Any decent employer just wants good skills, and shouldn't care where you picked them up. Consider employer reaction as a litmus test for whether you want to work there or not. I don't think my contractor friend ever had a problem, but he's worked on every continent except Antarctica. Certainly he is in a very high demand market, with pitifully few qualified workers. I'm nowhere near the DB/SAP field, and I get asked about it a few times each year from headhunters.
People become independent IT contractors after they have 20 years of experience and get fed up working for other people. They can do this because they have 20 years worth of personal contacts, industry knowledge and hands-on experience to draw from. You have none of those things.
Don't take it so easy with the kid.:-) But I'll second your pessimal advice.
I'd peg the minimum at 10 years before being fed up enough to start contracting. I started at 7 years, and the first 5 years of contracting were very rough despite some extremely niche skills that paid very well on a few occasions. I willingly went back to work for a big company with the intention of learning all the other skills I needed.
The only successful contractors have a lot of business skills to draw on, as well as their one or two specific technical skills. The only way to learn business skills is to work your way up in a company and pay attention to all the myriad of roles necessary in a modern company. At age 20, the kid can not possibly have that experience, flipping burgers for a couple of years doesn't count. The OP needs to spend a few years minimum in a 9to5 job, where he can keep his eyes and ears open and learn about everything not directly related to his job. Learn how purchasing departments work, AP/AR, personnel, review boards, building maintenance, middle management, legal and all the rest. Its not necessary to do those jobs, just learn how others do those jobs and why, because you will need all those skills for yourself, and know how to interact with every level in a company to keep the money coming in.
When the OP can tell a middle manager "That's not my job, but I know an IC who can do it for a fixed price" and do the job at night, then he is ready to start on the path of being a contractor.
Did I mention I'm 20 years old? Please hire me. Contractors don't beg to be hired, they approach a client with a specific offer for a well defined service and a calculated price. They can do this because they have spent years building up contacts all over their industry. The kid needs to learn this on his own, we can type it here in/., fount of wisdom and truth, and he still won't get it (because he's only 20).
the AC
[contracting for over 20 years, still waiting to become rich]
Sure there is. Just yesterday I started working at 9 in the morning, and finished at 5 this morning. That's why I'm posting now at 1 in the afternoon, I just got up to go do it again.
I met one SAP programmer at a client site who gets all his training in warm, sunny locations. If I didn't know everything already, I'd probably follow his example:-)
He loves to travel, earns enough from each SAP contract to take a few months off, and spends part of his travel learning "The Next Great Thing". I think he started as a DB2 expert, then went through the whole Oracle training series in places like Bangkok and Kuala Lumpur. He calculates the cost against things like local cost of living, exchange rates, and vacation possibilities. He double checks the course is offered in English, rather than the local language, often the courses have American or Kiwi instructors. He also talks to useless lumps of s^W^W^W^Wrecruiters about where the market is going and which skillset pays the best to decide what courses to take.
He had one example from when he was working in Colorado. To take the two or three necessary Oracle training courses local to Colorado, at US$3000-US$5000 per course, he could buy a ticket to Kuala Lumpur and take the courses at the equivalent of US$400, and still come out ahead. He spent a week in some tropical beach hut in the region to get over his jetlag, then 3 or 4 hectic weeks at the Oracle HQ in KL using the exact same materials and computers. Afterwards he had all the training on a specific product for his next contract, and a great tan.
If you do this, you don't have to mention where you got your certificate, but if it comes out, then put a positive spin on it. "Yes, I picked up that certificate on my most recent around the world trip, while scouting possible lucrative contracts downunda. But your company's project really caught my attention bla bla bullshit bla..." At the very least, some time spent in a foreign country learning new job skills will also open your mind quite a bit more than most 'merkins. Yeah, that's it, its a learning experience.
This is exactly what I use NoCatAuth for. I run an open.1g access point, accessible to anyone on my street. It doesn't require a login, just a correct configuration to gain access to the internet. If the user just connects and isn't configured correctly, and they are using a browser (most are), then they'll see a welcome page in 3 languages telling them what they have to change to have access. It also links to a statistics page, and other information about my network.
I like KA9Q's suggestion for a new reserved multicast address for mobile IP configuration. There needs to be an RFC describing the protocol, so that an AP can tell a new device about authentication methods (802.1x, kerberos, needs only a valid email, open, etc.) and access methods (behind NAT flag, default gateway, local DNS servers). This would be great for all the new mobile computing devices, set your PDA to autoconfigure, and away you go.
I saw this accident scene this morning. Driving back from Paris to Brussels, there was a large traffic jam which took about 20 minutes to get through. The accident occured just after a rest stop, just after the point where the rest stop traffic merges back into the autoroute. Since its where I usually stop for a rest about an hour north of Paris, I can imagine they either stopped for a rest and were merging back onto the autoroute, or else they got caught in a bunch of trucks scooting around someone merging slowly. Lots of accidents happen at the far end of rest areas. It was pretty foggy this morning, its that season.
There was quite a bit of heavy equipment on the scene, a mobile crane on the slip road, and a bucket-crane truck with a dump truck picking up what was left of the one truck's load, it looked like scrap metal. There was the cab and remnants of a trailer, very shredded, on flatbed trucks on the slip road. There was obviously a fire, since parts of the guard rail were burned, and the asphalt was scorched. There were some Pompiers (firefighters) and about a dozen Gendarmes from the B.E.A (Bureau d'Enquetes Accidents) standing around, but they had obviously finished all of their report gathering by 10:30 AM when I passed.
I know Rop, and I've probably met the others at various linux/hac-tic/2600/CCC/EC patent protest events. My heart goes out to the families and loved ones of those involved, and here is wishes for a speedy recovery for the injured. This accident affects all of us in the techie, hacker-in-the-good-sense-of-the-word, and linux scenes here in Europe. Lets remember Hans for the good things he accomplished in his life.
Maybe its because the book review itself is lame. The reviewer was stretching hard to come up with some points on how this book differs from the shallow make-a-fast-buck books which are little more than a rehash of the man pages for nessus and nmap.
I've seen the aftermath of cowboy security professionals, who come into a company, run nessus for a day or two, print out the report in its entirety, grab their money and run. At the other end of the spectrum I've seen CESG CHECK certified teams spend months carefully working through a structured procedure to secure an organisation's entire IT infrastructure. When I look at books I tend to categorise them into manpage reprints or full structured methodologies.
However, I'm certain that an O'Reilly book on nmap, written by the Fyodor himself, will be a worthy addition to my library. Here's hoping the book sells well enough you can earn some good money off of it.
the AC I had to set my clock back last week just to verify one of the cool new features in 3.70
There's no problem getting a PI IPv6 block for your AS, and multi-homing it. I'm doing it, so its not rocket surgery. There's even a new internet draft for multi-homing devices like IPv6 cell phones.
Its almost but not quite the same thing as IPv4, you get an AS, you ask the RIPE(or your local RIR) for a/48 (or/32 if you have big plans or lots of customers), then negotiate with various IPv6 capable peering points. A little playing around with BGP4+, a lot of playing around with broken multicast support, and the next thing you know, you've got multi-homed IPv6. Its a nerd thing right now, although growing into the commercial world at a steady pace.
Many ADSL providers here in Europe have transit and peering contracts which require an almost symetric level of traffic. Pull too much traffic, and you'll eventually find yourself in a breach of contract negotiations with the main carriers *cough*uunet*cough*L3*cough*opensewer*cough*
When your entire business is based on ASYMETRIC connections, you have to provide web hosting to balance the load. There is only one type of web service which can counteract all those thousands of home users downloading pr0n. Pr0n servers!
Many of the ADSL providers I work with have a few racks of pr0n servers to balance things out. The cautious ones get the money up front from the pr0nmeisters, because there are quite a few who serve up pr0n for a month or two, then disappear. There are many semi-legitimate pr0nsters who have no problem putting up a few thousand euros in bandwidth fees in advance, because they already are turning over huge amounts of cash from existing servers.
Hosting fees for pr0n servers are often slightly lower because the traffic patterns are to the ISPs advantage. Spammers, however, will get pulled in minutes, or at a maximum of a day later.
Those satellites are known as "keyhole". There were 10 of them before Hubble, and at least one built afterwards. The optics engineers and astronomers working on the super-secret american spy satellite knew that if they could make just one keyhole with slightly different optics and be allowed to point it out towards space, there would be a treasure of scientific information learned about the universe.
The first few keyholes were smaller, and were expendable after a service life of 6 to 18 months of taking photos of the soviet union and china. At a cost of over $1 billion (in 1970's dollars) each, the spy agencies wanted longer lasting satellites, because that much money soaked up a large percentage of their budget and only produced a few thousand interesting photos. There were at least a couple with exactly the same frame, optics, guidance packages and stabilizers as Hubble. Read Cliff Stoll's book "The Cuckoo's Egg" for an astronomer's view of the resolution of keyhole birds. The main difference was in the instrumentation package, keyholes having realtime far-infrared cameras, hi-res black and white cameras, and other optical frequencies helpful to trained analysts looking at earthbound targets.
The astronomers working on keyhole, being generally far more intelligent than the military, sold the idea that building ONE civilian version of keyhole would reap huge benefits for both science, and a reduction in the price of future keyholes.
The astronomers got their wish. The main fallout was that the mirror was ground wrong for Hubble, because keyhole 11, with an almost identical mirror, was using the test frame at the time. Google will turn up all you would care to read, and if you are inside the U.S., possibly a visit from men with no sense of humour. Keep your tin foil hats handy:-)
Nah, most street thieves are too stupid to try the handle first. They've got a rhythm, pop the lock with a screwdriver, twist the insides around, then pull hard on the door handle. The whole motion only takes a few seconds, only slightly longer than testing for the occasional unlocked door.
I've had my car broken into by thieves who didn't notice the fact the window was down, the doors were unlocked, and there was nothing in the car except bits of trash. Still, after one summer in the south of France, my old banger car had been damaged between 15 and 20 times by clueless thieves. They broke the boot lock twice (the original and the first replacement), and the door locks several times. When I finally just left empty holes where the door locks used to be, they smashed the windows to get in because they were too thick to realise the door couldn't be locked. I abandoned the car at Nice airport and wrote it off my taxes as a business loss.
It's fun to watch heavy street crime areas (central Amsterdam, along the Mediteranean coast from Albania to Portugal, anywhere in the greater London area) when the junkies and non-pro thieves are out in force in the wee early hours. One gang after another will walk up the street, breaking into each car, searching around for anything of value in about 20 seconds, then moving to the next car. Sometimes they are organised enough to have a guy with a moped keeping watch at the corner for approaching police cars.
One of my clients with many DNS servers has finally developed some filters to cut out all the AD crap lookups coming from a handful of poorly designed systems. Its not just a little bit of traffic, it was something like a 25x increase in bogus DNS traffic because a handful of his clients thought they could get away with putting their company name as the TLD or some other misunderstanding of AD.
Plan on first building a sandbox version of your network, with an external DNS server simulating the entire internet. Monitor the kinds of lookups escaping your network to make sure close to 100% of your traffic stays local. Your local AD and DNS servers should agree on your structure, and the rest of the world should agree on your chosen (assigned) domain name.
Although the batteries may come from the same manufacturer, and probably all from the same batches, there is a difference. At the end of the manufacturing step, the batteries are carefully tested using some precision electronics to measure things like internal resistance and impulse current. The subtle differences at that stage reveal whether a battery will die earlier or last longer. That is what determines which reseller label gets applied. The higher margin, well known brands will take bin 1 or bin 2 cells, lower margin store brands like to buy bin 5 or bin 6, which have a slightly lesser capacity. At the low end are the cells from bins 8 or 9, which will have a shorter shelf life, and die after a small amount of use. Those low quality cells tend to end up included with toys and other cheap consumer goods sporting a generic label.
The differences between the best and medium quality is not much, but the reject cells can be pretty bad.
the AC
Re:where are the IPv6 native ISPs?
on
IPv6 is Here
·
· Score: 2, Informative
The AMSix is a major IPv6 peering point, where many of their clients offer IPv6 to customers.
Nerim is a major provider in France. They offer IPv6 natively to all their home users, just enable it on your router/firewall.
The UK has any number of IPv6 capable ISPs (blech, puke), you just have to keep an eye on their internal support groups for help from those who have managed to make it work. Tunnels are always a way around broken providers, but are not an answer to your question.
There are a number of other transit and peering providers all over Europe who provide IPv6, and the ISPs are all starting to follow along. Demand only started when a handful of providers realised their was a large enough market for extra added services, even though very few customers made it an important item. The problem with IPv6 is that there is no WOW! factor, it just works as well as IPv4, transparently, and currently doesn't bring any new features to the internet that users can see.
Completely off topic... I had a great time at CeBit this year, talking to the chinese ADSL modem makers. After asking if thier boxes supported IPv6, I then told them I needed 20,000 boxes right away for a small scale test, but only with a product with IPv6 enabled right out of the box, no upgrades allowed. Once I started talking about the 20-40 million unit market over the next year, you could see their eyes light up. But if they offered an upgrade within a few weeks (in other words, they'd have their coders pull some all-nighters), I'd walk off to find another with IPv6 already built in. I have a feeling that next year there will be dozens of small ADSL routers with IPv6 capability. Once we can get cheap ADSL routers with IPv6 as a checklist item, ISPs will start offering it.
That's one word. Not a good idea on its own, but it can be made to work. It just takes some time and effort to build up defenses.
There are a few dozen common email addresses certain spam search software tries on every domain. ceo@, sales@, marketing, admin, info, etc. If you have control over your MTA, you can set it up to reject these addresses before the spam takes up too much of your bandwidth. If you have control over the whole machine or network, you can set up automatic IP blocking for a short period of time when you think there is a dictionary attack under way.
Beyond that, if you take the time, you can block certain IP ranges known to be the origins of 50% or more of spam. *.comcast.com, *.cn, *.kr, *.wanadoo.fr. This will cut down on another large percentage of spams.
I run a large number of wildcarded domains, some are legitimate, others are just used as honeypots to blackhole certain spam operations at the borders of my AS. It takes some effort to maintain, and to keep an eye out for problems, but the effect is a large reduction of the worst spam. Still, I get dozens of spams per day past my filters, but no where near the 200 to 500 per day without.
I'm not sure its Arnaud behind this scam. Arnaud is known for putting his money behind things which will turn around and make him more money, preferably in the short term. He is very gifted in that respect. This seems to be someone using his name, probably to impress people googling about reputation behind the directors.
Marcopoly is a shitty online company, but they certainly have high enough margins. They get a lot of business because they have a lot of "rebadge" front companies, all of whom used to get their advertising through Tequila subsidiaries. They are now trying to be the French version of Dell, but also selling white goods. I didn't know FT bought them, but then I try to avoid that whole market.
A quick reverse directory on that address turns up no company called novinit, but the offices of a couple of shell companies, MMSA/Digiplace. Web design and hosting, with not much history according to google.
Novinit is not a registered company name in France. Perhaps it is the operating name of another company. The website does not offer the required information of a tax number, physical address, and other contact details.
Arnaud de la Fouchardière is the money behind the fly-by-night Marcopoly online store. They've got a bad reputation for shipping various bits of kit which probably fell off the back of trucks, and no after sales service. He made his money from online pr0n, mostly doing the technical front for prostitution rings using the old Minitel service.
There are two sites, novinit.com and jackito-pda.com, one is hosted in France, the other in California. They seem identical in content, but the one hosted on 7x24net in the U.S. has bogus registration information.
The photos of the device on the website are of an Apple Newton.
There is no way to get in touch with this company except through a paypal link. The phone number given for the registrars is a pre-paid anonymous GSM phone on the orange network.
Meeesa thinks yousa needsa buy more consumer goods, citeeesen. Lessa all be thanksful weesa all dee commerce and zees new film from yousa god, Meesa Lucass. Yousa buy more. Yousa buy more nowsa. Buy! Anda yousa be vewwy happy.
From what I have on my bookshelf, books I have kept through many, many moves.
Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman! Adventures of a curious character compiled by Ralph Leighton. I was handed this book the night before Feynman was scheduled to give a talk, and I consumed it all at one reading. I sat in awe during his speech, amazed at his wit and quick mind. Then a group of us went out to dinner with him, and sealed forever his place as one of the people I worship.
The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester. Both versions, the 1939 short story first published in Thrilling Wonder Stories, and the 1956 novel. One of the first books I read which explored profound societal changes caused by a discovery. He truly thought out the consequences of being able to jaunte, and the obsolescence of things like prisons, borders, and women's rights.
The Lord of the Rings By some british guy. I heard they made it into a movie recently. The book which kicked off my interest in mythos, languages, and adventuring.
1984 by Eric Blair, and Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury. Books I read when I was capable of understanding the perverse and twisted self-supporting arguments used by those in power to maintain their hold on tenuous authority.
Starship Troopers by RAH. Again, a book about fascism, ultra-nationalism, and blind obedience to authority. Plus some cool weapons and tactics. This book opened my eyes how cool toys could be used to seduce young men to perform extreme acts without thinking about their actions or consequences.
Harry Potter by JK Rowling. After reading the first two books, I realised how difficult it is to write easy reading prose, and I've never tried to write fiction since. I also like the carefully camouflaged deeper meanings, such as Aquinas' 7 virtues and vices, good/evil/lawful/chaotic house themes, use of latin and greek root words to betray the truth behind people, spells, and creatures.
The Lensman Series by E. E. Doc Smith. First sci-fi books I picked up as a child, and forever fueled my imagination for space flight.
The Art of Seduction by Robert Greene and The Kama Sutra, both are completely unconnected to the modern western world, but contain nuggets of knowledge hidden within. Both need to be read with an eye on how each situation can be translated into dealing with modern women. ESR's sex tips is a good, albeit stilted, distillation of these books translated into geek, for geeks.
There are others, fun books like HHGTTG, and the Disc World series. But those haven't really changed my life other than as mild sources of humourous quotes.
The cybercafes.com site was created in about 1996, and abandoned in 2000, I think. I found cybercafes.com in my bookmarks of client sites from 1997, but the domain obviously changed hands since then. A quick glance through their database shows a couple of cafes I know haven't been around since 2000 or 2001. Their entries for Belgium and France still show francs for currency, so it isn't just Ireland.
Its a cobweb site. Nothing to see here, move along, move along. There will be a repost of this article over the weekend by CmdrTaco.
How many stories have floated around the internet news sites in the last year where a stupid criminal did something brainless like rob a bank with their own deposit slips, or made an anonymous extortion attempt using their real name? There are idiots in every profession, even criminals.
So a spotty teen loser with a low IQ gets busted because he didn't cover the autofocus and record lights with electrical tape. He probably also had the camera on a tripod in the third row with nobody between him and the screen where he could be picked out with ease. This kid deserves everything coming to him.
If you are going to record from a cinema screen, then you need to ensure the camera doesn't look anything like a camera. Hide it inside the head of an inflatable doll and put it in the seat next to you. Make sure all the light emitting parts are covered, like the view finder, rangefinder and power/record leds.
the AC
I may just buy one of those UK cinema goggles off eBay if I get a bonus next week. I've heard they are cheap commercial crap, with fixed focus plastic lenses, but for 75-90 Euros it might be a nice toy
What happens next time I bring a lady in with me and we sit up the back an eh...
Then the projectionist with the night vision camcorder will release a video of you two on all the P-2-P networks. You've seen the quality of one made by a girl named Paris, but don't expect to get a TV contract out of it, just years and years of embarassment.
Slashdot Mirror
These are Aussies you (we) are making fun of, do it right.
That's not a root kit.
Zzzzzzzziip. Now this here is a root kit, mate.
the AC
Funnier if you know the more sexual meaning of root (route) in Aussie.
Any decent employer just wants good skills, and shouldn't care where you picked them up. Consider employer reaction as a litmus test for whether you want to work there or not. I don't think my contractor friend ever had a problem, but he's worked on every continent except Antarctica. Certainly he is in a very high demand market, with pitifully few qualified workers. I'm nowhere near the DB/SAP field, and I get asked about it a few times each year from headhunters.
the AC
Putting spin on bad news for over 20 years
People become independent IT contractors after they have 20 years of experience and get fed up working for other people. They can do this because they have 20 years worth of personal contacts, industry knowledge and hands-on experience to draw from. You have none of those things.
:-) But I'll second your pessimal advice.
/., fount of wisdom and truth, and he still won't get it (because he's only 20).
Don't take it so easy with the kid.
I'd peg the minimum at 10 years before being fed up enough to start contracting. I started at 7 years, and the first 5 years of contracting were very rough despite some extremely niche skills that paid very well on a few occasions. I willingly went back to work for a big company with the intention of learning all the other skills I needed.
The only successful contractors have a lot of business skills to draw on, as well as their one or two specific technical skills. The only way to learn business skills is to work your way up in a company and pay attention to all the myriad of roles necessary in a modern company. At age 20, the kid can not possibly have that experience, flipping burgers for a couple of years doesn't count. The OP needs to spend a few years minimum in a 9to5 job, where he can keep his eyes and ears open and learn about everything not directly related to his job. Learn how purchasing departments work, AP/AR, personnel, review boards, building maintenance, middle management, legal and all the rest. Its not necessary to do those jobs, just learn how others do those jobs and why, because you will need all those skills for yourself, and know how to interact with every level in a company to keep the money coming in.
When the OP can tell a middle manager "That's not my job, but I know an IC who can do it for a fixed price" and do the job at night, then he is ready to start on the path of being a contractor.
Did I mention I'm 20 years old? Please hire me.
Contractors don't beg to be hired, they approach a client with a specific offer for a well defined service and a calculated price. They can do this because they have spent years building up contacts all over their industry. The kid needs to learn this on his own, we can type it here in
the AC
[contracting for over 20 years, still waiting to become rich]
i dont think there's a such thing as a 9-5 IT job
Sure there is. Just yesterday I started working at 9 in the morning, and finished at 5 this morning. That's why I'm posting now at 1 in the afternoon, I just got up to go do it again.
I hate 4:00 AM cutover schedules.
the AC
I met one SAP programmer at a client site who gets all his training in warm, sunny locations. If I didn't know everything already, I'd probably follow his example :-)
He loves to travel, earns enough from each SAP contract to take a few months off, and spends part of his travel learning "The Next Great Thing". I think he started as a DB2 expert, then went through the whole Oracle training series in places like Bangkok and Kuala Lumpur. He calculates the cost against things like local cost of living, exchange rates, and vacation possibilities. He double checks the course is offered in English, rather than the local language, often the courses have American or Kiwi instructors. He also talks to useless lumps of s^W^W^W^Wrecruiters about where the market is going and which skillset pays the best to decide what courses to take.
He had one example from when he was working in Colorado. To take the two or three necessary Oracle training courses local to Colorado, at US$3000-US$5000 per course, he could buy a ticket to Kuala Lumpur and take the courses at the equivalent of US$400, and still come out ahead. He spent a week in some tropical beach hut in the region to get over his jetlag, then 3 or 4 hectic weeks at the Oracle HQ in KL using the exact same materials and computers. Afterwards he had all the training on a specific product for his next contract, and a great tan.
If you do this, you don't have to mention where you got your certificate, but if it comes out, then put a positive spin on it. "Yes, I picked up that certificate on my most recent around the world trip, while scouting possible lucrative contracts downunda. But your company's project really caught my attention bla bla bullshit bla..." At the very least, some time spent in a foreign country learning new job skills will also open your mind quite a bit more than most 'merkins. Yeah, that's it, its a learning experience.
the AC
This is exactly what I use NoCatAuth for. I run an open .1g access point, accessible to anyone on my street. It doesn't require a login, just a correct configuration to gain access to the internet. If the user just connects and isn't configured correctly, and they are using a browser (most are), then they'll see a welcome page in 3 languages telling them what they have to change to have access. It also links to a statistics page, and other information about my network.
I like KA9Q's suggestion for a new reserved multicast address for mobile IP configuration. There needs to be an RFC describing the protocol, so that an AP can tell a new device about authentication methods (802.1x, kerberos, needs only a valid email, open, etc.) and access methods (behind NAT flag, default gateway, local DNS servers). This would be great for all the new mobile computing devices, set your PDA to autoconfigure, and away you go.
the AC
I saw this accident scene this morning. Driving back from Paris to Brussels, there was a large traffic jam which took about 20 minutes to get through. The accident occured just after a rest stop, just after the point where the rest stop traffic merges back into the autoroute. Since its where I usually stop for a rest about an hour north of Paris, I can imagine they either stopped for a rest and were merging back onto the autoroute, or else they got caught in a bunch of trucks scooting around someone merging slowly. Lots of accidents happen at the far end of rest areas. It was pretty foggy this morning, its that season.
There was quite a bit of heavy equipment on the scene, a mobile crane on the slip road, and a bucket-crane truck with a dump truck picking up what was left of the one truck's load, it looked like scrap metal. There was the cab and remnants of a trailer, very shredded, on flatbed trucks on the slip road. There was obviously a fire, since parts of the guard rail were burned, and the asphalt was scorched. There were some Pompiers (firefighters) and about a dozen Gendarmes from the B.E.A (Bureau d'Enquetes Accidents) standing around, but they had obviously finished all of their report gathering by 10:30 AM when I passed.
I know Rop, and I've probably met the others at various linux/hac-tic/2600/CCC/EC patent protest events. My heart goes out to the families and loved ones of those involved, and here is wishes for a speedy recovery for the injured. This accident affects all of us in the techie, hacker-in-the-good-sense-of-the-word, and linux scenes here in Europe. Lets remember Hans for the good things he accomplished in his life.
the AC
... roll out a new OS he also won't be familiar with, train all his users, and do it all flawlessly with no money.
;-) but you forgot "in his copious free time".
Sounds like many managers I know
the AC
Maybe its because the book review itself is lame. The reviewer was stretching hard to come up with some points on how this book differs from the shallow make-a-fast-buck books which are little more than a rehash of the man pages for nessus and nmap.
I've seen the aftermath of cowboy security professionals, who come into a company, run nessus for a day or two, print out the report in its entirety, grab their money and run. At the other end of the spectrum I've seen CESG CHECK certified teams spend months carefully working through a structured procedure to secure an organisation's entire IT infrastructure. When I look at books I tend to categorise them into manpage reprints or full structured methodologies.
However, I'm certain that an O'Reilly book on nmap, written by the Fyodor himself, will be a worthy addition to my library. Here's hoping the book sells well enough you can earn some good money off of it.
the AC
I had to set my clock back last week just to verify one of the cool new features in 3.70
There's no problem getting a PI IPv6 block for your AS, and multi-homing it. I'm doing it, so its not rocket surgery. There's even a new internet draft for multi-homing devices like IPv6 cell phones.
/48 (or /32 if you have big plans or lots of customers), then negotiate with various IPv6 capable peering points. A little playing around with BGP4+, a lot of playing around with broken multicast support, and the next thing you know, you've got multi-homed IPv6. Its a nerd thing right now, although growing into the commercial world at a steady pace.
Its almost but not quite the same thing as IPv4, you get an AS, you ask the RIPE(or your local RIR) for a
the AC
Many ADSL providers here in Europe have transit and peering contracts which require an almost symetric level of traffic. Pull too much traffic, and you'll eventually find yourself in a breach of contract negotiations with the main carriers *cough*uunet*cough*L3*cough*opensewer*cough*
When your entire business is based on ASYMETRIC connections, you have to provide web hosting to balance the load. There is only one type of web service which can counteract all those thousands of home users downloading pr0n. Pr0n servers!
Many of the ADSL providers I work with have a few racks of pr0n servers to balance things out. The cautious ones get the money up front from the pr0nmeisters, because there are quite a few who serve up pr0n for a month or two, then disappear. There are many semi-legitimate pr0nsters who have no problem putting up a few thousand euros in bandwidth fees in advance, because they already are turning over huge amounts of cash from existing servers.
Hosting fees for pr0n servers are often slightly lower because the traffic patterns are to the ISPs advantage. Spammers, however, will get pulled in minutes, or at a maximum of a day later.
the AC
You mean you found a screen where the brightness control goes up to 11?
the AC
Those satellites are known as "keyhole". There were 10 of them before Hubble, and at least one built afterwards. The optics engineers and astronomers working on the super-secret american spy satellite knew that if they could make just one keyhole with slightly different optics and be allowed to point it out towards space, there would be a treasure of scientific information learned about the universe.
:-)
The first few keyholes were smaller, and were expendable after a service life of 6 to 18 months of taking photos of the soviet union and china. At a cost of over $1 billion (in 1970's dollars) each, the spy agencies wanted longer lasting satellites, because that much money soaked up a large percentage of their budget and only produced a few thousand interesting photos. There were at least a couple with exactly the same frame, optics, guidance packages and stabilizers as Hubble. Read Cliff Stoll's book "The Cuckoo's Egg" for an astronomer's view of the resolution of keyhole birds. The main difference was in the instrumentation package, keyholes having realtime far-infrared cameras, hi-res black and white cameras, and other optical frequencies helpful to trained analysts looking at earthbound targets.
The astronomers working on keyhole, being generally far more intelligent than the military, sold the idea that building ONE civilian version of keyhole would reap huge benefits for both science, and a reduction in the price of future keyholes.
The astronomers got their wish. The main fallout was that the mirror was ground wrong for Hubble, because keyhole 11, with an almost identical mirror, was using the test frame at the time. Google will turn up all you would care to read, and if you are inside the U.S., possibly a visit from men with no sense of humour. Keep your tin foil hats handy
the AC
Nah, most street thieves are too stupid to try the handle first. They've got a rhythm, pop the lock with a screwdriver, twist the insides around, then pull hard on the door handle. The whole motion only takes a few seconds, only slightly longer than testing for the occasional unlocked door.
I've had my car broken into by thieves who didn't notice the fact the window was down, the doors were unlocked, and there was nothing in the car except bits of trash. Still, after one summer in the south of France, my old banger car had been damaged between 15 and 20 times by clueless thieves. They broke the boot lock twice (the original and the first replacement), and the door locks several times. When I finally just left empty holes where the door locks used to be, they smashed the windows to get in because they were too thick to realise the door couldn't be locked. I abandoned the car at Nice airport and wrote it off my taxes as a business loss.
It's fun to watch heavy street crime areas (central Amsterdam, along the Mediteranean coast from Albania to Portugal, anywhere in the greater London area) when the junkies and non-pro thieves are out in force in the wee early hours. One gang after another will walk up the street, breaking into each car, searching around for anything of value in about 20 seconds, then moving to the next car. Sometimes they are organised enough to have a guy with a moped keeping watch at the corner for approaching police cars.
the AC
Yes, get the DNS correct from the very beginning.
One of my clients with many DNS servers has finally developed some filters to cut out all the AD crap lookups coming from a handful of poorly designed systems. Its not just a little bit of traffic, it was something like a 25x increase in bogus DNS traffic because a handful of his clients thought they could get away with putting their company name as the TLD or some other misunderstanding of AD.
Plan on first building a sandbox version of your network, with an external DNS server simulating the entire internet. Monitor the kinds of lookups escaping your network to make sure close to 100% of your traffic stays local. Your local AD and DNS servers should agree on your structure, and the rest of the world should agree on your chosen (assigned) domain name.
the AC
Although the batteries may come from the same manufacturer, and probably all from the same batches, there is a difference. At the end of the manufacturing step, the batteries are carefully tested using some precision electronics to measure things like internal resistance and impulse current. The subtle differences at that stage reveal whether a battery will die earlier or last longer. That is what determines which reseller label gets applied. The higher margin, well known brands will take bin 1 or bin 2 cells, lower margin store brands like to buy bin 5 or bin 6, which have a slightly lesser capacity. At the low end are the cells from bins 8 or 9, which will have a shorter shelf life, and die after a small amount of use. Those low quality cells tend to end up included with toys and other cheap consumer goods sporting a generic label.
The differences between the best and medium quality is not much, but the reject cells can be pretty bad.
the AC
Move to Europe.
The AMSix is a major IPv6 peering point, where many of their clients offer IPv6 to customers.
Nerim is a major provider in France. They offer IPv6 natively to all their home users, just enable it on your router/firewall.
The UK has any number of IPv6 capable ISPs (blech, puke), you just have to keep an eye on their internal support groups for help from those who have managed to make it work. Tunnels are always a way around broken providers, but are not an answer to your question.
There are a number of other transit and peering providers all over Europe who provide IPv6, and the ISPs are all starting to follow along. Demand only started when a handful of providers realised their was a large enough market for extra added services, even though very few customers made it an important item. The problem with IPv6 is that there is no WOW! factor, it just works as well as IPv4, transparently, and currently doesn't bring any new features to the internet that users can see.
Completely off topic...
I had a great time at CeBit this year, talking to the chinese ADSL modem makers. After asking if thier boxes supported IPv6, I then told them I needed 20,000 boxes right away for a small scale test, but only with a product with IPv6 enabled right out of the box, no upgrades allowed. Once I started talking about the 20-40 million unit market over the next year, you could see their eyes light up. But if they offered an upgrade within a few weeks (in other words, they'd have their coders pull some all-nighters), I'd walk off to find another with IPv6 already built in. I have a feeling that next year there will be dozens of small ADSL routers with IPv6 capability. Once we can get cheap ADSL routers with IPv6 as a checklist item, ISPs will start offering it.
In the U.S., the term for your situation is TSOL.
the AC
Maybe.
That's one word. Not a good idea on its own, but it can be made to work. It just takes some time and effort to build up defenses.
There are a few dozen common email addresses certain spam search software tries on every domain. ceo@, sales@, marketing, admin, info, etc. If you have control over your MTA, you can set it up to reject these addresses before the spam takes up too much of your bandwidth. If you have control over the whole machine or network, you can set up automatic IP blocking for a short period of time when you think there is a dictionary attack under way.
Beyond that, if you take the time, you can block certain IP ranges known to be the origins of 50% or more of spam. *.comcast.com, *.cn, *.kr, *.wanadoo.fr. This will cut down on another large percentage of spams.
I run a large number of wildcarded domains, some are legitimate, others are just used as honeypots to blackhole certain spam operations at the borders of my AS. It takes some effort to maintain, and to keep an eye out for problems, but the effect is a large reduction of the worst spam. Still, I get dozens of spams per day past my filters, but no where near the 200 to 500 per day without.
the AC
I'm not sure its Arnaud behind this scam. Arnaud is known for putting his money behind things which will turn around and make him more money, preferably in the short term. He is very gifted in that respect. This seems to be someone using his name, probably to impress people googling about reputation behind the directors.
Marcopoly is a shitty online company, but they certainly have high enough margins. They get a lot of business because they have a lot of "rebadge" front companies, all of whom used to get their advertising through Tequila subsidiaries. They are now trying to be the French version of Dell, but also selling white goods. I didn't know FT bought them, but then I try to avoid that whole market.
the AC
A quick reverse directory on that address turns up no company called novinit, but the offices of a couple of shell companies, MMSA/Digiplace. Web design and hosting, with not much history according to google.
Novinit is not a registered company name in France. Perhaps it is the operating name of another company. The website does not offer the required information of a tax number, physical address, and other contact details.
Arnaud de la Fouchardière is the money behind the fly-by-night Marcopoly online store. They've got a bad reputation for shipping various bits of kit which probably fell off the back of trucks, and no after sales service. He made his money from online pr0n, mostly doing the technical front for prostitution rings using the old Minitel service.
There are two sites, novinit.com and jackito-pda.com, one is hosted in France, the other in California. They seem identical in content, but the one hosted on 7x24net in the U.S. has bogus registration information.
The photos of the device on the website are of an Apple Newton.
There is no way to get in touch with this company except through a paypal link. The phone number given for the registrars is a pre-paid anonymous GSM phone on the orange network.
All the hallmarks of a scam.
the AC
Meeesa thinks yousa needsa buy more consumer goods, citeeesen. Lessa all be thanksful weesa all dee commerce and zees new film from yousa god, Meesa Lucass. Yousa buy more. Yousa buy more nowsa. Buy! Anda yousa be vewwy happy.
From what I have on my bookshelf, books I have kept through many, many moves.
Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman! Adventures of a curious character compiled by Ralph Leighton. I was handed this book the night before Feynman was scheduled to give a talk, and I consumed it all at one reading. I sat in awe during his speech, amazed at his wit and quick mind. Then a group of us went out to dinner with him, and sealed forever his place as one of the people I worship.
The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester. Both versions, the 1939 short story first published in Thrilling Wonder Stories, and the 1956 novel. One of the first books I read which explored profound societal changes caused by a discovery. He truly thought out the consequences of being able to jaunte, and the obsolescence of things like prisons, borders, and women's rights.
The Lord of the Rings By some british guy. I heard they made it into a movie recently. The book which kicked off my interest in mythos, languages, and adventuring.
1984 by Eric Blair, and Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury. Books I read when I was capable of understanding the perverse and twisted self-supporting arguments used by those in power to maintain their hold on tenuous authority.
Starship Troopers by RAH. Again, a book about fascism, ultra-nationalism, and blind obedience to authority. Plus some cool weapons and tactics. This book opened my eyes how cool toys could be used to seduce young men to perform extreme acts without thinking about their actions or consequences.
Harry Potter by JK Rowling. After reading the first two books, I realised how difficult it is to write easy reading prose, and I've never tried to write fiction since. I also like the carefully camouflaged deeper meanings, such as Aquinas' 7 virtues and vices, good/evil/lawful/chaotic house themes, use of latin and greek root words to betray the truth behind people, spells, and creatures.
The Lensman Series by E. E. Doc Smith. First sci-fi books I picked up as a child, and forever fueled my imagination for space flight.
The Art of Seduction by Robert Greene and The Kama Sutra, both are completely unconnected to the modern western world, but contain nuggets of knowledge hidden within. Both need to be read with an eye on how each situation can be translated into dealing with modern women. ESR's sex tips is a good, albeit stilted, distillation of these books translated into geek, for geeks.
There are others, fun books like HHGTTG, and the Disc World series. But those haven't really changed my life other than as mild sources of humourous quotes.
the AC
The cybercafes.com site was created in about 1996, and abandoned in 2000, I think. I found cybercafes.com in my bookmarks of client sites from 1997, but the domain obviously changed hands since then. A quick glance through their database shows a couple of cafes I know haven't been around since 2000 or 2001. Their entries for Belgium and France still show francs for currency, so it isn't just Ireland.
Its a cobweb site. Nothing to see here, move along, move along. There will be a repost of this article over the weekend by CmdrTaco.
the AC
How many stories have floated around the internet news sites in the last year where a stupid criminal did something brainless like rob a bank with their own deposit slips, or made an anonymous extortion attempt using their real name? There are idiots in every profession, even criminals.
So a spotty teen loser with a low IQ gets busted because he didn't cover the autofocus and record lights with electrical tape. He probably also had the camera on a tripod in the third row with nobody between him and the screen where he could be picked out with ease. This kid deserves everything coming to him.
If you are going to record from a cinema screen, then you need to ensure the camera doesn't look anything like a camera. Hide it inside the head of an inflatable doll and put it in the seat next to you. Make sure all the light emitting parts are covered, like the view finder, rangefinder and power/record leds.
the AC
I may just buy one of those UK cinema goggles off eBay if I get a bonus next week. I've heard they are cheap commercial crap, with fixed focus plastic lenses, but for 75-90 Euros it might be a nice toy
What happens next time I bring a lady in with me and we sit up the back an eh...
Then the projectionist with the night vision camcorder will release a video of you two on all the P-2-P networks. You've seen the quality of one made by a girl named Paris, but don't expect to get a TV contract out of it, just years and years of embarassment.
the AC