When you set up an internet connection for a customer you do everything you can to protect them, you set up a restrictive firewall, you have a proxy that enforces policy for web surfing as far as possible. You also use all possible means to block spam and viruses in e-mail before they reach the lusers that still believe Bill Gates will give them free Nokia cellphones.

After you did all the technical stuff, you tell everyone (you know it falls on deaf ears, but you have to try) that they must not visit those porn sites, that they must copy links in e-mail and paste them into their browser rather than simply clicking on them etc. So what happens when one of the lusers that actually listened goes to a legitimate website and still have his windows computer exploited? Or if they are lucky the lusers get a warning from their anti-virus software and the site gets blocked.

The sad part is that even very competent IT professionals have extreme difficulty to prevent all exploits on the internet even when they do all the right things. You can read a fascinating account in the Gauteng Linux Users Group mail list archives of such a case where someone’s web site got exploited by quite a nasty man in the middle attack.

In short, a windows server (every one says, we are not surprised) was compromised in a data centre and intercepted traffic from other servers on the same local network. By doing this it managed to redirect innocent visitors of well managed websites to malicious websites that attempted to compromise the visitors’ machines. You can read the gory details at http://www.linux.org.za/Lists-Archives/glug-tech-0905/msg00009.html and more detail at http://www.linux.org.za/Lists-Archives/glug-tech-0905/msg00026.html. Links to the whole thread is at http://www.linux.org.za/Lists-Archives/glug-tech-0905/threads.html

The real scary part is that you cannot do much about something like this because even if you do have a secure local net and the web server you visit has a secure local net, this type of attack can be done anywhere in the path between you and the web server you are visiting.

Be careful out there.

It is of course quite easy to stay relatively anonymous on the internet and services like Pirate Bay are already offering ways to work around these new laws.

There are however people that figured out how to make use of the new technologies to distribute media and still make decent money. Jamendo is one of these companies. All music on Jamendo is free to download and licensed through one of several Creative Commons licenses or the Free Art License, making it legal to copy and share, as well as to modify and make commercial use of for some, depending on the license. Jamendo allows streaming of all of its thousands of albums in either Ogg Vorbis or MP3 format, and downloads through the BitTorrent and eDonkey networks. Jamendo also helps musicians to commercialise their music via their Jamendo Pro services.

On 23 March Jamendo published an ironic statement against the “Three strikes” laws. It is called “Three strikes vs. three thanks”. In a nutshell – they will reward people for downloading music, instead of punishing them showing “…that there are plenty of talented artists who know how to profit from the opportunities offered by the internet and embrace innovative monetization models…” Hopefully many more artists will join them.

BTW if you are in Johannesburg and want to hear a really great band that publish all their music under a creative commons license, NUL are playing at the Bohemian tonight 4/4/2009.

Those of you that use gmail will find sup’s way of  organising your e-mail familiar because sup uses the same ideas to do this. Instead of sorting mail into folders like you do in conventional mail clients you tag e-mails with labels enabling you to quickly find mails. Actually the idea is more to tag mail threads rather than single mails. There is also a powerful search function to search your mail that does not have specific labels. As in mutt you get through reading and sorting your mail really quickly.

I tried out sup and found that it worked very well although it takes a bit of getting used to. It reads mbox,  maildir and IMAP mailboxes.

Sup does have its drawbacks, the major one being that it does not syncronise with your IMAP server which means that if you read a mail using sup it does not get marked as read on the IMAP server and vice versa. In fact if you did read mail on your IMAP server using another mail client you have to re-sync sup’s indexes before you can read your mail with it again.

I also found sup’s mail source configuration a bit painful because it does not read all the folders on an IMAP server automagically, you have to type them in one by one. This is somewhat of a chore if you have lots of folders and want to switch. This is however only a once of task.

Sup also does not download any messages from a mail source which can be a show stopper if you are on a slow connection as I often am.

I think sup has great potential and if you like the way gmail organises mail it is definitely  for you. I am seriously considering switching to sup but the non-syncronisation with IMAP is holding me back because I often have to read my mail that is stored on an IMAP server from someone else’s computer using a web based mail client.

O yes, sup is written in Ruby and therefore should run on any platform that Ruby runs on. I tried it on Mac OS X because OS X Leopard conveniently has Ruby pre-installed.

To my surprise I found lots of info on past events but very little about upcoming events and no Boekehuis website. Why the surprise? Well “Die Boekehuis” is a very successful bookshop specialising in South African and World Literature. In 2006 they got listed by the International Booksellers Federation’s list of 50 unique bookshops in the world. Everyone in Johannesburg that I know, who has a real interest in books knows about them so they are successful.

I visited “Die Boekehuis” last week and asked: “Why don’t you have a web presence?” The answer was simple: “We don’t really have the time to properly maintain it.” They did however offer to put me on the announcement e-mail list for “Saturday Voices”. You can ask nicely for the same by mailing boekehuis@boekehuis.co.za.

This made me think and ask the question: “Does a small, maybe niche business really need a presence on the world wide web to be successful?” Taking “Die Boekehuis” and my own small buisiness as examples, no, not really. I was also simply too busy to maintain anything but a single homepage for my business. My work came via “word of mouth” advertising from mostly happy customers. “Word of mouth” seems to work even better for “Die Boekehuis”.

When I started out as a small consulting business everyone told me, I must get onto the web. Being someone that actually sells and maintains computer systems I believed them. As I said above all this turned out to be wrong. In fact in 8 years I got one serious enquiry via the website, unfortunately the person was in the USA so I couldn’t help him.

No you don’t need the web to sell 4000 year old technology. It seems that you don’t even need the web to sell brand new technology.

Amazon.com probably disagrees.

You may ask “What is a System Administrator?”

The answers you will find at http://www.sysadminday.com/ are as good as any. Being a System Administrator is a somewhat stressful job and turns you into a cynic very quickly (see http://www.sysadminday.com/time.html ) and you start hanging out in places like the scary devil monastery. Your (l)users also stop talking to you mainly out of fear of hearing the truth because the last time they complained about not getting e-mail you answered “Well, maybe nobody likes you anymore”

Why does one stay a System Administrator then if the stress is so much. You will find the answer in the scary devil monastery FAQ

Sysadmins are driven by a desire to _make_it_work_. We loathe non-functioning
pieces of crap. Similarly, we hate seeing equipment working at substantially
below its potential due to moronic admin decisions.

After a while, you quit and go to work for somewhere else, where you’re
promised you won’t have to be a sysadmin.
But the machine on your desk crashes every five minutes…