I beg to differ. I had never heard of Asperger's before I read that book. As a result of reading it book, I looked it up. I didn't pull the name out of thin air:)
There was a book I read recently which was written as if narrated by a teenage boy with Asperger's Syndrome.
It's called "The curious incident of the dog in the night time" and I recommend it to anyone who would like to learn a little more about Asperger's, or, just feels like an entertaining and moving read.
The thing with light aircraft accidents is that they tend to occur in 3 main different ways.
The first is inadvertant entry into IMC (Instrument Metoerological Conditions - essentially weather conditions inadequate for flying visually). This is all well and good if the pilot is instrument rated, but, if a non rated tries to keep flying visually, it is likely that they will enter a spiral dive, or, a spin. A BRS (Ballistic recovery system - ie parachute) will be advantageous in these conditions - passenger parachutes will not, you can't get people to jump into that sort of soup, and, you may not even be able to get the plane appropriately oriented for them to do so (in a spin for example, you know exactly what your seatbelts are for - you do a bit of spin recovery in training - a most unpleasant experience). Incidentally, a spin is when one wing stalls (fails to generate lift) and the other wing is still operating normally.
The other nasty that occurs during accidental entry into IMC, is the innocuously named CFIT (controlled flight into terrain - used in accident reports to categorise the type of accident where the aircraft is operation normally, but, impacts with terrain anywyay - almost always due to pilot error). If a BRS is deployed early enough then it would be advantageous here - once more, passenger parachutes wouldn't be much use.
Incidentally, the aviation community is a bit split over BRS in the above scenarios, the logic being that pilots may take bigger risks knowing there is a BRS sitting there as a backup. I guess that is inevitable, but, I find it to be much the same logic as "people will drive faster if they have seatbelts".
The second way they occur is with the pilot (and this is the biggy) failing to maintain sufficient speed on takeoff/landing either due to human error, or some other factor like engine failure after take off (which is another cool acronym we use - EFATO), and stalling and falling. BRS could potentially be useful here, passenger parachutes absolutely useless - you are too low, and there is no time.
Finally, the third main cause of crashes (and the smallest category) is mechanical failure of the aircraft (usually engine, but I have heard of a wing being torn off in a steep turn (for which the aircraft was not certified), when it (the wing) was covered in snow and ice). BRS could be pretty handy here, but, 99% (made up stat - a very high number anyway) of these types of accidents are non fatal as, as long as you have sufficient height, you can normally glide to a suitable landing site (field, beach, golf course, whatever - interestingly, they teach you to tend to avoid roads, they often have power lines running up the side of them that can't be seen from height). Another acronym here - PFLs - practise forced landings, where the instructor pulls the engine power, and says "OK - emergency, land from here!". Whenever you are flying, you are constantly planning for engine failure *right now*, and scanning the ground for suitable landing sites within gliding range. BRS would be pretty damn handy in these cases, especially when flying over inhospitable terrain like mountains or water.
My feeling is that BRS is a good thing, and I hope to see it being put on more and more aircraft, but, it is only an option of last resort, and should be treated as such. IMC should never be entered by non IMC pilots, spins and spiral dives are recoverable, given sufficient height, and engine failure will normally just result in a forced landing in a field. Nothing can contribute to the safety of a flight more than a cautious, sensible pilot who flys within his/her limits.
The other thing to remember with passenger parachutes, is, a certain amount of skill is required for their use, with BRS, passengers require special skills or physical agility.
One thing that may bump up the stats on these sorts of things is Firefox.
Oftentimes I just punch just enough into the address bar to hit what I want, knowing that Firefox wanders off to google and does an "I'm feeling lucky" if it cannot resolve my input. ie, ipw2200 will always take me to ipw2200.sourceforge.net.
Oh - c'mon - the whitehouse is one of the most recognisable buildings on earth. I've never seen it, but I am damned sure I could spot it from the air based on pictures in the popular media (I have a PPL and, during training, they ask you to spot far trickier things than that, even if they are surrounded by other buildings or terrain - don't get me started on the bloody "dam wall" I could never find!). Incidentally, we did all this without GPS, with GPS and it would have been even simpler. In fact, if you didn't wanna use/train on the in-aircraft one, a small handheld job would've done quite nicely.
Finally, "too much of a risk of a mid-air collision". I think not, mid air collisions tend to only happen in one of three different ways:
1) Under VFR (visual flight rules) where the pilot has responsibility to maintain a lookout and avoid collisions that way. These types of accidents are most common when in the circuit pattern.
2) When the controller makes a mistake.
3) When one or both pilots ignore/misunderstand controller instructions as well as ignore their TCAS (can't remember what that stands for, I've never used one, small planes don't have em, Traffic Collision Advisory Service? - basically a little box that tells you who is nearby and what action should be taken to avoid a collision).
My point with both 2 & 3 is, if the controllers vectors just one of the aircraft appropriately, collision will be avioded (and there is a v. high probability of this happening). If that fails, but, just one of the pilots listens to his TCAS (which is the last line of defense effectively) collision will also almost certainly be avoided.
Add to that, the chances of hitting another aircraft who isn't going to/coming from the same place that you are is so small anyway (there is a hell of a lot of airspace).
Frankly I can't imagine they avoided the Whitehouse due to risk of mid air collision.
However, if the US dropped off the face of the Earth
All well and good, but that wasn't my question. If for arguments sake, there was some massive catastrophe that wiped out the States, then yes I agree - the net will continue much as we know it, albeit with a lot less content.....for a while. I am sure most of us can appreciate the social, technical, economic and political reasoning behind why that would be so.
My question was: (sic) In event that US internet functionality is severely curtailed (snip). Is the US so important to the net at large, that the administration there would be able to effectively force all other nations to fall into line with their policy (snip)?
This is, to my mind a much more interesting question. Imagine the US government suddenly curtailed net freedoms internally, then said to everyone else in the world, you can only connect to us and use our bewildering array of content, if you introduce a set of laws similar to the ones we have introduced here. Unlike where the US disappears, this time there is a carrot being dangled in front of the other countries. Would they sacrifice the net as we know it in order to get that carrot?
I believe they would, but please don't tell the US administration.
What it really means is that the CIA sees your porn collection as a threat to the American way of life
There is an interesting point raised here about the Americentrocity (Amerocentrocity?) of the internet.
The US appears to be getting more and more draconian with it's protection (or lack thereof) of civil liberties, civil privacy in particular. I am looking now at doing some web connected stuff with very sensitive information (medical) and, although I haven't researched it yet, I have a strong feeling that US hosting will not be an option due to laws that allow the govt to confiscate/view that data. (Please do correct me if you think I am in error here - in fact, there is an "Ask Slashdot" question in there somewhere)
It should be noted that I do host a few things, but nothing containing anything more sensitive than CC details. Up until this project, the US has always been the place I have hosted (the lowest price for the best comms).
Further, consider the event that US internet functionality is severely curtailed (and I think the logistical and technical problems in doing that make that eventuality extremely unlikely). How functional and viable would the internet be with only partial US involvement? Is the US so important to the net at large, that the administration there would be able to effectively force all other nations to fall into line with their policy (another "Ask Slashdot")?
I am not American, nor have I ever lived there, but, I strongly suspect the answer to my second question could be "yes".
Seriously, there has been enough noise made about it lately. I jumped on to set up SPF in all of about 10 minutes, it really was that simple.
Since then I have been using the Thunderbird Extension for Sender Policy Framework as a quick and easy way to see which and how many domains publishing SPF records and have noted a few interesting things.
Namely, depsite the fact that MS wants their own standard to be thrown out into the marketplace (namely Sender ID), they are publishing SPF records on both Microsoft.com and on Hotmail.com. If I was the kind of guy who used the word "kudos" I would say "Kudos to them". I am no more of a fan of MS than anyone else here, but, those two domains alone represent a not insignificant percentage of spam floating around that can be fairly simply removed with a mail server reconfig. AOL is also publishing, so well done there.
Gmail are as well of course, but would you expect any less?
Yahoo are not, which amazes me - I realize they want to push DomainKeys, but, I see no reason for them not to be publishing SPF records as well.
The one that absolutely staggered me though was Citibank.com. I recall reading somewhere (no link sorry, but a quick google illustrates the point) that something like half all the phishing emails floating about are aimed at Citibank. For the sake of a few minutes, they could at least give people who want to, a surefire way of rejecting all phishing emails at MTA time. They must have among the crappest DNS admins on earth, or some very bad policy makers.
I shall end this spiel with a request. If you administer a DNS, and you relay, or can easily relay through known machines every time (which would be about 99% of us), then please publish SPF records. You don't have to use other people's records yourself to reject mail - just publish your own records so that other can reject mail that is purportedly from you, but isn't.
The nice thing about all this from the running a receiving MTA perspective, is you can phase it in. Pretty soon, I will be rejecting all mail that is fails SPF checks, but still accepting for people that don't yet publish records.
So please, do it now, jump over to the SPF link at the top of this mail - there is a webform there which dumbs down creating your SPF record as much as it can be dumbed down, and actually gives you a line to paste into your zone file.
Spam could be all but gone in a week for those who want to reconfigure their mail servers to reject it if those records are publish. Imagine that - effectively wiping out spam almost instantly!
If you won't do it for me, do it for the children, oh won't somebody please think of the children.....
-snip- I never want to leave my country (sic Canada). The only reasons I could possibly have for going to the US are for work related reasons, or to visit a special someone. I don't really have any desire to leave Canada... -/snip-
Oh god, this can't-see-past-my-own-borders-clearly disease is spreading. There are other places on the planet worth considering going besides the US and Canada?
Still - at least you acknowledge there are two countries worthy of your thoughts - that's a whole 100% more than some.
(Note to author of post above, don't mean to make you feel bad, that probably isn't even what you meant, but, the gist of your post is "I never want to leave my country coz the US isn't for me" and didn't consider that there are thousands of other places on earth with a richness and diversity beyond imagination)
Let me get this straight. Assume I am a bad guy. If I want to find an American overseas - particularly in a country where carrying a passport is mandatory, how am I going to go about it?
To take it one step further, if I am wifi'd into a database somehow, I can even do a few smarts and identify a "better" target (wealthier, public figure etc).
I carry an Australian passport and it will not shock me when "the Clever Country" bends over and does what the Americans do - yet again!
That's all well and good, but, assuming this thing takes off, did you see this bit in the FAQ's?
"However, it is possible that Certificate Authorities may become a valuable addition to the DomainKeys solution to add an even greater level of security and trust."
So, to extend the "SUSPECT" folder, are we eventually going to find ourselves in the position where we all have to pay a CA simply to avoid having mail from private domains being bounced by big/wealthy/corporate providers.
This would suck, I have about 20 domains that I serve mail for, a couple of commercial ones, but mainly domains for friends, myself etc. At 50 odd dollars a throw, that'd be $1000 dollars a year.
Don't get me wrong, public verification would be nice in certain circumstances, but I can't see how this would happen without incurring considerable cost, after all, what you are paying for (in theory) is for someone else to verify you are who you say you are - this is a service that quite rightly is chargeable.
To go one step further, it would also (once more, in theory - in my experience the checking done for CA signed certs is non-existent/trivial to circumvent) reduce the anonymity and privacy on the net that we all value so highly - at least as far as email is concerned.
That's not such a silly thought, but possibly not for the reasons you think. I am a bit tired and can't be bothered digging it up at the moment, but there was a story about both sides hiring a veritable army of lawyers ready to contest the election results in court.
Could this be grounds should Bush win? (I don't have a clue - it is a question for those more knowledgable in these matters than me).
There has been no hysteria and you are right - it hasn't "destroyed your way of live" - see "eroded" above.
What has happened is we have made a set of changes to our ways of life - some trivially minor, some major purely through our own fears.
In this case the change itself is almost inconsequential, but the philosiphy behind it is not. It does not take a huge imagination to be able to see that we are gradually trading more and more of our own freedoms in the interests of safety and security - and, we are doing it to ourselves!
It is all a matter of degrees though,it simply comes down to a question of how many freedoms you are willing to exchange for security.
The other point you make is that value has been added to your way of life. How? You have a little more security and a little less freedom. If your "way of life" is founded on basic freedoms then, whether you like to acknowledge it or not, it has been subtracted from, even if this doesn't affect you directly.
It has added to your security, but that is the thing that almost is worth getting hysterical about. There is becoming more and more of a interchangeablity in the terms "quality of life" and security in the media and various political spiels, and, no matter how many times you hear it, you need to remember, they are simply not the same thing at all, related in a lot of cases assuredly, but not the same thing.
This is why you are lucky to have other folks around who do understand.
But seriously, do you really not see? My first inclination is that you are doing a head in the sand type deal in the hope that others will want to shove there heads under and see what you are looking at.
On the off chance the above is not true, I offer the below explanation solely for your benefit...
Does the expression "thin end of the wedge" mean anything to you? This story is about something that has changed as an indirect result of Sep 11. Now, we are able to make less informed decisions than we were previously. Terrorists have not restricted our access to this information, we have done it to ourselves.
The temptation with these things is to dismiss it as "ah - this doesn't matter too much, it is only a minor thing", but, a lot of minor things can, and often do, add up to be a major thing.
Maybe destroying our way of life is a little too overdramatic, eroding would be a better word.
Slashdot Mirror
I beg to differ. I had never heard of Asperger's before I read that book. As a result of reading it book, I looked it up. I didn't pull the name out of thin air :)
Google agrees with me.
There was a book I read recently which was written as if narrated by a teenage boy with Asperger's Syndrome.
It's called "The curious incident of the dog in the night time" and I recommend it to anyone who would like to learn a little more about Asperger's, or, just feels like an entertaining and moving read.
Sun's sendmail as opposed to the version offered on http://sendmail.org/
Damn, I have mod points at the moment, but can't find the "-1, Pedantic git" mod option.
Credentials: Wildly inexperienced private pilot.
The thing with light aircraft accidents is that they tend to occur in 3 main different ways.
The first is inadvertant entry into IMC (Instrument Metoerological Conditions - essentially weather conditions inadequate for flying visually). This is all well and good if the pilot is instrument rated, but, if a non rated tries to keep flying visually, it is likely that they will enter a spiral dive, or, a spin. A BRS (Ballistic recovery system - ie parachute) will be advantageous in these conditions - passenger parachutes will not, you can't get people to jump into that sort of soup, and, you may not even be able to get the plane appropriately oriented for them to do so (in a spin for example, you know exactly what your seatbelts are for - you do a bit of spin recovery in training - a most unpleasant experience). Incidentally, a spin is when one wing stalls (fails to generate lift) and the other wing is still operating normally.
The other nasty that occurs during accidental entry into IMC, is the innocuously named CFIT (controlled flight into terrain - used in accident reports to categorise the type of accident where the aircraft is operation normally, but, impacts with terrain anywyay - almost always due to pilot error). If a BRS is deployed early enough then it would be advantageous here - once more, passenger parachutes wouldn't be much use.
Incidentally, the aviation community is a bit split over BRS in the above scenarios, the logic being that pilots may take bigger risks knowing there is a BRS sitting there as a backup. I guess that is inevitable, but, I find it to be much the same logic as "people will drive faster if they have seatbelts".
The second way they occur is with the pilot (and this is the biggy) failing to maintain sufficient speed on takeoff/landing either due to human error, or some other factor like engine failure after take off (which is another cool acronym we use - EFATO), and stalling and falling. BRS could potentially be useful here, passenger parachutes absolutely useless - you are too low, and there is no time.
Finally, the third main cause of crashes (and the smallest category) is mechanical failure of the aircraft (usually engine, but I have heard of a wing being torn off in a steep turn (for which the aircraft was not certified), when it (the wing) was covered in snow and ice). BRS could be pretty handy here, but, 99% (made up stat - a very high number anyway) of these types of accidents are non fatal as, as long as you have sufficient height, you can normally glide to a suitable landing site (field, beach, golf course, whatever - interestingly, they teach you to tend to avoid roads, they often have power lines running up the side of them that can't be seen from height). Another acronym here - PFLs - practise forced landings, where the instructor pulls the engine power, and says "OK - emergency, land from here!". Whenever you are flying, you are constantly planning for engine failure *right now*, and scanning the ground for suitable landing sites within gliding range. BRS would be pretty damn handy in these cases, especially when flying over inhospitable terrain like mountains or water.
My feeling is that BRS is a good thing, and I hope to see it being put on more and more aircraft, but, it is only an option of last resort, and should be treated as such. IMC should never be entered by non IMC pilots, spins and spiral dives are recoverable, given sufficient height, and engine failure will normally just result in a forced landing in a field. Nothing can contribute to the safety of a flight more than a cautious, sensible pilot who flys within his/her limits.
The other thing to remember with passenger parachutes, is, a certain amount of skill is required for their use, with BRS, passengers require special skills or physical agility.
One thing that may bump up the stats on these sorts of things is Firefox.
Oftentimes I just punch just enough into the address bar to hit what I want, knowing that Firefox wanders off to google and does an "I'm feeling lucky" if it cannot resolve my input. ie, ipw2200 will always take me to ipw2200.sourceforge.net.
Just a thought.
If the Feds came to them and said, "You know, if you want to keep doing buisness, we need this from you,"
Heh - why would the feds have to bother? They are doing this already, unrequested, now we know why...
Oh - c'mon - the whitehouse is one of the most recognisable buildings on earth. I've never seen it, but I am damned sure I could spot it from the air based on pictures in the popular media (I have a PPL and, during training, they ask you to spot far trickier things than that, even if they are surrounded by other buildings or terrain - don't get me started on the bloody "dam wall" I could never find!). Incidentally, we did all this without GPS, with GPS and it would have been even simpler. In fact, if you didn't wanna use/train on the in-aircraft one, a small handheld job would've done quite nicely.
Finally, "too much of a risk of a mid-air collision". I think not, mid air collisions tend to only happen in one of three different ways:
1) Under VFR (visual flight rules) where the pilot has responsibility to maintain a lookout and avoid collisions that way. These types of accidents are most common when in the circuit pattern.
2) When the controller makes a mistake.
3) When one or both pilots ignore/misunderstand controller instructions as well as ignore their TCAS (can't remember what that stands for, I've never used one, small planes don't have em, Traffic Collision Advisory Service? - basically a little box that tells you who is nearby and what action should be taken to avoid a collision).
My point with both 2 & 3 is, if the controllers vectors just one of the aircraft appropriately, collision will be avioded (and there is a v. high probability of this happening). If that fails, but, just one of the pilots listens to his TCAS (which is the last line of defense effectively) collision will also almost certainly be avoided.
Add to that, the chances of hitting another aircraft who isn't going to/coming from the same place that you are is so small anyway (there is a hell of a lot of airspace).
Frankly I can't imagine they avoided the Whitehouse due to risk of mid air collision.
However, if the US dropped off the face of the Earth
.....for a while. I am sure most of us can appreciate the social, technical, economic and political reasoning behind why that would be so.
All well and good, but that wasn't my question. If for arguments sake, there was some massive catastrophe that wiped out the States, then yes I agree - the net will continue much as we know it, albeit with a lot less content
My question was:
(sic) In event that US internet functionality is severely curtailed (snip). Is the US so important to the net at large, that the administration there would be able to effectively force all other nations to fall into line with their policy (snip)?
This is, to my mind a much more interesting question. Imagine the US government suddenly curtailed net freedoms internally, then said to everyone else in the world, you can only connect to us and use our bewildering array of content, if you introduce a set of laws similar to the ones we have introduced here. Unlike where the US disappears, this time there is a carrot being dangled in front of the other countries. Would they sacrifice the net as we know it in order to get that carrot?
I believe they would, but please don't tell the US administration.
What it really means is that the CIA sees your porn collection as a threat to the American way of life
There is an interesting point raised here about the Americentrocity (Amerocentrocity?) of the internet.
The US appears to be getting more and more draconian with it's protection (or lack thereof) of civil liberties, civil privacy in particular. I am looking now at doing some web connected stuff with very sensitive information (medical) and, although I haven't researched it yet, I have a strong feeling that US hosting will not be an option due to laws that allow the govt to confiscate/view that data. (Please do correct me if you think I am in error here - in fact, there is an "Ask Slashdot" question in there somewhere)
It should be noted that I do host a few things, but nothing containing anything more sensitive than CC details. Up until this project, the US has always been the place I have hosted (the lowest price for the best comms).
Further, consider the event that US internet functionality is severely curtailed (and I think the logistical and technical problems in doing that make that eventuality extremely unlikely). How functional and viable would the internet be with only partial US involvement? Is the US so important to the net at large, that the administration there would be able to effectively force all other nations to fall into line with their policy (another "Ask Slashdot")?
I am not American, nor have I ever lived there, but, I strongly suspect the answer to my second question could be "yes".
Or what about simply SPF.
Seriously, there has been enough noise made about it lately. I jumped on to set up SPF in all of about 10 minutes, it really was that simple.
Since then I have been using the Thunderbird Extension for Sender Policy Framework as a quick and easy way to see which and how many domains publishing SPF records and have noted a few interesting things.
Namely, depsite the fact that MS wants their own standard to be thrown out into the marketplace (namely Sender ID), they are publishing SPF records on both Microsoft.com and on Hotmail.com. If I was the kind of guy who used the word "kudos" I would say "Kudos to them". I am no more of a fan of MS than anyone else here, but, those two domains alone represent a not insignificant percentage of spam floating around that can be fairly simply removed with a mail server reconfig. AOL is also publishing, so well done there.
Gmail are as well of course, but would you expect any less?
Yahoo are not, which amazes me - I realize they want to push DomainKeys, but, I see no reason for them not to be publishing SPF records as well.
The one that absolutely staggered me though was Citibank.com. I recall reading somewhere (no link sorry, but a quick google illustrates the point) that something like half all the phishing emails floating about are aimed at Citibank. For the sake of a few minutes, they could at least give people who want to, a surefire way of rejecting all phishing emails at MTA time. They must have among the crappest DNS admins on earth, or some very bad policy makers.
I shall end this spiel with a request. If you administer a DNS, and you relay, or can easily relay through known machines every time (which would be about 99% of us), then please publish SPF records. You don't have to use other people's records yourself to reject mail - just publish your own records so that other can reject mail that is purportedly from you, but isn't.
The nice thing about all this from the running a receiving MTA perspective, is you can phase it in. Pretty soon, I will be rejecting all mail that is fails SPF checks, but still accepting for people that don't yet publish records.
So please, do it now, jump over to the SPF link at the top of this mail - there is a webform there which dumbs down creating your SPF record as much as it can be dumbed down, and actually gives you a line to paste into your zone file.
Spam could be all but gone in a week for those who want to reconfigure their mail servers to reject it if those records are publish. Imagine that - effectively wiping out spam almost instantly!
If you won't do it for me, do it for the children, oh won't somebody please think of the children.....
If I had mod points, I'd mod that once as insightful, and then come back and mod it again funny. I did laugh.
I just had a bit of a google. According to this DVDs have a lifetime of 30-50 years.
A better read though, is this which is an article about who to best go about long term storage on CDRs.
It includes the tip, amongst a load of others, that the top of CDR's is far more fragile and needs to be treated with great care.
Because I use linkification which frees me from having to worry about such mundalities.
/. comments when idiots like me forget to put the anchor tags in ;)
I find its main use is for reading
I agree re: ethereal.
I don't know why it wasn't linked to in the article, but here you go:
Homepage: http://ettercap.sourceforge.net/
Description: A suite for man in the middle attacks and network mapping
That link is most helpful - thanks.
Funny this is, when I glanced at the title of this page, I read "Letters of mass destruction". Very droll.
-snip- I never want to leave my country (sic Canada). The only reasons I could possibly have for going to the US are for work related reasons, or to visit a special someone. I don't really have any desire to leave Canada... -/snip-
Oh god, this can't-see-past-my-own-borders-clearly disease is spreading. There are other places on the planet worth considering going besides the US and Canada?
Still - at least you acknowledge there are two countries worthy of your thoughts - that's a whole 100% more than some.
(Note to author of post above, don't mean to make you feel bad, that probably isn't even what you meant, but, the gist of your post is "I never want to leave my country coz the US isn't for me" and didn't consider that there are thousands of other places on earth with a richness and diversity beyond imagination)
Identity theft can destroy people, literally.
Identity theft, the worlds leading cause of spontaneous human combustion. Four out of five leading physicists agree.
Brilliant - that works a treat and is far better than my "reload until the page renders right" solution :)
Many thanks,
Kent.
I did laugh at that, in Bangkok at the moment, and your point is very well made here!
BTW The Clever Country is hardly a phrase of my creation.
Let me get this straight. Assume I am a bad guy. If I want to find an American overseas - particularly in a country where carrying a passport is mandatory, how am I going to go about it?
To take it one step further, if I am wifi'd into a database somehow, I can even do a few smarts and identify a "better" target (wealthier, public figure etc).
I carry an Australian passport and it will not shock me when "the Clever Country" bends over and does what the Americans do - yet again!
That's all well and good, but, assuming this thing takes off, did you see this bit in the FAQ's?
"However, it is possible that Certificate Authorities may become a valuable addition to the DomainKeys solution to add an even greater level of security and trust."
So, to extend the "SUSPECT" folder, are we eventually going to find ourselves in the position where we all have to pay a CA simply to avoid having mail from private domains being bounced by big/wealthy/corporate providers.
This would suck, I have about 20 domains that I serve mail for, a couple of commercial ones, but mainly domains for friends, myself etc. At 50 odd dollars a throw, that'd be $1000 dollars a year.
Don't get me wrong, public verification would be nice in certain circumstances, but I can't see how this would happen without incurring considerable cost, after all, what you are paying for (in theory) is for someone else to verify you are who you say you are - this is a service that quite rightly is chargeable.
To go one step further, it would also (once more, in theory - in my experience the checking done for CA signed certs is non-existent/trivial to circumvent) reduce the anonymity and privacy on the net that we all value so highly - at least as far as email is concerned.
That's not such a silly thought, but possibly not for the reasons you think. I am a bit tired and can't be bothered digging it up at the moment, but there was a story about both sides hiring a veritable army of lawyers ready to contest the election results in court.
Could this be grounds should Bush win? (I don't have a clue - it is a question for those more knowledgable in these matters than me).
There has been no hysteria and you are right - it hasn't "destroyed your way of live" - see "eroded" above.
What has happened is we have made a set of changes to our ways of life - some trivially minor, some major purely through our own fears.
In this case the change itself is almost inconsequential, but the philosiphy behind it is not. It does not take a huge imagination to be able to see that we are gradually trading more and more of our own freedoms in the interests of safety and security - and, we are doing it to ourselves!
It is all a matter of degrees though,it simply comes down to a question of how many freedoms you are willing to exchange for security.
The other point you make is that value has been added to your way of life. How? You have a little more security and a little less freedom. If your "way of life" is founded on basic freedoms then, whether you like to acknowledge it or not, it has been subtracted from, even if this doesn't affect you directly.
It has added to your security, but that is the thing that almost is worth getting hysterical about. There is becoming more and more of a interchangeablity in the terms "quality of life" and security in the media and various political spiels, and, no matter how many times you hear it, you need to remember, they are simply not the same thing at all, related in a lot of cases assuredly, but not the same thing.
Don't be sorry mate.
This is why you are lucky to have other folks around who do understand.
But seriously, do you really not see? My first inclination is that you are doing a head in the sand type deal in the hope that others will want to shove there heads under and see what you are looking at.
On the off chance the above is not true, I offer the below explanation solely for your benefit...
Does the expression "thin end of the wedge" mean anything to you? This story is about something that has changed as an indirect result of Sep 11. Now, we are able to make less informed decisions than we were previously. Terrorists have not restricted our access to this information, we have done it to ourselves.
The temptation with these things is to dismiss it as "ah - this doesn't matter too much, it is only a minor thing", but, a lot of minor things can, and often do, add up to be a major thing.
Maybe destroying our way of life is a little too overdramatic, eroding would be a better word.