Only a few months ago I finally bit the bullet and switched over from Eudora to Thunderbird. I'd have stayed with Eudora, even though it hasn't been supported in nearly a decade, but everybody's SSL for IMAP/POP has switched to longer keys and other algorithms, so Eudora's 512-bit RSA or whatever could no longer connect to any of my ISPs. At least T-bird knew how to import the Eudora mailboxes cleanly.
Are there alternative email clients that can import mailboxes from Thunderbird, now that I apparently have to move them again?
Back when the crazy right-wingers were petitioning whitehouse.gov to let Texas secede from the Union again, ex-Texan friends of mine and I agreed we should let them go, but they have to let us keep Austin, like West Berlin as an island surrounded by reds. The Congress St. Bridge will be the new Checkpoint Charlie.
I've only visited Austin once (for my uncle's funeral), but I've got cousins there, and friends who've lived there, and if you've got to be in Texas, and are politically or culturally anywhere left of Rick Perry, it's the place to be. San Antonio's not too bad either, though I'd probably get tired of it pretty fast. Parts of the culture are fun, there's a great arts scene, but I suspect it's small enough you'd see everything in the first year and then be bored.
Houston's weather and traffic are horrible enough that it's off my list even aside from the culture. Dallas? Meh, if I had to live in a big dirty ugly city, it'd be New York, or maybe LA, plus it's a lot more like Texas. I know some really wonderful Texans, but I don't talk politics with them except the family in Austin or the ones who've escaped to California because they had to get out of Texas.
I'm a Christian, and Pastafarianism is mocking aspects of people who share my general corner of the religious world, and I'm just fine with that. Not only do some of my fellow believers sometimes act in ways that deserve mocking, we often do it ourselves (at least friendly mocking.) And more importantly, by doing things like this, Pastafarians are protecting other minority religious beliefs and practices. The US Army still hasn't quite figured out how to cope with Sikhs wearing turbans (and sometimes they even have trouble with Orthodox Jews, even army chaplains, because they violate critical military doctrines about gentlemen not wearing hats indoors), the TSA harassed them because they're different even before they decided to start harassing other hat-wearers, schools don't let students wear head-scarves (or mini-skirts) because that's Not How Proper American Girls Dress, Muslim-hating idiots beat up Sikhs, the list goes on.
I attended Quaker meetings for a few years, and we'd occasionally get the question about those hats the oatmeal-box guy wears. Quakerism came from England, where it's beastly cold and rainy and Anglos are prone to male pattern baldness, and moved to Pennsylvania and New England where it's also beastly cold and rainy much of the year, and many of them believed in wearing plain durable clothing instead of wearing flashy stuff to draw attention to themselves. But English social custom and legal practice was big on forcing lower-class people to acknowledge the importance of higher-class people, and taking off hats to your betters (especially government officials and nobility) was a big part of that, and Quakerism believes very radically in equality, so Quakers would often get thrown in jail for not taking off their hats around their betters. I wear hats to keep my head warm (as an Anglo who went bald early), and when my beard was longer I could pass for Orthodox if I was wearing a dark suit and a hat.
Back when the TSA were new, they didn't make people take off hats or coats in security lines, but out here at San Jose airport, the main people who wore them were Mexicans wearing cowboy hats heading down to Mexico, and the TSA were the white guys who'd replaced the previous mostly-immigrant screeners, and they decided to make a local rule telling the Mexicans to take their hats off. My first reaction was "if they tried this at LaGuardia the Hasidim would been in the mayor's office in an hour telling him to fire the bigot who thought up that nonsense", but as a Quaker I felt I ought to argue with them because they're clearly just doing it to bully people, and I was successful at making it difficult for them to avoid the bigotry issue for a while.
Maybe you're smiling because you got through the line at the driver's license bureau in less than two hours. But they want a photo that looks like you do when a cop pulls you over and shines a flashlight in your face.
My first one looked like I had a beard - I didn't back then, it's was just really bad lighting at the DMV. (And one of my recent DLs said I needed to be wearing glasses - I don't need them for distance, and didn't use them for the eye test, but I put them back on to read the forms.)
What you really need as a driver's license photo is one that shows you looking like you're extremely tired and someone's shining a flashlight in your face, because that's how a cop will really see you. If that includes wearing a colander on your head, then go for it.
Back in the late 80s / early 90s, we were using Sun computers, with either NeWS or OpenLook. My manager had a 21" monitor, but even so was getting tired of switching between one set of glasses to read it and another set to talk to people, and printing out email to read it. So we just told his machine to use 24-point bold font as his default, and he could read it just fine. (Your operating system probably isn't as flexible, though maybe if you've got a Mac it'll do:-)
Computers are typically at 22-24" focal distance, compared to book-reading glasses, which have a focal distance shorter than that (I forget it it's 18" or what.) This means telling the eye doctor when I get an exam that I want to know the pupillary distance for the computer reading glasses. (Sometimes this requires a "yes, really" discussion, in addition to the "oh, you're ordering glasses online" one, but that lets me get multiple $20 computer glasses of the current prescription so there's one set at the office and one at the home computer.)
Chainlink fence isn't even remotely a Faraday cage. (We were actually wondering if the chainlink security fence and metal modular walls at the lab's original location would be good enough, until the security director's pager went off when we were having a meeting about the new regs we'd have to meet:-) It might be good enough for really low frequencies, but that's about it.
You can deal with EMP transients and medium-high frequency signals on the power lines by using good enough filters, similar to what you'd use for lightning, and these days you're going to use fiber for any long-haul data (for my lab, that meant modems, outside the cage, connected by RS232-over-fiber:-) And yes, stopping all the leaks takes a lot of attention.
I've been at various parts of the Bell System and AT&T for some decades now. There were years when it was much easier to get leftover 23" telco racks for my lab than buy new 19" racks for computers, so we had a lot of extra rails for conversion. The more serious problem with that in recent years is that computer racks are generally deeper than telco racks, so not everything would fit in the cabinets (or we'd have to take the back door off.)
Sure, it's done in the little microcontroller that runs the hard drive instead of the CPU, and might even have ASIC help, but it's still software encryption, and from a crypto perspective there's the question of "how badly did they store the keys?"
The real advantage of self-encrypting disk drives is that you don't have to depend on the administrator remembering to install a decent software encryption system in the OS. (This applies both to corporate laptops and to personally administered ones, whether "personally" is yourself or the relative whose computer you'll be fixing over Thanksgiving.)
Attackers use DNS in a couple of ways - one is as an amplifier, where the attacker forges a query "from" the target's IP address to a DNS server that produces a response that's larger than the query, which causes more traffic and hides the attacker's IP. (Fixing this requires configuring DNS servers not to do amplification, and getting the ISPs that the bots live on to enforce anti-spoofing - how many decades old is BCP38 now?) Another is as a way for the bots to contact their controller, and for intermediate controllers to contact their master controllers, so the controllers can change their IP addresses and keep working. Often this is "fast-flux DNS", where the name records have short expiration times, and are often bought with stolen credit cards. (There are some defenses like identifying DNS registrars that support lots of bad guys, and configuring DNS resolvers not to accept names that have been registered in the past day or so, but bots can always do their own name resolution instead of using the host's or ISP's default DNS server, and you can't simply force DNS caching times to be long because that affects DNS-based load-balancers.)
Defenders have multiple ways to use DNS. One is simply load-balancing among servers - www.example.com can hand out different IP addresses to end users based on load or whatever, and can try to guess which users are legitimate and point them to different servers than the attackers. Lots of variations on this, and also they can do things like redirect web requests from www.example.com to wwwX.example.com, where X is 1...n different groups of servers, or moves every 15 minutes, or whatever. Some things to be careful of are that real web browsers usually cache IP addresses for a long time.
I finally had to bite the bullet and give up Eudora earlier this year, because the changes to SSL/TLS by my email providers meant that Eudora could no longer set up an encrypted connection, because it couldn't handle 2048-bit keys. At least Thunderbird works better now than it did a few years back when I last evaluated it, so I use that on Windows. (Haven't found an IMAP client for Android tablets I really like, so I use webmail from there.)
My mom's still using Eudora 1.4 on her Mac, over dialup, and it still works fine.
Wil Wheaton's Law says "Don't be a dick*". A committee that constantly insults people inappropriately is not going to be as productive or have as diverse a range of ideas as one that values contributors. If having a code of conduct says that rude annoying people don't participate, because they're afraid that someone in the future might tell them not to be a dick, well, mission accomplished. If they don't like it, they shouldn't be so thin-skinned.
* Yes, you can say that that's technically a sexually biased insult. The people who are most likely to say that are the ones who pretend to be thick-skinned and not care. So don't be a dick.
Having Christmas in the summer has got to be weird enough, especially since most Western European Christmas traditions (including the trees we borrowed from the pagans) are about being mid-winter, and you don't even do winter that well in Oz when you are having it.
But yeah, Halloween is pretty much something Americans adopted from Irish immigrants, expanded on, and then commercialized, and while we've sold some of that back to the English, it was long after you were on your own. Here in California we also get the "Day of the Dead" from the Mexicans, and cultural appropriation means we get to be sloppy about differentiating it from "Halloween with different graphics".
But Halloween wasn't the day before All Hallows Day, it was the first part of it. The English started days at sundown, just as most of the western world did before clocks, and Jewish holidays still do start at sundown.
And All Hallows was an important holiday primarily because it was trying to distract the pagans away from celebrating Samhain.
You're incorrect, which is bad form when you're being a pedant, which you were.
It's "correct", because while English tolerates rapid and radical changes in common usage, the old uses don't become wrong just because there are newer forms that are also correct. "Thee" and "thou" are still fairly cromulent English, even though you probably say "you" (and you probably use "you" correctly, even if you get "thee" and "thou" and their corresponding verb forms wrong.)
I used to work at Bell Labs, in a department that had a bunch of nuclear physicists doing research into EMP, because the government wanted studies about hardening their networks in case of nuclear war, and a big thing that influenced them was a telco cable that crashed during a mid-1970s solar flare. It was back when long-haul cable systems were still copper, before fiber had replaced them, and a few hundred miles of copper wire becomes a very big antenna if you hit it with enough of a magnetic field, and there's enough voltage difference between it and ground to fry the equipment at both ends. They had a huge amount of data to work with, and they also studied the effects of EMP on various pieces of equipment, and ways to design the networks to be resilient against suddenly getting big holes in it.
Fiber optics helps with a lot of this (but obviously that doesn't help the electric companies.) On the other hand, during the 60s and 70s, the phone networks were changing from electromechanical phone switches like relays and crossbars, which were easy to protect, to transistors and integrated circuits that just aren't, and you're not going to put it all in Faraday cages, especially these days when there's no longer a Soviet Union that's likely to nuke the US. And the Bell System divestiture meant that a lot of the interconnections between local telco switches were no longer available to act as backups for the now-multiple long-distance companies, but the switching logic was starting to get smarter so there were more option for rerouting traffic than with the older dumber switches. Lots of change, and then all this Internet stuff happened.
Don't mess with the clocks - you can keep them accurate and adjust the display format for leap seconds, just like you do for leap year days, time zones, Daylight Savings, US-vs-EU Daylight Savings, etc. Yes, this means that some people won't fix their code, so they'll be off by a few seconds from consensus, but time will continue to be monotonically increasing so stuff won't explode. There are also people who write code that doesn't handle leap years properly (I'm less bothered by the people who only do Year%4 than the ones who check for Year%100 but don't check Year%400.)
And I haven't seen a Y2K bug in the field in, oh, at least a month or two (I forget if it was the "year=19100" bug or a different one.)
That was SXSW's program scheduling people. The panel members who've written about it in public said they'd told SXSW that having this panel would mean SXSW would have to deal with harassment and threats, and they'd been ignored, so when it happened they expressed a range of opinions from WTF to anger to "we TOLD you this would happen and you should be ready to deal with it". Also, the Gamergate panel didn't get put on the schedule until after the program submission deadlines had passed, so the anti-harassment panel folks were already frustrated by that, and it first it had looked like only their panel was cancelled, not both.
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Only a few months ago I finally bit the bullet and switched over from Eudora to Thunderbird. I'd have stayed with Eudora, even though it hasn't been supported in nearly a decade, but everybody's SSL for IMAP/POP has switched to longer keys and other algorithms, so Eudora's 512-bit RSA or whatever could no longer connect to any of my ISPs. At least T-bird knew how to import the Eudora mailboxes cleanly.
Are there alternative email clients that can import mailboxes from Thunderbird, now that I apparently have to move them again?
So I'm putting some liquid in your liquid.
Back when the crazy right-wingers were petitioning whitehouse.gov to let Texas secede from the Union again, ex-Texan friends of mine and I agreed we should let them go, but they have to let us keep Austin, like West Berlin as an island surrounded by reds. The Congress St. Bridge will be the new Checkpoint Charlie.
I've only visited Austin once (for my uncle's funeral), but I've got cousins there, and friends who've lived there, and if you've got to be in Texas, and are politically or culturally anywhere left of Rick Perry, it's the place to be. San Antonio's not too bad either, though I'd probably get tired of it pretty fast. Parts of the culture are fun, there's a great arts scene, but I suspect it's small enough you'd see everything in the first year and then be bored.
Houston's weather and traffic are horrible enough that it's off my list even aside from the culture. Dallas? Meh, if I had to live in a big dirty ugly city, it'd be New York, or maybe LA, plus it's a lot more like Texas. I know some really wonderful Texans, but I don't talk politics with them except the family in Austin or the ones who've escaped to California because they had to get out of Texas.
They have this silly custom called "winter", but unlike Boulder they don't have mountains to make that any fun.
Are plastic colanders allowed? Or do they have to be metal?
I'm a Christian, and Pastafarianism is mocking aspects of people who share my general corner of the religious world, and I'm just fine with that. Not only do some of my fellow believers sometimes act in ways that deserve mocking, we often do it ourselves (at least friendly mocking.) And more importantly, by doing things like this, Pastafarians are protecting other minority religious beliefs and practices. The US Army still hasn't quite figured out how to cope with Sikhs wearing turbans (and sometimes they even have trouble with Orthodox Jews, even army chaplains, because they violate critical military doctrines about gentlemen not wearing hats indoors), the TSA harassed them because they're different even before they decided to start harassing other hat-wearers, schools don't let students wear head-scarves (or mini-skirts) because that's Not How Proper American Girls Dress, Muslim-hating idiots beat up Sikhs, the list goes on.
I attended Quaker meetings for a few years, and we'd occasionally get the question about those hats the oatmeal-box guy wears. Quakerism came from England, where it's beastly cold and rainy and Anglos are prone to male pattern baldness, and moved to Pennsylvania and New England where it's also beastly cold and rainy much of the year, and many of them believed in wearing plain durable clothing instead of wearing flashy stuff to draw attention to themselves. But English social custom and legal practice was big on forcing lower-class people to acknowledge the importance of higher-class people, and taking off hats to your betters (especially government officials and nobility) was a big part of that, and Quakerism believes very radically in equality, so Quakers would often get thrown in jail for not taking off their hats around their betters. I wear hats to keep my head warm (as an Anglo who went bald early), and when my beard was longer I could pass for Orthodox if I was wearing a dark suit and a hat.
Back when the TSA were new, they didn't make people take off hats or coats in security lines, but out here at San Jose airport, the main people who wore them were Mexicans wearing cowboy hats heading down to Mexico, and the TSA were the white guys who'd replaced the previous mostly-immigrant screeners, and they decided to make a local rule telling the Mexicans to take their hats off. My first reaction was "if they tried this at LaGuardia the Hasidim would been in the mayor's office in an hour telling him to fire the bigot who thought up that nonsense", but as a Quaker I felt I ought to argue with them because they're clearly just doing it to bully people, and I was successful at making it difficult for them to avoid the bigotry issue for a while.
The reason people think they're crazy is that aluminum foil hats don't work - they need to be Real Tin.
Maybe you're smiling because you got through the line at the driver's license bureau in less than two hours. But they want a photo that looks like you do when a cop pulls you over and shines a flashlight in your face.
My first one looked like I had a beard - I didn't back then, it's was just really bad lighting at the DMV. (And one of my recent DLs said I needed to be wearing glasses - I don't need them for distance, and didn't use them for the eye test, but I put them back on to read the forms.)
What you really need as a driver's license photo is one that shows you looking like you're extremely tired and someone's shining a flashlight in your face, because that's how a cop will really see you. If that includes wearing a colander on your head, then go for it.
Back in the late 80s / early 90s, we were using Sun computers, with either NeWS or OpenLook. My manager had a 21" monitor, but even so was getting tired of switching between one set of glasses to read it and another set to talk to people, and printing out email to read it. So we just told his machine to use 24-point bold font as his default, and he could read it just fine. (Your operating system probably isn't as flexible, though maybe if you've got a Mac it'll do :-)
Computers are typically at 22-24" focal distance, compared to book-reading glasses, which have a focal distance shorter than that (I forget it it's 18" or what.) This means telling the eye doctor when I get an exam that I want to know the pupillary distance for the computer reading glasses. (Sometimes this requires a "yes, really" discussion, in addition to the "oh, you're ordering glasses online" one, but that lets me get multiple $20 computer glasses of the current prescription so there's one set at the office and one at the home computer.)
Yes. That's why we had Real Physicists in the department, including a guy with a PhD in lightning.
Chainlink fence isn't even remotely a Faraday cage. (We were actually wondering if the chainlink security fence and metal modular walls at the lab's original location would be good enough, until the security director's pager went off when we were having a meeting about the new regs we'd have to meet :-) It might be good enough for really low frequencies, but that's about it.
You can deal with EMP transients and medium-high frequency signals on the power lines by using good enough filters, similar to what you'd use for lightning, and these days you're going to use fiber for any long-haul data (for my lab, that meant modems, outside the cage, connected by RS232-over-fiber :-) And yes, stopping all the leaks takes a lot of attention.
I've been at various parts of the Bell System and AT&T for some decades now. There were years when it was much easier to get leftover 23" telco racks for my lab than buy new 19" racks for computers, so we had a lot of extra rails for conversion. The more serious problem with that in recent years is that computer racks are generally deeper than telco racks, so not everything would fit in the cabinets (or we'd have to take the back door off.)
Sure, it's done in the little microcontroller that runs the hard drive instead of the CPU, and might even have ASIC help, but it's still software encryption, and from a crypto perspective there's the question of "how badly did they store the keys?"
The real advantage of self-encrypting disk drives is that you don't have to depend on the administrator remembering to install a decent software encryption system in the OS. (This applies both to corporate laptops and to personally administered ones, whether "personally" is yourself or the relative whose computer you'll be fixing over Thanksgiving.)
Attackers use DNS in a couple of ways - one is as an amplifier, where the attacker forges a query "from" the target's IP address to a DNS server that produces a response that's larger than the query, which causes more traffic and hides the attacker's IP. (Fixing this requires configuring DNS servers not to do amplification, and getting the ISPs that the bots live on to enforce anti-spoofing - how many decades old is BCP38 now?) Another is as a way for the bots to contact their controller, and for intermediate controllers to contact their master controllers, so the controllers can change their IP addresses and keep working. Often this is "fast-flux DNS", where the name records have short expiration times, and are often bought with stolen credit cards. (There are some defenses like identifying DNS registrars that support lots of bad guys, and configuring DNS resolvers not to accept names that have been registered in the past day or so, but bots can always do their own name resolution instead of using the host's or ISP's default DNS server, and you can't simply force DNS caching times to be long because that affects DNS-based load-balancers.)
Defenders have multiple ways to use DNS. One is simply load-balancing among servers - www.example.com can hand out different IP addresses to end users based on load or whatever, and can try to guess which users are legitimate and point them to different servers than the attackers. Lots of variations on this, and also they can do things like redirect web requests from www.example.com to wwwX.example.com, where X is 1...n different groups of servers, or moves every 15 minutes, or whatever. Some things to be careful of are that real web browsers usually cache IP addresses for a long time.
I finally had to bite the bullet and give up Eudora earlier this year, because the changes to SSL/TLS by my email providers meant that Eudora could no longer set up an encrypted connection, because it couldn't handle 2048-bit keys. At least Thunderbird works better now than it did a few years back when I last evaluated it, so I use that on Windows. (Haven't found an IMAP client for Android tablets I really like, so I use webmail from there.)
My mom's still using Eudora 1.4 on her Mac, over dialup, and it still works fine.
Thank you. Calling the invasion a "civil war" is pretty dishonest. Otherwise, an interesting, but pretty lightweight article.
Wil Wheaton's Law says "Don't be a dick*". A committee that constantly insults people inappropriately is not going to be as productive or have as diverse a range of ideas as one that values contributors. If having a code of conduct says that rude annoying people don't participate, because they're afraid that someone in the future might tell them not to be a dick, well, mission accomplished. If they don't like it, they shouldn't be so thin-skinned.
* Yes, you can say that that's technically a sexually biased insult. The people who are most likely to say that are the ones who pretend to be thick-skinned and not care. So don't be a dick.
Having Christmas in the summer has got to be weird enough, especially since most Western European Christmas traditions (including the trees we borrowed from the pagans) are about being mid-winter, and you don't even do winter that well in Oz when you are having it.
But yeah, Halloween is pretty much something Americans adopted from Irish immigrants, expanded on, and then commercialized, and while we've sold some of that back to the English, it was long after you were on your own. Here in California we also get the "Day of the Dead" from the Mexicans, and cultural appropriation means we get to be sloppy about differentiating it from "Halloween with different graphics".
But Halloween wasn't the day before All Hallows Day, it was the first part of it. The English started days at sundown, just as most of the western world did before clocks, and Jewish holidays still do start at sundown.
And All Hallows was an important holiday primarily because it was trying to distract the pagans away from celebrating Samhain.
You're incorrect, which is bad form when you're being a pedant, which you were.
It's "correct", because while English tolerates rapid and radical changes in common usage, the old uses don't become wrong just because there are newer forms that are also correct. "Thee" and "thou" are still fairly cromulent English, even though you probably say "you" (and you probably use "you" correctly, even if you get "thee" and "thou" and their corresponding verb forms wrong.)
I used to work at Bell Labs, in a department that had a bunch of nuclear physicists doing research into EMP, because the government wanted studies about hardening their networks in case of nuclear war, and a big thing that influenced them was a telco cable that crashed during a mid-1970s solar flare. It was back when long-haul cable systems were still copper, before fiber had replaced them, and a few hundred miles of copper wire becomes a very big antenna if you hit it with enough of a magnetic field, and there's enough voltage difference between it and ground to fry the equipment at both ends. They had a huge amount of data to work with, and they also studied the effects of EMP on various pieces of equipment, and ways to design the networks to be resilient against suddenly getting big holes in it.
Fiber optics helps with a lot of this (but obviously that doesn't help the electric companies.) On the other hand, during the 60s and 70s, the phone networks were changing from electromechanical phone switches like relays and crossbars, which were easy to protect, to transistors and integrated circuits that just aren't, and you're not going to put it all in Faraday cages, especially these days when there's no longer a Soviet Union that's likely to nuke the US. And the Bell System divestiture meant that a lot of the interconnections between local telco switches were no longer available to act as backups for the now-multiple long-distance companies, but the switching logic was starting to get smarter so there were more option for rerouting traffic than with the older dumber switches. Lots of change, and then all this Internet stuff happened.
Don't mess with the clocks - you can keep them accurate and adjust the display format for leap seconds, just like you do for leap year days, time zones, Daylight Savings, US-vs-EU Daylight Savings, etc. Yes, this means that some people won't fix their code, so they'll be off by a few seconds from consensus, but time will continue to be monotonically increasing so stuff won't explode. There are also people who write code that doesn't handle leap years properly (I'm less bothered by the people who only do Year%4 than the ones who check for Year%100 but don't check Year%400 .)
And I haven't seen a Y2K bug in the field in, oh, at least a month or two (I forget if it was the "year=19100" bug or a different one.)
That was SXSW's program scheduling people. The panel members who've written about it in public said they'd told SXSW that having this panel would mean SXSW would have to deal with harassment and threats, and they'd been ignored, so when it happened they expressed a range of opinions from WTF to anger to "we TOLD you this would happen and you should be ready to deal with it". Also, the Gamergate panel didn't get put on the schedule until after the program submission deadlines had passed, so the anti-harassment panel folks were already frustrated by that, and it first it had looked like only their panel was cancelled, not both.