Folks,

It's been a while, but I have a bunch of small stuff that you might be interested in.

Links

Here are a bunch of interesting links that have come up in the last few weeks.

A chatty, fictionalized account of the ways that on-line bad guys make money off of the evil things that they do.

<http://www.cio.com/article/117150/How_Organized_Crime_Uses_Technology_to_Make_Money/>

A rather amusing "Dear John" letter written to Windows XP.

<http://darkbrownhole.blogspot.com/2007/07/breaking-up-is-hard-to-do.html>

An automobile parts manufacturer switches from Windows to the Mac.

<http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&taxonomyName=operating_systems&articleId=298043&taxonomyId=89&intsrc=kc_feat>

<http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&taxonomyName=operating_systems&articleId=297826&taxonomyId=89&intsrc=kc_feat>

Duke University's IT department eats crow. Note the passive voice in their linked press release to avoid taking responsibility. Anyone know what happened to Kevin Miller, the guy who proclaimed that the problem was the iPhone?

<http://www.macworld.com/news/2007/07/20/dukecisco/index.php?lsrc=mwrss>

An absolutely hilarious video on how NOT to make a PowerPoint (or Keynote for that matter) presentation.

<http://www.i-am-bored.com/bored_link.cfm?link_id=23724>

Postcard Spam

I've been seeing a boatload of spam recently that looks like this:

Hi. Family member has sent you a greeting card.
See your card as often as you wish during the next 15 days.

SEEING YOUR CARD

If your email software creates links to Web pages, click on your card's direct www address below while you are connected to the Internet:

http://72.174.224.251/?2b54ce75338ee7c634591933434671c1

Or copy and paste it into your browser's "Location" box (where Internet addresses go).

We hope you enjoy your awesome card.

Wishing you the best,
Webmaster,
funnypostcard.com

What a total pain in the neck. It's immediately obvious from the body of the spam that it's not something you want to click on, but you can't tell from the header/subject/from lines alone, so you have to at least look at the body if it isn't caught by your spam filters.

Jot and the Random Password Generator

I've been playing with the /usr/bin/jot command line tool. It can print out either a sequential or random series of numbers/characters. For instance:

jot -r 1 10 253

prints out one number (the 1 parameter) at random (the -r flag) that is between 10 and 253, inclusive. This is really useful when you are setting up a new network in say, the 192.168.X.0/24 range, since you don't want to use 192.168.0.0/24 or 192.168.1.0/24, because you can run into IP address conflicts if you are using VPN to connect to or from the network. by running jot you can let the computer pick a good third octet — e.g., if the command prints out "141", then you can set up your network to be in the 192.168.141.0/24 range.

I put this into a random password generator shell script. I've been using the script to generate random passwords for several Open Directory transfer or re-construction engagements that I've been working on lately, and thought that you might find it useful as well.

<http://ps-enable.com/software/password_gen.zip>


--Paul