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Tue Aug 02 19:54:03 2005 GMT: Atom 1.0
Sun Jul 31 15:29:04 2005 GMT: Anti-Virus Software Flaws
Wed Jul 13 19:15:04 2005 GMT: Mail System Changes at web.de
Apparently, web.de is changing their mail system setup. Previously, only one server at web.de (mx??.web.de) was involved with forwarding e-mail messages (FWIW, I believe these MX servers are running some customised version of exim). Now I am seeing an additional hop (fmmailgate??.web.de) in the Received headers of forwarded messages which seems to be running some version of sendmail.
Tue Jul 12 19:14:31 2005 GMT: Domain Grabbers
My Web site seems to have attracted domain grabbers lately, as cmeerw.com got registered about a month ago and cmeerw.info seems to have been registered just a few hours ago. Of course, there is no useful content on both of these Web sites, except some sponsored links and a domain inquiry form on cmeerw.com.
Thu Jun 30 17:01:09 2005 GMT: Alpha Processor Comeback?
This week, The Inquirer has published two articles about rumours of a comeback of the Alpha processor, see Will the Alpha chip stage a comeback? and Could HP bring the Alpha processor back to life?. Remember, the Alpha had 64-bits from the beginning (back in 1992). So, it definitely is an interesting thought.
Tue Jun 28 19:43:53 2005 GMT: Testdriving 16x 1.5 GHz Itanium
HP has recently added an Integrity rx8620 to its TestDrive. Its 64 GB of RAM and 16 Itanium processors are quite impressive, although its running the "wrong" Linux distribution (Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS 4 instead of Debian or Ubuntu).
BTW, their Debian systems have been upgraded to Debian sarge (3.1).
Sun Jun 26 15:50:28 2005 GMT: Anti-Virus Software Quality
When you choose to run some kind of Windows on your PC you will probably also use some anti-virus software to protect you PC against viruses and trojan horses. And to get the maximum level of protection you will surely want to allow your anti-virus software to automatically update its virus definition database via the Internet.
We all know that the Internet isn't 100 % reliable and if a request fails it should be retried sometime later. Of course, we all expect that the update routines of anti-virus handle these cases reliably.
But today I noticed that the anti-virus software on a Windows PC started to bombard the proxy server with HTTP requests (at a rate of about 50 requests per second). Apparently, it somehow tried to request a non-existent file from the update site and got a HTTP 404 response which triggered an immediate retry.
Hmm, this looks a bit like a DoS attack -- I really had hoped that at least security related software should handle these cases better. After all, you won't have to write a worm for your next DDoS attack, anti-virus software's update functionality will do it for you (if you can poison a DNS cache, for instance).
BTW, I am talking about Bitdefender which tried to fetch http://upgrade.bitdefender.com/update71/avx/Plugins/c.gzip? for some reason.
Sat Jun 18 10:57:42 2005 GMT: WebRSS
Sun Jun 12 09:13:28 2005 GMT: PHP 5.1 Beta
Sun May 22 16:15:09 2005 GMT: PHP5 @ domainsteam
Mon May 16 21:05:11 2005 GMT: Member Templates and C++0x Extensions
Mon May 16 13:09:40 2005 GMT: Winchester, Bournemouth and London
