For any newfound Gil Scott-Heron fans, my favorite GSH piece:
Whitey's on the Moon
A rat done bit my sister Nell With whitey on the moon Her face and arms began to swell And whitey's on the moon I can't pay no doctor bills And whitey's on the moon Ten years from now, I'll be payin' still While whitey's on the moon You know, the man just upped my rent last night 'Cos whitey's on the moon No hot water, no toilets, no lights But whitey's on the moon I wonder why he's uppin' me 'Cos whitey's on the moon? Well, I was already givin' him fifty a week And now whitey's on the moon Taxes takin' my whole damn check The junkies make me a nervous wreck The price of food is goin' up And as if all that crap wasn't enough A rat done bit my sister Nell With whitey on the moon...
I've written a PHP/MySQL-based text advertising system that I'm testing out on one of my sites, a Dave Matthews Band fan site. It's a wicked-simple PayPal-based system that has held up nicely for millions of page views over the last couple of months. If you want to sell your own ads self-serve style, and you think that your site's users will find that to be a useful service, you should consider such a system. Best of all, the ads are non-intrusive, both in terms of download time and visual clutter. If you (or anybody else) want a copy, e-mail me, and I'll send you a tarball. I intend to release this properly, but I'd lke to make a few more enhancements after exams are done in a couple of weeks before I release it into the world.:)
Even port leaving port 80 isn't safe due to the Form_Mail.pl security issue that is plauging web servers all over and dumping spam into a mail spool near you.
There's no problem with keeping port 80 open. It's running an unsecured web-based non-authenticated mail relay that's the problem.
Wait, so this company, "Z/Yen," has determined that 71% of malicious connections to wireless networks are used for sending spam, and they've done so on the strength of setting up a grand total of two WiFi hotspots in one unspecified city (which I assume to be London, because that's where they're located) for an unspecifed time span...and this leads to conclusive results? That's just stupid.
In other news, based on my survey of my apartment, 75% of people are running Mac OS X, and 25% are running Linux.
"Certain software products, often known as ``filtering software'' or ``blocking software,'' restrict users from visiting certain internet websites. [...] Critics charge that some filtering programs unfairly block sites that do not contain undesirable material and therefore should not be filtered. [...] Several commenters assert that manufacturers of filtering software encrypt the lists naming the targeted sites and that they are not made available to others, including the operators of the targeted sites themselves. R56. These commenters assert that they have no alternative but to decrypt the encrypted lists in order to learn what websites are included in those lists. [...] Such acts of decryption would appear to violate 1201(a)(1) if it took effect without an exemption for these activities. [...] The case has been made for an exemption for compilations consisting of lists of websites blocked by filtering software applications."
The whole RFID debate seemed so familiar to me for a while, and I was pleased to finally put my finger on it recently. This is all so 1997.
Some of you might remember the huge debate over "magic cookies" (as we called them then) in the mid to late 90s. Around 1997, IIRC, it really built to a fevered pitch -- any self-respecting advocate (myself included) maintained that cookies would be the downfall of civilization, that they did nothing good, only evil, websites' reputation were based on whether or not they provided a Dreaded Cookie, etc., etc. Of course, we learned the cookies are useful, we developed tools to manage them, it became passe to protest them, and life went on.
Of course, RFID tags are just physical cookies. Much like with browsers, we will develop standards for how RFID tags should work, we will learn to manage them, and we will ultimately find that their benefits far outweigh their drawbacks.
MS isn't going to fix ONE security problem that wont' even affect your File or Fax server's unless you have them on the Internet like an a$$ (you probably do don't you?) and you're going to switch to Linux.
How in the world does Microsoft know what I'm doing with an NT box? "ONE security problem?" This is not a small security problem, though perhaps you haven't noticed. Further, does it matter how many security problems that they won't fix? A third of Microsoft-OS-running servers are running NT 4. And they told all of them to go screw.
I would wait until you get a bigger brain to attempt that. If you haven't gotten NT to work as a simple File and Fax server by now, then you won't be able to do anything with Linux. It requires reading. Furthermore, if it does work why are you switching at all??
Why would you say that I've not gotten NT to work as a file and fax server? What part of "[m]y family's business uses NT 4.0 as their primary file and fax server" indicated to you that it doens't work?
I'm switching because I don't want to run an OS that has as many holes as WinNT does, I don't want to run an OS that isn't going to be updated after June, I don't want to run an OS that takes extremely poor advantage of its hardware, I don't want to run an OS that thinks that a server demands a GUI, I don't want to run an OS that is being squeezed to force its users to upgrade to the newest version...the list is long.
Horrible company eh? Are you bitter because they make more money in a day than you'll ever see in your lifetime?
Please... You want to talk horrible companies why not AT LEAST start with companies that test products on animals, use slave labour, etc...
Microsoft uses bad business ethics sure, I don't like them either. However they aren't a "horrible company". They need a lot of improvement for sure, but they don't deserve to be labeled by un-educated extremists.
Blah blah blah worthless ad hominem blah blah stupid comparison blah blah failure to address any of my points blah blah blah...
Nice... Another MS basher. I am really sure that was what they *really* meant to say. When you don't know much about business it is easier to just slag it huh?
NT 4.0 is over 7 years old...
NT is still supposed to be supported through June. Arguments that "hey, it's old" are bullshit. My family's business uses NT 4.0 as their primary file and fax server. The machine, while whizzy at the time that NT 4.0 came out, cannot possibly support Win2K. We expect to switch to Linux for our file server by the end of the SLA, and have figured for years that Microsoft would, as per their support agreement, patch security holes until that end of life date. Turns out that they were lying.
"MS basher"? Only because they're a horrible company. What's your excuse for being an apologist?
Some how I don't feel better by Mailblocks' assertation that they're not going to spam users. Their privacy policy says:
Not now, but in the future, Mailblocks may permit third parties, such as advertisers, to furnish our members, through the Services and otherwise, with information from time to time.
So, were they lying to us before, or are they lying to us now; and if now, in which instance are they lying?
I buy Apple's AppleCare Warranty whenever I buy a new Mac. (I bought a new iBook and a PowerMac just two weeks ago, both with extended warranties.) Like many manufacturers, Apple only provides a one-year warranty with their systems -- you've got to pay extra for a two-year extension for a total of three years. ($169 for an iMac, $249 for an iBook or PowerMac, $349 for a PowerBook.) It always seems expensive at the time, but 30 months after the purchase date, when the AC plug gets all wigggly, the video card becomes mysteriously fried, or the hard drive up and dies, it looks like a pretty good deal.
I spent an hour trying to configure Nagios recently before finally giving up. As a result of its great flexibility and tremendous feature set, it's a horrible bitch to configure. Think Sendmail before m4, and you've got a good idea.
I'll just check back on their site every few months. When they've got m4 for Nagios, we'll talk.
I was going to moderate the above up, but then I wouldn't be able to reply to say: totally. It's not flamebait, it's just true. Dvorak is a drooling idiot. If you just take what he says and expect the opposite, you will forever be ahead of the curve.
I repeat: Dvorak is a moron. This is not a troll, or a flame -- it's an astute observation.
there are quite a few people that can hear the extremely high-pitched whine of CRT's scanning - we can tell if a TV is on in a room without looking with it on mute
God, I'm glad to hear somebody else mention that. My girlfriend and I can both hear this, but nobody else in her family or mine can. Her entirely family turns off not the TV, but just the cable box, subjecting us to high-pitched whines from throughout her home at all hours of the day and night. Once, we were housesitting, and we heard the damned noise everywhere. Turned out to be some kind of ultrasonic mouse-trap dealie. It damned near made us insane.
No - get the analogies right. If I, as a car servicing firm, knew of a part in a Ford car that could fail and cause the car to go off the road at random and I only let my best customers know, I would be sued for screwing around with peoples lives.
Close, but no cigar. If you, as a car servicing firm, knew of a part in a Ford car that could fail and keep the car from starting sometimes under some circumstances, and you only let your best customers know, you would be...um...nothing.
Can I boot from a USB drive? And what about all of those install disks I still get? Hard Drive manufacturers still have their disk setup programs based on a floppy disk install.
The same line of questioning was levelled at Apple back in '98 when they dropped the floppy. That nincompoop Dvorak insisted (and still insists, last I checked) that losing the floppy drive would be the death of Apple.
If Dell drops the floppy, manufacturers of hardware will stop providing install disks on floppies. They will ensure that their BIOS supports booting from a USB drive. I know this to be true because Dell didn't get to be a big successful company by being stupid, and because we done already did this with Apple.
-Waldo Jaquith
Sneaky Germans...
on
Corporate KDE
·
· Score: 4, Funny
I had this happen to me, too. Some spammer was promoting a pump-and-dump scheme and then moved onto promoting an actual product. It was easy enough to connect the two, and thus get a name and address. A friend and staunch anti-spam advocate actually called the guy up and challenged him. He invented some yarn about an evil business partner taking over his servers or something. I talked to several attorneys, but the cost for taking on the case was thousands of dollars, so that was out. I eventually filed a complaint with the SEC over the pump-and-dump scheme, but I've never heard back.
Another spammer started sending out mail with my return address about a week ago. This time, I wrote a quick filter to pipe it all into a folder where I could ignore it. I don't know what else I can do.
Slashdot really, truly, utterly needs to have a local cache of the pages it references. It's getting to where Slashdotting is as bad as a denial of service attack - and that's a terrible thing to inflict on *anyone*.
Slashdot should cache pages to prevent the Slashdot Effect!
Sure, it's a great idea, but it has a lot of implications. For example, commercial sites rely on their banner ads to generate revenue. If I cache one of their pages, this will mess with their statistics, and mess with their banner ads. In other words, this will piss them off.
Of course, most of the time, the commercial sites that actually have income from banner ads easily withstand the Slashdot Effect. So perhaps we could draw the line at sites that don't have ads. They are, after all, much more likely to buckle under the pressure of all those unexpected hits. But what happens if I cache the site, and they update themselves? Once again, I'm transmitting data that I shouldn't be, only this time my cache is out of date!
I could try asking permission, but do you want to wait 6 hours for a cool breaking story while we wait for permission to link someone?
So the quick answer is: "Sure, caching would be neat." It would make things a lot easier when servers go down, but it's a complicated issue that would need to be thought through in great detail before being implemented.
They could easily implement some kind of opt-in thing where you put a META tag in your web page telling Slashdot that you grant them explicit permission to mirror the site for (say) a week after mentioning it - so Slashdot would have no legal/copyright come-backs.
You're a genius! Oh...wait...no... You just haven't read the FAQ:
Is it possible to have META tags that Slashdot looks for in a story link before allowing it to be submitted/posted? Many times a server can't handle the load of a Slashdotting. So can the site have tags to prevent it from being added to a Slashdot story?
Not inconceivable, but I don't really think it's worth the work. Most of the sites that are Slashdotted are prepared for it, and the sites that get smashed usually are caught completely off guard; they wouldn't know of this mysterious opt-out meta tag. (See also Caching Slashdot Stories).
It's not rocket science to configure Apache to handle a Slashdotting. I've been hit three times in the past five years. Every time, my little 333MHz eMachine has done just fine. I just followed the instructions in the Apache guide. This guy took another fine route -- he took his pages off-line for the time being. Either route works.
People who put up websites should recognize that people are going to look at it. Sometimes, a lot of people might look at it, as a result of a link from Slashdot or any of hundreds of other sites. People who bitch and moan about being linked to from Slashdot remind me of the companies who whine when people link to "confidential" webpages -- guess what, if it's on the web, it's not confidential.
Slashdot Mirror
For any newfound Gil Scott-Heron fans, my favorite GSH piece:
Whitey's on the Moon
A rat done bit my sister Nell
With whitey on the moon
Her face and arms began to swell
And whitey's on the moon
I can't pay no doctor bills
And whitey's on the moon
Ten years from now, I'll be payin' still
While whitey's on the moon
You know, the man just upped my rent last night
'Cos whitey's on the moon
No hot water, no toilets, no lights
But whitey's on the moon
I wonder why he's uppin' me
'Cos whitey's on the moon?
Well, I was already givin' him fifty a week
And now whitey's on the moon
Taxes takin' my whole damn check
The junkies make me a nervous wreck
The price of food is goin' up
And as if all that crap wasn't enough
A rat done bit my sister Nell
With whitey on the moon...
I've written a PHP/MySQL-based text advertising system that I'm testing out on one of my sites, a Dave Matthews Band fan site. It's a wicked-simple PayPal-based system that has held up nicely for millions of page views over the last couple of months. If you want to sell your own ads self-serve style, and you think that your site's users will find that to be a useful service, you should consider such a system. Best of all, the ads are non-intrusive, both in terms of download time and visual clutter. If you (or anybody else) want a copy, e-mail me, and I'll send you a tarball. I intend to release this properly, but I'd lke to make a few more enhancements after exams are done in a couple of weeks before I release it into the world. :)
Waldo Jaquith
waldo@nancies.org
Even port leaving port 80 isn't safe due to the Form_Mail.pl security issue that is plauging web servers all over and dumping spam into a mail spool near you.
There's no problem with keeping port 80 open. It's running an unsecured web-based non-authenticated mail relay that's the problem.
-Waldo Jaquith
Wait, so this company, "Z/Yen," has determined that 71% of malicious connections to wireless networks are used for sending spam, and they've done so on the strength of setting up a grand total of two WiFi hotspots in one unspecified city (which I assume to be London, because that's where they're located) for an unspecifed time span...and this leads to conclusive results? That's just stupid.
In other news, based on my survey of my apartment, 75% of people are running Mac OS X, and 25% are running Linux.
-Waldo Jaquith
-Waldo Jaquith
The whole RFID debate seemed so familiar to me for a while, and I was pleased to finally put my finger on it recently. This is all so 1997.
Some of you might remember the huge debate over "magic cookies" (as we called them then) in the mid to late 90s. Around 1997, IIRC, it really built to a fevered pitch -- any self-respecting advocate (myself included) maintained that cookies would be the downfall of civilization, that they did nothing good, only evil, websites' reputation were based on whether or not they provided a Dreaded Cookie, etc., etc. Of course, we learned the cookies are useful, we developed tools to manage them, it became passe to protest them, and life went on.
Of course, RFID tags are just physical cookies. Much like with browsers, we will develop standards for how RFID tags should work, we will learn to manage them, and we will ultimately find that their benefits far outweigh their drawbacks.
-Waldo Jaquith
MS isn't going to fix ONE security problem that wont' even affect your File or Fax server's unless you have them on the Internet like an a$$ (you probably do don't you?) and you're going to switch to Linux.
How in the world does Microsoft know what I'm doing with an NT box? "ONE security problem?" This is not a small security problem, though perhaps you haven't noticed. Further, does it matter how many security problems that they won't fix? A third of Microsoft-OS-running servers are running NT 4. And they told all of them to go screw.
I would wait until you get a bigger brain to attempt that. If you haven't gotten NT to work as a simple File and Fax server by now, then you won't be able to do anything with Linux. It requires reading. Furthermore, if it does work why are you switching at all??
Why would you say that I've not gotten NT to work as a file and fax server? What part of "[m]y family's business uses NT 4.0 as their primary file and fax server" indicated to you that it doens't work?
I'm switching because I don't want to run an OS that has as many holes as WinNT does, I don't want to run an OS that isn't going to be updated after June, I don't want to run an OS that takes extremely poor advantage of its hardware, I don't want to run an OS that thinks that a server demands a GUI, I don't want to run an OS that is being squeezed to force its users to upgrade to the newest version...the list is long.
But there's no point in discussing this with you. You're an inflammatory troll. "IBM and other OpenSource backers (Sun, Apple) *know* that M$ products are currently far more superior than anything available for *nix."
NewbieTroll, begone!
-Waldo Jaquith
Horrible company eh? Are you bitter because they make more money in a day than you'll ever see in your lifetime?
Please... You want to talk horrible companies why not AT LEAST start with companies that test products on animals, use slave labour, etc...
Microsoft uses bad business ethics sure, I don't like them either. However they aren't a "horrible company". They need a lot of improvement for sure, but they don't deserve to be labeled by un-educated extremists.
Blah blah blah worthless ad hominem blah blah stupid comparison blah blah failure to address any of my points blah blah blah...
You talk a lot, but you sure don't say much.
-Waldo Jaquith
Nice... Another MS basher. I am really sure that was what they *really* meant to say. When you don't know much about business it is easier to just slag it huh?
NT 4.0 is over 7 years old...
NT is still supposed to be supported through June. Arguments that "hey, it's old" are bullshit. My family's business uses NT 4.0 as their primary file and fax server. The machine, while whizzy at the time that NT 4.0 came out, cannot possibly support Win2K. We expect to switch to Linux for our file server by the end of the SLA, and have figured for years that Microsoft would, as per their support agreement, patch security holes until that end of life date. Turns out that they were lying.
"MS basher"? Only because they're a horrible company. What's your excuse for being an apologist?
-Waldo Jaqutih
After running this through the honesty filter, we come out with:
"Windows is fundamentally insecure. Suck it up."
Gotta love the honesty.
-Waldo Jaquith
-Waldo Jaquith
I buy Apple's AppleCare Warranty whenever I buy a new Mac. (I bought a new iBook and a PowerMac just two weeks ago, both with extended warranties.) Like many manufacturers, Apple only provides a one-year warranty with their systems -- you've got to pay extra for a two-year extension for a total of three years. ($169 for an iMac, $249 for an iBook or PowerMac, $349 for a PowerBook.) It always seems expensive at the time, but 30 months after the purchase date, when the AC plug gets all wigggly, the video card becomes mysteriously fried, or the hard drive up and dies, it looks like a pretty good deal.
-Waldo Jaquith
I spent an hour trying to configure Nagios recently before finally giving up. As a result of its great flexibility and tremendous feature set, it's a horrible bitch to configure. Think Sendmail before m4, and you've got a good idea.
I'll just check back on their site every few months. When they've got m4 for Nagios, we'll talk.
-Waldo Jaquith
I was going to moderate the above up, but then I wouldn't be able to reply to say: totally. It's not flamebait, it's just true. Dvorak is a drooling idiot. If you just take what he says and expect the opposite, you will forever be ahead of the curve.
I repeat: Dvorak is a moron. This is not a troll, or a flame -- it's an astute observation.
-Waldo Jaquith
there are quite a few people that can hear the extremely high-pitched whine of CRT's scanning - we can tell if a TV is on in a room without looking with it on mute
God, I'm glad to hear somebody else mention that. My girlfriend and I can both hear this, but nobody else in her family or mine can. Her entirely family turns off not the TV, but just the cable box, subjecting us to high-pitched whines from throughout her home at all hours of the day and night. Once, we were housesitting, and we heard the damned noise everywhere. Turned out to be some kind of ultrasonic mouse-trap dealie. It damned near made us insane.
-Waldo Jaquith
You cow-orker was right.
Now, look here, there's no need to be mean.
-Waldo Jaquith
Don't you hate when there's several people with the same name as yours?
Whoo. Yeah. That drives me nuts.
-Waldo D. L. Jaquith
No - get the analogies right. If I, as a car servicing firm, knew of a part in a Ford car that could fail and cause the car to go off the road at random and I only let my best customers know, I would be sued for screwing around with peoples lives.
Close, but no cigar. If you, as a car servicing firm, knew of a part in a Ford car that could fail and keep the car from starting sometimes under some circumstances, and you only let your best customers know, you would be...um...nothing.
-Waldo Jaquith
Uh...yeah, you're right. That's a one hour difference.
Er...no. I'm an idiot. 9pm PST and 12am EST are the exact same time.
-Waldo Jaquith
Accounting for timezone differences between EST and PST, would this not make the two times much closer to each other?
Uh...yeah, you're right. That's a one hour difference.
Whoop-dee-freakin'-doo.
-Waldo Jaquith
Can I boot from a USB drive? And what about all of those install disks I still get? Hard Drive manufacturers still have their disk setup programs based on a floppy disk install.
The same line of questioning was levelled at Apple back in '98 when they dropped the floppy. That nincompoop Dvorak insisted (and still insists, last I checked) that losing the floppy drive would be the death of Apple.
If Dell drops the floppy, manufacturers of hardware will stop providing install disks on floppies. They will ensure that their BIOS supports booting from a USB drive. I know this to be true because Dell didn't get to be a big successful company by being stupid, and because we done already did this with Apple.
-Waldo Jaquith
KDE...Kraut Desktop Environment?
-Waldo Jaquith
Hell, can I write a review and get it posted?
No, what with none of us caring in the least about about what you think. JWZ, on the other hand, is a man to whom you should listen when he speaks.
"+5 Insightful" my ass,. Goddamn kids don't even respect their elders these days...
-Waldo Jaquith
I had this happen to me, too. Some spammer was promoting a pump-and-dump scheme and then moved onto promoting an actual product. It was easy enough to connect the two, and thus get a name and address. A friend and staunch anti-spam advocate actually called the guy up and challenged him. He invented some yarn about an evil business partner taking over his servers or something. I talked to several attorneys, but the cost for taking on the case was thousands of dollars, so that was out. I eventually filed a complaint with the SEC over the pump-and-dump scheme, but I've never heard back.
Another spammer started sending out mail with my return address about a week ago. This time, I wrote a quick filter to pipe it all into a folder where I could ignore it. I don't know what else I can do.
-Waldo Jaquith
Read the FAQ: They could easily implement some kind of opt-in thing where you put a META tag
in your web page telling Slashdot that you grant them explicit permission to mirror the site for (say) a week after mentioning it - so Slashdot would have no legal/copyright come-backs.
You're a genius! Oh...wait...no... You just haven't read the FAQ
People who put up websites should recognize that people are going to look at it. Sometimes, a lot of people might look at it, as a result of a link from Slashdot or any of hundreds of other sites. People who bitch and moan about being linked to from Slashdot remind me of the companies who whine when people link to "confidential" webpages -- guess what, if it's on the web, it's not confidential.
-Waldo Jaquith