We Have moved.

Hey finally PureDistortion has moved to its very own site.

It is at www.puredistortion.com.

This blog will stay up and have all of the archived posts here from before the move. they will be avaliable at puredistortion.blogger.com and blog.puredistortion.com

Dale

Magic the Gathering resources

Finally the local game store is getting into the Wizards of the coast game Magic the Gathering and stocking some of the cards. For me this is really cool as this is a game that I have always been interested in but no one in my social circles played at all. Also I think it is a game that my wife could really get into as well which would be cool as the continual smackdown I get in card games like Uno, SkipBo and Phase10 are beginning to wear a bit thin LOL.

So with this motivation I have been looking into how the game works as I have only ever had a couple of goes at the game in shops as demos and came a cross a series of online videos done by Wizards that are really great at explaining the game and how it works. I ahve only supplied links or else this post would be massive LOL.

This is a 6 part series that is titled "Learn to play Magic the Gathering":
(links to each video are the part 1 ect links)
PART 1: Is an introduction to Magic and the decks and how to get started.
PART 2: Is an explanation on the cards them selves.
PART 3: Is about the different types of cards that will be in your deck.
PART 4: Is all about the turn sequence and a basic turn.
PART 5: Is all about attacking and blocking.
PART 6: Deck building and the stratergies.

Another thing that the guys at Wizards do is they supply the rules online so that you can get down to your hobby store get a starter deck and get straight into playing you can get a copy of the rules straight from the website there are also link to other helpful playing resources such as the gatherer.

The Gatherer is an online database of all of the cards available so you can study up on you opponent or hunt out your next rare purchase/trade.

Also check out www.magicthegathering.com there is heaps of stuff on there.

Army Roster - Armybuilder on the web.

On Dakka Dakka today found a link to a site called armyroster.com.

Army Roster is a web based army builder that is now looking for people for Beta accounts to test the site and provide feedback and bugs.

I creatd an account on the site and went through and started to build a 1500pt list for my Orc and Goblin Fantasy army (at the moment Warhammer Fantasy lists are all that can be created) and found the interface nice and simple to use, though it did not have the AJAX web2.0 feel that I had come to expect from web applications these days.

Now apart from the feel there were a few more things that annoyed me, the basic functionality was not complete yes so links that were in the site would go to error pages and also the lists for the Fantasy Armies were incomplete with me not being able to add in things that are in the army book. Also the need for the site to be all linked in as a community was also something that annoyed me (fro no real reason) and this is something that I have issues with more and more new generation web apps providing a service have to try and shoe horn in community tools like forums into the site when forums already exist for the subculture that they are aiming at, I believe that these developers hould focus more on building intergration with existing services. Though I must say when the opponent finder... one of the broken bits of the site... is working I think this will be a great way for people to find other people in the local area to find opponents.

Now with those points aside this site has real potential to be a real competitor to Army Builder especially if they build on a few little bits of functionality. For example the site already validates your core choice requirements and total points but not charater magic items. The ability for people to be able to view your avaliable armies via a URL so that you can link to your profile in a forum.

Also the ability to import your own army spec files for games that army roster does not currently supprt would also be an awesome idea and take some load off the developers doing data entry for every game that they wish to support.

Though overall I think when this app gets out of Beta... and I am griping about a site that is in very early Beta at the moment... it will be an awesome site that will be a serious alternative to Army Builder and free.

So check out armyroster.com and keep an eye on it as when it is up and running I think it will be a great web app. I know I will be using it.

Plesk: How to count SMTP connections per email account.

Found an interesting solution for users of plesk/qmail for how to identify a user who is abusing your authenticated SMTP service.

Running the command:

cat /var/log/messages | grep -i smtp_auth | grep "logged in" | awk {' print $11 '} | awk -F / {' print $6"@"$5 '} | sort | uniq -c | sort -n | tail

or:

cat /var/log/syslog | grep -i smtp_auth | grep "logged in" | awk {' print $11 '} | awk -F / {' print $6"@"$5 '} | sort | uniq -c | sort -n | tail

Depending on your Linux Distro and you will get an output like the example bellow:

7 user@example.com
7 someone@spmewhere.net.au
8 stuff@onthenet.com.au
8919 user@crackeddomain.com.au

As you can see the account 'user' for the domain 'crackeddomain.com.au' are having unusually high amounts of SMTP connections for an account.

This is useful for tracking bulk email being sent through your system or hijacked accounts being used by spammers.

I found this on rackerhacker.com a site by Seinior Rackspace Systems Engineer Major Hayden, go and check it out it is full of awesome content.

"Great Firewall of Australia" ISP spam filter... EPIC FAIL

With all of the talk going on on the net and in main stream media about the new "Great Firewall of Australia" ISP spam filter I though I should have my say.

Firstly I think that this is ridiculous especially when the report that has been released regarding there 30 user test in Tasmania.... 30 user how the hell does 30 users represent Australia's traffic, maybe that is the amount of users that dont download MP3's or movies, but it is not a decent representation of the traffic this country generates. Also the reports suggest that internet link costs will go up due to the cost of implementation and the speed of the link will be slower.

Apart from this just making no sence at all why should someone decide for me what is relevant for me to view on the net (now Mr Conroy I am not a pedophile or a terroist) as filters miss one big factor..... context. How can a filter that only sees a request to a server on port 80 judge if i am looking at a site of "potentially" harmful information such as euthinasia to kill my self or I am writing a ballanced document about both sides of the topic.. in shor it can't and if some one is looking in this example for a way to kill themselves they will find it one way or another you aren't going to stop them.

Also with the filtering being done at the ISP level what is going to stop the ISP tracking your data and selling it to marketing firms in some way or another and this dosent have to be a company as a whole, it could be just an enterprising engineer working in the back end. This senario gets even worse when some if the technologies have the ability to decrypt and inspect SSL traffic the same traffic that used by internet banking and sites online.. can you say the death of online shopping in Australia.

Another thing to consider is not only will we be told what not to view but these decisions will cause false positive removing "legitimate" that we should be entitled to see. Also what stops the logical progression of an anoymous filtering tool becoming a tracking tool so it is logged where your IP has been or that a government would use the filter to block content that is contrary to there views and opinions. It is all possible just look to the harsh filtering of there internet users by there government.

Finially with this solution costing Millions and Millions and can be simpily avoided by using one of the many tools avaliable today. Proxies, TOR, VPN, Web Anonimisers all have the ability to bypass this technology so people who are looking at this dodgy content still will be able to as ISP's will not be able to block these technologies as that would serverly hamper Australian businesses.

In the end if it does come in to Australia I will be starting a buisnes soffering VPN solutio, help stop one of the greatest free speah injustices in this lifetime.ns to a data centre in another country to make some cash of all of the dodgy and paranoid people out there. In the end they cant stop what you look at on the net just hamper the growth of the technology sectors of Australia. They would be better spending this money on stopping people in this country creating the content.

Please sign the online petition here.

Also go to nocleanfeed.com to see what else you can do.

Resources for further reading:
Article from somebodythinkofthechildren.com aboiut the report of the TAS trial and comparing it to what Sen. Conroy had to say.
EFA page on there nocleanfeed.com site explaining the plan.
Forum discussion on whirlpool.net.au, great comments here from Mark Newton from Internode and other forun users.

Ill keep updating things as they come up to where this is headed.

Wired.com Photography compertition winners

Wired is doing a piece on all of the winners of there previous photography competitions. There are some awesome photos here, my favourites are the Gecko Eye by Alan M which is awesome and the picture of the guy canoeing in the mist by Peter Bowers.



The next photography contest being run by Wired is a Portraits contest so any photographers reading get involved. Check out the contests page at Wired.com for more info.

Also check out the gallery of the other winners here.

Redhat Servers Compromised

last week Redhat detcted intrusions to certin computer systems. There have been minimal details on the intrusion and what actually has happened as investigations are still happening.

RedHat's first concern was the RedHat Network (RHN) and ensuring that their distrobution channel with there clients was intact. I think this is a great move by RedHat acting so swiftly and ensuring that the packages that were in there up2date/yum channels were secure.

What was detected was a number ro SSH Service (here is a link to info on SSH) packages were signed and released to channels. In a move to quickly rmove this threat from the channel and customers systems that may have already down loaded and installed the RPM's is to relaease new RPM's into the channels for the affected systems. This is another move that I think is a great move by RedHat as it quickly and elegantly removes these unauthorised packages quickliy from RHEL systems and the update channels, using this method also means that mant people will go without even having the packages installed on there system as RPM (RedHat's package management system) uses versions to controll what packages it downloads and will always download the newr version if it avaliable.

The affected versions of RedHat Enterprise Linux are Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4,
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.5 Extended
Update Support.

As well as theis there has been a script released by RedHat that will assess weather you system has installed the affected packages and is avaliable from the RedHat website (see link at end of post).

I think that this issue has been handled well by RedHat and has showed how simply issues like this can be managed with a solid package management solution such as RPM.

It will be interesting to see how this progresses and I will keep an eye on this and keep you updated as news gets out about new updates on the issue.

Link to RedHat Security Advisory
Link to openssh-blacklist script