Lawrence Lessig and Robert W. McChesney’s op-ed piece on net neutrality, No Tolls on The Internet, is making the rounds. But for some reason, every time I look at the title, I keep misreading it as “No Trolls on The Internet.”
I guess the internet/troll combination is just too ingrained in my brain…
You’ve probably heard by now that AOL and Yahoo are preparing a system by which large-volume email senders can pay to get their mail sent on to subscribers. You probably haven’t heard that it’s not just pay-to-send so much as it’s pay-to-get-accredited. Senders pay a company called Goodmail to say “we won’t send spam,” Goodmail checks them out, and Yahoo and AOL use Goodmail to bypass their regular spam filters.
This, of course, hasn’t stopped a flood of knee-jerk reactions. (via Spamroll)
What’s funny is that this conundrum has been almost exactly like the controversy two years ago over Microsoft choosing Bonded Sender as an accreditation service/whitelist for Hotmail—knee jerking and all.
Back then I wrote the following article and never got around to posting it. Thanks to AOL, it’s finally topical again. Sadly, I haven’t had to change much to bring it up to date. Continue reading
Here’s a piece of friendly advice from a mail server admin to companies that interact with subscribers and customers via email:
Pick one domain name for your business. Just one. Don’t use any other domains in your emails, even if you want to keep order confirmations separate from promotions. If you contract out for some other company to send out a newsletter or survey to your customers, insist that they send it out using your own domain name. If you’re using DomainKeys or SPF, make sure they’re authorized or send it yourself. And don’t even think of making the links through redirection scripts, even if you really want to track which subscribers are clicking.
Why?
Two words: Spam and fraud. Continue reading
I love carving jack-o-lanterns. These days, though, I don’t have much motivation to do one unless there’s a prize involved. So when I saw that someone on Puzzle Pirates was holding a contest for piratey-themed pumpkin carving, I jumped on it. This is my rendition of the navigation puzzle from the game, and my first-ever attempt at a projector pumpkin. I think it looks okay.
The lit picture is pretty dark, but it had to be or the “Arrr!” on the wall wouldn’t show up.
Suggestions for next year, or even out-of-season carvings for this year, are being taken……
The SANS Internet Storm center, which has found itself dealing with the fallout on the Internet from a quite literal storm, is reporting that a vulnerability in Dameware (apparently a remote admin system for Windows) is being exploited. Ordinarily the solution would be to tell people to download the update… but the Dameware website is in New Orleans. Fortunately, the UK-based site is up.
Not everyone in New Orleans has gone offline. Netcraft reports that domain registrar DirectNIC has held on through Katrina and its aftermath. Being located 11 floors up in an area that hasn’t flooded yet probably helps. That, and having three weeks’ worth of backup power.
It occurred to me today that if you lay out the three major players in computer operating systems and the three major players in web browsers, the results track remarkably well.
It breaks down, of course. Traditional UNIX is missing from the OS wars, though it provides a nice analogy to Netscape for Firefox. The battle lines don’t quite track either, since the previous wars were Windows vs. Mac and IE vs. Netscape. And Safari’s missing entirely. But it’s interesting to see the same three roles in play.
I got into work this morning to find my desk’s keyboard and KVM switch non-responsive. The only way to reset the switch was to turn it off and back on, which meant disconnecting all the keyboard and mouse cables. (A KVM switch doesn’t need much power, so many of them just draw power from the computer, the same way an actual keyboard or mouse would.) It switched immediately to the Linux box, which was happily displaying its screen saver, so I switched back to the Windows box where it had been… and it got stuck again.
OK, so the Windows box had crashed. It’s been doing that lately, though usually I actually get a blue screen with the dreaded IRQL_NOT_LESS_THAN_OR_EQUAL, which could mean anything from a driver conflict to failing hardware. I haven’t taken the time to track it down, but maybe I should. I rebooted the Windows box, which seems fine for the moment, though there’s no sign of the crash—or even my forced reboot—in the system log.
Then I switched over to the Linux box, and the mouse wasn’t responding. When the mouse gets messed up, sometimes it’s enough to switch out of X into text mode and back. No luck. Sometimes closing X entirely and starting it again is enough. Not this time. I actually had to reboot the Linux box to get my mouse back. That really annoyed me.
So here are three things that went wrong.
It’s #2 and #3 that bug me the most. Maybe it’s the man-bites-dog effect (I expect Windows to crash and/or require frequent reboots, so it’s more annoying when Linux does it), or maybe it’s just the fact that they’re simple error-recovery issues. I mean, seriously, unplugging the mouse for a few seconds makes it unusable?
Update: I forgot to check the second Windows box on the switch. It also had stopped responding to the mouse even after I reset the KVM switch. I’m beginning to think that problem #3 was in the switch itself, not the Linux mouse driver, since the non-crashed Windows box had the exact same problem.
