Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic - Arthur C. Clarke.Simplicity is the key to brilliance - Bruce Lee
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View Article  How To Expertly NOT Answer A Question
I see this all the time on forums, mailing lists, newsgroups and so called expert knowledge websites. Folks responding to a problem without really answering the question but giving all kinds of useless suggestions on the way they THINK someone should be doing something.

Here is a great example of a completely useless response from a so called Linux Networking Expert Certified Expert Sage Level.

The so called Sage opens his response with:

I read your question as being how best to cause sshd to start up with that option.

This is a great start. It sounds like this sage understand exactly what the person asking the question is looking for. I'm expecting a really good answer from this sage.

This sage's next sentence begins with:

The "more generic solution" for a local LAN ...

He then proceeds to go way off topic and explains this more generic solution which has nothing to do with the real question. He then goes on to explain a hack type of solution that is going to work for precisely less than 2% of situations. And again, doesn't really answer the original question anyway.

What is worse is that this so called "Experts Exchange" community recommends this answer for points when other answers are clearly more appropriate. I have no idea how this community and points work but I can say that I wouldn't trust any so called sages on this site whatsoever if this is the norm.

You can find this expert non-response here.
View Article  Geesee
Another BlogChat type thing. I think it uses flash but looks nice.
View Article  FBI Tracks Down Big Phish
From Techdirt:

You would think that it wouldn't be that hard to track down phishing scammers. While they do try to hide themselves, in the end, there should be some sort of money trail leading back to them. However, for all the talk of trying to track these guys down, it seemed like no one ever got anywhere. There was a ton of hype around Microsoft catching a phishing "kingpin" until you realized that it was just some kid who set up a website and never made any money. The real problem, everyone always said, was that the real phishing kingpins operated as part of organized crime in Eastern Europe -- and that made them tough to track down. Partly due to the nature of any organized crime setup, it probably wasn't that hard to nab the small fry who were the front men -- but that was useless if you wanted to catch the big phish who actually masterminded the operation. However, that doesn't mean the authorities weren't working on it. The FBI has announced that they've brought down one phishing group, arresting at least 16 people. Up to five of those arrested are American with the rest being Polish. The FBI is still trying to track down others involved, including some in Romania. While it's definitely great to see them finally bring down a big phishing group, it should suggest how big a problem this really is that it's taken this long to nab one single group. Just imagine how many more are still out there, phishing away.

View Article  Method of script based remote JavaScript function call of web page
Brent points out a joke of a patent (Patent 6941562) this time hitting very close to home:

Beyond the obviousness, inspection of both the client and server side code for the patent reveals that most of it is copied directly from my JSRS library, published a year earlier, not only without attribution, but claiming it as their own “NetGratus Remote Scripting”. Of course, my license is very liberal, allowing reuse for pretty well anything, however it does say:

...

So, if you’ve been asked to license this patented technology, I’d be happy to have a look at the particular code being offered for licensing and see whether it violates my copyright by restricting you from using it without a license.
View Article  Spammers go island hopping to bypass filter
It is being reported lately that spammers are using lesser known domains in their links in spam messages. See this article for example. In the article they state:

Using a lesser-known top level domain changes the game and makes it harder to distinguish spam from legitimate e-mail by examining the links in the e-mails.

They also quote Conor Flynn of Irish security firm Rits as saying:

"Spam filters are set up to recognise the well known domains, spam from lesser known domains can slip through"

I would have to disagree with both of these statements. It actually might make it easier!!
View Article  Google Code Search
This looks like a great resource for developers looking to search public domain / open source code out there. As google says here:

Code Search crawls and indexes publicly hosted archives (.tar.gz, .tar.bz2, .tar, and .zip) and CVS and Subversion repositories, making them searchable in one place. Results are also accessible via a GData feed, which we hope people will use to create plugins for their favorite editors and IDEs.
View Article  Only a moron would buy YouTube
Via Mark Evans:

"You have to love Mark Cuban, who says it like it is. At a conference yesterday, he said only a "moron" would buy YouTube. "They are just breaking the law," CNet reported. "The only reason it hasn't been sued yet is because there is nobody with big money to sue." Cuban's no-lawsuit theory may be right but isn't a little curious YouTube has escaped the wrath of copyright owners so far while Napster, et al incited a wave of lawsuits and attacks on consumers?"
View Article  Yahoo On Phishing
Yahoo is now using what they call personal sign-in seals to combat Phishing. Interesting idea.
View Article  Bloglines, Sqweezer And No River Of News
Bloglines just announced yesterday that they are integrating Sqweezer support. Interesting on its own is Sqweezer which basically optimizes any website for mobile browsing. Just goto Sqweezer and enter any URL and checkout the output.

For example, here is this weblog in Sqweezer.
View Article  SimpleFilter Under Attack
It looks as though our SimpleFilter service has come under attack today. We seem to be weathering the storm and delivering email as we normally do.

Noticed that a majority of the attack seems to be coming from an IP owned by Affinity Internet. Considering they are an online marketing service company I wouldn't doubt if they are generating some sort of spam campaign.

I've done a bit of google searching on these guys. What I'm finding is a lot of bogus looking press releases from a number of bogus looking domains and websites/blogs so I've come to the conclusion that they are some sort of spam business (even though they look like a legitimate business). I'll update this post if I'm incorrect but I've done enough investigation at this point to lead me down that road.

I've attempted to contact them by phone but was waiting on hold for too long so I gave up. They can contact me through this post if they like.
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