As you've implied, but just to make it clear: It's not legitimate for someone to declare your domain's death in absentia just because they can't see anything new and cute. The domain name system was not invented for website addresses in the first place; it was invented to let people assign their own names for computers, and it's nobody's business whether they can see your list of zero or a million computers that are also none of their business. That being said, I'll mention a few tips to defend your domain against self-serving grabby types:
As long as you already have web hosting anyway, just make sure there's a homepage that mentions that the domain really is in use. It doesn't have to have images or anything fancy at all; just enough to let people know that someone is paying attention if they pull any tricks. Maybe mention that it's been in use since 2001, to indirectly discourage anyone from thinking that a typosquatting case is going to be in their favor. In any case, it will get the point across that you're not a squatter.
If you ever get tired of paying for hosting, some registrars (like Gandi) will host a redirect or a simple 1-page or 3-page site of your own content for free (not just placeholder spam for their own company). That's enough to tell grabby types to move along and stay off your lawn.
If you think someone might actually try to impersonate you to hijack your registration (either by registrar move, transfer of ownership, or "updating" your contact information to theirs), have your domain registrar add protective EPP flags for your domain. You have to go through the extra step of having those turned back off later if you really want to transfer or early-delete your domain name. Some of them:
clientDeleteProhibited and clientTransferProhibited: These stop your domain from being dropped or moved to another registrar where the attacker already has their own control in place. (Some registrars may already have them turned on.)
clientUpdateProhibited: If you think you're under active attack, you might ask for this; it usually means you can't even change which nameservers the domain uses, without asking for the flag to be removed first.
serverDeleteProhibited, serverTransferProhibited, serverUpdateProhibited: These are "super" versions of the above, but you probably don't want them unless someone is aggressively trying to steal your domain. Adding and removing them on your own request means that you have to ask your registrar, then the registrar has to forward the request to the top-level domain registry, who then has to add or remove the flags.
While you're playing with your domain registration: Make sure your registration contact information is good enough that your registrar can actually reach you if something goes wrong. Strictly speaking, someone can file a whois data complaint against a domain, claiming the contact data is phony, and then the registrar has to make sure they can contact someone who will still claim control of the domain.
"It's a persistent myth that only the beating of tom-toms restores the sun after an eclipse. But is that really true?"
Odd: that's pretty much the intro line to well over a third of all programming on History Channel in the U.S. now. (Another third is historic battles recreated as computer animations with some guy talking about equipment like it was a football game; the rest is people selling crap someone had in their basement, which is about as close to actual history as they get now.) Watch for a revealing look (except not) at the life of Unix admins next season: The Admin's Book of Secrets.
So is this closed-source then? If so, then presumably it won't make it into Chromium.
I think Foxit is proprietary, but it's really, really fast; display speed between Foxit PDF Reader and Adobe Reader isn't even a contest. Last I checked it leaves Ghostscript in the dust too. I haven't used anything but Foxit for Windows PDF reading for a while now. Now, Poppler (which uses Cairo) is a different story: those libraries are pretty fast. Chromium might be able to do something interesting with a Poppler-based reader instead of Foxit.
"Google Admits To Collecting Emails and Passwords." Yeah, it's called Gmail. At least the article summary was closer to reality than usual. Since we're on the subject: has anyone else been getting the suspicion that article summaries from other Slashdot editors lately are really kdawson also?
Is it a bad sign for my sanity that, when I read this in the RSS feed as "Former Soviet Republic of Georgia To Become I..." my first thought was "Former Soviet Republic of Georgia To Become Iowa"?
Linux conventions dictate that whole word options be preceded with a double hyphen
Isn't that a GNU convention?
FSF should rename it "GIOL Is Often Linux" so we don't need the slash between the parts anymore. (OK, that sounds trollish, but it's barely dawn on a weekend, so it's as good as I get right now.)
They already did that: after changing from QuantumLink then making several years of "improvements" to AOL they ran out of gold they could turn into lead, and had to hop aboard the dot-com strategy of throwing up blindingly huge amounts of cash to get anyone to consider associating with them.
Of course real BBC World News America doesn't have any results for "malamanteau" at all. Not only is that alleged "BBC America News" at bbcnewsamerica.com fake, but its alleged postal address is "DHA Lahore" (that's military barracks) with no further detail.
These are not hi-res pics, they're from your iPhone. What's wrong with putting everything on ONE page? Geez.
Because, even with the overhead of the HTML, it isn't worth the server and bandwidth hit to send 22 pictures to people who might not care after the first 2 or 3, especially if the site is getting Slashdotted.
Well, it's in Extended Support which for one thing means MS doesn't give a rats ass whether or not XP works with the more efficient AF HDDs, since that's not a security related patch.
Well, that's a fair assessment. Of course, that's a monopoly tactic — any business that dropped support for that widespread of a product in a legitimate competitive environment would find themselves with no customers for the newer product because customers would be trying to migrate out from under that vendor at all costs.
I don't know what "pretty much end-of-life Windows XP" you speak of. I'm replying to this from Windows XP Media Center Edition. 10-20% of the computers on display at Best Buy last week were netbooks and nettops with Windows XP. Most HP workstations have "Windows XP Professional 32-bit (available through downgrade rights from Genuine Windows® 7 Professional 32-bit)" and "Windows XP Professional 64-bit (available through downgrade rights from Genuine Windows® 7 Professional 64-bit)" as options as of today; until this week (last week of December 2009), if I remember, they didn't have any operating system options except "Vista® Business 32-bit with downgrade to Windows® XP Professional 32-bit custom installed" and "Genuine Windows Vista® Business 64-bit with downgrade to Windows® XP Professional 64-bit custom installed". Why? Because people who buy computers for a business environment will not buy Vista, at any price, for real production work — fair or not. I have clients who will not buy a computer unless it has Windows XP. Despite Microsoft again attempting to remove the previous OS from the supply chain by force despite overwhelming demand, just like they have before, XP is still being sold new on a very large portion of computers.
Ha! Sprint? Wait until you see what their proprietary firmware does to your phone. Verizon is probably worse now, but only because they took Sprint's castrated firmware strategy and ran with it. Most Verizon and Sprint customers don't even know what their phone's real software looks like. AT&T is probably jealous they haven't been able to keep up, but I'm sure they're working on it.
I seem to remember that IE 8 does something like this when it's first installed, asking if you want any IE extensions enabled at all, and whether you want IE extensions blocked until you approve them, or something of that nature. But suffice to say that I don't install IE often enough to remember for sure.
I'd really like to see Google open the API so anyone can upload 360 degree image sets and add to the mapping collection.
I think that was the original idea with Panoramio. They show up in Google Earth and they have quite a few 360-degree photos in addition to the usual ones.
Ah, so that's what the Ad-Aware 11 logo looks like!
But seriously: How do you trust a "security" company whose own download links all lead to a dead blank page until you unblock JavaScript not only on their site (www.lavasoft.com) but on a third-party site you've never heard of (www.trialpay.com)?
I used to put Ad-Aware on every computer, but around version 7 Ad-Watch started dragging down my clients' computers, then started dragging down my computers. I still offer it occasionally to clients who are unusually malware-prone, but it got past the cure-is-worse-than-the-disease part for a lot of people a while back. Maybe this new buzzword-thing version will clear some of that up.
I sometimes boot Ubuntu 8.10 and 9.04 from an SD card on an EeePC and leave it connected to the network for long periods (days) of time. I use the EeePC mainly for surfing. It's just the default Ubuntu. Being the only user, I have not set up any users or passwords. Does the the default configuration of Ubuntu allow telnet/ssh logins over the network?
The short answer: You're probably safe. But to make sure, go into your package manager (probably Synaptic) and look for the package openssh-server. If it's there, remove it — you don't need it for the desktop unless you want to be able to get into the computer from somewhere else.
Long answer: Telnet is definitely not a problem; nearly all Linux and BSD distributions stopped installing the telnet server by default years and years ago. As for SSH: if it's the "Live CD" version you're booting from the SD card, it won't have an SSH server either. (Because you claim to have no username/password, I suspect you're booting the Live CD from the chip. An installed Ubuntu prompts for username/password.) And I'm pretty sure Ubuntu doesn't install it on the desktop installs either. Maybe Server Edition does. But see the short answer above for the definite answer. openssh-client is OK to have — it's just openssh-server that allows incoming connections.
What Gmail is to MS Exchange is what iNotes is to Lotus. It's a web interface for a lotus system.
Except that Gmail doesn't have the baggage of being associated with Microsoft or Lotus, and a name like "LotusLive iNotes" does. Even though they based it on Outblaze, if they put any Lotus back-end architecture into it since then, there's a good chance at it being a rolling failure waiting to happen. The luckiest thing that could happen to a LotusLive iNotes user is that it turns out the programmers have still kept it far away from any code from any other Lotus product whatsoever.
You forgot the "My" on the front, which is of course required for any website that includes any variable other than the a datestamp in the underlying programming code. my dot my-eLotus-eLive-iNotesCom dot com would be perfect for that. Now all they need is the linkless "Best experienced with Adobe Flash" background for the mandatory Flash file that redirects to a hostname on completely different domain than the entry page, and it will be completely innovative and fresh. (And I'd even use it if the only other choice were real Lotus Notes.)
Let's see: This IBM guy in the article is making noise about Google's uptime record versus "what you'd expect from IBM in terms of security, reliability and privacy" with Lotus Notes branded products? Wow. It's like he actually aimed before he shot himself in the foot.
Slashdot Mirror
I hope she was using Windows, we all know how hardened that is.
Not only was she running Windows Server (according to the AP article), but she was using Network Solutions for her registrar, even after the U.S. Postal Service and several other large institutions had their NetSol domains slammed to a registrar in the British Virgin Islands against their will; and for some reason the clintonemail.com IP address was changed to that same company in 2011. (This, of course, years and years after anyone with tech experience had dropped Network Solutions.)
As you've implied, but just to make it clear: It's not legitimate for someone to declare your domain's death in absentia just because they can't see anything new and cute. The domain name system was not invented for website addresses in the first place; it was invented to let people assign their own names for computers, and it's nobody's business whether they can see your list of zero or a million computers that are also none of their business. That being said, I'll mention a few tips to defend your domain against self-serving grabby types:
I would be worrying about my precious bodily fluids, not the internet.
He's been doing that quite enough. The whole time he's been in power, or at least the last 30 years or so, he has been obsessed with people being doped up, given alcohol, or otherwise polluted. A few days ago, he told the public to avoid any milk or Nescafe from the areas in rebellion because they had been spiked with hallucinogens.
"It's a persistent myth that only the beating of tom-toms restores the sun after an eclipse. But is that really true?"
Odd: that's pretty much the intro line to well over a third of all programming on History Channel in the U.S. now. (Another third is historic battles recreated as computer animations with some guy talking about equipment like it was a football game; the rest is people selling crap someone had in their basement, which is about as close to actual history as they get now.) Watch for a revealing look (except not) at the life of Unix admins next season: The Admin's Book of Secrets.
So is this closed-source then? If so, then presumably it won't make it into Chromium.
I think Foxit is proprietary, but it's really, really fast; display speed between Foxit PDF Reader and Adobe Reader isn't even a contest. Last I checked it leaves Ghostscript in the dust too. I haven't used anything but Foxit for Windows PDF reading for a while now. Now, Poppler (which uses Cairo) is a different story: those libraries are pretty fast. Chromium might be able to do something interesting with a Poppler-based reader instead of Foxit.
"Google Admits To Collecting Emails and Passwords." Yeah, it's called Gmail. At least the article summary was closer to reality than usual. Since we're on the subject: has anyone else been getting the suspicion that article summaries from other Slashdot editors lately are really kdawson also?
Is it a bad sign for my sanity that, when I read this in the RSS feed as "Former Soviet Republic of Georgia To Become I..." my first thought was "Former Soviet Republic of Georgia To Become Iowa"?
Linux conventions dictate that whole word options be preceded with a double hyphen
Isn't that a GNU convention?
FSF should rename it "GIOL Is Often Linux" so we don't need the slash between the parts anymore. (OK, that sounds trollish, but it's barely dawn on a weekend, so it's as good as I get right now.)
"They seem to ruin everything they touch."
They should stick to touching themselves.
They already did that: after changing from QuantumLink then making several years of "improvements" to AOL they ran out of gold they could turn into lead, and had to hop aboard the dot-com strategy of throwing up blindingly huge amounts of cash to get anyone to consider associating with them.
Of course real BBC World News America doesn't have any results for "malamanteau" at all. Not only is that alleged "BBC America News" at bbcnewsamerica.com fake, but its alleged postal address is "DHA Lahore" (that's military barracks) with no further detail.
Agreed: It's a lousy story.
Ya just couldn't resist it, couldja?
He was itching to say it.
I wonder how long people here were scratching their head for a response before one said "I guess I'll bite."
Holy shit! You mean, that wasn't a "to do" list?
Not in that order.
Ceramic parabolas? I prefer wired mesh, that way I can put more on my head.
*Whoosh*
Maybe it's not the kind of "whoosh" you think it is. Maybe he's just likes that sort of nasty.
These are not hi-res pics, they're from your iPhone. What's wrong with putting everything on ONE page? Geez.
Because, even with the overhead of the HTML, it isn't worth the server and bandwidth hit to send 22 pictures to people who might not care after the first 2 or 3, especially if the site is getting Slashdotted.
Well, it's in Extended Support which for one thing means MS doesn't give a rats ass whether or not XP works with the more efficient AF HDDs, since that's not a security related patch.
Well, that's a fair assessment. Of course, that's a monopoly tactic — any business that dropped support for that widespread of a product in a legitimate competitive environment would find themselves with no customers for the newer product because customers would be trying to migrate out from under that vendor at all costs.
I don't know what "pretty much end-of-life Windows XP" you speak of. I'm replying to this from Windows XP Media Center Edition. 10-20% of the computers on display at Best Buy last week were netbooks and nettops with Windows XP. Most HP workstations have "Windows XP Professional 32-bit (available through downgrade rights from Genuine Windows® 7 Professional 32-bit)" and "Windows XP Professional 64-bit (available through downgrade rights from Genuine Windows® 7 Professional 64-bit)" as options as of today; until this week (last week of December 2009), if I remember, they didn't have any operating system options except "Vista® Business 32-bit with downgrade to Windows® XP Professional 32-bit custom installed" and "Genuine Windows Vista® Business 64-bit with downgrade to Windows® XP Professional 64-bit custom installed". Why? Because people who buy computers for a business environment will not buy Vista, at any price, for real production work — fair or not. I have clients who will not buy a computer unless it has Windows XP. Despite Microsoft again attempting to remove the previous OS from the supply chain by force despite overwhelming demand, just like they have before, XP is still being sold new on a very large portion of computers.
*walks in the direction of sprint*
Ha! Sprint? Wait until you see what their proprietary firmware does to your phone. Verizon is probably worse now, but only because they took Sprint's castrated firmware strategy and ran with it. Most Verizon and Sprint customers don't even know what their phone's real software looks like. AT&T is probably jealous they haven't been able to keep up, but I'm sure they're working on it.
I seem to remember that IE 8 does something like this when it's first installed, asking if you want any IE extensions enabled at all, and whether you want IE extensions blocked until you approve them, or something of that nature. But suffice to say that I don't install IE often enough to remember for sure.
And what exactly is a Man In The Mirror attack?
I don't know, but it probably involves a "special underwear" packet.
(It's worse than you think: I blew the chance to use moderator points on this post just to make that joke. See what I do for you folks?)
I'd really like to see Google open the API so anyone can upload 360 degree image sets and add to the mapping collection.
I think that was the original idea with Panoramio. They show up in Google Earth and they have quite a few 360-degree photos in addition to the usual ones.
What finger am i holding up for that company.....
Ah, so that's what the Ad-Aware 11 logo looks like!
But seriously: How do you trust a "security" company whose own download links all lead to a dead blank page until you unblock JavaScript not only on their site (www.lavasoft.com) but on a third-party site you've never heard of (www.trialpay.com)?
I used to put Ad-Aware on every computer, but around version 7 Ad-Watch started dragging down my clients' computers, then started dragging down my computers. I still offer it occasionally to clients who are unusually malware-prone, but it got past the cure-is-worse-than-the-disease part for a lot of people a while back. Maybe this new buzzword-thing version will clear some of that up.
I sometimes boot Ubuntu 8.10 and 9.04 from an SD card on an EeePC and leave it connected to the network for long periods (days) of time. I use the EeePC mainly for surfing. It's just the default Ubuntu. Being the only user, I have not set up any users or passwords. Does the the default configuration of Ubuntu allow telnet/ssh logins over the network?
The short answer: You're probably safe. But to make sure, go into your package manager (probably Synaptic) and look for the package openssh-server. If it's there, remove it — you don't need it for the desktop unless you want to be able to get into the computer from somewhere else.
Long answer: Telnet is definitely not a problem; nearly all Linux and BSD distributions stopped installing the telnet server by default years and years ago. As for SSH: if it's the "Live CD" version you're booting from the SD card, it won't have an SSH server either. (Because you claim to have no username/password, I suspect you're booting the Live CD from the chip. An installed Ubuntu prompts for username/password.) And I'm pretty sure Ubuntu doesn't install it on the desktop installs either. Maybe Server Edition does. But see the short answer above for the definite answer. openssh-client is OK to have — it's just openssh-server that allows incoming connections.
What Gmail is to MS Exchange is what iNotes is to Lotus. It's a web interface for a lotus system.
Except that Gmail doesn't have the baggage of being associated with Microsoft or Lotus, and a name like "LotusLive iNotes" does. Even though they based it on Outblaze, if they put any Lotus back-end architecture into it since then, there's a good chance at it being a rolling failure waiting to happen. The luckiest thing that could happen to a LotusLive iNotes user is that it turns out the programmers have still kept it far away from any code from any other Lotus product whatsoever.
...we'll call it eLotusLive iNotes. Dot com.
You forgot the "My" on the front, which is of course required for any website that includes any variable other than the a datestamp in the underlying programming code. my dot my-eLotus-eLive-iNotesCom dot com would be perfect for that. Now all they need is the linkless "Best experienced with Adobe Flash" background for the mandatory Flash file that redirects to a hostname on completely different domain than the entry page, and it will be completely innovative and fresh. (And I'd even use it if the only other choice were real Lotus Notes.)
Let's see: This IBM guy in the article is making noise about Google's uptime record versus "what you'd expect from IBM in terms of security, reliability and privacy" with Lotus Notes branded products? Wow. It's like he actually aimed before he shot himself in the foot.