I remember many years ago watching a Dr. Who episode where a very important key was “hidden” in a display of many other keys. Kind of like hiding a tree in a forest. This concept is “security by obscurity”. Generally this is considered a bad approach to security. It is a bad approach if this is the ONLY thing you consider. Many examples are security by obscurity are usually thought of as… proprietary applications that keep source code secret so no one can find what flaws exist, using operating systems or programs that are “obscure” or have small market share and are not targetted.
Tag: LOTS
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Sendmail mail queue backed up
Sendmail is not my favorite MTA. I really prefer Postfix, but… I have to use sendmail in a few situations. I’ve run a little script on the web server for a good while to monitor the mail queue. I was running into a problem where I had LOTS of messages backed up. I suspected I had been hit originally by a spam onslaught which had flooded the server and it had been throttled (VPS) to prevent causing problems for the other users and things got backed up.
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The check’s in the mail
Of course, there was a time when delivery of many things relied heavily on the US Postal Service and the blame of a delay could be passed along. I saw an article lately about people using technology to do tricks like that, turning back the clock on their computer before answering emails, getting sounds for their cells phones that sound like passing traffic, or a subway, etc. This strikes me as pretty silly. But there are some legitimate reasons, especially when posting to a web page when you might want to go ahead and type something and have it show up at another time, or as having come out earlier. (more…)