Could you imagine if the news reported every time that a company shut down their mail server? This news story seems a bit silly, and pretty indicative of how reactionary and misinformed the press can be about computer stuff.

I implement ingress filtering on my routers, and they compile a tally of the number of packets that fail against the filters. Interestingly, my router is seeing packets that claim to be from the three private IP blocks that are designated as not to be routed outside of private space; the only way that my router can be seeing these packets is if my ISP is routing them to me, which isn’t good. Time to do some work…

In February, a 16-year-old boy was drafted by D.C. United (one of the pro U.S. soccer teams); he’s got himself a Nike endorsement contract, and has dropped out of high school, pursuing his GED with tutors and homeschooling. I’m not sure how I feel about this; I wonder if the school district would let a kid do the same thing to pursue a dotcom business, or something similar.

“With God, all things are possible” — except using that phrase as the Ohio state motto, since the 6th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals ruled that it is unconstitutional. I wonder how many things that motto is printed, engraved, and chiseled into permanently; this has to be an enormous pain in the ass for Ohio.

More state-related business: a week or so ago, I asked why the Mississippi state flag (with its Confederate flag contribution) hasn’t generated more controversy. Today, it’s reported that that’s not actually the official Mississippi state flag, and in fact, there is no official Mississippi state flag, due to an oversight by the legislature back in 1906. (This was all discovered by the Mississippi Supreme Court, in a challenge to the flag’s constitutionality.) State lawmakers are now saying that they have a unique opportunity to actually designate a flag (and perhaps one that isn’t so damn racist).

Due entirely to configuration mistakes (laziness?) on the part of the Apache folks, the www.apache.org server was hacked recently; the folks that did it have explained how.

Also on the security front, David Dittrich of University of Washington has published a reasonably good analysis of mstream, the latest distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack tool to surface. From this comes a basic plea, from me in my role as a network admin: if you run a network, implement network ingress and egress filtering! It’s a big step towards preventing someone from using your network as a launching point for these attacks.