http://etbe.coker.com.au Linux, politics, and other interesting things Tue, 07 Oct 2008 09:00:58 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en A recent news item is the "hacking" of the Yahoo mailbox used by Sarah Palin (the Republican VP candidate) [1]. It seems most likely that it was a simple social-engineering attack on the password reset process of Yahoo (although we are unlikely to learn the details unless the ... http://etbe.coker.com.au/2008/10/07/the-security-benefits-of-being-unimportant/ One ongoing problem with TCP networking is the combination of RPC services and port based services on the same host. If you have an RPC service that uses a port less than 1024 then typically it will start at 1023 and try lower ports until it finds one that ... http://etbe.coker.com.au/2008/10/07/rpc-and-se-linux/ The first thing you need to do to get started using the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) [1] is to install the tools to manage the service. The service is run in a client-server manner. You install the client software on your PC to manage the EC2 services ... http://etbe.coker.com.au/2008/10/04/getting-started-with-amazon-ec2/ Currently we have a problem with the Debian list server and Gmail. Gmail signs all mail that it sends with both DKIM and DomainKeys (DomainKeys has been obsoleted by DKIM so most mail servers implement only one of the two standards although apart from space there is no reason ... http://etbe.coker.com.au/2008/10/03/dkim-and-mailing-lists/ There is a lot of discussion and speculation about The Singularity. The term seems to be defined by Ray Kurzweil's book "The Singularity Is Near" [1] which focuses on a near-future technological singularity defined by significant increases in medical science (life extension and methods to increase mental capacity) and ... http://etbe.coker.com.au/2008/10/03/how-many-singularities/ Currently we have a huge husing crisis in the US which involves significant political corruption including the federal government preventing state governments from stopping predatory banking practices [1]. The corrupt plan to solve this is to simply give the banks a lot of taxpayer money, so the banking business model then ... http://etbe.coker.com.au/2008/10/02/solutions-for-the-housing-crisis/ One of the most interesting new technologies that has come out recently is Cloud Computing, the most popular instance seems to be the Amazon EC2 (Elastic Cloud Computing). I think it would be good if there were some open alternatives to EC2. Amazon charges $0.10 per compute hour for a ... http://etbe.coker.com.au/2008/10/02/open-computing-cloud/ RAM is the new Disk [1] - interesting post about using a distributed network of servers with RAM for main storage. The concept is that RAM on another machine can be accessed faster than local disk and that disk performance for contiguous IO has been increasing steadily at a ... http://etbe.coker.com.au/2008/09/30/links-september-2008/ I was reading an interesting post about predicting the results of the invasion of Iraq [1]. One of the points made was that the author rejected every statement by a known liar (which includes all the world leaders who wanted the invasion). So basically regarding every statement by ... http://etbe.coker.com.au/2008/09/29/never-trust-a-drm-vendor/ I have previously written about how I refused an offer of a free iPhone [1] (largely due to it's closed architecture). The first Google Android phone has just been announced, the TechCrunch review is interesting - while the built-in keyboard is a nice feature the main thing that stands ... http://etbe.coker.com.au/2008/09/25/my-prediction-for-the-iphone/