pebkac thoughts

Honestly I haven’t read enough of the WSJ’s editorial page to pass judgment, but this article definitely doesn’t fit the picture that had been painted for me by others. It’s a happy dissonance for me, though I do have to say that the headline is really misleading. The casual observer will not take away the same message that someone reading the entire article will.

Oh well… I left this as a draft long enough that TPM already beat me to it.

via.

I’m stuck and I don’t have a good way out. I’ll paint the picture for you: I’m responsible for a mail server that handles mail for about 50 domains. We get joe jobbed pretty much constantly, and recently spammers have started picking on not-so-tech-savvy individuals who do their mail with us. Eg. “Poor User”<p.user@example.net> gets inundated with bounces. Why?

1. Spammer forges From: “Poor User” <p.user@example.net>
2. Spammer sends mail to a misconfigured MTA (not us).
3. misconfigured MTA accepts the forged mail, realizes the final To: address is invalid.
4. misconfigured MTA generates a DSN (Delivery Status Notification).
5. DSN goes to”Poor User” <p.user@example.net>.
6. Poor User files a ticket with me.

Now, there are circumstances when the original recipient MTA of the spam is not “misconfigured” when it sends the DSN. Example: somebody has set up a mail alias, say joe.user@example.org (note .ORG instead of .NET here), that points to TriLUG mail address, but joe does something silly and kills the TriLUG address without notifying the example.org mail admin. Over the weekend, spam sent to the example.org address will generate bounces.

Anyway, part of the solution would seem to be deploying something like SPF or DKIM. This would cut down on the number of servers that accept mail that claims to be from us but isn’t. Great! Let’s delpoy one of them! But….

• Suddenly we’re forcing all our (hundreds of) active users to reconfigure their mail clients to use us when sending mail outbound with a From: that claims to be from our domain. That’s a big flood of tickets, given the number of MUAs that aren’t configured that way by default.
• We don’t do DNS in-house. We’re dependent on $UNIVERSITY for DNS, and they’ve told me flatly they won’t do SPF or DKIM until they’ve finishd migrating to a new IPAM. Oh, and I’m the first person ever to have asked them about either.

So I’m stuck. I’d welcome any suggestions that will help mitigate the problem. This is a bit of a pickle.

A day of spam evil and various upgrade headaches (not to mention end-of-semester woes) makes this sound downright logical:

That robocall I posted about earlier also got posted on Orange Politics, where it got a lot of reads and a lot of comments fairly quickly. I started a tumblr blog to be able to easily post the audio of the robocall.

I just got a robocall from a group calling itself “Citizens for a better Orange County” that opposes the Transfer Tax. It calls the tax the “Home Tax,” which is clearly wrong on two levels. Firstly, the proposed tax is on all land sales, and secondly it is an attempt to falsely personalize this tax for local homeowners. Oh, and it fails to mention an important detail: the tax rate would be 0.4%. That’s right: four tenths of a percent. That’s one thousand dollars on a $250k hypothetical home. Sounds like too much money? Well, what are the alternatives? If this is defeated, the only two alternatives that have been seriously discussed are a sales tax (the most regressive tax possible) and a property tax increase. A property tax increase would be a home tax. Everything about the robocall was misleading and dishonest.

The call directs people to a website that I won’t link to here. The website refers to “Tom Holt” as their treasurer and “Mark Zimmerman” as their spokesperson. A bit of googling gives:

Mark Zimmerman (919) 942-9150

so that might be one way to get more info about this if anyone is interested. The website also lists a toll-free number: 866-275-1129. Also, a visit to the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine shows us that Mr. Zimmerman was chair of the Chapel Hill/Carrboro Chamber of Commerce in 2005, and is… drumroll… a realtor with Remax.

So, to recap: a realtor is the spokesperson for a shady group that is using shady tactics (including robocalls and dishonest “home tax” verbiage) to try to shoot down the Transfer Tax. A good question for Mr. Zimmerman might be, “How much money have you personally spent on trying to defeat the Transfer Tax?” Or maybe, “Why do you feel it’s necessary to resort to dishonest tactics to defeat a tax that might have a small impact on your business?”

Monte is in my Network Protocols class at UNC, and we went out for pizza and beer after class. He started talking about what it is that eats up all his time, and it absolutely blew me away. Check out my feeble attempt to use his website below, or jump right to making your own.

So… mirroring scripts are having trouble. I’m not a network expert, but this looks slightly problematic.

                               Matt's traceroute  [v0.54]
fedora1                                                        Wed Apr 16 19:41:40 2008
Keys:  D - Display mode    R - Restart statistics    Q - Quit
                                                   Packets               Pings
Hostname                                        %Loss  Rcv  Snt  Last Best  Avg  Worst
 1. 152.46.7.254                                   0%  140  140     0    0    1     27
 2. rtp11-gw-to-ibiblio-gw.ncren.net               0%  140  140     0    0    0      2
 3. rtp7600-gw-to-rtp11-gw-sec.ncren.net          44%   78  140     0    0    3    144
 4. dep7600-gw2-to-rtp7600-gw.ncren.net           42%   82  140     2    2    6    182
 5. internet2-to-dep7600-gw2.ncren.net            13%  123  140    10   10   11     52
 6. ge-0-1-0.10.nycmng.abilene.ucaid.edu          12%  124  140    23   23   24     35
 7. abilene-wash.rt1.fra.de.geant2.net             0%  139  139   127  127  127    147
 8. so-6-2-0.rt1.gen.ch.geant2.net                 0%  139  139   135  135  136    182
 9. so-7-0-0.rt1.mad.es.geant2.net                 0%  139  139   165  157  160    294
10. clara-gw.rt1.mad.es.geant2.net                 0%  139  139   362  361  362    363
11. rnp-br-spau.peer.redclara.net                  4%  134  139   362  362  364    403
12. so-0-0-0-r1-pr.bkb.rnp.br                     89%   16  139   368  368  375    432
13. ge-1-16-r2.pop-pr.rnp.br                      91%   13  139   369  368  390    504
14. 200.17.202.62                                  2%  137  139   371  371  372    375

Why am I going to NY, then Europe, THEN Brazil?

Let’s try going from TriLUG to Brazil:

                                     My traceroute  [v0.71]
pilot (0.0.0.0)                                                         Wed Apr 16 19:57:52 2008
Keys:  Help   Display mode   Restart statistics   Order of fields   quit
                                                        Packets               Pings
 Host                                                 Loss%   Snt   Last   Avg  Best  Wrst StDev
 1. 64.244.27.130                                      0.0%    25    0.3  18.6   0.3 198.5  55.0
 2. dhmir5-ge-0-0-0-0.sgns.net                         0.0%    25    0.3   0.3   0.3   0.4   0.0
 3. POS2-0.GW7.RDU1.ALTER.NET                          0.0%    25    1.0   1.0   1.0   1.1   0.0
 4. 152.at-2-2-0.XL1.RDU1.ALTER.NET                    0.0%    25   33.5   2.6   1.2  33.5   6.4
 5. 0.so-5-2-0.XL3.IAD8.ALTER.NET                      4.0%    25   15.4  16.1  15.1  34.9   4.0
 6. 0.ge-6-0-0.BR2.IAD8.ALTER.NET                      0.0%    25   14.1  15.1  13.6  33.3   4.1
 7. 204.255.169.202                                    0.0%    25   12.2  13.0  12.1  26.2   2.9
 8. MINISTERIO-DA-CIENCIA-E-TE.ge-3-2-0.ar2.GRU1.gblx  0.0%    25  131.9 135.5 131.9 148.9   5.2
 9. so-0-0-0-r1-pr.bkb.rnp.br                          0.0%    25  138.8 138.8 137.5 149.6   3.1
10. ge-1-16-r2.pop-pr.rnp.br                           0.0%    25  137.9 138.0 137.7 138.5   0.2
11. 200.17.202.62                                      0.0%    24  141.4 141.7 141.1 142.4   0.3

I think I need to find my opposite number at MCNC….

Most of you get this via planet TriLUG or feedburner, but for those of you that actually visit the site, you’ll notice that I’ve made a bunch of changes to the sidebar recently. The most recent and most important is that I made a page for the COSI calendar. I’m going to get off my rear and actually start planning events and otherwise making sure that COSI continues to be an active group that’s contributing to the Open Source community in one way or another.

And now, time for Lunch.