If you follow the "exploited to cause a crash..." link in the initial Slashdot item, you will see that a fix to Acrobat Reader 9 will be available by this coming Monday. You will also see that, unless you disable Protected View in Acrobat Reader 10, you are not vulnerable and thus can wait a month.
Forty years ago, a major software system for operating unmanned space satellites for the U.S. Air Force was written in a language called JOVIAL J4. The JOVIAL J4 compiler was itself written in JOVIAL J4.
Originally intended for a lifetime of 10-15 years, the system was actually in use for 20 years.
The cost of piracy in Canada was grossly overstated in an attempt to impose draconian controls on the transport of music. The Canadian Intellectual Property Council (an agency of the Canadian Chamber of Commerce) actually proposed that travelers entering the country have their luggage searched for counterfeit recordings.
On investigation,it was discovered that the Council based its estimated cost of piracy on data circulating in the U.S. The U.S. costs were contained in various reports from the FBI and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). However, neither agency could substantiate the data. Their estimates of the costs of piracy turned out to be "brain farts" with no real substance.
I downloaded Bounce Spam quite a few years ago. I might have been still using Windows 95 at the time. I use it now with Windows XP. This is freeware by Albert Yale. A Google search on "Albert Yale" and "bounce" will result in several download sites.
I do NOT use Bounce Spam for actual spam for two reasons. First of all, the From or Reply-to address in spam is often the address of some unfortunate innocent person; I do not want to flood such individuals with my faked bounce message. Then, my ISP has very effective anti-spam controls on its POP incoming E-mail server.
I use Bounce Spam to return messages to foul individuals who are angry about what they read on my Web site. Those individuals do not realize they can disagree without being disagreeable. They are exceptionally disagreeable.
Per a discussion in the comp.infosystems.www.authoring.html newsgroup, not all of HTML5 is supported in Kindle. See the Subject "HTML5 on Kindle - Not really html5?" at news:comp.infosystems.www.authoring.html.
I just now ran a test on the E-mail domains used by my two children and my brother. Messages from each use the same address on the Return-Path: and From: header lines. I did a DNS lookup on each address's domain to get an IP address. I then did a reverse DNS lookup on each IP address. My conclusion is that reverse DNS is not an acceptable filter against spam.
Here are the results of my test:
My daughter: shaw.ca > 204.209.208.8 > "no data record" error message Using reverse DNS lookup as a spam filter would thus block messages from my daughter.
My son: yahoo.com > 72.30.2.43 > ir1.fp.vip.sk1.yahoo.com
> 98.137.149.56 > ir1.fp.vip.sp2.yahoo.com
> 98.139.180.149 > ir1.fp.vip.bf1.yahoo.com
> 209.191.122.70 > ir1.fp.vip.mud.yahoo.com
> 67.195.160.76 > ir1.fp.vip.ac4.yahoo.com The yahoo.com domain resolved to five distinct IP addresses, each of which then resolved to a unique domain that ended with ".yahoo.com". Using reverse DNS lookup as a spam filter would thus not block messages from my son unless an exact match were used.
My brother: aol.com > 205.188.101.58 > hostheader-dtc02.evip.aol.com
> 207.200.74.38 > hostheader-dtc02.evip.aol.com
> 64.12.79.57 > open.aim.com
> 64.12.89.186 > nullsoftwinamp.com
> 205.188.100.58 > open.aim.net The aol.com domain resolved to five distinct IP addresses, each of which then resolved to a domain (not necessarily unique) that had several aliases (listed below). Two of those domains ended with ".aol.com"; each of the other three domains had at least one alias ending with ".aol.com". Using reverse DNS lookup as a spam filter might block messages from my son if an exact match were used or if alias domains were not considered.
Aliases found during reverse DNS lookup on AOL's IP addresses:
hostheader-dtc02.evip.aol.com aliases (for two IP addresses): ambassadoroflifestream.com, backup.aol.com, mqvibe.com, aolblog.com, aol4life.com, whatisaol.com, nullsoftwinamp.com
Phase 1 checks the domain from which the E-mail message was sent. If a DNS lookup indicates that no such domain has been registered, the message is trashed. This phase resulted in a very significant reduction in spam, both spam caught in Phase 2 and spam reaching my inbox.
Phase 2 uses a scored filtering system. It gives me the ability to add filters with my own scores. Any message caught in this phase is routed into a spam file on my ISP's server. I can review the messages in that spam file, marking some for acceptance into my inbox and some for deletion. In that review, I can also instruct the ISP's basic filter to "learn" what is really spam after a false negative or really not spam after a false positive.
Note well that I CAN REVIEW ANY MESSAGE THAT HAS BEEN MARKED AS SPAM in Phase 2. No matter how spam is detected, this is most important; the human element in determining spam is absolutely required. On the other hand, there is no human element in Phase 1, which does not perturb me. After all, I cannot reply to a message from a non-existent domain or or send a new message to it; I really do not want to receive any message that prevents an exchange of messages.
In the early 1960s, the Biostatistics Unit of the School of Medicine at UCLA developed BiMed (or was it BiMd). This was a package of statistical analysis applications that ran on a main-frame computer before the advent of desktop computers, the Internet, or client-server systems. It was widely requested by medical and non-medical researchers, not only at universities but also at various corporations. BiMed went through several versions. No, I don't know whether BiMed still exists today.
MetaCrawler was originally developed in 1994 at the University of Washington by then graduate student Erik Selberg and Associate Professor Oren Etzioni. This is a meta-search engine that sends queries to other seach engines. If you want to search Google, Yahoo!, Bing, and a few others all at once, your query at MetaCrawler uses all those. As with other software developed in universities, MetaCrawler is now owned by a for-profit company. Nevertheless, I still use it. It's at http://www.metacrawler.com./
It's not too hard to defeat Facebook cookies and cookies from other Web sites, at least if your browser is Firefox or SeaMonkey (the latter being the browser I use). After editing my set of cookies to the minimum that I feel to be appropriate, I copied my cookies.txt file to create the file cookies.txt.backup. Then, I created a script that I used to launch SeaMonkey. However, the script first deleted my cookies.txt file and then copied the cookies.txt.backup file to create a new cookies.txt file.
When Mozilla changed from using ASCII file cookies.txt for cookies to an SQLite database in file cookies.sqlite (implemented in both Firefox and SeaMonkey), I merely changed my script. Again, after I used SeaMonkey to edit my cookies to a minimum, I then copied cookies.sqlite to create cookies.sqlite-backup. Now my script deletes cookies.sqlite and then copies cookies.sqlite-backup to make a new cookies.sqlite, all before launching SeaMonkey.
All this allows me to accept persistent cookies and treat them as session-only cookies. Yes, I could merely set the preference for treating all cookies as session-only. However, sometimes I want to add a new persistent cookie to cookies.sqlite-backup or I need to allow a persistent cookie to be updated (especially when it is about to expire).
For those few (like me) who use SeaMonkey with "Advertise Firefox compatibility" disabled, the download site for Flash is broken. You wind up in a loop without ever getting the download. Either enable "Advertise Firefox compatibility" or spoof Firefox in some other way. Then, before trying the download site, remove all Adobe cookies. Yes, it's another case of invalid UA sniffing.
When you finally download, you get a stub installer, not a complete installer. This is true for everyone, including users of IE and Firefox. To download the complete installer, see http://forums.adobe.com/thread/889580?tstart=0.
I'm not sure why I pursued this so vigorously. Normally, I browse the Web with Flash disabled.
My LAN consists of two PCs, mine and my wife's. We are networked through a Netgear router that also connects us to a cable modem for broadband Internet. We have no network drive as such, merely having access to selected parts of each other's hard drives.
I do the backups for both of us, using the Windows XP backup tool. The backups reside on our own hard drives for use in restoring files we might have deleted or incorrectly updated.
I transfer copies of my wife's backups to my own hard drive. I use a freeware version of PGP to encrypt and digitally sign the backup files, both mine and my wife's. I then use Eraser to destroy the unencrypted copies of my wife's backups on my hard drive since such copies remain on her PC. Finally, I move the encrypted backups to a portable hard drive that I normally keep remote from the PCs.
In case a disaster happens to our PCs, copies of my PGP public and private keys and their passphrases are stored in a safe deposit box at a bank.
It appears that Google and Mozilla are attempting to follow this same pattern with their frequent, rapid-release versions of browsers and related applications. Firefox 4.0 was released by Mozilla on 22 March of this year. Approximately 14 weeks later (on 21 June), Firefox 5.0 was released; and all support -- even fixes for security vulnerabilities -- ceased for Firefox 4.0. Then, 8 weeks later (on 16 August), Firefox 6.0 was released; and all support ceased for Firefox 5.0.
All this seems to be wreaking havoc with businesses and organizations that deployed Firefox as their internal standard browser. System administrators are having difficulty keeping up with the changes.
Yes, this was all reported earlier in Slashdot. Now we have a name for it: Quick Death. And the products do not even have to fail.
Evil #5 includes domain name servers (DNSs) that redirect you to a commercial site when you have requested a non-existent domain. My ISP is Road Runner, whose DNSs do this.
I use GRC's DNS Benchmark to find publicly-accessible DNSs that do not do this, that have quick responses, and that have low error rates. I then change my Internet settings to use those DNSs. I rerun DNS Benchmark about once or twice each month, updating which DNSs I use. These reruns are necessary because the quality of DNSs -- timing and error rates -- is not constant; it varies with time.
If you have been proficient in at least 3 programming languages, you are never too old to learn another one. You already know how languages are the same and how they differ.
I started with Fortran II, Fortran IV, and the original BASIC. At the same time, I learned assembly languages for the IBM 7090/7094 and the IBM 1401. (That was in the early 1960s, before Noah and the Flood.) Later, I learned JOVIAL 4 and then REXX. In my 50s, I taught myself UNIX (both C and Korn). When I finally bought myself a PC (at age 55 after some 33 years as a programmer and software test engineer), I taught myself DOS, how to create Word and Excel macros, and how to create Web pages with hand-coded HTML and CSS. I still do DOS scripts for Windows XP; and I now have well over 300 Web pages on my site, some of which use UNIX scripts as server-side includes.
The only languages in which I had formal classes were COBOL and Pascal. I used COBOL for a few months, but that was a project to convert a legacy main-frame system in COBOL into a client-server system in C++. I never used Pascal.
This suggestion -- promptly killing someone's E-mail account without giving them time to defend themselves -- is a recipe for denial of service. All I have to do is file a complaint against someone I don't like. Zap. They have no E-mail. I don't have to prove my complaint is valid.
Hmm. Someone running a botnet could quickly eliminate all E-mail for a nation. Cyberwar!!
My daughter lives in Canada. To keep current with what is happening where she lives, I read several Canadian newspapers online daily. I went to their Web sites after reading this Slashdot article and could not find a single newspaper article about it. A Yahoo news search turned up only one Canadian item.
I sent my daughter an E-mail about this. Since she was an investigative reporter before becoming an educator, she generally keeps up with all the news. She replied: "This is the first I've heard of this. Why would they need to black out research on what's harming the salmon stocks? Is it linked to national security?"
I think it's more political security -- Prime Minister Harper staying in office -- than national security.
I went to the link [http://www.truth-out.org/new-court-filing-reveals-how-2004-ohio-presidential-election-was-hacked/1311603015] in the article. It froze my PC. I had to disable JavaScript in order to regain control.
I live in southern California. My electrical service is Southern California Edison (SoCalEd), which can have outages any time of the year.
My broadband service is through Time Warner Cable TV. When SoCalEd fails, Time Warner's amplifiers die, leaving me with no Internet, no VOIP, and (if I had it) no Time Warner phone service.
I don't have a cell phone, but my wife does. When SoCalEd fails, the local cell towers die.
However, my phone service is land-line (PSTN) through AT&T. This phone service is self-powered by AT&T and is not dependent on local power from SoCalEd. Only with land-line phone service can I call SoCalEd to report an outage. More important, if SoCalEd fails, my land-line service becomes the only way to call 911 for emergency services (police, fire, paramedics).
I got my BA degree in mathematics in 1964, before computer science was a generally recognized subject for degrees. I loaded up on numerical analysis classes since they presented the kinds of mathematics applicable to computers. I also took two years of symbolic logic (part of the philosophy curriculum) because I thought it might have some application to programming and a year of accounting (business curriculum) because I knew much of future use of computers would be in business applications. I did not know it at the time, but my English and public speaking classes meant that I was prepared to write literate, readable test procedures and user manuals and to make presentations in front of customers. By taking literature, history, art appreciation, and music appreciation classes, I ensured I would not be merely a geek or nerd (terms not yet in use at the time).
In the end, I got an excellent job as a computer test engineer. It was not long before I was supervising 5-10 other testers. When I hired a new tester, however, I tried to avoid hiring anyone with a computer science degree. I found that those with CS degrees were more interested in computers as the central object of their studies than as a tool to accomplish a task.
I am now very comfortably retired after a computer career of 40+ years. I retired before I was old enough for Social Security, retiring when I wanted to retire (not when my employer wanted to retire me). Part of the reason I am not bored with retirement was that my university education gave me a broad enough view of life and the world to have interests beyond my career. Part of the reason I was able to afford retirement was that my university education gave me the ability to understand financial statements and investment strategies.
A university education implies an education that is universal and not narrowly focused. Not everyone benefits from a university education. Those who could benefit but do not partake might find themselves as drudges, earning a living without having a life.
Why not PGP (free for non-commercial use) or Gnu Privacy Guard (GPG, free). Both use the OpenPGP method and are interoperable with each other. While neither is open source, the source code for both are supposed to be available to anyone who wants to check the integrity of either application (e.g., lack of back doors).
A decision by a U.S. District Court is not even binding within the same jurisdiction of that court. Yes, other District Court judges might give the decision some weight; but they are not required to do so.
Only when the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upholds a decision from a District Court in that circuit does the decision become binding on all the District Courts in that circuit. Even then, the decision is not binding in other circuits. To be binding throughout the U.S. requires a decision from the U.S. Supreme Court.
Even after the Supreme Court decides, similar cases may arise in which Circuit Court judges conclude the Supreme Court was wrong. Then the process starts all over again until the Supreme Court either upholds its prior decision (most likely result) or overturns its own prior decision (rare but not unknown). For the latter case, look at how long (about a half century) it took the Supreme Court to overturn its prior decision that "separate but equal" segregation was legal for public schools. Attempts to get the Supreme Court to overturn Roe vs Wade (abortion) have been unending for decades.
Conclusion: Living in California, I'm not yet worried about a ruling by a District Court in Maine on this issue.
If the E-mail is about non-delivery of a purchase or anything else that might require PayPal to refund money, I think some attention would be paid to my letter. After all, it's money honey.
If I started receiving such E-mail messages from companies, the first thing I would do would be to check my credit reports to make sure I am not a victim of identity theft. If the reports are clear, I would trash the messages.
However, it the messages continue to be sent by the same company, I would do some on-line research and determine the postal address of the company's headquarters and the name of the company's CEO. I would mail a postal letter to the CEO with a printout of the message -- with all headers -- demanding the company stop annoying me. I would clearly point out that the messages are going to the wrong E-mail address. Also, if the message was about a past-due bill that someone else owes, my letter would suggest that I might sue for harassment.
"Pop" music is as ephemeral as a mayfly -- top 10 today and forgotten tomorrow. Listen instead to classical music. While recent performances might be under copyright, the music itself is no longer protected. By "classical music", I mean not only Bach and Beethoven but also music that was popular 50-100 years ago and is still popular. Streaming broadcasts of such music over the Internet do not seem impacted by the contention between SWCast.net and SoundExchange.
By the way, see what I have to say about current copyright laws at the top of [http://www.rossde.com/music.html].
Slashdot Mirror
Rather than rely on a biased study by Google that damns its competitors, look at what Secunia -- an independent source -- says.
At http://secunia.com/advisories/product/38734/?task=statistics_2011, we see that Firefox 8 has 1 minor vulnerability (unpatched).
At http://secunia.com/advisories/product/38537/?task=statistics_2011, we see that Chrome 15 has 3 vulnerabilities, with 2 considered "highly critical". Those two have patches; the minor vulnerability is not yet patched.
It seems that security for Chrome and Firefox are currently equal but not perfect.
If you follow the "exploited to cause a crash ..." link in the initial Slashdot item, you will see that a fix to Acrobat Reader 9 will be available by this coming Monday. You will also see that, unless you disable Protected View in Acrobat Reader 10, you are not vulnerable and thus can wait a month.
Forty years ago, a major software system for operating unmanned space satellites for the U.S. Air Force was written in a language called JOVIAL J4. The JOVIAL J4 compiler was itself written in JOVIAL J4.
Originally intended for a lifetime of 10-15 years, the system was actually in use for 20 years.
The cost of piracy in Canada was grossly overstated in an attempt to impose draconian controls on the transport of music. The Canadian Intellectual Property Council (an agency of the Canadian Chamber of Commerce) actually proposed that travelers entering the country have their luggage searched for counterfeit recordings.
On investigation,it was discovered that the Council based its estimated cost of piracy on data circulating in the U.S. The U.S. costs were contained in various reports from the FBI and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). However, neither agency could substantiate the data. Their estimates of the costs of piracy turned out to be "brain farts" with no real substance.
See http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/5841/125/ and the follow-up http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/5850/125/.
I downloaded Bounce Spam quite a few years ago. I might have been still using Windows 95 at the time. I use it now with Windows XP. This is freeware by Albert Yale. A Google search on "Albert Yale" and "bounce" will result in several download sites.
I do NOT use Bounce Spam for actual spam for two reasons. First of all, the From or Reply-to address in spam is often the address of some unfortunate innocent person; I do not want to flood such individuals with my faked bounce message. Then, my ISP has very effective anti-spam controls on its POP incoming E-mail server.
I use Bounce Spam to return messages to foul individuals who are angry about what they read on my Web site. Those individuals do not realize they can disagree without being disagreeable. They are exceptionally disagreeable.
Per a discussion in the comp.infosystems.www.authoring.html newsgroup, not all of HTML5 is supported in Kindle. See the Subject "HTML5 on Kindle - Not really html5?" at news:comp.infosystems.www.authoring.html.
I just now ran a test on the E-mail domains used by my two children and my brother. Messages from each use the same address on the Return-Path: and From: header lines. I did a DNS lookup on each address's domain to get an IP address. I then did a reverse DNS lookup on each IP address. My conclusion is that reverse DNS is not an acceptable filter against spam.
Here are the results of my test:
My daughter: shaw.ca > 204.209.208.8 > "no data record" error message
Using reverse DNS lookup as a spam filter would thus block messages from my daughter.
My son: yahoo.com > 72.30.2.43 > ir1.fp.vip.sk1.yahoo.com
> 98.137.149.56 > ir1.fp.vip.sp2.yahoo.com
> 98.139.180.149 > ir1.fp.vip.bf1.yahoo.com
> 209.191.122.70 > ir1.fp.vip.mud.yahoo.com
> 67.195.160.76 > ir1.fp.vip.ac4.yahoo.com
The yahoo.com domain resolved to five distinct IP addresses, each of which then resolved to a unique domain that ended with ".yahoo.com". Using reverse DNS lookup as a spam filter would thus not block messages from my son unless an exact match were used.
My brother: aol.com > 205.188.101.58 > hostheader-dtc02.evip.aol.com
> 207.200.74.38 > hostheader-dtc02.evip.aol.com
> 64.12.79.57 > open.aim.com
> 64.12.89.186 > nullsoftwinamp.com
> 205.188.100.58 > open.aim.net
The aol.com domain resolved to five distinct IP addresses, each of which then resolved to a domain (not necessarily unique) that had several aliases (listed below). Two of those domains ended with ".aol.com"; each of the other three domains had at least one alias ending with ".aol.com". Using reverse DNS lookup as a spam filter might block messages from my son if an exact match were used or if alias domains were not considered.
Aliases found during reverse DNS lookup on AOL's IP addresses:
hostheader-dtc02.evip.aol.com aliases (for two IP addresses): ambassadoroflifestream.com, backup.aol.com, mqvibe.com, aolblog.com, aol4life.com, whatisaol.com, nullsoftwinamp.com
open.aim.com aliases: open.aim.net, eyeno.aol.com, forum.compuserve.nl, music.aim.com, music.aim.net, backup.aol.com, mqvibe.com, aolblog.com
nullsoftwinamp.com aliases: hostheader-mtc02.evip.aol.com, ambassadoroflifestream.com, backup.aol.com, mqvibe.com, aolblog.com, aol4life.com, whatisaol.com
open.aim.net aliases: eyeno.aol.com, forum.compuserve.nl, music.aim.com, music.aim.net, backup.aol.com, mqvibe.com, aolblog.com, aol4life.com
My ISP has a two-phase spam filter.
Phase 1 checks the domain from which the E-mail message was sent. If a DNS lookup indicates that no such domain has been registered, the message is trashed. This phase resulted in a very significant reduction in spam, both spam caught in Phase 2 and spam reaching my inbox.
Phase 2 uses a scored filtering system. It gives me the ability to add filters with my own scores. Any message caught in this phase is routed into a spam file on my ISP's server. I can review the messages in that spam file, marking some for acceptance into my inbox and some for deletion. In that review, I can also instruct the ISP's basic filter to "learn" what is really spam after a false negative or really not spam after a false positive.
Note well that I CAN REVIEW ANY MESSAGE THAT HAS BEEN MARKED AS SPAM in Phase 2. No matter how spam is detected, this is most important; the human element in determining spam is absolutely required. On the other hand, there is no human element in Phase 1, which does not perturb me. After all, I cannot reply to a message from a non-existent domain or or send a new message to it; I really do not want to receive any message that prevents an exchange of messages.
In the early 1960s, the Biostatistics Unit of the School of Medicine at UCLA developed BiMed (or was it BiMd). This was a package of statistical analysis applications that ran on a main-frame computer before the advent of desktop computers, the Internet, or client-server systems. It was widely requested by medical and non-medical researchers, not only at universities but also at various corporations. BiMed went through several versions. No, I don't know whether BiMed still exists today.
MetaCrawler was originally developed in 1994 at the University of Washington by then graduate student Erik Selberg and Associate Professor Oren Etzioni. This is a meta-search engine that sends queries to other seach engines. If you want to search Google, Yahoo!, Bing, and a few others all at once, your query at MetaCrawler uses all those. As with other software developed in universities, MetaCrawler is now owned by a for-profit company. Nevertheless, I still use it. It's at http://www.metacrawler.com./
It's not too hard to defeat Facebook cookies and cookies from other Web sites, at least if your browser is Firefox or SeaMonkey (the latter being the browser I use). After editing my set of cookies to the minimum that I feel to be appropriate, I copied my cookies.txt file to create the file cookies.txt.backup. Then, I created a script that I used to launch SeaMonkey. However, the script first deleted my cookies.txt file and then copied the cookies.txt.backup file to create a new cookies.txt file.
When Mozilla changed from using ASCII file cookies.txt for cookies to an SQLite database in file cookies.sqlite (implemented in both Firefox and SeaMonkey), I merely changed my script. Again, after I used SeaMonkey to edit my cookies to a minimum, I then copied cookies.sqlite to create cookies.sqlite-backup. Now my script deletes cookies.sqlite and then copies cookies.sqlite-backup to make a new cookies.sqlite, all before launching SeaMonkey.
All this allows me to accept persistent cookies and treat them as session-only cookies. Yes, I could merely set the preference for treating all cookies as session-only. However, sometimes I want to add a new persistent cookie to cookies.sqlite-backup or I need to allow a persistent cookie to be updated (especially when it is about to expire).
For those few (like me) who use SeaMonkey with "Advertise Firefox compatibility" disabled, the download site for Flash is broken. You wind up in a loop without ever getting the download. Either enable "Advertise Firefox compatibility" or spoof Firefox in some other way. Then, before trying the download site, remove all Adobe cookies. Yes, it's another case of invalid UA sniffing.
When you finally download, you get a stub installer, not a complete installer. This is true for everyone, including users of IE and Firefox. To download the complete installer, see http://forums.adobe.com/thread/889580?tstart=0.
I'm not sure why I pursued this so vigorously. Normally, I browse the Web with Flash disabled.
My LAN consists of two PCs, mine and my wife's. We are networked through a Netgear router that also connects us to a cable modem for broadband Internet. We have no network drive as such, merely having access to selected parts of each other's hard drives.
I do the backups for both of us, using the Windows XP backup tool. The backups reside on our own hard drives for use in restoring files we might have deleted or incorrectly updated.
I transfer copies of my wife's backups to my own hard drive. I use a freeware version of PGP to encrypt and digitally sign the backup files, both mine and my wife's. I then use Eraser to destroy the unencrypted copies of my wife's backups on my hard drive since such copies remain on her PC. Finally, I move the encrypted backups to a portable hard drive that I normally keep remote from the PCs.
In case a disaster happens to our PCs, copies of my PGP public and private keys and their passphrases are stored in a safe deposit box at a bank.
It appears that Google and Mozilla are attempting to follow this same pattern with their frequent, rapid-release versions of browsers and related applications. Firefox 4.0 was released by Mozilla on 22 March of this year. Approximately 14 weeks later (on 21 June), Firefox 5.0 was released; and all support -- even fixes for security vulnerabilities -- ceased for Firefox 4.0. Then, 8 weeks later (on 16 August), Firefox 6.0 was released; and all support ceased for Firefox 5.0.
All this seems to be wreaking havoc with businesses and organizations that deployed Firefox as their internal standard browser. System administrators are having difficulty keeping up with the changes.
Yes, this was all reported earlier in Slashdot. Now we have a name for it: Quick Death. And the products do not even have to fail.
Evil #5 includes domain name servers (DNSs) that redirect you to a commercial site when you have requested a non-existent domain. My ISP is Road Runner, whose DNSs do this.
I use GRC's DNS Benchmark to find publicly-accessible DNSs that do not do this, that have quick responses, and that have low error rates. I then change my Internet settings to use those DNSs. I rerun DNS Benchmark about once or twice each month, updating which DNSs I use. These reruns are necessary because the quality of DNSs -- timing and error rates -- is not constant; it varies with time.
See DNS Benchmark at http://www.grc.com/dns/benchmark.htm.
If you have been proficient in at least 3 programming languages, you are never too old to learn another one. You already know how languages are the same and how they differ.
I started with Fortran II, Fortran IV, and the original BASIC. At the same time, I learned assembly languages for the IBM 7090/7094 and the IBM 1401. (That was in the early 1960s, before Noah and the Flood.) Later, I learned JOVIAL 4 and then REXX. In my 50s, I taught myself UNIX (both C and Korn). When I finally bought myself a PC (at age 55 after some 33 years as a programmer and software test engineer), I taught myself DOS, how to create Word and Excel macros, and how to create Web pages with hand-coded HTML and CSS. I still do DOS scripts for Windows XP; and I now have well over 300 Web pages on my site, some of which use UNIX scripts as server-side includes.
The only languages in which I had formal classes were COBOL and Pascal. I used COBOL for a few months, but that was a project to convert a legacy main-frame system in COBOL into a client-server system in C++. I never used Pascal.
This suggestion -- promptly killing someone's E-mail account without giving them time to defend themselves -- is a recipe for denial of service. All I have to do is file a complaint against someone I don't like. Zap. They have no E-mail. I don't have to prove my complaint is valid.
Hmm. Someone running a botnet could quickly eliminate all E-mail for a nation. Cyberwar!!
My daughter lives in Canada. To keep current with what is happening where she lives, I read several Canadian newspapers online daily. I went to their Web sites after reading this Slashdot article and could not find a single newspaper article about it. A Yahoo news search turned up only one Canadian item.
I sent my daughter an E-mail about this. Since she was an investigative reporter before becoming an educator, she generally keeps up with all the news. She replied:
"This is the first I've heard of this. Why would they need to black out research on what's harming the salmon stocks? Is it linked to national security?"
I think it's more political security -- Prime Minister Harper staying in office -- than national security.
I went to the link [http://www.truth-out.org/new-court-filing-reveals-how-2004-ohio-presidential-election-was-hacked/1311603015] in the article. It froze my PC. I had to disable JavaScript in order to regain control.
I live in southern California. My electrical service is Southern California Edison (SoCalEd), which can have outages any time of the year.
My broadband service is through Time Warner Cable TV. When SoCalEd fails, Time Warner's amplifiers die, leaving me with no Internet, no VOIP, and (if I had it) no Time Warner phone service.
I don't have a cell phone, but my wife does. When SoCalEd fails, the local cell towers die.
However, my phone service is land-line (PSTN) through AT&T. This phone service is self-powered by AT&T and is not dependent on local power from SoCalEd. Only with land-line phone service can I call SoCalEd to report an outage. More important, if SoCalEd fails, my land-line service becomes the only way to call 911 for emergency services (police, fire, paramedics).
I got my BA degree in mathematics in 1964, before computer science was a generally recognized subject for degrees. I loaded up on numerical analysis classes since they presented the kinds of mathematics applicable to computers. I also took two years of symbolic logic (part of the philosophy curriculum) because I thought it might have some application to programming and a year of accounting (business curriculum) because I knew much of future use of computers would be in business applications. I did not know it at the time, but my English and public speaking classes meant that I was prepared to write literate, readable test procedures and user manuals and to make presentations in front of customers. By taking literature, history, art appreciation, and music appreciation classes, I ensured I would not be merely a geek or nerd (terms not yet in use at the time).
In the end, I got an excellent job as a computer test engineer. It was not long before I was supervising 5-10 other testers. When I hired a new tester, however, I tried to avoid hiring anyone with a computer science degree. I found that those with CS degrees were more interested in computers as the central object of their studies than as a tool to accomplish a task.
I am now very comfortably retired after a computer career of 40+ years. I retired before I was old enough for Social Security, retiring when I wanted to retire (not when my employer wanted to retire me). Part of the reason I am not bored with retirement was that my university education gave me a broad enough view of life and the world to have interests beyond my career. Part of the reason I was able to afford retirement was that my university education gave me the ability to understand financial statements and investment strategies.
A university education implies an education that is universal and not narrowly focused. Not everyone benefits from a university education. Those who could benefit but do not partake might find themselves as drudges, earning a living without having a life.
Why not PGP (free for non-commercial use) or Gnu Privacy Guard (GPG, free). Both use the OpenPGP method and are interoperable with each other. While neither is open source, the source code for both are supposed to be available to anyone who wants to check the integrity of either application (e.g., lack of back doors).
A decision by a U.S. District Court is not even binding within the same jurisdiction of that court. Yes, other District Court judges might give the decision some weight; but they are not required to do so.
Only when the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upholds a decision from a District Court in that circuit does the decision become binding on all the District Courts in that circuit. Even then, the decision is not binding in other circuits. To be binding throughout the U.S. requires a decision from the U.S. Supreme Court.
Even after the Supreme Court decides, similar cases may arise in which Circuit Court judges conclude the Supreme Court was wrong. Then the process starts all over again until the Supreme Court either upholds its prior decision (most likely result) or overturns its own prior decision (rare but not unknown). For the latter case, look at how long (about a half century) it took the Supreme Court to overturn its prior decision that "separate but equal" segregation was legal for public schools. Attempts to get the Supreme Court to overturn Roe vs Wade (abortion) have been unending for decades.
Conclusion: Living in California, I'm not yet worried about a ruling by a District Court in Maine on this issue.
If the E-mail is about non-delivery of a purchase or anything else that might require PayPal to refund money, I think some attention would be paid to my letter. After all, it's money honey.
If I started receiving such E-mail messages from companies, the first thing I would do would be to check my credit reports to make sure I am not a victim of identity theft. If the reports are clear, I would trash the messages.
However, it the messages continue to be sent by the same company, I would do some on-line research and determine the postal address of the company's headquarters and the name of the company's CEO. I would mail a postal letter to the CEO with a printout of the message -- with all headers -- demanding the company stop annoying me. I would clearly point out that the messages are going to the wrong E-mail address. Also, if the message was about a past-due bill that someone else owes, my letter would suggest that I might sue for harassment.
"Pop" music is as ephemeral as a mayfly -- top 10 today and forgotten tomorrow. Listen instead to classical music. While recent performances might be under copyright, the music itself is no longer protected. By "classical music", I mean not only Bach and Beethoven but also music that was popular 50-100 years ago and is still popular. Streaming broadcasts of such music over the Internet do not seem impacted by the contention between SWCast.net and SoundExchange.
By the way, see what I have to say about current copyright laws at the top of [http://www.rossde.com/music.html].