I was glancing through the BGP Instability Report which is a measure of the number of updates from various ASes over the past month. For a stable network, the number of updates must be relatively low.

I don’t understand why five of the top twenty most active ASes must be Indian ISPs. For a country with 3.6% of the World’s internet users and 0.5174% of the World’s IP addresses, it does seem more than a bit unusual.

It does point to very incompetent ISPs.

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More genius:

[14:45:27 jaidev@~]$ host -t mx yahoogroups.com
yahoogroups.com mail is handled by 10 mta2.grp.vip.scd.yahoo.com.
yahoogroups.com mail is handled by 20 mta1.grp.vip.re1.yahoo.com.
yahoogroups.com mail is handled by 30 mta12.grp.scd.yahoo.com.
yahoogroups.com mail is handled by 30 mta13.grp.scd.yahoo.com.
yahoogroups.com mail is handled by 30 mta14.grp.scd.yahoo.com.
[14:45:31 jaidev@~]$ telnet mta2.grp.vip.scd.yahoo.com 25
Trying 66.218.67.194…
Connected to mta2.grp.vip.scd.yahoo.com.
Escape character is ‘^]’.
220 yahoogroups.com ESMTP
helo <censored>
250 yahoogroups.com
mail from: <censored>
250 ok
rcpt to: <censored>@yahoogroups.com
250 ok
data
354 go ahead
Subject: Photos
.
554 we cannot accept this message because it appears to contain virus (#5.7.1)
quit
221 yahoogroups.com
Connection closed by foreign host.


Yahoogroups just refuses to accept emails with a subject line containing just Photos. Wow, my spamassassin setup is better than that.

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Dear Lazyweb,

Someone brought this to my attention recently. I don’t care much for attribution, but he’s stripped the original copyright message and even attached his own terms. I’m officially peeved.

Update: And now, another!

How would you deal with a GPL violation?

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Okay, the Nokia N75 has a serious bug. When you change the default security code from 12345 to something else, it allows you to choose a security code with more than 5 digits. But when you’re required to enter the code, it accepts only 5. This bug and the time gap between when I changed the code to when I wanted to use it meant that I forgot what my code was.

I didn’t want to flash the phone, so I figured out a simpler way of recovering the code off the phone. This may or may not work with other phones and may or may not hose it. Here goes (windoze based) -

• Install Nemesis Service Suite (NSS).
• Connect the phone through a USB cable, choose pc-suite mode on the phone.
• In NSS, go to the Phone Info section and the Permanent Memory tab.
• Read the permanent memory into a file.
• Open this file in a text-editor, it is organised in numbered sections. Locate section [308] and the line starting with 5= within this section.
• The 5 ASCII values (in hexadecimal) following 5= should be the security code. For instance, if the code was 12345, the line would be 5=3132333435 …

For older Nokia phones, just use this master security code generator.

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In a landmark ruling in Europe, a privacy regulator has ruled that IP addresses constitute private data. This is very interesting and long overdue. These days before every Google search I fear the cookie that Google has on my computer. I’ve disabled Google Web History, but I know they’re still gathering data! I could set firefox to delete the cookie after every session as I do with most other cookies, but (a) I like to stay signed in to reader, gmail, etc. and (b) Google can still mine a lot of data from my searches while I’m signed in. (Aside: Perhaps I need to start using different browsers for searches)!.

Coming back to privacy, I talk of Google but its true of anyone. Even if someone doesn’t use private data right now, there’ll always be an evil project manager who’ll wonder why they never thought of using it - its an obvious gold mine. The amount of data someone can collect about you with just a cookie (and an IP Address) is freaky! Just look at the cookies stored by your browser (beyond the necessary authentication cookies) to know how many companies love to collect data!

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