I have been a bit busy sorting out the new flat but think I am finally getting there, my new study is nicely settled now and I can close the door on the humming of machines. I have also minimized the amount of machines I have – less noise etc.
The big news for today is all about Mozilla releasing a new Firebird, Thunderbird and Mozilla Suite. I am very glad to see a new Firebird arrive and I hope they will soon work on a better install/upgrade method.
Well I have now moved to my new place and BT managed to get my ADSL in 2 days in advance of their projected install date, so far it seems nice and stable and I can finally sleep soundly again knowing I wont be stuck with dial-up for the next 6 months
I got this pdf via Boing Boing Blog, it is a full account and analysis of a spammer who owned a box via some PHP, Gallery and Geeklog vulnerabilities, installed some processes that tried their best to look like webservers that acted as bulk senders.
What makes this really interesting is the lengths that the spammers goes to in order to get their mail sent, custom written daemons, reporting back to the mother ship and so forth. Also interesting to read this for a view on some real world forensics performed and what looks like a good solid investigation into a compromised box.
This proves to me that the spammers have most definitely taken the fight to the next level and that those combating spam have a long way to go still before the spammers are going to admit defeat.
While reading Quicksilver I was looking for some on-line information about certain sections of the book and came across a wiki set-up by Neal Stephenson as a collection of annotations by page number as well as a sizable collection of other usefull resources to people who are reading this book.
I am currently around page 150 and so far I am loving this book.
I guess the big news today is that Verisign has suspended its controversial sitefinder services after pressure from ICANN.
ICANN is using anecdotal and isolated issues to attempt to regulate nonregistry services, but in the interests of further working with the technical community, we will temporarily suspend Site Finder.
This sounds to me like they are taking it down for now, but will be back once their legal types went through the fine print of their contracts. Maybe the ICANN board has been smoking the same stuff that SCO has been smoking.
