dakospace

Zoom from the edge of the universe to the quantum foam of space-time and learn the scale of things along the way! Learn the size of the Pillars of Creation and marvel at the minuscule scale of a neutrino!

http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/525347

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Well, I bet you know what a SPAM e-mail message is, so I am not going to explain it to you. Rather I will show you now to fight SPAM. One of the most powerful tools against SPAM to chose from is the Greylisting. And it happens that the last day there was a SPAM storm attack against a server running this tool, which is a perfect example how it works in real action. Take a look at the following picture:

I will explain it step by step:

1. Greylisting will “temporarily reject” any email from a sender it does not recognize (putting it in Pending queue – represented by the blue line).
2. If the mail is legitimate the originating server will, after a delay, try again and, if sufficient time has elapsed, the email will be accepted (moving from Pending to Verified queue – represented by the green fill).
3. If the mail is from a spam sender, sending to many thousands of email addresses, it will probably not be retried (timed-out entries are deleted from Pending queue).

In the above example, which is using real data statistics, almost 1000 servers have tried to comunicate to that particular server in timeframe of just 4 hours, each of them probably trying to send 100-s of SPAM messages, or more. Imagine what amount of SPAM was filtered out by just using simple Greylisting implementation. Good job, right?

Edit: The issue was resolved in 24 hours, as it’s visibe from the following picture:

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A friend asked me why in one of my programs I am counting transferred bytes in KiB and MiB-s; why I am not using easy-for-read Kb, MB, GB prefixes we all are familiar with? And the answer is… because it is just NOT right! More detailed explanation after the jump:

http://lpar.ath0.com/2008/07/15/si-unit-prefixes-a-plea-for-sanity/

“Everyone knows that 1MB is 1024KB, unless you’re talking about DVDs, or reading manufacturer specs for a hard drive, and that’s just the hard drive manufacturers being stupid. Everyone knows that ‘K’ on a computer means 1024; except for speeds, where it means 1000, except for file download speeds where it means 1024, except when it’s the speed of your modem, when it’s 1000. Everyone knows that. What, are you stupid?”

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Well, you will have to see it by yourself (aha, deja vu) to believe it. Yubiii Preview has been posted at 5Group. Already looking for it?!… (:

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Since I just received my Yubikey from Yubico I was eager using it, so I decided to start with my WP blog. It turned out to be an easy 2-step process once I’ve installed YubiKey WordPress plug-in:

1. Enabled the plug-in and entered the yubico API key info from here;
2. Entered my Yubikey OTP in my user’s account settings, and that’s it!

The latest Yubikeys firmware supports 2 configurations – one is preloaded from Yubico. Both can be re-programmed to have two independent and separate configurations, including any two of the three alternatives:

• Standard YubiKey 44 character pass code;
• Up to 64 character static pass code;
• OATH-HOTP 6 or 8 digit code identity.

The result: From now on, I will need to provide my username/password and Yubikey OTP in order to login to my blog. Yubiiiiiiii!…

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Hacker “sp33k” for leet, or elite. Originating from 31337 “eleet”, the UDP port used by Dead Cow Cult, a hacker group, to access Windows 95 using Back Orifice, a notorious hacking program.

Okay, so what /is/ 1337 in the first place? 1337 means Elite. The point of 1337 is to replace all the letters with symbols, and is quite fun to play with. 1337 was first created by some people would wanted to talk in a forum without any outsiders barging in. Some outsiders may have figured out the language and started using it as well. Eventually, 1337 became famous all over the internet. The original use of 1337 is hardly practiced any more, but it survives because many of peope use it for fun.

It takes a long time to translate between regular English and 1337 even if you know all 26 1337 secrets, unless you’re very skilled at it.

Here are the 26 1337 secrets.

S0m3 p30ple 4r3 700 l4zy 70 wri73 7hin65 in fu11 1337, r3su17ing in a 53n73nc3 1ik3 7hi5.

Quotes source: http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=1337

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Hi there! Again, Overclocking day post. Its has been a while since my last OC day, but I have great news for you:

First, ASUS had released new BIOS versions (for various boards) with improved OC features which refine AMD Core unlocking! Yes, indeed, my AMD Phenom X2 550 processor was recognized as X4 with 4 cores working and unlocked. Pity, Windows always stopped with BSOD no matter what I did. But ASUS did their job well, and in BIOS settings under Unleashed more, you can specify which cores to be unlocked. In my case the faulty core was #3 (starting from zero). So, I was able to boot and load in Windows successfully with 3 working cores: #0, #1 and #2.

Second, I needed a better OC tool to stress the 3 cores. It happened that Orthos is running on 2 cores only, and Prime95 I don’t like since it downloads some data chunks to process, then uploads results. So, a new OC tool was born, and it’s named FFT-z! You can see it in action on the screenshots bellow, next to CPU-z, HWMonitor, FurMark, K10stat and TaskManager applications. FFT-z is not released yet officially, but you can grab a public preview release from here. Expect some new cool features added to it In the next releases.

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Are you already using Windows 7? Well, create a new folder name it “GodMode.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C}” (without quotes) and hit Enter. Hahaaa Icon changed you see. So open it, to see what’s inside (:

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Imagine your company has hundreds if not thousands of computers. Imagine they are running for at least of a year. How many applications, updates, SP-s were installed meanwhile? How many unused files are left after that? How many temporary files were placed anywhere on those computers? Are your users complaining their computers are getting slow, or that their system drive is full? You want to cleanup! But how?

First of all you download Cleanup Temporary Files (shortly “Cle”) tool. The you setup Logon script for your Active Directory’s users (or OU-s, if you prefer) as this:

REM -- Startup script "user.bat"
REM -- Cleanups the PC temporary and unused files from
REM -- various (hidden) places.
\\SRV-DFS\Files\Audit\cleanup\Cle.exe /custom 32839 /p

then on each user Logon this will happen in the top left corner of the Desktop:

Of course all this could be managed from Cle Configuration application, which brings lots of settings and allows you to cleanup custom specified folders. You can tune up the GUI as well, even you can disable the visuals at all, so Cle would work quietly in the background. Corporate admins could deploy a company-wide Cleanup Policy easily using command-line switches as shows above, and force it to computers using “/s” option.

Noted the magic number parameter after the “/custom”? Well it could be easily obtained from Windows Registry (using regedit.exe) once you have run Cle Configuration. It should be specified as a decimal and not hexadecimal number. Here is its location in the Registry:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\5GROUP\Cle]
"Selection"=dword:00008047 (32839)

and here is a screenshot of Cle’s Configuration dialog:

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Just loved the HP Compaq LA2405wg 24-inch Widescreen LCD Monitor. Its specs are quite good with 1920×1200 resolution and DVI-D with HDCP support. It also has new DisplayPort interface (just in case I got a Mac notebook). I am looking for a new monitor recently and think this is a good replacement for my current HP 2045w one wich is just 1680×1050 resolution and lacks the HDCP support. With price at 240€ it is a good choice for everyone, I think.

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