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Wired published a nice retrospective on the Slammer worm, and as promised show the code.

I am an optimist and I keep hoping that if everyone was doing like me, spammers would just stop. But they don't. Anyway.. Here's my standard answer to 419 emails:

Not interested, but thank you.

On the other hand, you may be interested to hear that I have quite a subsequent backup to perform on our system (/dev/random seems to be the largest file or all) and I am asking volunteers all over the internet to help me keep a small portion of my backup for me.

You see, if everybody keeps a few megabytes then I can with no problems store my huge files simply by asking you (among others) to take care of a small quantity.

You do not need to do anything, the transfer will commence automatically and very soon. If you are not interested in helping me backup my files, can you then email 'unsubscribe' to uce@ftc.gov.

Kind regards.

I do send /dev/random to these guys, in chuncks of 32K all the way up to 4MB. Some of them make it, some don't. It's like playing tennis :-)

I haven't had an answer to any of these emails, but who knows. Also, sending multiple big files is a good way to sort out which email accounts are active (mail delivered) and which are bogus or abandoned (delivery failure -- mailbox full). I sit on a fat link and have tons of disk space so bouncing multi-MB emails around isn't really a problem here.

Windows ME and XP support FireWire (ieee1394) for networking. Linux too says this page. I never really thought about the usefullness, until this morning.

Out of the 5 in total, my main 2 computers are on separate networks: one for VPN to work (my email), and one directly attached to the ADSL router for my wife's personal email and browsing. The problem is that the PC's cannot see each other since they are in different networks, yet they stand two metres apart and I wanted to share my printer and scanner for the other PC to benefit.

This morning I bought a 4.5m FireWire 6-6 cable for 25 in order to connect the two PC's back-to-back using the firewire ports. The setup was very easy: assign a static IP address each from RFC1918, and the link was useable just after that at 400Mbits/s. The joy of copying files at OC-3 speed at home is great =)

Anyone else has tried this yet ? If not, and if you ever need a quick, cheap, reliable and easy to setup networking solution for a couple of PC's, think about it. These guys have thought about it for quite some time, it seems.

Update 13 May: Someone posted Apple: IP over Firewire Updated.

The Boston Globe is reporting that networking giant Cisco Systems will acquire Linksys later this year for $500M, thus entering the consumers market. Linksys press release is here. The good news is that those who bought a Linksys access point now have a Cisco access point for 1/2 of the price ;)

So, which certification(s) do you have ? Are you damn proud of it ?

• A. Adobe
• B. Cisco
• C. Compaq
• D. IBM
• E. Juniper
• F. Microsoft
• G. Novell
• H. Oracle
• I. Red Hat
• J. SANS Institute
• K. Sun Microsystems
• Other (details ?)
• None (Too good to bother / I don't work in the Tech Industry)

I deliberately left the actual certification titles off because there are way too many to list here, and because the level can vary widely. But feel free to brag if you like 8*)