An article came through recently on an anti-spam measure called nolisting. Basically, you change the primary MX record for your domain to point to an address with no running mail server and create a seocndary MX record that points to your real server. The theory is that spambots usually only try to send to the primary MX (which doesn't really exist), while properly-written MTAs will try all listed MXes in order until they find one that works.

My homebrew club's new vice-president needed to create an account on our TWiki to keep up with officer-type stuff. By default, if Net::SMTP is installed as part of your Perl configuration, it'll use that (TWiki is written mostly in Perl IIRC). If it can't find that, it'll call whatever sendmail-compatible program you specify. With TWiki using Net::SMTP and nolisting set up, TWiki was no longer able to send its new-user messages. It bitched about some sort of DNS error. Reconfiguring TWiki to use the sendmail wrapper instead got it working.

I also had some weirdness sending mail through alfter.us around the same time as I was testing these problems. Cox's SMTP server was acting up, so I opened an SSH tunnel from my Mac mini to alfter.us, with port 2525 on the Mac redirected to port 25 on alfter.us. When I tried sending mail from Thunderbird through the tunnel, I got DNS errors again (similar to what TWiki was generating). When I got rid of nolisting, those problems went away. With nolisting gone, I was also able to switch TWiki back to using Net::SMTP, and it works as it did before.

At first, I was going to attribute this problem to Net::SMTP as that's where I first noticed it. Now that I've thought about it a little more, it seems that maybe qmail is to blame. Net::SMTP wasn't in the loop when I was trying to send mail from home; that was Thunderbird (Mac) -> OpenSSH (Mac) -> OpenSSH (Linux) -> qmail (Linux). qmail has generally been well-behaved IME, but why would setting an intentionally-broken MX record cause it to spaz out like this? qmail-smtpd shouldn't care about its own MX records one way or the other; it should only be interested in other servers' records.

Looks like the peanut farmer has taken up Holocaust denial as a hobby:

Jimmy Carter Speaks on WWII & the "So-Called" Holocaust (Video)

On Sunday in a Town Hall Meeting that aired on C-SPAN, Jimmy Carter joined Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in defining the horror of World War II as the...

"So-called" Holocaust!

Such wonderful company he keeps, too.

Do you really want to leave your safety in the hands of clowns like this DEA agent who shoots himself in the foot? He's lucky he didn't hit anyone else while he was at it.

Here's some video of bumper cars in Portland:

It's Called Ice, And It Gets A Little Slick

Flooring it after bouncing around the intersection was a nice touch. Best comment: "I haven't seen this many cars trashed since the images from Paris."

Some are wondering if they've overhyped the "threat":

Climate scientists feeling the heat

Scientists long have issued the warnings: The modern world's appetite for cars, air conditioning and cheap, fossil-fuel energy spews billions of tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, unnaturally warming the world.

Yet, it took the dramatic images of a hurricane overtaking New Orleans and searing heat last summer to finally trigger widespread public concern on the issue of global warming.

Climate scientists might be expected to bask in the spotlight after their decades of toil. The general public now cares about greenhouse gases, and with a new [Democrat]-led Congress, federal action on climate change may be at hand.

Problem is, global warming may not have caused Hurricane Katrina, and last summer's heat waves were equaled and, in many cases, surpassed by heat in the 1930s.

In their efforts to capture the public's attention, then, have climate scientists oversold global warming? It's probably not a majority view, but a few climate scientists are beginning to question whether some dire predictions push the science too far.

"Some of us are wondering if we have created a monster," says Kevin Vranes, a climate scientist at the University of Colorado.

Vranes, who is not considered a global warming skeptic by his peers, came to this conclusion after attending an American Geophysical Union meeting last month. Vranes says he detected "tension" among scientists, notably because projections of the future climate carry uncertainties -- a point that hasn't been fully communicated to the public.

The science of climate change often is expressed publicly in unambiguous terms.

For example, last summer, Ralph Cicerone, president of the National Academy of Sciences, told the U.S. House Committee on Energy and Commerce: "I think we understand the mechanisms of CO2 and climate better than we do of what causes lung cancer. ... In fact, it is fair to say that global warming may be the most carefully and fully studied scientific topic in human history."

Vranes says, "When I hear things like that, I go crazy."

This ran in the local paper a couple of days ago. It's important enough to run it here in its entirety, as it'll otherwise likely go down the memory hole in a few more days:

Letters: Can't wait for that 'new direction'

To the editor:

So, the Democrats promise "A New Direction For America."

The stock market is at a new all-time high. America's 401(k) plans are back in positive territory. A new direction from there means, what?

Unemployment is at 25-year lows. A new direction from there means, what?

Oil prices are plummeting. A new direction from there means, what?

Taxes are at 20-year lows. A new direction from there means, what?

Federal tax revenues are at all-time highs. A new direction from there means, what?

The federal budget deficit is down almost 50 percent, just as predicted over last year. A new direction from there means, what?

Home valuations are up 200 percent over the past 3.5 years. A new direction from there means, what?

Inflation is in check, hovering at 20-year lows. A new direction from there means, what?

Not a single terrorist attack has taken place on U.S. soil since 9/11. A new direction from there means, what?

Osama bin Laden is living under a rock in a dark cave, having not surfaced in years, if he's alive at all, while 95 percent of al-Qaida's top dogs are either dead or in custody, cooperating with U.S. intelligence. A new direction from there means, what?

Several major terrorist attacks have already been thwarted by U.S. and British officials, including the recent planned attack involving 10 jumbo jets being exploded in mid-air over major U.S. cities in order to celebrate the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. A new direction from there means, what?

Just as President Bush told us on a number of occasions, Iraq was to be made "ground zero" for the war on terrorism -- and just as President Bush said they would, terrorist cells from all over the region are arriving from the shadows of their hiding places and flooding into Iraq in order to get their faces blown off by U.S. Marines rather than boarding planes and heading to the United States to wage war on us here. A new direction from there means, what?

Now let me see, do I have this right? I can expect: The economy to go south; illegals to go north; taxes to go up; employment to go down; terrorism to come in; tax breaks to go out; Social Security to go away; and health care to go the same way gas prices have gone.

But what the heck. I can gain comfort by knowing that Nancy P., Hillary C., John K., Edward K., Howard D., Harry R. and Obama have worked hard to create a comprehensive National Security Plan, Health Care Plan, Immigration Reform Plan, Gay Rights Plan, Same-Sex Marriage Plan, Abortion-On-Demand Plan, Tolerance of Everyone and Everything Plan, How to Return all Troops to the United States in the Next Six Months Plan, A Get Tough Plan adapted from the French Plan by the same name, and a How Everyone Can Become as Wealthy as We Are Plan.

I forgot the No More Katrina Storm Plan.

Now I know why I feel good after the elections. I am going to be able to sleep so much better at night knowing these dedicated politicians are thinking of me and my welfare.

Mark Wilson
HENDERSON

X-bit Labs is running this story on a crack for AACS, the copy-prevention method used by HD-DVD and Blu-Ray. A Doom9 post says that "BackupHDDVD is a tool to decrypt a AACS protected movie that you own, so you can play it back later using an HDDVD player software."

The format's not been out a year yet, and it's already busted? IIRC, it took longer to crack CSS. The tricky part is that you have to supply the key to BackupHDDVD from an unspecified source...somewhat of an "and then magic occurs here" solution perhaps, but it's a start.

On the radio, Doug Urbanski is subbing for Jerry Doyle. He's talking about the Charlie Brown Christmas special. On a lark, I decided to google "Charlie Brown Christmas tree," to see what would pop up.

You really can buy anything on the Intartubes these days. Even a Charlie Brown tree. Too bad they're sold out. :-|

(Even that would've been more than what I have set up at home...which is nothing, because I've only been in the new place one week today and I'm heading out of town Sunday.)

Blackfive found this:

Going Postal

It's an email exchange back-and-forth between what turned out to be a congressional aide and what he thought were a couple of "31337 h4x0r d00dz" who'd fix his college records to improve his GPA.

It's obvious the mark has never heard of RFC 1149. :-)

From today's Best of the Web, in the sounding-like-our-enemies department:

"You know, education--if you make the most of it, you study hard, you do your homework, and you make an effort to be smart, uh, you can do well. If you don't, you get stuck in Iraq."--John Kerry, Oct. 30

"Witnesses say Mr Ahmadinejad also tried to ridicule the students by referring to the university disciplinary code, under which those with three penalty points are suspended from studies. 'He joked that he was going to issue a presidential order for those with three stars to be enlisted as sergeants in the army. That made the students really angry,' said Mr Zamanian."--Guardian (London), Dec. 18

Long time, no write...spent last week moving across town. Friday, I managed to load up a 17' U-Haul with most of my stuff, get across town, and unload the thing into the new place in about five-and-a-half hours.

By myself.

I'm still a bit sore from moving boxes and furniture around.

Anyway, you might find this amusing. A truther gets in an unsuspecting bystander's face and doesn't like it much when he gets his dumb ass handed to him.

Edit: I really should check my messages before I post.

Liposuctioned fat could be biodiesel fuel

One person's liposuction is another person's biodiesel fuel, as a Norwegian businessman wants to use suctioned fat to develop an alternative fuel source.

Biodiesel can be produced from either plant oils or animal fat, and Lauri Venoy sees the product from liposuction procedures as a renewable energy source, Aftenposten said.

Venoy's firm in Miami is in negotiations with a hospital to give the company about 3,000 gallons of human fat a week from liposuction operations, which the company says is enough to produce about 2,600 gallons of biodiesel fuel.

In Norway biodiesel is primarily produced from fish oils and used fryer fat.

Occasionally, the blind squirrels that are known as "Slashdot editors" find a nut. For those of you who don't bother with the front page anymore, give this a shot:

Silly String Goes to War Against IEDs

In an age of multimillion-dollar high-tech weapons systems, sometimes it's the simplest ideas that can save lives. Which is why a New Jersey mother is organizing a drive to send cans of Silly String to Iraq. American troops use the stuff to detect trip wires around bombs, as Marcelle Shriver learned from her son, a soldier in Iraq.

Smash has this post up for the events of 65 years ago today. The first reply he received is a pointed commentary on how we dealt with existential threats then, vs. how we deal with them today.

(Reposted so that the trollbait from Captain Splendid (in his own mind) could be sent down the memory hole where it belongs. Welcome to my foes list, assmunch.)

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