In order to stay updated with the latest spam identification rules, it is necessary to update the internal rules of SpamAssassin.

This procedure for SpamAssassin on a FreeBSD operating system will check for updates in rules, and, if available, download and install them.

SpamAssassin provides a silent utility, that downloads and installs the latest rules from a SpamAssassin channel in a secure manner using The GNU Privacy Guard.

sa-update && /usr/local/etc/rc.d/sa-spamd reload && "Rules of SpamAssassin was updated and SpamAssassin was reloaded."

An exit code of 0 means, that an update was available, downloaded and installed. An exit code of 1 means, that no updates was available. An exit code of 2 means, that an error occurred.

Thinking, that you are above reproach, is not enough to stop your personal data from being used against you by authorities, employers, marketing campaigns, hackers and sick people with or without your permission or authorization.

Personal data can be used for theft of identity, criminal activities, revenge and other critical abuse, that can give you severe trouble with authorities, debt and other traumatic events. You can as innocent even get arrested and emprisoned.

Make sure, that the personal data, you give, is proportional to your goal. An example of this is when you as a private person is buying a service or a product from a private company – and the private company asks for your social security number. This is not proportional to the goal and should be denied.

Make sure, that your service memberships, subscriptions and accounts use different  usernames, passwords and mail addresses. An example of this is when you use the same password for all services, such as computer, mail and social networks – and a hacker obtains the password from the least secure service. This might give the hacker access to surprising amounts of personal data about you and your relations.

Make sure, that you have a policy for using social networks. The policy should include your rules for privacy settings, personal data, content, applications, quizzes, relations and sharing. An example of this is when you make unverified relations or accept applications and share personal data, that can be abused.

Make sure, that you have a policy for content of conversions, chats and communication. You can assume, that most conversations are logged, monitored and recorded. This includes public areas, rooms of interest, fixed phones, mobile phones, messaging, mail and social networks.

Make sure, that you use secure encryption when transmitting or storing private data. Use digital signing and encryption of mail. An example of this is when you submit credit card details to an insecure non-encrypted payment service. Another example is when you store private data on an insecure non-encrypted computer, which is then lost during transportation, subject to theft or hacking.

Make sure, that you use and surf the internet anonymously. Replace the domain name service (DNS) servers of your internet service provider (ISP) with open DNS servers. Replace the mail service of your ISP with your own mail service. Replace the proxy server of your ISP or the direct connection to the internet with a connection through a network of virtual tunnels, such as Tor.

Make sure, that electronic devices, that leaves digital tracks, are turned off or is offline when not in use. This include mobile phones, computers, watches, sports equipment, security wear and other devices, that use trackable systems, such as GSM, GPRS, GPS and other networks.

Make sure, that you can get advice from a system administrator and a criminal defence lawyer.

Learn more at European Association for The Defence of Human Rights, European Digital Rights and IT Political Association of Denmark (IT Politisk Forening).

Password protecting a website or part of a website is used to control access.

Which method you use depends on the operating system, web server, language and content management system.

If you use the FreeBSD operating system and the Apache web server, a simple solution is to use the htpasswd utility.

In the following example, two users are given access to a password protected part of a website. Each user will be given a username and a password. The same commands can be used for changing password.

nano -w www/www.foobar.com/ppc/.htaccess

AuthUserFile /usr/home/foobar/www/www.foorbar.com/ppc/.htpasswd
AuthType Basic
AuthName "Foobar Password Protected Content"
Require valid-user

htpasswd -c www/www.foobar.com/ppc/.htpasswd ann
htpasswd www/www.foobar.com/ppc/.htpasswd bob

When opening the password protected part of the website, a dialog appears, and, if correct password is given, gives access to the password protected content.

Note, that website password protection should not be considered safe in general.

Here are some of our mobile phone pictures from the Open Source Days 2010 conference. Enjoy!

[View with PicLens]

The content management system WordPress has a built in feature, that can handle pictures. However, this is not a well working feature. Fortunately, WordPress supports the use of plugins, which are extensions for WordPress. You can find many different plugins for WordPress on the homepage of WordPress.

NextGEN Gallery handles pictures much better. It is easy to create a new gallery, upload one or more pictures into it – and then insert a picture from the gallery or the complete gallery into a post. The way, that NextGEN Gallery displays pictures is neat, smooth and fast. It supports full screen.

This procedure will install NextGEN Gallery.

cd wp-content/plugins
ftp http://downloads.wordpress.org/plugin/nextgen-gallery.zip
unzip nextgen-gallery.zip
rm nextgen-gallery.zip

Open the website. Click “Log in” or “Site Admin”. Click “Plugins”. Find “NextGEN Gallery”. Click “Activate”.

The plugin is now installed and it is ready to use.

Click “Gallery”. Click “Upload pictures”. Set the value of “New Gallery” to the title of your new gallery, such as “2009-04-16 The Queen and Chris-Craft”. Click “Add gallery”. Click “Upload Images”. Click “Browse…”. Select file with MouseLeft. Select more files with Ctrl and MouseLeft. Click “OK”. Set the value of “in to” to the new gallery. Click “Upload images”.

If you want to insert  gallery when adding or editing a post, then click the “Add NextGEN Gallery” button. Set the value of “Select gallery” to the new gallery. Click “Insert”.

If you want to insert a picture from one of the galleries, then click the “Add NextGEN Gallery” button. Click “Picture”. Set the value of “Select picture” to the picture. Set the value of “Float” to either “Left”, “Center” or “Right”. Click “Insert”.

Open Source Days is the largest open source conference in Denmark with a low budget, high quality, dedicated crew from the open source community and 6 tracks of speakers of different topics.

This 12th Open Source Days conference will be held at IT University of Copenhagen on Friday 5th of March and Saturday 6th of March.

Open Source Days is a great chance to learn more about open source and to make friends and contacts within the open source community.

Graphical website visitor statistics (usage reports) is created on the basis of website log file analysis.

One way to do this, is to install Webalizer, which is an open source log file analysis utility, that can produce graphical website visitor statistics in HTML format, that can be viewed in a browser.

Webalizer can read standard log file formats, such as the one used by popular web servers, such as Apache.

This procedure will install Webalizer, analyse the log file of a website and produce the graphical website visitor statistics on a FreeBSD operating system with Apache.

Install Webalizer from the ports collection.

su -
cd /usr/ports/www/webalizer
make install

Analyse the log file and produce the detailed website visitor statistics with reverse lookup resolving of IP addresses of visitors for geographical statistics.

webalizer -o /usr/home/foobar/www/www.foobar.com/visitors/ -t www.foobar.com -D /usr/home/foobar/www/www.foobar.com/visitors/dnscache -N 10 /var/log/www/www.foobar.com/custom.log

Webalizer is highly configurable and works well with cron (crontab) automation. In order to configure Webalizer and its reports, read the manual.

Open Tech SmbA er det perfekte valg for den mellemstore og mindre virksomhed.

Drømmer du om, at starte egen virksomhed?

Open Tech SmbA har erfaring med iværksætteri, regnskab og jura – og er derfor også det perfekte valg for mindre virksomheder, der har behov for sparring, fleksibilitet, sikkerhed, stabilitet og tryghed, samt iværksættere, der med en forretningsplan i hånden drømmer om, at blive virksomhedsejere.

Open Tech SmbA har som et led i markedsføringen indgået en aftale om annoncering i magasinet Out & About, der er det største nyhedsmedie, der også henvender sig til homoseksuelle, biseksuelle og transseksuelle i Danmark.

Den første annonce, der er udarbejdet af Gobananas Design, er med i den trykte martsudgave af Out & About, nummer 87, der udkommer fredag den 26. februar.

Out & About udkommer såvel i online som i trykt udgave 12 gange årligt i et oplag på 10.000 eksemplarer, der læses af 32.000 læsere. Det er gratis og kan hentes på barer, restauranter, caféer og diskoteker i 15 større byer i Danmark og Sverige.

Per default, FreeBSD servers keep its system administrator informed about events from log files and results from periodic scripts. The information is regularly sent as electronic messages. However, the name of the sender of these electronic messages can be confusing, and, the recipient address might not be one, that is being read.

This procedure configures the name of the sender of these messages to a human friendly one and configures the recipient address to one, that is being read by a system administrator.

Configuring the name of the sender of the messages is done by updating the name of the root account in the password database. In the following example, the sender is changed to a combination of the name of the owner and the name of the server.

pw usermod root -c "Foobar Inc STARNIX"


Configuring the recipient address is done by editing the mail aliases configuration file, rebuild the database for mail aliases and test a restart of sendmail.

cd /etc/mail
nano -w aliases
root: sysadm@foobar.com
newaliases
make
make install
make restart

The Sony Handycam DCR-SX30 is a digital video recorder (DVR), that stores video clips in the MPEG program stream (PS, MPEG-PS) container format, that multiplexes one digital video channel and two digital audio channels. The video channel is MPEG-2 at a 16:9 wide screen frame resolution (dimension) of 720 x 576 pixels at a rate of 25 frames per second (fps). The digital audio channels is Dolby Digital (AC-3) at a sample rate of 48 kHz and 256 kbps. The DVR can record in three different qualities. These are named HQ, SP and LP. However, these all use the same aspect, resolution, frame rates and so on.

PS is used on stable media, such as a memory stick or a digital video disc (DVD). The related MPEG transport stream (TS, MPEG-TS) is used in unstable media, such as transmitting over the internet.

In this example, we will go through the proces of making movies from the video clips.

We turn the DVR on and attach the USB cable to the DVR and the computer. On the DVR, we select access to internal or external memory (memory stick) as necessary. The operating system Ubuntu presents the MPEG-PS video clips, which we transfer to a local directory. It is not recommended to edit video clips, that is stored on a network file system. This might result in problems – and the operating system behind the network file system might even backup the huge amounts of temporary files.

In our example, the video editing program Kino is not installed yet. We install it from Applications and Ubuntu Software Center.

We are now ready to edit our video clips from the DVR. However, we do not run Kino from Applications, Sound & Video and Kino. Instead, we right click the first MPEG-PS video clip and open it with Kino.

This is important because Kino reads aspect settings from the first frame. If no frame is available at run time, then it defaults to wrong aspect settings, that will result in black borders and wrong aspect settings. This is a bug, that has never been fixed. Also, we go to Edit, Preferences and look under Default. We confirm, that the aspect ratio is correct. If not, we change correct it and close Kino. This setting is only read on start. This seems to be another bug.

Kino offers to import and convert our video clip into raw digital video (DV, DV-DIF) format, which is used in video editing. The resolution and the frame rate of the video channel remains the same. The sample rate of the audio channels remains the same. We drag the MPEG-PS video clips into Kino.

We are now ready to edit the video clips. We go to Edit. The purpose of this step is to end up with a series of scenes. Use the drag, cut, copy, paste, split, join and timeline tools. Keep it as simple and as short as possible. Save the project at this point.

We can now add special effects as necessary. This is done in FX. There are two types of effects. One is scene effects. One is transition effects. The scene effects are applied (rendered) on one scene at a time. If transitions effects is needed, such as cross fading, then render these.

If titles are needed, then prepare a scene of reading time length and render these. We can recommend the following themes.

Theme  Font               Opa  Colour  O  Opa  Colour  Align   Fa
Pinky  Market Regular 56  200  F52AF5  1  202  451342  Center  25

If audio dubbing or mixing is needed, such as adding background music, then render these. If other video or audio filters are needed, then render these.

Kino is now ready to export the final movie. Save.

Now, we are almost done. We will now want to export our series of scenes into the final movie. This is done in Export. We select every 1 frame of all.

There are different movie formats available. You should choose the movie format, that suits your purpose. If your final movie is to be uploaded to YouTube or Facebook, you might want to choose Flash. This format is also a good choice for MPEG1 video clips with bad frame rates and aspect settings.

In our example, we choose the MPEG1 format. We open the MPEG tab. Set File to the filename of the final movie.

An example of a valid filename is “mpeg1″ or “flash-broadband”. Do not include a complex path, the home hyphen or a file type suffix in order to avoid weird errors, such as “Error writing to KINO/MJPEG audio – aborting”.

We set the File Format to Generic MPEG1. This format can be viewed by most users and does not require the DivX software. We click Export and Kino now writes the audio track (MP2), write the video track (MPV) and join (multiplex) them (MPG or MPEG). The multiplexer is MJPEG. The final movie is stored in the user home.

The following are other acceptable test results of a scene with a duration of 6,5 sec.

Encoding                    Time   MB  Pixels  fps   kHz kbps
Generic MPEG1               0:54  1,1  720x576  25  48,0  224
Generic MPEG2               0:29  2,6  720x576  25  48,0  224
Flash / Broadband           1:52  0,7  384x288  25  44,1   NA
DivX Single / Broadband     0:56  0,5  512x288  25  32,0   64
DivX Single / Medium        0:54  0,5  512x288  25  44,1  128
DivX Single / Best          1:20  4,3  720x576  25  48,0  192

We copy files as necessary and delete the temporary files.