Despite Saleh’s assurances, al-Zarqawi’s group posted a new Web message Friday warning Iraqis that they could get hit by shelling or other attacks if they approach polling stations, which it called “the centers of atheism and of vice.”

“We have warned you, so don’t blame us. You have only yourselves to blame,” it said.

Sunni Arab extremists have vowed to disrupt Sunday’s national elections, in which Iraqis will choose a 275-member National Assembly and provincial councils in the country’s 18 provinces. Iraqis in the Kurdish-ruled north will chose a new regional parliament.

So what they are saying is that “We don’t want you to have a choice and you could die if you decide to have a say in what happens.” WTF? I’m incapable of understanding how that can possibly work, even if it does. If a gang in my town came out and said that, I’d be right down there at the polling place voting for the guy who was going to rip their heads off and shit down their neck.

Here is the full article from Yahoo.

I was looking over the logs of our colo’ed server and found that several random folks were trying to do bad things to the forum I recently setup. I took a few packets that Snort had grabbed for me and looked them over in Ethereal and verified they we up to no good, so I needed a fix.

I have always been a proponent of active firewalls, it’s just the “Right Thing(tm)” to do. You can’t possibly have a set of static rules that stops everything bad from happening, but if you find that they are…drop their ass. I have some code that I found a few years ago that parses logs and finds strings set by iptables and puts in a DROP rule via iptables, but I wanted to go with something that was a few layers higher and I had the info I wanted from Snort.

I looked at the options and picked a IDS reactor and after a bit of mucking around I got it working and it’s doing it’s thing as we speak. It’ll take me a few days of tuning to make sure I’m not turning off the wrong folks, but I’m pretty pleased with it so far.

The moral of the story is: Review your logs often and make sure you have a decent IDS and probably something that can act on the findings of the IDS automatically, if you don’t, bad things will happen.

By Matthias Dopfner
FrontPageMagazine.com | January 7, 2005

A few days ago Henryk M. Broder wrote in Welt am Sonntag, “Europe — your family name is appeasement.” It’s a phrase you can’t get out of your head because it’s so terribly true.

Appeasement cost millions of Jews and non-Jews their lives as England and France, allies at the time, negotiated and hesitated too long before they noticed that Hitler had to be fought, not bound to agreements. Appeasement stabilized communism in the Soviet Union and East Germany in that part of Europe where inhuman, suppressive governments were glorified as the ideologically correct alternative to all other possibilities. Appeasement crippled Europe when genocide ran rampant in Kosovo and we Europeans debated and debated until the Americans came in and did our work for us.

Rather than protecting democracy in the Middle East, European appeasement, camouflaged behind the fuzzy word “equidistance,” now countenances suicide bombings in Israel by fundamentalist Palestinians. Appeasement generates a mentality that allows Europe to ignore 300,000 victims of Saddam’s torture and murder machinery and, motivated by the self-righteousness of the peace-movement, to issue bad grades to George Bush. A particularly grotesque form of appeasement is reacting to the escalating violence by Islamic fundamentalists in Holland and elsewhere by suggesting that we should really have a Muslim holiday in Germany.

What else has to happen before the European public and its political leadership get it? There is a sort of crusade underway, an especially perfidious crusade consisting of systematic attacks by fanatic Muslims, focused on civilians and directed against our free, open Western societies. It is a conflict that will most likely last longer than the great military conflicts of the last century — a conflict conducted by an enemy that cannot be tamed by tolerance and accommodation but only spurred on by such gestures, which will be mistaken for signs of weakness.

Two recent American presidents had the courage needed for anti-appeasement: Reagan and Bush. Reagan ended the Cold War and Bush, supported only by the social democrat Blair acting on moral conviction, recognized the danger in the Islamic fight against democracy. His place in history will have to be evaluated after a number of years have passed.

In the meantime, Europe sits back with charismatic self-confidence in the multicultural corner instead of defending liberal society’s values and being an attractive center of power on the same playing field as the true great powers, America and China. On the contrary-we Europeans present ourselves, in contrast to the intolerant, as world champions in tolerance, which even (Germany’s Interior Minister) Otto Schily justifiably criticizes. Why? Because we’re so moral? I fear it’s more because we’re so materialistic.

For his policies, Bush risks the fall of the dollar, huge amounts of additional national debt and a massive and persistent burden on the American economy-because everything is at stake.

While the alleged capitalistic robber barons in American know their priorities, we timidly defend our social welfare systems. Stay out of it! It could get expensive. We’d rather discuss the 35-hour workweek or our dental health plan coverage. Or listen to TV pastors preach about “reaching out to murderers.” These days, Europe reminds me of an elderly aunt who hides her last pieces of jewelry with shaking hands when she notices a robber has broken into a neighbor’s house. Europe, thy name is cowardice.

“All that is necessary for the forces of evil to win in the world is for enough good men to do nothing.” — Edmund Burke.

Now that I have our VOIP implementation working, I’m off to my next adventure. I see that I need to do some work on our QoS policies due to having our PBX also being a webserver and a rsync mirror for CentOS. So I’ve jumped off into the next thing with the goal of priortizing our VOIP traffic to be higher than everything else so as to give excellent VOIP performance first, other traffic second.

Here are a few links I have found that seem to be related to what I want to do. I don’t have the CLASSIFY option available to me as I want to run stock kernels on the router boxes, so I’ll have to do some munging and testing to see if I can get things working the way I want.

Links:

Asterisk QoS
IPTables + tc shaping
NetworkQoS
Linux Traffic Shaping - Examples

Well, my Sipura SPA-841’s finally arrived last week and I spent a couple of days testing on my local gentoo box before I rolled to our colo’ed server. The phones work wonderfully, but I’m not sure it’s really that the phones are that nice, but the the Asterisk PBX and IAX2 infrastructure is so well implemented. I did run into one serious problem that I attributed to NAT, but turned out to be a simple error on my part where I had an invalid Caller ID string. It took me 2 days to figure it out and in the end I was kicking myself. I finally found it when I broke out Ethereal out and looked at the packets and saw that my packets were getting across the Firewall + NAT. This ment that the issue had to be at the device, so I started poking around and it was indeed something simple.

We have our DID lines through IAX.cc/SixTel and our outgoing via VOIPJet. We setup one incoming toll-free for $0.02/min, one local Houston DID for $0.0143/min and our outbound for $0.013/min.

I’ve delivered one of the phones to one of my partners in Houston and we now have real office extension, conference rooms, multi-line, transfers in our homes…VERY cool stuff.

I’ve created a phpBB site for ex-Landmark employees to keep in touch with each other and general chatting. I had been thinking of doing this for several months and then I was included on a email thread about a unoffical reunion and it perked my interest. I chatted it over with the folks in the thread and then went a grabbed the xmark.org domain and threw up phpBB, did a quick logo/favicon and we were off and running. We’ve brought in 150 users since we went live 1 week ago, that’s pretty cool!

Here is the site

Wow, I can imagine twice the legal limit, but twice the LETHAL limit? That’s some staying power! The dude was even talking with folks.

Here is the story

This article has a very interesting write up on the fact that few or no animals have been found to be drowned by the tsunami that killed close to 150,000 humans.