Field notes and occasional musings by Peter on stuff that happens, from a free software perspective, mainly OpenBSD, FreeBSD.
© 2026 Peter N. M. Hansteen A website designed to appeal to humans' vanity serves to reveal how the large language models degrade by ingesting each others' unverified output In early July 2026, I was made aware of the website intheweights.com via a fediverse post. The idea is simple, and appeals to human vanity: You type in your name, and the site checks the various large language models for…
© 2026 Peter N. M. Hansteen The European Union Cyber Resilience Act (CRA) and its various international analogs are entering fully into force during 2026 and 2027, with new legal requirements that some have found to be perilous or challenging to software developers and possibly for open source developers in particular. Some have predicted this legislation will be the end of open source…
Image credit: the OpenSMTPD project © 2026 Peter N. M. Hansteen The SMTP mail server for the 21st century and onwards is OpenSMTPD , which is developed as an integral part of OpenBSD , but available in a portable variety too. It was one of those things that I had fully intended to do years ago, but I only got around to actually doing once there was a definite deadline to get it done. The time…
© 2005, 2026 Peter N. M. Hansteen Historical note: We implemented the Carrier Pigeon Internet Protocol, RFC1149 , with the full scale test performed on April 28, 2001. The following are my lightly edited notes for a talk I gave to the Adelaide Unix user group in October 2005 on the way to participating in the AUUG 2005 conference in Sydney with the first PF tutorial, which in turn is a…
© 2026 Peter N. M. Hansteen The long wait is over. Fresh copies of The Book of PF, 4th Edition arrived here today. Which means: I'll bring some to upcoming conferences! When the email message with package tracking information turned up, I thought at first that this was yet another dirty, scammy, spammy phishing thing. Note: This piece is also available with trackers but nicer formatting here…
© 2026 Peter N. M. Hansteen We are now halfway through the nineteenth year of greytrapping, still tracking and collecting from the wealth of imbecility out there My logs tell me that in early September of 2025, I added the following entries to the list of spamtraps (or raw version ) !!!!!!!!der!rest!ist!muell!@bsdly.net !!!!!!!!el!resto!es!basura!@bsdly.net…
© 2026 Peter N. M. Hansteen So it happened again. A major mail provider proved that they do not, in fact, understand how modern email works. I've been running mail services for longer than I care to remember. It started out back when I was running a small business on the edge of tech, mainly dealing with software localization and documentation writing. Note: This piece is also available with…
© 2025 Peter N. M. Hansteen A software vendor was using SMTP spamware to send license keys customers had paid thousands for. A measured rant was in order, and turned out to be quite enlightening. While looking through directories of old material, I stumbled upon what was most likely the main part of a complaint sent to a software vendor for failing to deliver a license key file the company I…
© 2025 Peter N. M. Hansteen Norway is digital to a fault. That is why attempting to buy the ticket for a bus ride can reveal a cascade of user experience ( UX ) failures. Most days, I either take a half hour stroll to get to my main customer's offices, or work from home. But occasionally, I need to visit my employer's offices. On those days, I take the bus for an easy 20-ish minutes ride.…
© 2025, 2026 Peter N. M. Hansteen What is BSD? It's where the Internet comes from! Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) is a family of computer operating systems derived from the software developed at the University of California at Berkeley from the late 1970s through the early 1990s. You may or may not be aware that the BSD code still powers a lot of things, and we meet up regularly for…
© 2025 Peter N. M. Hansteen On December 12 2027, it's already too late. The day before, the European Union Cyber Resilience Act (CRA) will have fully entered into force. On December 11 2027, the Cyber Resilience Act is fully in force in the European Union member states and associated countries and territories. From that date onward, suppliers of any " product with digital elements " are…
© 2025 Peter N. M. Hansteen With the imaginary friends , also known as spamtraps , now more numerous than the inhabitants of their virtual landlord's home country, a greytrapping retrospective is in order. Friends, it finally happened. On August 7th, 2025 , the number of spamtraps intended to woo the unwary spammer rolled past the number of inhabitants in my home country of Norway, as tallied…
© 2025 Peter N. M. Hansteen A chance followup to an old geek joke reveals how AI creates myths based on severely limited historical inputs Sometimes LinkedIn discussions run much like informal office banter. Earlier this week, Niall Murphy posted there, saying Best joke hostnames? I'll go first: "switchen" - network equipment close to the fridge "madwoman" - storage server somewhere up high…
© 2024 Peter N. M. Hansteen (2024-12-06) Beware of robots generating your references. They could very well take it upon themselves to lie on your behalf. Testing in 2023, I observed a whopping 25% truth in the result. What is the truth rating in 2024? Note: This is a field note that was originally intended as a fediverse (mastodon) post, but the text would have overflowed into a thread and…
© 2025 Peter N. M. Hansteen Long rumored and eagerly anticipated by some, the fourth edition of The Book of PF is now available for preorder This week it was finally time to announce, to the fediverse and to mailing lists , that there is a new edition of The Book of PF in the works, and preordering is now enabled. Note: This piece is also available with trackers but nicer formatting here .…
© 2025 Peter N. M. Hansteen How long does data on misbehaving hosts on the Internet stay relevant in an IP Address Reputation context? My main presence on the Internet also serves, for all practical purposes, as a honeypot , and is seen as mainly that by what appears to be a small but significant number of people who run IP Reputation services (yes, link to SpamHaus because apparently…
© 2025 Peter N. M. Hansteen A collection of pointers to things I have written and that I think may be of value to you too, my fellow geek friend I was recently (late May of 2025) asked to provide a list of things I have written over the years that would be suited to offer useful insights to someone not familiar with my work or the field(s) I cover. In addition to the book I wrote and have…
© 2025 Peter N. M. Hansteen A good tutorial should sound to passersby much like an intense but amicable discussion between colleagues. In a little over a month, I'll be heading out to Ottawa to attend BSDCan 2025 , to help run the conference and to give this year's Network Management with the OpenBSD Packet Filter Toolset tutorial, with my co-presenters Max Stucchi and Tom Smyth . I've been a…
© 2025 Peter N. M. Hansteen The system you develop and maintain does not exist in isolation. Providing SBOMs for our work is our way to show we care. Software is a relatively recent phenomenon. For a long time, you could credibly say most of its existence, software was poorly understood by society and industry at large. There was a time -- and I am old enough to remember that time -- when…
© 2025 Peter N. M. Hansteen Already somewhat blasé from life in the honeypots, yours truly registers an even more bizarre level of events after a some routine logs spelunking If you're reading this soon after the piece is published, 2025 is a fresh new year, and I would like to wish you all the best for the year ahead. Then I want to relate what happened here (or rather at the Internet facing…
© 2024 Peter N. M. Hansteen Mange av de såkalte opplæringsprogrammene om phishing og annet med epost er tilnærmet ren støy, og det finnes mer produktive tilnærminger. Mange av de såkalte opplæringsprogrammene om phishing og annet med epost er tilnærmet ren støy, og hele konseptet har etter mitt hode totalt kontraproduktiv tenking som utgangspunkt. Merk: Denne artikkelen er også tilgjengelig…
© 2024-2026 Peter N. M. Hansteen Despite some persistent rumors, installing OpenBSD is both quick and easy on most not too exotic hardware. But once the thing is installed, what is daily life with the most secure free operating system like? Welcome to OpenBSD ! I assume you are reading this as a new user who has just completed installing the system. If you are more experienced with the system…
A commendable attack data dump, lightly analyzed. In the morning hours (CEST) of April 17, 2024, I found in my social media stream a reference to an Ars Technica article titled UNDER SIEGE — Attackers are pummeling networks around the world with millions of login attempts . NOTE: A version with nicer formatting but trackers is available here . --> NOTE: A version without trackers but…
© 2024 Peter N. M. Hansteen Making life harder for spammers does not necessarily require a lot of effort, if done correctly. Here are a few suggestions for how to use your spamd(8) on an OpenBSD or FreeBSD system that require minimal input but can yield noticeable gains. Doing your bit to protect your own users and others agains scams, phising or other undesirable mail activity is good…
© 2024 Peter Hansteen If you want to hurt spammers, you can get away with maintaining a list of domains you want to receive mail for in your spamd.alloweddomains . I have at times written at length about spam countermeasures, and I must take responsibility for sometimes going into too much detail about options and nuances that are on offer if you enjoy fighting back at the spammers and…