I am always thinking about ways that I can not only improve the site here, but also ways that I can provide something useful to visitors. Along those lines, I decided to put some network tools online fo visitors to use. You never know when you might need to ping or trace something from an outside source when troubleshooting a problem. There is also a Whois option, and even one to show the IP address that we see you coming from. That’s useful when trying to configure IP based access somewhere. I’ll be refining the tools and working to add more and improve the existing tools as time moves on. Let me know what you think, if you have any problems with them or suggestions, hit the contact link and drop me a line. Now, go check ‘em out!

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This article from Slashdot ought to get you thinking! Read this:

“National Intelligence Director Mike McConnell is currently helping to draft a new Cyber-Security Policy that could make the debate over warrantless wiretaps seem like a petty squabble. The new policy would allow the government to access to the content of any email, file transfer, or web search.”

Dang. Don’t that just sound like a whole lot of fun?

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In an article on Slashdot, we find that Network Solutions (NSI) has been caught registering every domain name that users check for availability from their whois service.  So, if you check to see if foo.com is available, and it is but you don’t register it immediately, they register it out from under you.  Nice job there NSI, way to provide a good service to the customer.  I have long suspected that someone was doing this, but I didn’t think the registrar was.  Wow.  Just goes to show that my aversion to dealing with this low life company was not incorrect.

Read more here …

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It seems that the folks at GraffitiCMS, who make a competitor to WordPress, are aligning with Presidential hopefuls and slinging mud to promote their product even though it isn’t out of beta yet. I found the article here, I am not going to give them the satisfaction of linking to the original. Let’s take a walk though their arguments, shall we?

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Although you can read the Monty Python skit here, I am talking about email spam. Lately I have been inundated with spam, and it’s aggravating me. I use MailWasher which I recommend to people for filtering spam at the user level, and it does a superb job. However, I really want to stop spam at the server level. I am now on a quest, or mission if you will, to figure out how to stop spam (at least as much as I can) from passing through my server and even getting to the user level. So, as I go forth on my spam fighting quest, I will bring you along with me and share what I find. Maybe we can all move a step forward in overcoming the spam epidemic.

More to come …

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I am sure that any game playing geek out there has heard of, if not played America’s Army.  This was the FPS put out by the Army about five years ago.  It has been so popular that it seems the Army is looking to use video games even more for training and other purposes.  It’s about time someone decided to tap this gold mine!

Read more at Wired.

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