Posts by Foo Bar

Net shoppers bullied into being Verified by Visa

And some banks enrol without making it available to all their customers

ANZ bank enrolled, except they did it only for their Australian customers, not their New Zealand customers. But Visa doesn't know that, so whenever I (as a kiwi customer) try to make a purchase, I get a 'Verified by..." dialog that I cannot fill out, because as one of their kiwi customers I cannot sign up for it.

It's completely screwed up and annoying. I wrote about this madness here ( http://www.geekzone.co.nz/foobar/5256 ) and here ( http://www.geekzone.co.nz/foobar/5294 )

US customs: Yes, we can seize your laptop, iPod

Re: Going to keep them busy...

Hiding the stuff you want hidden in some system file folder, thinking they can't find it there because the filename is innocent sounding?

You (and everyone else who made that suggestion) seem to think that they will inspect all those files manually, apparently?

Did it occur to you that they could use ... you know ... computers to do that? Scan through ALL files (computers are good at this kind of stuff), look for strings or encrypted content automatically, etc.

Spam DDoS assault cuts off south Pacific state

It's the number of open connections that's problematic

I don't think they would have issues with 500 normal, short connections per second. The article talks about 'constantly locking' their servers to zombies. This looks to me like the zombies opened long-lasting connections at a rate of 500 per second.

With that strategy, you quickly exhaust the available number of slots for TCP connections on a system. Even qmail wouldn't help then, because the TCP connection would be rejected on a much lower level by the TCP stack already.

You need to set an aggressive, small TCP timeout on your server to combat that strategy. Even so: If the rate of new connections is too high, you will still have problems.

Time Warner moots billing based on bandwidth usage

New Zealand ISPs do the same

Same here in New Zealand. Besides a fixed fee of some $49 per month, I also pay $1 per GB, and that is quite cheap actually. There are other plans that have some amount of free transfer volume for you, and for anything above that you pay between $5 to $20 per GB.

Besides paying for excess bandwidth, with many ISPs you may also opt for throttling when the limit is exceeded.

You can get away with a lot if your customers are used to it. Since in the US the customers are used to unrestricted bandwidth, ISPs may loose customers if they want to introduce it. In other parts of the world, however, this is all very normal already.