A few days ago, someone posted a link to a story in The Atlantic, referring to a leaked NSA document that showed that the agency had lied. The particular article is weak and irrelevant – one of a stream of similar articles that follow on the heels of each new Snowdon revelation.
Blog
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Why spammers send “from” your email address
Someone asked me recently why spammers often use other people’s addresses in the “From:” field of their spams. They asked “what’s the payoff for the spammer in doing that?” Here’s the answer.
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Mikrotik troubleshooting case study
Just for the fun of it, here’s a a case study in troubleshooting. Actually it’s a case study in stupidity too, since I should have figured this out without all the troubleshooting. Anyway, just as an exercise…
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Mikrotik plus phone dongle = instant hotspot
I attended the Sapphire Coast StartUp Camp this weekend. At one point in the leadup to it, it seemed the venue would have no Internet access, so I suggested setting up a MikroTik router with a GSM phone dongle to provide wifii/LAN and Internet connectivity. In the end an alternative was found, but just for the exercise, our team at the camp used my new hotspot, and it worked really well.
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Editorial dishonesty at the SMH
On the sixteenth of March 2014, the Sydney Morning Herald had an editorial calling for Government control of pornography on the Internet. You can read the editorial at the link below. This post is my response.
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Overhead vs Underground
Putting cables (electrical, coax, fibre – whatever) on existing poles, or even putting up new poles to carry a new service, seems like such an obviously cheaper and easier way to go. But is it really? Let’s look at some of the reasons why underground is almost always better than overhead – even though overhead looks cheaper.
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A simple chook-feeder
Now for something completely different! Here in the country, some people have chooks. We have chooks (well, my daughter does) and she was stricken to see that a decent chook-feeder was going to cost her 30-odd dollars of her hard-earned pocket money. So we went home and made one ourselves! It only took about fifteen minutes.
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Vectoring schmectoring
Recently, I was directed to an article in the Sydney Morning Herald of 2 May 2013, touting in uncritical fashion the supposed benefits of VDSL – Vectoring DSL.
Let me take issue…
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What can I do?
In this article about privacy, civil liberties and the way the “war on terror” has become a war on all of us, John Pilger asks “What are you going to do about it?”
Well, here’s my question, John: What can I do about it?
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Digital tear-gas
A discussion started on a network operators list I frequent, about a case where an apparently innocent party, Melbourne Free University, had had its website blocked. Aside from a terse “yes it’s blocked” from one provider concerned, no further information was forthcoming. Here’s one report about it. (more…)