Microsoft has been making a lot of claims as to how much more secure Windows Vista is than any previous Windows. This is a complete lie.

The thing that amazes me is how many foolish people have jumped mindlessly on this security bandwagon. What frustrates and shocks me is that many of these people should know better!

There was some discussion about ssh attacks on the FreeBSD mailing lists not too long ago. It's a frequent topic, and this time I jumped in and made my opinions known. Someone asked if I could make my configuration public and I agreed to, then promptly got swamped with other things.

It's been a few weeks, and I'm finally making my configuration public. I can't find the original thread in which it was discussed, but I'll make an independent post.

Enjoy.

This server's security

This is the way this server's packet filtering is configured.

Many people would claim that in doing this, I reduce some of the security of the system, but I don't see it that way. I don't believe obscurity adds any significant level of security, thus I feel no need to obscure my setup.

The flip side is that I believe in the concepts of open source. What that means is that I believe that by making this information public, I will get more people helping to make the setup better than who will try to break it, and the result will be even better security than if I kept it secret.

The best laid plans oft go awry.

In case anyone was curious, The Month of SPAM isn't going to happen. Not this April, at least.

Too many other things going on in my life. I've too many other projects, all of which are falling behind.

So I'm going to refocus on these other things. Sorry if anyone was eagerly looking forward to the SPAM articles.

It must have been some time around 1998 when I first started fighting spam.

Back then, nobody cared much about spam. The meaning of the term wasn't even known outside the circles of computer geeks. I even had the ISP of one particular spammer call me names and tell me to find something better to do with my time. After all, the guy sending the spam wasn't hurting anyone, and I could just delete the email.

All servers that appear as part of the potentialtech.com domain are owned and managed by Bill Moran.

OpenOffice is a pretty good product (in spite of the fact that comes with a spreadsheet). But there are some issues with how it's designed.

These can be summed up in one sentence: “OpenOffice is trying to be just like Microsoft Office.”

It may not be immediately obvious why this is a bad thing. Lucky for you, I'm willing to explain it.

SWFT stands for Simple Web File Transfer.

It's design goals follow:

• Simple
• Easy to install without altering web server configuration
• Works on any platform that supports PHP
• Does not require cookies

Like other projects developed during the Potential Technologies days, SWFT was something we did to address a need that we had. Now that Potential Technologies is gone, I have neither the requirement for SWFT, nor the time to maintain it.

You can download it here.

Read the INSTALL and HOWTO files after unpacking it.

phppdflib was written several years ago because we needed something to create PDF files that we didn't have to sublicense.

It was fairly successful, but the need disappeared and I no longer have time to maintain it. It's kind of a shame, as the code was starting to come along nicely. Perhaps I'll have time to update it again some day.

The code can be downloaded here.

The documentation is online here.

I do stuff with Computers.

Have a look at my old page for stuff that hasn't been migrated to CMS yet.

I'm currently working for Collaborative Fusion and I keep a separate page for the work I do there.