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3297 discussions

Re: Bank websites
by Justin Dugger 22 Oct '10

22 Oct '10

I appreciate the attempt at irony, and regret that I replied off list my mistake. Apologies if this thread is confusing people. >On Wed, Oct 6, 2010 at 12:16, Justin Dugger <jldugger(a)gmail.com> wrote: >> What I like is OFX, which is basically a network protocol for your >> screen scraping tools. GNUcash does a good job importing my OFX >> transactions from Discover, for example. In this manner I don't have >> to care about how much they like Flash on their website. Supposedly >> Capitol Federal has an OFX gateway, but I've never seen it work in >> GNUcash. But neither of these places are one stop banking. But it's >> better than the wtf-are-you-thinking Mint website. >OFX looks neat. Too bad it's existed 10+ years now and this is the first I've heard of it. It also sounds like most financial institutions >only peer with each-other with it, and don't expose it to customer use. And it also sounds like it is massively over-engineered for what I >want, which is basically to aggregate a table of transactions that the bank can insert, but never update or remove; and to maintain a >local bank-independent cache of every statement document. >I'll read up some more on OFX. I'll even try to use it when I pick my next bank, but I'm not holding my breath that they'll allow it. Man >it would be nice to be able to send a check from a cron job, or have each transaction matching X criteria forward to my email. >We need a 'Geek Savings and Loan' that would support regex filters and actions like this. Here's the deal: you live in America, land of the business deal. OFX has been around for ages, so long as you used Microsoft or Quicken products. You've heard of those, right? To have free and open systems, you'd have to live in communist Europe, where they built a platform known generally as HCBI/FinTS. Frankly, regex is dramatically underengineered for this stuff. XSLT would be a bit saner, as would having a bayesian importer (such as GNUcash has) to classify transactions. >> As far as messages go you'll never find a bank that sends financial >> documents to you via email, as it's not encrypted and you'd have a >> hard time convincing the auditors of public key encryption. If you do >> find one, think twice about it. >I never said I'd withhold my gpg public key from them. Banking insurance mandates auditors and it's these people you must convince. GPG encrypted statements would probably work, but for ~0.1 percent of the population, half of which would implement it wrongly. >When was the last time you received a document containing sensitive information that was encrypted? Now how many of those >documents came through the USPS unencrypted? I have more confidence in the reliability and secrecy of email than USPS mail. I've received lots of documents via HTTPS that were encrypted. None from email or USPS. Frankly, it's a false equivalence, since USPS documents are a liability; you have to trust both the chain of posession, including postal inspectors, mail carriers, and an unlocked postbox, and the shredder to destroy the junkmail credit card offers people can steal out of your trash if you're not careful. In an ideal world, we wouldn't be trusting USPS. >I would appreciate the right to choose. And I would gladly choose to forfeit the secrecy SSL provides in exchange for the convenience >of email. I think I'd prefer RSS over that even since I could easily script an encrypted feed catcher. >They could deliver statements via https rss feed with authentication. Heck, a feed of every individual transaction (debit/credit) on every >account I have with them would be DAMN handy. You could do that over SSL, with a client having to provide username and password. That's a winner. Of course, it relies on browsers and SSL, but it's at least standardized. It's too bad it won't happen, but maybe the Bank of Geek can pull it off. >Fundamentally, they prepare the document. They know first when it is ready. It is their duty to transmit it to me without my >involvement. Email fits that profile well. What I want is every midnight of the first day of the month, the statement for the last month >gets saved in all of my replicated servers, and pops up in evince on all of my desktops. I should not have to click links or enter >passwords or fore-go secrecy. Their duty is to protect your money and your privacy. If you're following proper security procedures, your PGP key is encrypted on disk, requiring you to decrypt it before passing it to evince (really, your ideal world involves PDF?!?) >Emailing me to tell me that I can come get it pisses me off. To help demonstrate how fucked up that is, you're reading my reply off >my webserver. Thanks. Good thing the privacy of this conversation is not subject to regulation, law or insurance. Justin >On Wed, Oct 6, 2010 at 1:08 PM, Billy Crook <billycrook(a)gmail.com> wrote: >> On Wed, Oct 6, 2010 at 12:16, Justin Dugger <jldugger(a)gmail.com> wrote: >>> What I like is OFX, which is basically a network protocol for your >>> screen scraping tools. GNUcash does a good job importing my OFX >>> transactions from Discover, for example. In this manner I don't have >>> to care about how much they like Flash on their website. Supposedly >>> Capitol Federal has an OFX gateway, but I've never seen it work in >>> GNUcash. But neither of these places are one stop banking. But it's >>> better than the wtf-are-you-thinking Mint website. >>> >>> As far as messages go you'll never find a bank that sends financial >>> documents to you via email, as it's not encrypted and you'd have a >>> hard time convincing the auditors of public key encryption. If you do >>> find one, think twice about it. >> >> A reply to your message is now available. For your convenience, >> securely sign in to retrieve it at http://bcrook.com/.reply.txt >>

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That case of a Teacher not comprehending Linux seems to warrant Hackerdom's attention.
by Oren Beck 17 Oct '10

17 Oct '10

Recently, some folks were recalling the weirdly strange events caused by a schoolteacher seeing Linux for the first time: http://linuxlock.blogspot.com/2008/12/linux-stop-holding-our-kids-back.html We've had a few years of the economy getting so nuked that paying for software from vendors demanding per-seat fees is literally impossible in many educational and charity situations. Which of course, mandates a choice between either having NO computers in use- or the use of software that's de minimus -cost free, and after that, the "Open Source" concept becomes a feature as opposed to the liabilities inherent in "Closed Source" software. Frankly speaking- I consider using ONLY "Closed Source" software in education to be made of Pure Fail. In a reality accepting society- we'd have the whole range of totally free to totally unfree software presented to our children, in a neutral fashion. Except? If you go to a school board and suggest anything beyond their comfortable, shrinkwrapped, high dollars per seat software,. it's not unexpected to replicate what Helios encountered. The whole reason this is of potentially existential importance to ALL of Hackerdom is what our future will be- or NOT be if we do not teach our children to teach their TEACHERS. Oh, call it "Worldview Hacking" if we want to have a geeky pride in how we do it:) Things like showing a demo of Puppy Linux might be "Less Scary" if someone first gave a demo of Portable Firefox on a comfortably familiar to that school- thumbdrive device. They see the "wow- it works" effect in their comfortable Windows based sandbox. Sadly, more schools still use IE than anything else so there's still a risk of Xenophobia being triggered. Hacking the Worldview of Education is something that also falls under my favorite concept "Leading By Example" IF we teach our children to be an ambassador for everything WE want our- and THEIR literal future to be, their example becomes what can lead us to a better world. I have 2 Grandchildren in a public school, and scarcely a week goes by that does not produce some story displaying a stunning "Lack Of Clue" in their teachers or the school itself. In handing this over for hopefully constructive comments, I close with a question and Book recommend. Do you think your life would have been different in a world where Linux/ "Open Source" type Worldviews had been taught? The book recommend that spawned that last query is Little Brother, by Cory Doctorow: http://craphound.com/littlebrother/download/ Do we REALLY want our children in a school like what Marcus attended, let alone to have us in the world that school is set in ? -- Oren Beck 816.729.3645

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DNS Queries from port 53 blocked?
by Charles Steinkuehler 14 Oct '10

14 Oct '10

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 I am trying to debug a DNS issue we're having with a few domains, and I have run across some strange behavior. If I directly query their DNS using dig, I get a response. If, however, I let my DNS server ask (using a source port of 53), the query seems to drop into a black hole. The "good" queries, generated by 'dig mx mwmg.com @<theirIP> > tcpdump: listening on eth0, link-type EN10MB (Ethernet), capture size 96 bytes > 16:22:35.929965 IP (tos 0x0, ttl 64, id 0, offset 0, flags [DF], proto: UDP (17), length: 54) 199.79.203.4.32774 > 98.124.193.1.53: 64781+ MX? mwmg.com. (26) > 16:22:35.978142 IP (tos 0x0, ttl 119, id 26954, offset 0, flags [none], proto: UDP (17), length: 323) 98.124.193.1.53 > 199.79.203.4.32774: 64781*- 2/5/5 mwmg.com. MX[|domain] > 16:22:35.981553 IP (tos 0x0, ttl 64, id 0, offset 0, flags [DF], proto: UDP (17), length: 54) 199.79.203.4.32774 > 98.124.197.1.53: 24533+ MX? mwmg.com. (26) > 16:22:36.037816 IP (tos 0x0, ttl 119, id 27090, offset 0, flags [none], proto: UDP (17), length: 323) 98.124.197.1.53 > 199.79.203.4.32774: 24533*- 2/5/5 mwmg.com. MX[|domain] > 16:22:36.041330 IP (tos 0x0, ttl 64, id 0, offset 0, flags [DF], proto: UDP (17), length: 54) 199.79.203.4.32774 > 98.124.192.1.53: 28663+ MX? mwmg.com. (26) > 16:22:36.088247 IP (tos 0x0, ttl 119, id 26125, offset 0, flags [none], proto: UDP (17), length: 323) 98.124.192.1.53 > 199.79.203.4.32774: 28663*- 2/5/5 mwmg.com. MX[|domain] > 16:22:36.091515 IP (tos 0x0, ttl 64, id 0, offset 0, flags [DF], proto: UDP (17), length: 54) 199.79.203.4.32774 > 98.124.196.1.53: 29634+ MX? mwmg.com. (26) > 16:22:36.147736 IP (tos 0x0, ttl 119, id 10602, offset 0, flags [none], proto: UDP (17), length: 323) 98.124.196.1.53 > 199.79.203.4.32774: 29634*- 2/5/5 mwmg.com. MX[|domain] The "bad" queries, when I let my DNS server do the asking for me: > 16:23:13.273239 IP (tos 0x0, ttl 64, id 0, offset 0, flags [DF], proto: UDP (17), length: 65) 199.79.203.10.53 > 98.124.193.1.53: 23036 [1au] MX? mwmg.com. (37) > 16:23:15.277325 IP (tos 0x0, ttl 64, id 0, offset 0, flags [DF], proto: UDP (17), length: 65) 199.79.203.10.53 > 98.124.196.1.53: 64536 [1au] MX? mwmg.com. (37) > 16:23:17.281891 IP (tos 0x0, ttl 64, id 0, offset 0, flags [DF], proto: UDP (17), length: 65) 199.79.203.10.53 > 98.124.192.1.53: 34458 [1au] MX? mwmg.com. (37) > 16:23:19.286253 IP (tos 0x0, ttl 64, id 0, offset 0, flags [DF], proto: UDP (17), length: 54) 199.79.203.10.53 > 98.124.197.1.53: 35884 MX? mwmg.com. (26) > 16:23:21.286655 IP (tos 0x0, ttl 64, id 0, offset 0, flags [DF], proto: UDP (17), length: 54) 199.79.203.10.53 > 98.124.193.1.53: 65460 MX? mwmg.com. (26) > 16:23:23.291087 IP (tos 0x0, ttl 64, id 0, offset 0, flags [DF], proto: UDP (17), length: 54) 199.79.203.10.53 > 98.124.196.1.53: 59086 MX? mwmg.com. (26) > 16:23:25.295724 IP (tos 0x0, ttl 64, id 0, offset 0, flags [DF], proto: UDP (17), length: 54) 199.79.203.10.53 > 98.124.192.1.53: 5122 MX? mwmg.com. (26) > 16:23:27.300226 IP (tos 0x0, ttl 64, id 0, offset 0, flags [DF], proto: UDP (17), length: 54) 199.79.203.10.53 > 98.124.197.1.53: 53089 MX? mwmg.com. (26) > 16:23:29.304645 IP (tos 0x0, ttl 64, id 0, offset 0, flags [DF], proto: UDP (17), length: 54) 199.79.203.10.53 > 98.124.193.1.53: 12885 MX? mwmg.com. (26) > 16:23:37.306880 IP (tos 0x0, ttl 64, id 0, offset 0, flags [DF], proto: UDP (17), length: 54) 199.79.203.10.53 > 98.124.196.1.53: 21131 MX? mwmg.com. (26) So...have folks started dropping traffic originating from port 53?!? How did I miss this memo, or am I missing something obvious in the above? - -- Charles Steinkuehler charles(a)steinkuehler.net -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.10 (MingW32) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org/ iEYEARECAAYFAky3djQACgkQLywbqEHdNFxX0gCfchNpsCEkLQzc/hDncxDK/YGZ BToAn00jwPV7OT9UjQ4wyLKB/kGS7OqQ =oV+d -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

2 2

transmeta.com is being auctioned
by David Nicol 14 Oct '10

14 Oct '10

http://www.namejet.com/Pages/Auctions/ListBidPage.aspx?domainList=Transmeta…

3 2

Bank websites
by Billy Crook 07 Oct '10

07 Oct '10

I've been with a particular bank for some time, and really liked their online banking when I started. HTML only, no iframes, csv downloads, quick, few images. I may and or may not have been able to automate things with curl...... Anyway. It has gone to shit over the last year or so with their outsourcing various products. There are now 5 or 6 separate domain names involved, and popup windows for various functionality. Do not want. So I'm looking for a new bank to move a small savings, all my checking, all credit cards, and all my retirement to. I want to be able to see all transactions from any account on the same website. I do not want monthly CC bills that I have to send checks to pay. All bills and statements must be available electronically, in Free formats. Extra bonus points for SENDING them to me so I don't have to log in to get them. I need the ability to issue checks to payees electronically. I need to ability to download transaction histories in csv. I will not accept any bank that even hints at using flash, java, silverlight, or installing plugins to use their site. If can't have any obviously negligent security bugs. And I don't really want dongles, keyfobs, or second authentication factors that involve human interaction. Bonus points for clientside ssl certs. It also must be a WEBsite, not an IE site. All that said, I realise I will probably have to compromise a bit, well, a lot. I'm asking for recommendations. If you have really pleasent experiences using your bank's webinterface, I'd like to know what you like about it, and who the bank is. I don't care a lot about interest rates, or branch locations and hours. Because this is a bit sensitive of a topic, I do not expect many people to provide that information on list. If you would like to provide it anonymously, you may do so by posting it to any google-indexable place on the web, under any name, via tor if you like. Just include the string Toskyegyun somewhere in the page. I have a google alert on that word, and other list members can see its results as they accumulate at http://www.google.com/alerts/feeds/03811048145931891306/250644208453399365 If you're particularly impressed at how well your bank website works, and would like to show it off at the next lug meeting (sans login page), let me know and I'll make sure to be there. Once I pick a bank, I will be moving everything from my old one to it, and letting them know what about their website made me leave.

7 8

Ubuntu 9.04 with file issues Cross posted by intent- we're supposed to compare notes on such problems - I hope.
by Oren Beck 11 Sep '10

11 Sep '10

Hi- I have a system in front of me with Ubuntu 9.04 on it- it was installed ext3. the part that is escapingmy understanding is recovering from a file corruption of some sort. Duplicate or bad blocks is the error message. The automatic run- in recovery mode- of fsck dies with exit status 4. A manual run of fsck shows a list of what it calls multiply-claimed blocks in several inodes. and there's aprompt asking yor no about cloning them. Needless to say- I am quite aware that my lack of understanding risks avoidable data loss. Any suggestions both on what to do and the best training document/s so I can understand why/how this issue happened in the first place will be appreciated. This is one of those gaps in my understanding of Linux admin skills. Either this is so drop dead simple that I will feel more of an idiot for not having "known" what is going on..Or it's going to be non-trivial to recover from. My first suggested fix was using Puppy etc and an external drive to simply grab any unique personal files that are intact- then DBAN wipe that drive before starting over. Which is what I cal a "Last Resort First" tactic . I hate having to use them, but LRF type methods have become a major mental hygiene tool for me :) Of course- I am deeply curious if my oft preached model for data protection- keeping the OS and Userdata on physically separate drives would have helped here -or not.. -- Oren Beck 816.729.3645

7 16

Re: Ubuntu 9.04 with file issues Cross posted by intent- we're supposed to compare notes on such problems - I hope.
by Jack 10 Sep '10

10 Sep '10

I forgot to mention a few more points. 1) fsck -y isn't designed, at least in single pass mode, to ensure the filesystem is completely fixed (see next point), It is designed to make sure that further writes to the fs don't make it worse, among other things. 2) After running fsck, and it reports, "FILE SYSTEM MODIFIED", you must run fsck again to make sure you don't have further errors. When running fsck it must be run, repeatedly until you no longer get the message above. Only then are all the problems with the fs fixed. 3) If you have in the list of messages a note about hard link count being wrong and the count is too few, you *will* cause the deletion of the file, by using the -y fix. This, on a file that would have been totally recoverable had you not chosen the -y option. 4) In the particular case at hand, where there are multiply linked files, you may also wind up rewriting over the top of a good file with information that is not good, hence causing you to lose a file, had you chosen to not clone the file. The opposite is also true. Lastly, my source for my notes comes from the linux-ext4 mailing list, but what do those guys know anyway? Jack

3 3

Mid-America GNU/Linux Networkers Conference
by MAGNet Con 01 Sep '10

01 Sep '10

Hello, all. Attached is a press release about a new FLOSS conference coming up in May 2011. If you are interested in volunteering, speaking or sponsoring the event, please let us know as soon as possible. Thank you for your time! Regards, Russ MAGNet Con http://magnetcon.info

2 1

USB 3.0 Use with Linux
by Peter Cross 26 Aug '10

26 Aug '10

Has anyone tried any USB 3.o devices with any flavor or Linux? I've seen some sites stating that since 2.6.31 usb 3.0 is supported but linux.org/newsstates the following: "The xHCI driver is already included in linux-next and since Linux<http://www.linux.org/news/2009/06/10/0004.html#>2.6.30 has just been released, it should go into the main development tree from which Linux version 2.6.31 will emerge around late August. Users that want to have a look at the new driver can find it in the Git repository." Just wanting to know general experiences if someone has taken the leap... I'm looking at a 2TB external WD drive and am also curious as to which vendor (sabrent, evga, etc) generally has the fewest issues with newer technology. Thanks! Peter -- Cheers! Peter J. Cross San Antonio, TX "Experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions" -James Madison, Federalist Paper No. 51 Please consider the environment before printing this email

6 8

Happy Birthday Linux
by Jim Herrmann 25 Aug '10

25 Aug '10

From:torvalds@klaava.Helsinki.FI <From%3Atorvalds(a)klaava.Helsinki.FI> (Linus Benedict Torvalds) Newsgroup: comp.os.minix Subject: What would you like to see most in minix? Summary: small poll for my new operating system Message-ID: 1991Aug25, 20578.9541(a)klaava.Helsinki.FI Date: 25 Aug 91 20:57:08 GMT Organization: University of Helsinki. Hello everybody out there using minix- I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones. This has been brewing since april, and is starting to get ready. I'd like any feedback on things people like/dislike in minix; as my OS resembles it somewhat (same physical layout of the file-sytem due to practical reasons)among other things. I've currently ported bash (1.08) an gcc (1.40), and things seem to work. This implies that i'll get something practical within a few months, and I'd like to know what features most people want. Any suggestions are welcome, but I won't promise I'll implement them :-) Linus Torvalds torvalds(a)kruuna.helsinki.fi

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