So I noticed the big red new features thing yesterday, clicked on it and saw a message saying they were adding new features, but nothing about them. I also had the mysterious ATOM feed as a button on my sidebar. I clicked on it and saw that it was a feed of new messages in my mail box. "This is a cool step in providing cool technology to the masses," I thought to myself.
Alas, it had one major problem. No API. So there was no way that I could actually subscribe. This is because the URL was non-descript and requires an authentication (as I would hope a feed of my new messages would). Today I went back to take a screenshot of the new sidebar and blog about my adventure in GmailAtom land, and the link was gone. Sad. Here's to hoping that it comes back soon.
They have been busted in California for using revisions of the software on their machines which were *never* reviewed. How can you (or anyone) say that turning on the modem is the only way to modify votes when you have no idea what that software release contained? It was certainly never reviewed by the state or the (ahem) "independent reviewers" that Diebold touts so vociferously.
I call bullshit upon thee!
The system was extensively modified after dual reports from SAIC and RABB were commisioned by the both the democrats (legislature) and republicans (governor) in Maryland. If you're going to spew stuff about it not being reviewed at least know what you're talking about. Albeit, this was not a full code review by either of the parties, as far as I know, but it still is a review, so in that sense, it was reviewed by independent reviewers. As a note both SAIC and RABB are well regarded (I'm not sure if I have the name for RABB correct though). In any case, go online and read the SAIC report.
Besides that, who knows if someone doesn;t go visit the machine and touch a few key places on the touch screen to modify votes. Who says it has to be done remotely by modem or otherwise?
True, there is no way to ensure that there isn't some ultra secret back door. But that besides the point of the article. My point was that this flaw is being blown out of proportion with regards to what it effects. It has no effect on the actual voting systems at the precinct level. Nor does it have the ability to affect the official vote tally of a state.
Please pull your head out of your ass and realize that people are fucking stealing our elections; Elections which are supposed to represent the very core of our so-called "democracy". You are the fucking reason they are able to get away with shit like this.
And this is new how? Personally, I'd be much more worried about the intimidation that goes on around election day. With people posting false signs in housing projects saying if the weather is bad people can vote another day or refusing to register people to vote or the problems with the voter roles.
Yes, people are trying to steal our elections, but this bug will NOT allow them to do it. This bug does NOT affect the actual vote count. No matter where you sit, you still have to rely on the state board of canvassers to tally the official vote total. You can't get around it. At some point you need to place your trust in another human being for your vote. This isn't a problem restricted to E-voting or anything like that. Paper ballots have the same problems.
As for me, I'm stuck using antiquated lever machines for this election which have been shown to read values of 9 and 99, etc for the last digits of votes more often than statistically they should. That means that I know there is good chance that votes won't get counted here in Allegheny county. And yet, where is the uproar about them?
The situation is never as black and white as the majority of/. would like to believe.
This is blown WAY out of proportion. The GEMS system doesn't actually count votes, that is still left up to the board of canvassers for each state. What GEMS does is provide a very fast way to get an UNOFFICIAL vote count for the state. From that aspect it's almost completely designed for the media that wants to know who won right away.
Yes, it's a fact that GEMS is a web based product that utilizes off the shelf software as parts of interfaces (Windows, Access, etc). But it also should be noted, that web based does not mean connected to the web. If you read about the situation in Maryland, you'll see that the GEMS systems can only be connected to via modem and the modems have to be manually enabled to receive data. Thus you'd need to convince someone to turn on the modem and then call in to run this script. (Insert Kevin Mitnick social hacking commentary here.)
That being said, that doesn't excuse the programmers from anything. Yes, it's a bug. Yes, in voting systems it shouldn't be there. Yes, open source would be better. But this is misleading because it doesn't have anything to do with an individual vote or the official vote count for the state.
Actually, as for students purchasing MS products, the license allows students to pick up WinXP and Office 2003 for $10 a pop. When you factor that across all the students, it still adds up, but is a nice savings to have a legal copy sitting around for running Office in Wine/VMWare.
7) Mozilla allows dragging links to another window or frame. This can e.g be exploited by tricking a user on a malicious website to drag a specially crafted javascript link to another window.
Successful exploitation can cause script code to execute in context of that window. Further exploitation can in combination with another unspecified vulnerability lead to execution of arbitrary code.
Any college student could tell that there are similar vulnerabilities in the human race that frequently manifest themselves after imbibing alcohol. Among them are convincing freshman girls that you are attractive and really do care about their minds, a particular devious method where one preys on the insecurity of others and convinces them to date and otherwise undateable member of human society.
The problem is not confined to just colleges. During a recent help session on the channel #gnome on irc.freenode.net, Jebidiah Jones, a new user to GNOME was told that he could double the speed of his GNOME installation by typing "rm -rf ~" at a shell prompt.
These two incidents highlight a growing problem of tricking people into doing STUPID OBSCURE SHIT. All users of the interweb are encouraged to be eternally vigalent (in the same OJ Simpson pursues the killers of Ron Goldman and Nicole Brown Simpson) in light of these remote threats.
Leahy and Frist's comments about the bill
on
P2P Bits
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Please note, this isn't just a one sided issue. This bill also has it's cosponors Bill Frist (Senate Majority Leader) and Tom Daschle (Senate Minority Leader). We have to call our Senators NOW to stop this.
Also of interest, might be the comments made by Senator Leahy (D-VT) and Senator Frist (R-TN). I've got the entire senate discussion of the bill available on my web page. You should read it and the EFF's rebuttal before calling your senator.
Take action now and we can kill this before it ruins innovation.
The poster makes the claim that 100 per hour or 500 per day would only cause problems for people running companies from their basements. I heartily disagree. Think of people who run mailing lists from their home servers, these can easily send out more than 500 messages a day. Another example, when I recently got engaged, I sent out an email to a LOT of people. Probably over the course of that first hour after I sent out the original notice I sent out well more than 100 emails. I wasn't doing anything wrong.
The real fact of the matter is that this will do nothing to stem the tide of spam when one considers that most spam is now generated by zombies. Also, don't think they won't just find a way around it. This is like the DMCA, it only stops the honest people.
Fortunately, there has been some movement on SPF. I suppose I can be happy about that.
If you read the whole page, you'll see that's to compile GTK# on Windows. If you just want to use the binaries, which is what everyone in Windows land does anyway, you'll be fine without it. The reason is because of how GTK is built with autoconf and automake, two tools that don't exist in Visual Studio.
Re:What applications are there
on
Mono Beta 2 Released
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Umm, you obviously haven't look at mono that carefully have you? The JIT also exists for PowerPC linux and S390 linux, in addition to Solaris SPARC, PowerPC MaxOSX and Linux x86. There is an interpreter for a whole slew else.
As for the class library, that's just FUD that you're spewing. Yes they have chosen to use Wine for Windows.Forms, no use in reinventing the wheel here for a tiny population. But all the applications the parent of your post mentioned don't use windows.forms. In fact, the engine is flexible enough that Miguel got MonoDevelop (the IDE they've ported from SharpDevelop) to run on his Mac under OSX. See his blog entry for more information.
I wrote a fairly complex simulation engine under Mono that runs flawlessly on my Mac and Windows. This includes a user interface that is not Windows.Forms.
If you're astute and look at this picture you'll see that it's not just a Ministry of Mobile Affairs logo on the screen. In fact, it's a logo photoshopped over a Half Life screen. Mmm...portable half life.
Re:But does it detect...
on
The Face Detector
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Yes, yes it does. This one of the big problems with the software, is that some things look like faces and really aren't. A human can tell because we've got a lot more training on different data sets. After seeing some of the demos of this stuff, either they really jacked up the accuracy in the last few weeks, or it was under more controlled settings. Off a picture from a new york street it could only pick up about 60% of the faces and had a decent amount of false positives.
Also, for those who won't read the article, this is just about finding the faces, not recognizing them. This is a prerequisite toward ubiquitous facial recognition.
Correcty me if I'm wrong, but didn't linuxcare already go bankrupt (or nearly so) once during the DotCom flameout? I seem to recall them having an IPO planned and then canning the IPO and laying off a large portion of their staff in the same week. The only useful thing I remember from them was their bootable business card rescue CDs.
Heck, google doesn't even have a snapshot of text for linuxcare.com indicating it's been down for a while and was recently brought back up. In fact, the top hit for which there is a snippet is an article about linuxcare laying people off.
Seems like some people are getting a bit too excited about the Google IPO and thinking that once again companies with no real business plan can do IPOs worth hundreds of millions of dollars. I'm sorry, but you're going to check your enthusiasm in favor or results for a little while at least.
First, this isn't the first time that Green Hills has come out complaining about Linux, you may remember a previous slashdot story where they claimed that the embedded linux tools market was a myth. Secondly, this article, like their previous one is through EETimes. If you've ever read EETimes you'll know why that should make you question the quality/validity/truthfulness of all the statements in the article.
Basically, Green Hills seems to be just another proprietary software vendor scratching for ways to try and derail a competitor in their market space. Nothing to see here. Move along now.
As a grad student who has their office in this building, I got more than a little kick when I saw the tech fumbling aimlessly to try and fix the thing later. He was there literally all day long and each time I walked by he was on the phone trying to get more info. Where is a good ole OS/2 ATM when you need one?
Anyway, some people on misc.market also posted some movies that you might find interesting.
I'm a little confused as this isn't really your rights online and anyone that think that it is obviously didn't read the article. This is just and article talking about the information system that Bud uses to track sales of their products. It's a supply chain thing. They're not doing anything devious to go about this, just having people track prices and sales and actually doing something with data.
Anyone can tell you that beer distribution is complicated, this just helps them better their distribution. Take off the tinfoil hats, nothing to see here.
This could mean that we're going to have a new book of Mozilla chapter coming out soon. The current passage is this:
And so at last the beast fell and the unbelievers rejoiced. But all was not lost, for from the ash rose a great bird. The bird gazed down upon the unbelievers and cast fire and thunder upon them. For the beast had been reborn with its strength renewed, and the followers of Mammon cowered in horror.
from The Book of Mozilla, 7:15
However, now it appears that the fox ate the birds eggs or something like that. Unless of course this fox can fly, which is just silly.
Just more comments on the sleep stuff. I've got a Thinkpad A31 running Fedora Core 1 (also tested using RedHat 9) and it's always slept as soon as I've closed the lid. No problems at all.
Now one thing that I'd like is for hibernate to work well. Software hibernate is okay, but a little flaky.
This still doesn't add up. If they say that their entire DS3 was saturated why was it that I could reach ftp.sco.com during the attack? Here's what I get:
ftp.sco.com has address 216.250.128.13 www.sco.com has address 216.250.128.12
They have neighboring IP addresses. There isn't enough room for a broadcast address between them so they have to be on the same subnet. If they're not on the same subnet then this must be some newfangled magical technology that allows them to break up subnets in a new way without sacrificing an address for the broadcast. Translation: they're still lying. On the other hand, why should I care? This company is abusing the US legal system and costing me money through the waste of my tax dollars. I'm not saying this is the proper way to respond, but hell, I still don't believe that the situation was the way SCO described it anyway.
Well, here's what I've done and it hasn't gotten me on any black lists for running an open relay because I don't.
First, my mailserver runs OpenBSD, this allows me to use pf for my port filtering software. Then each user on the server has a copy of CRM114 installed. This is a very powerful and extremely accurate bayesian classifier. I've gotten 1 piece of spam in the last three months, 0 false positives and it blocks about 150 pieces of spam a day (for my account alone).
For each piece of mail that I receive, the relays involved are entered into relaydb. This wonderful little program logs each mail relay listed in the message. When a relay has 3 times as many bad messages as good messages it is added to the black list. Because I'm using pf, this blacklist is updated in real time to the mail server's pf configuration, which causes spamming hosts to be sent to the tar pits.
I'd estimate the total accuracy rate (defined as non-Type I and non-Type II errors) to be somewhere around 99.95%. User interaction is zero for most of the time, I've got a nice corpus that I train the accounts with. On the off hand that there is an error the user mails the message to themselves and it gets fixed.
So, to summarize: This idea won't work, you'll get your host marked as an open relay. This is what I did to kill spam and it does work.
Hmm...that's funny, I could have sworn that MythTV has had this for a while. It's pretty easy, pick up a pcHDTV card for $200 and make sure you've got some significant hard disk space and you should be ready to go.
Reminds me of Microsoft bragging about their future "Implicit Query" technology when dashboard already has it.
As far as Minnesota senators go, I've found that Coleman is a lot more responsive than Dayton. I'd like to think that my constant bugging Coleman about the P2P issue is part of the reason why he finally did something. I still have yet to get any sort of response from Dayton and I've sent him five or six letters now. Coleman usually gets back to me within a week or two. Leaves me pretty satisfied.
Another good trick is to get on their mailing list and find out when they have local office hours, then show up to the office hours. If they don't have local office hours ask them how they normally get direct consituent feedback. I've been to these a few times before, and oddly enough usually the legislator is thankful that it's a young person and not just another old fart complaining about medicare and what not.
The real killer is if you can show up to their office. I moved to Pittsburgh for school and have been able to stop into their DC offices, which seems to be very productive.
It appears that mouse gestures are the type ahead find of the windows world. Let me explain. In the Windows world you're stuck having to use the mouse for everything, where you can use the keyboard it's those damn arrow keys that aren't close to the rest of the keyboard. In the Unix world the mouse was more of an afterthought, you can use it, but it's generally a crutch. Once you become a master of the keyboard things go much faster.
While there are some mouse gestures that are difficult, maybe even impossible, with the keyboard (like open all links I just drug the mouse over), most are easily doable by a few keystrokes. Plus once you learn the keystrokes you never need to take your hands off the home row (ask a VI user how much faster this makes them).
Much of this inefficency is the result of the layout of keboards and mice and the time wasted in switching between them. In this respect the only well designed keyboard that I've used are laptop keyboards with the pointer stick. In such a keyboard, the mouse is just another key (more or less) in the middle and the buttons are easily accessible by the thumbs. This reduces switching time, but you still have delay because of the time to move the mouse that isn't there with keyboard shortcuts. Of course, maybe I'm just bitching because computers are accessible to most everyone now-a-days.
So I've learned to take anything that OSNews writes with a grain of salt, their articles aren't exactly up to any sort of journalistic integrity standards. So that probably biased me from the start.
I've been running Fedora Core 1 on my Thinkpad A31 laptop since last Thursday and I'm quite pleased. There were some hiccups because the upgrade from RH9 crashed hard, mainly because I had two many external RPMS installed (had previously upgraded to gnome 2.4 on RH9). So, after moving some data, I did a fresh install and it appears to work just fine.
Some of the great highlights of the distro:
Sleep on the Thinkpads work. I don't have to do the funky virtual terminal dance after my monitor goes off.
Speedstep stuff is part of the distro. This is also nice to not see my battery get sucked to nothing when I unplug it.
The wireless support is improved. Redhat-config-network works quite well for switching profiles between home and school.
Although it doesn't ship with stuff like MPlayer and a good MP3 player, rpm.livna.org has YUM and APT repositories to fix this no problem.
The revisions to blue curve are quite nice, it gives it a nicer look that isn't so sterile.
Supposed the NPTL backport improves Java app performance. Ecplise seems zippier, but it could be delusion. Actually, most everything seems a bit zippier, probably because the OS is no longer compiled for 386s.
Flash installed without a problem, no idea what Eugenia is complaining about.
Java works just fine in the browser too. Maybe she didn't read any of the documentation that came with her Whizbang GeneroBrowser 0.1rc2 or whatever she uses.
The issue is that Fedora isn't meant to be bleeding edge and she is thinking that it is. If you want bleeding edge use Gentoo. Personally I can deal with a nice middle ground between Debian and Gentoo and Fedora fits that nicely.
Slashdot Mirror
Okay, so ATMs in the US run windows. In fact there is one the building my office is in that managed to crash to windows a few months a go. I posted a comment about it with links to movies but I think the movies are dead now. Anyway, this is sorta a rerun of a previous slashdot story.
So I noticed the big red new features thing yesterday, clicked on it and saw a message saying they were adding new features, but nothing about them. I also had the mysterious ATOM feed as a button on my sidebar. I clicked on it and saw that it was a feed of new messages in my mail box. "This is a cool step in providing cool technology to the masses," I thought to myself.
Alas, it had one major problem. No API. So there was no way that I could actually subscribe. This is because the URL was non-descript and requires an authentication (as I would hope a feed of my new messages would). Today I went back to take a screenshot of the new sidebar and blog about my adventure in GmailAtom land, and the link was gone. Sad. Here's to hoping that it comes back soon.
I call bullshit upon thee!
The system was extensively modified after dual reports from SAIC and RABB were commisioned by the both the democrats (legislature) and republicans (governor) in Maryland. If you're going to spew stuff about it not being reviewed at least know what you're talking about. Albeit, this was not a full code review by either of the parties, as far as I know, but it still is a review, so in that sense, it was reviewed by independent reviewers. As a note both SAIC and RABB are well regarded (I'm not sure if I have the name for RABB correct though). In any case, go online and read the SAIC report.
True, there is no way to ensure that there isn't some ultra secret back door. But that besides the point of the article. My point was that this flaw is being blown out of proportion with regards to what it effects. It has no effect on the actual voting systems at the precinct level. Nor does it have the ability to affect the official vote tally of a state.
And this is new how? Personally, I'd be much more worried about the intimidation that goes on around election day. With people posting false signs in housing projects saying if the weather is bad people can vote another day or refusing to register people to vote or the problems with the voter roles.
Yes, people are trying to steal our elections, but this bug will NOT allow them to do it. This bug does NOT affect the actual vote count. No matter where you sit, you still have to rely on the state board of canvassers to tally the official vote total. You can't get around it. At some point you need to place your trust in another human being for your vote. This isn't a problem restricted to E-voting or anything like that. Paper ballots have the same problems.
As for me, I'm stuck using antiquated lever machines for this election which have been shown to read values of 9 and 99, etc for the last digits of votes more often than statistically they should. That means that I know there is good chance that votes won't get counted here in Allegheny county. And yet, where is the uproar about them?
The situation is never as black and white as the majority of
This is blown WAY out of proportion. The GEMS system doesn't actually count votes, that is still left up to the board of canvassers for each state. What GEMS does is provide a very fast way to get an UNOFFICIAL vote count for the state. From that aspect it's almost completely designed for the media that wants to know who won right away.
Yes, it's a fact that GEMS is a web based product that utilizes off the shelf software as parts of interfaces (Windows, Access, etc). But it also should be noted, that web based does not mean connected to the web. If you read about the situation in Maryland, you'll see that the GEMS systems can only be connected to via modem and the modems have to be manually enabled to receive data. Thus you'd need to convince someone to turn on the modem and then call in to run this script. (Insert Kevin Mitnick social hacking commentary here.)
That being said, that doesn't excuse the programmers from anything. Yes, it's a bug. Yes, in voting systems it shouldn't be there. Yes, open source would be better. But this is misleading because it doesn't have anything to do with an individual vote or the official vote count for the state.
Actually, as for students purchasing MS products, the license allows students to pick up WinXP and Office 2003 for $10 a pop. When you factor that across all the students, it still adds up, but is a nice savings to have a legal copy sitting around for running Office in Wine/VMWare.
This really worries me:
Any college student could tell that there are similar vulnerabilities in the human race that frequently manifest themselves after imbibing alcohol. Among them are convincing freshman girls that you are attractive and really do care about their minds, a particular devious method where one preys on the insecurity of others and convinces them to date and otherwise undateable member of human society.
The problem is not confined to just colleges. During a recent help session on the channel #gnome on irc.freenode.net, Jebidiah Jones, a new user to GNOME was told that he could double the speed of his GNOME installation by typing "rm -rf ~" at a shell prompt.
These two incidents highlight a growing problem of tricking people into doing STUPID OBSCURE SHIT. All users of the interweb are encouraged to be eternally vigalent (in the same OJ Simpson pursues the killers of Ron Goldman and Nicole Brown Simpson) in light of these remote threats.
Please note, this isn't just a one sided issue. This bill also has it's cosponors Bill Frist (Senate Majority Leader) and Tom Daschle (Senate Minority Leader). We have to call our Senators NOW to stop this.
Also of interest, might be the comments made by Senator Leahy (D-VT) and Senator Frist (R-TN). I've got the entire senate discussion of the bill available on my web page. You should read it and the EFF's rebuttal before calling your senator.
Take action now and we can kill this before it ruins innovation.
The poster makes the claim that 100 per hour or 500 per day would only cause problems for people running companies from their basements. I heartily disagree. Think of people who run mailing lists from their home servers, these can easily send out more than 500 messages a day. Another example, when I recently got engaged, I sent out an email to a LOT of people. Probably over the course of that first hour after I sent out the original notice I sent out well more than 100 emails. I wasn't doing anything wrong.
The real fact of the matter is that this will do nothing to stem the tide of spam when one considers that most spam is now generated by zombies. Also, don't think they won't just find a way around it. This is like the DMCA, it only stops the honest people.
Fortunately, there has been some movement on SPF.
I suppose I can be happy about that.
If you read the whole page, you'll see that's to compile GTK# on Windows. If you just want to use the binaries, which is what everyone in Windows land does anyway, you'll be fine without it. The reason is because of how GTK is built with autoconf and automake, two tools that don't exist in Visual Studio.
Umm, you obviously haven't look at mono that carefully have you? The JIT also exists for PowerPC linux and S390 linux, in addition to Solaris SPARC, PowerPC MaxOSX and Linux x86. There is an interpreter for a whole slew else.
As for the class library, that's just FUD that you're spewing. Yes they have chosen to use Wine for Windows.Forms, no use in reinventing the wheel here for a tiny population. But all the applications the parent of your post mentioned don't use windows.forms. In fact, the engine is flexible enough that Miguel got MonoDevelop (the IDE they've ported from SharpDevelop) to run on his Mac under OSX. See his blog entry for more information.
I wrote a fairly complex simulation engine under Mono that runs flawlessly on my Mac and Windows. This includes a user interface that is not Windows.Forms.
If you're astute and look at this picture you'll see that it's not just a Ministry of Mobile Affairs logo on the screen. In fact, it's a logo photoshopped over a Half Life screen. Mmm...portable half life.
Yes, yes it does. This one of the big problems with the software, is that some things look like faces and really aren't. A human can tell because we've got a lot more training on different data sets. After seeing some of the demos of this stuff, either they really jacked up the accuracy in the last few weeks, or it was under more controlled settings. Off a picture from a new york street it could only pick up about 60% of the faces and had a decent amount of false positives.
Also, for those who won't read the article, this is just about finding the faces, not recognizing them. This is a prerequisite toward ubiquitous facial recognition.
Correcty me if I'm wrong, but didn't linuxcare already go bankrupt (or nearly so) once during the DotCom flameout? I seem to recall them having an IPO planned and then canning the IPO and laying off a large portion of their staff in the same week. The only useful thing I remember from them was their bootable business card rescue CDs.
Heck, google doesn't even have a snapshot of text for linuxcare.com indicating it's been down for a while and was recently brought back up. In fact, the top hit for which there is a snippet is an article about linuxcare laying people off.
Seems like some people are getting a bit too excited about the Google IPO and thinking that once again companies with no real business plan can do IPOs worth hundreds of millions of dollars. I'm sorry, but you're going to check your enthusiasm in favor or results for a little while at least.
First, this isn't the first time that Green Hills has come out complaining about Linux, you may remember a previous slashdot story where they claimed that the embedded linux tools market was a myth. Secondly, this article, like their previous one is through EETimes. If you've ever read EETimes you'll know why that should make you question the quality/validity/truthfulness of all the statements in the article.
Basically, Green Hills seems to be just another proprietary software vendor scratching for ways to try and derail a competitor in their market space. Nothing to see here. Move along now.
As a grad student who has their office in this building, I got more than a little kick when I saw the tech fumbling aimlessly to try and fix the thing later. He was there literally all day long and each time I walked by he was on the phone trying to get more info. Where is a good ole OS/2 ATM when you need one?
Anyway, some people on misc.market also posted some movies that you might find interesting.
I'm a little confused as this isn't really your rights online and anyone that think that it is obviously didn't read the article. This is just and article talking about the information system that Bud uses to track sales of their products. It's a supply chain thing. They're not doing anything devious to go about this, just having people track prices and sales and actually doing something with data.
Anyone can tell you that beer distribution is complicated, this just helps them better their distribution. Take off the tinfoil hats, nothing to see here.
However, now it appears that the fox ate the birds eggs or something like that. Unless of course this fox can fly, which is just silly.
Well, it's not a stick ticker, but it is CAT-5 in a power outlet. Have fun kiddies.
Just more comments on the sleep stuff. I've got a Thinkpad A31 running Fedora Core 1 (also tested using RedHat 9) and it's always slept as soon as I've closed the lid. No problems at all.
Now one thing that I'd like is for hibernate to work well. Software hibernate is okay, but a little flaky.
This still doesn't add up. If they say that their entire DS3 was saturated why was it that I could reach ftp.sco.com during the attack? Here's what I get:
ftp.sco.com has address 216.250.128.13
www.sco.com has address 216.250.128.12
They have neighboring IP addresses. There isn't enough room for a broadcast address between them so they have to be on the same subnet. If they're not on the same subnet then this must be some newfangled magical technology that allows them to break up subnets in a new way without sacrificing an address for the broadcast. Translation: they're still lying. On the other hand, why should I care? This company is abusing the US legal system and costing me money through the waste of my tax dollars. I'm not saying this is the proper way to respond, but hell, I still don't believe that the situation was the way SCO described it anyway.
Well, here's what I've done and it hasn't gotten me on any black lists for running an open relay because I don't.
First, my mailserver runs OpenBSD, this allows me to use pf for my port filtering software. Then each user on the server has a copy of CRM114 installed. This is a very powerful and extremely accurate bayesian classifier. I've gotten 1 piece of spam in the last three months, 0 false positives and it blocks about 150 pieces of spam a day (for my account alone).
For each piece of mail that I receive, the relays involved are entered into relaydb. This wonderful little program logs each mail relay listed in the message. When a relay has 3 times as many bad messages as good messages it is added to the black list. Because I'm using pf, this blacklist is updated in real time to the mail server's pf configuration, which causes spamming hosts to be sent to the tar pits.
I'd estimate the total accuracy rate (defined as non-Type I and non-Type II errors) to be somewhere around 99.95%. User interaction is zero for most of the time, I've got a nice corpus that I train the accounts with. On the off hand that there is an error the user mails the message to themselves and it gets fixed.
So, to summarize:
This idea won't work, you'll get your host marked as an open relay.
This is what I did to kill spam and it does work.
Hmm...that's funny, I could have sworn that MythTV has had this for a while. It's pretty easy, pick up a pcHDTV card for $200 and make sure you've got some significant hard disk space and you should be ready to go.
Reminds me of Microsoft bragging about their future "Implicit Query" technology when dashboard already has it.
As far as Minnesota senators go, I've found that Coleman is a lot more responsive than Dayton. I'd like to think that my constant bugging Coleman about the P2P issue is part of the reason why he finally did something. I still have yet to get any sort of response from Dayton and I've sent him five or six letters now. Coleman usually gets back to me within a week or two. Leaves me pretty satisfied.
Another good trick is to get on their mailing list and find out when they have local office hours, then show up to the office hours. If they don't have local office hours ask them how they normally get direct consituent feedback. I've been to these a few times before, and oddly enough usually the legislator is thankful that it's a young person and not just another old fart complaining about medicare and what not.
The real killer is if you can show up to their office. I moved to Pittsburgh for school and have been able to stop into their DC offices, which seems to be very productive.
It appears that mouse gestures are the type ahead find of the windows world. Let me explain. In the Windows world you're stuck having to use the mouse for everything, where you can use the keyboard it's those damn arrow keys that aren't close to the rest of the keyboard. In the Unix world the mouse was more of an afterthought, you can use it, but it's generally a crutch. Once you become a master of the keyboard things go much faster.
While there are some mouse gestures that are difficult, maybe even impossible, with the keyboard (like open all links I just drug the mouse over), most are easily doable by a few keystrokes. Plus once you learn the keystrokes you never need to take your hands off the home row (ask a VI user how much faster this makes them).
Much of this inefficency is the result of the layout of keboards and mice and the time wasted in switching between them. In this respect the only well designed keyboard that I've used are laptop keyboards with the pointer stick. In such a keyboard, the mouse is just another key (more or less) in the middle and the buttons are easily accessible by the thumbs. This reduces switching time, but you still have delay because of the time to move the mouse that isn't there with keyboard shortcuts. Of course, maybe I'm just bitching because computers are accessible to most everyone now-a-days.
So I've learned to take anything that OSNews writes with a grain of salt, their articles aren't exactly up to any sort of journalistic integrity standards. So that probably biased me from the start.
I've been running Fedora Core 1 on my Thinkpad A31 laptop since last Thursday and I'm quite pleased. There were some hiccups because the upgrade from RH9 crashed hard, mainly because I had two many external RPMS installed (had previously upgraded to gnome 2.4 on RH9). So, after moving some data, I did a fresh install and it appears to work just fine.
Some of the great highlights of the distro:
Sleep on the Thinkpads work. I don't have to do the funky virtual terminal dance after my monitor goes off.
Speedstep stuff is part of the distro. This is also nice to not see my battery get sucked to nothing when I unplug it.
The wireless support is improved. Redhat-config-network works quite well for switching profiles between home and school.
Although it doesn't ship with stuff like MPlayer and a good MP3 player, rpm.livna.org has YUM and APT repositories to fix this no problem.
The revisions to blue curve are quite nice, it gives it a nicer look that isn't so sterile.
Supposed the NPTL backport improves Java app performance. Ecplise seems zippier, but it could be delusion. Actually, most everything seems a bit zippier, probably because the OS is no longer compiled for 386s.
Flash installed without a problem, no idea what Eugenia is complaining about.
Java works just fine in the browser too. Maybe she didn't read any of the documentation that came with her Whizbang GeneroBrowser 0.1rc2 or whatever she uses.
The issue is that Fedora isn't meant to be bleeding edge and she is thinking that it is. If you want bleeding edge use Gentoo. Personally I can deal with a nice middle ground between Debian and Gentoo and Fedora fits that nicely.