especially GPL projects) benefit from people knowing about bugs in their code, because that increases the likelihood that somebody will fix them and send in a patch. Closed source, on the other claw, has commercial incentive to hide bugs as much as the customers will allow.
Otherwise, Joe Sixpack will always buy the product that does not tell him about the known bugs. "Gee, Mable, the Microsoft version has 1000 bugs listed, but the Happy Lucky Kitty version doesn't have any bug list at all. I guess we better buy the one with no bugs!" The first company that advertises its bugs probably goes out of business or has a stockholder revolt leading to new management.
FOSS projects publish their known bugs in order to encourage outsiders to fix them and feed back the code. Different ecosystem.
Having been the target of mac fan-boy hatemail myself (I had the unmitigated temerity to say that I choose not to use iTunes because of the EULA; what was I thinking!) I'm sure that the lawyers only gave the hatemail a target. They didn't have to do anything to create it.
There are apparently an obscene number of people who have nothing better to do with their time than to attack anyone who does not worship at the altar of Jobs. If you mention Apple in a critical way in public, you can expect the email equivalent of molotov cocktails and flaming crosses on your lawn.
Mac zealots make the linux and OpenBSD zealots seem relatively sane.
If you set a cinder block on a set of steel pins and heat all the pins perfectly evenly, long before you get to the point where they melt or shear the cinder block will hit the ground as the pins turn to sphagetti. The block may end up on its side, or several feet away from the original position, but it is incredibly unlikely that all forces would balance perfectly and it would collapse straight down (unlikely in the sense that it WON'T HAPPEN in the real world).
If you supply enough heat that steel can instantly combust, puddle, or shear, there is no way you can have humans anywhere in the vicinity. I suspect you are talking center-of-the-sun type heat to accomplish this in a real-world environment. Researching the firebombing of Dresden might be illuminating.
The rest of this is to show I have some clue of what I'm talking about (in regards to metal, not architecture or politics). I'm not cribbing wikipedia or ABANA, this is out of my head.
Different steels have different optimum working temperatures. Generally, though, you can determine the correct temperature for the operation you want to perform (drawing, punching, bending, welding, etc.) by color. Exotic steels that do not color normally are not used for skyscraper construction as far as I know (I am not an architect or structural engineer). Forges are dimly lit so that color is apparent.
At dull-red, pressure "packs" steel, making it harder. This effect is more pronounced the closer you get to the point where the hammer struck, so the effect can be similar to other types of surface hardening. At mid-to-high-orange you can bend, draw, upset, or otherwise shape the metal - it will be extremely plastic, which is not the same thing as being weak.
At high-yellow-to-white you can weld. You can cheat a little with fluxing; this will be required in most gas forges but not in a coking forge. The highest yellows are extremely close to melting temperature for practical purposes - if your fire is hot enough to achieve a welding heat in some reasonable time frame, it is able to increase the temperature of the work very rapidly and the metal will either burn or melt if you leave it in the fire just a minute too long.
Depending on the carbon content of the steel, and the oxygen available in the airflow over the metal surface (which is related to how you are supplying air to the fire - blower, bellows, sandia wizardry, whatever) at some point right around white the metal will burn (usually) or melt (rarely). If you are an expert who is using metal you are very familiar with (I am not an expert and I use found metal) you will know how white you can get - possibly cheating with a flux that prevents air reaching the metal - before burning begins.
We'll leave tempering, case hardening, and annealing for another day. Suffice it to say that I-beams are not tempered as far as I know, every one I ever worked with had a slightly work-hardened surface rind (probably from the manufacturing process) and a soft center.
The way SenderID basically works is that if you have a CallerID record, Exchange will use it, if not and you have a classic SPF record, it will use that. The last time I checked, incidentally, the MS SenderID wizard generated totally broken records that do not conform to any spec (not even Microsoft's). Probably that's been fixed by now?
:)
"Classic" SPF was (also last time I checked, about a year ago) the most widely deployed anti-forgery system in the world. DomainKeys is technically better but much harder to implement. I'm told that when Microsoft's Exchange group says SenderID is "widely adopted" they are counting all SPF records as SenderID records, because SenderID uses SPF as I mentioned above. Non-SPF SenderID has vanishingly small penetration among the dozens of MS Exchange admins I regularly communicate with - nobody actually turns it on, the most they do is use it in a point-scoring system. Perhaps that's just my circle of associates, though.
I'm not normally a "Microsoft basher" (I like Windows on the desktop, although I prefer more cost-effective solutions in the server room) but in this case they really engaged in some incredibly self-destructive stupidity. Meng Wong, the inventor of SPF, bent over backwards to try to help them and was willing to re-engineer the entire spec to suit their needs, but the whole effort was sabotaged by Microsoft's greed and duplicity.
Anyway, an interesting thing about anti-spoofing technology is that the spammers are very aware of it - probably because AOL honors it on their incoming.
As I'm sure you know, spammers use fake return addresses that they steal from web pages or people's Outlook address books. Since their "business model" (if you can call it that) works off small percentages of success, it makes sense for them to avoid spoofing domains that have SPF records published. Why use a fake address that is guaranteed to be rejected by AOL, after all?
Since you're publishing an SPF record for your outgoing mail, you probably have fewer problems from spammers faking email addresses from your domain than you would otherwise. I recently advised a small research lab that was getting hundreds of "bounce" messages every day (from spam that was spoofing their users) to publish SPF. They did so, and within two weeks the problem completely went away. They don't check incoming SPF at all, they just put up the one DNS TXT RR!
Obviously, that's purely anecdotal; I'm not a confidant of spammers. But it's widely reported to work, and it worked for me on two separate occasions.
I recommend "Classic" SPF for now, and DKIM for the future... mostly because that's what Eric Allman was pushing at Linuxworld.
Oh, and BTW, if you are looking for an Exchange replacement check out Scalix - they are based off HP's deceased OpenMail source base and they can provide Exchange- and Outlook-compatible calendaring.
"I wish you all had one neck, and my hands were around it." -- Carl Panzram
"Utinam populus Romanus unam cervicem haberet!" (I wish the Roman people had one throat) -- Caligula
You meant to say SPF and DKIM.
"senderID" was an unsuccessful non-standard created by Microsoft hijacking SPFv2 with submarine patents and other deceits. Read up on MARID and see what I mean. senderID is dead, do not try to implement it, do SPFv1 or domainkeys if you want the current gold standard.
DKIM is the successor to domainkeys, and it's looking pretty good.
There is no "easy" involved in crypto, however. If you want "easy" do SPFv1... spoofing prevention with 5 minutes of work by any competent DNS administrator.
Try here.. I believe #1, "Set Internet Explorer security level to High" is the recommendation that disables JavaScript.
Use the power of the market. Browse without ActiveX, use ffox's javascript restrictions, refuse to take cookies for anything but shopping-cart sites, use flashblock. That makes it profitable to build better websites, and helps run the crappy websites that require bad security on the user PC go out of business. You can be part of the solution, and all you have to do is ignore shitty sites!
Didn't Bush & Co. argue in Rumsfeld
I use lots of different opsystems all the time, so I'm probably jaded. Anything with a superuser and a 3-class file security model looks like a bad joke to me.
Anyway, hmmmm you axed: I'm afraid I haven't a clue. His actions are not predictable or even sane. The immediate goal, obviously, is the keep the price of Texas oil high, but that doesn't really explain his disregard for traditional American freedoms or his love for Saudi fundamentalists.
Your other statements make me think we don't have a lot of viewpoint in common. I pretty much stopped slamming Clinton when he left office; I don't understand the obsession. And I don't think it's actually possible to wage war on a technique, so to me the "war on terrorism" is just another insane Bushism.
I'd very much like to see a "war on the people who attacked us" (and I'd even settle for a "war on the people who funded the attacks") but since the Wahhabists in Saudi Arabia and the UAE are George Bush's friends and business partners, I guess that won't happen.
"Oil is a drug producing madness" -Anacharis of Scythia, ~590 BC