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Comment Re:i moved to host chopper, never looked back (Score 5, Informative) 375

by KazW (#38480028) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Best Inexpensive VPS Provider?

after trying FDC, Slicehost, Swvps, & Linode, i finally found a hosting solution that had everything I needed for a good price.

http://hostchopper.com/

A publicly posted support ticket they show one their site:

HOLY SHIT... COULD YOUR ENGLISH BE ANY MORE BROKEN? IT REMINDS ME OF A VENTRILOQUIST'S DUMMY AFTER FALLING DOWN ABOUT 12 FLIGHTS OF STAIRS AND THEN BEING CRUSHED IN THE ASS-END OF A GARBAGE TRUCK! YOU COULD USE A PASSROD WHERE THE SUN DON'T SHINE! I'LL HAVE TANGO CONTACT YOU, HE'S INTO SODOMY AND OTHER KINKY SHIT. -NOVEMBER CHIEF EXECUTIVE WIZARD SERIOUS MASTURBATOR HOSTCHOPPER.COM

"Server: wizardfucker.hostchopper.com"

Charlie Sheen started a hosting company?

This hosting company is a good joke, I have mod points but couldn't mod you 'funny' since I wanted to post this, too bad.

P.S. All kidding aside, anyone willing to pay this "company" for services of any type would be brain dead.

Comment Re:Why? (Score 1) 68

by KazW (#38429634) Attached to: MIT Software Allows Queries On Encrypted Databases

comparison operations ( select * where salary > 60000) the encryption used maintains order. The encrypted value of 59,999 is less than the encrypted value of 60,000,

I've never understood this bit. If, without the encryption key, I can compare two pieces of data to see which plaintext is less than then other, that seems like a huge hole. For normalized data in the DB, if some of the plaintext is known or guessable, I can probably guess all the values (since normalized values are generally represented by small integers). Heck, if I have "less than", can't I find the plaintext result of subtracting one plaintext value from another, without the key? That's effectively the same as decrypting English text.

Incorrect. The GP was speaking about an integer comparison, not a string comparison. Integer sorting is useful for sorting data records, sorting data by the calculated result of text data wouldn't be so useful.
Encryption

Submission + - OpenDNS Tool Secures DNS Traffic (net-security.org)

Submitted by Orome1
Orome1 writes: OpenDNS unveiled a preview of DNSCrypt, a new technology that improves both the security and privacy of Internet users, particularly those on unsecured wireless hotspots and residential ISP networks. The technology is being open-sourced. DNSCrypt is significant because it encrypts all DNS traffic between Internet users and OpenDNS. This technological advancement thwarts efforts by attackers, or even ISPs, from spying on DNS activity, or worse, maliciously redirecting DNS traffic. In the same way the SSL turns HTTP Web traffic into HTTPS encrypted Web traffic, DNSCrypt turns regular DNS traffic into encrypted DNS traffic that is secure from eavesdropping and man-in-the-middle attacks. It doesn't require any changes to domain names or how they work, it simply provides a method for securely encrypting communication between Internet users and OpenDNS servers in the OpenDNS data centers.
Piracy

Submission + - Major Australian ISPs Propose Piracy Education Not (commsalliance.com.au)

Submitted by xav_jones
xav_jones writes: The ABC is reporting that "Australia's five major ISPs have revealed their plans to crack down on online piracy by sending warning notices to suspected illegal downloaders while assisting rights holders to pursue serial offenders through the courts." The idea is that "[d]uring an 18-month trial, rights holders would send copyright infringement notices, including evidence of copyright infringement and the IP address involved, to ISPs who would then send "educational notices" to the internet users concerned." Further action would entail that "[u]sers who are suspected of further copyright breaches would then receive up to three warning notices before rights holders are able to pursue court action."

This seems a gentler approach than other countries. Will it prove more effective and/or cost efficient?
Networking

Submission + - Ask Slashdot: Mass network backup/wipe 4

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: I am required to backup and wipe several hunderd computers. Currently this involves booting it up, running a backup script, turning it off booting off a pendrive and running some software that writes 0s to the drive several times. I was wondering if there was a faster solution. Like a server on an isolated network with a switch where I could just connect the computers up, turn them on and get the server to backup the data and wipe the drives.
Math

Submission + - Pancake flipping is hard - NP hard (i-programmer.info)

Submitted by mikejuk
mikejuk writes: French computer scientists have finally proved that sorting pancakes is hard — NP hard.No really — this isn't a joke. Well, it is slightly amusing but that's just because it is being presented as pancake flipping. The algorithm in question is sorting a permutation using prefix reversal — which is much easier to understand in terms of pancakes. Basically you have to sort a pancake stack by simply inserting your spatula and flipping the top part of the stack. We now know that if you can do the this in polynomial time then you have proved that P=NP.
Pancakes have never seemed so interesting....
Government

Submission + - 2011 Digital Cities Survey Winners Announced (govtech.com)

Submitted by folsomfella
folsomfella writes: The 11th annual survey spotlights the municipalities that best show how information and communication technology are used to enhance public service.

The top 10 cities are selected in four different population categories and judged on the criteria of enterprise applicability or impact across multiple program areas, measurable progress from the prior year, hard dollar savings or soft dollar benefits as a result of technology use, innovation and a demonstration of effective collaboration.
Hardware

Submission + - Qubits found in cheap, mass-produced semiconductor (extremetech.com)

Submitted by
MrSeb
MrSeb writes: "Physicists at UC Santa Barbara have discovered a quality of silicon carbide — a material commonly used in the manufacture of semiconductors — that can be used to perform quantum computing. Silicon carbide is a compound that has some 250 crystalline forms, but its 4H polytype has an imperfection that traps electrons. The spin of these electrons can then be manipulated and measured (addressed) with optical wavelengths. In short, silicon carbide is an array of solid-state, addressable qubits. The reason this is big news is because silicon carbide traps electrons at room temperature, and (so far) the only other material to exhibit this property is diamond. Unlike diamond, silicon carbide crystals can be grown at an industrial scale and relatively cheaply. Furthermore, the qubits in silicon carbide can be addressed using optical wavelengths already used in telecommunications."
Verizon

Submission + - Verizon Moving to Offer Premium QoS on Mobile (pcmag.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: PC Mag attended an open-house event at Verizon's Application Innovation Center in San Francisco, where executives said Tuesday that "Verizon will publish an API that could allow consumers to "turbocharge" the network bandwidth their smartphone apps use for a small fee."

Verizon anticipates that a customer running an app on a smartphone will have the option to dynamically snatch more bandwidth for that app, if network congestion slows it down, said Hugh Fletcher, associate director for technology in Verizon's Product Development and Technology team. The app, however, must be running what Verizon referred to as the network optimization API it is currently developing, and hopes to publish by the third quarter of 2012.

This comes after Verizon's earlier claims that "Verizon is fully committed to an open Internet."

Comment iRedMail+SOGo+Funambol (Score 1) 554

by KazW (#37015800) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Self-Hosted Gmail Alternatives?
I use iRedMail+SOGo+Funambol... iRedMail is a CentOS based email server that supports domain keys, multiple domains, spam assassin, sieve filtering, mailbox quotas, email aliases, mailing lists and an LDAP/MySQL hybrid backend (and many more features). SOGo is a very nice groupware suite with a calendar and can be hooked up to Thunderbird with Lightening for a desktop UI, SOGo can also pull from POP/IMAP accounts on other servers. You can also link SOGo to iRedMail's sieve server to make email filtering rules from the web UI, SOGo also supports multiple identities for one user and multiple domains. Funambol connects to SOGo and syncs everything to your iOS/Android/Windows Mobile devices, including email, contacts and calendar (you can also save photos and other media/stuff to Funambol, but I haven't used it). All of these services are easy to wrap up in SSL when using Apache as a proxy (SOGo and Funambol are their own HTTP servers, but are limiting if you want to run everything on one domain with SSL). This setup also works great on a VPS.

My only complaint is that iRedMail's use of LDAP isn't great and it can be a pain to configure other services like Samba, NFS/NIS and OpenVPN to use it's LDAP, but it's doable. iRedMail also has a nice web UI for basic operations like adding a domain and users, and there is a more advance admin UI available ($200/year), but if you can use phpLDAPadmin and Google, you don't need it.

As for security concerns, iRedMail is already setup to be secure as far as not being an open relay. As for securing the web UI, modify your Apache config and only let certain services use https (public), and set the admin stuff to use http (or https if you have 2 NICs) via only the local network.

The last step would be to get a cheap little VPS somewhere and set it up to be a backup MX.
Idle

Submission + - Keys Can Be Copied From Pictures Taken 200ft Away (singularityhub.com) 1

Submitted by
kkleiner
kkleiner writes: "A group of computer scientists at UC San Diego have developed software, called Sneakey, that can copy keys using digital images taken from large distances, and from almost any angle. In one demonstration they duplicated a key using an image captured on a cell phone camera. In another demonstration, with the help of a telephoto lens they were able to duplicate keys sitting on a café table almost 200 feet away. Incredibly, all of the copies worked when tested out on the relevant locks."
Wireless Networking

Submission + - What's killing your Wi-Fi? (pcpro.co.uk)

Submitted by
Barence
Barence writes: "PC Pro has taken an in-depth look at Wi-Fi and the factors that can cause connections to crumble. It dispels some common myths about Wi-Fi problems — such as that neighbouring Wi-Fi hotspots are the most common cause of problems, instead of other RF interference from devices such as analogue video senders, microwave ovens and even fish tanks. The feature also highlights free and paid-for tools that can diagnose Wi-Fi issues, such as inSSIDer and Heatmapper, the latter of which maps provides a heatmap of Wi-Fi hotspots in your home or office."

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