A couple of days ago the enet.gr domain went missing. I observed this because of a call I got from our press office where a user complained that sending mail to journalists was not possible: “I can email all the world, except journalists”. The mail logs showed that:
Feb 17 13:08:26 ns sm-mta[1215]: q1HB5o4Y001215:
lost input channel from host.name [x.x.x.x] to mta after rcpt
So what was wrong? Because of delays in DNS server responses regarding enet.gr, Thunderbird timed out and dropped the connection (the problem appeared to be Thunderbird specific). My quick hack of the moment because I was on the road was to point enet.gr to 127.0.0.1 in the SMTP server’s /etc/hosts (I was on the road with limited connectivity). A far better solution is to increase the value of mailnews.tcptimeout preference.
“The Cybernetic State” is a book written by Javier Livas and is available as PDF on request from the author. From the preface:
The emergence of a cybernetic State is now a real possibility, and most likely inevitable in the near future. This book sketches this information age organization and the cybernetic management principles on which it is based. As we shall see, many of its features are already present in embrionary form in the modern democratic State.
The description of the cybernetic State relies on the Viable System Model (VSM) developed by professor Stafford Beer and explained in several of his books. This model originates from control theory and the cybernetics of the human nervous system, and has been adopted and validated by management science. In this book the VSM is used to show the nature of the State.
The enormous explanatory power of this cybernetic map will show that Economics, Law, and Political Science, which have mostly been studied separately, actually refer to three different aspects of the same phenomena, namely the State. In this sense, the book attempts a synthesis of ideas that were born disconnected and remained so for a long time. Helpful insights about the evolution of economic, legal and political theory are a byproduct.
The first book I ever bought from ISACA‘s bookstore, was Nigrini‘s book on Benford’s Law. Briefly stated the law says that in a series of numbers that occur while observing a phenomenon, numbers starting with 1 are more likely to occur than those starting with 2 which in turn are more likely to appear than those that start with 3 and so on up to numbers starting with 9.
The law stands for other bases too.
I’ve had discussions about Benford’s Law applicability on email data over at twitter with Martijn Grooten, but never run any tests. A few hours back I had an interesting discussion with Theodore which reminded me of the law and so I decided to see whether it stands on a number series related to email. The easiest test I could run was on the length of the Subject: lines. Bellow what follows is a graph of Benford’s distribution and actual data from 376916 mails that passed a certain mail server during last week:
Benford's Law vs. length of Subject: lines
It seems that the length of subject lines follow the pattern. For the sake of speed I have omitted from the computation non-latin subject lines, which means that I have to recompute whenever I find a timeslot longer than 15 minutes. But then again if I am to find such a slot, I think I will try to see whether the message body size also follows a Benfordian distribution. It may be more difficult to verify though because of different mail servers imposing different limits on the size of messages sent and received by them. Oh wait, Sotiris just did that! The rest of the tests mentioned in Nigrini’s book are also worth a try.
So what do your logs say about subject lines’ length and Benford’s Law? Do they follow the pattern? I’d be glad to see your answer in the comments section.
PS: I see that there is now a second edition of Nigrini’s book about to be published!
Russia alleged that an arms control race was unfolding in cyberspace and that constraints on state capabilities were necessary
Now where had I heard that before? It was in 2009 while watching a presentation given by iDefense’s Eli Jellenc. In it he presented the following variation of the Prisoner’s Dilemma:
The Security Dilemma
The basic premise of the model is that efforts to increase your own security makes others insecure. In Cyber warfare it is easier to attack than to defend a complex system (or at least it feels that way since time is on the side of the persisent, patient attacker). It is also very difficult at times to distinguish between offense and defense and the fact of the matter is that both the digital underground and the private sector have well established offensive capabilities for hire. The result of the situation is that everybody is forced to deploy offensive capabilies with a spiral of mistrust being built at the same time as a side effect.
“Why, foreign leaders ask, would the world’s only superpower seek radical improvement of its armed forces in the absence of a clear threat? Given the expense of accumulating national power, some may assume it is meant to be used and conclude that the United States is improving its military capabilities in order to impose its will on others. The United States can either accept such suspicions or find a new, less intimidating method of pursuing the revolution in military affairs, perhaps through greater cooperation with potential allies. The problem is that such cooperation could speed the dissemination of new technology, techniques, and ideas, and thus contribute to the emergence of challengers. But if the United States unilaterally pursues the RMA, other states will respond, whether symmetrically or asymmetrically. In turn, knowing the benign intentions of the United States, American leaders and planners will consider this threatening. Why, they will ask, would other states seek to improve their military capability unless contemplating aggression? Vigorous American pursuit of the RMA may make other nations feel less secure and their response will make the United States feel less secure. The result may be a spiral of mutual misperception and a new arms race, albeit a qualitative rather than quantitative one.”
Ironic how I was scolded in a meeting a couple of months ago for mentioning Game Theroy as a tool to study strategies (“Theory is one thing, reality is another”) when in fact we see how such simple models are suited to study reality.
Naturally, such a recovery should never be necessary if your machine is properly backed up, and if you keep your source files under some form of revision control, such as rcs(1).
Upon reading the passage, my memory triggered and brought to my attention again cvi, a handy little tool by Sotiris Tsimbonis just for this purpose.
Sendmail provides for queue groups where one can have messages that stay in queue be placed in separate queues which are treated differently according to rules described in the queuegroup ruleset. FEATURE(queuegroup) helps managing such queues via the access database but unfortunately deals only with recipient addresses. But what if one wants to place messages in a separate (slower) queue based on sender’s address?
The above trick does not make use of the access database. In fact you must not use FEATURE(queuegroup) in your sendmail.mc with it. The queuegroup ruleset is called with the recipient address as an argument. The first line replaces it with the sender’s address ($&f) canonified. In this particular newsletter case, we are only interested in the left hand side of the email address ($1). Others may be interested in the sender’s domain ($2). The third line checks to see whether the left hand side matches what we expect (owner-newsletter) and if so, it selects the corresponding queue. Otherwise the default queue, named mqueue, is selected.
For a more complete ruleset that can treat combinations of senders and recipients and via the access database see “Sendmail Extended Queue Groups“.
IT Gestapo, n.:
The whole inflexible complex set of policies, regulatory compliance, reporting and other bureaucratic activities that takes away the fun from computing, sometimes resulting in absorbing more manmonths than those needed to get the job done. As such, it can sometimes be seen as a job creator. It is also a regulatorium enforcer.
The sysadmin paradox, n.:
The fact that when your system administrator is constantly running behind problems is perceived to be working and being productive, as opposed to being perceived as idle while managing a working infrastructure.
Our aim is to eliminate ourselves from the management of the system, to be considered as “not needed” because the system has no problems, therefore we do not work enough. Luckily, whenever (if) this happens, new more complex requirements emerge and the circle continues.
With BYOD (Bring Your Own Disaster Device at the workplace) gaining traction, there is no point in having three sets of users / user machines (internal, external and the DMZ plus spaghetti policy exceptions). You only have external users and the DMZ.
Internal users and insider threats “do not exist”. It makes life simpler and you get rid of hybrid characterizations for consultants and outsourcers…
Managing organized complexity 