Most DSL and cable connections use temporary IP addresses and you can't RBL Verizon.
I can't? Gee, I better remove the thousands of Verizon dial-up and DSLs from my personal RBL. Along with the dial-up/DSL/cable IPs for SBC, YAHOO, COMCAST, UUNET, ALLTEL, and several hundred other providers. The proliferation of compromised home machines has made it impossible to not block such addresses by default.
Verizon's mail servers can get through (although they were blocked when they let KLEZ relay unbridled). Any business with a legitimate mail server can get through. But anything that isn't one of those will be put on hold until I can determine whether or not it fits in the other category. Mostly, the "servers" never try again, but nothing legit gets stopped - just delayed. Our system rejects 90% of the mail thrown at it from dial-up lines. No MAPS involved. And that 90% is the majority of the spam we get...
As for black-listing an entire colocation facility, if your reverse-DNS doesn't come back to something other than the colo IP space, you're going to have a hard time convincing me to pass your mail through. Especially if it's in Boca Raton, FL!
We use limited RBLs. SPAMCOP, one open-relay list, and one open-proxy list. None of these are "loose" - typically, our local filters block a lot more than the RBLs do. And those local lists also handle exceptions, for getting mail from systems that can't seem to stay out of the RBLs.
[of course it helps that 20-30% of the spam is directed at addresses on our system that have never been valid, or haven't been valid since 1995, so we can lock those IPs out bothering to investigate further.]
It doesn't matter what types of web logs the SF council wants to regulate - the fact that they want to regulate some of them is indicative of the mindset of government agencies. When they provide you with a service, they get to chose what that service involves, not you.
Take the example of waste pickup. Chicago decided that's a government job, so you get the service and restrictions that Chicago imposes. If your needs aren't covered by their rules, you get to pay for private pickup AND the public pickup you can't use. Other cities regulate which private companies are allowed to pick up garbage, and you get stuck paying whatever the licensed company wants to charge for the service.
My opinion is not "knee jerk". It's based upon 40+ years experience with government "helpfulness", plus time spent in the bureaucracy. Government doesn't do anything without an agenda, and it's rarely the published one. Government has already expressed an interest in regulating what you view via internet, such as Utah wanting ISPs to block porn sites. Government has already expressed an interest in being able to watch what you do on internet, especially if they don't have to get pesky wire-tap warrants to do it, as is often brought up every time the word "PATRIOT" appears on this site.
Government-run internet service is the perfect combination - the ability to regulate what you can connect to and to monitor what you do without waking up a judge. If someone petitions the city government that site X is in violation of city decency ordinance 555.1212, what is the city going to do, cite freedom of speech, or block site X on city-run internet?
Let's see, SanFran wants to regulate web logs, and people are cheering a law that lets cities to install government-controlled WiFi networks to drive the "greedy" private companies out of business....
Not to mention fact that the FBI can hack a wireless net in 3 minutes, so they'd never need to get a wiretap order to watch what you do... (and neither would the RIAA/MPAA)
Yep, sounds like the sort of thing every Slashdot reader should champion!
I think they should also make sure NONE of their content is every referenced by www.google.com, by locking all the Agence France Presse servers out of their spidering system. A mass update of the database is in order, too... delete everything with a URL that contains an AFP server.
Give AFP what they ask for, even if it isn't what they're going to find that they want...
We are constantly being asked by vocal members of certain un-named groups that use our hosting services to "spice up" their pages. "We need a flashy intro, to keep people's attention! Lots of graphics! Pictures!" You probably know the drill.
As an experiment, we implemented a picture gallery on the site that got the most requests. After 12 months, we are still getting requests from these same people for "more pictures", despite the fact that they didn't even realize the "Photo gallery" link has been prominent on the home page (every page, for that matter) for a year. They'd never even looked, and they certainly haven't posted any of the "hundreds" of pictures they wanted a place to display.
We've strived to keep the sites usable for modem users. And the modem users like that... but they're not the vocal ones at the "design meetings". The last design meeting wanted a streaming video added to the initial page. The video they wanted to use was just under 80MB... "It won't be a problem!" they said, "Nobody uses MODEMS anymore!"
"Show of hands, how many people at this meeting still use dial-up to reach internet?" All but three people raised their hands. "Do any of you nobodies want it to take 20-60 minutes to reach the web page, so that you can watch a 5 minute video?"
... the brain dead woman......even the legally uncontroversial, medically backed decisions of US judges...
The problem is, she isn't brain dead. She's alive, breathing on her own, reacts to people, but can not feed herself. If simply being brain damaged to the point of not being able to perform certain functions was reason enough to kill people, we have hundreds, if not thousands, of them in nursing homes in worse condition than Terry Schiavo. But, they don't have a husband out to kill them, and it currentlyis considered "controversial" to want to kill them.
This isn't a case of "letting a brain-dead woman finish dying". It's a case of, "I don't want her around anymore, so I want her dead." And the husband claims, with no evidence to support him, that she "wanted to die". How convenient.
You would die if we withheld food from you. Does that mean that if we did it, we would simply be "allowing you to die"? Would you consider that a mercy, or would you complain that we were murdering you? Terry can't complain. She is going to suffer. They won't even offer the kindness of a lethal injection, because that's too much like murder.
Now, whether setting a precident like this is "medical terrorism", I don't know. I do think it is a bad thing to do, making the decision of who should live or die based not on whether or not someone could survive, but on how much it inconveniences the living.
Why bother separating them, when the "new and improved" Slashcode won't let you exclude sections from your main page anymore? If they decide it's a feature article, it's going to show up in your list, no matter what your settings.
The section only decides which horrid color scheme it will be displayed in...
I don't see the government stepping in and stopping VOIP, so it's not a free speech issue. First Amendment issues refer to the government abridging public speech. This is decidedly private speech, carried over non-public conduits. Everyone who owns transmission lines is free to carry or not carry what they want. If I own 5,000 miles of fiber-optic cable and decide it won't carry VOIP, who is going to infringe on MY rights to do with my property as I see fit?
The possible exception is someone covered under a "common carrier" regulation, requiring them to not discriminate against content... but, if the government decides to require that, how are they going to justify it when they want to regulate things like kiddie porn?
Uh oh... watch yourself in this crowd! Lots of them think that software and music piracy isn't theft, because it doesn't take any property away from those it is stolen from. And here you're only talking about losing your time, bandwidth, and CPU cycles!
Then again, those last two are precious commodities to these people, so maybe you're safe...
I trust the compiler to optimize almost everything.
It is important to understand any automated optimizations in use. Most are safe. Some have dire consequences under certain circumstances. Compilers only understand the code presented to them, not the context in which it will run. A common example is loop-invarient code migration. 99.9% of the time, it's great. Until it optimizes your device driver polling loop to remove the device read from the loop. (but whe all know we shouldn't be writing polling loops anymore, right?)
I agree with those who say strive for a better algorithm first, then profile it to see where the improvements would do the most good, after you have it correct.
With cable tv:
1) They wire behind your walls
2) If the service goes out they come and fix it (no charge to you)
3) Unless your wires are faulty - bad weather RARELY (less then 1% for me) affects your connection
4) High speed cable modems are way bettr then DSL...and satellite high speed is a joke.
Location is everything. Here in the boonies:
1. Comcast does wire behind your walls... so long as they're outside walls, and you don't mind them wiring on the outside of the house, and drilling straight through the wall where you want the jack installed. They'll ignore pre-installed wiring, demarcation points and distribution boxes.
2. Yes, they will. Usually within 60 days. Often within 30. Depends upon to whom and how often you yell, and how good of friends you are with the people who regulate them, if it's a tough problem. (a recent incident comes to mind, where only one of two ONDEMAND boxes working on the same cable, even after three replacements, taking 2 months to fix, because it took the insistance of a knowledgeable tech that the head-end server be rebooted, after COMCAST said, "ONDEMAND is down in your area". "But why does the other box work?")
3. Faulty wiring is less a problem now than it was 10 years ago, but we still have problems during storms. Seems people keep running into telephone poles and taking out the main cable trunks, knocking out whole neighborhoods. Not the cable company's fault, really, but as much a problem out here as loss of satellite signal has been.
4. Comcast lists our area as having that nice high-speed cable modem thingy available. Too bad they've not bothered to install the head-end equipment in our town, and haven't upgraded the cable plant to handle it...
Neither is perfect. If it weren't for Cartoon and SciFi, I'd not bother, since over-the-air is cheaper, and I can get 10 digital channels with "just" a 50 foot tower. And (getting back on topic) TiVo is the only way any of it is worth it!
They don't "hate our freedom and liberty" - they hate our government.
Right. And that's why one of the leaders of the insurgents in Iraq declared his opposition to the elections by telling people that anyone who supported democracy was an enemy of Islam. Nope, they don't hate freedom or liberty. No way!
Osama bin Laden has never worked FOR the US. Osama has worked for HIS best interests. At one time, those interests overlapped, as Osama was fighting the Soviet Union. Anyone who isn't for furthering Osama's interests is expendible, including his own family.
Where did Iraq get all the weapons that they are now shooting at our sons and daughters?
Why don't you ask the French, who supplied his nuclear hardware, and the Germans, who supplied many of his now-missing biological agents, and the Soviets and Russians, who supplied anything he wanted to buy? It wasn't F16s in the Iraqi airforce, it was Mirages.
Perhaps you're confusing Iraq with Iran. Iran had US military hardware, because Iran used to be one of our allies. But we didn't "push with Military Might" to keep Iran from falling into its current dark age.
More people have been killed in the name of Christianity than any other single cause.
More than the 10,000,000+ (some say upwards of 60M) killed by the Soviets during the various purges, which had nothing to do pushing Christianity? And are you counting the millions who died in the various 7th- through 11th-century Jihads because they weren't Muslims as agression by the Jews and Christians? After all, the Christians died in the name of Christ, even if it was because the Muslims who killed them believed (and many still do) that anyone who fails to worship Allah must die.
But of what use is base 30, except for obfuscation.
Because it is different. There are other systems out there that use other bases - Automatic Position Reporting System uses Base 91 encoding under certain circumstances, for example, and it does it for the exact kind of reasons this patent application is addressing. And it's been around for a while...
I think you'd find that there would still be private ISPs. For starters, WiFi is still not as fast, reliable, or secure as a hard line can be.
But, this discussion isn't just about WIFI. Quoting from the summary atop this discussion, "The report has some interesting points (mostly about building fiber networks),...", which are faster and more reliable than the wire lines most of us use right now.
How is an ISP going to compete against an entrenched (literally!) agency with multi-megabit fiber to the home, just on the basis of content?
Yes, injecting religion into the discussion was just to amplify the point that a "community decision" leaving the dissenters with the option of ignoring their principles or leaving the community.
I suppose the correct example for this crowd would be the community voting that all computers run Windows, and a "computer tax" of $40/computer would imposed to pay for a city-wide license. Even people whose computers weren't capable of running Windows would be subjected to it, because it is for the "public good"...
Anyone who opposes the goverment deciding just what is acceptable to carry on internet should be fighting along side the "special interests" to stop government WIFI installations.
Once you accept the idea of the government providing your conduit, you've given up the right to decide what is "acceptable" and what is not - that's in the hands of bureaucrats, who might decide that any site that mentions "breasts" is "unacceptable" before 11PM local time, to "protect the children". And you're stuck, because the private companies won't be around to offer alternatives, since they can't afford to compete.
If you live in my small town and don't like the decisions we make, you can either choose to live with it or leave.
Ah, so, in your small town, you're allowed to force me to abandon my property rights (make me leave town) if I disagree with your collective decision? What if the collective decision is to build a free Christian daycare center, and I'm a Muslim, Jew, Budhist, or atheist?
In the larger context, when the municipality decides what constitutes "acceptable" WIFI or other internet access, who's to say they won't also decide what you're allowed to access via that public-funded interenet connection? And what if you disagree with that decision (they've banned your favourite porn site, for example), and you find that you can't find any private, non-restricted ISP to service your address, because they can't make money competing with the local government's monopoly?
Anyone who values freedom should shout loud and hard against any attempt by government entities to control your access to internet, even under the guise of "free access".
Yes, there are ways to slow and disable MSNBot. From the MSN site:
MSNBot is crawling a site too often
When MSNBot is crawling your site, it generally does not try to access your site more often than once every few seconds. If MSNBot determines that your site has a slow connection, it automatically adjusts the frequency. To specify a minimum frequency (in seconds), use the crawl delay parameter in the robots.txt file: user-agent: msnbot
crawl-delay: 120
There is additional information on excluding the bot on this page as well, including a section entitled Use metadata tags to control page indexing and link crawling....
Given the traffic reported by many PHPBB2 operators as MSNBot endlessly spidered their sites, retrieving the same pages hundreds of times via different session IDs, I wonder how accurate their page counts are going to be on any dynamic-content site.
We had to modify our sites to remove session IDs when MSNBot comes by to cut the traffic.
Who really creates an unpassworded root@% superuser account?
The MySQL install program, because you need SOMETHING to administer it with. Of course, the first thing it tells you to do is to change the root password, and how to do that.
The alternative is to create a passworded root user account, with a published password... Which is just as bad. How many consumer routers have the password of "admin"?
It exploits weak passwords to gain root within MySQL.
Just like so many worms exploit weak or non-existant administrator passwords in Windows XP to promote themselves to services. Weak passwords are worse than no password. At least no password means you know anyone can access your system. And Windows XP doesn't do much to discourage you from running as Administrator, and does a lot to prevent you from running as anything else (What? I can't sync my Palm Pilot without being an Administrator?!? DO IT!).
Gee, according to the article, it's about MySQL, Poor Administration, and Windows. Remove any of the ingredients, and it's not a problem!
That said, Windows, by default, has a lot of things going on that the user is unaware of. Does the average Windows user know that LSASS is running? Or the Messenger service? And why does Windows default to loading MSMessenger, and fight most attempts to disable it?
And the firewall is considered laughable by many sources I've read, including Windows zealot sites. It's very easy to write a program to disable it without the user's knowledge. And it's off by default, unless you've got SP2... which many users are scared of, because it has a history of killing systems and certain programs.
I install SP2 where I can, but there are some systems where the risk of something not working outweighs the customer's desire to be fully patched... The only thing we can do is build another system for them, and verify everything still works under SP2, before they'll let us touch the working system. If the system is behind a hardware NAT firewall, I don't concern myself with it too much.
You can still avoid this problem. Even if you have to have remote access, do NOT allow 'root' to log in remotely. Create another user, also password protected, to do root-like things on MySQL.
The way to do this:
use mysql; grant all privileges on *.* to obscureusername@"%" identified by 'strongpassword' with grant option; delete from user where host='localhost' and user=''; flush privileges;
Slashdot Mirror
I can't? Gee, I better remove the thousands of Verizon dial-up and DSLs from my personal RBL. Along with the dial-up/DSL/cable IPs for SBC, YAHOO, COMCAST, UUNET, ALLTEL, and several hundred other providers. The proliferation of compromised home machines has made it impossible to not block such addresses by default.
Verizon's mail servers can get through (although they were blocked when they let KLEZ relay unbridled). Any business with a legitimate mail server can get through. But anything that isn't one of those will be put on hold until I can determine whether or not it fits in the other category. Mostly, the "servers" never try again, but nothing legit gets stopped - just delayed. Our system rejects 90% of the mail thrown at it from dial-up lines. No MAPS involved. And that 90% is the majority of the spam we get...
As for black-listing an entire colocation facility, if your reverse-DNS doesn't come back to something other than the colo IP space, you're going to have a hard time convincing me to pass your mail through. Especially if it's in Boca Raton, FL!
We use limited RBLs. SPAMCOP, one open-relay list, and one open-proxy list. None of these are "loose" - typically, our local filters block a lot more than the RBLs do. And those local lists also handle exceptions, for getting mail from systems that can't seem to stay out of the RBLs.
[of course it helps that 20-30% of the spam is directed at addresses on our system that have never been valid, or haven't been valid since 1995, so we can lock those IPs out bothering to investigate further.]
Take the example of waste pickup. Chicago decided that's a government job, so you get the service and restrictions that Chicago imposes. If your needs aren't covered by their rules, you get to pay for private pickup AND the public pickup you can't use. Other cities regulate which private companies are allowed to pick up garbage, and you get stuck paying whatever the licensed company wants to charge for the service.
My opinion is not "knee jerk". It's based upon 40+ years experience with government "helpfulness", plus time spent in the bureaucracy. Government doesn't do anything without an agenda, and it's rarely the published one. Government has already expressed an interest in regulating what you view via internet, such as Utah wanting ISPs to block porn sites. Government has already expressed an interest in being able to watch what you do on internet, especially if they don't have to get pesky wire-tap warrants to do it, as is often brought up every time the word "PATRIOT" appears on this site.
Government-run internet service is the perfect combination - the ability to regulate what you can connect to and to monitor what you do without waking up a judge. If someone petitions the city government that site X is in violation of city decency ordinance 555.1212, what is the city going to do, cite freedom of speech, or block site X on city-run internet?
Not to mention fact that the FBI can hack a wireless net in 3 minutes, so they'd never need to get a wiretap order to watch what you do... (and neither would the RIAA/MPAA)
Yep, sounds like the sort of thing every Slashdot reader should champion!
Give AFP what they ask for, even if it isn't what they're going to find that they want...
As an experiment, we implemented a picture gallery on the site that got the most requests. After 12 months, we are still getting requests from these same people for "more pictures", despite the fact that they didn't even realize the "Photo gallery" link has been prominent on the home page (every page, for that matter) for a year. They'd never even looked, and they certainly haven't posted any of the "hundreds" of pictures they wanted a place to display.
We've strived to keep the sites usable for modem users. And the modem users like that... but they're not the vocal ones at the "design meetings". The last design meeting wanted a streaming video added to the initial page. The video they wanted to use was just under 80MB... "It won't be a problem!" they said, "Nobody uses MODEMS anymore!"
"Show of hands, how many people at this meeting still use dial-up to reach internet?" All but three people raised their hands. "Do any of you nobodies want it to take 20-60 minutes to reach the web page, so that you can watch a 5 minute video?"
There isn't going to be a video intro...
The problem is, she isn't brain dead. She's alive, breathing on her own, reacts to people, but can not feed herself. If simply being brain damaged to the point of not being able to perform certain functions was reason enough to kill people, we have hundreds, if not thousands, of them in nursing homes in worse condition than Terry Schiavo. But, they don't have a husband out to kill them, and it currently is considered "controversial" to want to kill them.
This isn't a case of "letting a brain-dead woman finish dying". It's a case of, "I don't want her around anymore, so I want her dead." And the husband claims, with no evidence to support him, that she "wanted to die". How convenient.
You would die if we withheld food from you. Does that mean that if we did it, we would simply be "allowing you to die"? Would you consider that a mercy, or would you complain that we were murdering you? Terry can't complain. She is going to suffer. They won't even offer the kindness of a lethal injection, because that's too much like murder.
Now, whether setting a precident like this is "medical terrorism", I don't know. I do think it is a bad thing to do, making the decision of who should live or die based not on whether or not someone could survive, but on how much it inconveniences the living.
Um, they didn't allow them to be purchased. They were leased, so that GM maintained control over them and their eventual disposal.
The section only decides which horrid color scheme it will be displayed in...
I don't see the government stepping in and stopping VOIP, so it's not a free speech issue. First Amendment issues refer to the government abridging public speech. This is decidedly private speech, carried over non-public conduits. Everyone who owns transmission lines is free to carry or not carry what they want. If I own 5,000 miles of fiber-optic cable and decide it won't carry VOIP, who is going to infringe on MY rights to do with my property as I see fit?
The possible exception is someone covered under a "common carrier" regulation, requiring them to not discriminate against content... but, if the government decides to require that, how are they going to justify it when they want to regulate things like kiddie porn?
Uh oh... watch yourself in this crowd! Lots of them think that software and music piracy isn't theft, because it doesn't take any property away from those it is stolen from. And here you're only talking about losing your time, bandwidth, and CPU cycles!
Then again, those last two are precious commodities to these people, so maybe you're safe...
It is important to understand any automated optimizations in use. Most are safe. Some have dire consequences under certain circumstances. Compilers only understand the code presented to them, not the context in which it will run. A common example is loop-invarient code migration. 99.9% of the time, it's great. Until it optimizes your device driver polling loop to remove the device read from the loop. (but whe all know we shouldn't be writing polling loops anymore, right?)
I agree with those who say strive for a better algorithm first, then profile it to see where the improvements would do the most good, after you have it correct.
1) They wire behind your walls
2) If the service goes out they come and fix it (no charge to you)
3) Unless your wires are faulty - bad weather RARELY (less then 1% for me) affects your connection
4) High speed cable modems are way bettr then DSL...and satellite high speed is a joke.
Location is everything. Here in the boonies:
1. Comcast does wire behind your walls... so long as they're outside walls, and you don't mind them wiring on the outside of the house, and drilling straight through the wall where you want the jack installed. They'll ignore pre-installed wiring, demarcation points and distribution boxes.
2. Yes, they will. Usually within 60 days. Often within 30. Depends upon to whom and how often you yell, and how good of friends you are with the people who regulate them, if it's a tough problem. (a recent incident comes to mind, where only one of two ONDEMAND boxes working on the same cable, even after three replacements, taking 2 months to fix, because it took the insistance of a knowledgeable tech that the head-end server be rebooted, after COMCAST said, "ONDEMAND is down in your area". "But why does the other box work?")
3. Faulty wiring is less a problem now than it was 10 years ago, but we still have problems during storms. Seems people keep running into telephone poles and taking out the main cable trunks, knocking out whole neighborhoods. Not the cable company's fault, really, but as much a problem out here as loss of satellite signal has been.
4. Comcast lists our area as having that nice high-speed cable modem thingy available. Too bad they've not bothered to install the head-end equipment in our town, and haven't upgraded the cable plant to handle it...
Neither is perfect. If it weren't for Cartoon and SciFi, I'd not bother, since over-the-air is cheaper, and I can get 10 digital channels with "just" a 50 foot tower. And (getting back on topic) TiVo is the only way any of it is worth it!
Right. And that's why one of the leaders of the insurgents in Iraq declared his opposition to the elections by telling people that anyone who supported democracy was an enemy of Islam. Nope, they don't hate freedom or liberty. No way!
Osama bin Laden has never worked FOR the US. Osama has worked for HIS best interests. At one time, those interests overlapped, as Osama was fighting the Soviet Union. Anyone who isn't for furthering Osama's interests is expendible, including his own family.
Where did Iraq get all the weapons that they are now shooting at our sons and daughters?
Why don't you ask the French, who supplied his nuclear hardware, and the Germans, who supplied many of his now-missing biological agents, and the Soviets and Russians, who supplied anything he wanted to buy? It wasn't F16s in the Iraqi airforce, it was Mirages.
Perhaps you're confusing Iraq with Iran. Iran had US military hardware, because Iran used to be one of our allies. But we didn't "push with Military Might" to keep Iran from falling into its current dark age.
More people have been killed in the name of Christianity than any other single cause.
More than the 10,000,000+ (some say upwards of 60M) killed by the Soviets during the various purges, which had nothing to do pushing Christianity? And are you counting the millions who died in the various 7th- through 11th-century Jihads because they weren't Muslims as agression by the Jews and Christians? After all, the Christians died in the name of Christ, even if it was because the Muslims who killed them believed (and many still do) that anyone who fails to worship Allah must die.
Because it is different. There are other systems out there that use other bases - Automatic Position Reporting System uses Base 91 encoding under certain circumstances, for example, and it does it for the exact kind of reasons this patent application is addressing. And it's been around for a while...
But, this discussion isn't just about WIFI. Quoting from the summary atop this discussion, "The report has some interesting points (mostly about building fiber networks), ...", which are faster and more reliable than the wire lines most of us use right now.
How is an ISP going to compete against an entrenched (literally!) agency with multi-megabit fiber to the home, just on the basis of content?
I suppose the correct example for this crowd would be the community voting that all computers run Windows, and a "computer tax" of $40/computer would imposed to pay for a city-wide license. Even people whose computers weren't capable of running Windows would be subjected to it, because it is for the "public good"...
Once you accept the idea of the government providing your conduit, you've given up the right to decide what is "acceptable" and what is not - that's in the hands of bureaucrats, who might decide that any site that mentions "breasts" is "unacceptable" before 11PM local time, to "protect the children". And you're stuck, because the private companies won't be around to offer alternatives, since they can't afford to compete.
Ah, so, in your small town, you're allowed to force me to abandon my property rights (make me leave town) if I disagree with your collective decision? What if the collective decision is to build a free Christian daycare center, and I'm a Muslim, Jew, Budhist, or atheist?
In the larger context, when the municipality decides what constitutes "acceptable" WIFI or other internet access, who's to say they won't also decide what you're allowed to access via that public-funded interenet connection? And what if you disagree with that decision (they've banned your favourite porn site, for example), and you find that you can't find any private, non-restricted ISP to service your address, because they can't make money competing with the local government's monopoly?
Anyone who values freedom should shout loud and hard against any attempt by government entities to control your access to internet, even under the guise of "free access".
MSNBot is crawling a site too often When MSNBot is crawling your site, it generally does not try to access your site more often than once every few seconds. If MSNBot determines that your site has a slow connection, it automatically adjusts the frequency. To specify a minimum frequency (in seconds), use the crawl delay parameter in the robots.txt file:
user-agent: msnbot
crawl-delay: 120
There is additional information on excluding the bot on this page as well, including a section entitled Use metadata tags to control page indexing and link crawling....
We had to modify our sites to remove session IDs when MSNBot comes by to cut the traffic.
The MySQL install program, because you need SOMETHING to administer it with. Of course, the first thing it tells you to do is to change the root password, and how to do that.
The alternative is to create a passworded root user account, with a published password... Which is just as bad. How many consumer routers have the password of "admin"?
Just like so many worms exploit weak or non-existant administrator passwords in Windows XP to promote themselves to services. Weak passwords are worse than no password. At least no password means you know anyone can access your system. And Windows XP doesn't do much to discourage you from running as Administrator, and does a lot to prevent you from running as anything else (What? I can't sync my Palm Pilot without being an Administrator?!? DO IT!).
Vastly. By default, Postgres won't do anything. You need to actively administer it to accept even local connections, let alone activate TCP/IP.
That said, Windows, by default, has a lot of things going on that the user is unaware of. Does the average Windows user know that LSASS is running? Or the Messenger service? And why does Windows default to loading MSMessenger, and fight most attempts to disable it?
And the firewall is considered laughable by many sources I've read, including Windows zealot sites. It's very easy to write a program to disable it without the user's knowledge. And it's off by default, unless you've got SP2... which many users are scared of, because it has a history of killing systems and certain programs.
I install SP2 where I can, but there are some systems where the risk of something not working outweighs the customer's desire to be fully patched... The only thing we can do is build another system for them, and verify everything still works under SP2, before they'll let us touch the working system. If the system is behind a hardware NAT firewall, I don't concern myself with it too much.
The way to do this: