Category Archives: Internet

Symantec, you’re doing it wrong…

At work we had an SSL certificate that is no longer required, so we want to quietly let it expire and get on with our lives. Unfortunately Symantec is doing their best to trick us into renewing it. It mentions an “order number” even though we haven’t ordered anything (perhaps their system persistently uses the […]

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Historical DNS Quirks

I love understanding the background of how particular parts of Internet infrastructure evolved to be how they currently are and the particular quirks of history that shaped them that way. Last night’s spelunking was triggered by this tweet from @miekg: Calculating why there are 13 root nameservers, based on a pkt size of 512 b. My […]

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Fail2ban monitoring itself recursively

I use fail2ban to monitor brute force login attacks on my server. However it was quite clear that the short bans intended to deter bots but not real users with fat fingers weren’t actually deterring the bots. As soon as the ban was lifted a lot of bots come straight back and keep trying, only to […]

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#newnewtwitter Mobile: UX clangers are just the beginning…

So I’ve been using Twitter’s mobile website for a while and it’s been updated a number of times, most recently a few months ago. There was no fanfare until just recently when #newnewtwitter was announced and it became clear that the current look was part of this redesign effort. What surprises me is that this […]

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Series of Scalability Articles by Haytham El-fadeel

As the title says… Art of scalability (1) – Scalability principles Art of scalability (2) – Scalability guidelines part 1 Art of scalability (3) – Scalability guidelines part 2 Art of scalability (4) – Scalability guidelines part 3

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Bernadette McMenamin applying the spin, again…

Australian IT is carrying a blog post by Bernadette McMenamin which is just full of mis-representation and spin. One of the most horrendous developments that we have experienced in the last 15 years is the dramatic explosion in the global trade of child sexual abuse images on the internet. No one really knows the true […]

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Firefox 3 Download Day

“Set a Guinness World Record, Enjoy a Better Web. Sounds like a good deal, right? All you have to do is get Firefox 3 during Download Day to help set the record for most software downloads in 24 hours – it’s that easy.”

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Daily Links Automated

As can be seen from the previous post I’m back! The best bit is that post was created automatically. I use del.icio.us to bookmark interesting things I read day to day. It has support for daily links posted to your blog but that requires XML-RPC support which Blosxom doesn’t have out of the box. So […]

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Some helpful addons for Apache and PHP…

Jdub points out a couple of packages which I’m off to install right now. I’ve always redirected to a “one true” FQDN on my websites by using an extra virtualhost container and a redirect rule. libapache2-redirtoservname to the rescue! I don’t use as much PHP as a I used to but I’m sure that what […]

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Google doesn’t seem to care about your privacy…

SMH is reporting about Google’s imminent launch of “Street View” in Australia. Richard Chirgwin points out the spineless journalism that let quotes like the following through to the keeper: Still reeling from the backlash by privacy activists after Street View began in the US last year, Ms Mayer said Google was developing technology to blur […]

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