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Voice be Herd

Maeyanie — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 06:01:23 +0000

One of my friends has opened a site, Voice be Herd, in support of her equine charity work.
She has some nice pictures and articles and a forum and stuff there.
If you’re interested in horses, go ahead and take a look.

Convert PeerGuardian to IPFilter.dat

Maeyanie — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 19:58:29 +0000

A handy companion to my last utility, this very simple program converts PeerGuardian blocklists to ipfilter.dat blocklists. This lets you use BLM to update eMule and such too.
It’s available as pg2ipfilter.c, but should be as easy to build as “make pg2ipfilter” on any real computer.

Blocklist Merging on Linux

Maeyanie — Sat, 22 Aug 2009 17:44:07 +0000

A little while back, I wrote a post about using iptables PeerGuardian blocklists efficiently. However, that program only uses a single list; it expects it to be pre-processed by another program.

Originally I used Bluetack’s Blocklist Manager. It’s quite good, but it’s Windows-only, slow, and eats gobs of memory. (Seriously, 100+ MB, and 24/7 if you want it to auto-update.)

Today, I got bored, and wrote my own as a tiny command-line program dubbed BLM.

It only merges the blocklists, though I included a couple of scripts to show downloading them with wget automagically too. Also, it’s designed to output the merged list in PeerGuardian format to stdout, which works very nicely with my pg2ipset utility from that post I linked above.

My suggestion is to make a file with a bunch of URLs of blocklists in .gz format (the .tar.bz2 includes a list of the Bluetack ones) then add a script something like this to your crontab or /etc/cron.daily:
#!/bin/bash cd /opt/blocklist wget --timestamping `grep -v ^# urls.txt` zcat *.gz | ./blm | ./pg2ipset | ipset -R

Modifying this to your personal paths and needs, as always.

Microsoft’s “Browser for the Better”

Maeyanie — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 14:16:13 +0000

As many of you probably already know, Microsoft is doing a “Browser for the Better” campaign to promote IE8.

Basically, for every download of IE8 from their BftB site, Microsoft will donate money for 8 meals to food banks.

Note that they say “for every download,” not “for every unique download” or “for every installation.” Their mistake.

To, ah… “help” with their promotion, I would encourage people to run the following scriptlet on Linux/UNIX systems, and Windows systems with Cygwin installed:
for (( x=0; $x < 1000; x++ )) do curl -L http://view.atdmt.com/action/dlXP > /dev/null sleep 60 done

This will download the browser from the site 1000 times (tweak the 1000 to your preference), dumping the downloaded data to /dev/null, and pausing 1 minute between each. I’m not trying to encourage DDoSing them here.

Note that the file is 20.9 MB, so 1000 downloads will eat a bit over 20 GB of bandwidth in under a day. If you have a low monthly cap, this might not be for you.

OneSwarm Community Feeds

Maeyanie — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 19:03:36 +0000

In the latest development release of OneSwarm (version 0.6.2) they added another way to find peers: community feeds. Basically, a central server takes public key registries and hands out the few “nearest” peers to you (based on binary search of public keys).

The sample community server is in Java only. My VDS is a bit short on memory to be running random Java programs, so I took a little time and hacked together a simple PHP one. It doesn’t (yet) support some of the important features of the mainline one, like registration DoS protection or IP limits, but you can get the source under GPL if anyone wants it.