August 2003 Archives

Within the past month or so, I received a warning from Sony about fraudulent e-mails claiming to be from Sony but that actually were not. The deceptive e-mails were designed to lure Sony customers into divulging personal information at a fake Sony site. It "falsely indicates that it is from SonyStyle.com" and "includes a link to a bogus SonyStyle.com registration site"

So, I was shocked to notice that the e-mail from Sony that was supposedly warning about deceptive e-mails and URLs was itself guilty of using apparently deceptive or "fraudulent" URLs!

Within the text, it contained a couple of URLs that, in the HTML version of the e-mail, deceptively show up as www.sonystyle.com, but in fact pointed to some other site at m0.net. Here is one of the deceptive URLs from Sony:

http://news.sonystyle.m0.net/m/S.asp?HB9483736521X2571692X218821X

Not to mention that the From address of the e-mail was also from the same site: sonystyle@news.sonystyle.m0.net

Should you trust the warning e-mail? Sure. The contents are benign enough. Just think twice about clicking those links or replying to the e-mail! Sony is surely using a company to send out the mass e-mailings and to track the "click-through" responses, but that seems like a pretty poor choice in this context!

This is such a great line.

In Courtroom, Laughter at Fox and a Victory for Al Franken

Judge Chin said the case was an easy one, and chided Fox for bringing its complaint to court. The judge said, "Of course, it is ironic that a media company that should be fighting for the First Amendment is trying to undermine it."

You can buy the book here:

Sorry for not keeping up. Been enjoying the summer too much!

Anyhow, I thought that my experience in trying to get openLDAP 2.0.x working with TLS would be of interest to someone because the solution was so orthogonal it is unbelievable.

I have working OpenLDAP servers with TLS on two other machines so was baffled when I tried /etc/rc.d/init.d/ldap start and got [FAILED] with a very similar configuration to the others. Permissions on the TLS files are very finicky so I tried tweaking those--but nothing was working. I tried strace on the slapd binary but that did not offer any clues. I was able to get it to work by running slapd in debug mode on the command line, but in that mode it was ignoring the -u ldap so was running as root. So that told me there was some sort of permissions problem. But where?