OK, folks, repeat after me: Don’t run unexpected attachments.

If you get email, and it has an attachment, and either you’re not actually expecting it, or the message body does not clearly explain what the attchment is, then delete it. It’s just that simple.

If it was from someone you know, contact them personally and ask them what it was that they sent you.

The latest worm/virus is yet another testament that people simply *refuse* to learn this simple lesson. But this one makes it stand out even more.

I mean, come on folks. The subject line is “Hi” and the message body is “Testy test”. Doesn’t this suggest to *anyone* that this is not legitimate email? And, yet, there are reports of *millions* of infected machines.

Once again, the Postfix rules:

In header_checks:

^Subject: Hi$ DISCARD Beagle virus/worm

and in mime_header_checks.regexp

/name=”?(.*).(ade|adp|asx|bas|bat|chm|cmd|com|cmp|crt|do|exe|hlp|hta|hta|inf|ins|isp|jse|lnk|mnb|mde|msc|msi|msp|mst|pcd|reg|rm|scr|pif|scr|sct|shs|url|vbe|vbs|vxd|wsc|wsf|wsh|xl)”?$/ REJECT For security reasons we reject attachments of this type

This particular worm is a combination of mail server administrator incompetence (or negligence) and people persistent refusal to use a smidgen of common sense when reading email. This is exactly the sort of worm that should have died before it ever infected the first person.

*Sheesh*

Just when you think that patents can’t get any stupider, you see an article like this.

In summary, the patent claims to own the idea of someone having both MyName@somewhere.com (email address) and MyName.somewhere.com (web site).

I have to shake my head in amazement that someone could *be* that stupid. And I wish, not for the first time, that someone with deep pockets would start a massive class action lawsuit against the US Patent Office for gross negligence, gross misuse of public funding, and general stupidity.

On *several* of my machines, I’m using mod_rewrite to map username.domain.com to a web site for every username on the machine. That user, by definition, of course, has an email address of username@domain.com for that particular domain.

Note that *many* companies have been doing this for the last ten years, not least of which is Demon Internet, in England, one of the largest ISPs on the planet, I think.

Also, note that the recipe for doing this appears in the Apache documentation, in a document called the rewrite guide. See the section called Virtual User Hosts on the page http://httpd.apache.org/docs/misc/rewriteguide.html

Also note that the recipe for doing this appears in Apache Cookbook.

Also note that people have been doing this since the VERY FIRST DAY that there was such a thing as the World Wide Web.

The fact that the patent office can give out patents for stuff that have been part of common practice since day one is absolutely absurd, and possibly criminal. The patent office is way out of hand. We all knew that. But things like this make it so apparent that it’s mind boggling that the US courts are content to sit around and allow frivolous lawsuits like this to be filed on a regular basis.

First, I want to be completely clear that i hate SCO for technical reasons, not for legal, financial, or corporate reasons. The OS, not the company, is a festering heap of dung. And not in a nice way, either.

I have now been attempting to boot a SCO server for 4 hours. I consider myself moderately knowledgeable about Unix-like operating systems. This should not be this hard.

I think that I should be permitted to testify in the SCO trial, if it indeed ever comes to trial. My role would be to laugh mockingly each time SCO suggests that someone would want to copy their code.

Then, during breaks in the trial, I can set up a mud pie stand on the corner, and sue the Mrs Smith’s pie company for stealing my ideas. I could submit evidence such as “Hey, they’re both pies! It should be obvious!” and then I could send bills to everyone making pies at home.

It’s pure genius!