I remember Guru Meditations... did a lot of coding on the Amiga, you saw them a lot.:) The first one scared the hell out of me, cause I saw the power light on my then-2-day-old A500 blinking first and then the screen goes dark...
Going through the Includes & Autodocs, specifically exec/alerts.h, you find all kinds of interesting codes that were possible for the first 4 bytes. (00000003 and 80000003, and their cousins 04 were CPU traps, with the initial 0 meaning recoverable and the initial 8 meaning not recoverable)
I actually TRIED to get as many of these to come up as I could, and a lot were obsoleted or just weren't triggerable (the call that would seem to trigger an alert just returned an error code instead, IIRC)
The most amusing one was 0x82011234 - emergency memory not available from graphics.library. I think the only time I saw this was when it was trying to allocate memory to draw a recoverable Guru and failed. Or some such.
And then there was the amusing undocumented ones. Like 0x48454C50 - HELP... when you really really really confuzzled the heck out of exec.library... I got this once but forget how.
Good times.
Oh, and then in 2.0 (or was it 3.0? Probably 3...) you had Amber and Red instead of just Red (Amber for the recoverable alerts I mentioned earlier).
I whole-heartedly support MAPS and RBLs in general, and generally view with great suspicion anyone who argues against them, including the article submitter who is NOT running an opt-in system - any system that accepts blindly email addresses and starts spewing junk mail to them is almost as bad as full-blown spammers IMHO.
It has been proven many times in the past that MAPS's "shotgun" like approach is the ONLY way to get a large majority of ISPs to actually DO something about spam.
They generally do NOT "shotgun" until an ISP has just blatantly refused to do anything about it.
At a largish-university. There would be (and was) no way a webmaster would have root access to any boxen I controlled. For a number of reasons:
a) You don't need it. Making sure apache is up and running and patched is my job, and I probably do it to 50 boxes at once and have nice automated scripts.
b) Every single webmaster I met (until I left a few months) ago swore they needed root access to install some apache module or other. No, you don't. You ask the sysadmin and, most times, if he can do it without a huge amount of effort (pointing him to the exact URL of the module's home page, and even better, pre-compiled packages for your OS, would tend to improve his/her mood) then I will, after carefully evaluating it, its security, its size, etc.
c) Politics sucks, and the poor sysadmin generally has to fight tooth and nail for every little bit he/she can get. Going the political route and over your sysadmin's head is a very good way whatever box you end up controlling has a number of... strange issues. Not saying I did this, but I know a LOT of sysadmins who have. A LOT. A lot of people you normally wouldn't expect. Especially in a university or state-run organization, politics and political image counts for a lot, and if you use politics to override your sysadmin, they're going to be very bitter about it. Not a good idea at all.
d) Working with the sysadmin, if you can provide a DAMN good case, and actually show you know what you're doing, what will usually happen is the sysadmin will hand over root and wash his or her hands of the matter. Box gets owned? Your problem. Box goes down? Your problem. Operating system barfs? Your problem. Too many people having root is a terminally bad idea, and most sysadmins will avoid it like the plague.
e) If all you need is the ability to restart/reload apache, there are a number of other ways to accomplish that, as has been mentioned. Personally, I would have gone the 80->8080 route, because I didn't hand out sudo either.:)
One trick I use regularly is I have a second email address I use only for eBay, Amazon, places like that. This email address I set to forward to my main address only when I'm expecting something, and just drops the mail otherwise. I don't want to send bounce messages as they may decide to render my account inactive (had this happen from one place some time ago). I also change this name every so often because even for those few days I have it open, the amount of spam grows to obscene amounts, even with RBL and ORBS running.
I just checked, and the various rogue accounts dumped 73 messages yesterday alone. 52 were caught by RBL or ORBS. In contrast, I received 8 legit email.
I've considered setting the rogues to bounce instead, but, as has been mentioned previously, that tends to send the messages to the wrong people.
Every so often I try and get myself off the mailing lists, but I usually can only get maybe a third of it, and that helps for a bit, but the amount continues to grow.
While I don't think anti-spam legistation is the solution, one wonders if redoing the mail protocols (SMTP, etc) wouldn't help alleviate this problem.
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I remember Guru Meditations... did a lot of coding on the Amiga, you saw them a lot. :) The first one scared the hell out of me, cause I saw the power light on my then-2-day-old A500 blinking first and then the screen goes dark...
Going through the Includes & Autodocs, specifically exec/alerts.h, you find all kinds of interesting codes that were possible for the first 4 bytes. (00000003 and 80000003, and their cousins 04 were CPU traps, with the initial 0 meaning recoverable and the initial 8 meaning not recoverable)
I actually TRIED to get as many of these to come up as I could, and a lot were obsoleted or just weren't triggerable (the call that would seem to trigger an alert just returned an error code instead, IIRC)
The most amusing one was 0x82011234 - emergency memory not available from graphics.library. I think the only time I saw this was when it was trying to allocate memory to draw a recoverable Guru and failed. Or some such.
And then there was the amusing undocumented ones. Like 0x48454C50 - HELP... when you really really really confuzzled the heck out of exec.library... I got this once but forget how.
Good times.
Oh, and then in 2.0 (or was it 3.0? Probably 3...) you had Amber and Red instead of just Red (Amber for the recoverable alerts I mentioned earlier).
According to TFA, they did this deliberately: compliant browsers should ignore bogus CSS attributes.
I just looked in my mail server logs - in the past 4 days, RBLs have stopped 1,518 messages. Rock!
I whole-heartedly support MAPS and RBLs in general, and generally view with great suspicion anyone who argues against them, including the article submitter who is NOT running an opt-in system - any system that accepts blindly email addresses and starts spewing junk mail to them is almost as bad as full-blown spammers IMHO.
It has been proven many times in the past that MAPS's "shotgun" like approach is the ONLY way to get a large majority of ISPs to actually DO something about spam.
They generally do NOT "shotgun" until an ISP has just blatantly refused to do anything about it.
At a largish-university. There would be (and was) no way a webmaster would have root access to any boxen I controlled. For a number of reasons:
:)
a) You don't need it. Making sure apache is up and running and patched is my job, and I probably do it to 50 boxes at once and have nice automated scripts.
b) Every single webmaster I met (until I left a few months) ago swore they needed root access to install some apache module or other. No, you don't. You ask the sysadmin and, most times, if he can do it without a huge amount of effort (pointing him to the exact URL of the module's home page, and even better, pre-compiled packages for your OS, would tend to improve his/her mood) then I will, after carefully evaluating it, its security, its size, etc.
c) Politics sucks, and the poor sysadmin generally has to fight tooth and nail for every little bit he/she can get. Going the political route and over your sysadmin's head is a very good way whatever box you end up controlling has a number of... strange issues. Not saying I did this, but I know a LOT of sysadmins who have. A LOT. A lot of people you normally wouldn't expect. Especially in a university or state-run organization, politics and political image counts for a lot, and if you use politics to override your sysadmin, they're going to be very bitter about it. Not a good idea at all.
d) Working with the sysadmin, if you can provide a DAMN good case, and actually show you know what you're doing, what will usually happen is the sysadmin will hand over root and wash his or her hands of the matter. Box gets owned? Your problem. Box goes down? Your problem. Operating system barfs? Your problem. Too many people having root is a terminally bad idea, and most sysadmins will avoid it like the plague.
e) If all you need is the ability to restart/reload apache, there are a number of other ways to accomplish that, as has been mentioned. Personally, I would have gone the 80->8080 route, because I didn't hand out sudo either.
Rackspace effectively 'gives' you the server hardware and the bandwidth - installing patches and other maintainence are your own responsibility.
One trick I use regularly is I have a second email address I use only for eBay, Amazon, places like that. This email address I set to forward to my main address only when I'm expecting something, and just drops the mail otherwise. I don't want to send bounce messages as they may decide to render my account inactive (had this happen from one place some time ago). I also change this name every so often because even for those few days I have it open, the amount of spam grows to obscene amounts, even with RBL and ORBS running.
I just checked, and the various rogue accounts dumped 73 messages yesterday alone. 52 were caught by RBL or ORBS. In contrast, I received 8 legit email.
I've considered setting the rogues to bounce instead, but, as has been mentioned previously, that tends to send the messages to the wrong people.
Every so often I try and get myself off the mailing lists, but I usually can only get maybe a third of it, and that helps for a bit, but the amount continues to grow.
While I don't think anti-spam legistation is the solution, one wonders if redoing the mail protocols (SMTP, etc) wouldn't help alleviate this problem.