Actually, I am opposed to breaking up Microsoft. I don't give a damn what it says "their [sic] in black and white," it is obvious that the investigation is over, and any punishment will be ludicriously weak. Anybody that thinks otherwise is fooliing themselves.
I hate Anonymous Cowards. Can't you stand behind your own opinion?
The worst part is that couldn't we all see this coming? Ashcroft was such a weenie during his appointment hearings, especially whenever the topic of Microsoft came up. Microsoft, of course, must have been getting the inside word on this, which explains their incredibly nervy behavior (many aspects of XP, Smart Tags, etc.) in the last few months. This was surely all arranged between Bill and Double-Yah many months ago.
There are lots of programs like Charlottesville's Computers4Kids out there. We'll take any processor at or above 130MHz, drives over 1GB, and other things of that generation. I don't know of any central directory of similar programs, but if there's not one, I know that we'd love to have 'em!
A warning to all considering purchasing Yellow Dog 2.0 that already run an earlier version: it's impossible to upgrade.
I bought v2.0 as soon as it came out a few months ago (the same as I did with v1.0), wanting to support Terra Soft by giving them some money. Not having read all of the technical notes before purchasing it, I didn't found out until I got it in the mail that there was no upgrade path from v1.2. I complained on the mailing list, which started a big battle, but solved nothing. I sent another post about a week ago, asking if I could upgrade yet. No replies.
While technically feasible, we have not yet posted instructions on using 'yup!' to update a YDL 1.2 system to YDL 2.0. Please stay tuned as we work out these details.
This would indicate to me that upgrading is possible, just not via YUP, their fantastic apt-get type updating system. That, unfortunately, is not the case. Maybe there are other notices on their site, but I'm yet to locate them.
I was told, at the time that I initially complained, that I just didn't properly appreciate how difficult that it was to get v2.0 out, and that it's really difficult to create a distribution that can be upgraded, and why should I worry about such details anyhow? Didn't I have proper tape backup and off-site storage procedures for my home iMac? Didn't I know that I was a fool to ever upgrade a machine? All of these things are true, but they don't excuse creating a release that without notifying purchasers beforehand cannot be upgraded.
I like Yellow Dog Linux. I use it every day. I like Terra Soft, and I've enjoyed every enounter that I've had with their staff. I think that they've created a fine distribution. It irks me that it can't be upgraded, but that's their perogative and my incentive to run Mac OS X. But their lack of notification that this problem exists makes me nuts. This review, like all others, really makes me want to run v2.0. I sure hope that I can someday, because it looks like a gem of an update.
We discussed this one year ago this week. It was concluded that they were running a round-robin DNS, and you'd sometimes get Apache (~20% of the time) and sometimes get IIS 5.0 (~80% of the time.) To run your own experiment, try the script that I included at the time.
#!/bin/bash
i=1
while [ "$i" -lt 253 ]
do
lynx -head -dump http://lw7fd.law7.hotmail.msn.com/ |grep Server >>/var/tmp/hotmail
let i="$i"+1
done
I live in Charlottesville, Virginia. There are a number of things that make our tech scene great. A few:
The Neon Guild,a group of geeks. We've met twice monthly since 1995, and we have hundreds of members. It's like Cheers, only for geeks.
The Virginia Piedmont Technology Council represents our interests (theoretically) on a legal level to the state and beyond. I have some qualms with them, but the concept is great.
Tech non-profits like Computers 4 Kids. Geeks need an outlet in their time off, but many of us are happy to keep doing computer stuff. Being able to donate time to organizations like this is great.
But we need some changes. Like:
A wireless network. Downtown should be blanketed with 802.11b and a DHCP server to handle the users. No charge, something that the city would do as an incentive to tech businesses to set up house downtown. Not fast enough to be used as an office Internet connection, but sufficient for browsing at a café or something.
Tax breaks for tech start-ups. We have one for personal property taxes, but the state taxes are killers. It would be nice to see a graded tax that would leave companies paying full face-value after n years.
A clueful City Council. Most of them just don't get tech, and there's a general attitude that as goes the stock market, so goes the city's interest in having tech firms here. This is foolish, as tech firms are excellent businesses: non-polluting, compact, undemanding (ignoring my list here:), and high-paying. If the City were simply able to react to needs quickly, instead of running a 24-month study, I imagine that things would get done more quickly.
Anyhow, that's my take on things as regards my experience with my city. YMMV.
Don't you think it's irresponsible to list the IPs of owned hosts in public?
Not really. Not to say that I didn't put some thought into it -- I did. But anybody that has a machine connected to the Internet for any length of time (and I mean any, as some folks have found out) is going to get their own list quite rapidly. I'd considered how to best notify them, but I found that it was simply impossible to notify the majority of them. I live in a tight-knit tech community here in Charlottesville, Virginia, and I primarily hope that one of the many local folks that check in on my site regularly will recognize some of the IP addresses as their own or those of their associates. Idealistic? Perhaps. But what put me over the edge into deciding that is a reasonable action is that so many machines are infected at this point that I figure it's worth trying something. Every little bit helps.
Think of it from a practical, not fiscal, perspective: individuals are likely to require many less lookups than many businesses. (Not without exceptions, of course, but it's probably a reasonable generalization.)
Just take the total and write it to a file that contains only the total. Every time that the page is loaded, have it check the timestamp. If it's less than n hours old, show the cache. Otherwise, re-grep the log and write the result to the cache and start anew.
At www.waldo.net/misc/codered I set this up this afternoon. I've personally alerted the owners of several of these IPs, but I hope that the public viewing may lead to them disconnecting their machines. <fingers crossed>
I knew something this would happen. Y'all can bitch about Dell all you want (no, I didn't know that you could get Red Hat desktops or laptops, either), or about people being able to install it themselves, or whatever, but the fact is that this is a minor PR disaster for Linux and for Open Source.
I think the worse part is that the comments from Dell ("the productivity suites just aren't there"..."the biggest growth is on the server") are totally true. Sure, we all think that KOffice and Star Office are just grand, but the average consumer sure doesn't think so.
My girlfriend had this happen to her a couple of years ago. She was quite distraught to have lost 1.5+ years of e-mail. Correspondance with Hotmail only led them to tell her that she shouldn't have had that much spam in her In Box. (We were on vacation for a couple of weeks, and she didn't check e-mail frequently.) She has an account on one of my machines now, so all is well.
You have a low enough UID to have a clue, so I'm curious, why do you have Apache resolving IPs in the log? Low volume server, or maybe you know the magic to make the resolution fast enough for Apache not to care? (I'm assuming Apache, anyway).
Low volume server, for the most part. That particular server (I run about half a dozen, all of which are low-volume) serves up a lot of sites that are specific to Charlottesville, Virginia, and I find it highly useful to be able to scan the logs, sometimes real-time, and see who is hitting my machine. DSLs are so common here, and the naming scheme for the addresses so similar to the business name, that I can simply see "hey, The Daily Progress is reading...OK, now the Chamber of Commerce...," etc.
So, yeah, low volume and a desire for convenience. No magic.:)
No, I did propose something along these lines on Advogato back in February in a piece entitled "Realtime Worm Filtering System," but I'm not accusing the author of ripping off my blatently-obvious and not-uncommon idea. That system is intended to stop worms, obviously, and not spam. Worms tend to be easier to stop because they're seldom wholly polymorphic, often retaining enough similarities that collaborative filtering is quite feasible.
You know, I think that may have been the solution. I feel so stupid for forgetting the origin of this story. I'm an urban legends geek, and I'm quite certain that this isn't one of them. (That is, unless a major publication fell prey to one, which has been known to happen. Googling for the story has turned up naught, but I'll keep poking around in the morning.
In principle, the alarm has to alert people and signal the direction of travel. The Localizer fulfils both these criteria. According to Deborah, 'There is only one type of sound that our brains can pinpoint, called 'white noise', like running water, the cracking of a twig or rustle of leaves. This is the sort of sound used since ancient times to pinpoint sound and avoid being eaten by prey.' So the Localizer siren uses short pulses of white noise, like radio static.
The article is about a University of Leeds audiologist that got a "Smart award" for developing a siren that's more easily pinpointed.
A sidenote. I read something about a year ago, but I just can't recall where. (I'll keep Googling, but I think I read it in Scientific American or something.) A fire department tested out one of these new sirens, and they worked splendidly in all the important ways...but one. Traffic could easily determine where the fire engine was coming from, the siren was easily heard, and that was all nice. The problem was that firemen have learned to associate the sound of the engine with excitement. So they arrived at fires unprepared, psychologically, and without the gusto to fight the fire. Weird, huh?
Sending that command to your modem (presumably as part of the init. string) will tell your modem only to answer on a triple ring. It will report this as "RING 3." If you wanted it only to work for the single rings, you'd use AT-SDR=1 ("RING 1") and for dual rings, AT-SDR=2 ("RING 2".) Some modems will send "RING A," "RING B," etc. -- I gather that there's no such thing as a standard message for this.
It's been a while since I ran my BBS (ObReminisce: Aahhh, yes...those were the days), but lemme see if I can think my way through this one.
If you're using one of many modems that supporting distinctive ring (that feature was quite common Back In The Day, I can only assume that it still is), then you should be able to use AT settings, if such things still exist, to echo something aside from "RING" when the phone rings. "RING 0," "RING 1," etc. When mgetty is looking for activity, I think it just looks for "RING" and answers. You should be able to modify mgetty to only answer upon seeing "RING 0".
What the review doesn't say is that there's no way to upgrade to YDL2.0. (At least, there wasn't a month ago, and I haven't seen anything on the mailing list or the website to indicate that's changed yet.) I bought the YDL2.0 CDs the moment that they were available (maybe 6 weeks ago), hoping to upgrade my YDL1.2 machine. No such luck. Frustated, I bought up the topic on the mailing list, but it devolved into a bit of a flame war, unfortunately. I was told that if I had any sense, I'd wipe my machine and re-install from scratch, that there's no reason I couldn't wait for an upgrade path, etc.
Anyhow, if you're a user of an earlier version of Yellow Dog Linux, do yourself a favor and hold off. What would lead Terrasoft to release a 2.0 final release that lacks the ability to upgrade from previous versions is beyond me. But don't make the same mistake that I did.
Slashdot Mirror
I have yet to hear any credible explanation of how breaking Microsoft up will hurt the entire U.S. economy or even a segment of it.
Because people think that it will. That's the way that our economy works -- it's fear-based. (Or euphoria-based[1], as the case might be.)
-Waldo
[1] See 1999.
Actually, I am opposed to breaking up Microsoft. I don't give a damn what it says "their [sic] in black and white," it is obvious that the investigation is over, and any punishment will be ludicriously weak. Anybody that thinks otherwise is fooliing themselves.
I hate Anonymous Cowards. Can't you stand behind your own opinion?
-Waldo
The worst part is that couldn't we all see this coming? Ashcroft was such a weenie during his appointment hearings, especially whenever the topic of Microsoft came up. Microsoft, of course, must have been getting the inside word on this, which explains their incredibly nervy behavior (many aspects of XP, Smart Tags, etc.) in the last few months. This was surely all arranged between Bill and Double-Yah many months ago.
Those bastards!
-Waldo
There are lots of programs like Charlottesville's Computers4Kids out there. We'll take any processor at or above 130MHz, drives over 1GB, and other things of that generation. I don't know of any central directory of similar programs, but if there's not one, I know that we'd love to have 'em!
-Waldo
I got a $500 credit limit. I'm so excited.
-Waldo
I bought v2.0 as soon as it came out a few months ago (the same as I did with v1.0), wanting to support Terra Soft by giving them some money. Not having read all of the technical notes before purchasing it, I didn't found out until I got it in the mail that there was no upgrade path from v1.2. I complained on the mailing list, which started a big battle, but solved nothing. I sent another post about a week ago, asking if I could upgrade yet. No replies.
Poking around on their site, I can only find a single reference to the fact that upgrading is impossible. Is that in the installation guide? Nope. The engineer's notes? No sir. Perhaps just a note in their on-line store? Unh-uh. Surely the installation FAQ? No siree Bob. No, you'd have to go to the bottom of the support page and follow the Can I upgrade my previous install of YDL to 2.0? link, which says:This would indicate to me that upgrading is possible, just not via YUP, their fantastic apt-get type updating system. That, unfortunately, is not the case. Maybe there are other notices on their site, but I'm yet to locate them.
I was told, at the time that I initially complained, that I just didn't properly appreciate how difficult that it was to get v2.0 out, and that it's really difficult to create a distribution that can be upgraded, and why should I worry about such details anyhow? Didn't I have proper tape backup and off-site storage procedures for my home iMac? Didn't I know that I was a fool to ever upgrade a machine? All of these things are true, but they don't excuse creating a release that without notifying purchasers beforehand cannot be upgraded.
I like Yellow Dog Linux. I use it every day. I like Terra Soft, and I've enjoyed every enounter that I've had with their staff. I think that they've created a fine distribution. It irks me that it can't be upgraded, but that's their perogative and my incentive to run Mac OS X. But their lack of notification that this problem exists makes me nuts. This review, like all others, really makes me want to run v2.0. I sure hope that I can someday, because it looks like a gem of an update.
-Waldo
We discussed this one year ago this week. It was concluded that they were running a round-robin DNS, and you'd sometimes get Apache (~20% of the time) and sometimes get IIS 5.0 (~80% of the time.) To run your own experiment, try the script that I included at the time.
/var/tmp/hotmail
#!/bin/bash
i=1
while [ "$i" -lt 253 ]
do
lynx -head -dump http://lw7fd.law7.hotmail.msn.com/ |grep Server >>
let i="$i"+1
done
-Waldo
- The Neon Guild,a group of geeks. We've met twice monthly since 1995, and we have hundreds of members. It's like Cheers, only for geeks.
- The Virginia Piedmont Technology Council represents our interests (theoretically) on a legal level to the state and beyond. I have some qualms with them, but the concept is great.
- A wide variety of tech businesses populate the city, from gaming companies like Electronic Arts and (formerly) Boxer Jam to small shops like my website design firm. Not much homogeny, as a result.
- Tech non-profits like Computers 4 Kids. Geeks need an outlet in their time off, but many of us are happy to keep doing computer stuff. Being able to donate time to organizations like this is great.
But we need some changes. Like:- A wireless network. Downtown should be blanketed with 802.11b and a DHCP server to handle the users. No charge, something that the city would do as an incentive to tech businesses to set up house downtown. Not fast enough to be used as an office Internet connection, but sufficient for browsing at a café or something.
- Tax breaks for tech start-ups. We have one for personal property taxes, but the state taxes are killers. It would be nice to see a graded tax that would leave companies paying full face-value after n years.
- A clueful City Council. Most of them just don't get tech, and there's a general attitude that as goes the stock market, so goes the city's interest in having tech firms here. This is foolish, as tech firms are excellent businesses: non-polluting, compact, undemanding (ignoring my list here
:), and high-paying. If the City were simply able to react to needs quickly, instead of running a 24-month study, I imagine that things would get done more quickly.
Anyhow, that's my take on things as regards my experience with my city. YMMV.-Waldo
Don't you think it's irresponsible to list the IPs of owned hosts in public?
Not really. Not to say that I didn't put some thought into it -- I did. But anybody that has a machine connected to the Internet for any length of time (and I mean any, as some folks have found out) is going to get their own list quite rapidly. I'd considered how to best notify them, but I found that it was simply impossible to notify the majority of them. I live in a tight-knit tech community here in Charlottesville, Virginia, and I primarily hope that one of the many local folks that check in on my site regularly will recognize some of the IP addresses as their own or those of their associates. Idealistic? Perhaps. But what put me over the edge into deciding that is a reasonable action is that so many machines are infected at this point that I figure it's worth trying something. Every little bit helps.
-Waldo
Think of it from a practical, not fiscal, perspective: individuals are likely to require many less lookups than many businesses. (Not without exceptions, of course, but it's probably a reasonable generalization.)
-Waldo
Just take the total and write it to a file that contains only the total. Every time that the page is loaded, have it check the timestamp. If it's less than n hours old, show the cache. Otherwise, re-grep the log and write the result to the cache and start anew.
That's how I do it, anyhow.
-Waldo
At www.waldo.net/misc/codered I set this up this afternoon. I've personally alerted the owners of several of these IPs, but I hope that the public viewing may lead to them disconnecting their machines. <fingers crossed>
:)
Oh, yeah, I did it in PHP, of course.
-Waldo
Don't forget that MAPS is free for individuals' mail servers. It only costs if your server is for a business. This sounds wholly reasonable for me.
-Waldo
I knew something this would happen. Y'all can bitch about Dell all you want (no, I didn't know that you could get Red Hat desktops or laptops, either), or about people being able to install it themselves, or whatever, but the fact is that this is a minor PR disaster for Linux and for Open Source.
I think the worse part is that the comments from Dell ("the productivity suites just aren't there"..."the biggest growth is on the server") are totally true. Sure, we all think that KOffice and Star Office are just grand, but the average consumer sure doesn't think so.
Hooray to Sun for their recent Gnome recent UI testing, and kudos to KDE and Jono Bacon for their new (less-formalized) UI testing via the KDE Usability Project. Let's hope that the result of this is Dell picking up Linux again in six months.
But in the meantime, let's not fool ourselves: this is bad.
-Waldo
My girlfriend had this happen to her a couple of years ago. She was quite distraught to have lost 1.5+ years of e-mail. Correspondance with Hotmail only led them to tell her that she shouldn't have had that much spam in her In Box. (We were on vacation for a couple of weeks, and she didn't check e-mail frequently.) She has an account on one of my machines now, so all is well.
-Waldo
You have a low enough UID to have a clue, so I'm curious, why do you have Apache resolving IPs in the log? Low volume server, or maybe you know the magic to make the resolution fast enough for Apache not to care? (I'm assuming Apache, anyway).
:)
Low volume server, for the most part. That particular server (I run about half a dozen, all of which are low-volume) serves up a lot of sites that are specific to Charlottesville, Virginia, and I find it highly useful to be able to scan the logs, sometimes real-time, and see who is hitting my machine. DSLs are so common here, and the naming scheme for the addresses so similar to the business name, that I can simply see "hey, The Daily Progress is reading...OK, now the Chamber of Commerce...," etc.
So, yeah, low volume and a desire for convenience. No magic.
-Waldo
So I guess I don't have to worry about all of these in my logs, huh?
/default.ida?NNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNN[fucking lameness filter]NNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNN%u9090%u6858 %ucbd3%u7801%u9090%u6858%ucbd3%u7801%u9090%u6858%u cbd3%u7801%u9090%u9090%u8190%u00c3%u0003%u8b00%u53 1b%u53ff%u0078%u0000%u00=a HTTP/1.0" 400 332
ool-18bf4a76.dyn.optonline.net - - [01/Aug/2001:12:01:01 -0400] "GET
Phew. Thanks guys. I'll just ignore those, then.
-Waldo
This certainly looks familiar.
;)
No, I did propose something along these lines on Advogato back in February in a piece entitled "Realtime Worm Filtering System," but I'm not accusing the author of ripping off my blatently-obvious and not-uncommon idea. That system is intended to stop worms, obviously, and not spam. Worms tend to be easier to stop because they're seldom wholly polymorphic, often retaining enough similarities that collaborative filtering is quite feasible.
-Waldo
See my recent Ask Slashdot ("SPAM - Stopping Rumpelstiltskin Attacks?") for more information on this topic.
-Waldo
I'm sorry -- when I said "the sound," I was referring to the traditional sound of a fire engine, not The Sound that is the topic of this story. :)
-Waldo
You know, I think that may have been the solution. I feel so stupid for forgetting the origin of this story. I'm an urban legends geek, and I'm quite certain that this isn't one of them. (That is, unless a major publication fell prey to one, which has been known to happen. Googling for the story has turned up naught, but I'll keep poking around in the morning.
-Waldo
A sidenote. I read something about a year ago, but I just can't recall where. (I'll keep Googling, but I think I read it in Scientific American or something.) A fire department tested out one of these new sirens, and they worked splendidly in all the important ways...but one. Traffic could easily determine where the fire engine was coming from, the siren was easily heard, and that was all nice. The problem was that firemen have learned to associate the sound of the engine with excitement. So they arrived at fires unprepared, psychologically, and without the gusto to fight the fire. Weird, huh?
-Waldo
AT-SDR=4
Sending that command to your modem (presumably as part of the init. string) will tell your modem only to answer on a triple ring. It will report this as "RING 3." If you wanted it only to work for the single rings, you'd use AT-SDR=1 ("RING 1") and for dual rings, AT-SDR=2 ("RING 2".) Some modems will send "RING A," "RING B," etc. -- I gather that there's no such thing as a standard message for this.
Some of the places that I gathered this from include Motorola, FaxTalk, Fosh Australia and Dell Europe. This google was the most useful one.
Good luck -- you should have pretty much all of the info that you need at this point, I hope.
-Waldo
It's been a while since I ran my BBS (ObReminisce: Aahhh, yes...those were the days), but lemme see if I can think my way through this one.
:)
If you're using one of many modems that supporting distinctive ring (that feature was quite common Back In The Day, I can only assume that it still is), then you should be able to use AT settings, if such things still exist, to echo something aside from "RING" when the phone rings. "RING 0," "RING 1," etc. When mgetty is looking for activity, I think it just looks for "RING" and answers. You should be able to modify mgetty to only answer upon seeing "RING 0".
It ain't a link to an RPM, but it's something.
-Waldo
What the review doesn't say is that there's no way to upgrade to YDL2.0. (At least, there wasn't a month ago, and I haven't seen anything on the mailing list or the website to indicate that's changed yet.) I bought the YDL2.0 CDs the moment that they were available (maybe 6 weeks ago), hoping to upgrade my YDL1.2 machine. No such luck. Frustated, I bought up the topic on the mailing list, but it devolved into a bit of a flame war, unfortunately. I was told that if I had any sense, I'd wipe my machine and re-install from scratch, that there's no reason I couldn't wait for an upgrade path, etc.
Anyhow, if you're a user of an earlier version of Yellow Dog Linux, do yourself a favor and hold off. What would lead Terrasoft to release a 2.0 final release that lacks the ability to upgrade from previous versions is beyond me. But don't make the same mistake that I did.
-Waldo