Stéphane Lee

After watching the ScobleShow on Smugmug, I decided to give it a try. My original intent is to pay for a Smugmug subscription and let my Flickr account die. In the interview, they showed how they auto-resize the picture. You get a larger picture if you have a larger screen. If you resize your browser window, the picture is resized automatically. It’s a pretty neat feature. They also have video for premium accounts. The videos are re-encoded in various formats and are streamed to the appropriate format (iphone, wide screen…).

Unfortunately, this is not enough. I uploaded some pictures in bulk (original format, unsorted). The Canon camera software downloads the pictures in folders by date. If the picture is taken on January 7th, 2008, it will automatically create a 2008_01_07 folder. I’ve uploaded a couple of these folders using Send to SmugMug tool. You right-click on a folder and you have an option to send to SmugMug in the contextual menu. This software is pretty cool and is better that the Flickr Uploadr.

The problem starts when I wanted to reorganize the photos. I wanted to create galleries, move pictures around easily, put a title and description on the pictures and galleries in a quick and easy manner. To delete or move a photo for example, you will have to choose an action in a drop-down list. There is also a ‘bulk’ option. Since you are trying to sort and organize your photos, the bulk option is not very useful. There are far too many clicks before things get done. If you have used the Flickr Organizer once, you will see what I mean. With Flickr, you drag and drop the pictures, create collections (groups of albums), click on a picture to edit its description… Click once on the title to edit and then press Enter to finish (no second click necessary).

You are invited to give Smugmug a try. It’s free for 14 days. You get 50% off the regular price if you put ‘flickr‘ as the coupon code. For me, at the end of the day, Flickr remains a better product and I renewed my pro account.

The tracker has been updated from scratch (fresh install). It is now using Wordpress 2.3.x. The comment list is not working yet on the sidebar. I’ll fix it asap.

This Week in Tech: the grandmother of all tech podcast. Leo and John C make a good pair. It’s nice to hear (always) opposing views. The recent episodes with Jason Brooklyn Gangtsa-style Calacanis were full of insight. He is a great guest.

Infected: Martin Sargent, the Internet Superstar wannabe, has great interview skills and has crazy websites to show us. It’s like Unscrewed but not exactly the same. The same sense of humour is here.

Cranky Geeks: Sebastian Rupley is co-host and provides insightful remarks.

What are your top podcasts?

I must acknowledge that the best anti-spam tool is Spamhaus (not SpamAssassin). They maintain a blacklist of spamming and rogue IP addresses. The listing and delisting are done promptly in a very professional manner. The listing decision and spam proofs are available on their website. If an IP address is blacklisted by Spamhaus, you can be 100% sure that it is spamming (voluntarily or unvoluntarily). Spamhaus can block 90% of the spam without any content check. I trust the Barracuda firewall to do the rest of the job.

It is very easy, these days, to launch a DDOS attack on a server or website. Thousands of computers can be controlled centrally by one person. The “zombies” get their orders usually through an IRC chat channel.

There are basically two types of denial of service attack:

1. UDP Flood

Fake UDP packets are sent to the victim server IP in order to flood its connection. You can block the packets on your firewall but the packets have already arrived and are congesting your uplink. If the attacker has more bandwidth than you, you cannot do much except contacting your uplink provider for help and who has more bandwidth to cope with the attack.

2. TCP Syn flood

The server gets too many fake syn requests (that are not getting established/acknowledged) and has no room to handle other legitimate requests. Activating syn cookies can help mitigate the attack but it is generally not enough. The bandwidth required to accomplish this attack is much less.

Third-party firewalls can mitigate the syn flood. You can even put some reverse proxies in front of your web server that will receive the syn requests. To mitigate a UDP flood, you simply have to have a bigger pipe that the attacker. It is not impossible to have a multi-gigabit attack. Even if you have a 1 Gbps uplink, you’re hosed. Your uplink provider cannot help you much if the source IP addresses are faked and random.

If you missed the news about the attack on Estonia, you can read the detailed report on Wired.