Latest 5 posts

For more than a decade, I've run my own BIND-based DNS server, using FreeDNS for a free secondary DNS service. There has been quite some to do about a large-scale DDoS attack perpetrated against Spamhaus recently. One significant aspect of this attack was that the DDoS used so-called DNS amplification. This makes use of misconfigured DNS servers ("open recursors") to greatly increase the amount of traffic sent to a victim. One fellow server administrator wrote about this and it made me wonder about being an open resolver. Fortunately, my own server was properly configured and could not be used as an accessory in such an attack, but what if it had been? That's where CloudFlare comes in.
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There's a site called webstatsdomain that purports to be "a free online service that collects and analyzes any data about domains and keywords they are optimized for". Basically, it sucks, polluting the web with lots of broken links.
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On Monday, Facebook intends to revise its SRR and Data Use Policy. They are inviting users to vote on them. That is a sham, really, as for the vote to be binding, 30% of users would have to vote, which is obviously not going to happen. The comments on that page includes tens of thousands of people posting the same bogus message. Those people are such clueless and gullible morons that they deserve all the spam in the world. For the people who are really interested in what's going on, even if the vote is a sham, they should read on.
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Advertising server software OpenX is reasonably user friendly to work with, but also quite insecure and buggy. One of the bugs I came across was that it misidentified Flash banners compiled with Flash version 11.4 as requiring Flash Player 17 (which doesn't exist). Since OpenX checks the version of the Flash plugin against its perceived minimum requirements, this meant that a few ads simply wouldn't display. Here's the fix to the OpenX code.
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Sometimes you want to load a specific category (or product) in Magento. It's easy enough to load an object by its ID number, but magic numbers are bad. Besides, the number could differ between your development environment and the live production site. Fortunately, it is also possible to load an object by its url_key.
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