Lee.org

CA has this big ad in eWeek Magazine for their backup software. So I asked them

I am looking for a backup product capable of backing up from a Win XP computer to an untrusted Win XP or Linux machine on the internet. It should be possible to access the data on the untrusted machine in a random access manner.

We’ll see what I get for a response.

http://habeas.com/ I still don’t totally understand how this company uses the power of haiku to defeat spammers. But I think I like it.

I think it works thusly:
– If you promise not to spam people and sign up with them, you get 8 points subtracted from your SpamAssassin score when you use the Habeas header in your emails.
– If you (illegally & inappropriately) use the Habeas header in your email, then when the Habeas people catch you, they’ll tell SpamAssassin that the IP address that sent the email gets 8 points added to their spam score.
– If you illegally use the Habeas header, they’ll sue your ass off, but quick, for copyright infringement (the poem), defamation (their header would never voluntarily associate with spam), and license infringement (you didn’t sign up for the Habeas service).

Nice. Of course, a distributed offshore email relaying scheme can probably get around it. Forged headers might also be able to get around it. The battle continues…

(For reference, using the phrase “WIN FREE VIAGRA!” in the subject field of an email costs the message only about 4 points. A difference of 8 points will almost definitely make or break an email’s spam threshold in SpamAssassin. I’ve only every been marginally happy with SpamAssassin’s performance. I set it to a threshold of “8” and it catches about 10 spams a day (that’s 40% of the spams I receive recently). If I set it any higher, it starts catching legitimate mail. Still, SpamAssassin from my email hosting company and Cloudmark Spamnet on my client have been working together to do an excellent job recently.)

Thanks to Dada Mail for pointing out this Habeas thing to me.

Oh and I also just noticed….

Vispul’s Razor (the source code for Spamnet) is open source. The plug-in for MS Outlook (the Spamnet service) isn’t.

The Vispul’s Razor / Spamnet collaborative filtering servers are located at cloudmark.com.

That’s an interesting collaboration between open source and not… The unix folks are free to develop the brains of the system in an open source environment while Vispul is (hopefully) making money off the gazillions of Windows clients. If you had unix at home, you’d be able to get the service for free. But hey, Vispul is only charging $2.00/month for the service. It’s well worth it for any individual client to buy the service. Everyone wins. Open source seems to work.

I was parked in a parking lot on the NJ Parkway on Feb 23rd. As I was walking toward my car, I pushed the button on my keychain to unlock the door. To my surprise, that caused the alarm on a car just across from mine to start beeping. I unlocked my car again and the alarm stopped. BEEP BEEP BEEP. BEEP BEEP BEEP. I’m thinking that there aren’t enough radio code keys out there!

And that reminds me of a story a friend told me recently. (Gosh darn it, I can’t remember who told me this story! It wasn’t PPG…. so who was it? AAARRRGGG My memory!

My friend gave her car keys to an attendant to fetch her car from the lot. A few minutes later, the attendant drives up with the wrong car. Some discussion ensued. It turned out that her car had been parked in the wrong space. But the kicker is that her car keys fit the car that was in her space! Not enough key combinations!

I’ve never been to the place and I haven’t heard the radio commercial in years now but the radio commercial is STILL stuck in my head!!

“At Tony Floramo’s, the meat falls off the bone!”

Listen to my version of it

Floramo’s
213 Everett Avenue, Chelsea, MA 02150-1816
(617) 889-1330
Tommy Floramo is well known for RIBS with Meat that falls off the bone
Directions: From the North: Take route 1 south to the last exit before the Tobin Bridge, Carter Street.
Keep to the right and turn left at the lights.
Located next to gas station on the left.

Cool

A powerful method for extracting information from supposedly secure systems is side-channel attacks: cryptanalytic techniques that rely on information unintentionally leaked by computing devices. Most side-channel attack research has focused on electromagnetic emanations (TEMPEST), power consumption and, recently, diffuse visible light from CRT displays. The oldest eavesdropping channel, namely acoustic emanations, has received little attention. Our preliminary analysis of acoustic emanations from personal computers shows them to be a surprisingly rich source of information on CPU activity…

On Breaking RSA-1024

This is from the same author. It looks like RSA-1024 is safe for now, but not for too much longer!

…Using this hypothetical device (and ignoring the initial R&D costs), it appears possible to break a 1024-bit RSA key in one year using a device whose cost is about $10M (previous predictions were in the trillions of dollars)…

Grrr.. My front brakes need replacing. $227.

Grr*3.9 My air conditioner died, the compressor isn’t compressing. $895. Jeez, for that much I should just buy a lot of dry ice and leave it in the trunk.

Grr*.44 It’ll cost about $100 to fix my tape player… I’ll hold off on that expense ’til next month.

And the worst part is, I bought a 50,000 mile extended warrantee on the car. Things didn’t start going wrong until 52,000 miles.

at 52k, there was an overheating problem
at 59k (now) the front brake pads and rotors need replacing (the rotors not from wear but rust), the a/c needs serious repair, and the tape player is sick.

Moderately good news: The people at Johnson Chrysler rotated my tires going front to back. But the manual says to cross-rotate the tires. I raised my eyebrows at this discrepancy. I’ve asked around and gotten mixed answers. The guys at the oil change place though it was wrong. Mike at On The Move Auto said that front-to-back rotation was fine and that 1 in 1,000 tires fail when cross-rotated. So I guess I’m not so unhappy about Johnson Chrysler not cross-rotating.

The Pets.com sock puppet, out of work for so long, found a new job doing commercials for 1-800-bar-none.

This is a photo of Julia B. Boolia on the Merry Go Round at the Hackettstown Spring Festival. Nice photo, eh?