Slashback: Matrix, Terminology, Topology

Slashback is back from a Thanksgiving hiatus with a bigger-than-usual collection of updates, corrections and followups to previous Slashdot stories, including pretty maps of the Internet, spammers' OS choices, stupidity in the wild, and more. Read on for the details.

Of course, Red Hat didn't claim to be the first ... cmeyer writes in response to the news that Red Hat is expected to attain Common Criteria certification. "Linux achieved the first Common Criteria certification back in the beginning of August. It was a joint effort of IBM and SUSE." He points to this August Slashdot posting about the news and to a press release on SUSE's site.

Well, it's robust, stable and handy for networking tasks ... Linux and Unix users may be justifiably smug about our machines' resistance to viruses and trogans (including ones that send spam), since most of these things are aimed at Microsoft Windows. Maybe it should be no surprise that spammers like Linux, too:

Niels Provos writes "You might remember Honeyd? I have been using it since June to capture spam emails in an attempt to better understand how spammers operate. A recent feature in Honeyd is passive fingerprinting which allows Honeyd to passively identify the operating system that contacts it. For spammers, it turns out that about 43% seem to be running Linux. And mostly Unix, Windows ranks at around 0.7%. The unknown fraction is 52%, so there might be surprises lurking there."

Apple products must be ripened before consumption. Ipodlounge.com editor Dennis Lloyd was one of several readers to note that, rather than the November date named in the recent 2-year iPod retrospective in the New York Times, the device came out just a bit earlier. "The iPod's anniversary was in October ;) The iPod was officially launched on Oct. 23, 2001. The NYT article is incorrect."

May the tide be with you. Doc Searls writes: "Thought I'd direct your attention to the first half of a transcription of the talk Linus gave on the September Geek Cruise that got Slashdotted a few weeks ago. Can't find the link to the Slashdot item, but as i recall it didn't have the benefit of a real transcription." (Here's the Slashdot post about the cruise.) "This one is not only a full transcription (by yours truly, all disclaimers apply), but features pix of his slides and demos as well."

Searls also has up the second part: "That's the Q&A, which is even longer than the prepared part of the talk," as well as the third: "The third part is a transcription of a talk Linus and others gave to the Victoria Linux Users Group. Shorter than the first two."

Searls' three-part report on the cruise itself ran in Linux Journal.

This way to the Egress! Rick Chapman, author of the recently reviewed In Search of Stupidity , writes to point out that book excerpts are available at insearchofstupdity.com, along with some of the book's illustrations.

"Also, I recently was interviewed live on a local CT business show and I've had the session digitized and am mounting on the site today. It runs about 45 minutes and I discuss a lot of the stuff in the book as well as other issues revolving around software marketing and development. ... I have a lot of samples of really bad things I brought to the taping and I think you'll get a kick out of the session."

They should sell nice prints to buy bandwidth. An anonymous reader writes "From the New Scientist article: A project to create a comprehensive graphical representation of the Internet in just one day and using only a single computer has already produced some eye-catching images."

Back pedal, back pedal, baker's man, cover that label with tape if you can. Mr. Slippery writes "According to this Yahoo! News story, L.A. County did not ban the use of 'master' and 'slave' in labeling, but made more of a polite request to vendors. A subtle but important distinction.

'"I do understand that this term has been an industry standard for years and years and this is nothing more than a plea to vendors to see what they can do," said Joe Sandoval, division manager of purchasing and contract services. "It appears that some folks have taken this a little too literally."' (As, perhaps, did those who got offended in the first place...)"

The original memo called Master and Slave labels "not acceptable" -- how non-literally can that be taken? -- and as further news stories have reported, was prompted by an employee's workplace discrimination complaint against the city. That sounds to me like more than a polite request. At least the city has found that a little tape is enough to make the world safe from misinterpreted words.

I bet Bill is a better actor than Keanu. Karma Sucks writes "After some embarrassing PR backlash it seems as if Microsoft is clamping down on distribution of pictures or videos related to the Matrix Spoof that featured Linux and Windows at COMDEX. Even more interesting are the reports that Microsoft is systematically scouting Open Source desktop technology."

And this is what percentage of the industry's profits? dlh writes "Boston.com is reporting that a federal judge Thursday approved a $143 million settlement of a lawsuit that accused major record companies and large music retailers of conspiring to set minimum music prices."

Time to get a new watch. Krellis writes "DynDNS.org, a major dynamic DNS provider, has announced that they will shut off access to any customers using the Linksys WRT54G wireless router to update their service on December 8th unless the router is patched. See the story on ExtremeTech and the DynDNS Press Release for more details. Updated firmware can be downloaded from Linksys."

They should sell prints...

[Space cowboy]

They *do* sell prints. There's a part of the FAQ all about how you can use them for wallpaper, and, er, that's it.

Not that I have anything against that - they're very pretty, and they're entitled to sell them as much as they want :-)

Simon

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Filerush has it

[tycage]

Filerush [aixgaming.com] has a torrent [filerush.com] of it up. Also a traditional mirror [aixgaming.com], take your pick.

Political correctness

[Anonymous Coward]

The original memo called Master and Slave labels "not acceptable"

Help! Help! I'm being opressed!

Re:And this is what percentage...

[John Hasler]

Zero. It's a not for profit corporation.

Re:Internet topology

[hattmoward]

The maps aren't connected in terms of IP addresses as coordinates. It's a map of the links between hosts and networks. Very basically, they are doing traceroute/tracert to hosts and each host that gets mentioned is one dot, and it is connected to the hosts before and after it. If you haven't used traceroute before, run traceroute or tracert in a command window with a host name. The shorter one is used in windows. So to see the hops involved in talking to my website, you would run "tracert hattmoward.org"

Mirror mirror on the wall

[Adam9]

If you just want the images, I have them mirrored here [darkfire.net]

Here's a direct mirror to the video [indtech.edu]

Re:Filerush has it

[Faizdog]

Unfortunately this isn't the complete video, only a small portion of it. There's a funny fight scene between Gates and Balmer a la Morpheus and Neo in the Japanese Dojo. That would be hillarious to see.

Re:When I saw that map of the Internet

[pantherace]

there are bus, star, mesh & ring topolgies, both of which are created by links between 2 locations. (ex computer to hub)

Bus is for most things the worst, because everyone shares one connection, to everyone else.
Ring topologies (think token ring) pass things through the intermediate computers, and take reduce the bandwidth to each.
Star is by far the most common, and is arguably the best, because each computer has the full bandwidth available to it, to talk to other computers, presuming of course that each of them isn't already saturated. Hubs are examples of star network topologies.
Mesh topologies are very interesting. Seen on high performance clusters, where each computer can hit another with a jump or two (token ring like) when directly connected, or in wifi. Wireless mesh networks (rare, and usually rather custom & experemental currently) act in a way similar to a star network for the most part, but if something is out of range it contacts a node that can see it's target, and passes the information (or a series of nodes). I would really, really like to see a standard supporting this over all OSes. Currently most setups I have seen on the internet require an all (patched) linux setup to work, but can have other clients connect to it.

Linux Spammers

[JLester]

I had a server that began sending undeliverable messages to my postmaster account that were obviously spams originating from the server itself. I use Debian with Exim set to disable relaying and could not figure out how this occurred. I finally found a couple of strange processes running that apparently were acting as an SMTP reflector of some sort. Computers were sending e-mails to it and it forwarded them out to the proper addresses.

I finally traced it back to an older CGI script on the server that had a few bugs. Luckily they only had access to the /tmp directory, so it was an easy fix after upgrading the script. I never did figure out exactly what the process was doing though and couldn't find anything about on the 'net. This occurred about a year ago.

Jason

Awww MAN! (WRT54G)

[Matey-O]

The lastest firmware plugs the hole you can use to play around with the linux distro on the router. :(