I run a mail server on linux. the mail daemon is Postfix. the H Dizzle asked me about SPAM filtering. Spamassassin does a good job of killing SPAM. Google found me a nice HOWTO on using SpamAssassin with Postfix. I tested, it worked. Yay!

Heh, yeah, well…

From whitestripes.net:

WHITE STRIPES TO ROCK CONAN

At the end of April, to celebrate the release of Elephant, Jack and Meg will be performing on the Conan O’Brien show. Thats the good news. The great news is they will not be on just one night, not even two. But all week! Yea, you heard me correctly, they will be the house band for Conan, performing for one week in late April. Keep checking back here for the exact dates. What are you waiting for? Get those VCR’s fired up and ready to record!

Jackson, Kelly, and I went on the hunt for more geocaches on Sunday — caches were found, pictures were taken, llamas were petted.

The caches:
Lynn’s Paradise Cafe
Joe Creason Nature Reserve (now with more LLAMAS!)
Tyler Park
Seneca G.C. / Bowman Field

Navigator extraordinaire Jackson has also updated his geocaching gallery with the new pics!

when I went to go upload a new gallery today, Gallery told me I had a folder that it didn’t create in the albums/ directory. Low and behold, it was some “warez” directory with an MP3 recorder or some junk in it. Doing a little more research, I find that there is a phpshell script in there (so that your browser acts like a shell), an ftp script to download a PHP Exploit Lab script.

Well, scanning my Apache logs I find that the culprits came from Russia, or at least were using dialups in Russia. The offending hosts:

213.158.2.85
82rez.telegraph.spb.ru
213.134.206.99
161ppp.telegraph.spb.ru
85rez.telegraph.spb.ru
160ppp.telegraph.spb.ru

Further, some of the referrers for these hits lead me to this URL (a forum), which is another exploited Gallery. ( some ICQ numbers of folks on that board include: 2243057, 321381, 118407481)

So, I check out Gallery’s website — and first notice this security notice about a possible security hole. Turns out, it’s not a security hole in Gallery, but in any shared webserver. Well, that IS true. However, what DOESN’T help is that there WAS an exploit with version 1.3.2, which I was running. I’m assuming this exploit allowed for the upload of a file, namely phpshell.php, and thus… script kiddies from Mother Russia had their day. Their day as an unprivileged user, mind you.

Gallery x1.3.2 exploit

I received an email from a fellow geocacher who saw Jackson and I down at Brown Park, and mentioned he saw a man and a woman poking around a cache. Well, at first I thought — “Hey! I’m ALL MAN, man!”, but then looking at Jackson’s photos of our geocaching, I realized that from 300 yards, my sunglasses on my head do look like a fasionable hair-clip. Oh well. Peep his photos for more.

Jackson and I did a little geocaching on Saturday. What is geocaching, you say? Geocaching is finding hidden treasure with a GPS device, essentially. Someone plants a little something somewhere, records the latitude and longitude thanks to their GPS receiver, and then tells others. Yay! We hit 4 out of 5 of the caches. Music in the Brown, Stroll Along – Farnsley Park, Des Pres Park, Pee Wee Park, and the appropriately named String Along a Broken Bridge (which we didn’t find).

Also included — Grandma Betty’s 70th Birthday Fiesta and Kelly and I spend a lovely Valentines Day at the airport.

So I played a bit of Freelancer last night, and despite early warnings of its demise, I must say that this game is great. There is something about space-trading/dogfighting games that really grabs me — and I played Privateer quite a bit in my youth. Freelancer is more of the same, and BETTER. In Privateer you could pick your ship and outfit it will all sorts of firepower and such, and Freelancer does much the same. Your alignment with various groups in the game is affected by what you blow up, and who you screw over/do nice things for.

As far as the dogfighting goes — well, I will tell you that this game has NO JOYSTICK SUPPORT. No, at first glance, that’s fairly disappointing, right? Wrong. The mouse control for flying is really quite smooth and easy to do. You dogfight third-person from your ship and the handy targeting system (how far should I lead my firing to hit the enemy?) is challenging enough to stay interesting. The environment in which you play is quite open and large — you can explore all you want, or you can use the “space highway” system within the game to get where you want to go in a hurry. In relation to dogfighting — whereas in Privateer you couldn’t “abort”, that is to say, run away, from a fight — in Freelancer, if you are fast enough you can do damn well what you please!

There is a multiplayer side to this thing, replete with an in-game browser. The server for the game comes along with the install, and there are already a number of servers out there to play on. I can’t really say any further than that as I’ve only played single-player so far, but I’m assuming it’s a free-for-all out in cyberspace, yay!

Oh, I bet you are wondering what kind of monster system you’ll need to play this thing, right? Well, the specs call for a 16 meg video card on a 600 Mhz machine, and they are probably right — I’ve got a 1300 Mhz machine with an ATI RADEON 8500 card, and the game is smoooooth to me. The graphic in this game are not simple, but they are certainly CLEAN. The planets and spaceports are not extremely detailed, but the “fog” or “particle cloud” effects look quite good… altogether a nice, clean presentation.

Anyway, that’s my horribly written pseudo-review. I give it a thumbs-up so far.

From here:

good morning children, and goodnight meg and i are violently pushing forward for absolutely no reason, we see elephant rising soon and it’s uncomplicated presence forces us to wake up in the morning. i want to tell you about it some, but i don’t know where to start. i designed the artwork myself and with the help of headcoats drummer bruce brand was able to bring it to printing block. i’ve seperated the earth into three parts vertically ( lattitude or longitude?) there will be six covers, one for vinyl, and one for compact disc in each of the three sections of the globe, that way meg and i know where you got it from, such as the vinyl in australia will be the same as the vinyl in japan, but different from the cd in south america, which will be the same as the cd in north america. don’t you understand? lots of lightbulbs going off, getting our feet on solid ground, attempting to destroy and rebuild at a moments notice. i’m very sad at some of you for peeking at you christmas presents before christmas morning, can’t you wait? i can, well i do, we want you to have it when we want you to have it, it’s unfair that some get a taste and confuse others before they have the chance to have it for themselves, but the devil is at work here and you will pay for your impatience. this world of have it now, millisecond attention span and gross neglect for quality is getting old. i’m getting old too, watch me slowly die. meg coughed today. i looked at a puddle too. i told beck to get out of my bathtub, and i collected do not disturb signs with terry. mostly i had three minutes to myself today, and tomorrow too. some of the minutes are on loan. eating well though, and smiling politely to strangers, meg says to hug you mothers tightly and i say to let you lamplight shine and burn. see you soon kids on a stage near you, boomdagle rumblefuss charpenhurper fortusblend and cateldragon.
.

Despite Jack’s claim of confusion, I don’t think there is too much confusion about Elephant. It ROCKS. Good god, does it rock.

now i know all too well… had to take Danielle to the aeropuerto this morning, as she is finally able to take leave of Louisville back to the icy winterland that is Baltimore. Then I got to take Kelly to work. I guess it’s OK, because I have to go to Cincinatti this AM on business. Thank goodness I’m not driving.

Despite “stringent” anti-piracy methods (releasing the previews on vinyl) The White Stripes‘ new LP, “Elephant”, has found its way onto the Internet. Yeah, I’ve got a copy of it. Yeah, I’ve burned it to a CD. Yeah, I’ve spread it around like peanut-butter. Wanna know why? IT COMPLETELY, TOTALLY, UTTERLY DESTROYS. I can’t make this more apparent!! This album ROCKS. HARD. The Mohs scale now goes to 11!

XL has decided to move the album’s release date up to March 31st (or April 1st, depending on your source) from April 14th because of this. AWESOME, I saw! I can’t wait to get my hands on this… I can’t explain the rock-tasticness that is Elephant.

Wanna see the promo shots for Elephant? sure you
do. also, a crap photo of the cover.

I think Meg looks like Bobbie Gentry in those shots, and Jack is toting dead cowboy like no man has seen before. So yeah, if you thought that Jack and Meg were creepy before, I’m sure you’ll be recoiling in fear from those shots. This whole undead look is due to the extreme strain that such rock would naturally impart upon the bodies of only two human beings. Behold a pale horse, and upon him a pale rider, and what followed was ROCK!!! \m/

I nabbed those shots from triple tremelo. the cover was via whitestripes.net.