Happy Diwali

Happy Diwali folks!

(See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diwali if you want to read a bit about
Diwali)

From "Tips and Tweaks" to Techbite

Steve Bass - the author of the technology column (Hassle-Free PC) and blog (Tips and Tweaks) has left the organization that he used to work for.

Steve wrote the Tips and Tweaks News letter - a source that has given me quite a few pointers to nifty tips and utilities. Before this he used to write the Home & Home Office column. He was also the founder of PIBMUG (www.pibmug.com). Search this blog itself for a couple of entries/posts which are courtesy of Steve's blog/column. If I've ever shown you the little program on my pc that simulates a martian surface flyby- that program is courtesy Steve from one of his newsletters.

As one of the first writers that I encountered when venturing into the WWW some ~7 years ago, I've been following his column and blog for a while now. I enjoy his writing style and personal touch to the column, a trait missing in many other technical writers.
Steve will now be starting his own column at Techbite (www.techbite.com).

If you were a follower of the Tips and Tweaks blog or the newsletter, hop on over to Techbite, where Steve will be continuing to run his weekly newsletter.

Original Tips and Tweaks : http://www.pcworld.com/blogs/id,43/steve_basss_tips_and_tweaks.html

Techbite: http://www.techbite.com/

Chocolate Chip muffins

I made some chocolate chip muffins today. They came out pretty good.

VNC, firewalls and iptables

VNC requires port 5900+display_number to be open through the firewall.
For eg: for vnc display on :1, you need port 5901 open.

vnc displays are found to be at server.example.com:PortNumber

Or look in your .vnc folder for an entry that states example.com:X.pid
(where X denotes the display number)

[The following requires root (or sudo) privileges]
---
1. Add rule to firewall by adding the following rule into your iptables
script:

-A RH-Firewall-1-INPUT -m state --state NEW -m tcp -p tcp --dport
5900:5906 -j ACCEPT

[This opens ports 5900-5906 through the firewall for the tcp protocol]

2 .Then restart the iptables daemon using the command :

service iptables restart

Now you should be good to go. Connect into vnc using vncviewer or a
program such as RealVNC or TightVNC
---
For fedora 9,
iptables is a textfile at /etc/sysconfig/iptables
service is an shell script at /sbin/service

Ubuntu 7 (Gutsy Gibbon)
- implements iptables as an executable. ( located at /sbin/iptables )
Run the command, by prefixing 'sudo iptables' in front of the -A
command, and remove the string RF-Firewall-1-INPUT and replace it with
the string INPUT
eg: sudo iptables -A -INPUT blah blah blah

The Ubuntu community has a set of nice guides which should be helpful.

The main HOWTO: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/IptablesHowTo
Ubuntu Forum guides :
BASIC :http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=159661
ADVANCED_USERS : http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=668148

Future Spam

Spam creators have apparently found out how to send messages across time. On

Thu October 02, 2008 07:07 PM CST, I have emails with Saturday, Oct-4 as the timestamp.

:P

Boilerplate responses

I'm a fan of having a boilerplate (otherwise called template) response available when multiple people ask you the same question again and again and again. I am however against form letters that don't give you any useful information. I believe a template letter can do the job, IF it provides some useful information.

I found one such template recently and enjoyed it. This template is to be used for responding to people who come up with their latest idea of "How to solve the Spam problem". Fill in the appropriate sections with a X and you are ready to go.

----
Your post advocates a

( ) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante

approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)

( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
( ) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) $BigCorporation will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business

Specifically, your plan fails to account for

( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
( ) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
( ) Asshats
( ) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
( ) Extreme profitability of spam
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) $PopularEmailClient

and the following philosophical objections may also apply:

( ) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever
been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Sending email should be free
( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough

Furthermore, this is what I think about you:

( ) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, $expletive ! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!