taint.org: Justin Mason’s Weblog

Law: Darius Whelan at UCC writes, ‘my colleague Louise Crowley and I are involved in drafting an Irish version of the Creative Commons licence‘.

If you’re interested in helping ‘port’ the Creative Commons licence to Irish law, it’s well worth a gander.

Tags: colleague, commons, creative, gander, law, licence, port, ucc, version

Spam: The Reg reports that a Belkin Router software upgrade hijacks HTTP connections to spam the browser with ads. Here’s a screenshot of the ad page. Here’s a USENET post bemoaning the situation, and the followup from a Belkin PM.

This is amazing; a working piece of network infrastructure has been effectively modified to:

• replace the expected HTTP responses with spam ‘for your convenience’
• do this once every 8 hours until told to stop
• report serial numbers, IP addresses and software revisions back ‘home’ as part of this

And, of course, web browsing is not the only thing that runs over port 80.

So, it’s a router that inserts spam into your packets, whether you want it or not, due to a software upgrade; and if you want the bugfixes in that upgrade, you get the spam whether you want it or not. And, that spam could break quite a bit of legitimate port 80 traffic, such as automated download tools that aren’t a full web browser, for example. And the spam is unannounced on the download page, or in the change log. I’d hope that’s pretty serious under consumer-protection law… it certainly should be.

Copyright: In case there was any doubt that Sonny Bono and Jack Valenti wanted to remove the legal concept of the public domain, check this quote from the Congressional record:

(Mary Bono): Actually, Sonny wanted the term of copyright protection to last forever. I am informed by staff that such a change would violate the Constitution. I invite all of you to work with me to strengthen our copyright laws in all of the ways available to us. As you know, there is also Jack Valenti’s proposal for term to last forever less one day. Perhaps the Committee may look at that next Congress.

Wow. More via an Eldred-related site.

Tags: belkin, browser, copyright, http, port, router, software, spam, upgrade, web

Given all the fuss over blocking dynamic IPs due to spam, I’ve long sent outgoing SMTP via my server (which lives on a static IP). I download my mail from that using fetchmail over an SSH tunnel, and have done for a while. It’s very reliable, and that way it really doesn’t matter where I download from — quite neat. Also means I don’t have to futz with SMTP AUTH, IMAP/SSL, Certifying Authorities, or any of the other hand-configured complex PKI machinery required to use SSL for authentication.

However, I’ve been using plain old SMTP for outgoing traffic, by just poking a hole in the access db for the IP I’m on. A bit messy and generally not-nice.

So I decided to make it sensible and deliver using SMTP-in-an-SSH-tunnel. In the same SSH tunnel, in fact ;) With Postfix, it turned out very easy — here’s how to do it:

Add this option to the SSH commandline in the SSH tunneling script (I’m presuming you have one ;):

-L 8025:127.0.0.1:25

That’ll port-forward port 25 on the remote system to port 8025 on localhost, so that if a connection is made to port 8025 on localhost, it’ll talk to port 25 on the remote host. Std SSH tunneling there.

Now for Postfix — add this to /etc/postfix/main.cf:

default_transport = smtp:localhost:8025

This means that Postfix will always use SMTP to localhost on port 8025 for any non-local deliveries.

Run service postfix reload (cough, Red Hat-ism) and that’s it! A whole lot easier than I was expecting… Postfix rocks.

Tags: download, ips, localhost, port, postfix, smtp, spam, ssh, ssl, tunnel

posting this so the googlebrain will pick it up next time I need to find it — Padraig Brady’s interconnect speed cheat sheet. It lists a whole stack of interconnect protocols, from 802.11b, 10Mb/s LAN, to SPP parallel port, to 8mm DAT tape, along with their effective transfer rates in megabytes per second. (I never realised Bluetooth was only as fast as SPP parallel ports — 0.1MB/s. That sucks.)

Tags: bluetooth, googlebrain, port, second, sheet, speed, spp, tape, time, transfer