Tao of Mac

Jun 18th 2003 · 1 min read

Gaming Odds and Ends

Amazing. Action Quake 2 lives on, years after dropped into the scene and rendered all my hardware obsolete. I was more of a Lithium player myself, but I'm amazed at this mod's longevity (not to mention Quake 2's).

Meanwhile, Urban Terror keeps getting more and more like Counter-Strike. Bomb/Defuse. OGC proxy bots. I wonder how much longer I'll keep playing it.

802.11n Surfaces

Hot on the heels of the ratification, rumor-mongers have hit upon 802.11n as the new (as yet totally uncharted) standard that will push WLANs beyond 54Mbps (100Mbps and 320Mbps are being hailed as "likely" speeds). Oh boy, as if we didn't have enough confusion...

Replayable Virtual Machines

The ReVirt project is something like a replayable VMware - a neat idea for setting up honeypots (my first take on it), with several other uses in debugging, code profiling, etc. The Matrix is nearer every day, I think...

Com-Teck Spam

After nearly one year of using my .Mac account (the only e-mail account I never had to filter through Spam Assassin), I've received my first spam message, from none other than Com-Teck - a company I've never dealt with (and never will, since I'm not even in the same continent), never gave my e-mail address to, and never gave consent for sending me e-mail.

Whoever sent the spam mail (and who paid for getting it sent out) was notoriously clueless, since:

  • It included scores of [email protected] addresses
  • It included lots of obviously non-US e-mail addresses (.co.uk, .be, etc.)
  • .Mac users are not likely to want to buy cheapass PCs
  • They used a BellSouth connection:
Received: from adsl-34-92-60.mia.bellsouth.net (HELO nexsys) (67.34.92.60)
  by 12.105.171.187 with SMTP; Sat, 14 Jun 2003 04:32:51 +0000

Heck, I didn't even break a sweat finding this out. But I reported it, of course (first spam is always something special, I'm a stickler for due process and I do security/abuse tracking work myself at work), but my sincere hope is that Microsoft sues them too. There is no excuse - these people must be punished.