One of those routine system management tasks these days ischecking to make sure that I'm up to date on vendor security releasesand other updates. And when I'm not up to date, I generally want toknow what's out of date; being out of date on diff is one thing,being out of date on a kernel or glibc is quite another. (For astart, I probably want to test the kernel a bit more before pushing itinto our local update queue.)

Since

Important update : the buggy RPMs have been superseded. See the end.

You may remember back to FC4FirstIrritations , where I talked aboutseveral X problems. Well, Red Hat managed to outdo itself recently, aswe discovered the hard way: their latest update to the xorg-x11 packages, 6.8.2-37.FC4.48.1 (released September 16th or so) nowcauses almost all of our workstations to explode.

Not literally exploded, but

Here's an extreme example of import and namespace trickery, drawnfrom the standard Python ftplib module:

try:  import SOCKS  socket = SOCKS  del SOCKS  from socket import getfqdn  socket.getfqdn = getfqdn  del getfqdnexcept ImportError:  import socket

(linebreaks added for clarity)

Modules are objects in Python, so a module's name binding can bemanipulated like anything else. This leads to the two things that ftplib is doing here.

First, the ftplib module would like to use the SOCKS module if itexists and otherwise

Vernon Schryver, in news.admin.net-abuse.email:

The buck always stops or is at least duplicated at the SMTP client.It does not matter to rational spam targets whether the operators ofa spam relay are paid for their services or forward spam as acharity.

(From Message-ID ,and let's hope that link stays working.)