Roachys Weblog

To qualify for a Darwin Award, you need to do something achieving suicidal levels of stupidity, thus rendering an abrubt end to your gene pool…..

It would appear that David Kernell has just achieved that with his “hack” of Sarah Palin’s private Yahoo mail account.

The following article is well worth a read, as it shows that when carrying out a stupid stunt, that level of stupidity is made infinitely less (or more) impressive by broadcasting your act of stupidity and creating a paper trail back to you leaving incriminating evidence of your stupid act…

http://www.tgdaily.com/html_tmp/content-view-39405-108.html

To throw into the mix the potential death of the career of said offenders father makes this possibly the MOST ridiculous act of self-sabotage I have heard of this year…

http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/09/fbi-raid-apartm.html

Following my scathing comments about Ubuntu and the Debian OpenSSL flaw and my subsequent migration to Fedora…(http://technicalmumblings.wordpress.com/2008/05/23/goodbye-ubuntu/), I was a little concerned when I read the following:

https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-announce-list/2008-August/msg00012.html

This kind of begs the question, which is the lesser of the 2 evils here?  A security breach can occur on any platform and across many platforms…..mistakes do happen.  The real trick is how these breaches and vulnerabilities are actually dealt with.  To Debian’s credit, it dealt with protecting the users as a first priority, whereas in this case Fedora/Red Hat’s first priority appears to have been covering it’s own arse, with the users put at risk being the second priority.  Maybe this is the difference between the 2 vendors outlook and corporate responsibilities….

There’s an interesting discussion on Slashdot here:

http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/09/10/029231

By default, Microsoft exchange uses the username when creating email addresses for users using Recipient Policy.

eg.

username@domainname.com

However, in many cases the standardised email address format is slightly different – for example:

firstname.lastname@domainname.com

This is actually really easy to edit in the Exchange System Manager using a few variables:

%g  = Given Name (First name).
%3g = means first 3 letters of Given Name
%s  = Surname (Last name).
%3s = means first 3 letters of sn.
%d  = displayname.
%m  = Exchange alias.

Once this has been edited, just right click on the Policy and click Update this Policy now.