Yeah, it's possible to do authentication on Port 25, but it's generally hokey and often broke things when people did it, and left passwords in the clear for eavesdroppers - 587 is a cleaner and more standardized solution. I remember having to configure Eudora for receive-before-send when my email provider was trying that approach...
Most ISPs already do a fair bit of policing on the users of their mail servers, so this probably won't make a big dent (though botnets keep evolving, and if the scalability works to use ISP mail servers, they'll go back to it.) This basically provides a cleaner, more standardized solution for mail submission and authentication. VZ might block Port 25 later, and getting their users onto 587 makes it easier.
Zombies already do deliver their mail directly using Port 25. They're not generally running Real Sendmail (which is way too big and heavy for what they need) - in general they're running stripped-down mail senders that don't bother checking error messages correctly, which is why greylisting's "Go away and come back in 5 minutes" is enough to discourage lots of them. But lots of ISPs have been jumping on the "Block Port 25" bandwagon (with no apologies to Linux users who run their own sendmail), so maybe the zombies will go back to using ISP mail servers more often.
As far as I can tell from this article and a few others that are derived from the same press releases, what VZ is doing here is setting up their own mail servers to use Port 587 submission instead of Port 25. That won't stop zombies or legitimate Linux mail systems from sending mail directly to their recipients' systems, though I'm guessing that they'll get around to blocking Port 25 (sigh) once they've got most of their users migrated to 587.
What this will do is give them authentication, which makes it easier for them to block customers who use VZ's mail servers from spamming, but I'd be surprised if there's much of that happening (though botnets keep evolving their techniques.) It's already possible to reduce that simply by using passwords, or using various hokey port 25 authentication methods like receive-before-send; this cleans up the process a bit.
Sure, if you're heating your house with electricity anyway, might as well have the stuff doing some computation for you, at least in the winter. Obviously it's different in the summer...
With all the churn of the last few years of oil prices, I don't know how electric heat compares to oil or gas heat (my last data point was 15 years ago, when heating my all-electric high-ceilinged condo in Silicon Valley at California's "regulated" electricity prices cost more than oil heat for my moderately-well-insulated house in New Jersey, where we actually had winter...)
I've always found it frustrating that so many projects described as "experiments" aren't experiments - they're (optionally cool) projects replicating somebody else's work, but you're not learning anything new, you're just validating what somebody else already learned. That can still be fun - hands-on experience is different than book learning for most people, and blowing things up is always a good time - but it's not an experiment.
I've seen lots of freshman engineering / design projects that are at least not just replication - building bridges with toothpicks, making eggs survive dropping from high windows, etc., but even those are often not done with actual science in the process, just empirical engineering.
Some of the typical blowing-things-up projects can also be experimental - make your potato cannon, figure out something about the amount of energy you're getting from the fuel and how far the potato goes and therefore conclude something about your gun's efficiency. (You already knew you needed to point it at a 45 degree angle for maximum distance, and probably even why...) Can you find other ways to learn something new from your projects, even if it's less interesting that the fun of doing the project?
The important colors of routers are teal and blue - most other ones seem to be beige (and of course, if you're running a beige router from a company that now makes teal routers, it's old enough that either you're not doing anything too critical on it or you're not a production ISP...)
(Beige, of course, includes black or steel or whatever other colors 1U servers come in, running software like OpenBSD or Quagga or Vyatta, as well as some of the non-top-2 hardware-based router companies out there.)
VMS looked far more like RSTS-11 or RSX-11 than like Unix. I don't know if CP/M was inspired by VMS or by its predecessors. DOS certainly wasn't inspired by Unix, at least in the original versions; they clearly didn't have any of the concepts, even though they had a machine that was almost as powerful as a small PDP-11 and more powerful than an IBM System/34 (which had a quite nice shell), and later versions of DOS (around 3ish?) started emulating some Unix shell syntax while still not having the underpinnings to do the job.
My first Unix shell was the Mashey shell that preceded Bourne shell, on a PDP-11 running v6.:-) Before that I'd used RSTS-11, HPUX Basic, the IBM System 34 shell (OCL was fairly powerful, though less than sh), CMS, Plato, and various things with punch cards. Unix shell seemed powerful, flexible, and really really appropriate. I later used other shells like TSO and occasionally CP/M; I forget if I used VMS and ddt before DOS or only after.
Eventually MS-DOS came around, and it was painfully clumsy. It was like they'd seen Unix on a viewgraph, but hadn't gotten the concepts and had left most of the interesting commands out - they had hardware that was about as powerful as a small PDP-11, dedicated to one user!, and an integrated graphics system as well, and yet the environment was hopelessly lame. There were directories, but they didn't have the same syntax for each level of the file system, there wasn't the equivalent of "cd..", you could use variables but they were really limited, you couldn't pipe commands together, and of course regular expressions were missing. MS-DOS 2.11 and 3 were better than MS-DOS 1. People claimed it was friendly, but it was almost as bad as being on a punch-card system like JES-3 or HASP except that you had a backspace key.
A few years later the Macintosh people came around and claimed that _they_ were more friendly than Unix, and they were correct - the system was less powerful, but it really was helpful. VMS was ugly and evil, but it was reasonably powerful, and had a very good help system.
It would have been more appropriate under the Bush Administration, since they believed in Unitary Executives who weren't accountable to Congress or the Courts, but the term rather predates them. But really the term is an anglicization of "Caesar", the family of thugs who ruled Rome and the surrounding world and turned the Republic into an Empire.
There are several reasons for calling somebody a (whatever) Czar:
Bureaucrats like to build empires, and they're in charge of one
The last Czar of Russia got assassinated along with his whole family, and if it's politically expedient, a US administration can do that to their (whatever) Czar.
The title "Scapegoat" just doesn't have the same appeal when you're recruiting them...
Since we've been calling the previous people Czars rather than Tsars, the corresponding anglicization of a russianized roman title would be Czarina rather than Tsarina or Tsaritsa.
If you really don't need more than 3 significant digits, slide rules use surprisingly low power:-)
Most computers these days have separate processors for graphics and a main CPU, and fairly often the GPU is a lot more powerful than the CPU. Perhaps the place to use the fast low-power less-accurate chip is in the graphics (at least in all the shaders and pixel-bashers, though not necessarily in the geometry calculations)?
I forget what the story is behind the 60s band "The Mamas and the Papas"; I think they were originally studio musicians or something. Producers were picking the pop version of rock&roll bands for cuteness back then too, and they obviously didn't have that; they were good singers instead.
And you should come to our local bluegrass/old-time jam session some time - average hair color is gray...
There's a movie in the movie festival circuit called "The Wrecking Crew", about the group of LA studio musicians who backed up just about everybody's recordings in the 60s-70s. A typical recording might have a lead singer or two and occasionally a guitarist who were the actual group recording, but mostly the guitars, bass, drums, and other instruments were actually played by the studio musicians, rather than by the band on the label themselves. They were fast, professional, and very good, and it made a lot of money for record producers to use them.
Sometimes they'd be used very effectively - Bob Dylan(mostly in Nashville rather than LA) would know what he wanted to do, and he'd be playing lead guitar as well as singing, and you didn't care who backed him up. Brian Wilson's Pet Sounds was mostly him and the crew, with the actual Beach Boys doing some vocals. On the other hand, there were prefab bands like the Monkees back then, and other bands that really weren't the same live because they couldn't play that well. And just about every artist complained about Phil Spector overproducing their stuff, including bands that really were artists and other bands that really weren't...
Is digital post-production to fix a singer or guitarist cheating any more than having him/her replaced by (usually better) studio musicians for a record?
The pop music I remember most from the late 50s (which was a bit before my time, though I was alive by then) is mostly groups of about 4 guys singing in harmony - Blue Moon, etc. - and folk had a lot of that. Even by the 70s there was still Crosby Stills Nash and Occasionally Young, though they were a bit more of an exception by then.
Sure, Sturgeon's Law applies to rap music and hip-hop the way it does to fiction and to other genres of music, and Donaldson's Commentary that "Sturgeon was an optimist" also applies there. Not everything that's popular has to be a keeper.
Rap had a lot of potential depth and character to it, and people had a lot of fun with it even if most of it wasn't very good. It's not like most of the early rock&roll bands banging out three chords in their garage were that good either... And hip-hop expanded far beyond where rap was.
Did the performers have anything interesting to say? Did they say it in new and interesting ways? Did they grab a voice from the culture around them? Could you dance to it? Did they have fun? Did they get girls? (and if you don't think the latter wasn't a major objective of rock&roll, you obviously weren't around during the 60s:-) Did their parents yell at them to turn off that noise? Were they good enough to listen to even if they didn't achieve _all_ of those objectives simultaneously?
Yeah, it's not particularly my music, and lots of the performers were appallingly misogynistic thugs, but there was also a lot of blazing creativity there in addition to a lot of overpromoted crap. Some of it's worth keeping, and lots of it was good for its time even if it wasn't worth keeping.
Are you thinking of the same beatniks I am? They were very strongly rebelling against metric verse; most of their poetry, or at least the poetry of people inspired by them, ran towards free or blank verse, and was much more about imagery and Zen stuff.
"I have seen the best minds of a generation destroyed by madness, starving, hysterical, naked..."
I *really* wish laptops would standardize on 12volt power, and not insist on random 13.5v,15, 16, 18. There's so much 12v gear out there for use in cars, and there are portable 12vdc power packs for powering that stuff when you're not running your car, and even if you need a filter adapter of some sort to clean up car alternator power, that's still a lot less trouble than having to drag along an inverter to convert 12vdc to 110vac and a laptop power brick to convert it back down to 16v or whatever.
Currently if I want to work in my backyard for more than an hour or two (or run the screen brighter than it'll run on batteries) I can drag out an extension cord, but it'd be much easier to carry my car-jumper which could power the thing all laptop all day if it would run on 12v.
And USB obviously rocks for things that need that level of power. I've had several devices like portable disk drives or DVD drives that need more power than one USB connection gives - so they use two USB cables, one with a regular B connector for data, and another with a round power connector on the end that just provides power.
The rules are a lot less strict for cable than for broadcast TV, though the FCC and some Congresscritters keep wanting to use regulation of broadcast TV as an excuse to regulate cable.
But even if they were regulated, they'd get a lot less heat for it because it was not only obviously not the company's intended broadcast, it was also only in one limited market as opposed to the whole country.
If this had happened in, say, the middle of the third quarter when not much was happening, they'd still have gotten some complaints, but if you were watching the game for the football and not just the commercials, the timing would have been really annoying. It was one of those games where most of the action was in the last three minutes of each half.
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Little Bobby Tables, we call him
Hey, maybe they'll never see the google hits she'd most be worried about...
If you Google my name, most of the hits you get are for a drummer. If you've heard me drumming, you'd know that's not me :-)
Yeah, it's possible to do authentication on Port 25, but it's generally hokey and often broke things when people did it, and left passwords in the clear for eavesdroppers - 587 is a cleaner and more standardized solution. I remember having to configure Eudora for receive-before-send when my email provider was trying that approach...
Most ISPs already do a fair bit of policing on the users of their mail servers, so this probably won't make a big dent (though botnets keep evolving, and if the scalability works to use ISP mail servers, they'll go back to it.) This basically provides a cleaner, more standardized solution for mail submission and authentication. VZ might block Port 25 later, and getting their users onto 587 makes it easier.
Zombies already do deliver their mail directly using Port 25. They're not generally running Real Sendmail (which is way too big and heavy for what they need) - in general they're running stripped-down mail senders that don't bother checking error messages correctly, which is why greylisting's "Go away and come back in 5 minutes" is enough to discourage lots of them. But lots of ISPs have been jumping on the "Block Port 25" bandwagon (with no apologies to Linux users who run their own sendmail), so maybe the zombies will go back to using ISP mail servers more often.
As far as I can tell from this article and a few others that are derived from the same press releases, what VZ is doing here is setting up their own mail servers to use Port 587 submission instead of Port 25. That won't stop zombies or legitimate Linux mail systems from sending mail directly to their recipients' systems, though I'm guessing that they'll get around to blocking Port 25 (sigh) once they've got most of their users migrated to 587.
What this will do is give them authentication, which makes it easier for them to block customers who use VZ's mail servers from spamming, but I'd be surprised if there's much of that happening (though botnets keep evolving their techniques.) It's already possible to reduce that simply by using passwords, or using various hokey port 25 authentication methods like receive-before-send; this cleans up the process a bit.
The issue of whether somebody is a "public figure" affects libel lawsuits - if the principal were suing her, it might have some relevance.
This is a criminal case - the principal was alleging "harassment" or some similarly bogus charge.
Sure, if you're heating your house with electricity anyway, might as well have the stuff doing some computation for you, at least in the winter. Obviously it's different in the summer...
With all the churn of the last few years of oil prices, I don't know how electric heat compares to oil or gas heat (my last data point was 15 years ago, when heating my all-electric high-ceilinged condo in Silicon Valley at California's "regulated" electricity prices cost more than oil heat for my moderately-well-insulated house in New Jersey, where we actually had winter...)
I've always found it frustrating that so many projects described as "experiments" aren't experiments - they're (optionally cool) projects replicating somebody else's work, but you're not learning anything new, you're just validating what somebody else already learned. That can still be fun - hands-on experience is different than book learning for most people, and blowing things up is always a good time - but it's not an experiment.
I've seen lots of freshman engineering / design projects that are at least not just replication - building bridges with toothpicks, making eggs survive dropping from high windows, etc., but even those are often not done with actual science in the process, just empirical engineering.
Some of the typical blowing-things-up projects can also be experimental - make your potato cannon, figure out something about the amount of energy you're getting from the fuel and how far the potato goes and therefore conclude something about your gun's efficiency. (You already knew you needed to point it at a 45 degree angle for maximum distance, and probably even why...) Can you find other ways to learn something new from your projects, even if it's less interesting that the fun of doing the project?
The important colors of routers are teal and blue - most other ones seem to be beige (and of course, if you're running a beige router from a company that now makes teal routers, it's old enough that either you're not doing anything too critical on it or you're not a production ISP...)
(Beige, of course, includes black or steel or whatever other colors 1U servers come in, running software like OpenBSD or Quagga or Vyatta, as well as some of the non-top-2 hardware-based router companies out there.)
VMS looked far more like RSTS-11 or RSX-11 than like Unix. I don't know if CP/M was inspired by VMS or by its predecessors. DOS certainly wasn't inspired by Unix, at least in the original versions; they clearly didn't have any of the concepts, even though they had a machine that was almost as powerful as a small PDP-11 and more powerful than an IBM System/34 (which had a quite nice shell), and later versions of DOS (around 3ish?) started emulating some Unix shell syntax while still not having the underpinnings to do the job.
My first Unix shell was the Mashey shell that preceded Bourne shell, on a PDP-11 running v6. :-) Before that I'd used RSTS-11, HPUX Basic, the IBM System 34 shell (OCL was fairly powerful, though less than sh), CMS, Plato, and various things with punch cards. Unix shell seemed powerful, flexible, and really really appropriate. I later used other shells like TSO and occasionally CP/M; I forget if I used VMS and ddt before DOS or only after.
Eventually MS-DOS came around, and it was painfully clumsy. It was like they'd seen Unix on a viewgraph, but hadn't gotten the concepts and had left most of the interesting commands out - they had hardware that was about as powerful as a small PDP-11, dedicated to one user!, and an integrated graphics system as well, and yet the environment was hopelessly lame. There were directories, but they didn't have the same syntax for each level of the file system, there wasn't the equivalent of "cd ..", you could use variables but they were really limited, you couldn't pipe commands together, and of course regular expressions were missing. MS-DOS 2.11 and 3 were better than MS-DOS 1. People claimed it was friendly, but it was almost as bad as being on a punch-card system like JES-3 or HASP except that you had a backspace key.
A few years later the Macintosh people came around and claimed that _they_ were more friendly than Unix, and they were correct - the system was less powerful, but it really was helpful. VMS was ugly and evil, but it was reasonably powerful, and had a very good help system.
It would have been more appropriate under the Bush Administration, since they believed in Unitary Executives who weren't accountable to Congress or the Courts, but the term rather predates them. But really the term is an anglicization of "Caesar", the family of thugs who ruled Rome and the surrounding world and turned the Republic into an Empire.
There are several reasons for calling somebody a (whatever) Czar:
Since we've been calling the previous people Czars rather than Tsars, the corresponding anglicization of a russianized roman title would be Czarina rather than Tsarina or Tsaritsa.
(Or "Ocarina" if you prefer? :-)
If you really don't need more than 3 significant digits, slide rules use surprisingly low power :-)
Most computers these days have separate processors for graphics and a main CPU, and fairly often the GPU is a lot more powerful than the CPU. Perhaps the place to use the fast low-power less-accurate chip is in the graphics (at least in all the shaders and pixel-bashers, though not necessarily in the geometry calculations)?
I forget what the story is behind the 60s band "The Mamas and the Papas"; I think they were originally studio musicians or something.
Producers were picking the pop version of rock&roll bands for cuteness back then too, and they obviously didn't have that; they were good singers instead.
And you should come to our local bluegrass/old-time jam session some time - average hair color is gray...
It's called "ethanol"...
There's a movie in the movie festival circuit called "The Wrecking Crew", about the group of LA studio musicians who backed up just about everybody's recordings in the 60s-70s. A typical recording might have a lead singer or two and occasionally a guitarist who were the actual group recording, but mostly the guitars, bass, drums, and other instruments were actually played by the studio musicians, rather than by the band on the label themselves. They were fast, professional, and very good, and it made a lot of money for record producers to use them.
Sometimes they'd be used very effectively - Bob Dylan(mostly in Nashville rather than LA) would know what he wanted to do, and he'd be playing lead guitar as well as singing, and you didn't care who backed him up. Brian Wilson's Pet Sounds was mostly him and the crew, with the actual Beach Boys doing some vocals. On the other hand, there were prefab bands like the Monkees back then, and other bands that really weren't the same live because they couldn't play that well. And just about every artist complained about Phil Spector overproducing their stuff, including bands that really were artists and other bands that really weren't...
Is digital post-production to fix a singer or guitarist cheating any more than having him/her replaced by (usually better) studio musicians for a record?
Good post - thanks!
The pop music I remember most from the late 50s (which was a bit before my time, though I was alive by then) is mostly groups of about 4 guys singing in harmony - Blue Moon, etc. - and folk had a lot of that. Even by the 70s there was still Crosby Stills Nash and Occasionally Young, though they were a bit more of an exception by then.
Sure, Sturgeon's Law applies to rap music and hip-hop the way it does to fiction and to other genres of music, and Donaldson's Commentary that "Sturgeon was an optimist" also applies there. Not everything that's popular has to be a keeper.
Rap had a lot of potential depth and character to it, and people had a lot of fun with it even if most of it wasn't very good. It's not like most of the early rock&roll bands banging out three chords in their garage were that good either... And hip-hop expanded far beyond where rap was.
Did the performers have anything interesting to say? Did they say it in new and interesting ways? Did they grab a voice from the culture around them? Could you dance to it? Did they have fun? Did they get girls? (and if you don't think the latter wasn't a major objective of rock&roll, you obviously weren't around during the 60s :-) Did their parents yell at them to turn off that noise? Were they good enough to listen to even if they didn't achieve _all_ of those objectives simultaneously?
Yeah, it's not particularly my music, and lots of the performers were appallingly misogynistic thugs, but there was also a lot of blazing creativity there in addition to a lot of overpromoted crap. Some of it's worth keeping, and lots of it was good for its time even if it wasn't worth keeping.
Are you thinking of the same beatniks I am? They were very strongly rebelling against metric verse; most of their poetry, or at least the poetry of people inspired by them, ran towards free or blank verse, and was much more about imagery and Zen stuff.
"I have seen the best minds of a generation destroyed by madness, starving, hysterical, naked..."
I *really* wish laptops would standardize on 12volt power, and not insist on random 13.5v,15, 16, 18. There's so much 12v gear out there for use in cars, and there are portable 12vdc power packs for powering that stuff when you're not running your car, and even if you need a filter adapter of some sort to clean up car alternator power, that's still a lot less trouble than having to drag along an inverter to convert 12vdc to 110vac and a laptop power brick to convert it back down to 16v or whatever.
Currently if I want to work in my backyard for more than an hour or two (or run the screen brighter than it'll run on batteries) I can drag out an extension cord, but it'd be much easier to carry my car-jumper which could power the thing all laptop all day if it would run on 12v.
And USB obviously rocks for things that need that level of power. I've had several devices like portable disk drives or DVD drives that need more power than one USB connection gives - so they use two USB cables, one with a regular B connector for data, and another with a round power connector on the end that just provides power.
The rules are a lot less strict for cable than for broadcast TV, though the FCC and some Congresscritters keep wanting to use regulation of broadcast TV as an excuse to regulate cable.
But even if they were regulated, they'd get a lot less heat for it because it was not only obviously not the company's intended broadcast, it was also only in one limited market as opposed to the whole country.
If this had happened in, say, the middle of the third quarter when not much was happening, they'd still have gotten some complaints, but if you were watching the game for the football and not just the commercials, the timing would have been really annoying. It was one of those games where most of the action was in the last three minutes of each half.