Well... if your two primes are p-1 and p+1 you could use them as the primes in the RSA algorithm. I mean, it's not like it's trivial to break a composite number of the form p^2-1.:-)
(For those who don't know applied number theory, when factoring a number you first try the small primes, then assuming two large factors of the form (p-n)(p+n) = p^2-n^2.)
Wrong idea - you don't want to erect artificial partitions between adults. What I consider fairly innocent may shock you, and vice versa, and the "compromise" invariably leaves the "mainstream" stuff incredibly banal while marginalizing even mildly provocative stuff.
I remember a good example of this years ago. Newsweek decided to put an artistic nude on its front cover for a story on the arts, and a lot of people were outraged at it. Meanwhile far more people were shocked at these knuckle-walkers getting worked up over this. It wasn't porn, it wasn't close to porn, and bare nipples have occured in art throughout history. Even the Victorians, who required "shapely" furniture legs to be covered, never suppressed such art. If we need to do this now "to protect the kids," the price is too high.
Yet that's exactly what these laws would do. Can you imagine having to go to an "adult" site to browse a garden shop's web site? You would (if not under this law, then under others) because the concrete cherubs are, gasp, naked!
If we need to protect the children (and by "children" I mean true children) then we should establish a "safe harbor" for them, not attempt to force everyone else into an adult ghetto. Create a TLD.kids for them, and leave the rest alone.
(BTW, I thought that the.kids domain *had* been created a while back, or at least authorized. Am I mistaken? Or is this bill just more grandstanding?)
"I have a formula P(x) that can always churn out primes, give me a number, any number and after the application of my formula, I can guarantee that it will be a prime number."
That's trivial. P(x+1)=1+PI{P(i) for i = 0 to x}, P(0) = 1 or 2, depending on whether you want to list 1 as a prime number. That's been know since antiquity.
What would blow open mathematics would be a non-trivial function to determine all prime numbers, in order, with at most a finite number of known omissions.
I've used formal methods in a few places... much to the indifference of colleagues. I remember one time finding a subtle bug via Z-notation and fixing it, then moving on to another project while several of my former coworkers criticized my code as "unnecessarily complex," etc. A couple years later I happened to overhear a conversation that strongly suggested somebody had "cleaned up" my code, then actually encountered that rare, subtle bug years later and had great difficulty (and pride) in fixing it.
So formal methods are extremely powerful... but I rarely use them now. The problem is that few problems are so well defined that you can use them in a meaningful manner. If you're writing low-level code - something on the level of string libraries or date routines, use them. But as you get closer to real world problems, the formal methods seem more effective at driving home how little you understand about your problem space, not writing solid code.
(As a specific example, I remember getting nailed by the concept of "triangle." We were writing meteorological code, and sometimes "triangles" were planar and sometimes they were triangles on a sphere -- and the problems are *very* different as you move away from small triangles. Some of our code did - many navigation problems can be reduced to triangles with the two endpoints and the North Pole.)
The ISO9660 FS has some pretty strict limits on number of files in a directory (~1024) and length of filenames under Rock Ridge extensions (~30s, I think). If you exceed this, you'll be unable to retrieve those "extra" files - I know after being burned by it in the past.
(Obviously I don't like working in directories with thousands of entries, but some tools will produce them, it's easy to accidently hit numbers like that with mail or news spools, etc.)
As for the RW media, you do realize that they have a limited lifetime, right? Are you validating the discs you write, or going on blind faith?
Dump works by reading the raw data partition. That works great with an unmounted partition, or if you have a very limited OS that does not perform any caching.
But Linux is different - it's now using the cached pages as the primary content, usually flushing them to disk only as the pages are dropped. This is the approach used by most mature OSes, but Linux doesn't yet have an interface for "dump" programs to query the OS for updated but unwritten sectors.
So dump is the worst of all possible things now. Not only will you get incomplete live files, you can get incomplete files even if the users have all terminated but the pages haven't been flushed to disk yet. That's non-deterministic, and there's simply no way for you to perform reliable dumps.
On the practical side, dump is specific to the filesystem. When everyone ran ext2, that wasn't a problem. But now people may have a mixture of ext2, ext3, reiserfs, xfs, jfs, and probably even other formats. Each requires their own dump and restore, and that requires a lot more effort.
A lot of the problems backing up live systems are because of poor coding practices. (The other problem is people attempting to back up things that shouldn't be backed up at the filesystem level. A classic example of this is relational databases - they should usually be dumped and restored with their own tools.)
Specifically, how many programmers routinely get advisory write locks on files they plan to update? How many home-brewed or ad-hoc backup solutions bother to get advisory read locks?
I've written some backup utilities that do the open()/flock()/mmap() dance, and while it's mildly annoying to get a couple error messages per run, I greatly prefer having no file to having a corrupted one in the archive.
That isn't reliable. ISO9660 directories can only have ~1024 entries, any more are dropped on the floor. There are also limitations on the length of a filename with Rock Ridge extensions, possibly 32 characters.
Then there's the other things that don't translate well. Do you deference symbolic links? What about fifos and special devices?
If you want to be safe, you need to either check the directory tree first or put everything into a container without these restrictions. I've been developing some tools for this, but keep flipping back and forth between compressed tar files and zipfiles. The former can be read with standard tools, but requires an explicit index (for performance when seeking single files) and doesn't scale to multiple discs. The latter has an index and supports multiple discs, but isn't widely used in the Unix world.
This is affecting a lot more than just "web designers" who had no skills beyond that covered in "MS Frontpage for Dummies."
My extended circle of friends and I all have solid educations and lots of experience covering pretty much every aspect of IT that you can name, but no potential employer will give us the time of day. It's not a matter of demanding unreasonable salaries either - if we call their bluff and say that we're willing to accept a low salary just to pay the mortgage, we're told that we're out of consideration since the boss is sure that within a month the economic fairies will come around and we'll bolt for a well-paying job at a new startup.
Finally, my connections on "the other side of the fence" have told me that the ridiculous requirements on these lists are there for a reason - the powers that be want to give the appearance of looking for an employee, but they have no intention of actually hiring anyone. The way they hid this is by creating lists that no single person could possibly satisfy, then offering a wage far below what such a mythical person would actually accept.
If somebody actually had all of that experience and was desperate enough to accept the salary, some overlooked requirement would be discovered. E.g., for a while a popular overlooked requirement was that you had to speak fluent Japanese - and have spent several years in that country.
So do you know what's involved in upgrading your kernel?
This isn't a minor change, major kernel updates usually require updated tools. Hopefully the tools will update cleanly, but it's a non-trivial risk.
The same thing applies to upgrading distro versions. I'm hardly a naive user, yet I have been unsuccessful in every attempt to upgrade my Debian potato systems to woody. I've now given up - I just do a clean install of woody.
Re:Theorem
on
World of Ends
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I understood the point to be that there's been a huge disconnect between what people want and companies think they want. Or more often, what they try to convince consumers they want... and which only they can provide.
Filtering contents adds value, right? Nobody really wants those porn sites? In reality, we all know that porn has been the driving force behind many internet protocols - in some cases people had no real options, in other cases they could go to local stores but didn't because of fear the neighbors/boss/whoever would see them and judge them.
Music downloads adds value, right? Except the "solutions" replace an easily scratched plastic disc with an even more fragile piece of DRM-crap. With a CD, I can dub it to a tape so I can listen to it in my car. I can put it onto an MP3 player that I can take to the gym. But the "value-added" downloads can only be played on one system, for only a brief time.
I believe that was their point - that almost everything claimed to "add value" to the internet has actually removed something people actually value. In contrast almost every time the net has been opened up (e.g., AOL becoming a gateway to the internet at large, instead of its own lake) has been considered valuable by the users.
That may be true, but it seems that most of the time I bring up a man page it's that placeholder saying that the developer knows that there's no man page available, but created a link to the placeholder so the package would get out of testing.
Yeah, that helps me a LOT.
YMMV - I've been doing Unix for a long time and don't have to hit the man pages for the usual stuff. But that just makes it that much more of a pain to find the information elsewhere.
As the other MS article points out, they were already planning to change their name with the next generation DRM-enhanced, subscribed-based OS to get out from under the antitrust ruling. That ruling applied to "Microsoft Windows," not any and all Microsoft operating systems.
First it confused "office" and "openoffice" while officially representing Microsoft. Microsoft is fighting attempts to invalidate its use of trademarked generics for its products (e.g., claiming that Lindows is infringing), and MS lawyers will have a far harder time defending this practice if even their own representatives are unable to correctly identify Microsoft products. (And no, trademarks can't apply to every possible phrase containing the words Windows, Office, Word, etc.)
But now we learn it's using Lisa Seaman's domain for commercial purposes, almost certainly without authorization. "nobody.com" is a registered domain, and while she may not have many practical solutions to the dofuses (dofi?) that use her domain personally, an organization using it commercially (they get money for strong-arming people, right?) is a different thing.
But as you cross barriers, be they physical (fences) or symbolic (no trespassing signs) you have a far harder time defending your presence there regardless of your intent.
As the logical extreme for residences, if you're in my bedroom at 2 AM I don't give a damn what your "intent" is - at best you're going to spend the rest of the night in jail for "entry" (which is one step up from trespass). At worst you'll be dead and I'll have the affirmative defense of the local "make my day" law. (I don't have the right to kill you in cold blood, but the onus of burden is shifted onto the prosecution to prove that I could not have been in reasonable fear of my life to discover a stranger in my bedroom at 2AM.)
I haven't read the article to see what signs they have at Los Alamos, but at the nearby missile silos the fence is clearly marked both "no trespassing" and "use of lethal force authorized." You can't cross a sign like that and then claim that the lack of criminal intent means that everything is cool....
My experience is that, as I get older, is that my code has gone from near perfect to so bug-ridden that I'm amazed it ever works.
Have I gone senile? Or just gotten sloppy?
Or is it that I've learned to use assertions and strict compiler checks and the like for any program that I won't immediately delete once I have run it once? (I've seen too many "quickie" programs live for a decade or longer.)
The third possibility is that my code today is a lot more intelligent than the first few years I wrote code. E.g., a few years ago I would never transparently compress my data, but now I use zlib several times a year. But I may only be comfortable writing this type of code after developing those other skills.
My friends and I are often responsible for small sites - our own colocated servers, small businesses, and the like.
What are your technical recommendations for us, to make your life easier?
For instance, I usually argue to require valid FQDNs in the HELO and MAIL FROM command, and reject anything claiming to come from myself or one of the RFC1918 reserved IP addresses. This is entirely content-neutral - I just see no point in accepting any message from somebody who can't be contacted in turn if there's a problem delivering the message.
But I generally don't bother with RBLs, and am philosophically opposed to IP redlining since it could easily lead to a world where a few corporations act as gatekeepers.
I know what impact this has on my sites, but does this cause problems for the large sites? Or does it help you as well?
The point is usually to give advice to kids today, not to find some crazy professor and hit 88mph in his DeLorean. I didn't get much help from adults when I was a kid (and every year appreciate my scout master more and more), but maybe I can offer a bit to some today.
In many ways 12 is too young - the best advice in the world is worthless if you don't have the ability to do anything about it.
But a few years later, I have some advice that I would give to my younger self - and that I'm still trying to follow past 40:
1. it's far better to regret things that you've done than things that you didn't risk. (Okay, maybe this isn't the best advice for a teenager...)
2. your PE teacher is an idiot, but time spent on physical fitness is not wasted. Get to the gym. Lift weights. Run. You'll get back the time spent today in increased productivity for years to come.
A quick generic note - if you just want an encrypted channel, stunnel (or sshd tunnels) are good enough and eliminate a lot of complexity from your setup.
But I've rarely see situations where I want encryption but don't care who the other party is. If you want to make sure that the LDAP master is who it claims to be, you really need to use SSL with mutual authentication (since the server will also want to verify the identify of its clients). You can probably set up stunnel to verify this, but I personally prefer to keep authentication as close as possible to the tools that need it.
No, you never learned that somebody you knew has AIDS. It's almost certain that a least one person you've known has become HIV+, and very possible that at least one has developed AIDS.
Remember, there's no visible marker that somebody is HIV+. Even early stages of AIDS are not obvious to the naked eye, and the wasting is often countered with steroids.
You might be fairly certain about your own immediate family and closest friends, but what about your coworkers? Your old college classmates? Dormmates? The people you recognize at the grocery store, sub shop, barbershop, etc.
The parent asserted that there are health benefits to not sleeping around.
No, he was (implicitly) claiming that the problem is "deviant" sexual behavior that's not permitted by the OT. Not just "no sleeping around," but no sodomy, no homosexuality, etc. Nowhere in the OT did it say that homosexual sex is fine as long as the people involved are monogamous. Nor monogamous fornication outside of marriage.
We know he was refering to the OT, not that "new agey" NT nonsense, since he made a point of noting that the Catholics died but the Jews did not during the Black Plague.
(Whenever I see people praising the morals of the OT, I wonder if they're ready to impregnant their brother's widow. Odon's sin was not masturbation, it was pulling out early in such a situation.)
The Colorado law is not modeled on our highly popular telephone registry. In the latter case, if somebody calls us we can report them to the state and the Attorney General will go after them. I don't know whether we get any renumeration, and frankly I don't care since the intent is to ensure compliance. A call from the AG's office carries a lot of weight with companies, even those suing to overturn the law.
In contrast, the proposed spam law still puts the burden on us to track down the spammers, and for our trouble we'll get the princely sum of $10. Thanks, but no thanks since I already have that right for the 99% of the spam I receive that doesn't have "ADV:" in the headers. Meanwhile the $10 won't come close to compensating me for this asshole passing my address along to everyone he can in retaliation.
What I want to see is the right of the AG's office to go after anyone who violates some common sense rules. $100 fine/message for forged headers. $1000 fine/message if the forged header pointed at a Colorado resident. $1,000 fine/message if the forged message was bounced through an open relay located in this jurisdiction. $1,000 fine/message if a commercial message did not contain a valid "remove me" link, and $2,000 fine/message if the message was not acknowledged and acted upon within a reasonable period. (Say 3 business days.) With stacking fines. One night with a spambot and even a low-level spammer could be facing tens of thousands of counts, and millions of dollars in fines.
That won't stop the Nigerians or the jerks bouncing mail through Korean ISPs, but it should stop the spammeisters who brag to the WSJ then bitch when they get tons of unsolicited physical mail.
You might want to call up the local cable company and ask them what your options are. Just be sure that they agree to keep your identity confidential if the shit hits the fan (and it very well may, if your apartment complex is violating a legally mandated monopoly) - it would be easy (albeit stupid) for your landlord to attempt to retaliate if your legitimate desire for broadband access ended up costing them big bucks in fines.
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Well... if your two primes are p-1 and p+1 you could use them as the primes in the RSA algorithm. I mean, it's not like it's trivial to break a composite number of the form p^2-1. :-)
(For those who don't know applied number theory, when factoring a number you first try the small primes, then assuming two large factors of the form (p-n)(p+n) = p^2-n^2.)
Wrong idea - you don't want to erect artificial partitions between adults. What I consider fairly innocent may shock you, and vice versa, and the "compromise" invariably leaves the "mainstream" stuff incredibly banal while marginalizing even mildly provocative stuff.
.kids for them, and leave the rest alone.
.kids domain *had* been created a while back, or at least authorized. Am I mistaken? Or is this bill just more grandstanding?)
I remember a good example of this years ago. Newsweek decided to put an artistic nude on its front cover for a story on the arts, and a lot of people were outraged at it. Meanwhile far more people were shocked at these knuckle-walkers getting worked up over this. It wasn't porn, it wasn't close to porn, and bare nipples have occured in art throughout history. Even the Victorians, who required "shapely" furniture legs to be covered, never suppressed such art. If we need to do this now "to protect the kids," the price is too high.
Yet that's exactly what these laws would do. Can you imagine having to go to an "adult" site to browse a garden shop's web site? You would (if not under this law, then under others) because the concrete cherubs are, gasp, naked!
If we need to protect the children (and by "children" I mean true children) then we should establish a "safe harbor" for them, not attempt to force everyone else into an adult ghetto. Create a TLD
(BTW, I thought that the
That's trivial. P(x+1)=1+PI{P(i) for i = 0 to x}, P(0) = 1 or 2, depending on whether you want to list 1 as a prime number. That's been know since antiquity.
What would blow open mathematics would be a non-trivial function to determine all prime numbers, in order, with at most a finite number of known omissions.
I've used formal methods in a few places... much to the indifference of colleagues. I remember one time finding a subtle bug via Z-notation and fixing it, then moving on to another project while several of my former coworkers criticized my code as "unnecessarily complex," etc. A couple years later I happened to overhear a conversation that strongly suggested somebody had "cleaned up" my code, then actually encountered that rare, subtle bug years later and had great difficulty (and pride) in fixing it.
So formal methods are extremely powerful... but I rarely use them now. The problem is that few problems are so well defined that you can use them in a meaningful manner. If you're writing low-level code - something on the level of string libraries or date routines, use them. But as you get closer to real world problems, the formal methods seem more effective at driving home how little you understand about your problem space, not writing solid code.
(As a specific example, I remember getting nailed by the concept of "triangle." We were writing meteorological code, and sometimes "triangles" were planar and sometimes they were triangles on a sphere -- and the problems are *very* different as you move away from small triangles. Some of our code did - many navigation problems can be reduced to triangles with the two endpoints and the North Pole.)
Never underestimate the value of beaning somebody over the head. That's actually one of the values of the large maglights - it can be used as clubs.
Even if you're an armed guard, you want something for close-in self-defense. A knife can beat a gun if the attacker is within 25 feet or so.
The ISO9660 FS has some pretty strict limits on number of files in a directory (~1024) and length of filenames under Rock Ridge extensions (~30s, I think). If you exceed this, you'll be unable to retrieve those "extra" files - I know after being burned by it in the past.
(Obviously I don't like working in directories with thousands of entries, but some tools will produce them, it's easy to accidently hit numbers like that with mail or news spools, etc.)
As for the RW media, you do realize that they have a limited lifetime, right? Are you validating the discs you write, or going on blind faith?
Have you even read Linus's comments?
Dump works by reading the raw data partition. That works great with an unmounted partition, or if you have a very limited OS that does not perform any caching.
But Linux is different - it's now using the cached pages as the primary content, usually flushing them to disk only as the pages are dropped. This is the approach used by most mature OSes, but Linux doesn't yet have an interface for "dump" programs to query the OS for updated but unwritten sectors.
So dump is the worst of all possible things now. Not only will you get incomplete live files, you can get incomplete files even if the users have all terminated but the pages haven't been flushed to disk yet. That's non-deterministic, and there's simply no way for you to perform reliable dumps.
On the practical side, dump is specific to the filesystem. When everyone ran ext2, that wasn't a problem. But now people may have a mixture of ext2, ext3, reiserfs, xfs, jfs, and probably even other formats. Each requires their own dump and restore, and that requires a lot more effort.
A lot of the problems backing up live systems are because of poor coding practices. (The other problem is people attempting to back up things that shouldn't be backed up at the filesystem level. A classic example of this is relational databases - they should usually be dumped and restored with their own tools.)
Specifically, how many programmers routinely get advisory write locks on files they plan to update? How many home-brewed or ad-hoc backup solutions bother to get advisory read locks?
I've written some backup utilities that do the open()/flock()/mmap() dance, and while it's mildly annoying to get a couple error messages per run, I greatly prefer having no file to having a corrupted one in the archive.
That isn't reliable. ISO9660 directories can only have ~1024 entries, any more are dropped on the floor. There are also limitations on the length of a filename with Rock Ridge extensions, possibly 32 characters.
Then there's the other things that don't translate well. Do you deference symbolic links? What about fifos and special devices?
If you want to be safe, you need to either check the directory tree first or put everything into a container without these restrictions. I've been developing some tools for this, but keep flipping back and forth between compressed tar files and zipfiles. The former can be read with standard tools, but requires an explicit index (for performance when seeking single files) and doesn't scale to multiple discs. The latter has an index and supports multiple discs, but isn't widely used in the Unix world.
This is affecting a lot more than just "web designers" who had no skills beyond that covered in "MS Frontpage for Dummies."
My extended circle of friends and I all have solid educations and lots of experience covering pretty much every aspect of IT that you can name, but no potential employer will give us the time of day. It's not a matter of demanding unreasonable salaries either - if we call their bluff and say that we're willing to accept a low salary just to pay the mortgage, we're told that we're out of consideration since the boss is sure that within a month the economic fairies will come around and we'll bolt for a well-paying job at a new startup.
Finally, my connections on "the other side of the fence" have told me that the ridiculous requirements on these lists are there for a reason - the powers that be want to give the appearance of looking for an employee, but they have no intention of actually hiring anyone. The way they hid this is by creating lists that no single person could possibly satisfy, then offering a wage far below what such a mythical person would actually accept.
If somebody actually had all of that experience and was desperate enough to accept the salary, some overlooked requirement would be discovered. E.g., for a while a popular overlooked requirement was that you had to speak fluent Japanese - and have spent several years in that country.
So do you know what's involved in upgrading your kernel?
This isn't a minor change, major kernel updates usually require updated tools. Hopefully the tools will update cleanly, but it's a non-trivial risk.
The same thing applies to upgrading distro versions. I'm hardly a naive user, yet I have been unsuccessful in every attempt to upgrade my Debian potato systems to woody. I've now given up - I just do a clean install of woody.
I understood the point to be that there's been a huge disconnect between what people want and companies think they want. Or more often, what they try to convince consumers they want... and which only they can provide.
Filtering contents adds value, right? Nobody really wants those porn sites? In reality, we all know that porn has been the driving force behind many internet protocols - in some cases people had no real options, in other cases they could go to local stores but didn't because of fear the neighbors/boss/whoever would see them and judge them.
Music downloads adds value, right? Except the "solutions" replace an easily scratched plastic disc with an even more fragile piece of DRM-crap. With a CD, I can dub it to a tape so I can listen to it in my car. I can put it onto an MP3 player that I can take to the gym. But the "value-added" downloads can only be played on one system, for only a brief time.
I believe that was their point - that almost everything claimed to "add value" to the internet has actually removed something people actually value. In contrast almost every time the net has been opened up (e.g., AOL becoming a gateway to the internet at large, instead of its own lake) has been considered valuable by the users.
That may be true, but it seems that most of the time I bring up a man page it's that placeholder saying that the developer knows that there's no man page available, but created a link to the placeholder so the package would get out of testing.
Yeah, that helps me a LOT.
YMMV - I've been doing Unix for a long time and don't have to hit the man pages for the usual stuff. But that just makes it that much more of a pain to find the information elsewhere.
As the other MS article points out, they were already planning to change their name with the next generation DRM-enhanced, subscribed-based OS to get out from under the antitrust ruling. That ruling applied to "Microsoft Windows," not any and all Microsoft operating systems.
You still come out ahead because of the improved quality of life from the regular exercise.
The BSA really f*cked up on this one.
First it confused "office" and "openoffice" while officially representing Microsoft. Microsoft is fighting attempts to invalidate its use of trademarked generics for its products (e.g., claiming that Lindows is infringing), and MS lawyers will have a far harder time defending this practice if even their own representatives are unable to correctly identify Microsoft products. (And no, trademarks can't apply to every possible phrase containing the words Windows, Office, Word, etc.)
But now we learn it's using Lisa Seaman's domain for commercial purposes, almost certainly without authorization. "nobody.com" is a registered domain, and while she may not have many practical solutions to the dofuses (dofi?) that use her domain personally, an organization using it commercially (they get money for strong-arming people, right?) is a different thing.
Wrong.
You can walk across somebody's unfenced lawn.
But as you cross barriers, be they physical (fences) or symbolic (no trespassing signs) you have a far harder time defending your presence there regardless of your intent.
As the logical extreme for residences, if you're in my bedroom at 2 AM I don't give a damn what your "intent" is - at best you're going to spend the rest of the night in jail for "entry" (which is one step up from trespass). At worst you'll be dead and I'll have the affirmative defense of the local "make my day" law. (I don't have the right to kill you in cold blood, but the onus of burden is shifted onto the prosecution to prove that I could not have been in reasonable fear of my life to discover a stranger in my bedroom at 2AM.)
I haven't read the article to see what signs they have at Los Alamos, but at the nearby missile silos the fence is clearly marked both "no trespassing" and "use of lethal force authorized." You can't cross a sign like that and then claim that the lack of criminal intent means that everything is cool....
My experience is that, as I get older, is that my code has gone from near perfect to so bug-ridden that I'm amazed it ever works.
Have I gone senile? Or just gotten sloppy?
Or is it that I've learned to use assertions and strict compiler checks and the like for any program that I won't immediately delete once I have run it once? (I've seen too many "quickie" programs live for a decade or longer.)
The third possibility is that my code today is a lot more intelligent than the first few years I wrote code. E.g., a few years ago I would never transparently compress my data, but now I use zlib several times a year. But I may only be comfortable writing this type of code after developing those other skills.
My friends and I are often responsible for small sites - our own colocated servers, small businesses, and the like.
What are your technical recommendations for us, to make your life easier?
For instance, I usually argue to require valid FQDNs in the HELO and MAIL FROM command, and reject anything claiming to come from myself or one of the RFC1918 reserved IP addresses. This is entirely content-neutral - I just see no point in accepting any message from somebody who can't be contacted in turn if there's a problem delivering the message.
But I generally don't bother with RBLs, and am philosophically opposed to IP redlining since it could easily lead to a world where a few corporations act as gatekeepers.
I know what impact this has on my sites, but does this cause problems for the large sites? Or does it help you as well?
The point is usually to give advice to kids today, not to find some crazy professor and hit 88mph in his DeLorean. I didn't get much help from adults when I was a kid (and every year appreciate my scout master more and more), but maybe I can offer a bit to some today.
In many ways 12 is too young - the best advice in the world is worthless if you don't have the ability to do anything about it.
But a few years later, I have some advice that I would give to my younger self - and that I'm still trying to follow past 40:
1. it's far better to regret things that you've done than things that you didn't risk. (Okay, maybe this isn't the best advice for a teenager...)
2. your PE teacher is an idiot, but time spent on physical fitness is not wasted. Get to the gym. Lift weights. Run. You'll get back the time spent today in increased productivity for years to come.
A quick generic note - if you just want an encrypted channel, stunnel (or sshd tunnels) are good enough and eliminate a lot of complexity from your setup.
But I've rarely see situations where I want encryption but don't care who the other party is. If you want to make sure that the LDAP master is who it claims to be, you really need to use SSL with mutual authentication (since the server will also want to verify the identify of its clients). You can probably set up stunnel to verify this, but I personally prefer to keep authentication as close as possible to the tools that need it.
No, you never learned that somebody you knew has AIDS. It's almost certain that a least one person you've known has become HIV+, and very possible that at least one has developed AIDS.
Remember, there's no visible marker that somebody is HIV+. Even early stages of AIDS are not obvious to the naked eye, and the wasting is often countered with steroids.
You might be fairly certain about your own immediate family and closest friends, but what about your coworkers? Your old college classmates? Dormmates? The people you recognize at the grocery store, sub shop, barbershop, etc.
No, he was (implicitly) claiming that the problem is "deviant" sexual behavior that's not permitted by the OT. Not just "no sleeping around," but no sodomy, no homosexuality, etc. Nowhere in the OT did it say that homosexual sex is fine as long as the people involved are monogamous. Nor monogamous fornication outside of marriage.We know he was refering to the OT, not that "new agey" NT nonsense, since he made a point of noting that the Catholics died but the Jews did not during the Black Plague.
(Whenever I see people praising the morals of the OT, I wonder if they're ready to impregnant their brother's widow. Odon's sin was not masturbation, it was pulling out early in such a situation.)
The Colorado law is not modeled on our highly popular telephone registry. In the latter case, if somebody calls us we can report them to the state and the Attorney General will go after them. I don't know whether we get any renumeration, and frankly I don't care since the intent is to ensure compliance. A call from the AG's office carries a lot of weight with companies, even those suing to overturn the law.
In contrast, the proposed spam law still puts the burden on us to track down the spammers, and for our trouble we'll get the princely sum of $10. Thanks, but no thanks since I already have that right for the 99% of the spam I receive that doesn't have "ADV:" in the headers. Meanwhile the $10 won't come close to compensating me for this asshole passing my address along to everyone he can in retaliation.
What I want to see is the right of the AG's office to go after anyone who violates some common sense rules. $100 fine/message for forged headers. $1000 fine/message if the forged header pointed at a Colorado resident. $1,000 fine/message if the forged message was bounced through an open relay located in this jurisdiction. $1,000 fine/message if a commercial message did not contain a valid "remove me" link, and $2,000 fine/message if the message was not acknowledged and acted upon within a reasonable period. (Say 3 business days.) With stacking fines. One night with a spambot and even a low-level spammer could be facing tens of thousands of counts, and millions of dollars in fines.
That won't stop the Nigerians or the jerks bouncing mail through Korean ISPs, but it should stop the spammeisters who brag to the WSJ then bitch when they get tons of unsolicited physical mail.
Is that lease enforceable?
You might want to call up the local cable company and ask them what your options are. Just be sure that they agree to keep your identity confidential if the shit hits the fan (and it very well may, if your apartment complex is violating a legally mandated monopoly) - it would be easy (albeit stupid) for your landlord to attempt to retaliate if your legitimate desire for broadband access ended up costing them big bucks in fines.