I have this same problem with a Comcast IP, I host my own domain (actually about a dozen of them) on my home Linux server. The MX records point to my box and everything authenticates back correctly, and it's most definately *not* an open relay. Not that it matters when a blacklist decides to put Comcast's entire class B on the list. Now I can't send email directly from my system.
Of course, Spammers being stupid and all will never figure out how to change their sendmail config to relay all the Spam through the Comcast SPAM^H^H^HMTP server. AOL cannot block Comcast's SMTP gateway (professional curtesy and all).
Nah, they won't figure it out like I did !
I can understand blocking any specific IP's that are open relays, but blocking an entire class B because some *might* be OR's or actual Spammers seems like it's seriously diluting the power of the blacklist.
Not that I really care now, it's just aggrevating to be blacklisted as a spammer when I'm not, and by AOL, of all things!! That's like MS accusing me of being a monopoly.
Since the defect rate is the ratio of defects to "something", just define the "something" in terms you can live with. I suggest "defects per bytes of the binary program file". Then statically link everything to make the code huge (if you're working on Windows, compile with.Net to ensure bloated code).
To lower the defect rate, just add more code bloat so the denominator gets larger. Problem solved in a way that makes the PHB's think you're really making progress.
Now that I think about it, this explains so much . . .
So, it was your generation that used up all the vowels!
Luckily, we will soon be opening up new vowel fileds for domestic drilling! The future lokks so much brighter for our kids!
Dennis
(oops, I think I'm over my vow3l qv0tz f0r th3 dzy!
Who wants to own a Windows box anyway ? Is there anyway to upgrade it to Linux after you get in ?
What is needed is a remote, unattended install of Linux so the system security can be fixed while giving the cracker something more useful to use. It might even be considered charitable, the new system admin could maintain the system for free and the users might not even notice if you gave them an autologin with a message telling them their kid installed a cool new desktop theme!
Throttle the rate of email from all accounts
on
ISP Chief on Spam
·
· Score: 1
Spammers rely on the fact that they can send many thousands of emails in an hour or 2 before the ISP detects their violation and shuts them down. What if ISP's simply throttled the rate of email going through each account down to 1 or 2 (or 5 or 10) per minute. Then it would take much longer for a spammer to send the emails and they would get far less out before being shut down. If the email system used SpamAssasin to rate the emails and adjusted the rate, that would be even better (only 3 SpamAssasin "points" per minute, for example). If it costs a spammer $20 to send 200,000 emails, they might consider it worthwhile (assuming the ISP cancels their account after that many emails and doesn't refund their money), but if they only got 200 or 2000 emails through for the same price, they might decide it's not worth it.
The terrorists just need to send their emails with the subject line "Lowest rate in 40 years !!!!!". Seriously, the signal/noise ratio of spam is so low that if secret messages were embedded in spam, no one would ever find it. But it would make life more painful for the terrorists, since they would have to turn off SpamAssasin and actually read all that spam. If it gets bad enough, maybe they'd repent of their evil ways just so they could stop reading Spam.
Ethics are valuable for their own sake
on
When Sysadmins Go Bad
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I'm a UNIX sysadmin and Oracle DBA. I've always had root (and sys, for Oracle) on all systems I manage. I've done this for years and have never compromised any data or any system. And I don't think I'm an anomoly. As the admin, I'm very proud of the work I do and the efficacy of the systems I'm responsible for. Employers have extended a trust to me and I wouldn't dream of violating it. No amount of money would be worth the loss of self-worth.
At my last job, I had unfettered access (at work and at home) to thousands of customer's credit card info. It was not even a temptation for me (it was a source of concern that the info might be compromised by others, and I brought that to management's attention on a number of occasions). When the company started layoffs and morale plummetted, I left, but on extremely good terms. The level of trust between us was so high that I was asked to keep my secured access to the system in my home for several months in return for a consulting retainer.
When we were getting new PC's, they let us spec what we wanted. The PC dept prohibited us from ordering the PC's with CDRW's because they were afraid that we would use them to steal company data or code. My boss chuckled when I pointed out that it would be safer and more convenient for me to download said data or code via the company provided ISDN to my house. I just bought a CDRW myself and installed it. Either the PC guys never figured it out or they were afraid to mess we me. Doesn't matter much now, as they are all unemployed anyway.
If libraries would implement an open source solution like Dan's Guardian (http://sun.dansguardian.org/), they could have asked their admin to add sites to the white list whenever they were found to be OK. This software has no secrets, anyone can see what it blocks and why.
I think some censorware is inevitable and if the choice comes down to censored internet or no internet, I'd vote for a sanely-censored internet.
I do the same thing. By default, all emails to my domains go into my mailbox, so anything I makeup comes to me. This works great for filling out forms where they email a password to you. If I sign up with microsoft@mydomain.org, I can tell when they Spam me or when they sell my address to a spammer and I can add a line with that address to a sendmail config file that returns an error message instead of accepting mail. Permanent blacklist of all spammer who bought that address. I've actually had to do that very few times, but then I don't get out much (in the internet consumer sense).
This seems very simple and straightforward to me, but when I try to explain how it works to non-techie coworkers, they get that "deer in the headlights" look. I'd arrange to teach a class about how to use email effectively, except the thought of getting that look from a whole bunch of people at once scares me.
If you have some $$ to spend, look into Oracle's Portal product that comes with 9iAS. The middle tier is Apache with their own module for PL/SQL and everything is web-based with the data stored in a back-end database. Very capable and fast to develop in, also very good support.
If you want something a little cheaper, install Zope, CMF and Plone. That will give you a very capable, basic portal. If you want something added that isn't already there, you have the option of writing it yourself or contracting with someone to develop the product for you.
I've been very impressed with both products. I use Oracle Portal at work and Zope at home.
When I started reading the article, I was just sure they would point out that this is another sure effect of the over-consumption of fossil fuels by the US. I guess they decided to save that for a followup article and conclude this one with ad blurb for an upcoming film. It's nice to see them using some scientific restraint.
This would be really fun if you did open it up to crackers and let them enter commands, then respond in AI fashion with "helpful" error messages ("you sound angry, are you sure you want to execute rm -rf/") or the famous "I'm sorry, Dave, I can't let you do that". Watching the logs of this might provide some amusment.
I'd recommend you look at Plone (http://plone.org/). This uses Zope and CMF (Content Management Framework). It is easy to install and very flexible. Parts of it could be better documented.
Most Home Schoolers are not really tech savvy, but a few of us are (the demographics of home schoolers track pretty closely to the general population). The thing to remember is that homeschooling offers a great deal of freedom for parents to customize their child's education. There is not even a dominant vendor of materials, mostly because the parents really value their freedom to choose. We have never used an entire curriculum from a single vendor, we might get math from one place and English from another and decide to "roll our own" on sign language. The real point is that the curriculum is "free as in speech, not free as in beer".
Homeschooling should not be considered a low-cost education (that would be public school), but rather a high-quality education. We would certainly be a lot of $$ ahead if my wife worked full time and we sent our kids to a private school. We make the choice to home school because we feel it is best for our kids. I don't believe it is the best choice universally, but it clearly is the best for some, it's largely a personality and value issue. I can tell you that when done well, the kids really shine. I am always amazed by the people who say there is no way the kids can be socialized properly. The people making those claims most vociferously are generally trying to assuage their own guilt for not home schooling (or even better to justify their membership in the NEA, a labor union, not a child advocacy group!). These people would not want to meet my kids, they are data points they'd rather ignore (pardon the obvious parental pride and chest beating - homeschool dad's are prone to that).
So, in conclusion, OSS fits perfectly with home schooling. They are, at a philosophical level, cut from the same mold. I'm proud to be a staunch advocate of both!
As other posters have mentioned, this has been done lots of times. I did it myself back in the RedHat 5.2 days and had a nice little Network Computer that ran entirely off a CD. At the time, I started with diskettes from the Linux Router Project (LRP), but if I were doing it again today, I think I'd choose a project that already worked from a CD, to avoid reinventing stuff. Mindi Linux comes to mind. It is part of the Mondo Rescue porject and sounds like it is already close to what you are trying to accomplish.
Netra X1 is no more
on
Buying Unix?
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Sun replaced the Netra X1 with the Sunfire V100 (for the same price). It is a great value. I bought one of each for my company. Incidentally, you can add any IDE drive into the system easily and non-Sun RAM works fine. I bought the $995 web special (40 GB HD and 128 MB RAM) and added 2 - 512 MB RAM chips ($299 each) and a WD 120 GB HD ($239) to give me a 64 bit Solaris system with 1.1 GB RAM and 160 GB of disk space for well under $2000, including tax and shipping). It even comes with licenses for Netscape Web Server and other stuff. Mine's running a full install of Oracle RDBMS and 9iAS (both the Enterprise Edition). It's a great development system. It seems like a good choice for non-disk intensive production systems also (not for a production RDBMS, need fast SCSI disks for that).
Slashdot Mirror
I have this same problem with a Comcast IP, I host my own domain (actually about a dozen of them) on my home Linux server. The MX records point to my box and everything authenticates back correctly, and it's most definately *not* an open relay. Not that it matters when a blacklist decides to put Comcast's entire class B on the list. Now I can't send email directly from my system.
Of course, Spammers being stupid and all will never figure out how to change their sendmail config to relay all the Spam through the Comcast SPAM^H^H^HMTP server. AOL cannot block Comcast's SMTP gateway (professional curtesy and all).
Nah, they won't figure it out like I did !
I can understand blocking any specific IP's that are open relays, but blocking an entire class B because some *might* be OR's or actual Spammers seems like it's seriously diluting the power of the blacklist.
Not that I really care now, it's just aggrevating to be blacklisted as a spammer when I'm not, and by AOL, of all things!!
That's like MS accusing me of being a monopoly.
You don't do much programming, do you ?
He could call it "Gates of Luna", or "Gates of L" for short.
Dennis
And Libya will be in charge of the UN Human Rights Committe
and Iraq in charge of the UN Disarmament Committee
Oh wait! Those are actually happening too.
Since the defect rate is the ratio of defects to "something", just define the "something" in terms you can live with. I suggest "defects per bytes of the binary program file". Then statically link everything to make the code huge (if you're working on Windows, compile with .Net to ensure bloated code).
To lower the defect rate, just add more code bloat so the denominator gets larger. Problem solved in a way that makes the PHB's think you're really making progress.
Now that I think about it, this explains so much . . .
So, it was your generation that used up all the vowels! Luckily, we will soon be opening up new vowel fileds for domestic drilling! The future lokks so much brighter for our kids! Dennis (oops, I think I'm over my vow3l qv0tz f0r th3 dzy!
Krispy Kreme
Who wants to own a Windows box anyway ? Is there anyway to upgrade it to Linux after you get in ?
What is needed is a remote, unattended install of Linux so the system security can be fixed while giving the cracker something more useful to use. It might even be considered charitable, the new system admin could maintain the system for free and the users might not even notice if you gave them an autologin with a message telling them their kid installed a cool new desktop theme!
Spammers rely on the fact that they can send many thousands of emails in an hour or 2 before the ISP detects their violation and shuts them down. What if ISP's simply throttled the rate of email going through each account down to 1 or 2 (or 5 or 10) per minute. Then it would take much longer for a spammer to send the emails and they would get far less out before being shut down. If the email system used SpamAssasin to rate the emails and adjusted the rate, that would be even better (only 3 SpamAssasin "points" per minute, for example). If it costs a spammer $20 to send 200,000 emails, they might consider it worthwhile (assuming the ISP cancels their account after that many emails and doesn't refund their money), but if they only got 200 or 2000 emails through for the same price, they might decide it's not worth it.
The terrorists just need to send their emails with the subject line "Lowest rate in 40 years !!!!!".
Seriously, the signal/noise ratio of spam is so low that if secret messages were embedded in spam, no one would ever find it.
But it would make life more painful for the terrorists, since they would have to turn off SpamAssasin and actually read all that spam. If it gets bad enough, maybe they'd repent of their evil ways just so they could stop reading Spam.
I'm a UNIX sysadmin and Oracle DBA. I've always had root (and sys, for Oracle) on all systems I manage. I've done this for years and have never compromised any data or any system. And I don't think I'm an anomoly. As the admin, I'm very proud of the work I do and the efficacy of the systems I'm responsible for. Employers have extended a trust to me and I wouldn't dream of violating it. No amount of money would be worth the loss of self-worth.
At my last job, I had unfettered access (at work and at home) to thousands of customer's credit card info. It was not even a temptation for me (it was a source of concern that the info might be compromised by others, and I brought that to management's attention on a number of occasions). When the company started layoffs and morale plummetted, I left, but on extremely good terms. The level of trust between us was so high that I was asked to keep my secured access to the system in my home for several months in return for a consulting retainer.
When we were getting new PC's, they let us spec what we wanted. The PC dept prohibited us from ordering the PC's with CDRW's because they were afraid that we would use them to steal company data or code. My boss chuckled when I pointed out that it would be safer and more convenient for me to download said data or code via the company provided ISDN to my house. I just bought a CDRW myself and installed it. Either the PC guys never figured it out or they were afraid to mess we me. Doesn't matter much now, as they are all unemployed anyway.
Why don't you write a program to help people like yourself with no real ideas to start their own business.
Yeah, that's the ticket. You could call it "Make Money Fast" and advertise via email and popup ads.
Later you could create a "Pro" version and a "Home Edition" as well.
If libraries would implement an open source solution like Dan's Guardian (http://sun.dansguardian.org/), they could have asked their admin to add sites to the white list whenever they were found to be OK. This software has no secrets, anyone can see what it blocks and why.
I think some censorware is inevitable and if the choice comes down to censored internet or no internet, I'd vote for a sanely-censored internet.
I do the same thing.
By default, all emails to my domains go into my mailbox, so anything I makeup comes to me. This works great for filling out forms where they email a password to you. If I sign up with microsoft@mydomain.org, I can tell when they Spam me or when they sell my address to a spammer and I can add a line with that address to a sendmail config file that returns an error message instead of accepting mail. Permanent blacklist of all spammer who bought that address. I've actually had to do that very few times, but then I don't get out much (in the internet consumer sense).
This seems very simple and straightforward to me, but when I try to explain how it works to non-techie coworkers, they get that "deer in the headlights" look. I'd arrange to teach a class about how to use email effectively, except the thought of getting that look from a whole bunch of people at once scares me.
If you have some $$ to spend, look into Oracle's Portal product that comes with 9iAS. The middle tier is Apache with their own module for PL/SQL and everything is web-based with the data stored in a back-end database. Very capable and fast to develop in, also very good support.
If you want something a little cheaper, install Zope, CMF and Plone. That will give you a very capable, basic portal. If you want something added that isn't already there, you have the option of writing it yourself or contracting with someone to develop the product for you.
I've been very impressed with both products. I use Oracle Portal at work and Zope at home.
When I started reading the article, I was just sure they would point out that this is another sure effect of the over-consumption of fossil fuels by the US. I guess they decided to save that for a followup article and conclude this one with ad blurb for an upcoming film. It's nice to see them using some scientific restraint.
Wouldn't this upset the person coming down behind you ?
I guess it might help them stop as well.
This would be really fun if you did open it up to crackers and let them enter commands, then respond in AI fashion with "helpful" error messages ("you sound angry, are you sure you want to execute rm -rf /") or the famous "I'm sorry, Dave, I can't let you do that". Watching the logs of this might provide some amusment.
I'd recommend you look at Plone (http://plone.org/). This uses Zope and CMF (Content Management Framework). It is easy to install and very flexible. Parts of it could be better documented.
Most Home Schoolers are not really tech savvy, but a few of us are (the demographics of home schoolers track pretty closely to the general population). The thing to remember is that homeschooling offers a great deal of freedom for parents to customize their child's education. There is not even a dominant vendor of materials, mostly because the parents really value their freedom to choose. We have never used an entire curriculum from a single vendor, we might get math from one place and English from another and decide to "roll our own" on sign language. The real point is that the curriculum is "free as in speech, not free as in beer".
Homeschooling should not be considered a low-cost education (that would be public school), but rather a high-quality education. We would certainly be a lot of $$ ahead if my wife worked full time and we sent our kids to a private school. We make the choice to home school because we feel it is best for our kids. I don't believe it is the best choice universally, but it clearly is the best for some, it's largely a personality and value issue. I can tell you that when done well, the kids really shine. I am always amazed by the people who say there is no way the kids can be socialized properly. The people making those claims most vociferously are generally trying to assuage their own guilt for not home schooling (or even better to justify their membership in the NEA, a labor union, not a child advocacy group!). These people would not want to meet my kids, they are data points they'd rather ignore (pardon the obvious parental pride and chest beating - homeschool dad's are prone to that).
So, in conclusion, OSS fits perfectly with home schooling. They are, at a philosophical level, cut from the same mold. I'm proud to be a staunch advocate of both!
As other posters have mentioned, this has been done lots of times. I did it myself back in the RedHat 5.2 days and had a nice little Network Computer that ran entirely off a CD. At the time, I started with diskettes from the Linux Router Project (LRP), but if I were doing it again today, I think I'd choose a project that already worked from a CD, to avoid reinventing stuff. Mindi Linux comes to mind. It is part of the Mondo Rescue porject and sounds like it is already close to what you are trying to accomplish.
Sun replaced the Netra X1 with the Sunfire V100 (for the same price). It is a great value. I bought one of each for my company. Incidentally, you can add any IDE drive into the system easily and non-Sun RAM works fine. I bought the $995 web special (40 GB HD and 128 MB RAM) and added 2 - 512 MB RAM chips ($299 each) and a WD 120 GB HD ($239) to give me a 64 bit Solaris system with 1.1 GB RAM and 160 GB of disk space for well under $2000, including tax and shipping). It even comes with licenses for Netscape Web Server and other stuff. Mine's running a full install of Oracle RDBMS and 9iAS (both the Enterprise Edition). It's a great development system. It seems like a good choice for non-disk intensive production systems also (not for a production RDBMS, need fast SCSI disks for that).