Fun in the snowpocalypse

T'was the night of January 5th, when it snowed and snowed and snowed. This is what we woke up to on January 6th.

As you can see, Oscar the Rhodesian Ridgeback's double-TPLO operations are completely healed (that's 'tibial plateau leveling osteotomy' to you, squire).

A "Monster" Spammer (NYSE:MWW)

Update May 1 3.30 UTC: several listwashing requests.

Dear Monster.com (NYSE:MWW),

You are spamming me. Stop it. Please.

You're sending marketing email to an address that has never given informed consent to receive it.

Not only that, but you're even breaking the spirit, if not the letter, of the U.S. CAN-SPAM Act. While your unwelcome missive does include the proscribed physical address and unsubscribe link, they are displayed in white text on a white background.

Yes, really. (I dare say they'd be more visible if my email client displayed HTML images by default, but like many clients, it doesn't.)

Naturally, it's also in violation of the law in which your UK subsidiary operates. There was no "prior consent" given, within the meaning of the Privacy and Electronic Communications (EC Directive) Regulations 2003. Offenders are liable to a fine of up to £5,000 in a magistrate's court, or an unlimited fine if the trial is before a jury.

Update May 1 3.30 UTC:

I've received a couple of email messages and a Twitter DM from Monster, expressing apologies for the situation. Sadly, these expressions of regret don't extend to actually fixing the spam problem; they appear to be an attempt to listwash.

Sorry, Monster; listwashing is bad practice. My standard operating procedure is to never unsubscribe from a list that I did not subscribe to.

If Monster wishes to solve this problem, it would stop sending email to addresses of people who did not subscribe. I'm open to a public dialogue on this subject: feel free to tweet or comment here, rather than privately emailing or DM'ing.

Stephen Fry: Must Try Harder

Stephen Fry, we love you very much. You are a National Treasure.

But...

If you're going to expound the delights of free software, you could at least make an effort to pronounce Linus's name correctly.

Anyway, if you can't be bothered to muck about with Ogg Vorbis and such, I found this version of the video on the evil, unfree YouTube.



There's more at IT Blogwatch.

Video not displaying? Try this link.

Gmail, How do I Love Thee? Let me Count the Ways...

Here's a quick Gmail goodness grab-bag top-10...

1. Spam filtering. It just works. I estimate it kills more than 99% of my spam, and the only occasional false positives I get are from Yahoo Groups (which is a spam cesspit anyway) and mailing lists that include spam samples (uhhh...)
   
   
2. IMAP access. Yay, we've been asking and asking and asking for it, but it finally arrived yesterday.
   
   
3. Local front-end servers. Recently, Google moved the POP/IMAP/SMTP servers I connect to. They're not now in the U.S., but much closer to me (in the UK?). Some sort of routing cleverness, I dare say. This means downloading a load of messages is now very, very fast.
   
   
4. Search and Filters. Fast, flexible, frequently-very-useful. Especially when combined with the saved search extension for Firefox (using Greasemonkey or the Better Gmail extension).
   
   
5. Labels. I know some people hate 'em, to which I say, "Just think of them as folders." But they're so much better than folders, mainly 'cos you can "file" a message in more than one of them.
   
   
6. Fetchmail. Integrated, as way of grabbing your email from other accounts, using POP. Saves auto-forwarding, which is increasingly broken.
   
   
7. AJAX. Not as ground-breaking as OWA, not as flashy as Oddpost/Yahoo/SWA, not as mashable as Zimbra, but fast and usable all the same.
   
   
8. Keyboard shortcuts. A big productivity saver. I hate to move my hands off the keyboard to find my mouse -- that's a key reason why I don't "do" Mac OS.
   
   
9. Google Apps. A white label version of Gmail is included in Google's hosted applications service.
   
   
10. Free. Yes, as a confirmed cheapskate, this is a good thing. Even Google Apps is free for up to 50 mailboxes. No more do vanity domain owners have to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous email forwarders.
    

The DHS is a Wonderful Organization

So I hear the U.S. Department of Homeland security has been having one or two problems with its computer security:

A subcommittee of the Committee on Homeland Security ... expressed "shock and disappointment" that the DHS had reported as many as 844 security incidents in fiscal years 2005 and 2006. The incidents occurred on IT networks at DHS headquarters, and those belonging to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

The security issues ... included one in which a password dumping utility was found on two DHS servers. In addition, Trojans and other malicious programs were found on numerous agency servers, and classified mail was found to have been sent out over insecure networks.

Trojans? Unencrypted sensitive email? Oh, big fat hairy deal. C'mon, this is nothing that you couldn't find in most organizations of that size. It's hardly DHS's fault.

Give them a break. In fact, give them all a big pay rise -- especially those nice officers who work the immigration and customs desks at America's fine airports (and the ones who sit in Canada, too). I do like them a lot, and look forward to my time chatting with them every time I visit the U.S.

They are all, without exception, wonderful people, and anyone who says otherwise is probably some sort of terrorist.

See you at Inbox/Outbox this Week?

I'll be keynoting again and sitting on the Spamhaus panel. I'm also running an extra session about sender authentication (i.e., SPF and DKIM).

Everything's repeated both days, except the panel, which is only on Tuesday.

If you can't find me, text me on +447789200701 (assuming you want to ;-)

Thoughts on Network Neutrality

Update: clarified the point about IPv6 (see the comments)

Our old friend Curt Monash has a think-piece about net neutrality up on his weblog. In it, he argues for ISPs to sell a premium service tier for high-bandwidth/latency-sensitive applications:

The current Internet [can't] well support … communication-rich applications such as entertainment, gaming, telephony, telemedicine, teleteaching, or telemeetings.

A bold assertion. Certainly if t’were true the anti-neutrality camp would have a point.

I’m not 100% in either camp, but my gut tells me that today’s IP routing technology is holding up well. It’s the lack of investment in sufficient peering bandwidth and router horsepower that’s letting the side down. That and the criminally glacial progress towards RSVP-TE (RFC3209) with label switching and IPv6, a combination that would allow much better traffic prioritisation.

He later clarified his assertion:

I think that in a high fraction of applications that amount to real-time communications, good quality will entail seriously sub-second latency. I don’t think it will soon be affordable to provide that kind of QOS for all traffic. Ergo, tiering. Until we get to unmeteredly-cheap, just-like-being-there transmission of full-room-sized sounds and images, there will be a place for differentiated QOS.

Here's the thing... Those of us that live the other side of the Atlantic live with 250ms latency every day, when we connect to services hosted in North America. I dare say the same is true for those on the other side of the Pacific. There's not much getting around the speed of light.

Yet stuff still works just fine. TCP is designed to get the best out of a latent connection. Even if that latency is unpredictable/chaotic (as is often the case with latency caused by congestion).

I recently ditched my old ISP. It got taken over by a company that appear to be running into the ground. Typical latencies over the first hop grew from 20ms to 500ms (often higher). But even though there was severe network congestion, stuff still worked fine.

Of course, if an application writer makes assumptions that ignore realities such as the speed of light or temporary congestion, their application's going to behave badly. But no premium QoS in the world is going to help that.

My sense is still that the ISPs that are complaining about net neutrality are simply being greedy and don't want to invest money to cope with the growth in usage.

There are perhaps some lessons to be learned from the experience of UK ISPs when many users' connection "suddenly" jumped from fixed-rate DSL connections in the 512Kb/s - 2Mb/s range to an "up to 8Mb/s" service that offers the highest speed that the phone copper can support. How the various ISPs coped with the associated jump in demand makes for a salutary tale.

But that's the subject of another post, some other day...

Update: clarified the point about IPv6 (see the comments)