I had read something to the effect that with GCC, if you compile on an x86-64, it'll make 64-bit binaries.. But, I will play, experement, and abuse it until it does what I want..
In the back of my mind, I keep hearing the echo of "you'll need a cross compiler", so we'll see how it goes once I get started. I have nothing against building a cross-compiler, if that's what it takes.. I already did it for my ARM machine (ipaq with Familiar), so I can't imagine it being much harder for the x86-64..
Yippie! 2.4.21 is finally here!:) (I got it about an hour before the/. story showed up.)
They now have Opteron support in there.. I knew it was in the pre, I was just wondering if the new kernel or the rest of my hardware would show up first. I have everything for a dual Opteron system, except the processors and case. I'm so anxious, I'm going to burst.:)
I wrote in it, as a passing interest. I made a few executables of stupid graphic programs (draw moving lines and dots) with our BBS names and phone numbers in it.. That was back in the days of scripting BBS's and other passively fun things..
Maybe they should have a review of BBS's for dummies, so we can relive other things that are long since dead.
Hmmmm.. This sounds interesting. So you want a communications network that doesn't actually require an infrastructure? If there's any additional equipment required, you'll always have to have someone to pay for it. Your phone bill goes to your telco's costs, like paying for the wires, hardware, physical locations, staff, etc, etc, etc...
I like the idea of the wireless peer networking idea.. If you're in range of other devices, you can relay through them. There was a PDA out a year or two ago targeted towards school kids that could do that. But it was limited to about 100' range. I suppose it could be done with an ad-hoc network, but there are definate problems with it.. Like, what happens if you have too many people in the same place? What if you're the only link to the next network?
I'd definately not want to be the only point between two large groups.
But, it's not on "the" internet, unless there's a peering.. Peerings don't come free. Without a peering, you don't see the Internet.
Wireless, as it is, won't cut it. There are a few places in the world that would be obsticles to this, such as oceans (a subtle percentage of the earth's surface), and deserts.. I drove across I-10 not too long ago, and saw a whole lot of dirt and rocks, but had no signal on my phone, and no AM or FM reception. I know what I drove across (4 lanes of pavement 2000+ miles long) is a very small sample of what's out there. A boost in power could work, but it would also cause *LOTS* of interference. Imagine 10 people broadcasting at high power in the middle of the desert. They'd have no problems reaching each other.. Now imagine the same broadcast power in a "hyperdense" area. 83,000 people per square mile in New York.. That would be messy. Good thing cell phones are low power, and they have a lot of towers.
To get access *anywhere*, you'd need a more distributed method.. Iridium has a beautiful network of satellites, with both data and voice service, but you're going to have to pay for using it.. Someone paid a few dollars to get those satellites up there.
Until people are willing to do things for free, and receive things for free, you won't see free connectivity.. Now you're looking at a Star Trek Utopia that will never happen.
I for one, am willing to give my time, but it's going to take a lot more than the two of us, and someone's going to have to figure out where the equipment comes from to do something like this. You can just go war-driving, and find poorly configured access points, and do VoIP on those.:) You're limited to being within range of their AP's though.
I have a whole lot of lesser dual and single CPU machines running around the network too. We just ordered the parts for a dual Opteron machine as parts ($2,500). I'm curious to see how hard it is to recompile Slack 9.0 for it.:) It shouldn't be hard, since I can run the 32bit OS on it while I compile the 64 bit OS for it..:) I'm planning on giving the freshly compiled binaries back to Slackware, assuming everything goes smoothly.
What you mentioned about OpenSSH is applicable to any program your running. That's really up to you to manage. Honestly, most of the machines that I've fixed due to breakins lately were other people's machines. They've been RedHat and Solaris x86 machines. They just put them up on the net, put a site on them, and then never even consider upgrading any software after that. For our machines, I do scripted updates, that handle everything, so for a hundred or so machines, one person can update all of them in no time. But that's us..
If you want your machine secure, keep up on what's going on. Read some good security mailing lists. Check the authors sites occasionally to see what's up. Frequently, you'll see stuff posted to their sites about problems before they make it to BugTraq,/. , or CNN..:) Too many people, including end users, never update their software. Even Windows users that only need to point&click their updates don't do them.
I usually notify my friends of updates that they should do (like, urgent issues), and give them the scripts to update with.. I usually get to them, before they know from RedHat or whoever.
It's definately worth learning how to compile programs, if you're going to be playing in any Unix environment. And, damned well build your own kernel.:) A nice customized kernel specific for your hardware and needs always runs better than anything that is part of the distribution. If you need some special patches, do them yourself. It's not hard. Building a new kernel only takes a few steps.
# wget http://kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v2.4/linux-2.4. 20.tar.bz2 # tar xvpjf linux-2.4.20.tar.bz2 # ln -s linux-2.4.20 linux # cd linux # make mrproper # make menuconfig # make dep ; make clean ; make bzImage # make modules ; make modules_install # cd arch/i386/boot ; cp bzImage/boot/vmlinuz # lilo # shutdown -r now
(or read the README. It'll tell you something similiar)
I don't cry to anybody because I can't find a module, or my kernel doesn't support something. If there's anything my kernel can't support, it's because I couldn't find how to do it, or it just hasn't been done yet. Ya, I'm sure someone's going to reply about Linux not supporting more than 64 processors, or more than 10Tb RAM.. Well, tough, I can't get my hands on a 64 processor machine to even try it with.:) Every time someone gives me an obscure piece of hardware to make work under Linux, I get it done without too much effort. Well, except for a few very obscure sound cards, but they're tough to get working even in Windows with the drivers.
These instructions aren't specific to Slackware. You can put newer versions of program on, and upgrade kernels, on any distribution, which I'm a firm believer that you *SHOULD* do. Don't wait for your vendor/group to give you a patch, when you can do it yourself in just a few minutes.
I had friends and doctors telling me for a long long time that I was drinking too much caffeine, and that it was bad for me.
Caffeine dialates the blood vessles in your body (most importantly your brain), which seems to give you more energy, yada, yada, yada.. Check a medical site for all the stuff it does to you.:)
When you stop taking caffeine, the blood vessles go back to their normal size, and the newly reduced blood flow can cause headaches.. That's the way the doctors told it to me.. True or not, I'm repeating what they said.
I was given caffinated drinks as a kid, and kept drinking them for years.. I like to drink while I eat, so in a restraunt, I could drink many glasses of Coke to wash down my food..
One day I decided for myself that I was drinking too much caffeine. It was a personal decision, which anyone wishing to stop a bad habit must decide for themselves.
The day I stopped drinking caffeine, it took a few hours for an absolutely massive headache to come on. I remember laying on my girlfriends couch, face down, with my head burried in pillows.. I was moaning, and didn't want anything to be happening around me.. It was terrible.. My girlfriend, being the sweet and insightful person that she is, brought me one coke, to ease the pain.. It actually helped.. That took the headache away for a little while.. I was grumpy and had a bit of a headache for a few more days, until it finally went away.
I started drinking lots of water then.. That worked really well for me. I lost a little weight, probably because my calorie intake went way down. It's something like 150 calories per can, and if I drink 6 cans per day that's 900 calories. A pretty substantial amount. If I remember the nutritional stuff right, a person my size (150 pounds) should have 1500 calories per day.
I just checked the Coke site. They claim that caffeine has absolutely no health or addiction risks.
* Soft drinks containing caffeine are not addictive.
* Caffeine has no negative impact on hydration or bone health.
* There is no connection between cardiovascular disease and caffeine. ---
Well, I know #1 to be absolutely false. Physical addiction means your body will act as if it *NEEDS* the drug, and will cause things, including headaches, when you stop taking it. A mental addiction just means you want more, even though there is no physical need. Like wanting to read Slashdot every day.:)
I didn't *WANT* to drink another coke. My body was telling me that I *NEED* another coke. That's a physical addiction.
If you read the Coke page, read it with the thought in your mind that Coke's public relations people wrote this.. The same type people that say cigarettes aren't bad for you.
For me, I still occasionally drink soft drinks. I probably do more now than after I stopped, because they're most of what's available in my office environment. I'm going to start carrying a bottle of water to work. It'll at least save me a bunch of cash, if I don't buy soda's every day.:)
The numbers for Vegas I heard were that as a player you have a 98% chance of loosing in the big casino's, and a 95% chance of loosing in a small casino.
I've been out to Vegas a few times now, and spent more time keeping my eyes open an observing things, than actually gambling.
The oddest thing I ever saw was the ball on a Roulette wheel move back up while it was spinning. We all know the general idea.. The wheel spins at a set speed, the guy drops the ball on the conical wheel, and as the speed of the ball slows to match the speed of the wheel, it slowly drops down.. I saw the ball go up about an inch.. I don't know how. Maybe the wheel sped up. Maybe there was a magnet at the top or bottom. With the sensors that are obviously on the table and wheel, it wouldn't be impossible for the casino to predict the landing of the ball. If there's going to be a big winner on a particular number, it's worth it to them to "encourage" the ball to go elsewhere.
I won't even go into the card games.. There's too many years in tradition of cheating for me to even consider.. Card counting, marked decks, dealer slight of hand, etc, etc...
The computerized slot machines are the best.. I can't see a better way to cheat the gambling public.. No longer is it a set of wheels that spin with any sort of input from the user.. It's a program that spins the wheels, or even graphically simulated wheels.. Duh, like could someone write a program to cheat a little?
Of course, the levels of cheating are how Vegas makes money, and how the big casino's can make more profit than other casino's.. Just about everyone I've talked to that's gone to Vegas had a few big wins, and a whole lot of losses, but by the end of any Vegas trip, they always come home with a lot less cash than they started with.. Well, with the exception of the son in National Lampoon's Vegas Vacation (oh ya, that was a piece of art).
I was particularly fond of the car give-aways in Vegas. The sign above say 10 slot machines would say "We gave away 10 of these cars in 2002". Sweet.. So, you have 10 machines played every 5-10 seconds or so 24 hrs/day, 365 days/yr.. I wish I owned a casino..
25 cents * 10 machines * 6 plays/minute * 60 min/hr * 24 hr/day * 365 days/yr = $7,884,000 per year.. Sure, try to be one of the few winners, they're still collecting millions from the loosers.
I swear when I was sitting in the casino watching the slot machines, I was seeing distinct patterns.. I didn't spend enough time watching, and I didn't have anything to record with (would the casino's allow that??), but I'd see the same sets of results after every 50 to 100 plays..
It's all a big game of give and take. They let you win occasionally, and then take it all back.. It's a fine art for them. They have to give enough to keep you interested, but take as much as possible.. So, you'll loose 10 plays, but you'll get a single 1x win to keep you hopeful that you can still win.. Occasionally they'll throw in a bigger win to keep the excitement up, but their takes will never let you leave with much, if anything.
(Get the feeling I left Vegas down a few hundred bucks again).
I saw a show on the Discovery channel (I believe) that was very similiar to that. It was gas bubbles, but from the limestone bed of the ocean, (I think).
When the gas was released, the bubbles lowered the effective density of the water over an area, and anything that was floating on it would probably sink.
Doesn't exactly explain aircraft though. Air turbulance can be a factor, but.......
They did a demonstration, where someone fitted a swimming pool with a grid of pipes with small holes in them, and then pumped compressed air into the pipes. It made all the water bubble (duh), and their little toy boat sank.. I can't say I was impressed with their technological know-how, but it was cute.. Kind of reminded me of a little kid farting in the bathtub.:)
I read a few articles on "stealing" proximity card data. It's aparently not very hard..
One proximity card that I use requires almost physical contact to the reader, which is appropriate for a doorway.. But another card I use (same building, same card type) to open the garage gate reads the card within about a foot of the reader. I roll my car slowly by, casually holding the card out, and it reads with no contact.
With the appropriate equipment, you can read data from just about anyone's card at a distance. How close do you have to be? People get kinda close in elevators, or you can just be polite, and be holding an outside door for them while they walk by your briefcase/laptop bag/purse. For that matter, I guess your reader could be in the brown paper bag that appears to hold your lunch.
They're used everywhere but they could be making you even more vulnerable to privacy invasion. Delchi has been working with proximity based card systems for two years and has developed a method of casually extracting data from proximity cards in a public environment. Riding in an elevator, subway, or just walking down the hall, a person can bump into you, say "excuse me," and walk away with the decoded information from the proximity card in your pocket. It could then be possible to build a device that can capture and replay these snippets of information on demand or to even brute force a proximity card system. This talk will focus on the vulnerabilities of the systems and show a low power working prototype. Alternatives will be discussed, as well as other vulnerable aspects of proximity based building and computer access systems."
I've read some design information on it also, but can't seem to find the links right now. I don't know what the options are for protection of proximity cards.. Keep them in a foil pouch?
So, I decided I couldn't see details well enough, so here in our office, we opened up the pic in GIMP.. If you adjust "Brightness" and "Contrast" all the way up (127 on each), illuminated objects really stand out..
I'm looking at something I don't understand though.. What we're looking at is the full shapes of the objects, plus refraction from the atmosphere, right?
The "Earth" is a vertically aligned rectangle with bright bars of red, green, blue, with splatters of yellow and aqua. There's a grey box coming off the left side.
The "moon" is a white dot with a black and white checkerboard pattern going to it's right.
Jupiter now appears as a larger white blob, with only a little bit of blue at the bottom, but instead of a diffused pattern, or even a finite box around it, there are three boxes, stretching from the top, left and a smaller from te right.
The right-most moon only has a tall rectangle with a similiar checkerboard pattern to the Earth's moon.
The far left moon has a lesser pattern than the Earth's moon, but it's still aparent.
The 2nd from the left moon has a distinctly different pattern.
What we're finding most pecular is that there are absolutely no stars aparent in this picture.
From the Earth, Mars looks like a bright star, in a field of stars.. Shouldn't a view from the same distance (Mars -> Earth = Earth -> Mars) have a similiar sky view? At least the larger stars should jump out at us in this picture. At least we should be seeing more stars by cranking the contrast all the way up... I'm not expecting like spectacular starfield views or anything, but I'd expect at least one..
This honestly looks like a serious photo-shop job. Someone took a black background, dropped on a few very small images, with Jupiter being the only one with distinct patterns.
It's seriously missing stars.. Bringing the contrast up a bit should at least show *SOMETHING* in there.. Looking at a night's sky from Earth, even with the city lights, if you can see Mars, you can see huge starfields.. I don't think I've ever seen Mars, and not seen any stars...
I wanna see a real picture..At least that'd be cool.:)
No matter what town it is, you'll always have areas like that..
In a nicer town in Florida, an ex-girlfriend lived in a nice community. It had grown up over the last 10 years in pretty much rural nowhere (like most of Florida was until it grew up). If you drive a couple miles down the road she lived on, you'd suddenly leave the nice development and hit a wooded area. Another 1/2 mile down the road you hit the trailer parks, and then industrial stuff.. Usually where you have the industrial stuff and low paid staff, you'll have lower income residential areas. Pay the staff poorly and they can only get what they can afford. $6/hr doesn't pay $1500/mo in rent, but it will cover $200/mo rent and almost feed the kids too.
I can't really talk bad about it.. It wasn't in a very distant past where I was very happy to be able to live in areas like that.. They're usually the areas with more check cashing stores, pawn shops, thrift stores, and lesser desireable stores (like adult novelty stores). Oddly enough more police patrols because they know there's going to be more crime..
MMmmm.. Reminds me of an apartment I used to live in. The floors would flood if it rained hard (window leaks), and when we finally moved out the building management unlocked our doors while we were moving and let the residents steal anything we hadn't moved yet. It's less than entertaining to see your posessions leaving your old apartment in other people's hands as you come to get another load of stuff.
If the theif held onto it, he'll be caught eventually.. Someone will spot a Segway in the garage and know he didn't spend $5000 on it..
Even in LA, I've only seen one Segway so far.. Well, it was in one of the nearby cities, but I don't remember exactly where. I drive around too much..:)
Ya, I do feel sorry for him. Random prank, or simple theft, it sucks.. But he has insurance to cover it, which is a good thing.. Unless this is now a nationally known case that will turn into insurance fraud. I know I'd be having second thoughts about it after the first day or so..
So, I have to ask, is the neighborhood what it looks like from the satellite photo? Condo's, trailer parks, and some warehouse or supermarket building immediately to the West? Just curious. I'm a thousand miles from there, I'll never actually see the area.
Well, the site in my sig is all about freedom of the press. Well, it's a site where anyone is free to post any news they want without censorship.
It's not there to justify my post, it's on all my messages.
In the country I'm writing from, I have the freedom of speech. If you're in the USA, you do too, at least for the time being.
I wasn't trying to justify the theft was right. Just as I won't try to justify a 1st year law student standing in a subway with a law book in his hand saying "you can't hit me, it's against the law" to a bunch of thugs is a good thing. He'll more than likely get bitch slapped. Is there a law against taunting? Not that I'm aware of. It's constitutionally protected as free speech (just as this), but it's probably not a good idea.
When the recent war started, I was where a bunch of protesters were (coincidentally). I was wearing a shirt that said "Greens+" on the front and "Swallow The Leader" on the back. It's an advertisment for health supplements from a store someone I knew worked at. Everyone that has said anything about it reads a sexual reference into it (funny that). A guy walked up to me talking about Green Peace. I smiled and nodded. I guess the peace-nik's can't read. There was also a guy at a piercing shop with a picture of a pistol on his shirt. We're all making our statements. Mine was for oral sex. His was pro-war, and the protesters were obviously anti-government peace-nik's with a cause they didn't understand.:)
(free speech remember? I can saw what I want. {{Pbthhh}})
But I already know your answer.. "Opinions are like assholes.. Everyone has one..." That's fine. You can say it. It's your right.
Want to do something about it? Find some obscure but news-worthy news that you probably won't find on a major news outlet due to censorship, and post it to FreeInternetPress.com.. You can make a difference.
A lot of computer crashes depend on what you're doing with it.
The machine I'm working on right now running Win98 or Win2k crashed on a regular basis by itself. I was tempted to blame bad hardware. Under Linux with a similiar workload (OS, GUI, browser, mail client) it never crashes.. That I can blame on the software being run.
Identical machines with completely MS software behave the same, so it's hard to blame non MS software for the crashing.
My Compaq iPaq with WinCE would lock up or shut itself off about twice a day under virtually no load and no 3rd party software. (I hadn't really figured out what to do with it yet). I was ready to return it to the store. I opted to call it a part-time paperweight, and "try" Familiar Linux on it.. Hasn't crashed since..
Well, that's not completely true. I've done some rather silly OS upgrades (hey, lets change all the libraries while it's running, and see what happens), so the crash was user failure.
But not to make Linux sound perfect, I've crashed machines with poorly written software. I've sent them into huge loops, and had software running that managed to suck up all the memory and hang the machine (a packet sniffer monitoring a 100Mb/s connection). Even my favorite web server, thttpd, had a poorly written beta version once that would upset the server after a couple days of running.
Is it always the OS? Nope. I've had a set of 10 machines with "generic" memory in them.. After a few years of running, they all began crashing mysteriously about twice a day.. Swapped the memory out for name-brand memory, and the started working perfectly.
We have a big industrial looking Dell on the network. Memory flaked out in that. Machine was dying about once a month. Swapped that out for a larger quantity of Crucial memory, and no more problems.
In a computer store I worked in years ago, we bought the cheapest hardware possible. The motherboards didn't come with boxes, and the manuals never made a reference to a manufacturer. Most of the hardware I couldn't even track down a manufacturer name through the vendors. About 1 in 10 parts wouldn't behave properly when we turned it on. About 1 in 30 machines came back for repairs for bad hardware within a few months.
So, it is really up to everyone involved if the machine will work right. I use Asus motherboards, Crucial memory, and Western Digital hard drives, and rarely have a hardware problem. The last problem I had was a bad IDE cable. There's always something that can fail.
The software has to run well, and we've very very happy with Slackware's distributions, with Apache and thttpd.
The biggest problem we have is user software or simple misconfigurations.. What happens when you have a heavy traffic web site, and the web server logs never rotate or get truncated? The drive fills up fast, and you end up with 2Gb logs.
What happens when you write a program that ends up sucking up all the memory and CPU time? Makes it not run right (I've done it myself a few times. Oops.)
People constantly bring their home machines in to work for repairs, for various reasons. About half are software misconfigurations (how many 3rd party applications do you really need running at boot time?). The other half, dying hardware.. The CPU fan made noise for 6 months and then stopped making noise, but you let it go? Ya your CPU is burnt. Cheap fans do that faster than most.
Can they build a crash-proof computer? No. Just like they can't build a crash proof car.. Cars typically crash due to user failure (users including other drivers), or compontent failure (Ford tire blowouts). Not really the car's fault. I had a car in a parking lot crash. A driver missed the highway and broadsided it.
So, you can strive for perfection, but there are always going to be circumstances that can cause failures, usually attributed to users. (those damned users.).
Some Americans are too lazy to walk to the mailbox, and some are energetic enough when some twit goes riding around the apartment complex on his "Unique Two Wheeled Motorized Walking Machine", or riding past the trailer park next door showing off that he has a $5000 bicycle, when their houses aren't worth $5000.
The Smoking Gun was nice enough to leave his address unobscured, so We can see exactly where he lives:
1810 Maple Ln
Kent, WA 98030-7426
I can just picture the old man riding his overpriced mutant bicycle down the roads at 10mph, blocking traffic and annoying everyone in the area. Some kid probably grabbed it, and ditched it in the river.
Personally, I know running Windows inside and out simply from working on other people's machines.
For users, I help people on everything from Win95 through XP. Sometimes it's their actual workstation in the office, or machines brought from home and they politely ask me "can you fix this?". They already know there's nothing beyond me fixing unless it's a fairly fatal error (like a hard drive failing).
For example, right at this moment I have a WinME machine sitting on my workbench. It had all kinds of extra crap starting up in the startup directory and registry, it hadn't been defragged in 800 days (as reported by Windows), and virus software that hadn't been updated in about a year. It also hadn't had any Windows Updates done at all.
On my networks, there are hundreds of machines. Most are Linux, but some aren't.
One is a Windows Media streaming server that's simply hosted with us, so I haven't touched it since I set it's IP.
Some near and dear to me has 5 machines that are WinNT Server and Win2k Advanced Server that she does customer hosting, and custom site development on. She writes in Cold Fusion, and since some of these sites have existed for years, she hasn't been daring enought to get off of Windows yet. We did come to a compromise though. If I can set up a Linux machine with Cold Fusion on it, and prove to her that it won't be a headache to move the sites over (including moving the databases from MSSQL to MySQL), she'll switch to Linux.. Her concerns are perfectly justified. If she converted and the sites don't work, she'd loose all her income. If there are substantial differences in the way ColdFusion on Windows and ColdFusion on Linux work, her productivity will be down.
We also have some old NT boxes, that are serving sites that they've served for years. No one wants to rewrite the code for all of them, so they remain.
So, of all my machines, there are over 100 Linux boxes, maybe 5 NT boxes, 5 Win2k boxes, and 20 Win98/WinME/Win2k/WinXP workstations. Oh ya, don't forget 1/2 dozen OS/9 and OS/X machines.:)
*MY* machines are Linux. I use one workstation at work, one at home, a laptop, and an iPaq PDA.. Both workstations and the laptop have been upgraded to Slackware 9.0. The iPaq runs Familiar. Even my home firewall is running Slackware (7.1.0).
My girlfriend still uses Windows on her laptop, and her kid has a Win98 machine to chat with her little friends, and play games on. Eventually I'll get the kid moved over to Linux. I can't say the girlfriend will be easy to change, unless WineX handles "The Sims" better than Windows does.:)
So ya, I deal with Windows machines daily. And even though there are a whole lot more Unix machines on my networks, the Windows machines end up being the bigger headaches.
To really keep on topic, I have had problems with the Windows Updates too.. I believe it was on an "e-machine". Normal cheap consumer grade hardware with an "e" embossed into the side. It uses an Intel network card.. Windows Update has an updated driver listed, so I went ahead and let it install. After that reboot, it refused to get onto the network again. Took some fiddling with it to get rid of the new driver, and get the old driver going again. That's the machine the kid plays on, so she was rather upset that she couldn't chat with her little online friends for like an hour. Around the same time, I heard other people telling me that they had done the same upgrade, and had the same problem. Luckly for us, most of our office people don't do Windows Updates on their own, so we didn't have too many machines to fix..
I was contemplating microwaves and dishes the other night.. What would happen if you mounted the emitter from a home microwave oven (roughly 2.5Ghz) on a big old satellite dish, and aligned it with a satellite? Like, the old satellite TV control boxes aligned the dishes fairly easily. Would 1000w on a 15' dish be enough to shut off HBO? {{Evil Grin}}
That wouldn't be the safest place to be standing, would it?
But as far as people's paranoia goes, I got a 2' (24db) parabolic antenna for my laptop (200mw card). It's on a tripod a common area of our office. It's not actually attached to anything, other than the tripod. Every day, I see that someone turns it away from their office or desk. Over the last week, it's turned about 90 degrees to the left. I suspect the people to the right of the dish. No one believes me when I tell them that it's just a piece of metal until it's turned on..:)
I had only intended on keeping it in the office temporarly, but this has become entertaining..:)
Actually, you asking for proof is more of what *THEY* should be doing.
A *RESPONSIBLE* organization would be investigating all of the incidents, rather than just saying "1.2.3.4 is spamming, lets block 1.2.3.0/22 to make sure they're stopped."
ISP's investigate abuse claims. *THEN* they'll block accordingly. I've known Level3 to block individual IP's, and if the company hosting them lets them add/move to a new IP, they'll do more. There's a procedure they follow, not just arbitrarly blocking traffic because they feel like it.
Sure, if a spammer finds a relay on my network, block it temporarly. But it'd better be something that can be undone quickly. It's useless to have a system where I can fix the problem, but wait months for some anonymous person to undo their blacklist.
There was one machine hosted with us that was open for relaying, accidently. The owner spotted it when there were a bunch of messages (about 100) coming from China, going out to other accounts, but he shouldn't have been allowed to.. The funny part is, that was on a network that has never been blackholed, and there wasn't a single complaint generated from it.
If there was a proper organization set up that handled the blackholes, rather than a few hundred groups of egomanics doing it, it would be better. Say if the NIC's and IANA were all in cooperation with the group, would be better.
My idea of it would be something along the lines of:
1) A complain goes to the anti-spam group..
2) After a proper investigation (like, verifying the spam complaint was real), the anti-spam group asks the ISP to block the IP, and the NIC's are asked to remove the NS records for the domain.
3) If that doesn't work (like, the ISP doesn't cooperate), that network gets a null-route with IANA.
4) If the ISP fails to behave, or lets the spammers get new/24's, the ISP is null routed entirely, until they behave.
In a matter of months, you'd see a significant drop in spam.
Right now, the whole system is chaotic. A few hundred people making blackhole lists that no one is sure if they're on or not, or even why isn't productive.
Maybe I should write up a good plan, and submit it as a RFC..:)
Actually, phone calls *aren't* a good way to communicate with me.. I work odd hours.. Like yesterday, I worked from about 11am until 11pm at the office, and then until 6am at home..
If you called my office, you'd be listening to yourself talk to the answering machine. But if you dropped me an Email it would be answered quickly. Just like the guy who decided one of our primary domains was unused and he wanted to buy it off us.. I got back with him within a couple hours.
Likewise, if I needed to contact you, I know most offices won't answer between 6pm and 8am, unless it happens to be a spiffy-keen NOC.:) After sitting on hold for over an hour with both AOL and Time Warner/RoadRunner on individual cases, just to be told, "Sorry, we don't know anything about that" on abuse issues, I know it doesn't do much good to call the listed numbers. It also doesn't do much good for me to call Moscow at 4am their time. If I'm lucky, they'll see an English email come in, and run it through babelfish to read it.
We receive legal notes by Email all the time. Usually it's nothing significant, but answering them quickly is enough to keep us from getting sued.
Most of the blackhole problems we've encountered weren't directly with our networks.. Like I said, other networks very frequently get larger blocks blacklisted. What do I do? Go to my providers switch and start yanking out wires until I find the one that Mr. Relay is using? That'd go over really well, assuming I could even do it. Maybe I should call my provider, and ask for the physical address of the demarc for another block? ha.
If you don't like the fact that SPAM exists, I suggest you bring up a bigger issue with the USPS. I have a *SERIOUS* problem with junk mail. Consider the resources that are burnt up by that.. Besides the wasted fuel used by the mail trucks, and the time used to sort it, it wastes space in my box, and causes litter. After I moved recently, the post office never stopped delivering the junk mail to my house. An old neighbor called to ask if it was ok for him to throw it all away, because it was spilling into the street.
If we're to take the blackhole thing as a valid method for filtering, the USPS should adopt the same thing. If someone sends more than X pieces of unsolicited mail, just throw away all the mail from that zip code. If that isn't sufficent, the surrounding 3 zip codes too.. So what if your mail doesn't go out, at least you've stopped the junk mail.
I'm definately going to suggest it to the US Legal system. To make a point that you shouldn't commit crimes, every time there is a death penalty conviction, they should kill the next two defendants too. Who cares if they did anything relating to the matter, right?
Ok, that was a stretch, but I hope you see where I was going with it.. You're blocking innocent networks with poorly designed arbitrary rules. Well, the blacklist mantainers cover their asses by saying "we only make the liste, we don't tell you how to use it." But Joe ISP admin doesn't think about that. He takes your stance of "This is cool, I can stop a bunch of mail."
Yup, you're exactly the admin that we get complaints about every day.. And when you continue to treat your customers like that, either you'll white list us, or they'll change to another provider.
We use MailScanner, with damned well over a 95% success rate for catching spam.. It does use blackhole lists minimally, and even if it is marked as spam, it's *MARKED*. The subject line is changed, so we can filter automagically. That way, I don't have a single complaint from any users that I blocked a message so they couldn't receive it.. After we went with MailScanner, most of my users started filtering all their spam marked mail to trash. But some (like me) filter them off to a spam box to be checked later. A few real messages show up in there occasionally (maybe 10 of 10k, but those were still important).
But hey, like you said, it's your network. Of course since you're blocking Email without really knowing who you're blocking, it may be important.. The next message may be from a lawyer about illegal content on your network (and the last communication before a lawsuit), or a note from someone like me saying "Hey, we spotted this odd traffic coming from your network.", which may have been the first indicator to you that someone broke into one of your servers.
I am anything but pro-spam, but I'm happy to see the blackhole lists get kicked around a little bit. Some of my accounts get hit more than the average person, because they are well placed on many web pages, or have been in use for years and are now forwarded to my account when people leave the company. I average about 200 spam messages per day coming into my account.
$RANT_MODE="ON";
I also handle many networks, with many many machines. Some of our networks have other people's equipment on it, but I'm 100% positive that they don't spam from their machines. Since they frequently ask me to help with their configurations, or help with problems, I'm intimately aware of what they do.
If there are spam complaints, they filter through to me very quickly. Level3's abuse account gets most of them. They filter out most of the bogus complaints, and are quick to get with us about legitimate complaints. We did have one machine hosted on one network that was spamming, which we ejected from the network shortly afterwards.
On a monthly basis, someone will come to me saying that they've been blacklisted by one of the many lists for ambiguous reasons. Any incident that is legitimate is cleared up between us and our bandwidth provider, under the threat of having the IP or IP block blocked from all Internet access. Level3 Communications is very anti-spam. They'll cut you off for being a spammer. If we don't explain or handle an incident, we could very easily loose our lines. I have no problem with this.
The last case with Level3 was a single spam complaint, sent through SpamCop. The message wasn't a spam at all. Someone had made a purchase online with an invalid credit card number. The Email simply stated that they had attempted a purchase (with IP and invoice number), and said if they still intended to make the purchase, they should contact the sales department at the store. I know the owner of the store personally, so I called him. He freaked out when I told him there was a spam complaint. This is a business man who is the most honest person I know. (If in Ft. Lauderdale, tell Glenn I say "hi"). I read the Email to him, and he confirmed that it was a legitimate message, and the card had been bad.. He immediately cancelled the order, and blacklisted the customer. The next day I got a forwarded Email which was an apology from the customer. She sends every Email off to SpamCop, and lets them sort them out. Nice, huh?
Now on to the abuses of the spews system. SpamHaus is/.'d right now, or I'd complain about them, but lets check who we can.
65.59.224.0/25 is one of our networks. A small backwater of our network. A few older machines live there, and not much happens. SPEWS has 65.59.224.0/24 blacklisted, as well as 66.166.136.128/24 which is no relationship to us (the wrong network size is theirs, not ours). Because I have machines on the first half of 65.59.224.0/25, I'm blacklisted. 65.59.224.128/25 could be blacklisted, but I happen to know that they have quite a few hosting customers, most of who know nothing about the other customers.. Legitimately blacklisted??
ORDB has my ex-girlfriend's mail server listed. She develops and hosts sites. No spamming at all.
65.59.224.11 is listed as herbalo.com. Funny thing is, it doesn't exist on our network.. I'll personally escort anyone from spews into the colo to prove it to them.. Oh wait, I forgot, these are anonymous people who don't exist in the real world and don't feel themselves accountable for blacklisting innocent networks.
AOL has blocked one of my own servers, as well as those of two different friends (on their own networks) for "potential spam".. One of them had a *WEB* proxy server, and aparently because it existed (on port 8000), he was blacklisted from sending
You don't have to send the monkeys.. An infinite number of monkeys with an infinite number of packet generators will eventually create any traffic that may have beeen sent across the network.
Slashdot Mirror
I had read something to the effect that with GCC, if you compile on an x86-64, it'll make 64-bit binaries.. But, I will play, experement, and abuse it until it does what I want..
In the back of my mind, I keep hearing the echo of "you'll need a cross compiler", so we'll see how it goes once I get started. I have nothing against building a cross-compiler, if that's what it takes.. I already did it for my ARM machine (ipaq with Familiar), so I can't imagine it being much harder for the x86-64..
Yippie! 2.4.21 is finally here! :) (I got it about an hour before the /. story showed up.)
:)
:) I'm going to try to get Slackware running on it. :)
They now have Opteron support in there.. I knew it was in the pre, I was just wondering if the new kernel or the rest of my hardware would show up first. I have everything for a dual Opteron system, except the processors and case. I'm so anxious, I'm going to burst.
( ) 386
( ) 486
( ) 586/K5/5x86/6x86/6x86MX
( ) Pentium-Classic
( ) Pentium-MMX
( ) Pentium-Pro/Celeron/Pentium-II
( ) Pentium-III/Celeron(Coppermine)
( ) Pentium-4
( ) K6/K6-II/K6-III
( ) Athlon/Duron/K7
(X) Opteron/Athlon64/Hammer/K8
( ) Elan
( ) Crusoe
( ) Winchip-C6
( ) Winchip-2
( ) Winchip-2A/Winchip-3
( ) CyrixIII/VIA-C3
( ) VIA-C3-2
I'm going to be a compiling fool when the rest of the parts show up.
Hasn't QBasic been dead for years?
I wrote in it, as a passing interest. I made a few executables of stupid graphic programs (draw moving lines and dots) with our BBS names and phone numbers in it.. That was back in the days of scripting BBS's and other passively fun things..
Maybe they should have a review of BBS's for dummies, so we can relive other things that are long since dead.
Hmmmm.. This sounds interesting. So you want a communications network that doesn't actually require an infrastructure? If there's any additional equipment required, you'll always have to have someone to pay for it. Your phone bill goes to your telco's costs, like paying for the wires, hardware, physical locations, staff, etc, etc, etc...
:) You're limited to being within range of their AP's though.
I like the idea of the wireless peer networking idea.. If you're in range of other devices, you can relay through them. There was a PDA out a year or two ago targeted towards school kids that could do that. But it was limited to about 100' range. I suppose it could be done with an ad-hoc network, but there are definate problems with it.. Like, what happens if you have too many people in the same place? What if you're the only link to the next network?
I'd definately not want to be the only point between two large groups.
But, it's not on "the" internet, unless there's a peering.. Peerings don't come free. Without a peering, you don't see the Internet.
Wireless, as it is, won't cut it. There are a few places in the world that would be obsticles to this, such as oceans (a subtle percentage of the earth's surface), and deserts.. I drove across I-10 not too long ago, and saw a whole lot of dirt and rocks, but had no signal on my phone, and no AM or FM reception. I know what I drove across (4 lanes of pavement 2000+ miles long) is a very small sample of what's out there. A boost in power could work, but it would also cause *LOTS* of interference. Imagine 10 people broadcasting at high power in the middle of the desert. They'd have no problems reaching each other.. Now imagine the same broadcast power in a "hyperdense" area. 83,000 people per square mile in New York.. That would be messy. Good thing cell phones are low power, and they have a lot of towers.
To get access *anywhere*, you'd need a more distributed method.. Iridium has a beautiful network of satellites, with both data and voice service, but you're going to have to pay for using it.. Someone paid a few dollars to get those satellites up there.
Until people are willing to do things for free, and receive things for free, you won't see free connectivity.. Now you're looking at a Star Trek Utopia that will never happen.
I for one, am willing to give my time, but it's going to take a lot more than the two of us, and someone's going to have to figure out where the equipment comes from to do something like this. You can just go war-driving, and find poorly configured access points, and do VoIP on those.
You should be looking at another distribution.
:) It shouldn't be hard, since I can run the 32bit OS on it while I compile the 64 bit OS for it.. :) I'm planning on giving the freshly compiled binaries back to Slackware, assuming everything goes smoothly.
/. , or CNN.. :) Too many people, including end users, never update their software. Even Windows users that only need to point&click their updates don't do them.
:) A nice customized kernel specific for your hardware and needs always runs better than anything that is part of the distribution. If you need some special patches, do them yourself. It's not hard. Building a new kernel only takes a few steps.
. 20.tar.bz2 /boot/vmlinuz
:) Every time someone gives me an obscure piece of hardware to make work under Linux, I get it done without too much effort. Well, except for a few very obscure sound cards, but they're tough to get working even in Windows with the drivers.
We use Slackware for just about everything. It's free, it's fast, and it's fairly easy to configure.
Someone else mentioned that if you want 4 CPU's and lots of memory, you have to use RedHat AS.. That's BS.. Two specific examples that I run are:
Quad PIII Xeon 500Mhz, 4Gb RAM
Dual P4 Xeon 2.8Ghz (with HT), 8Gb RAM
I have a whole lot of lesser dual and single CPU machines running around the network too. We just ordered the parts for a dual Opteron machine as parts ($2,500). I'm curious to see how hard it is to recompile Slack 9.0 for it.
What you mentioned about OpenSSH is applicable to any program your running. That's really up to you to manage. Honestly, most of the machines that I've fixed due to breakins lately were other people's machines. They've been RedHat and Solaris x86 machines. They just put them up on the net, put a site on them, and then never even consider upgrading any software after that. For our machines, I do scripted updates, that handle everything, so for a hundred or so machines, one person can update all of them in no time. But that's us..
If you want your machine secure, keep up on what's going on. Read some good security mailing lists. Check the authors sites occasionally to see what's up. Frequently, you'll see stuff posted to their sites about problems before they make it to BugTraq,
I usually notify my friends of updates that they should do (like, urgent issues), and give them the scripts to update with.. I usually get to them, before they know from RedHat or whoever.
It's definately worth learning how to compile programs, if you're going to be playing in any Unix environment. And, damned well build your own kernel.
# wget http://kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v2.4/linux-2.4
# tar xvpjf linux-2.4.20.tar.bz2
# ln -s linux-2.4.20 linux
# cd linux
# make mrproper
# make menuconfig
# make dep ; make clean ; make bzImage
# make modules ; make modules_install
# cd arch/i386/boot ; cp bzImage
# lilo
# shutdown -r now
(or read the README. It'll tell you something similiar)
I don't cry to anybody because I can't find a module, or my kernel doesn't support something. If there's anything my kernel can't support, it's because I couldn't find how to do it, or it just hasn't been done yet. Ya, I'm sure someone's going to reply about Linux not supporting more than 64 processors, or more than 10Tb RAM.. Well, tough, I can't get my hands on a 64 processor machine to even try it with.
These instructions aren't specific to Slackware. You can put newer versions of program on, and upgrade kernels, on any distribution, which I'm a firm believer that you *SHOULD* do. Don't wait for your vendor/group to give you a patch, when you can do it yourself in just a few minutes.
Wow, what a coincidence. 97.25% of all statistics are bogus. :)
I am not a doctor, but...
I had friends and doctors telling me for a long long time that I was drinking too much caffeine, and that it was bad for me.
Caffeine dialates the blood vessles in your body (most importantly your brain), which seems to give you more energy, yada, yada, yada.. Check a medical site for all the stuff it does to you.
When you stop taking caffeine, the blood vessles go back to their normal size, and the newly reduced blood flow can cause headaches.. That's the way the doctors told it to me.. True or not, I'm repeating what they said.
I was given caffinated drinks as a kid, and kept drinking them for years.. I like to drink while I eat, so in a restraunt, I could drink many glasses of Coke to wash down my food..
One day I decided for myself that I was drinking too much caffeine. It was a personal decision, which anyone wishing to stop a bad habit must decide for themselves.
The day I stopped drinking caffeine, it took a few hours for an absolutely massive headache to come on. I remember laying on my girlfriends couch, face down, with my head burried in pillows.. I was moaning, and didn't want anything to be happening around me.. It was terrible.. My girlfriend, being the sweet and insightful person that she is, brought me one coke, to ease the pain.. It actually helped.. That took the headache away for a little while.. I was grumpy and had a bit of a headache for a few more days, until it finally went away.
I started drinking lots of water then.. That worked really well for me. I lost a little weight, probably because my calorie intake went way down. It's something like 150 calories per can, and if I drink 6 cans per day that's 900 calories. A pretty substantial amount. If I remember the nutritional stuff right, a person my size (150 pounds) should have 1500 calories per day.
I just checked the Coke site. They claim that caffeine has absolutely no health or addiction risks.
From the Coke.com site
---
Key Facts
* Soft drinks containing caffeine are not addictive.
* Caffeine has no negative impact on hydration or bone health.
* There is no connection between cardiovascular disease and caffeine.
---
Well, I know #1 to be absolutely false. Physical addiction means your body will act as if it *NEEDS* the drug, and will cause things, including headaches, when you stop taking it. A mental addiction just means you want more, even though there is no physical need. Like wanting to read Slashdot every day.
I didn't *WANT* to drink another coke. My body was telling me that I *NEED* another coke. That's a physical addiction.
If you read the Coke page, read it with the thought in your mind that Coke's public relations people wrote this.. The same type people that say cigarettes aren't bad for you.
For me, I still occasionally drink soft drinks. I probably do more now than after I stopped, because they're most of what's available in my office environment. I'm going to start carrying a bottle of water to work. It'll at least save me a bunch of cash, if I don't buy soda's every day.
Gambling is rigged? That's news? :)
The numbers for Vegas I heard were that as a player you have a 98% chance of loosing in the big casino's, and a 95% chance of loosing in a small casino.
I've been out to Vegas a few times now, and spent more time keeping my eyes open an observing things, than actually gambling.
The oddest thing I ever saw was the ball on a Roulette wheel move back up while it was spinning. We all know the general idea.. The wheel spins at a set speed, the guy drops the ball on the conical wheel, and as the speed of the ball slows to match the speed of the wheel, it slowly drops down.. I saw the ball go up about an inch.. I don't know how. Maybe the wheel sped up. Maybe there was a magnet at the top or bottom. With the sensors that are obviously on the table and wheel, it wouldn't be impossible for the casino to predict the landing of the ball. If there's going to be a big winner on a particular number, it's worth it to them to "encourage" the ball to go elsewhere.
I won't even go into the card games.. There's too many years in tradition of cheating for me to even consider.. Card counting, marked decks, dealer slight of hand, etc, etc...
The computerized slot machines are the best.. I can't see a better way to cheat the gambling public.. No longer is it a set of wheels that spin with any sort of input from the user.. It's a program that spins the wheels, or even graphically simulated wheels.. Duh, like could someone write a program to cheat a little?
Of course, the levels of cheating are how Vegas makes money, and how the big casino's can make more profit than other casino's.. Just about everyone I've talked to that's gone to Vegas had a few big wins, and a whole lot of losses, but by the end of any Vegas trip, they always come home with a lot less cash than they started with.. Well, with the exception of the son in National Lampoon's Vegas Vacation (oh ya, that was a piece of art).
I was particularly fond of the car give-aways in Vegas. The sign above say 10 slot machines would say "We gave away 10 of these cars in 2002". Sweet.. So, you have 10 machines played every 5-10 seconds or so 24 hrs/day, 365 days/yr.. I wish I owned a casino..
25 cents * 10 machines * 6 plays/minute * 60 min/hr * 24 hr/day * 365 days/yr = $7,884,000 per year.. Sure, try to be one of the few winners, they're still collecting millions from the loosers.
I swear when I was sitting in the casino watching the slot machines, I was seeing distinct patterns.. I didn't spend enough time watching, and I didn't have anything to record with (would the casino's allow that??), but I'd see the same sets of results after every 50 to 100 plays..
It's all a big game of give and take. They let you win occasionally, and then take it all back.. It's a fine art for them. They have to give enough to keep you interested, but take as much as possible.. So, you'll loose 10 plays, but you'll get a single 1x win to keep you hopeful that you can still win.. Occasionally they'll throw in a bigger win to keep the excitement up, but their takes will never let you leave with much, if anything.
(Get the feeling I left Vegas down a few hundred bucks again).
I saw a show on the Discovery channel (I believe) that was very similiar to that. It was gas bubbles, but from the limestone bed of the ocean, (I think).
:)
When the gas was released, the bubbles lowered the effective density of the water over an area, and anything that was floating on it would probably sink.
Doesn't exactly explain aircraft though. Air turbulance can be a factor, but.......
They did a demonstration, where someone fitted a swimming pool with a grid of pipes with small holes in them, and then pumped compressed air into the pipes. It made all the water bubble (duh), and their little toy boat sank.. I can't say I was impressed with their technological know-how, but it was cute.. Kind of reminded me of a little kid farting in the bathtub.
I read a few articles on "stealing" proximity card data. It's aparently not very hard..
One proximity card that I use requires almost physical contact to the reader, which is appropriate for a doorway.. But another card I use (same building, same card type) to open the garage gate reads the card within about a foot of the reader. I roll my car slowly by, casually holding the card out, and it reads with no contact.
With the appropriate equipment, you can read data from just about anyone's card at a distance. How close do you have to be? People get kinda close in elevators, or you can just be polite, and be holding an outside door for them while they walk by your briefcase/laptop bag/purse. For that matter, I guess your reader could be in the brown paper bag that appears to hold your lunch.
H2K2 had a lecture on it. Here's the lecture description. in July of 2002
"Proximity Cards: How Secure Are They?
Sunday, 6 pm
Area "B"
They're used everywhere but they could be making you even more vulnerable to privacy invasion. Delchi has been working with proximity based card systems for two years and has developed a method of casually extracting data from proximity cards in a public environment. Riding in an elevator, subway, or just walking down the hall, a person can bump into you, say "excuse me," and walk away with the decoded information from the proximity card in your pocket. It could then be possible to build a device that can capture and replay these snippets of information on demand or to even brute force a proximity card system. This talk will focus on the vulnerabilities of the systems and show a low power working prototype. Alternatives will be discussed, as well as other vulnerable aspects of proximity based building and computer access systems."
I've read some design information on it also, but can't seem to find the links right now. I don't know what the options are for protection of proximity cards.. Keep them in a foil pouch?
So, I decided I couldn't see details well enough, so here in our office, we opened up the pic in GIMP.. If you adjust "Brightness" and "Contrast" all the way up (127 on each), illuminated objects really stand out..
:)
I'm looking at something I don't understand though.. What we're looking at is the full shapes of the objects, plus refraction from the atmosphere, right?
The "Earth" is a vertically aligned rectangle with bright bars of red, green, blue, with splatters of yellow and aqua. There's a grey box coming off the left side.
The "moon" is a white dot with a black and white checkerboard pattern going to it's right.
Jupiter now appears as a larger white blob, with only a little bit of blue at the bottom, but instead of a diffused pattern, or even a finite box around it, there are three boxes, stretching from the top, left and a smaller from te right.
The right-most moon only has a tall rectangle with a similiar checkerboard pattern to the Earth's moon.
The far left moon has a lesser pattern than the Earth's moon, but it's still aparent.
The 2nd from the left moon has a distinctly different pattern.
What we're finding most pecular is that there are absolutely no stars aparent in this picture.
From the Earth, Mars looks like a bright star, in a field of stars.. Shouldn't a view from the same distance (Mars -> Earth = Earth -> Mars) have a similiar sky view? At least the larger stars should jump out at us in this picture. At least we should be seeing more stars by cranking the contrast all the way up... I'm not expecting like spectacular starfield views or anything, but I'd expect at least one..
This honestly looks like a serious photo-shop job. Someone took a black background, dropped on a few very small images, with Jupiter being the only one with distinct patterns.
It's seriously missing stars.. Bringing the contrast up a bit should at least show *SOMETHING* in there.. Looking at a night's sky from Earth, even with the city lights, if you can see Mars, you can see huge starfields.. I don't think I've ever seen Mars, and not seen any stars...
I wanna see a real picture..At least that'd be cool.
No matter what town it is, you'll always have areas like that..
In a nicer town in Florida, an ex-girlfriend lived in a nice community. It had grown up over the last 10 years in pretty much rural nowhere (like most of Florida was until it grew up). If you drive a couple miles down the road she lived on, you'd suddenly leave the nice development and hit a wooded area. Another 1/2 mile down the road you hit the trailer parks, and then industrial stuff.. Usually where you have the industrial stuff and low paid staff, you'll have lower income residential areas. Pay the staff poorly and they can only get what they can afford. $6/hr doesn't pay $1500/mo in rent, but it will cover $200/mo rent and almost feed the kids too.
I can't really talk bad about it.. It wasn't in a very distant past where I was very happy to be able to live in areas like that.. They're usually the areas with more check cashing stores, pawn shops, thrift stores, and lesser desireable stores (like adult novelty stores). Oddly enough more police patrols because they know there's going to be more crime..
MMmmm.. Reminds me of an apartment I used to live in. The floors would flood if it rained hard (window leaks), and when we finally moved out the building management unlocked our doors while we were moving and let the residents steal anything we hadn't moved yet. It's less than entertaining to see your posessions leaving your old apartment in other people's hands as you come to get another load of stuff.
If the theif held onto it, he'll be caught eventually.. Someone will spot a Segway in the garage and know he didn't spend $5000 on it..
It yas a defect in mw kewboard, honest. :)
That was probably him..
:)
Even in LA, I've only seen one Segway so far.. Well, it was in one of the nearby cities, but I don't remember exactly where. I drive around too much..
Ya, I do feel sorry for him. Random prank, or simple theft, it sucks.. But he has insurance to cover it, which is a good thing.. Unless this is now a nationally known case that will turn into insurance fraud. I know I'd be having second thoughts about it after the first day or so..
So, I have to ask, is the neighborhood what it looks like from the satellite photo? Condo's, trailer parks, and some warehouse or supermarket building immediately to the West? Just curious. I'm a thousand miles from there, I'll never actually see the area.
Well, the site in my sig is all about freedom of the press. Well, it's a site where anyone is free to post any news they want without censorship.
It's not there to justify my post, it's on all my messages.
In the country I'm writing from, I have the freedom of speech. If you're in the USA, you do too, at least for the time being.
I wasn't trying to justify the theft was right. Just as I won't try to justify a 1st year law student standing in a subway with a law book in his hand saying "you can't hit me, it's against the law" to a bunch of thugs is a good thing. He'll more than likely get bitch slapped. Is there a law against taunting? Not that I'm aware of. It's constitutionally protected as free speech (just as this), but it's probably not a good idea.
When the recent war started, I was where a bunch of protesters were (coincidentally). I was wearing a shirt that said "Greens+" on the front and "Swallow The Leader" on the back. It's an advertisment for health supplements from a store someone I knew worked at. Everyone that has said anything about it reads a sexual reference into it (funny that). A guy walked up to me talking about Green Peace. I smiled and nodded. I guess the peace-nik's can't read. There was also a guy at a piercing shop with a picture of a pistol on his shirt. We're all making our statements. Mine was for oral sex. His was pro-war, and the protesters were obviously anti-government peace-nik's with a cause they didn't understand.
(free speech remember? I can saw what I want. {{Pbthhh}})
But I already know your answer.. "Opinions are like assholes.. Everyone has one..." That's fine. You can say it. It's your right.
Want to do something about it? Find some obscure but news-worthy news that you probably won't find on a major news outlet due to censorship, and post it to FreeInternetPress.com
Crashes are a rather ambiguous topic..
A lot of computer crashes depend on what you're doing with it.
The machine I'm working on right now running Win98 or Win2k crashed on a regular basis by itself. I was tempted to blame bad hardware. Under Linux with a similiar workload (OS, GUI, browser, mail client) it never crashes.. That I can blame on the software being run.
Identical machines with completely MS software behave the same, so it's hard to blame non MS software for the crashing.
My Compaq iPaq with WinCE would lock up or shut itself off about twice a day under virtually no load and no 3rd party software. (I hadn't really figured out what to do with it yet). I was ready to return it to the store. I opted to call it a part-time paperweight, and "try" Familiar Linux on it.. Hasn't crashed since..
Well, that's not completely true. I've done some rather silly OS upgrades (hey, lets change all the libraries while it's running, and see what happens), so the crash was user failure.
But not to make Linux sound perfect, I've crashed machines with poorly written software. I've sent them into huge loops, and had software running that managed to suck up all the memory and hang the machine (a packet sniffer monitoring a 100Mb/s connection). Even my favorite web server, thttpd, had a poorly written beta version once that would upset the server after a couple days of running.
Is it always the OS? Nope. I've had a set of 10 machines with "generic" memory in them.. After a few years of running, they all began crashing mysteriously about twice a day.. Swapped the memory out for name-brand memory, and the started working perfectly.
We have a big industrial looking Dell on the network. Memory flaked out in that. Machine was dying about once a month. Swapped that out for a larger quantity of Crucial memory, and no more problems.
In a computer store I worked in years ago, we bought the cheapest hardware possible. The motherboards didn't come with boxes, and the manuals never made a reference to a manufacturer. Most of the hardware I couldn't even track down a manufacturer name through the vendors. About 1 in 10 parts wouldn't behave properly when we turned it on. About 1 in 30 machines came back for repairs for bad hardware within a few months.
So, it is really up to everyone involved if the machine will work right. I use Asus motherboards, Crucial memory, and Western Digital hard drives, and rarely have a hardware problem. The last problem I had was a bad IDE cable. There's always something that can fail.
The software has to run well, and we've very very happy with Slackware's distributions, with Apache and thttpd.
The biggest problem we have is user software or simple misconfigurations.. What happens when you have a heavy traffic web site, and the web server logs never rotate or get truncated? The drive fills up fast, and you end up with 2Gb logs.
What happens when you write a program that ends up sucking up all the memory and CPU time? Makes it not run right (I've done it myself a few times. Oops.)
People constantly bring their home machines in to work for repairs, for various reasons. About half are software misconfigurations (how many 3rd party applications do you really need running at boot time?). The other half, dying hardware.. The CPU fan made noise for 6 months and then stopped making noise, but you let it go? Ya your CPU is burnt. Cheap fans do that faster than most.
Can they build a crash-proof computer? No. Just like they can't build a crash proof car.. Cars typically crash due to user failure (users including other drivers), or compontent failure (Ford tire blowouts). Not really the car's fault. I had a car in a parking lot crash. A driver missed the highway and broadsided it.
So, you can strive for perfection, but there are always going to be circumstances that can cause failures, usually attributed to users. (those damned users.).
Some Americans are too lazy to walk to the mailbox, and some are energetic enough when some twit goes riding around the apartment complex on his "Unique Two Wheeled Motorized Walking Machine", or riding past the trailer park next door showing off that he has a $5000 bicycle, when their houses aren't worth $5000.
The Smoking Gun was nice enough to leave his address unobscured, so We can see exactly where he lives:
1810 Maple Ln
Kent, WA 98030-7426
I can just picture the old man riding his overpriced mutant bicycle down the roads at 10mph, blocking traffic and annoying everyone in the area. Some kid probably grabbed it, and ditched it in the river.
Personally, I know running Windows inside and out simply from working on other people's machines.
:)
:)
For users, I help people on everything from Win95 through XP. Sometimes it's their actual workstation in the office, or machines brought from home and they politely ask me "can you fix this?". They already know there's nothing beyond me fixing unless it's a fairly fatal error (like a hard drive failing).
For example, right at this moment I have a WinME machine sitting on my workbench. It had all kinds of extra crap starting up in the startup directory and registry, it hadn't been defragged in 800 days (as reported by Windows), and virus software that hadn't been updated in about a year. It also hadn't had any Windows Updates done at all.
On my networks, there are hundreds of machines. Most are Linux, but some aren't.
One is a Windows Media streaming server that's simply hosted with us, so I haven't touched it since I set it's IP.
Some near and dear to me has 5 machines that are WinNT Server and Win2k Advanced Server that she does customer hosting, and custom site development on. She writes in Cold Fusion, and since some of these sites have existed for years, she hasn't been daring enought to get off of Windows yet. We did come to a compromise though. If I can set up a Linux machine with Cold Fusion on it, and prove to her that it won't be a headache to move the sites over (including moving the databases from MSSQL to MySQL), she'll switch to Linux.. Her concerns are perfectly justified. If she converted and the sites don't work, she'd loose all her income. If there are substantial differences in the way ColdFusion on Windows and ColdFusion on Linux work, her productivity will be down.
We also have some old NT boxes, that are serving sites that they've served for years. No one wants to rewrite the code for all of them, so they remain.
So, of all my machines, there are over 100 Linux boxes, maybe 5 NT boxes, 5 Win2k boxes, and 20 Win98/WinME/Win2k/WinXP workstations. Oh ya, don't forget 1/2 dozen OS/9 and OS/X machines.
*MY* machines are Linux. I use one workstation at work, one at home, a laptop, and an iPaq PDA.. Both workstations and the laptop have been upgraded to Slackware 9.0. The iPaq runs Familiar. Even my home firewall is running Slackware (7.1.0).
My girlfriend still uses Windows on her laptop, and her kid has a Win98 machine to chat with her little friends, and play games on. Eventually I'll get the kid moved over to Linux. I can't say the girlfriend will be easy to change, unless WineX handles "The Sims" better than Windows does.
So ya, I deal with Windows machines daily. And even though there are a whole lot more Unix machines on my networks, the Windows machines end up being the bigger headaches.
To really keep on topic, I have had problems with the Windows Updates too.. I believe it was on an "e-machine". Normal cheap consumer grade hardware with an "e" embossed into the side. It uses an Intel network card.. Windows Update has an updated driver listed, so I went ahead and let it install. After that reboot, it refused to get onto the network again. Took some fiddling with it to get rid of the new driver, and get the old driver going again. That's the machine the kid plays on, so she was rather upset that she couldn't chat with her little online friends for like an hour. Around the same time, I heard other people telling me that they had done the same upgrade, and had the same problem. Luckly for us, most of our office people don't do Windows Updates on their own, so we didn't have too many machines to fix..
Hehe..
:)
:)
I was contemplating microwaves and dishes the other night.. What would happen if you mounted the emitter from a home microwave oven (roughly 2.5Ghz) on a big old satellite dish, and aligned it with a satellite? Like, the old satellite TV control boxes aligned the dishes fairly easily. Would 1000w on a 15' dish be enough to shut off HBO? {{Evil Grin}}
That wouldn't be the safest place to be standing, would it?
But as far as people's paranoia goes, I got a 2' (24db) parabolic antenna for my laptop (200mw card). It's on a tripod a common area of our office. It's not actually attached to anything, other than the tripod. Every day, I see that someone turns it away from their office or desk. Over the last week, it's turned about 90 degrees to the left. I suspect the people to the right of the dish. No one believes me when I tell them that it's just a piece of metal until it's turned on..
I had only intended on keeping it in the office temporarly, but this has become entertaining..
Actually, you asking for proof is more of what *THEY* should be doing.
/24's, the ISP is null routed entirely, until they behave.
:)
A *RESPONSIBLE* organization would be investigating all of the incidents, rather than just saying "1.2.3.4 is spamming, lets block 1.2.3.0/22 to make sure they're stopped."
ISP's investigate abuse claims. *THEN* they'll block accordingly. I've known Level3 to block individual IP's, and if the company hosting them lets them add/move to a new IP, they'll do more. There's a procedure they follow, not just arbitrarly blocking traffic because they feel like it.
Sure, if a spammer finds a relay on my network, block it temporarly. But it'd better be something that can be undone quickly. It's useless to have a system where I can fix the problem, but wait months for some anonymous person to undo their blacklist.
There was one machine hosted with us that was open for relaying, accidently. The owner spotted it when there were a bunch of messages (about 100) coming from China, going out to other accounts, but he shouldn't have been allowed to.. The funny part is, that was on a network that has never been blackholed, and there wasn't a single complaint generated from it.
If there was a proper organization set up that handled the blackholes, rather than a few hundred groups of egomanics doing it, it would be better. Say if the NIC's and IANA were all in cooperation with the group, would be better.
My idea of it would be something along the lines of:
1) A complain goes to the anti-spam group..
2) After a proper investigation (like, verifying the spam complaint was real), the anti-spam group asks the ISP to block the IP, and the NIC's are asked to remove the NS records for the domain.
3) If that doesn't work (like, the ISP doesn't cooperate), that network gets a null-route with IANA.
4) If the ISP fails to behave, or lets the spammers get new
In a matter of months, you'd see a significant drop in spam.
Right now, the whole system is chaotic. A few hundred people making blackhole lists that no one is sure if they're on or not, or even why isn't productive.
Maybe I should write up a good plan, and submit it as a RFC..
Actually, phone calls *aren't* a good way to communicate with me.. I work odd hours.. Like yesterday, I worked from about 11am until 11pm at the office, and then until 6am at home..
:) After sitting on hold for over an hour with both AOL and Time Warner/RoadRunner on individual cases, just to be told, "Sorry, we don't know anything about that" on abuse issues, I know it doesn't do much good to call the listed numbers. It also doesn't do much good for me to call Moscow at 4am their time. If I'm lucky, they'll see an English email come in, and run it through babelfish to read it.
If you called my office, you'd be listening to yourself talk to the answering machine. But if you dropped me an Email it would be answered quickly. Just like the guy who decided one of our primary domains was unused and he wanted to buy it off us.. I got back with him within a couple hours.
Likewise, if I needed to contact you, I know most offices won't answer between 6pm and 8am, unless it happens to be a spiffy-keen NOC.
We receive legal notes by Email all the time. Usually it's nothing significant, but answering them quickly is enough to keep us from getting sued.
Most of the blackhole problems we've encountered weren't directly with our networks.. Like I said, other networks very frequently get larger blocks blacklisted. What do I do? Go to my providers switch and start yanking out wires until I find the one that Mr. Relay is using? That'd go over really well, assuming I could even do it. Maybe I should call my provider, and ask for the physical address of the demarc for another block? ha.
If you don't like the fact that SPAM exists, I suggest you bring up a bigger issue with the USPS. I have a *SERIOUS* problem with junk mail. Consider the resources that are burnt up by that.. Besides the wasted fuel used by the mail trucks, and the time used to sort it, it wastes space in my box, and causes litter. After I moved recently, the post office never stopped delivering the junk mail to my house. An old neighbor called to ask if it was ok for him to throw it all away, because it was spilling into the street.
If we're to take the blackhole thing as a valid method for filtering, the USPS should adopt the same thing. If someone sends more than X pieces of unsolicited mail, just throw away all the mail from that zip code. If that isn't sufficent, the surrounding 3 zip codes too.. So what if your mail doesn't go out, at least you've stopped the junk mail.
I'm definately going to suggest it to the US Legal system. To make a point that you shouldn't commit crimes, every time there is a death penalty conviction, they should kill the next two defendants too. Who cares if they did anything relating to the matter, right?
Ok, that was a stretch, but I hope you see where I was going with it.. You're blocking innocent networks with poorly designed arbitrary rules. Well, the blacklist mantainers cover their asses by saying "we only make the liste, we don't tell you how to use it." But Joe ISP admin doesn't think about that. He takes your stance of "This is cool, I can stop a bunch of mail."
Yup, you're exactly the admin that we get complaints about every day.. And when you continue to treat your customers like that, either you'll white list us, or they'll change to another provider.
We use MailScanner, with damned well over a 95% success rate for catching spam.. It does use blackhole lists minimally, and even if it is marked as spam, it's *MARKED*. The subject line is changed, so we can filter automagically. That way, I don't have a single complaint from any users that I blocked a message so they couldn't receive it.. After we went with MailScanner, most of my users started filtering all their spam marked mail to trash. But some (like me) filter them off to a spam box to be checked later. A few real messages show up in there occasionally (maybe 10 of 10k, but those were still important).
But hey, like you said, it's your network. Of course since you're blocking Email without really knowing who you're blocking, it may be important.. The next message may be from a lawyer about illegal content on your network (and the last communication before a lawsuit), or a note from someone like me saying "Hey, we spotted this odd traffic coming from your network.", which may have been the first indicator to you that someone broke into one of your servers.
I am anything but pro-spam, but I'm happy to see the blackhole lists get kicked around a little bit. Some of my accounts get hit more than the average person, because they are well placed on many web pages, or have been in use for years and are now forwarded to my account when people leave the company. I average about 200 spam messages per day coming into my account.
/.'d right now, or I'd complain about them, but lets check who we can.
$RANT_MODE="ON";
I also handle many networks, with many many machines. Some of our networks have other people's equipment on it, but I'm 100% positive that they don't spam from their machines. Since they frequently ask me to help with their configurations, or help with problems, I'm intimately aware of what they do.
If there are spam complaints, they filter through to me very quickly. Level3's abuse account gets most of them. They filter out most of the bogus complaints, and are quick to get with us about legitimate complaints. We did have one machine hosted on one network that was spamming, which we ejected from the network shortly afterwards.
On a monthly basis, someone will come to me saying that they've been blacklisted by one of the many lists for ambiguous reasons. Any incident that is legitimate is cleared up between us and our bandwidth provider, under the threat of having the IP or IP block blocked from all Internet access. Level3 Communications is very anti-spam. They'll cut you off for being a spammer. If we don't explain or handle an incident, we could very easily loose our lines. I have no problem with this.
The last case with Level3 was a single spam complaint, sent through SpamCop. The message wasn't a spam at all. Someone had made a purchase online with an invalid credit card number. The Email simply stated that they had attempted a purchase (with IP and invoice number), and said if they still intended to make the purchase, they should contact the sales department at the store. I know the owner of the store personally, so I called him. He freaked out when I told him there was a spam complaint. This is a business man who is the most honest person I know. (If in Ft. Lauderdale, tell Glenn I say "hi"). I read the Email to him, and he confirmed that it was a legitimate message, and the card had been bad.. He immediately cancelled the order, and blacklisted the customer. The next day I got a forwarded Email which was an apology from the customer. She sends every Email off to SpamCop, and lets them sort them out. Nice, huh?
Now on to the abuses of the spews system. SpamHaus is
65.59.224.0/25 is one of our networks. A small backwater of our network. A few older machines live there, and not much happens. SPEWS has 65.59.224.0/24 blacklisted, as well as 66.166.136.128/24 which is no relationship to us (the wrong network size is theirs, not ours). Because I have machines on the first half of 65.59.224.0/25, I'm blacklisted. 65.59.224.128/25 could be blacklisted, but I happen to know that they have quite a few hosting customers, most of who know nothing about the other customers.. Legitimately blacklisted??
ORDB has my ex-girlfriend's mail server listed. She develops and hosts sites. No spamming at all.
65.59.224.11 is listed as herbalo.com. Funny thing is, it doesn't exist on our network.. I'll personally escort anyone from spews into the colo to prove it to them.. Oh wait, I forgot, these are anonymous people who don't exist in the real world and don't feel themselves accountable for blacklisting innocent networks.
AOL has blocked one of my own servers, as well as those of two different friends (on their own networks) for "potential spam".. One of them had a *WEB* proxy server, and aparently because it existed (on port 8000), he was blacklisted from sending
You don't have to send the monkeys.. An infinite number of monkeys with an infinite number of packet generators will eventually create any traffic that may have beeen sent across the network.
Who needs Shakespeare? I need network traffic!
Ah, even the Scientologists deserve connectivity. I hack and serve porn. They regress back to the womb.. We all get our kicks somehow. :)