Adam Fields (weblog)

The system has cost around $15 billion, and has caught about 1000 criminals. No terrorists, all immigration violations and common criminals.

http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/01/the_failure_of_1.html

This estimate doesn’t include lost tourism revenue, academic implications of detaining foreign students or professors, or a count of how many of those criminals might have been caught anyway.

Tags: US-VISIT, security, immigration, government

There are plenty of servers out there that, if they just disappear from the internet, not much bad happens. They include known ad server, spam, and spyware sites. The fine folks at mvps.org maintain a good list, which is up to about 10,000 entries now. Since I couldn’t figure out how to get privoxy to honor the local hosts file when doing DNS lookups, I wrote a little ruby script to fetch that file, break it down, and output a privoxy block list.

I chose ruby, because I’ve been working with it lately, and I really really like it. I find it incredibly easy to write, read, and work with.

If you’re a ruby developer, improvements of all kinds are welcomed. Please feel free to comment and discuss ways I could have made this more ruby-ish. Also, I haven’t quite grokked what the right approach is for ruby error/exception handling. Opinions on where checks should go are welcomed. For example, the whole thing is wrapped in a conditional block of opening the file. Do I need to handle any exception conditions, or is that all just taken care of properly?

#!/usr/bin/ruby

require 'open-uri'

hosts = Array.new
header = 1

open('http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/hosts.txt') do |file|
  file.each_line() do |line|
    # skip if still in header
    header = 0 if line =~ /^#start/
      next if header == 1
    # skip comments
    next if line =~ /^\s*#/

    # add the hostname to an array
    hosts < < line.split[1] #(sorry, no space between << - wordpress keeps inserting one for some reason.)
  end

  # write the output file
  outfile = open('privoxy_user_actions.txt', "w")
  outfile.puts "{ +block }" + "\n"
  hosts.each do |host|
    outfile.puts host + "\n"
  end
  outfile.close
end

Tags: ruby, privoxy, hosts, privacy