How to catch a script kiddie

I was doing my daily reading of boards.ie today and I came across this, how to catch a script kiddie.
It would defiantly seem that there is infact one born every minute ;-)

Irelands now mostly smoke free

Well its official as of today the 29th of March 2004 smoking in Pubs, Clubs and all places that serve food is illegal, don't believe me please look at CNN, BBC News, The Times, Reuters and about 232 other news sources

I've always been in support of this law so its the best news I've heard all year.
I'm currently visiting in the UK and my impression so far is that ALOT more people seem to smoke here then Ireland so if the UK Gov has any sense they'll think about doing the same thing as Ireland. I believe Sweden is next to put this law into action :-)

Is Firefox really free?

There seems to be a debate rising about weather or not Mozilla Firefox is really free enough, in this case the debate is weather Firefox is free enough to be distributed with Debian.
Mozilla has been cracking down on its trademark being used on merchandise and other items in decent times ever since the Mozilla Foundation was started back in June, it would also seem that the new Firefox artwork is not Open-Source and cannot be used on unoffical builds or those not authorised by the Mozilla Foundation.

The Irish smoking ban and spam!

For those of you that are
not aware I live and work in Eire (Rep Of Ireland) and from the end of
March 2004 smoking of cigarettes in bars, restaurants, night clubs,
work places, etc. will be illegal and any publican (owner) who allows
the public to smoke within there premises can be fined by the
Government.

I'm for the idea of course, my family owned a pub for 75 years and I
lived in it for 20 years of my life so I've seen the affects more then
the average joe smoker who dropped in for a drink.



That did'ent stop some muppet from spamming my mailbox this morning about there petition for wanting to stop the ban (which incidentally can not be stopped at this stage as its been passed into law)

See a copy of the spam mail below (with headers and all)

More then anything else this site seems like a massive joke :-)




I have no problem in pasting this e-mail in full and the sender of it
can complain all they want, but when it comes down to it, I fully 110%
support this ban and this e-mail was sent to me without me requesting
it.


That classes this mail as spam :-)

----------------------------------------------



X-Auth-No:

Return-Path:

Received: from smtp-relay01.x-mailer.co.uk not authenticated [212.69.217.30]

by smtp-send.myrealbox.com with NetMail SMTP Agent $Revision: 3.56 $ on Novell NetWare

via secured & encrypted transport (TLS);


Tue, 23 Mar 2004 07:52:53 -0700

Received: from [xxx.xx.xxx.xxx]
(helo=xxxxxx.xxx)

by smtp-relay01.x-mailer.co.uk with esmtp (Exim 4.30)
id 1B5nGq-0007RP-F2

for me@xxxxxx.com; Tue, 23 Mar 2004 14:52:48 +0000

Received: from combinedmedia.ie
(webmail.inet7.com [209.98.201.65])

by xxxxxx.xxx (x.xx.x/x.xx.x) with ESMTP id i2NEqlw07565

for ; Tue, 23 Mar 2004 14:52:47 GMT


Received: from layla [83.70.32.229] by combinedmedia.ie with ESMTP
(SMTPD32-8.03) id AF2B59300C4; Tue, 23 Mar 2004 08:52:27 -0600
Message-ID: <266970-220043223134940902@layla>

From: "Nicola Farrell"

To: myemailaddress@host.com

Subject: The smoking ban is wrecking me buzz!

Date: Tue, 23 Mar 2004 13:49:40 -0000

MIME-Version: 1.0

Content-type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII"

Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable






Hi



My name is Nicola Farrell, I am a 24 year old Dublin smoker desperately
trying to get the 'smoking ban' lifted I am organising a 50,000 name
petition which I will present in person to Micheal Martin our misguided
minister for Health

Can you help



We all participated in getting Ronnie O'Brien signed to Juventus and
nominating 'A nation once again' as the most popular song on the BBC
World service poll

Please help me as this is important



I have set up a website http://www.wreckingmebuzz.com where you can
sign my petition, it takes less than a minute and as a bonus I have
short piece of animation where you can see me on a typical Friday out
in Dublin!




Time is running out so please forward this email to all in your address book



Cheers!





Nicola



Ps Don't forget the web address http://www.wreckingmebuzz.com and to look at my big night out



--------------------------------------------




I left the following note on the owners website/guestbook



"Heavens forbid we might want to care about our health care system and non-smokers health.
OK hows this for a idea?

All people that smoke can smoke all they care and want, but any smokers
that have lung cancer in later years will not get any health care
towards it.
Sounds like a fair deal ;-)

Also I don't like spam.

Why not dedicate your website to something worth while??"

Gates: Buy stamps to send e-mail

CNN are reporting that MS founder Bill Gates is suggesting we buy "stamps" to send e-mail (paid in cpu cycles that we rent to others). After all here in snail mail land I'm sure we'd have alot more spam is mail is free to send.
Could this be the very end of the "free internet"?
Although the point is valid I believe this would do nothing more then put a small dent in the junk mail setup on the net, I have two junk mail accounts, these are e-mail accounts which I used to use but had to drop them as they were getting hammered with junk e-mail (100+ a day) so I changed my address so it looks like a anti-spam messure but is actually a valid address, I've also setup spam filters blocking whole countries, now I get about 2 junk e-mails a day. :-)

Windows XP SP2 could break existing apps

Computerweekly.com have a interesting article highlighting the fact that Windows XP2 could cause alot of problems for some current applications running on the OS, it seems this is because of the trade off Microsoft did in order to implement all the new security tweaks.

Bush campaign criticised over TV ad

RTE On-Line are reporting that families of victims of the 11 September terrorist attacks have accused
President George W Bush of exploiting the tragedy for his re-election
bid in a TV advert. Once again the crazyiness of Bush continues which
can be plainly seen from this type of situation, while he's at it he
might as well run pictures from the Iraq war, oh wait to late thats
been proven as a fraud..


Source: RTE On-Line



Representatives
of many families of victims of the 11 September terrorist attacks have
accused President George W Bush of exploiting the tragedy for his
re-election bid.

The first television advertisement of Mr Bush's
campaign features images of the devastation at the World Trade Centre
in New York and a fire fighter working in the rubble.

The Bush campaign has defended the images as necessary, saying the message was that Mr Bush rose to the challenge.



An adviser said the advertisement was tastefully done.

However
a representative of one 9/11 families association said that while the
tragedy should not be ignored during the election year, there should be
no manipulation of it for a particular agenda.

Irish-born Jack
Lynch, whose firefighter son Michael Francis Lynch died in the World
Trade Centre, said the matter should not be used

Seen any three headed frogs?

The BBC reports that Children in a nursery were shocked when they spotted a three-headed frog
hopping in their garden.
I've never seen one of these, might be just a random freak of nature
but it possiable could be the start of things, after all I remember
reading somewhere that client change will affect frogs and similar
creatures before it'll affect us.

Downloading music is killing the music industry

CDfreaks.com are reporting a article on the BBC
that the RIAA are saying that once again the downloading of music is
destroying the store music industry, full article is available by
clicking the read more link below

The impact of online piracy on
the US music business has been "devastating", says the head of the
Recording Industry Association of America, Cary Sherman.
He told a conference in London that a 31% decline in music sales
between 1999 and 2002 was primarily due to piracy.
"More music is being consumed than at any time in history, it's just
that less of it is being paid for," he said.
The industry is fighting back by licensing download services and taking
legal action against music pirates.
The RIAA is also backing a large-scale "educational campaign" including
public service adverts and targeting the university student market, a
major area of piracy.
Mr Sherman was speaking at this week's Financial Times New Media and
Broadcasting Conference in London.
Film file-sharing
Escalating online sales in the US suggest that lawsuits targeting
pirates are having an impact on peer-to-peer file-sharing of
copyrighted material.
Although legitimate online sales are up sharply, they still represent
only a fraction of what is being exchanged via the net.
Rob Sisco, president of Nielsen Music, said lawsuits by the RIAA have
rekindled sales, not by striking fear in music pirates but by educating
users.
The US film industry is also threatened by rampant internet piracy.
This has been made worse by the increased availability of broadband and
the imminent removal of technical barriers to moving and storing
massive amounts of content, said Dara MacGreevy of the Motion Picture
Association of America.
In 2003, Hollywood lost $3.5bn from hard goods piracy alone, while
internet piracy losses are harder to quantify, he added.
But despite piracy fears, analysts believe the future of the music
industry lies in online digital downloads.
Since the files can be easily transported and stored on a range of
devices, they have transformed the way people consume music.
Chris Gorog, head of the Napster music download service, believes
ventures like his will be highly profitable in the long-term.
He told the FT conference of his plans to expand from the US into
Europe this year, with the UK as the first entry point.
By 2008, one-third of music sales in the US and nearly 20% in Europe
will come in the form of downloads and streaming music over the
internet, building a multi-billion dollar business, according to a
recent study by consultancy Forrester Research. Source: BBC News

Outlook Vs. Thunderbird

Mozillazine.org has a link to a great review comparing Mozilla Thunderbird to Outlook, You can read the glowing article here.

Might be making the move..

So its been very sucessfull using the blogger.com setup on my website these last few months but now I want to move onto bigger and better things.
I've been testing this PHPNuke webpage and I like the interface alot, allows me to do more with the site with less work, if you like it please vote in the poll on the site :-)

Do you want to see your bank notes explode??

Just browsing away on slashdot and came across this interesting story, after this writter setoff RFID scanners at truckstops he discovered that the cause of the problems were the $20 notes in his pocket, so he set off on a quest to try and disable the RFID tags by putting the notes in a microwave this however had some very interesting results indeed :-) its kinda mad really..