Gah! The evil scumbags who operate the .com and .net domains have decided to set up a wild-card DNS record for all non-existant domains. This means that sites like www.dygiehwlkgiuwekrf.com now exist, and take you to a nice little VeriSign plug page instead of a helpful error message telling you that the site does not exist.

Much worse is the effect this will have on email - checking for non-existent domains is a good way of blocking spam, and indeed just verifying email addresses. Also, as VeriSign are running a mail server that rejects all messages, old or incorrect MX records which previously be ignored will now cause all email to a domain to be bounced.

Update 1: Ooh! More fun! Any DNS blacklists (again popular for blocking spam) which no longer exist (eg orbs.dorkslayers.com) will now have sprung back into life listing every address on the internet - meaning more false positives in junk mail blockers.

Update 2: Here's a good article written a couple of hours after this started. There is, of course, much discussion on Slashdot, and an article on The Register (with quotes from my boss, alnitak). VeriSign's posting about it on NANOG can be found here, and there's apparently much backlash to be found there too.

Update 3: One other concern this raises is privacy/security - every mis-typed URL or email address that goes to a non-existant .com or .net domain will now hit VeriSign's servers - and their terms and conditions state that they will keep that information - what email addresses you were trying to send to and from, what websites you were trying to visit (including any form parameters, potentially including usernames and passwords). How nice.

Update 4: This doesn't just happen to un-registered domains - it also applies to domains which are paid for and owned by someone who just happens not to have st up any DNS servers for it. Leading to even further dubious legality.

WAY TO BREAK THE INTERNET!!!!!

Needless to say, large numbers of ISPs and the like will be looking to take their domain registration and SSL certificate business elsewhere.

Of course, what I neglected to mention earlier was the death of Visar, my Linux box under the sink. I got home to find no Internet connection and a strange silence in the kitchen. My initial diagnosis is a dead PSU, but it could be the motherboard, Hopefully I can borrow a spare power supply from work tomorrow to test my theory and get things up and running again. For the time being, the ADSL modem is hooked up to Zorac the Windows XP box, and I even have the internet connection sharing working for the benefit of (no-name) the iBook, but it's far from an ideal long-term solution - plus there's all sorts of stuff on Visar's disks that I want to retrieve.

Anyway, time to stop spamming my friendspage and go to bed. OK, so I ended up not posting until this morning, due to LJ being DDoSed. Meh.

kazzik: Today I saw a girl who had a couple hundred saftey pins attatched to her bag straps..
kazzik: Not pinned on, just around the little thing sting-type straps.
kazzik: Now my question is...
kazzik: why?
kazzik: Has there been a huge saftery pin shortage forecast that I'm blissfully unaware of?
zorac: If there has been, then I've certainly missed the memo. Not that I actually have any use for safety pins these days.
kazzik: My other theory is that she's a member of the st johns ambulance people
kazzik: and needs them in case of an emergency where she has to secure dozens of little slings
zorac: Hmmm. That's certainly a possibility, altough even then it would seem to be a case of being just a little bit overly prepared.
kazzik: Perhaps she is merely lopsided and needs large amounts of metal attatched to the other side of her to keep her balanced?
zorac: Or maybe she has a large magnet at home which she hangs her bag from and the safety bins are there so it has something to attract.
kazzik: I'd like to think someone mistook her for a voodoo doll at some point in her life, except as I said they're not actually IN the bag as such, just neatly stacked on one of the straps.
zorac: Well maybe there's a voodoo doll *in* the bag, and she's just got all those pins on the strap ready to plunge into it.
kazzik: She could be a secret alchemist and determined to change them all to gold.
kazzik: Although what one would do with several dozen solid gold saftey pins escapes me
zorac: Maybe she has the Philosopher's stone right ther in the bag!
kazzik: I suspect she'd leave them attatched to her bag
kazzik: I wouldn't be suprised >:0 the safteypins are clearly a sign of evil
zorac: Indeed! You just have to change a couple of letters and they becom Satanypins!
zorac: (wow. am much with the typos tonight...)
kazzik: Sod spelling. it's eluding me also.
kazzik: I fear these Satanypins
kazzik: and yet at the same time feel there's a market which could be capitalised on
zorac: I feel an icon coming on...
kazzik: Mujah :D

Thursday: Memories of two years earlier.

Friday: Went to work. Came home. Started to learn PHP. Developed obsession (and the beginnings of a webapp).

Saturday: More PHP. Went into town and wandered round the shops. Picked up Billy Joel CDs for £2 in a charity shop - go me! Went to the Order of the Phoenix Picture House to see Spirited Away, which was cool, although subtitled rather than dubbed. Came home. Coded more.

Sunday: Slept late. Coded more PHP. Watched Gigi. Only just remembered in time to go to Sainsbury's. Did some more perl hacking on my new code for RS.

Today: Work again. Took delivery of two hefty tomes containing the Illiad and the Odyssey plus new toys. Managed to cook dinner despite having forgotten to get more olive oil yesterday.

Tomorrow: Tomorrow, I love you, Tomorrow, you're only a day away!

And finally: GIU!

Today was the second day of St. Giles' Fair. I was going to be meeting up with kay_taylor and some other folk, but missed messages conspired against that. For those that don't know, every year St. Giles (the large road on which the Eagle and Child is located) is closed down for a couple of days to become a fairground. There were dozens of attractions ranging from gypsy fortune-tellers to a fair-sized roller-coaster. There were, of course, all the usual games of skill - throwing hoops over things, shooting with pellet guns, arrows or crossbows, basketball, and so on. Not having much in the way of that kind of skill (and also not having any great need for large stuffed toys), I decided to pass on these.

The roller-coaster was a wild mouse type - not the sort I'm too keen on, so my first choice was Big Ben Tower. It's an impressively tall edifice, and you get bounced to the top of the tower, where it held for a fair while (fantastic views of the dreaming spires of Oxford) before dropping back down, again with a few bounces. Next up was Stargate - a nasty piece of work in which you stand on the inside of a drum which both spins and a fair clip and flips over as well - I was beginning to think "can we stop now" towards the end. Finally I went on Chaos - you sit in hanging seats, which are spun around in addition to the whole thing doing a big swing like a pirate ship - top stuff. An this point, my stomach (and other parts of me that had been constricted by the seats and safety restraints) politely suggested that enough was enough and I decided not to tempt fate with a fourth ride.

OK, I have done some friends-list culling as mentioned the other day, some people have been filtered (as per my poll), others (and those who didn't answer) have been defriended. If you fall in the latter group, I'm happy to re-friend you, but you'll go in the filter so I probably won't read your journal all that often. I'm using the 'Default View', so folk I've filtered just won't appear on my default friends page.

That is all.

Cor blimey, it were fair parky this mornin'. It's bad enouigh trying to persuade oneself out of bed at quarter past seven in the morning without one's limbs being frozen off the moment one pokes them out from beneath the duvet.

My copy of wilwheaton's Dancing Barefoot finally arrived. Apparently I was one of the unfortunate people whose orders went astray. Anyway, I'll be pushing that onto my stack of Books To Read.

And finally, in another not to my cunning purchase timing, Apple have just revised the iPod with bigger disks. Ah, well. C'est la vie. etc. I would GIP, but the GI is on my PC at home so I can't P it.

Update: GIP! Oh, and they updated the iMac too. Must resist...

I was idly playing with numbers in my head the other day, something to occupy my mind while I trudged back from Sainsbury's with a load of shopping. In particular, I was looking at number sequences (you know, what number comes next - 1, 3, 5, 7, ? or 1, 4, 9, 16, ?) and came up with the following (related, but calculated in opposite ways):

1 ... 4 ... 19,683 ... ?
1 ... 4 ... 7,625,597,484,987 ... ?

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A long time ago in an office far, far away . . . . P O S T E R W A R S It is a time of change in the technical department. The YODA POSTER which was thought lost many years ago when we were denied it by some other EVIL DEPARTMENT has be found. We have rescued it from down the back of a partition and restored it to a PLACE OF GLORY on our wall. The great Jedi Master in his neatly-framed A0 glory now casts his BENEVOLANT GAZE over our office.