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crypto

Tunneling SMTP through SSH

Since Dreamhost doesn’t support any sort of secure SMTP, I’ve been tunneling it through ssh for the past month or so.

ssh -f -N -L 9999:mail.myserver.com:25 myserver.com -l user

9999 is the local port, mail.myserver.com is the mail server, 25 is the remote port, myserver.com is where your shell is, user is your username on the server. Then, just tell Thunderbird (or whatever mail app you use) that your smtp server is localhost:9999

I have this run at bootup, so that all I have to do is type in my key when I boot up and all my mail is encrypted (Dreamhost does support IMAPS).

You could, of course, setup your ssh account to have no key, but this is a rather large sacrifice of security (as soon as the attacker acquires your private key, he has access to your ssh account)– especially if your primary computer is a laptop, like mine.

Minor updates

I’ve made a few more minor changes to the stylesheet, most notably the textured background. There’s also a couple new banner images above.

I'm a data whore

ResTek Nick called me last night to say I was eating up 25% of the bandwidth. Oops. Sorry about that. Wget is an aggressive little bugger.

In other news, the IAEA won the Nobel Peace Prize.

Shifty drugs

I seem to have acquired a cold, so I decided that this was the perfect time to try the random drugs I picked up on a street corner in a nondescript brown paper envelope.

Ok, so it was a street corner – it was red square. And the women who gave it to me was wearing a lab coat (at least she looked like a doctor). They’re supposed to be a homeopathic cold remedy. The envelope says it includes Echinacea, Calendula, and Chelidonium. We’ll see if it works.

More deer in the parking lot

I went to a slideshow last night of some guy’s mountain climbing in Nepal. It was cool.

Pretty pictures

I picked up a Max Headroom poster today. The guy who was selling the Max Headroom poster on ebay also happened to have a Network 23 patch, so I bought that, too.

review, books

No Logo

I’ve finally finished reading Naomi Klein’s No Logo. It’s been on my bookshelf for over a year, and I’ve been reading it for about a month. For some reason it was really slow reading for me, but overall it is a good book – if slightly dated (pre Seattle and pree 9/11).

It can be summed up in a few statements:

1) Modern advertising = evil
2) Corporate outsourcing = evil
3) Reclaim the Streets, Adbusting, Culture Jamming = Good

The toilet paper is much better there

I went home today and picked up a couple posters I’d found on ebay. One is Equilibrium and the other is Max Headroom. I’ll take some pictures tomorrow.