The shutting down of Craigslists adult services on a global scale has been applauded by some as a victory against the exploitation of women and children. While on the surface it seems like a victory, it could be just a hollow victory.

The move by Craigslists to shut down its adult services section came about after a few years of being hounded by various Attorney Generals in different states in the US. Many accusations of “enabling prostitution” have been leveled against the site, despite its taking certain measures to properly identify advertisers to make sure that there was no crime being committed through the use of the site.

The shut down of the Craigslists adult services section will mean that the advertisers will go somewhere else. There is no shortage of internet entrepreneurs out there who will be willing to take some dollars to advertise adult services. It should also be noted that the shutting down of an adult services section of a website does not in anyway bear any relationship to the exploitation of women and children, because the exploitation of women and children is not caused by Craigslists.

adultservices · classifieds · craigslists · legal · prostitution

In the age of software patent and patent for just about everything else to do with technology, Kodak has launched a patent lawsuit against Shutterfly. Shutterfly have fought back with counter claims, but this means that, if validated, the patent could have very wide ramifications for Flickr and other photo sharing sites such as Google’s Picasa.

What it means is that essentially anyone who publishes photos online could be infringing Kodak’s patents. This situation is just untenable for a lot of the smaller site operators, but for the bigger companies such as Yahoo!, which owns Flickr.com and Google, which owns Picasa, they are more likely to challenge such a lawsuit and seek to invalidate the patent, which is one of a claimed 400 related patents that Kodak has in its portfolio.

Let us hope that all parties can see some sense in the end.

kodak · litigation · obvious · patents · Photography · shutterfly

In 1997, I purchased a computer system with a Pentium II 300 processor. At that time, I remember that this computer ate all my savings and I was a poor university student. Inside the box, was 64MB of RAM and a 4.3GB HDD made by Seagate. Thinking about it now, I thought that a 4.3GB hard drive was quite large. Also, with the computer, I bought an Iomega ZIP drive which connected through the printer port.

When I had moved up to a better machine later, I turned the PII 300 machine into a server. I installed Mandrake 8.0 on it and it became my internet gateway/mail server/web server in one box. It served me faithfully for quite a few years without complaint from the machine or me.

Eventually, the motherboard died and I decided to throw the whole lot out, except for the Hard Drive. I was then given a PII 450 from a friend who had just purchased a new machine (it’s funny how people will give you computers once you own one, but not if you have no computers). I installed Mandrake 9.0, Qmail and Shorewall on this machine and it ran on the old Seagate HDD.

The same server configuration ran for many years up until last month when I decided to get a new greener box, which resulted in an Atom box running a flavor of Debian. So the same Seagate 4.3 HDD has been with me since 1997 and still working perfectly well.

server atom seagate hdd storage reliability

According to a revelation from Theo de Raadt, the IPSEC stack in OpenBSD has a backdoor built in. The code was puportedly inserted by contractors who were also paid by the FBI. This revelation should not come as a big surprise to anyone, as this has been a possibility that has been discussed in relation to a lot of software either open-source or otherwise.

The backdoor (if the report is true), apparently allows FBI access to encrypted sessions (such as VPN) and other sofware that rely on the IPSEC stack in OpenBSD. This will mean that the FBI will have the ability to capture packets from an encrypted session and decrypt them to reveal the contents. While this may not sound like a great deal to most people, for the security conscious, this is a real threat. After all, if the FBI is able to carry out a surveillance of encrypted traffic, who says that criminal elements or other government agencies will not do the same.

It should be noted, though, that other implementations of IPSEC such as FreeSwan and OpenSwan are not affected by this development.

OpenBSD Unix security ipsec vpn

I recently acquired a new motherboard, processor and some RAM. The motherboard was a Gigabyte G-41MT and the processor was an Intel Core2 Duo E7500. After running the machine as part of an exhibition, when I took it back home I was tempted to do something else with it, so I thought:”why not try a Hackintosh?”.

I did a little research and I got some information from this blog. After following the instructions carefully (it was very specific), I got the computer to boot into OSX installer. After about an hour, I got to the OS X desktop and was happy to find that the network card worked (the one onboard) and that everything else seemed to have been detected fine except for a couple of problems, namely the soundcard (no sound at all) and the graphics adapter (resolution stuck at 1024×768).

A little research later I discovered that to do this successfully you need a recent GPU from Nvidia, as the intel built-in one was not supported at all. Not sure how to get the sound working, but I will try in the next few days to play around with some kexts (kernel modules).

Mac PC OS X hackintosh core2duo

What seems like a perfect (from attackers’ point of view) remote exploit has been discovered in the mail server software called Exim. In the exploit, an attacker can compromise an entire system remotely and gain access to not only the mail server user privilege, but even root according to an article here. If that is not serious enough, the problem with the mail server agent has been around for at least two years. This vulnerability affects only version 4.69 and earlier versions, but since the upgrade to 4.7 did not mention the existence of any sort of vulnerability, many sysadmins did not upgrade. After all, if it ain’t broke…

If you are running Exim for your MTA, it is recommended to upgrade to 4.7 immediately.

exim mta mail server exploit inthewild

Despite calls from gamers in the community, the various state Attorney Generals refused to the plan for an R18+ rating for games in Australia. The plan was rejected at the Standing Committee of Attorney General meeting at Canberra yesterday.

The constant denial of the need for such a rating for games in Australia means that games can be rejected if it does not fit within the other classifications. A good game can be rejected for unsuitable sexual content, violence or others. While not a champion for sexual content or violence in games, there is absolutely no reason not to introduce an R18+ rating for games in Australia.

games ratings gaming classification

I have had a Tomtom One dedicated GPS unit for the last four years , it has been a reliable assistant on the road on countless of trips. The only downside was after two years and some travelling interstate, I found that the map data started becoming out of date. For example, earlier this year, I travelled north to Byron Bay from Sydney and found that travelling on the Pacific Highway, a lot of the new sections were not on the map. In the end, I shelled out US$99 to buy a map update from Tomtom.

When Google made navigation available to Australian users, this was a big relief for me, and I am sure, a lot of other GPS navigation users in Australia. No longer was I feeling locked in as Google map updates come in for free as the maps are hosted on the server, not being kept in an SD card with some ridiculous DRM scheme. It means that I would not have to put up with SD cards being periodically corrupted for some unknown reasons which rendered my navigation device useless without access to a computer and internet access.

The other thing that is pleasant about the Google Maps navigation is that it knows the names of the streets and it even tells me the signs to follow. I must give Tomtom credit, though, for developing good navigation device years ago when internet access through 3G networks were not so common. The other great thing that I found about using the Tomtom was when travelling outside of metropolitan areas, it does not need any 3G signals to access the map data. However, in the city areas, the Google Maps navigation on Android so far appears to be a superior experience.

3G adroid phone googlemaps google maps navigation

Unlike most people I have spoken to, I have actually found a place for an ipad in my little gadget universe. I can see it being a more capable replacement for my Nokia N800 which is now getting a little long in the tooth. The only issue I have is that the Ipad is a device that is tightly locked down by Apple (do you hear that all those Android Tablet manufacturers?). That was the reason I steered clear of the Iphone in the first place.

At the same time, my Nokia E71 is now slowly dying (charger pin getting loose so that it does not charge properly anymore). I have been thinking maybe I should go with one of those giant-screened Android phones like the HTC Desire or the Sony Ericsson Xperia X10. Buying one of these phones will be around the same as buying a 3G Ipad. Hmmm!

apple · hardware · mobile · Nokia

I have jumped the bandwagon with the updates this time and downloaded and installed Linux Mint 9 (Isadora) on my old HP Mini Note 2133 which has been a testing bed for all sorts of OS and software. Upon completion, however I have noticed a couple of important issues:

1. The K3520 Vodafone dongle does not get recognised by the network manager anymore. When I plug it in, it shows up as a CDROM drive, but does not get unmounted an then used as a modem like it was with Linux Mint 8 (Helena).
2. The Interface seems to be really slow as to make it nearly unusable. The delay between clicking on a program to launch it and the actual launch is around 3-5 seconds. This is unacceptable.

To keep myself sane, I think I will just go back to Helena for now and be happy that everything works well enough to use the netbook on the move.

2133 · computing · hardware · Linux · Linux Mint · Mint · netbook · Vodafone