You can get a free personal certificate from Thawte that works great. Once you've setup your account with them, you can create a signature for each email address you use. On the Mac side, you just download the certificate, and the Mac takes care of automatically installing it. Mail will also detect the certificates you install, and you'll see sign and encrypt (provided you have the recipients public key) buttons when you compose new messages. Here's a tutorial on getting it up and running with Mail:
Are these personal projects that you need to access from computers other than your PowerBook? If not, why not just run them on your PowerBook when you're using it? The built-in Apache and PHP work great, and it's simple to add a MySQL database. I wrote a little script that makes it possible to host multiple virtual hosts under Mac OS X, though they're only accessible from that computer by default. (I use NetInfoManager to add additional host names that point at 127.0.0.1.)
Wow, MAPS is up to their usual shoot-now-ask-questions-later approach. Reminds me of times not long ago... We stopped using MAPS after the last incident, and our level of spam has not increased that I've noticed. I encourage others to try for a few days without MAPS (SORBS and spamcop seem all right) to see if they really notice a difference.
Not to be picky, but it's Daylight Saving Time, without the "s" at the end of Saving.
Saving is used here as a verbal adjective (a participle). It modifies time and tells us more about its nature; namely, that it is characterized by the activity of saving daylight. It is a saving daylight kind of time. Similar examples would be dog walking time or book reading time. Since saving is a verb describing a single type of activity, the form is singular.
Sorry, my mistake there. Our primary servers did not use MAPS -- we did have one minor server for a few personal domains that was using it, and that was removed. But our use of MAPS on that server didn't affect us negatively because of the blacklist; if a message destined for the same server as the outgoing server through which it is sent is listed on an RBL, Sendmail and Postfix seem smart enough to not reject their own mail; they both see the destination as local, and don't do the checks -- at least, not in our configuration.
But regardless, the original comment about us using MAPS was not really relevant to the discussion -- this experience has just really opened my eyes and made me changes my ways to do a lot more research into an RBL before I trust it to block mail destined for me.
I don't know about that... Above.net (co-founded by one of the founders of MAPS's parent company, Kelkea) has more listings than Peer 1 does, and some listings are over two years old!
If you are a co-location customer, and your IP address gets black-listed, I think it's your responsibility to put pressure on the co-lo facility to resolve the problem. All of the people on these black-listings must not care if they've let it go this long.
Also, just because you're listed on these pages doesn't necessarily mean you are the one causing the problem. A non-profit for whom I do server administration got listed on a bunch of these lists. The cause was some spammer stealing content from their site, and including the URL to this non-profit in the email. SpamHaus just finds all domains listed in the email, looks up information on everything it finds, and blacklists ensue. When this happened, I had to fight with both Peer 1 and SpamHaus to convince them we had nothing to do with the spam, which we didn't. (Peer 1 acted too quickly if you ask me, as they blocked one of our IP's listed in the report almost immediately.) What should have happened and what didn't is that SpamHaus should only be looking at the servers through which the spam travels. Had they done that, the non-profit with whom I'm involved would have never been included in the blacklist. Instead, only the originating mail server and any open-relays would have been affected.
So many here are so quick to jump to the conclusion that the co-lo facility "harbours" spammers. That is not, in fact, the case. They have a very specific and clear Acceptable Use Policy, and they are very quick to terminate customers in violation of said policy when they find a breach.
You're right: you do have the right to choose to use MAPS if you want to. By starting this discussion, I'm hoping to get some good dialogue going about the effectiveness of RBLs (MAPS in particular), and whether or not the practices of these RBLs are really something us geeks want to support.
They are a co-location facility, and I'm not sure how they would go about doing this. Obviously, co-location facilities don't actively monitor traffic going in and out, and in my experiences, they are pretty quick to deal with troublesome customers who are violating their Acceptable Use Policy as soon as they are made aware of a breach.
I'm sure they will make sure they bump the priority on alerts from MAPS, though I would guess only because MAPS is so quick to jump the gun, and not because they actually respect MAPS.
Oh, believe me, I was very much so pissed off at my ISP. I hassled them all weekend and Monday, and I even went down there Monday afternoon to have a meeting with them.
But when I saw things from their perspective (and this was after I had talked with MAPS a couple times too) I saw that there wasn't much that could have been done differently. Could they have responded a little faster to the MAPS email? Possibly so, but I think their response time is pretty reasonable. When you have data-centers across North America and now Europe, with tens of thousands (maybe more?) customers, you can imagine that it would take some time to sift through all of the abuse complaints, deciding which ones are legitimate or not, etc.
Plus, to complicate matters more, it turns out that one of the principles of Kelkea Inc (they run MAPS), David Rand once owed my co-location facility a lot of money or something which resulted in a bitter lawsuit against him. Their heavy-handed approach, timing of the black-list, and slow response time the following week suggested that there could have been some retribution at play. I'm not a conspiracy theorist by any means, but it did seem pretty fishy to me. Especially when I asked MAPS point-blank what had to be done to get off of the blacklist -- the people I talked couldn't even give me a straight answer.
I guess I just feel that if you are running an RBL, you should at least be available 7 days a week to work *with* the ISP in dealing with the situation at hand. The situation here is that the spammers who caused the problem *were* actually dealt with before the weekend, but because MAPS isn't around for the weekend, we were all still punished.
I use grey-listing on my personal domains to reduce the spam that comes through and I find this does a much better job than RBLs, as most spam is sent via one-off programs that don't interpret SMTP temporary errors properly.
If people would be responsible enough to prevent open-relays, and to not run operating systems that are so easily infected by spam engines, we'd all be a lot better off.
My ISP follows the rules of the internet just fine. MAPS seems to think they can invent an enforce new rules, even though they are just a private company. If it was Microsoft doing this service the same way, I'm sure you would be singing a different tune. I don't think anyone benefits from private companies inventing rules that everyone is supposed to follow, and punishing hundreds of thousands of innocent customers because one ISP doesn't respond to an email in what they have dictated is a reasonable amount of time.
I in fact did spend my entire weekend talking with the ISP and trying to figure out how I could help the problem, even though I had nothing to do with the cause. But when MAPS activates a blacklist Friday night, after business hours, and then is not open until Monday morning, I hardly think that's fair play. They could have waited until Monday morning when they'd be able to respond to resolution requests, but they didn't. Instead they screwed us all over.
I had a meeting with a bunch of important people at my ISP on Monday afternoon, and I was quite satisfied that they were doing everything they could to resolve the problem with MAPS. It was pretty clear that MAPS was being extremely slow or unresponsive, and it took them half a day to come back with a list of "demands" before they would remove the blacklist. My ISP responded quickly and sufficiently, and it still took MAPS several more hours to remove the blacklist.
Re:A person is a irresponsible admin if they...
on
Should You Trust MAPS?
·
· Score: 2, Informative
The problem wasn't that we used MAPS -- we didn't. It's that other large organizations do, and we were adversely affected by an over-zealous "investigator" and an co-location facility who wasn't able to respond to MAPS's notification email within a day -- not all that unreasonable, in my opinion.
Actually, no, that's not what I'm admitting. My co-location provider had some customers that were the problem. And when I talked to them, they said those problem customers were terminated before the blacklist even happened. They didn't respond to MAPS in time, and MAPS took it upon themselves to blacklist 180,000 IPs, affecting innocent people like myself all over the world.
I'm a Canadian, and I know how easy it is to fall into the trap of referring to our neighbours down south as "stupid Americans". But in actuality, Americans have a higher rate of education per capita than Canada, and there are plenty of them who are intelligent, cultured, and open-minded. Only, these people don't usually make the headlines because that doesn't sell. Canadians would for some reason rather hear about all of the right-winged Christian extremists who protest at the funerals of homosexuals and such. Canada has its fair share of ignorant, small-minded people too. Take the majority of the prairies or any suburb of any large city, for example. While Canadians and Americans do have different attitudes about some things (ie. privacy, rights, drugs, etc), I think for every difference, there are at least two similarities.
I have quite a bit of experience with FreeBSD since I switched away from Linux, and a good chunk of OpenBSD under my belt, too.
The nice thing about OpenBSD is that it is amazingly clean. Bare to the bones, etc. It seems to work well on a lot of hardware, and is super-secure. The big downside that I found when I was first getting into it is that the OpenBSD community is very -- how shall we put this delicately -- impatient with newbies. RTFM is a popular response to most questions. I always did my best to search through the mailing list archives (they have the worst searching engine I've ever seen!), but so long as you can show that you've made a concerted effort in understanding and solving the problem, there should be at least one person who will help you. The OpenBSD documentation is quite thorough, though I have found it lacking in the example department, which for me, is a really important thing in helping me understand something. Oh yeah, and Theo de Raadt is kinda nasty and abusive, but you gotta love him anyway.
FreeBSD, on the other hand, is really easy to figure out without needing support from the community. The Handbook is an amazing resource, and has answers to pretty much all of the questions I've ever had. I've always found FreeBSD to be particularly stable, and to handle high server loads much better than Linux. Updating the system is easy, and the ports system is to die for. With Linux, I was always having to stay on top of security updates and hope that my server wouldn't get hacked through yet another exploit; while FreeBSD is occasionally subject to the same exploits (eg. BIND, Sendmail), the overall maintenance is much less demanding.
My own server cluster has three FreeBSD machines and a little OpenBSD companion. I generally find FreeBSD to be friendlier and less-frustrating, but OpenBSD has some definite advantages and uses.
Yeah, what's the deal here? Every Mac has the ability to encode video in MPEG4, and it is a really, really good format with brilliant quality for the filesize.
In a job like that, it would make things a lot less stressful and more fun if you smoked the occasional j-stick before work. I suggest doing right before your shower so that you don't smell. You'll have a nice grin on your face, and people's problems won't seem to bad.
I also agree with the person who posted about exercise. I started working out three times a week over a year ago, and now I go anywhere from three to five times a week. It definitely helps with stress, and has the added benefit of making you feel a lot better about yourself, too.
I have been using NetNewsWire Lite from the very start, and have found it to be an excellent program with a nice, clean interface. The Dock icon updates itself to show you how many unread articles you have, the built-in library of RSS-enabled sites is quite extensive, and one of the best features in my opinion is an option that opens the web-pages behind the NetNewsWire window. (I go through all the articles, opening browser windows as I go in the background, and then I go and read all the pages I brought up.)
Slashdot Mirror
Or more simply:
/System/Library/CoreServices/RemoteManagement/ARDAgent.app/Contents/MacOS/ARDAgent
chmod u-s
After doing that, I get:
patrick@picasso:~$ osascript -e 'tell app "ARDAgent" to do shell script "whoami"'
patrick
(Repairing permissions will probably reset this though.)
This receiver from Sony has two, and I'm sure it's only a matter of time before they have more...
You can get a free personal certificate from Thawte that works great. Once you've setup your account with them, you can create a signature for each email address you use. On the Mac side, you just download the certificate, and the Mac takes care of automatically installing it. Mail will also detect the certificates you install, and you'll see sign and encrypt (provided you have the recipients public key) buttons when you compose new messages. Here's a tutorial on getting it up and running with Mail:
x
http://joar.com/certificates/
It also works with Outlook, Outlook Express, Thunderbird, and Mozilla:
http://www.marknoble.com/tutorial/smime/smime.asp
Are these personal projects that you need to access from computers other than your PowerBook? If not, why not just run them on your PowerBook when you're using it? The built-in Apache and PHP work great, and it's simple to add a MySQL database. I wrote a little script that makes it possible to host multiple virtual hosts under Mac OS X, though they're only accessible from that computer by default. (I use NetInfoManager to add additional host names that point at 127.0.0.1.)
Wow, MAPS is up to their usual shoot-now-ask-questions-later approach. Reminds me of times not long ago... We stopped using MAPS after the last incident, and our level of spam has not increased that I've noticed. I encourage others to try for a few days without MAPS (SORBS and spamcop seem all right) to see if they really notice a difference.
What's wrong with the Power suite in the System Events application?
tell application "System Events"
sleep
end tell
from the shell:
osascript \
-e "tell application \"System Events\"" \
-e "sleep" \
-e "end tell"
(this is currently available in Panther).
Sorry, my mistake there. Our primary servers did not use MAPS -- we did have one minor server for a few personal domains that was using it, and that was removed. But our use of MAPS on that server didn't affect us negatively because of the blacklist; if a message destined for the same server as the outgoing server through which it is sent is listed on an RBL, Sendmail and Postfix seem smart enough to not reject their own mail; they both see the destination as local, and don't do the checks -- at least, not in our configuration.
But regardless, the original comment about us using MAPS was not really relevant to the discussion -- this experience has just really opened my eyes and made me changes my ways to do a lot more research into an RBL before I trust it to block mail destined for me.
If you are a co-location customer, and your IP address gets black-listed, I think it's your responsibility to put pressure on the co-lo facility to resolve the problem. All of the people on these black-listings must not care if they've let it go this long.
Also, just because you're listed on these pages doesn't necessarily mean you are the one causing the problem. A non-profit for whom I do server administration got listed on a bunch of these lists. The cause was some spammer stealing content from their site, and including the URL to this non-profit in the email. SpamHaus just finds all domains listed in the email, looks up information on everything it finds, and blacklists ensue. When this happened, I had to fight with both Peer 1 and SpamHaus to convince them we had nothing to do with the spam, which we didn't. (Peer 1 acted too quickly if you ask me, as they blocked one of our IP's listed in the report almost immediately.) What should have happened and what didn't is that SpamHaus should only be looking at the servers through which the spam travels. Had they done that, the non-profit with whom I'm involved would have never been included in the blacklist. Instead, only the originating mail server and any open-relays would have been affected.
So many here are so quick to jump to the conclusion that the co-lo facility "harbours" spammers. That is not, in fact, the case. They have a very specific and clear Acceptable Use Policy, and they are very quick to terminate customers in violation of said policy when they find a breach.
You're right: you do have the right to choose to use MAPS if you want to. By starting this discussion, I'm hoping to get some good dialogue going about the effectiveness of RBLs (MAPS in particular), and whether or not the practices of these RBLs are really something us geeks want to support.
They are a co-location facility, and I'm not sure how they would go about doing this. Obviously, co-location facilities don't actively monitor traffic going in and out, and in my experiences, they are pretty quick to deal with troublesome customers who are violating their Acceptable Use Policy as soon as they are made aware of a breach.
I'm sure they will make sure they bump the priority on alerts from MAPS, though I would guess only because MAPS is so quick to jump the gun, and not because they actually respect MAPS.
But when I saw things from their perspective (and this was after I had talked with MAPS a couple times too) I saw that there wasn't much that could have been done differently. Could they have responded a little faster to the MAPS email? Possibly so, but I think their response time is pretty reasonable. When you have data-centers across North America and now Europe, with tens of thousands (maybe more?) customers, you can imagine that it would take some time to sift through all of the abuse complaints, deciding which ones are legitimate or not, etc.
Plus, to complicate matters more, it turns out that one of the principles of Kelkea Inc (they run MAPS), David Rand once owed my co-location facility a lot of money or something which resulted in a bitter lawsuit against him. Their heavy-handed approach, timing of the black-list, and slow response time the following week suggested that there could have been some retribution at play. I'm not a conspiracy theorist by any means, but it did seem pretty fishy to me. Especially when I asked MAPS point-blank what had to be done to get off of the blacklist -- the people I talked couldn't even give me a straight answer.
I use grey-listing on my personal domains to reduce the spam that comes through and I find this does a much better job than RBLs, as most spam is sent via one-off programs that don't interpret SMTP temporary errors properly.
If people would be responsible enough to prevent open-relays, and to not run operating systems that are so easily infected by spam engines, we'd all be a lot better off.
My ISP follows the rules of the internet just fine. MAPS seems to think they can invent an enforce new rules, even though they are just a private company. If it was Microsoft doing this service the same way, I'm sure you would be singing a different tune. I don't think anyone benefits from private companies inventing rules that everyone is supposed to follow, and punishing hundreds of thousands of innocent customers because one ISP doesn't respond to an email in what they have dictated is a reasonable amount of time.
I in fact did spend my entire weekend talking with the ISP and trying to figure out how I could help the problem, even though I had nothing to do with the cause. But when MAPS activates a blacklist Friday night, after business hours, and then is not open until Monday morning, I hardly think that's fair play. They could have waited until Monday morning when they'd be able to respond to resolution requests, but they didn't. Instead they screwed us all over.
I had a meeting with a bunch of important people at my ISP on Monday afternoon, and I was quite satisfied that they were doing everything they could to resolve the problem with MAPS. It was pretty clear that MAPS was being extremely slow or unresponsive, and it took them half a day to come back with a list of "demands" before they would remove the blacklist. My ISP responded quickly and sufficiently, and it still took MAPS several more hours to remove the blacklist.
The problem wasn't that we used MAPS -- we didn't. It's that other large organizations do, and we were adversely affected by an over-zealous "investigator" and an co-location facility who wasn't able to respond to MAPS's notification email within a day -- not all that unreasonable, in my opinion.
Actually, no, that's not what I'm admitting. My co-location provider had some customers that were the problem. And when I talked to them, they said those problem customers were terminated before the blacklist even happened. They didn't respond to MAPS in time, and MAPS took it upon themselves to blacklist 180,000 IPs, affecting innocent people like myself all over the world.
Is it just me, or does everything feel a bit snappier now! Amazing! Best update ever!
I'm a Canadian, and I know how easy it is to fall into the trap of referring to our neighbours down south as "stupid Americans". But in actuality, Americans have a higher rate of education per capita than Canada, and there are plenty of them who are intelligent, cultured, and open-minded. Only, these people don't usually make the headlines because that doesn't sell. Canadians would for some reason rather hear about all of the right-winged Christian extremists who protest at the funerals of homosexuals and such. Canada has its fair share of ignorant, small-minded people too. Take the majority of the prairies or any suburb of any large city, for example. While Canadians and Americans do have different attitudes about some things (ie. privacy, rights, drugs, etc), I think for every difference, there are at least two similarities.
I have quite a bit of experience with FreeBSD since I switched away from Linux, and a good chunk of OpenBSD under my belt, too.
The nice thing about OpenBSD is that it is amazingly clean. Bare to the bones, etc. It seems to work well on a lot of hardware, and is super-secure. The big downside that I found when I was first getting into it is that the OpenBSD community is very -- how shall we put this delicately -- impatient with newbies. RTFM is a popular response to most questions. I always did my best to search through the mailing list archives (they have the worst searching engine I've ever seen!), but so long as you can show that you've made a concerted effort in understanding and solving the problem, there should be at least one person who will help you. The OpenBSD documentation is quite thorough, though I have found it lacking in the example department, which for me, is a really important thing in helping me understand something. Oh yeah, and Theo de Raadt is kinda nasty and abusive, but you gotta love him anyway.
FreeBSD, on the other hand, is really easy to figure out without needing support from the community. The Handbook is an amazing resource, and has answers to pretty much all of the questions I've ever had. I've always found FreeBSD to be particularly stable, and to handle high server loads much better than Linux. Updating the system is easy, and the ports system is to die for. With Linux, I was always having to stay on top of security updates and hope that my server wouldn't get hacked through yet another exploit; while FreeBSD is occasionally subject to the same exploits (eg. BIND, Sendmail), the overall maintenance is much less demanding.
My own server cluster has three FreeBSD machines and a little OpenBSD companion. I generally find FreeBSD to be friendlier and less-frustrating, but OpenBSD has some definite advantages and uses.
Patrick
Yeah, what's the deal here? Every Mac has the ability to encode video in MPEG4, and it is a really, really good format with brilliant quality for the filesize.
What are you, some sort of PC user? Reboots only make a difference on Windows!
Is it just me, or does this release make the whole OS seem snappier? Great jaerb, Apple! :)
In a job like that, it would make things a lot less stressful and more fun if you smoked the occasional j-stick before work. I suggest doing right before your shower so that you don't smell. You'll have a nice grin on your face, and people's problems won't seem to bad.
I also agree with the person who posted about exercise. I started working out three times a week over a year ago, and now I go anywhere from three to five times a week. It definitely helps with stress, and has the added benefit of making you feel a lot better about yourself, too.
Those apps are pretty cool (particularly the UML one), but none can eat productivity like Gridlock!
I have been using NetNewsWire Lite from the very start, and have found it to be an excellent program with a nice, clean interface. The Dock icon updates itself to show you how many unread articles you have, the built-in library of RSS-enabled sites is quite extensive, and one of the best features in my opinion is an option that opens the web-pages behind the NetNewsWire window. (I go through all the articles, opening browser windows as I go in the background, and then I go and read all the pages I brought up.)