fake DSNs

Dear lazyweb, this morning I got bitten by fake Delivery Status Notifications. You’ve probably seen this a thousand times:

• Spammer sends mail to non-existant user in existant domain.
• Idiotic mail service accepts mail, even though:
  • My domain’s SPF record is telling them not to.
  • Destination address doesn’t even exist.
• Another component of idiotic mail service (hurray for qmail modularity!) realizes this address is invalid, and generates a DSN for the mail sender, even though they don’t really know who that is.
• I receive a gazillon of bounces informing me that some mail I didn’t send couldn’t be delivered.

Do you know of any blacklist containing all hosts and/or domains that do this?

Alternatively, I think a blacklist containing all qmail domains would probably cover most of it.

GRUB 1.97 released

GNU GRUB 1.97 has just been released.

This release of GRUB is a significant breakthrough compared to GRUB 1.96. Among a long list of improvements, GRUB 1.97 includes support for booting the kernels of FreeBSD, OpenBSD
and NetBSD, it detects the Ext4 filesystem which is commonly used with the kernel Linux, and it implements a robust mechanism for booting from GPT drives, by embedding itself in the BIOS Boot partition.

GRUB on Lemote Yeeloong

I read that Vladimir Serbinenko’s effort to bring GRUB to the Lemote Yeeloong laptop has reached a milestone: It is now able to initialize and draw text in the display:

This is quite significant for GNU GRUB as it’s the first time it’s ported to a mipsel platform. In addition, it is planned to support the Yeeloong both as a “disk bootloader” (i.e. the way it is normally used on x86/PC) and as a “firmware bootloader”, thereby offering a more flexible alternative to PMON2000 (the preinstalled firmware).

The Lemote Yeeloong is a legacy-free, mipsel-based laptop that runs using entirely free software, including the firmware and its initialization routines.

Experimental branch of GRUB

We’ve recently made available an experimental branch of GRUB, using GNU Bazaar.

Although it is currently identical to SVN trunk (the codebase that will lead to GRUB 1.97), we plan to use it as staging area for different kinds of experimental work, which would benefit from user testing so that it becomes more mature before it is merged into our main tree.

My appreciation goes to Vladimir who kindly volunteered to be the person in charge of this branch, and I’m confident he will do a great job.

The Pirate Bay and Youtube

Like many other people, it used to bother me that The Pirate Bay was being sued for distributing hashes of copyright-restricted material whereas Youtube could distribute the material itself without fear of punishment.

Like many other people, it used to bother me that there was no way to download music from The Pirate Bay (which in the Spanish kingdom is a legal activity) directly into a music player without the hassle of manually browsing the website, launching a bittorrent client, etc.

Then I found rhythmbox-youtube.

Torvalds on EFI

Insightful quote of the day:

Not that I’d ever claim that the BIOS is wonderful either, but at least everybody knows that the BIOS is just a bootloader, and doesn’t try to make it anything else.
– Linus Torvalds (in reference to EFI)

I couldn’t agree more. Notice that GRUB is a bootloader too, and argueably a better one than BIOS. If we’re looking for a replacement to old legacy BIOS, why not use something modern and flexible instead?

EFI is just the repetition of the same design mistakes, which the industry already rejected, using a less obsolete instruction set. Today’s legacy i8086 realmode is tomorrow’s legacy ia32/amd64. Are we going to fall for it?

GRUB 1.97 beta1

GNU GRUB 1.97 beta1 is out. Give it a shot!

the economics of smoke

I heard a reputable economist speak on TV. He came to say US economic recovery is fundamentally based on “innovation”. He sounded pretty convinced that this is going to restore it in a few years.

Usually, when I hear this word, it’s associated with crap patents. Makes me wonder: do these poor bastards know they’re investing on smoke? Maybe someone should tell the stock market there’s this huge bubble and it’s going to burst. I hear the smart ones follow value, and there’s none here. OTOH the dumb ones just follow the herd…

conspiracy unveiled

Finally, proof that there’s a secret pact between Microsoft, Sun, IBM, Intel and Yahoo. This was in my mailbox today morning:

You are receiving this e-mail because you subscribed to Intel Featured Offers Sun Microsystems respects your privacy. If you do not wish to receive this IBM Featured Offers e-mail, please click the “Unsubscribe” link below. This will not unsubscribe you from e-mail communications from third-party advertisers that may appear in MSN Feature Offers. This shall not constitute an offer by MSN. Yahoo shall not be responsible or liable for the advertisers’ content nor any of the goods or service advertised.

New maintainers for GNU GRUB

Just a quick note to mention that Pavel Roskin and I have been appointed maintainers for GNU GRUB. We will share the burden of GRUB maintenance with Marco Gerards and Yoshinori Okuji-san, who in recent times have had very little time to dedicate to GRUB matters.

Feel free to send us your condolences :-)