Same ID over on your phpbb, tier 2, included copies of what I did to get things to work to my satisfaction.
Most of the minor issues left have nothing to do with the instalation, other than that they highlight problems in MythTV itself. For example, help files suggesting the user uset tools that are pretty much unavailable. (or were unrealistically dificult to locate by when Debian's search engine was down) Specific example being the program to allow the user to confirm that they are getting audio through the btaudio driver's dsp channel from the capture card.
Fortunately I don't have to reboot often, however there are tweeks that have to be done each time. Specificaly running alsamixer because even though I specified using/dev/dsp to capture audio, it insists on using the line port on the audio card, which is not where I have plugged in my patch cord from my capture cord. (have it lugged into the aux port on the card itself rather than through the 1/8" jack.
Both of the "games" included are unplayable on my setup, and leave x in a state which requires restarting X. I am using a Daewoo 19" monitor as my display, and it doesn't like the video mode that either Frozen Bubbles or tuxracer select. If either had a way of sensing that the user was unable to play the game, or apeared to be unwilling, and exited restoring the video mode I would have no problem with it.
I think the biggest complaint I have is probably something being updated in MythTV for the next version, or already in 0.13, which is imdb lookups crashing the front end. I get a segment fault, which is pretty much useless as an error message.
Personally I happen to like the product. That may seem like a long litany of problems, however compared to some of the alternatives, such as digging up each individual perl module library, or whaterver just to get xmltv running, being able to watch TV, but not record, documentation that says "to use program x, refer to the documentation for program x" without providing a copy of said documentation, even though they included the program, etc. that I ran into with Freevo, and my attempts to install MythTV on my own, I happen to think you have a winning project.
Longer term, and more of a MythTV aspect than a KnoppMyth aspect, is that I would like to be able to author DVDs that would play as dvd's either as a sequential series of the vidios that I put on the DVDs, or with some sort of menu system.
I think you and Dale are doing a great job. Thanks for all of your efforts.
I used knoppmyth to set up two boxes, going to make a couple of changes and use one as a front end, the other as a three tuner server. Possibly this weekend. Latest Journal entry is my experience.
Web site with a forum (you may still want to search through e-mail list archives, I don't) is http://www.mysettopbox.tv/
R4 worked for me after some tweeking that I agree would be more than the original article writer would like. I am comfortable with Linux, including Debian, so it was not a problem for me. I am hopping R5 will be out soon, and will take care of the few issues I had.
One item that the KnoppMyth forums have that you may find handy is a tier 1, tier 2, tier 3 listing for hardware configurations that worked out of the box, with minor changes, or not at all.
As a point of interest, Oracle sells far larger database implementations than Microsoft SQL Server can support, and has been selling them for far longer than Microsoft has been selling SQL Server. Which has an archetecture that virus and worm writers have been able to exploit.
Apache on Linux, BSD and Solaris hosts significantly more web sites than IIS on Windows does, and has for several years longer. Which combination is more prone to being abused by viruses and worms?
Sendmail, hosts an order of magnitude more e-mail transactions than Exchange does. Which gets less press for it's holes because it runs on a platform that gets exploited so often people expect the worm of the week to attack?
The applications that get the worst rap for security problems are the ones with the most users, Internet Explorer, and Outlook (any variation). The fact that they happen to run on the same basic platform as the SQL server and IIS web servers do, should provide sufficient evidence that the alternatives running on other platforms would _tend_ to be more secure.
That does not prevent problems from being possible in a Linux monoculture, or a BSD monoculture. It just suggests that the underlying structure is more secure, and less likely to be a significant source of security problems for e-mail and web browser clients running on top of them.
ADD/ADHD are diagnostic "Disorders", that are only "Disorders" because the condition they describe is disruptive to the order of classrooms and other tightly structured working conditions. A more apt title would be Attention Divergent Condition, or Attention Divergent Hyperactive Condition. They are slightly different conditions.
The thinking mechanism in use in people who are ADC/ADHC is actualy extreamly good in dealing with seaminly chaotic situations. On the other hand it finds regular, predictable behaviour and tasks boring.
I am willing to bet that adults who were diagnosed as ADD/ADHD as children, remember with great joy learning all kinds of things Outside of the classrom. Whether it was computer/console games, summer camp, exploring on their own, reading some novel, or other activity that was fascinating in one way or another, you probably had very little problem "learning" if it wasn't in the form of learn these dates for history, this multiplication table, or write the word you misspelled 20 times in the correct spelling. In fact later on you probably found words that you wrote the 20 times in the correct spelling, harder to remember to spell correctly, than words that you realized later on you would need to communicate in other fields that you didn't discuss in grade school.
At least that's been my experience.
It's a condition, not a disorder. Other people have a condition that makes it easy for them to learn in the highly structured environment the US calls a public school system. Strangly they seem to fall appart when things get chaotic.
Does ssh'ing into a linux box halfway across the world count? What if it's across the same city? What if it's under my desk?
ssh into a box halfway across the world, across the same city, and under your desk only counts if you have opened a ssl vpn to your sdf account, sshed to the mail server then sshed to your pc to do a rsync of your/var/mail/spool/[$userid] mailbox.
Sure/home is in a seprate partition, but is/var/www? How about/var/spool? And considering all the tweeking you have done to your/etc files, so you have a functioning web server, you are keeping that in a seprate partition as well right?
What you don't live with your maximum mounts loaded before the user can log in?
But then SCO hasn't been showing a lot of examples of being bright, have they?
It's perhaps not the best move to try to extort money out of a company that can show that all you are capable of is extortion. I would suspect that if someone at Google wanted to, they could find a copy of the source to Unix online some place, and use a few spare cycles to compare the source code to the entire Linux source that they are using, and prove that SCO is full of hot air.
The requrirement that a persons vote be annonymous implies that if their vote shows up on a paper trail, it be impossible to trace it back to the person who voted.
If you happen to choose to vote for the Nazi party candidate (Note I am not talking about Republicans, even though that association has been bandied about recently), or the Communist party, (Again, not the Democrats), Voting law (varies by district to be sure) is generally there to prevent someone from taking a baseball bat to your car, or you knees.
In the district I vote in, there are three steps involved. Make sure you are in the registered voters book, usually a sign in. Go to next table and get a chit allowing you to collect a ballot, or in an electronic ballot case, a number you enter into your electronic ballot. This is unique, but does not identify you. The last step is to collect your ballot, and vote.
As a result, once you vote, you can't vote again, (your register name is already signed) and they can confirm that the number of chits and the number of ballots counted match. With the electronic ballot, you may be able to say that chits 74, 583, and 1097 did not actually vote, but you can't say that John, Mary, and Bill were the voters who decided to vote, but were incompetent.
Find out what the button for "no vote on this item" will be, before the election, file to have your name changed to that title, (or legaly aliased/a.k.a.) and you will easily win several offices. Some of which may request you to do some actual work, but most of which only request that you occasionally go to meetings and randomly select an option for future directions.
In several voting districts that I have experienced, absentee ballots are not counted unless a recount is requested. So if you choose to vote absentee, you very well may be throwing away your vote.
Per the TiVo web site, HMO consists of the following: Digital Music, Digital Photos, and web scheduling.
MythTV does have all of this, as well as features that are not in TiVo, such as IMDB interaction. If you see a movie title you are not sure about, and the description is not sufficient, click on the IMDB search link, select the right year, and you have far more detail about them than TiVo will produce.
Motion is included as well. Get a USB Cam, plug it in, activate Motion, see what was happening in the living room while you were out.
There is a lot of work to be done yet. Actor and genra searching still has work to be done. I don't know if there will ever be a "other viewers who liked the shows you regularly record also liked..." feature.
I finally got my own pvr build using knoppmyth ( http://www.mysettopbox.tv ) Notes in my Journal...
For FM, you might want to take a look at the Archos FM Recorder. I don't own one, so I can't confirm that you can schedule several recordings over a week, or anything like that. I also am not sure that the output of the RM receiver is capturable.
I seem to recall another story over the past six months or so reviewing a Personal Radio Recorder, or something like that. HalfBaked has four ideas in that zone, but no indication of existing hardware.
If you have not set up your e-mail client (Outlook Express by default I believe) with your ComCast e-mail and password, you may not actually have one.
I ran the ComCast cable modem software on my windows partition of my laptop (since sold) just far enough that my cable modem became generally available. For the next several months I was unable to boot that partition without running into errors, as the software wanted to complete the install. As I understand it that would have included creating an e-mail account on their servers, and configuring my e-mail client to use that server.
Perhaps, or perhaps you missed his I freely admit to using a lot of bandwidth. From the day Fedora Core was released via BitTorrent I have kept an active BitTorrent session going to help others get it too. So I find this a bit of a concern. note...
It was the B varient. I bought it for my Financial Accounting classes required for my degree. It's the first calculator I ran into that would handle a number greater than 10e100. It calculated up to 10e500. Can't envision needing a number that large for anything other than the National Debt, but it could handle it. (Note that my 11c could not, don't know if a 15c could either.)
I suspect that the calculator you are talking about is the Radio Shack EC-4023. I have forgotten how to program it, and for that matter how to use some of the more advanced functions, however I keep one at my desk. (I also have a couple of HP calculators, 11C, and 15B that I generally keep at home.)
I don't know if the EC-4023 ever shows up on ebay, but if the labeling had all worn off, you have that info to work from...
"The GIMP" (proper name include "The") takes some time to learn. You can use many of the skills you learn in using Photoshop, however getting to the tools you are familiar with is an exercise in creative thinking. The Interface is different, so if the tool you are looking for is (as an example) adjusting the gama for a layer, you have to navigate through different menus than you would under Photoshop, or PSP.
Whether that makes it "harder" than the other tools is a matter of interpretation.
The largest problem with learning The GIMP right now is that if you go to a bricks and mortar book store, you will be hard pressed to find a "Teach yourself" or "24 hours" type book, especially for the current version. There are tutorials online, and some of the techniques documented in earlier books (look at the online used books) are still useful.
Photoshop has been around longer, and has more marketing muscle behind it because Adobe has earned quite a bit of money off the product. As a result of those two factors (and perhaps a dozen others I am not aware of) it is easier to find people willing to earn money teaching you how to use the product. If you drop over $200 on a piece of software, wouldn't you want to make sure you had some pretty good ideas on how to use it?
The GIMP on the other hand is more of a play with this tool, and see what you can do, how about that tool, etc.
Sure. After all I obviously have an axe to grind, and if I can't be bothered to check the spelling before posting, there is no sense in worring about whetehr I ever got that axe sharpened. Right?
the journalistic integrity of the host of this article. If they are proposing, or even carrying the message, that programers be "licenced" and held accountable, should they not be held to the high standard of having accurate dates on their articles?
Note that this sounds fairly familiar, in that I think we have heard suggestions quite similar coming from the northwest coast of the US. I also note that the vast majority of exploitable code comes from that region of the US as well. (Ok, the vast majority of code on the market today comes from there, but that's only part of the issue.)
At the same time, I don't think Microsoft really wants to play that game, as I am pretty sure that they are aware that they would then becmoe liable for bugs and faulty security decisions in their own software.
But that's juse my opinion. I've been wrong before.
The service the sites being DDoSed are offering is a list of well known IP address ranges, and domain names that are Well Known, because they have been found to either have customers who are known spammers, or have done nothing to prevent customers from being inadvertant spammers (open proxies and the like.)
If your spam assasin were configured to use one of the black hole lists that they provide, to either mark messages as potential spam, in addition to the filters you have customized, you may get a better recognition rate than just by using the filters you have customized.
No, this is not a perfect solution. Some ISP's attempting to help their customers by installing such spam filters are discovering that the black hole lists include ranges of their own addresses, and have had problems getting those addresses and domains unblocked. I am not criticising either the ISP, or the black hole list maintainers, just stating reported observations.
There are other flaws with this sollution, which generally means that you will have to continue to tweek your rules.
White lists are one option. Vetted addresses may be another. Restricting your in box to people who send their e-mail to you encrypted or signed with a public key is even another possible solution. The key doesn't have to be fully trusted to be useful, but it would be helpfull if your friends had already approved the key and your e-mail client would lift the rating out of the spam bucket if it was appropriate.
At the same time I have to review my "spam" bucket once or twice a week to make sure that one of my kids hasn't accidentally sent me a chain letter. Then I throw out the 60-80% of my inbound mail that has been dropped there. And yes that number does include the e-mail lists I am on that are not treated as spam.
One of the problems they have found with radio noise is that if you take your samples too close together you get too many strings of either 1111, 0000, or 10101010. While all three of these strings, as well as many of the permutations are perfectly normal as part of a truely random process, it doesn't do much for your encryption process if you xor your raw text with a string of zeros.
The problem with most algorythmic random number generators is that if you can collect enough samples you can figure out what function created those samples, and reproduce the original OTP and decrypt the original message.
For messages that are not extreamly complex, it is often better to use a code instead of a cypher. The difference being a cypher takes the original message, and sends it encrypted with a key that when applied properly returns the original message. A code is generally harder to decrypt simply because the original message is not transmited. Only a reference to that message is sent.
As an example if you and I agree that one light means that the rascals are going to road march into town, and two lights means that they have figured out how to use boats, you have a simple code that can be used to send a simple message many miles without having someone in the middle. The rascals using the boats are also very unlikely to decode the message.
More complex messages would require more complex codes being sent. A CD, or a DVD would potentially provide enough raw space as a code book, but you would want to be very sure that no-one who was not supposed to, got copies of the disk. (no sharing them via p2p networks).
The longstanding myth was that you could recognize the Russian spy operatives because they always carried around big heavy books. War and Peace might have been long, dull and boring for a reason.
Slashdot Mirror
Same ID over on your phpbb, tier 2, included copies of what I did to get things to work to my satisfaction.
/dev/dsp to capture audio, it insists on using the line port on the audio card, which is not where I have plugged in my patch cord from my capture cord. (have it lugged into the aux port on the card itself rather than through the 1/8" jack.
Most of the minor issues left have nothing to do with the instalation, other than that they highlight problems in MythTV itself. For example, help files suggesting the user uset tools that are pretty much unavailable. (or were unrealistically dificult to locate by when Debian's search engine was down) Specific example being the program to allow the user to confirm that they are getting audio through the btaudio driver's dsp channel from the capture card.
Fortunately I don't have to reboot often, however there are tweeks that have to be done each time. Specificaly running alsamixer because even though I specified using
Both of the "games" included are unplayable on my setup, and leave x in a state which requires restarting X. I am using a Daewoo 19" monitor as my display, and it doesn't like the video mode that either Frozen Bubbles or tuxracer select. If either had a way of sensing that the user was unable to play the game, or apeared to be unwilling, and exited restoring the video mode I would have no problem with it.
I think the biggest complaint I have is probably something being updated in MythTV for the next version, or already in 0.13, which is imdb lookups crashing the front end. I get a segment fault, which is pretty much useless as an error message.
Personally I happen to like the product. That may seem like a long litany of problems, however compared to some of the alternatives, such as digging up each individual perl module library, or whaterver just to get xmltv running, being able to watch TV, but not record, documentation that says "to use program x, refer to the documentation for program x" without providing a copy of said documentation, even though they included the program, etc. that I ran into with Freevo, and my attempts to install MythTV on my own, I happen to think you have a winning project.
Longer term, and more of a MythTV aspect than a KnoppMyth aspect, is that I would like to be able to author DVDs that would play as dvd's either as a sequential series of the vidios that I put on the DVDs, or with some sort of menu system.
I think you and Dale are doing a great job. Thanks for all of your efforts.
-Rusty
I used knoppmyth to set up two boxes, going to make a couple of changes and use one as a front end, the other as a three tuner server. Possibly this weekend. Latest Journal entry is my experience.
Web site with a forum (you may still want to search through e-mail list archives, I don't) is http://www.mysettopbox.tv/
R4 worked for me after some tweeking that I agree would be more than the original article writer would like. I am comfortable with Linux, including Debian, so it was not a problem for me. I am hopping R5 will be out soon, and will take care of the few issues I had.
One item that the KnoppMyth forums have that you may find handy is a tier 1, tier 2, tier 3 listing for hardware configurations that worked out of the box, with minor changes, or not at all.
-Rusty
As a point of interest, Oracle sells far larger database implementations than Microsoft SQL Server can support, and has been selling them for far longer than Microsoft has been selling SQL Server. Which has an archetecture that virus and worm writers have been able to exploit.
Apache on Linux, BSD and Solaris hosts significantly more web sites than IIS on Windows does, and has for several years longer. Which combination is more prone to being abused by viruses and worms?
Sendmail, hosts an order of magnitude more e-mail transactions than Exchange does. Which gets less press for it's holes because it runs on a platform that gets exploited so often people expect the worm of the week to attack?
The applications that get the worst rap for security problems are the ones with the most users, Internet Explorer, and Outlook (any variation). The fact that they happen to run on the same basic platform as the SQL server and IIS web servers do, should provide sufficient evidence that the alternatives running on other platforms would _tend_ to be more secure.
That does not prevent problems from being possible in a Linux monoculture, or a BSD monoculture. It just suggests that the underlying structure is more secure, and less likely to be a significant source of security problems for e-mail and web browser clients running on top of them.
-Rusty
Ok, you're a complainer. I happen to agree with the complaint, but that doesn't change the fact that you are a complainer.
More accurately, anyone have a mailbox/netidentity account older than that?
I will have to check my logs....
ADD/ADHD are diagnostic "Disorders", that are only "Disorders" because the condition they describe is disruptive to the order of classrooms and other tightly structured working conditions. A more apt title would be Attention Divergent Condition, or Attention Divergent Hyperactive Condition. They are slightly different conditions.
The thinking mechanism in use in people who are ADC/ADHC is actualy extreamly good in dealing with seaminly chaotic situations. On the other hand it finds regular, predictable behaviour and tasks boring.
I am willing to bet that adults who were diagnosed as ADD/ADHD as children, remember with great joy learning all kinds of things Outside of the classrom. Whether it was computer/console games, summer camp, exploring on their own, reading some novel, or other activity that was fascinating in one way or another, you probably had very little problem "learning" if it wasn't in the form of learn these dates for history, this multiplication table, or write the word you misspelled 20 times in the correct spelling. In fact later on you probably found words that you wrote the 20 times in the correct spelling, harder to remember to spell correctly, than words that you realized later on you would need to communicate in other fields that you didn't discuss in grade school.
At least that's been my experience.
It's a condition, not a disorder. Other people have a condition that makes it easy for them to learn in the highly structured environment the US calls a public school system. Strangly they seem to fall appart when things get chaotic.
-Rusty
Does ssh'ing into a linux box halfway across the world count? What if it's across the same city? What if it's under my desk?
/var/mail/spool/[$userid] mailbox.
ssh into a box halfway across the world, across the same city, and under your desk only counts if you have opened a ssl vpn to your sdf account, sshed to the mail server then sshed to your pc to do a rsync of your
Sure /home is in a seprate partition, but is /var/www? How about /var/spool? And considering all the tweeking you have done to your /etc files, so you have a functioning web server, you are keeping that in a seprate partition as well right?
What you don't live with your maximum mounts loaded before the user can log in?
-Rusty
1. Pay money for slow performing computers
2. Spend time installing Linux on them
3. Donate them to charity
4. ???
5. Profit!!! ?
But then SCO hasn't been showing a lot of examples of being bright, have they?
It's perhaps not the best move to try to extort money out of a company that can show that all you are capable of is extortion. I would suspect that if someone at Google wanted to, they could find a copy of the source to Unix online some place, and use a few spare cycles to compare the source code to the entire Linux source that they are using, and prove that SCO is full of hot air.
The requrirement that a persons vote be annonymous implies that if their vote shows up on a paper trail, it be impossible to trace it back to the person who voted.
If you happen to choose to vote for the Nazi party candidate (Note I am not talking about Republicans, even though that association has been bandied about recently), or the Communist party, (Again, not the Democrats), Voting law (varies by district to be sure) is generally there to prevent someone from taking a baseball bat to your car, or you knees.
In the district I vote in, there are three steps involved. Make sure you are in the registered voters book, usually a sign in. Go to next table and get a chit allowing you to collect a ballot, or in an electronic ballot case, a number you enter into your electronic ballot. This is unique, but does not identify you. The last step is to collect your ballot, and vote.
As a result, once you vote, you can't vote again, (your register name is already signed) and they can confirm that the number of chits and the number of ballots counted match. With the electronic ballot, you may be able to say that chits 74, 583, and 1097 did not actually vote, but you can't say that John, Mary, and Bill were the voters who decided to vote, but were incompetent.
Find out what the button for "no vote on this item" will be, before the election, file to have your name changed to that title, (or legaly aliased/a.k.a.) and you will easily win several offices. Some of which may request you to do some actual work, but most of which only request that you occasionally go to meetings and randomly select an option for future directions.
In several voting districts that I have experienced, absentee ballots are not counted unless a recount is requested. So if you choose to vote absentee, you very well may be throwing away your vote.
Per the TiVo web site, HMO consists of the following: Digital Music, Digital Photos, and web scheduling.
MythTV does have all of this, as well as features that are not in TiVo, such as IMDB interaction. If you see a movie title you are not sure about, and the description is not sufficient, click on the IMDB search link, select the right year, and you have far more detail about them than TiVo will produce.
Motion is included as well. Get a USB Cam, plug it in, activate Motion, see what was happening in the living room while you were out.
There is a lot of work to be done yet. Actor and genra searching still has work to be done. I don't know if there will ever be a "other viewers who liked the shows you regularly record also liked..." feature.
I finally got my own pvr build using knoppmyth ( http://www.mysettopbox.tv ) Notes in my Journal...
For FM, you might want to take a look at the Archos FM Recorder. I don't own one, so I can't confirm that you can schedule several recordings over a week, or anything like that. I also am not sure that the output of the RM receiver is capturable.
I seem to recall another story over the past six months or so reviewing a Personal Radio Recorder, or something like that. HalfBaked has four ideas in that zone, but no indication of existing hardware.
If you have not set up your e-mail client (Outlook Express by default I believe) with your ComCast e-mail and password, you may not actually have one.
I ran the ComCast cable modem software on my windows partition of my laptop (since sold) just far enough that my cable modem became generally available. For the next several months I was unable to boot that partition without running into errors, as the software wanted to complete the install. As I understand it that would have included creating an e-mail account on their servers, and configuring my e-mail client to use that server.
Good luck.
-Rusty
Perhaps, or perhaps you missed his I freely admit to using a lot of bandwidth. From the day Fedora Core was released via BitTorrent I have kept an active BitTorrent session going to help others get it too. So I find this a bit of a concern. note...
It was the B varient. I bought it for my Financial Accounting classes required for my degree. It's the first calculator I ran into that would handle a number greater than 10e100. It calculated up to 10e500. Can't envision needing a number that large for anything other than the National Debt, but it could handle it. (Note that my 11c could not, don't know if a 15c could either.)
I suspect that the calculator you are talking about is the Radio Shack EC-4023. I have forgotten how to program it, and for that matter how to use some of the more advanced functions, however I keep one at my desk. (I also have a couple of HP calculators, 11C, and 15B that I generally keep at home.)
I don't know if the EC-4023 ever shows up on ebay, but if the labeling had all worn off, you have that info to work from...
"The GIMP" (proper name include "The") takes some time to learn. You can use many of the skills you learn in using Photoshop, however getting to the tools you are familiar with is an exercise in creative thinking. The Interface is different, so if the tool you are looking for is (as an example) adjusting the gama for a layer, you have to navigate through different menus than you would under Photoshop, or PSP.
Whether that makes it "harder" than the other tools is a matter of interpretation.
The largest problem with learning The GIMP right now is that if you go to a bricks and mortar book store, you will be hard pressed to find a "Teach yourself" or "24 hours" type book, especially for the current version. There are tutorials online, and some of the techniques documented in earlier books (look at the online used books) are still useful.
Photoshop has been around longer, and has more marketing muscle behind it because Adobe has earned quite a bit of money off the product. As a result of those two factors (and perhaps a dozen others I am not aware of) it is easier to find people willing to earn money teaching you how to use the product. If you drop over $200 on a piece of software, wouldn't you want to make sure you had some pretty good ideas on how to use it?
The GIMP on the other hand is more of a play with this tool, and see what you can do, how about that tool, etc.
Just my thoughts, others may think otherwise.
-Rusty
No problem. My response should have been taken with a grain of salt as well.
Sure. After all I obviously have an axe to grind, and if I can't be bothered to check the spelling before posting, there is no sense in worring about whetehr I ever got that axe sharpened. Right?
the journalistic integrity of the host of this article. If they are proposing, or even carrying the message, that programers be "licenced" and held accountable, should they not be held to the high standard of having accurate dates on their articles?
Note that this sounds fairly familiar, in that I think we have heard suggestions quite similar coming from the northwest coast of the US. I also note that the vast majority of exploitable code comes from that region of the US as well. (Ok, the vast majority of code on the market today comes from there, but that's only part of the issue.)
At the same time, I don't think Microsoft really wants to play that game, as I am pretty sure that they are aware that they would then becmoe liable for bugs and faulty security decisions in their own software.
But that's juse my opinion. I've been wrong before.
-Rusty
The service the sites being DDoSed are offering is a list of well known IP address ranges, and domain names that are Well Known, because they have been found to either have customers who are known spammers, or have done nothing to prevent customers from being inadvertant spammers (open proxies and the like.)
If your spam assasin were configured to use one of the black hole lists that they provide, to either mark messages as potential spam, in addition to the filters you have customized, you may get a better recognition rate than just by using the filters you have customized.
No, this is not a perfect solution. Some ISP's attempting to help their customers by installing such spam filters are discovering that the black hole lists include ranges of their own addresses, and have had problems getting those addresses and domains unblocked. I am not criticising either the ISP, or the black hole list maintainers, just stating reported observations.
There are other flaws with this sollution, which generally means that you will have to continue to tweek your rules.
White lists are one option. Vetted addresses may be another. Restricting your in box to people who send their e-mail to you encrypted or signed with a public key is even another possible solution. The key doesn't have to be fully trusted to be useful, but it would be helpfull if your friends had already approved the key and your e-mail client would lift the rating out of the spam bucket if it was appropriate.
At the same time I have to review my "spam" bucket once or twice a week to make sure that one of my kids hasn't accidentally sent me a chain letter. Then I throw out the 60-80% of my inbound mail that has been dropped there. And yes that number does include the e-mail lists I am on that are not treated as spam.
-Rusty
One of the problems they have found with radio noise is that if you take your samples too close together you get too many strings of either 1111, 0000, or 10101010. While all three of these strings, as well as many of the permutations are perfectly normal as part of a truely random process, it doesn't do much for your encryption process if you xor your raw text with a string of zeros.
The problem with most algorythmic random number generators is that if you can collect enough samples you can figure out what function created those samples, and reproduce the original OTP and decrypt the original message.
For messages that are not extreamly complex, it is often better to use a code instead of a cypher. The difference being a cypher takes the original message, and sends it encrypted with a key that when applied properly returns the original message. A code is generally harder to decrypt simply because the original message is not transmited. Only a reference to that message is sent.
As an example if you and I agree that one light means that the rascals are going to road march into town, and two lights means that they have figured out how to use boats, you have a simple code that can be used to send a simple message many miles without having someone in the middle. The rascals using the boats are also very unlikely to decode the message.
More complex messages would require more complex codes being sent. A CD, or a DVD would potentially provide enough raw space as a code book, but you would want to be very sure that no-one who was not supposed to, got copies of the disk. (no sharing them via p2p networks).
The longstanding myth was that you could recognize the Russian spy operatives because they always carried around big heavy books. War and Peace might have been long, dull and boring for a reason.
-Rusty