At the time I had only one machine (Linux) and didn't bother to firewall it. This was back quite a while ago, before people were so agressively scanning the entire Internet for exploitable stuff. Later on, I built out a 486 from parts, and used that for my firewall. After that, they couldn't even ping me.:)
They had started portscanning all the machines on their networks. If they had *ASKED* me to stop, that would have been one thing. My warning was the fact that I came home one day to find that I had no service.
At the time, rather than wait for 5 to 10 seconds per resolution, it was easier for me to fire up named, and change resolve.conf to 127.0.0.1 . It worked really well, but broke some things. They only gave out the IP's for their SMTP and news servers to clients using their DNS servers, which didn't bother me a lot, I didn't use either one of those. They were pathetically slow too.
RoadRunner in Tampa, Fla was funny. You could tell every time they changed network admins. The service would go to crap for a month, and then eventually come back to something resembling acceptable. I didn't know this til I was talking to one of the techs at Level3's colo in Tampa, who delt with them directly. He started telling me every time they changed admins. They had a fairly high turnover rate, at least back then.
Just put these dickhead spammers in jail for 5-10 years for causing so much disruption and cost to the world.
You know that'll never happen.
All things considered, spam isn't the only problem out there. The ratio of junk to legitimate mail is about the same in my postal mailbox. I may get one letter or bill in, and the rest is junk.. Why aren't people screaming "We need to make laws.." "they need to be in jail.." etc, etc.. That won't happen because the post office turns a profit on it.
Most US bandwidth providers do a pretty decent job of trying to stop spam. Most have pretty strict standards, and will shut off a line for spam. I've been in on several of those actions, although not against me or my networks. It would be nice if all providers did that, but again, it probably won't happen. Many overseas companies make good money selling overpriced bandwidth to spammers. Think of it in business terms. If you're a [insert country here] provider, you can charge double or more for hosting and bandwidth to a spammer. You don't really have to answer to anyone but yourself, why not take the sale? Big spammers can use up some pretty substantial bandwidth, so it's worth it for them to sell to this customer. If I have the choice of barely paying my bills, or buying a new house and cars this year, I think the choice is obvious.
One of the magic questions is, who do you go after? Just a couple days ago, a site hosted on a network belonging to a friend of mine was the "source" of spam. I know they didn't do it, it had absolutely no relationship to them or what they did. So I got on the machines, and found the source. They had a feedback program that was fairly well written, but someone exploited a bug in it, to send out to a few thousand people before I stopped it. Should they throw this perfectly legitimate businessman in jail because someone managed to exploit something. I had to look at it a few times to figure out how they exploited it, the script was fairly well written.
Since plenty of the spam relates back to overseas sources, you'll never see them spending time in a US jail. Simply enough, you'd never see every government in the world agreeing on enforcement of any law, even an anti-spam law. In a lot of countries, it's rather difficult to even report the spam. What happens when you're trying to report it, and the support people don't speak English. And don't be so egotistical to say "they should all speak English", the universe or even the Internet doesn't revolve around America.
They've been blocking virtually anyone sending lots of mail towards them. You have to sign up for their feedback loop, then for their whitelist. In our case, we send a lot of mail to users, because they write to us asking questions. There's plenty of mail going back and forth, but none of it is spam. Most are written by humans, some are automated (You just completed this function, your tracking number is....). They've been doing hit and miss blocking just because they can. It's really annoying. They blocked my workstation because I sent out 4 messages to AOL users in the same day. {sigh}. For my workstation, it's not a big thing, I just changed the IP. But, it's more of a pain for servers.
It doesn't make a lot of sense. I've known spammers. They'll get multiple lines from multiple providers, and keep switching IP's and networks to keep from being blocked. It's all a big act just to make it look like they're being all progressive, even though they're really just annoying legitimate people. Kinda like the TSA.
One of our clients, with his own server and a completely opt in mailing list (like, you specifically have to ask to be on the list) was blocked. He spent hours on the phone with AOL, and got me in on a conference call with them. The support people I spoke with were completely dense. We gave up on any political approach, and just moved his mail server off to another network. He only has about 2000 people who receive his newsletter, and the people not getting it on AOL were actually complaining that they weren't getting them.
Hopefully Comcast will be more professional about it. I know Roadrunner (now Bright House Networks) were absolute dicks about it. They once disconnected my service because I had a DNS server running. I tried to explain to them that their DNS servers sucked (about 5 to 10 seconds to resolve any name). Instead of fixing their problem, they were busy blocking users. {sigh}
thttpd does do CGI's (Perl of course is included there). There was a way to make PHP work with it. Last time I read the documentation, it was anything but optimal.
We use thttpd on quite a few of our static servers, and I have to say it's absolutely fabulous. Instead of thousands of tasks that Apache 1.3.x would run, it has just one. Well, we start up a few sessions, and found a dual 1.4Ghz machine with 1Gb RAM has absolutely no trouble sending out 150Mb/s through teql bound NIC's. That's 150Mb/s of small files (HTML and images), not 150Mb/s of mp3's or videos. We tried Apache 2.0.x also, for it's single-threaded mode, something would mess up and make Apache hang after a few days and refuse to restart without rebooting the entire machine. That's not really acceptable in a high-load production environment.
It's kinda nice to hop on those machines, and see just a couple dozen tasks running and the machine being pretty much idle. That, and our uptime is usually outragous.
This is from a machine pushing out 40Mb/s right now. The loadavg is a little higher than normal, because I was running top.:)
# cat/proc/loadavg 0.19 0.14 0.06 1/28 25770
This is from the logs for one process. Obviously, we've overrun it's byte counter.:)
Jun 12 03:14:13 voy06 thttpd[17430]: up 54000 seconds, stats for 3600 seconds: Jun 12 03:14:13 voy06 thttpd[17430]: thttpd - 264517 connections (73.4769/sec), 307 max simultaneous, -712678350 bytes (-197966/sec), 475 http d_conns allocated Jun 12 03:14:13 host thttpd[17430]: libhttpd - 6183 strings allocated, 3068596 bytes (496.296 bytes/str) Jun 12 03:14:13 host thttpd[17430]: map cache - 2283 allocated, 2183 active (70290217 bytes), 100 free; hash size: 65536; expire age: 60 Jun 12 03:14:13 host thttpd[17430]: fdwatch - 1573422 polls (437.062/sec) Jun 12 03:14:13 host thttpd[17430]: timers - 237 allocated, 237 active, 0 free
But I do love Apache for it's power. You can do anything with it. We use it on about half of our web servers.
We don't restrict ourselves to saying "We're an [anything] only shop." We'll use what works best for the application.
I have to agree. There are too many variables that could have been wrong.
Did he have a weak signal? Was he 300 feet from the AP or 2 feet? Did he have poor signal quality? Maybe he was standing by a wall where someone was running a microwave in the next room. We found a brand new radio in one office was interfering with our 2.4Ghz telephones. It was putting off a *LOT* of noise, even when it was turned "off" but plugged in. There's one room in my house, even though it shows 90% link quality, 802.11b devices suffer performance problems. Every other room is fine.
Maybe it was the throughput of his Internet connection. Was he sharing bandwidth on a 56K dialup, or a poor quality provider? Maybe there was any number of problems between point A and point B. Maybe it was simply the device(s) he was using were faulty. Nah, no one gets bad hardware.
Saying VoIP over WiFi is dead is like saying the Internet is dead because you're on a noisy line and it takes 5 minutes to view a single web page. By this judgement, television is dead, because as a kid I saw more snow on the screen than picture. Was it television technology at fault? No, it's because I was 100 miles from the nearest broadcast tower.
But hey, people declare perfectly viable projects dead all the time. *BSD is dead, right?:) I'd be more willing to declare Amiga dead, but there's hardcore Amiga lovers still using it who may argue with me.
You'll never hear a merchant say "Our cost is $5, so sell it at $5. Sell everything at cost!"
What you will see is the merchant looking at the cost ($5), considering how many units he sells (1000) per period (month), what his overhead is ($5000), and then saying "Sell it at $14.95!"
Wait. $14.95? Sure. Prices always end in.95 or.99 to misdirect the consumer. Ah, it's a $14 product. Oh no, it was 5 cents short of a $15 product.
So now, he's covered the cost of the item ($5,000), the cost of his overhead ($5,000), and made himself a nice little profit ($4,950), which he can tuck away in the "Mr. Merchant Going To Hawaii Fund"
Greedy swine make so much of a profit that they have $40 billion in the vault under their office.
Most merchants don't have the balls to rape customers like that, and flaunt it. Good merchants will see that they've turned a really good profit, and lower their profit margins a little to make sure they undercut the other companies. Oh wait, said merchant has no competition, they've all been bought or pushed out of business.
Most merchants just buy a nice car, and live in a nice house, and are happy to take their wife, mistress, or whoever on trips every week or so.:)
Sorry honey, no European vacation today, I'm still not one of those "Most merchants". Maybe next year.
Why do I use Linux? Because I like it. It does everything I want, and everything I need, and doesn't give me headaches. Because there's plenty of people writing neat stuff for it, that I can get free, or at a reasonable price. Because I have plenty of choices of distros, and I can download and install them til my heart's content.
Why not Windows? Because I don't want to pay whatever market value is on Windows. Because I don't want to pay again in a year or two, just to keep up to date. Because I don't like doing daily updates. Because I don't like the way it freezes because it wants to. Because sometimes I do things that take days to do , and I don't want the constant feeling that I need to save my work because something might break. Because I don't like rebooting daily because "that's the way it is". Because I don't like the constant war of spyware, adware, and viruses on my desktop. Because I spend more time maintaining a dozen Windows workstations for other people than I do maintaining my workstations and 100+ servers.
Why not *BSD? Because I never really got into *BSD. How's that for an argument?:) If I had started playing more with *BSD first, I'd probably be using it now. I used BSDi a long time ago, but they want (or wanted) a lot of money, that I'm not willing to let go of.
Why not Solaris? Because it just rubs me the wrong way. But again, if I didn't have Linux or *BSD, I'd probably use it.
And all the other choices? Because I haven't used them enough. People love their choice of distro, either because they're blind and someone told them "Oh, you have to use this", or because they have used it and really like it. There's some I did and didn't like. I kinda like Irix, but it was slow compared to a comparable speed Linux box. That was years ago, who knows, it could be better now.
I agree. I could definately see Clear Channel spend millions (billions?) buying the property, which shouldn't really be sold in the first place. Why should a company now get something that should be open to everyone, and have the rights to it indefinately? It would be like selling the rights to speech? It's sound waves, at a lower frequency. But hey, this is the world we live in (for now), anything can be bought and sold. Even the land you're sitting on is owned by someone. It was there for millions of years, til some genius said "This is mine", and then made it available for sale. Why? Because they could, or more importantly because they were allowed to. There are *HUGE* tracts of land that are "owned" and undeveloped, that I'm sure plenty of people wouldn't mind moving to. Why? Because someone got a sweet deal years ago, and isn't willing to share. In many areas, that keeps the commodity of land at a high value.
Until the Europeans invaded North America, the concept of land ownership was unknown. Now ask the Native Americans what they think of land ownership.
There was another story about a vendor who was using two channels to double the throughput, but ended up interfering with other near by 802.11b/g networks, due to poor restraints on their frequencies. I can't seem to find that one, it was a couple months ago.
They're suggesting frequencies be sold like property. If you're broadcasting between 54Mhz and 216Mhz, and I own that property in the area (VHF TV channels 2-13), I'll sue you, and I'll get a restraining order to get your equipment unplugged or seized.
For the owner of those frequencies, it's a valuable asset. It'd be like owning property on Wall Street, and opening a peep show theater. I could make a whole lot more money selling the space as executive office space.
I don't agree with the idea of abolishing the FCC, but I do feel that they need to be reorganized.
I'd like to buy a 100W transmitter, and do a mix of talk and local group/band/dj music. It's not going to happen though, the FCC is getting too much for their licensing. I'm sure the ASCAP, BMI, etc, etc, would want a substantial cut of my profits too.
In the case of the boob flash at the Superbowl, the sponsors pulling their money hurt them more than the FCC throwing fines around. The sponsors control what gets broadcast way more than the FCC does.
Consider what gets more viewers, Friends, or a local talk show about county government? People are going to watch Friends, rather than hear about zoning changes in the ghetto. The sponsors throw their money to where the viewers are, and broadcasters are going to try to put up more content that is favorable to making more money. More housewives want to watch soaps than sci-fi horror movies. If more people were watching higher channels with their movie reruns during the day, you'd see more movies showing up in the lower channels during the day. Thank you Nielsen.
Even the cable industry knows when to cash in. Sure there's a bit of soft-core porn on at night, but it's available 24/7 on PPV channels, where they can make a real buck.
If getting a 80MW transmitter and broadcasting whatever you want gets you off, do it. You can buy transmitters online from overseas vendors. Right now you worry about the FCC. Without the FCC, you worry about the owners of those frequencies suing the pants off you. I'd worry more about 83 lawsuits, than I would about 1 FCC fine. Don't forget to make sure that porn you're transmitting is licensed for distribution purposes, or you'll be sued by all those porn companies too.
So, when you pay for "unlimited internet connections", does that mean you can have 40 modems dialed up at the same time, at full throughput?
Unlimited makes it a lot easier for accounting. You charge a flat rate, no modifications. But thanks to people abusing the systems, they have to make it more complicated.
The cablemodem I used to have was exactly one of these cases. When it was first available in my area, it was "unlimited". You could use the max throughput of the modem, which was about 3Mb/s. They were working on getting new modems which would have 10Mb/s throughput. Users would love this. Their downloads would go very quickly. The cumulative utilization would still be fairly low, because how many users really use the full speed of their line all the time.
Abusers got smart. "I'll put a web server up, and make all my MP3's available." Boom, full utilization of the line. Sure, it said no servers on the residential lines, but no one cared. So the provider blocked port 80.
The abusers got smarter. "I'll put my web server up on some other port." Boom, utilization went up again.
Was this normal usage? no. Was it forbidden by the TOS? Yes.
Because people would use virtually any port they wanted, the problem continued.
The provider started scanning the network for any machine on any port with a web server. That became an unrealistic task.
Now look at your cablemodem's throughput. It's low. With two different providers, in two different cities, I had 768K down, 128K up, and if I peaked at 128K up (like, sending a large file from home to work), the 768K down suddenly was locked at 128K for the rest of the day. Why? Obviously not to stop the average user from sending large files occasionally, it was because of people trying to max out their line all the time.
I *REALLY* liked having 3Mb/s down and up. It was very useful for me to get the occasional file to or from my office. It was nice being able to download a full kernel source in just a few minutes.
Where I work, we do free hosting, with a few conditions. There are enough sites hosted with us, that we can't check every site every day. (50k, last time I looked). Still almost daily, we get some winner that knows this, uploads a bunch of large files (porn video, warez, whatever), and when they link it from where ever, that server will peak up to 100Mb/s. Is it unlimited? No, it's 100Mb/s. Are they following the TOS? No. What do we do? Cancel their account, and delete their content.
They could put it in their TOS to not send more than 1k messages per month, but of course they are a bit greedy. Bill them for the overage. Get that few extra bucks before they cancel.
Most companies don't have a limit for how many Emails you can send while you work there. It isn't written down "You can only send x emails per month". If sending Emails is part of your job, you're expected to send lots of mail. Now take the addresses of every user that you communicate with, and send them an hourly newsletters, and you'll get fired. You knew better. There was no need to have in your contract "You will not send more than x emails to customers." But after they fire you, they'll quite likely write it into the company policy.
Abusing something, just because they didn't put in a "don't abuse this" clause, isn't justification to abuse it.
The office building I'm in doesn't have a policy that says I can't ride the elevator up and down all day, stopping on every floor. Try it sometime, you'll make all kinds of new friends.
If they do instate such a policy, and someone tries to make a point that it's wrong by getting all his friends to ride the elevators all day for the rest of the month, stopping at every floor, they'll probably get their asses kicked.
It's people like you that there are entire libraries of law books, and rules dictating policy everywhere. Thanks.
And by the way, no farting in the elevators either.
So lets see. The provider recognizes that people are abusing the system. The guy sends thousands of pages to his friends to prove people are abusing the system, and he makes the news as being the good guy because telco's are evil??
If someone started sending *ME* thousands of messages per month, I'd get a bit irate. I suppose his friends aren't exactly happy with a month of their phone beeping at them constantly. I get a bit pissed at just our server pages (sent to my phone), and those don't count up anywhere near thousands per month.
Just on one machine. It's a Win98 print server. If for whatever reason it falls off the network and I can't VNC into it, I plug in a keyboard and monitor. Just plugging in a mouse doesn't work til you reboot. So I navigate Windows with no mouse. It feels wierd, being a Unix guy even working on a Windows machine, but I get real funny looks doing it without a mouse.:)
It's anything but an excuse for Microsoft to define a couple extra keys, so they'll get their logo on every new keyboard.
Well, I don't really have a porn collection. Funny considering what my main job is.:)
It's really ironic where I work. I was never very big into porn. But computers and cars, oh ya...:)
I wish I had a whole bunch of money to spend somewhere. I had a great idea a while back. I want to open a speed shop (like, car parts), and build a 1/4 mile drag track and a street racing track next to it. That way, people could performance test their cars after we install parts, and we could have weekly races. Every time someone loses a race, they always want more go-fast parts.:) It could make a killing. Unfortunately, knowing what property values are here, I'd never be able to afford it. Maybe after I move.:) I still have to get beyond the mental block of "I've been at this job x years, why should I quit? What if I don't last 6 months at the new job?"
But how many do you need? If you don't have anything accessable, you don't really need them. The largest target would have to be SSH, which lots of people have sshd running.
You're absolutely right. I have a friend who was completely anal about a lot of things. His car was his favorite toy. He's 30-something now, and has started becoming more lax. He hasn't been rotating his tires, or even taking a good look at them. He was occasionally glancing at the outside edge, seeing the tread looked ok, and assumed all was fine.
A couple weeks ago, on a wet road, he slid off the road, and his car ended up in a lake. Why? Because his alignment was a little bit off, and the majority of his tires were bald. Well, all except the outside edge, which appeard to have tread. He had a very nice car. Now it's a very nice decoration at a junk yard. He's fine. He just got wet, swimming out of the lake. He found out about the tires when they loaded the car on the tow truck, and he noticed the tires.
As far as cars go, I don't go by milage, but that's because I'm very technical, and look for the indicators which say something needs to be done. That may mean I rotate my tires at 10,000 miles, or I change my oil at 2000 miles, or 6000 miles. But non-technical drivers, who don't even check their oil, think that 3000 miles means "3,000 miles, or when I feel like it in a couple months". I changed the oil in a car once that came out as sludge. I flushed light-weight oil through that engine about 3 times before it came out like liquid.
But I'm far from perfect too. My last annual physical was 5 years ago. I don't have the current firmware on all my hardware. I have no idea if my toaster, microwave, or tv have been recalled. It usually takes me a week or two to get around to fix the time on the clocks when time changes happen.
Have you checked for recalls on your car, toaster, or microwave oven?
If your toaster had a recall on it, and for whatever reason caught fire in the middle of the night and burnt your house down, you'd be suing the manufacturer. Well, if you didn't, your insurance company would. They don't like giving away money, they like to get it back from somewhere else.
What's different in a product which simply exists in a larger product? Would you be checking for recalls on the radio in your car? Probably not.
People are generally greedy. Most of the people I knew that tried to get their tires replaced under the Firestone recall did it not for safety, but because their tires were pretty much worn out, and they wanted new tires for free. People with good condition tires, even though they had seen all the press on the recall, didn't bother with it. Why? "It won't happen to me."
It's just like unprotected sex. Everyone knows of the dangers of unprotected sex, but they believe, "It won't happen to me." Well, not til the day they go to the doctor and find out they have a STD, or worse, a potentially fatal STD.
I heard about one guy who kept baby wipes in his bathroom. He'd wipe himself off after sex, believing it was a "better" solution. It's the same as people who believe they've protected themselves from computer problems by not opening emails with attachments. Sure, it stops some, but not all.
"I don't have to worry about Sasser, there are so many computers on the Internet, it'll never find me."
If Microsoft made the security patches part of a cool new free "gotta have it" product, there's a pretty good chance, a larger segment of the users would get it immediately. As it is now, most users have Windows that is at the same patch state as when they took it out of the box.
Users won't go for changing away from Windows. They've been told for too long that they need Windows. It's sad.
In my office environment, when I go around cleaning up machines from various problems, I say "You know, Linux doesn't have these problems." I even set up a Linux machine where anyone can sit down and try it. The guest password is written on a piece of paper stuck to the monitor. One person so far has used it. I made it virtually idiot-proof. Evolution, Firebird, and GAIM are in the bar at the top of the screen, so all they have to do is click. Still, they're scared.
The only person who I've successfully got to use Linux was a computer illiterate 13 year old girl. She wanted to "get online" to check her Email and chat on some web based chat. So I pointed her to my computer. *MINE*, a Linux guru machine. It's anything but a default install. It was already logged in, and in X. I didn't tell her anything. By the time I looked over to see how far she'd gotten, she already had windows open to Yahoo mail, Hotmail, and some chat (AOL chat, I think). She played on there for hours.
It's not rocket science, people just need to start understanding that they're in danger with Windows, and much less danger with *nix. Sure, boxes can be exploited, but the odds of that are very slim if there's nothing running as a server. I don't find mystery ports open on my Linux machines, which I have to hopelessly try to track down. Windows users are non-technical, they don't even know how to scan for open ports. They shouldn't really even need to. But as long as they believe they *NEED* windows to be able to function in an office environment, they'll use it at work and home.
My girlfriend has WinXP, for the simple reason she has one game that doesn't work under any Windows emulators on any other OS. I tried an experement on there. I installed Firefox on the WinXP machine, and told them to only use that. They wouldn't. They "needed" MSIE to be able to browse sites. A few weeks later, I took every MSIE icon off the desktop and Start menu, and put Firefox in it's place. Both the girlfriend, and her kid (now 14) started using Firefox with no complaints.
It's not technology we should be trying to push, but using psychology to help them understand that they don't "need" windows any more.
It's because all the other things pop up prompts when the user thinks they want to continue. The little box coming up saying there are patches to do, and the users knowing they are busy doing something else right now, don't want to dedicate several minutes or more (assuming modem users) downloading patches they don't understand, and then have to reboot. Users don't understand patching things. They just know that their computer works, so why do they have to patch. Saying there's some mystery evil out to get them doesn't cut it.
Just yesterday, I was having a problem with a users WinXP machine. We were switching IP's from one connection to another in an office. After changing the IP, the machine wasn't allowed to browse anywhere due to their firewall software not recognizing the network change. I needed to reboot it, so I asked, "Do you mind if I reboot, you can't get on the Internet right now." They didn't want me to. So then I explained again "You can't get on the Internet until I reboot." It took saying it a few times for it to sink in.
Users don't understand security. Look at the passwords they set. They've been required to set passwords on virtually everything web based for years, and they're still using simple words. Stop by any network with more than a couple machines, and you'll find file shares with no protection at all.
Click-through boxes are a part of life now, the users do it habitually. Anything more than two words long, they don't read. I could put up a box saying "Clicking yes will install a virus, wipe out your computer, and transfer all your money to me.", and users would still click it.
Hmmm, maybe I'll try that sometime today with a sample group. Users are stupid. I'd be willing to bet I'd get over 50% clicks of "yes", and only a few people would ask about it.
It's at dreamhost.com? Damn, I didn't even traceroute it. I know their equipment! Small world. Ya, they have plenty of bandwidth, and their servers are pretty good. It's probably maxing out the connectivity for that one machine (or cluster, I don't know their stuff that well).
For anyone interested, they do have a really sweet setup. I've talked to their techs a few times, who gave me the tour.
Re:Why not just record straight to the hard disk?
on
LA to Oregon at Mach 9
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· Score: 1
I used webcam32 for my trip (Tampa Florida, to Los Angeles), recording one frame/sec to the hard drive, then I put the whole thing back together into a video clip after I arrived. I used webcam32 to send the frames up to a web server, as long as my cell modem had connectivity. I had connectivity through most of the South East US, but it was very poor through the South West, where there isn't much more than dirt to keep you company.:)
For those that can't see the slashdotted site, our automatic mirrors have the page itself HERE. The backup site (listed on the page) still has the video available.
I did the same thing driving with only one sleep stop from Florida to California. It ended up being rather boring. Lots of night driving where you could only see tail lights and reflectors, and plenty of "Road Runner" desert country.:)
I shortened the whole 2500 mile drive down to 5 minutes, which was too much for most people to watch.
I did a web broadcast for most of the drive, losing my Internet connection while driving through most of the South West US. It picked back up in the few major cities that I passed through, and that's when I got all the voicemails on my phone saying "Hey, your feed broke!":)
Most of the drive was rather quick. I got pulled over twice in Texas, where the cops were entertained to see a laptop in the passenger seat and a camera on the dash. Either of them asked why it was there, they just gave me a warning, and I went on my way. I really had the urge to tell the cops "My car can do almost 200mph, I'm doing 80mph, I want to go lots faster, there's nothing out here and no traffic!", but I held back to avoid an escort out of Texas.:)
I got stuck in traffic going through San Antonio, Texas, which looked wierd on the video. Scenery was flying by, suddenly you saw the same minivan I was stuck behind for several frames. You could also see every time I stopped for gas, which lasted for just a couple frames.
I made a run from LA to Salem Oregon and back, about a year ago. The drive took from Friday evening to Sunday morning. Again, it would have been a boring video. Most of Northern California was during the night, and Oregon was all under fog first thing in the morning when we arrived. I was in a rush, so we didn't get the laptop and camera set up for this one.
Yes it is.:) This is from a WinXP home box. I remember it being on Win2k also, and may exist on WinNT. I don't know about other workstation platforms (95/98/ME), but it may.
Microsoft(R) Windows DOS (C)Copyright Microsoft Corp 1990-2001.
C:\DOCUME~1\USER>at/help Invalid command.
The AT command schedules commands and programs to run on a computer at a specified time and date. The Schedule service must be running to use the AT command.
AT [\\computername] [ [id] [/DELETE] |/DELETE [/YES]] AT [\\computername] time [/INTERACTIVE]
[/EVERY:date[,...] |/NEXT:date[,...]] "command"
\\computername Specifies a remote computer. Commands are scheduled on the
local computer if this parameter is omitted. id Is an identification number assigned to a scheduled
command./delete Cancels a scheduled command. If id is omitted, all the
scheduled commands on the computer are canceled./yes Used with cancel all jobs command when no further
confirmation is desired. time Specifies the time when command is to run./interactive Allows the job to interact with the desktop of the user
who is logged on at the time the job runs./every:date[,...] Runs the command on each specified day(s) of the week or
month. If date is omitted, the current day of the month
is assumed./next:date[,...] Runs the specified command on the next occurrence of the
day (for example, next Thursday). If date is omitted, the
current day of the month is assumed. "command" Is the Windows NT command, or batch program to be run.
Slashdot Mirror
At the time I had only one machine (Linux) and didn't bother to firewall it. This was back quite a while ago, before people were so agressively scanning the entire Internet for exploitable stuff. Later on, I built out a 486 from parts, and used that for my firewall. After that, they couldn't even ping me.
They had started portscanning all the machines on their networks. If they had *ASKED* me to stop, that would have been one thing. My warning was the fact that I came home one day to find that I had no service.
At the time, rather than wait for 5 to 10 seconds per resolution, it was easier for me to fire up named, and change resolve.conf to 127.0.0.1 . It worked really well, but broke some things. They only gave out the IP's for their SMTP and news servers to clients using their DNS servers, which didn't bother me a lot, I didn't use either one of those. They were pathetically slow too.
RoadRunner in Tampa, Fla was funny. You could tell every time they changed network admins. The service would go to crap for a month, and then eventually come back to something resembling acceptable. I didn't know this til I was talking to one of the techs at Level3's colo in Tampa, who delt with them directly. He started telling me every time they changed admins. They had a fairly high turnover rate, at least back then.
You know that'll never happen.
All things considered, spam isn't the only problem out there. The ratio of junk to legitimate mail is about the same in my postal mailbox. I may get one letter or bill in, and the rest is junk.. Why aren't people screaming "We need to make laws.." "they need to be in jail.." etc, etc.. That won't happen because the post office turns a profit on it.
Most US bandwidth providers do a pretty decent job of trying to stop spam. Most have pretty strict standards, and will shut off a line for spam. I've been in on several of those actions, although not against me or my networks. It would be nice if all providers did that, but again, it probably won't happen. Many overseas companies make good money selling overpriced bandwidth to spammers. Think of it in business terms. If you're a [insert country here] provider, you can charge double or more for hosting and bandwidth to a spammer. You don't really have to answer to anyone but yourself, why not take the sale? Big spammers can use up some pretty substantial bandwidth, so it's worth it for them to sell to this customer. If I have the choice of barely paying my bills, or buying a new house and cars this year, I think the choice is obvious.
One of the magic questions is, who do you go after? Just a couple days ago, a site hosted on a network belonging to a friend of mine was the "source" of spam. I know they didn't do it, it had absolutely no relationship to them or what they did. So I got on the machines, and found the source. They had a feedback program that was fairly well written, but someone exploited a bug in it, to send out to a few thousand people before I stopped it. Should they throw this perfectly legitimate businessman in jail because someone managed to exploit something. I had to look at it a few times to figure out how they exploited it, the script was fairly well written.
Since plenty of the spam relates back to overseas sources, you'll never see them spending time in a US jail. Simply enough, you'd never see every government in the world agreeing on enforcement of any law, even an anti-spam law. In a lot of countries, it's rather difficult to even report the spam. What happens when you're trying to report it, and the support people don't speak English. And don't be so egotistical to say "they should all speak English", the universe or even the Internet doesn't revolve around America.
98% of all statistics are made up, inluding this one.
For some reason, people like to see "hard" figures, even if someone did just yank it out of their ass.
That's a good one to ask AOL..
They've been blocking virtually anyone sending lots of mail towards them. You have to sign up for their feedback loop, then for their whitelist. In our case, we send a lot of mail to users, because they write to us asking questions. There's plenty of mail going back and forth, but none of it is spam. Most are written by humans, some are automated (You just completed this function, your tracking number is....). They've been doing hit and miss blocking just because they can. It's really annoying. They blocked my workstation because I sent out 4 messages to AOL users in the same day. {sigh}. For my workstation, it's not a big thing, I just changed the IP. But, it's more of a pain for servers.
It doesn't make a lot of sense. I've known spammers. They'll get multiple lines from multiple providers, and keep switching IP's and networks to keep from being blocked. It's all a big act just to make it look like they're being all progressive, even though they're really just annoying legitimate people. Kinda like the TSA.
One of our clients, with his own server and a completely opt in mailing list (like, you specifically have to ask to be on the list) was blocked. He spent hours on the phone with AOL, and got me in on a conference call with them. The support people I spoke with were completely dense. We gave up on any political approach, and just moved his mail server off to another network. He only has about 2000 people who receive his newsletter, and the people not getting it on AOL were actually complaining that they weren't getting them.
Hopefully Comcast will be more professional about it. I know Roadrunner (now Bright House Networks) were absolute dicks about it. They once disconnected my service because I had a DNS server running. I tried to explain to them that their DNS servers sucked (about 5 to 10 seconds to resolve any name). Instead of fixing their problem, they were busy blocking users. {sigh}
thttpd does do CGI's (Perl of course is included there). There was a way to make PHP work with it. Last time I read the documentation, it was anything but optimal.
:)
/proc/loadavg
:)
We use thttpd on quite a few of our static servers, and I have to say it's absolutely fabulous. Instead of thousands of tasks that Apache 1.3.x would run, it has just one. Well, we start up a few sessions, and found a dual 1.4Ghz machine with 1Gb RAM has absolutely no trouble sending out 150Mb/s through teql bound NIC's. That's 150Mb/s of small files (HTML and images), not 150Mb/s of mp3's or videos. We tried Apache 2.0.x also, for it's single-threaded mode, something would mess up and make Apache hang after a few days and refuse to restart without rebooting the entire machine. That's not really acceptable in a high-load production environment.
It's kinda nice to hop on those machines, and see just a couple dozen tasks running and the machine being pretty much idle. That, and our uptime is usually outragous.
This is from a machine pushing out 40Mb/s right now. The loadavg is a little higher than normal, because I was running top.
# cat
0.19 0.14 0.06 1/28 25770
This is from the logs for one process. Obviously, we've overrun it's byte counter.
Jun 12 03:14:13 voy06 thttpd[17430]: up 54000 seconds, stats for 3600 seconds:
Jun 12 03:14:13 voy06 thttpd[17430]: thttpd - 264517 connections (73.4769/sec), 307 max simultaneous, -712678350 bytes (-197966/sec), 475 http
d_conns allocated
Jun 12 03:14:13 host thttpd[17430]: libhttpd - 6183 strings allocated, 3068596 bytes (496.296 bytes/str)
Jun 12 03:14:13 host thttpd[17430]: map cache - 2283 allocated, 2183 active (70290217 bytes), 100 free; hash size: 65536; expire age: 60
Jun 12 03:14:13 host thttpd[17430]: fdwatch - 1573422 polls (437.062/sec)
Jun 12 03:14:13 host thttpd[17430]: timers - 237 allocated, 237 active, 0 free
But I do love Apache for it's power. You can do anything with it. We use it on about half of our web servers.
We don't restrict ourselves to saying "We're an [anything] only shop." We'll use what works best for the application.
I have to agree. There are too many variables that could have been wrong.
:) I'd be more willing to declare Amiga dead, but there's hardcore Amiga lovers still using it who may argue with me.
Did he have a weak signal? Was he 300 feet from the AP or 2 feet? Did he have poor signal quality? Maybe he was standing by a wall where someone was running a microwave in the next room. We found a brand new radio in one office was interfering with our 2.4Ghz telephones. It was putting off a *LOT* of noise, even when it was turned "off" but plugged in. There's one room in my house, even though it shows 90% link quality, 802.11b devices suffer performance problems. Every other room is fine.
Maybe it was the throughput of his Internet connection. Was he sharing bandwidth on a 56K dialup, or a poor quality provider? Maybe there was any number of problems between point A and point B. Maybe it was simply the device(s) he was using were faulty. Nah, no one gets bad hardware.
Saying VoIP over WiFi is dead is like saying the Internet is dead because you're on a noisy line and it takes 5 minutes to view a single web page. By this judgement, television is dead, because as a kid I saw more snow on the screen than picture. Was it television technology at fault? No, it's because I was 100 miles from the nearest broadcast tower.
But hey, people declare perfectly viable projects dead all the time. *BSD is dead, right?
{Cough}{Cough}
.95 or .99 to misdirect the consumer. Ah, it's a $14 product. Oh no, it was 5 cents short of a $15 product.
:)
You'll never hear a merchant say "Our cost is $5, so sell it at $5. Sell everything at cost!"
What you will see is the merchant looking at the cost ($5), considering how many units he sells (1000) per period (month), what his overhead is ($5000), and then saying "Sell it at $14.95!"
Wait. $14.95? Sure. Prices always end in
So now, he's covered the cost of the item ($5,000), the cost of his overhead ($5,000), and made himself a nice little profit ($4,950), which he can tuck away in the "Mr. Merchant Going To Hawaii Fund"
Greedy swine make so much of a profit that they have $40 billion in the vault under their office.
Most merchants don't have the balls to rape customers like that, and flaunt it. Good merchants will see that they've turned a really good profit, and lower their profit margins a little to make sure they undercut the other companies. Oh wait, said merchant has no competition, they've all been bought or pushed out of business.
Most merchants just buy a nice car, and live in a nice house, and are happy to take their wife, mistress, or whoever on trips every week or so.
Sorry honey, no European vacation today, I'm still not one of those "Most merchants". Maybe next year.
Why do I use Linux? Because I like it. It does everything I want, and everything I need, and doesn't give me headaches. Because there's plenty of people writing neat stuff for it, that I can get free, or at a reasonable price. Because I have plenty of choices of distros, and I can download and install them til my heart's content.
:) If I had started playing more with *BSD first, I'd probably be using it now. I used BSDi a long time ago, but they want (or wanted) a lot of money, that I'm not willing to let go of.
Why not Windows? Because I don't want to pay whatever market value is on Windows. Because I don't want to pay again in a year or two, just to keep up to date. Because I don't like doing daily updates. Because I don't like the way it freezes because it wants to. Because sometimes I do things that take days to do , and I don't want the constant feeling that I need to save my work because something might break. Because I don't like rebooting daily because "that's the way it is". Because I don't like the constant war of spyware, adware, and viruses on my desktop. Because I spend more time maintaining a dozen Windows workstations for other people than I do maintaining my workstations and 100+ servers.
Why not *BSD? Because I never really got into *BSD. How's that for an argument?
Why not Solaris? Because it just rubs me the wrong way. But again, if I didn't have Linux or *BSD, I'd probably use it.
And all the other choices? Because I haven't used them enough. People love their choice of distro, either because they're blind and someone told them "Oh, you have to use this", or because they have used it and really like it. There's some I did and didn't like. I kinda like Irix, but it was slow compared to a comparable speed Linux box. That was years ago, who knows, it could be better now.
I agree. I could definately see Clear Channel spend millions (billions?) buying the property, which shouldn't really be sold in the first place. Why should a company now get something that should be open to everyone, and have the rights to it indefinately? It would be like selling the rights to speech? It's sound waves, at a lower frequency. But hey, this is the world we live in (for now), anything can be bought and sold. Even the land you're sitting on is owned by someone. It was there for millions of years, til some genius said "This is mine", and then made it available for sale. Why? Because they could, or more importantly because they were allowed to. There are *HUGE* tracts of land that are "owned" and undeveloped, that I'm sure plenty of people wouldn't mind moving to. Why? Because someone got a sweet deal years ago, and isn't willing to share. In many areas, that keeps the commodity of land at a high value.
Until the Europeans invaded North America, the concept of land ownership was unknown. Now ask the Native Americans what they think of land ownership.
You saw it on here. Well, a mixture of several different articles (that I'm too lazy to find).
A story one story about a vendor taking multiple 802.11b/g channels to get higher throughput.
A story about the FCC allowing for wireless devices to use unused television frequencies.
A Story about 2.4Ghz interference.
There was another story about a vendor who was using two channels to double the throughput, but ended up interfering with other near by 802.11b/g networks, due to poor restraints on their frequencies. I can't seem to find that one, it was a couple months ago.
The first year you get to play with breasts, and you don't realize what you have. You spend the next 16 years trying to even touch one again. :)
/.ers, it may be more like 20+, til you score with an 'escort'.
Well, in the case of
[Ducking]
Read the article.
They're suggesting frequencies be sold like property. If you're broadcasting between 54Mhz and 216Mhz, and I own that property in the area (VHF TV channels 2-13), I'll sue you, and I'll get a restraining order to get your equipment unplugged or seized.
For the owner of those frequencies, it's a valuable asset. It'd be like owning property on Wall Street, and opening a peep show theater. I could make a whole lot more money selling the space as executive office space.
I don't agree with the idea of abolishing the FCC, but I do feel that they need to be reorganized.
I'd like to buy a 100W transmitter, and do a mix of talk and local group/band/dj music. It's not going to happen though, the FCC is getting too much for their licensing. I'm sure the ASCAP, BMI, etc, etc, would want a substantial cut of my profits too.
In the case of the boob flash at the Superbowl, the sponsors pulling their money hurt them more than the FCC throwing fines around. The sponsors control what gets broadcast way more than the FCC does.
Consider what gets more viewers, Friends, or a local talk show about county government? People are going to watch Friends, rather than hear about zoning changes in the ghetto. The sponsors throw their money to where the viewers are, and broadcasters are going to try to put up more content that is favorable to making more money. More housewives want to watch soaps than sci-fi horror movies. If more people were watching higher channels with their movie reruns during the day, you'd see more movies showing up in the lower channels during the day. Thank you Nielsen.
Even the cable industry knows when to cash in. Sure there's a bit of soft-core porn on at night, but it's available 24/7 on PPV channels, where they can make a real buck.
If getting a 80MW transmitter and broadcasting whatever you want gets you off, do it. You can buy transmitters online from overseas vendors. Right now you worry about the FCC. Without the FCC, you worry about the owners of those frequencies suing the pants off you. I'd worry more about 83 lawsuits, than I would about 1 FCC fine. Don't forget to make sure that porn you're transmitting is licensed for distribution purposes, or you'll be sued by all those porn companies too.
So, when you pay for "unlimited internet connections", does that mean you can have 40 modems dialed up at the same time, at full throughput?
Unlimited makes it a lot easier for accounting. You charge a flat rate, no modifications. But thanks to people abusing the systems, they have to make it more complicated.
The cablemodem I used to have was exactly one of these cases. When it was first available in my area, it was "unlimited". You could use the max throughput of the modem, which was about 3Mb/s. They were working on getting new modems which would have 10Mb/s throughput. Users would love this. Their downloads would go very quickly. The cumulative utilization would still be fairly low, because how many users really use the full speed of their line all the time.
Abusers got smart. "I'll put a web server up, and make all my MP3's available." Boom, full utilization of the line. Sure, it said no servers on the residential lines, but no one cared. So the provider blocked port 80.
The abusers got smarter. "I'll put my web server up on some other port." Boom, utilization went up again.
Was this normal usage? no. Was it forbidden by the TOS? Yes.
Because people would use virtually any port they wanted, the problem continued.
The provider started scanning the network for any machine on any port with a web server. That became an unrealistic task.
Now look at your cablemodem's throughput. It's low. With two different providers, in two different cities, I had 768K down, 128K up, and if I peaked at 128K up (like, sending a large file from home to work), the 768K down suddenly was locked at 128K for the rest of the day. Why? Obviously not to stop the average user from sending large files occasionally, it was because of people trying to max out their line all the time.
I *REALLY* liked having 3Mb/s down and up. It was very useful for me to get the occasional file to or from my office. It was nice being able to download a full kernel source in just a few minutes.
Where I work, we do free hosting, with a few conditions. There are enough sites hosted with us, that we can't check every site every day. (50k, last time I looked). Still almost daily, we get some winner that knows this, uploads a bunch of large files (porn video, warez, whatever), and when they link it from where ever, that server will peak up to 100Mb/s. Is it unlimited? No, it's 100Mb/s. Are they following the TOS? No. What do we do? Cancel their account, and delete their content.
They could put it in their TOS to not send more than 1k messages per month, but of course they are a bit greedy. Bill them for the overage. Get that few extra bucks before they cancel.
Most companies don't have a limit for how many Emails you can send while you work there. It isn't written down "You can only send x emails per month". If sending Emails is part of your job, you're expected to send lots of mail. Now take the addresses of every user that you communicate with, and send them an hourly newsletters, and you'll get fired. You knew better. There was no need to have in your contract "You will not send more than x emails to customers." But after they fire you, they'll quite likely write it into the company policy.
Abusing something, just because they didn't put in a "don't abuse this" clause, isn't justification to abuse it.
The office building I'm in doesn't have a policy that says I can't ride the elevator up and down all day, stopping on every floor. Try it sometime, you'll make all kinds of new friends.
If they do instate such a policy, and someone tries to make a point that it's wrong by getting all his friends to ride the elevators all day for the rest of the month, stopping at every floor, they'll probably get their asses kicked.
It's people like you that there are entire libraries of law books, and rules dictating policy everywhere. Thanks.
And by the way, no farting in the elevators either.
So lets see. The provider recognizes that people are abusing the system. The guy sends thousands of pages to his friends to prove people are abusing the system, and he makes the news as being the good guy because telco's are evil??
If someone started sending *ME* thousands of messages per month, I'd get a bit irate. I suppose his friends aren't exactly happy with a month of their phone beeping at them constantly. I get a bit pissed at just our server pages (sent to my phone), and those don't count up anywhere near thousands per month.
Just on one machine. It's a Win98 print server. If for whatever reason it falls off the network and I can't VNC into it, I plug in a keyboard and monitor. Just plugging in a mouse doesn't work til you reboot. So I navigate Windows with no mouse. It feels wierd, being a Unix guy even working on a Windows machine, but I get real funny looks doing it without a mouse.
It's anything but an excuse for Microsoft to define a couple extra keys, so they'll get their logo on every new keyboard.
Well, I don't really have a porn collection. Funny considering what my main job is.
It's really ironic where I work. I was never very big into porn. But computers and cars, oh ya...
I wish I had a whole bunch of money to spend somewhere. I had a great idea a while back. I want to open a speed shop (like, car parts), and build a 1/4 mile drag track and a street racing track next to it. That way, people could performance test their cars after we install parts, and we could have weekly races. Every time someone loses a race, they always want more go-fast parts.
But how many do you need? If you don't have anything accessable, you don't really need them. The largest target would have to be SSH, which lots of people have sshd running.
I just posted a similiar rant. :)
You're absolutely right. I have a friend who was completely anal about a lot of things. His car was his favorite toy. He's 30-something now, and has started becoming more lax. He hasn't been rotating his tires, or even taking a good look at them. He was occasionally glancing at the outside edge, seeing the tread looked ok, and assumed all was fine.
A couple weeks ago, on a wet road, he slid off the road, and his car ended up in a lake. Why? Because his alignment was a little bit off, and the majority of his tires were bald. Well, all except the outside edge, which appeard to have tread. He had a very nice car. Now it's a very nice decoration at a junk yard. He's fine. He just got wet, swimming out of the lake. He found out about the tires when they loaded the car on the tow truck, and he noticed the tires.
As far as cars go, I don't go by milage, but that's because I'm very technical, and look for the indicators which say something needs to be done. That may mean I rotate my tires at 10,000 miles, or I change my oil at 2000 miles, or 6000 miles. But non-technical drivers, who don't even check their oil, think that 3000 miles means "3,000 miles, or when I feel like it in a couple months". I changed the oil in a car once that came out as sludge. I flushed light-weight oil through that engine about 3 times before it came out like liquid.
But I'm far from perfect too. My last annual physical was 5 years ago. I don't have the current firmware on all my hardware. I have no idea if my toaster, microwave, or tv have been recalled. It usually takes me a week or two to get around to fix the time on the clocks when time changes happen.
Have you checked for recalls on your car, toaster, or microwave oven?
If your toaster had a recall on it, and for whatever reason caught fire in the middle of the night and burnt your house down, you'd be suing the manufacturer. Well, if you didn't, your insurance company would. They don't like giving away money, they like to get it back from somewhere else.
What's different in a product which simply exists in a larger product? Would you be checking for recalls on the radio in your car? Probably not.
People are generally greedy. Most of the people I knew that tried to get their tires replaced under the Firestone recall did it not for safety, but because their tires were pretty much worn out, and they wanted new tires for free. People with good condition tires, even though they had seen all the press on the recall, didn't bother with it. Why? "It won't happen to me."
It's just like unprotected sex. Everyone knows of the dangers of unprotected sex, but they believe, "It won't happen to me." Well, not til the day they go to the doctor and find out they have a STD, or worse, a potentially fatal STD.
I heard about one guy who kept baby wipes in his bathroom. He'd wipe himself off after sex, believing it was a "better" solution. It's the same as people who believe they've protected themselves from computer problems by not opening emails with attachments. Sure, it stops some, but not all.
"I don't have to worry about Sasser, there are so many computers on the Internet, it'll never find me."
If Microsoft made the security patches part of a cool new free "gotta have it" product, there's a pretty good chance, a larger segment of the users would get it immediately. As it is now, most users have Windows that is at the same patch state as when they took it out of the box.
Users won't go for changing away from Windows. They've been told for too long that they need Windows. It's sad.
In my office environment, when I go around cleaning up machines from various problems, I say "You know, Linux doesn't have these problems." I even set up a Linux machine where anyone can sit down and try it. The guest password is written on a piece of paper stuck to the monitor. One person so far has used it. I made it virtually idiot-proof. Evolution, Firebird, and GAIM are in the bar at the top of the screen, so all they have to do is click. Still, they're scared.
The only person who I've successfully got to use Linux was a computer illiterate 13 year old girl. She wanted to "get online" to check her Email and chat on some web based chat. So I pointed her to my computer. *MINE*, a Linux guru machine. It's anything but a default install. It was already logged in, and in X. I didn't tell her anything. By the time I looked over to see how far she'd gotten, she already had windows open to Yahoo mail, Hotmail, and some chat (AOL chat, I think). She played on there for hours.
It's not rocket science, people just need to start understanding that they're in danger with Windows, and much less danger with *nix. Sure, boxes can be exploited, but the odds of that are very slim if there's nothing running as a server. I don't find mystery ports open on my Linux machines, which I have to hopelessly try to track down. Windows users are non-technical, they don't even know how to scan for open ports. They shouldn't really even need to. But as long as they believe they *NEED* windows to be able to function in an office environment, they'll use it at work and home.
My girlfriend has WinXP, for the simple reason she has one game that doesn't work under any Windows emulators on any other OS. I tried an experement on there. I installed Firefox on the WinXP machine, and told them to only use that. They wouldn't. They "needed" MSIE to be able to browse sites. A few weeks later, I took every MSIE icon off the desktop and Start menu, and put Firefox in it's place. Both the girlfriend, and her kid (now 14) started using Firefox with no complaints.
It's not technology we should be trying to push, but using psychology to help them understand that they don't "need" windows any more.
It's because all the other things pop up prompts when the user thinks they want to continue. The little box coming up saying there are patches to do, and the users knowing they are busy doing something else right now, don't want to dedicate several minutes or more (assuming modem users) downloading patches they don't understand, and then have to reboot. Users don't understand patching things. They just know that their computer works, so why do they have to patch. Saying there's some mystery evil out to get them doesn't cut it.
Just yesterday, I was having a problem with a users WinXP machine. We were switching IP's from one connection to another in an office. After changing the IP, the machine wasn't allowed to browse anywhere due to their firewall software not recognizing the network change. I needed to reboot it, so I asked, "Do you mind if I reboot, you can't get on the Internet right now." They didn't want me to. So then I explained again "You can't get on the Internet until I reboot." It took saying it a few times for it to sink in.
Users don't understand security. Look at the passwords they set. They've been required to set passwords on virtually everything web based for years, and they're still using simple words. Stop by any network with more than a couple machines, and you'll find file shares with no protection at all.
Click-through boxes are a part of life now, the users do it habitually. Anything more than two words long, they don't read. I could put up a box saying "Clicking yes will install a virus, wipe out your computer, and transfer all your money to me.", and users would still click it.
Hmmm, maybe I'll try that sometime today with a sample group. Users are stupid. I'd be willing to bet I'd get over 50% clicks of "yes", and only a few people would ask about it.
It's at dreamhost.com? Damn, I didn't even traceroute it. I know their equipment! Small world. Ya, they have plenty of bandwidth, and their servers are pretty good. It's probably maxing out the connectivity for that one machine (or cluster, I don't know their stuff that well).
For anyone interested, they do have a really sweet setup. I've talked to their techs a few times, who gave me the tour.
I used webcam32 for my trip (Tampa Florida, to Los Angeles), recording one frame/sec to the hard drive, then I put the whole thing back together into a video clip after I arrived. I used webcam32 to send the frames up to a web server, as long as my cell modem had connectivity. I had connectivity through most of the South East US, but it was very poor through the South West, where there isn't much more than dirt to keep you company. :)
For those that can't see the slashdotted site, our automatic mirrors have the page itself HERE. The backup site (listed on the page) still has the video available.
:)
:)
:)
I did the same thing driving with only one sleep stop from Florida to California. It ended up being rather boring. Lots of night driving where you could only see tail lights and reflectors, and plenty of "Road Runner" desert country.
I shortened the whole 2500 mile drive down to 5 minutes, which was too much for most people to watch.
I did a web broadcast for most of the drive, losing my Internet connection while driving through most of the South West US. It picked back up in the few major cities that I passed through, and that's when I got all the voicemails on my phone saying "Hey, your feed broke!"
Most of the drive was rather quick. I got pulled over twice in Texas, where the cops were entertained to see a laptop in the passenger seat and a camera on the dash. Either of them asked why it was there, they just gave me a warning, and I went on my way. I really had the urge to tell the cops "My car can do almost 200mph, I'm doing 80mph, I want to go lots faster, there's nothing out here and no traffic!", but I held back to avoid an escort out of Texas.
I got stuck in traffic going through San Antonio, Texas, which looked wierd on the video. Scenery was flying by, suddenly you saw the same minivan I was stuck behind for several frames. You could also see every time I stopped for gas, which lasted for just a couple frames.
I made a run from LA to Salem Oregon and back, about a year ago. The drive took from Friday evening to Sunday morning. Again, it would have been a boring video. Most of Northern California was during the night, and Oregon was all under fog first thing in the morning when we arrived. I was in a rush, so we didn't get the laptop and camera set up for this one.