I run my own mail server, and with a domain name of 'whatever.net' it gets lots of spam sent to both real and nonexistent addresses. Whether or not an address exists does not seem to make any difference in the amount of spam an address receives.

One segment of the spamming industry consists of people who sell lists of addresses. They do not clean those lists - if they took out the dead email addresses, the list would be smaller, and then they couldn't charge as much for it.

The thing that makes the spamming industry so hard to deal with is the fact that nobody in the spamming industry has any economic motivation to reduce the impact they have on people who don't want spam. It works the other way 'round, actually: if they bothered people less, they would make less money.

With postal mail, it costs money to send junk mail, so there's at least some motivation to avoid sending it to bogus addresses, dead people, and even people who don't want it. With spam, all of the incentives point towards one goal: send more spam.

This is not a problem that will go away on its own.

"[...] because the mere tendency of speech to encourage unlawful acts is not a sufficient reason for banning it."

Justice Kennedy
Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition et al

I guess some people take the first amendment more seriously than others?

Peru: 2, Microsoft: 0

"We need to remember that there is a big difference between being pro-business and being pro-marketplace. Capitalism is all about marketplaces. Capitalism fails if we try to preserve a given business model."

- Bob Frankston

I just thought that was interesting.

If you want to make money selling software, you have to write that software yourself. All of it. Seems fair, doesn't it?

If taxpayers and students are going to pay universities to write innovative software, we (the people who paid for the creation of that software) would like that software to belong to the public domain. You can't sell that software - we own it - we already paid for it.

Bill Gates, on the other hand, opposes the Gnu Public License (GPL) because he wants to enable himself and others to make money on the backs of students who work at the expense of taxpayers. Is there some reason that I should be sympathetic here?

As Gates is reportedly fond of saying, that's the stupidest idea I've heard all week.

Funny thing is, Bush made a speech today in which he told both the Israelis and the Palestinians to get their acts together. He was pretty blunt about it, too. Right on.

Fall 2001	Spring 2002
World Trade Center	Daily suicide bombings
Afghanistan	Palestine
Taliban	Palestinian Authority
al Qa'eda	Hamas, Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad
George Bush	Ariel Sharon
Mullah Omar	Yasser Arafat?
a few thousand troops	Envoy Zinni
"We will make no distinction between those who committed these acts and those who harbor them."	"[...] the president has always been open to whatever allows for the most constructive dialogue."

On one hand, there was a time when the US made no distinction between terrorists and those who harbored them. It surprises me to see the way Bush implores Israel to use "restraint" in the face of suicide bombers in restaurants and public sidewalks.

On the other hand, I often think the US should walk away from Israel, and take our ~$6 billion / year with us.

What to do?

Who's teaching our children?

Check out www.WeHaveTheWayOut.com

Notice it's basically an ad for Microsoft products and why you should run them on Unisys hardware in your data centers.

What you won't notice - unless you look at the HTTP headers - is that this web site is being served by a Unix box running a web server based on Apache and secured with OpenSSL - two of those "viral" open-source projects Microsoft warns against.

Trying 198.63.57.204...
Connected to www.wehavethewayout.com (198.63.57.204).
Escape character is '^]'.

GET / HTTP/1.0

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Sat, 30 Mar 2002 07:25:49 GMT
Server: Rapidsite/Apa-1.3.14 (Unix) FrontPage/4.0.4.3 mod_ssl/2.7.1 OpenSSL/0.9.5a 

I guess you're supposed to do as they say, not as they do?

Credit goes to slashdot.org user #557523 for pointing this out.

"Naturally the common people don't want war... but after all it is the leaders of a country who determine policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along ... All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger."

Hermann Goering (1832-1946) German Nazi political leader

"To those who scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty, my message is this: Your tactics only aid terrorists, for they erode our national unity and diminish our resolve. They give ammunition to America's enemies and pause to America's friends."

John Ashcroft, U.S. Attorney General, Quoted on Dec. 7th 2001.

Let's not get too carried away, in either direction. (Thanks to Ron Corwin for bringing these quotes to my attention.)

"If Bill Gates had a nickel for every time Windows crashed... wait, never mind."

- Unknown

I read an interview with a (clueless) politician who voted in favor of keeping spam legal. The interviewer had two questions that I think every pro-spam person should ask themselves:

How many pieces of junk email per day are you willing to receive?

What will you do when you receive more than that amount?

The answer to the first question doesn't really matter, but I am curious about how pro-spam people would answer the second. The politician in question never got a chance to answer it because (oh the irony...) his mailbox was full.

Want to know who to blame for all the spam you get? There are a lot of offenders, but Sprint is among the biggest. They don't send spam themselves, but unlike most internet providers, they are only too happy to provide service for people who do.

65.162.116.100 - http://www.bulkers.net/
65.162.116.101 - http://www.bulkbarn.com/

Sprint has been providing connectivity to these spammers for roughly three weeks now as of today.

Another round in Microsoft's ongoing struggle with ethics...

In December, Java was more popular than .Net for building Web services, according to a ZDNet UK poll, but weeks later the position had dramatically reversed; investigation revealed just what lengths Microsoft will go to to promote its products. [....]

There is a very high incidence of people attempting to cast multiple votes, even though the poll script blocked out most attempts at multiple voting. The one that wins the prize made 228 attempts to vote. This person was from within the microsoft.com domain.

Several of the voters evidently followed a link contained in an email, the subject line of which ran: "PLEASE STOP AND VOTE FOR .NET!" We know this, because our logs include the Web address where visitors browsed from; when people click there from a Microsoft Exchange email message, Exchange helpfully gives us the subject line and username. The people who followed that link all had email addresses in the microsoft.com domain.

- From http://news.zdnet.co.uk/story/0,,t269-s2102244,00.html

On second thought, struggle probably isn't the right word...

Being unemployed has given me a chance to work on a project I've been wanting to do for over a year. It's not quite done, but it's getting to be pretty usable. Click here for screen shots and downloads.

I received the most brilliant suggestion today. It came in an email message:

When you get ads in your phone or utility bill, include them with the payment. Let them throw it away.

When you get those pre approved letters in the mail for everything from credit cards to 2nd mortgages and junk like that, most of them come with postage paid return envelopes, right? Well, why not get rid of some of your other junk mail and put it in these cool little envelopes? Send an ad for your local chimney cleaner to American Express.

I shall.

Quoth Mr. Dean Kamen, inventor the Segway, aka Ginger, aka It:

"We've used technology to solve all of the long-haul problems," Kamen said, listing planes, trains and automobiles as methods of hauling people and freight over long distances at high speeds. "But when we finally come back to the pedestrian...the (only) technology we've added in the last 5,000 years is a pair of sandals."

From this ZDNet article at Yahoo.com

This guy does not appear to have been paying attention.

• Xootr eX3
• Wheelman
• Scoot-E
• MotoSk8
• CityBug E2
• Hoverboard
• ...and so on.

Kamen's creation appears to be easier to ride than most anything else, and that, coupled with his marketing budget, might be what this niche needs to become an industry. I can't see myself getting real excited about Ginger, but what's good for Kamen is probably going to be good for his competitors too, and that's intriguing.

On a just-barely-related note, this thing here has almost inspired me to start looking for a job now, but I still think I'm gonna wait until the snow melts.

Eskimos have seventeen words for snow.
Skiers and boarders have several.
People who write snow reports have three.

Powder	Very dry, light snow. Forms clouds behind skiers and boarders as they float through it. Barely slows them down at all.	It's perfect.
Powder	Heavier, wetter snow that can be pushed around as you ski through it.	It's awesome.
Powder	Snow that fell with rain mixed in.	It's terrific.
Packed powder	Snow that fell as powder, more than 12 hours ago. Has been skied through so much that it holds an edge pretty well.	It's wonderful.
Packed powder	Wet snow that may have fallen a week ago.	It's great.
Packed powder	Wet snow that has been thawing during the day and freezing up at night, for the last week. A .22 caliber round will penetrate three to four inches at most.	It's nice.
Ice	A minimum of two inches of transparent ice, usually caused by freezing rain. A .45 caliber round will simply ricochet.	No refunds.

It's been an interesting couple of months. First, my employer quit delivering paychecks. Did you know that you cannot collect unemployment just because your employer has stopped paying? Then, they had the decency to lay off 4 of the 5 remaining employees (I wasn't the 5th). But they didn't have the decency to pay us anything they owed us, that took an order from the bankruptcy judge.

Then I went on unemployment for a while. Then, after the missing pay finally materialized, I realized that I could probably live off my savings until sometime around April. I had to do the math about 47 times to convince myself, but eventually I did. I quit looking for work, quit collecting unemployment, and got my snowboard waxed.

Security Pays

USA Today takes a look at what it calls "the world's most security-conscious airline"--Israel's national carrier, El Al. The airline's security precautions, on which it spends about $90 million a year, has had some business benefits: "After a year of heavy losses, El Al's bookings have soared since Sept. 11, with many passengers too fearful to fly other airlines. In stark contrast to other airlines, El Al shelved its plans to lay off 500 people and withdraw some of its Boeing 747-200 aircraft."

- James Taranto, Wall Street Journal, October 1, 2001

Random film pick:

"Memento"
Where: Anytown USA
When: Right about now
Who: A man with no short-term memory, and the people around him.

It's as if they filmed it from start to finish, cut it into 5-minute sections, played half of them in chronological order, and half of them in reverse order. You see the effects first, and the causes later. It's a bit like having no short term memory yourself, except that they do fill in the blanks periodically, so you know what's going on, even if the main character doesn't. It's a fun ride!

It should be in the 'new releases' section of you local video store.

What would it take to bring the Muslim world into the fight against terrorism? I've heard that there may have been as many as a thousand Indian software developers in or near the top of one tower. I'm still looking for confirmation of that figure, but if it's true, and if 14% of Indians are Muslim, then the terrorists might have killed 140 of their own. I wonder how this would impact various Muslim nations' stances on the recently declared 'war on terrorism.'

Things the US ought not do, internationally: 1) Replay Vietnam in Afghanistan. Osama bin Laden is an enemy, the Taleban are no better, but the Afghan people are not to be trifled with (just ask Russia). If we're smart, they will be our allies; if we're stupid, they are likely to unify against us in righteous opposition - this is probably a best-case scenario for bin Laden and the Taleban. 2) Replay Afghanistan in Afghanistan. The Russians fought there for ten years and accomplished nothing. Our best bet might be to back the existing opposition - give them the tools to eradicate the Taleban, so that the takeover emerges from within. Foreign incursion has failed, and will only turn the common Afghan people against the foreigners. 3) Overreact. I've heard otherwise respectable people advocate wiping Afghanistan off the map. Never mind the fact that the most we could accomplish is the rearrangement of the existing rubble, massive civilian casualities will dissolve our alliances and create a new wave of people with dead relatives, no homeland, nothing to lose, and hatred for the West - fertile ground for those who recruit suicide bombers.

Things the US ought not do, internally: 1) Believe that increased air travel security will make us safe. It just means they'll have to build their next bomb out of something other than an airplane. 2) Turn racist. It appears that fools in Texas, Arizona, and Ohio are already screwing this up.

Let us not become the monsters we seek to destroy.

"We're all gonna die, but three of us are going to do something."

-Tom Burnett, Passenger, UA 93, shortly before the aircraft crashed in Pennsylvania.

I have long believed that the WTO was a massive subversion of democracy just waiting to happen. It never failed to surprise me how many "Americans" actually cheered the WTO and its powers. Now that the WTO's judges have paved the way for the European Union to seek $4 billion in trade sanctions against the US, it's hard to overlook the double-edged nature of the WTO's sword.

EU May Hit U.S. With $4 Billion In Penalties

It's all in the interest of free trade, of course.
The WTO's supporters keep using that term.
I do not think that it means what they think it means.

Two notes today... This one has to do with what I wrote on February 25, about the goofy position taken by a nonprofit Washington advocacy group" called Citizens Against Government Waste. It's now clear just what that group is really all about... and government waste has nothing to do with it. Check out this article from a couple of LA Times reporters.

Some highlights:

Letters purportedly written by at least two dead people landed on the desk of Utah Attorney General Mark Shurtleff earlier this year, imploring him to go easy on Microsoft for its conduct as a monopoly.

[....]

The first crop of letters began rolling into state offices in the spring.

Quietly distributed by another Microsoft-supported group, Citizens Against Government Waste, those letters were identical except for the signature.

Minnesota Attorney General Mike Hatch said he got about 300 of those. "It's sleazy," Hatch said. "This is not a company that appears to be bothered by ethical boundaries."

Better late than never, I guess.... I just found out that yesterday was Left-Hander's Day 2001. So do something extra nice for your favorite lefty, and do it soon, because you were supposed to do it yesterday.

Famous lefties include (I had no idea...) Paul McCartney, Fidel Castro, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Jimi Hendrix and Pablo Picasso.

Q: Why do ducks have flat feet?
A: To stamp out forest fires.

Q: Why do elephants have flat feet?
A: To stamp out flaming ducks.

I thought this was just another email hoax when I first saw it... but Yahoo! had the same scoop from Reuters. It's for real:

Philip Morris Report Attacked
Tuesday, July 17, 2001
Associated Press

A report commissioned by cigarette giant Philip Morris says that tobacco could save governments millions of dollars because many smokers die earlier than non-smokers.

The report, which was conducted by research company Arthur D. Little International, analyzed the cost of smoking in the Czech Republic in 1999, and concluded that the government had benefited from the "indirect positive effects" of early deaths, including the saving of $30 million in health care, pensions and housing for the elderly.

Shortly after my last little missive, a new anti-mailing-list list came to my attention, at www.removeyou.com. I have submitted a decoy address. We'll see how long it takes for spam to arrive.

If you do have any faith in this idea, make sure you've got all your bases covered... register your email address with www.dm1.com and www.e-mps.org. They ain't dead yet.

And be sure you get registered with the next "opt out" list, too. History demonstrates that, in spite of the stupidity of this idea, it is reinvented at least once a year.

Interestingly, a service called www.optlist.com has ceased operation. They claim that the Mail Abuse Prevention System is the reason for their disappearance. This is a lie. They also claim that MAPS doesn't work very well. This is also a lie. And a big one, too.

www.optlist.com disappeared for the same fundamental reason that www.returnmail.com www.remove-list.com, www.removelist.com (yes, two different sites, one with a hyphen, run by two different people) (both links are broken so you won't get hassled with porn popups, fix the links if you want to see), and www.safeeps.com have all disappeared: it's a stupid idea.

A couple years ago, a couple of spammers put their heads together and came up with a great idea. No really, it would help direct spam to the people who want it (stop laughing) and it would prevent spam from going to people who don't want it (really, this is what they said!).

They created www.remove-list.com so that people who don't want spam could register their aversion to spam along with their email address. No, remove-list.com is no longer pretending to be anything useful. If you go there now, you just get advertisements for porn. But anyhow, their story was that spammers would use the "remove list" service to clean their mailing lists so as to annoy fewer people.

First problem: at last count, approximately 0% of the spamming community actually cares how many millions of people they annoy. People who care don't get into spamming. People who spam only do so because they don't mind annoying a couple million people to find one or two victims for the scam of the week make one or two sales.

Second problem: Giving a spammer a list of email addresses is like giving a pyromaniac a box of matches. I created a bogus email address (RLbait@....), opened up www.remove-list.com, and registered the address as one that belonged to a person who does not want spam.

Yes, this address is getting now spam on a semi-regular basis. Color me surprised.

Think about this the next time you ask a spammer to remove you from their mailing list.

What happened to zopmist.com?

A couple years back, Washington State passed a law requiring spammers to provide actual contact information, and to refrain from obfuscating headers in their messages.

In one of the first cases to reach a judge, the judge declared the law unconstitutional on the grounds that it placed an undue burden on spammers. He's right, in a way... asking a spammer to be honest and/or accountable is like asking the Pope to take up Hinduism.

The good news is, a recent vertict recognized the value in keeping people honest (and yes, that includes spammers). I quote, "To be weighed against the act's local benefits, the only burden the act places on spammers is the requirement of truthfulness, a requirement that does not burden commerce at all but actually facilitates it by eliminating fraud and deception."

This is good news. I am waiting for another Washington-based spamming operation to come my way...

In memory of Kathy Bosik
196X-2001

A week ago today I went to a funeral for a woman I met in my last year of college.

I hadn't seen her much in the last couple of years, but she and I and a few mutual friends had plans to meet up at a music festival next month. We won't get to do that after all. These things make you think.

Be there for your friends. Recognize the good people around you. Let the good people in your life know you appreciate them. Be a good person in someone else's life.

How do you want to be remembered?

You wouldn't believe the number of hack attempts this site has seen in the last month. The again, if you were one of the lucky many who woke up one Monday to find pro-Chinese / anti-US messages all over your web site, perhaps you would believe.

Typically they arrive in batches of a couple dozen beginning friday night and tapering off by the end of the weekend. Typically they originate in China or Korea. Fortunately, they have yet to succeed. I'm keeping my fingers crossed...

Microsoft Code Has No Bugs (that Microsoft cares about)

In this 1995 interview, Bill gets distracted and reveals his contempt for you, his customer, and says things that probably weren't true in 1995, and definitely weren't true at the time of this writing.

And of course, here's what Microsoft is saying about Windows XP:

With Windows XP Home Edition, Microsoft has merged the best features of its consumer operating systems with the power, security, and reliability of the Windows 2000 engine to create a friendlier, more dependable operating system.

More dependable than... ummm... Windows 95?

On a lighter note...

Here's something funny I just came across.

And here's something absolutely hysterical.

The Chinese government has asked the United States government to apologize for the mid-air collision that occurred in international waters well off the coast of China. Chinese officials would have us believe one of the following:

• Their single-seat F-8 fighter jet lacks the maneuverability to avoid a mid-air collision with our EP-3 propeller plane and the 24 people on board.
• Their jet-fighter pilots lack the skills necessary to avoid a mid-air collision with a lumbering propeller plane and the 24 people on board.

The implications are obvious. Any nation wishing to engage China in all-out war need only send a squadron of 1969-vintage propeller planes into the area, pereferably equipped with large plastic bumpers. Air superiority will be established after a sufficient number of rounds of "chicken" have been concluded.

I wonder how the top brass at Chinese Air Force headquarters feel about the way their press and officials have been characterizing their equipment and personnel.

The Bush-Whitman environmental exploitation team strikes again, four-fold...

1. While arsenic levels of 10 parts per billion are good enough for the European Union and the World Heath Organization, Bush and Whitman would prefer to continue to subject Americans to 50 parts per billion, in spite of a 1999 report by the National Academy of Sciences which concluded that the higher level carried a cancer risk about 10,000 times higher than the EPA allows for carcinogens in food.

   To be fair, they have not completely rolled back to the 50 parts per billion standard, they just want 60 days to think about it. What do you figure will be proposed in 60 days? Watch this space...

2. Who pushed for the rollback on arsenic levels? Probably the mining companies whose arsenic escapes into municipal water supplies. Bush has done the mining industry another favor too, by proposing to remove a requirement that they post a cleanup bond before beginning operations on federal land. Oh well. I guess that's what the Superfund is for...

3. In other news, the new administration has proposed opening more federal land to petroleum companies, including 1.5 million acres of wildlife refuge land in Alaska. Of course, when you compare the political contributions offered by wildlife to those offered by multinational petrochemical concerns, this news is hardly surprising.

4. Finally, about a third of all federal forest land is currently off-limits to new road construction and logging. Bush and Whitman have proposed delaying this ban, I guess they want to think this over. I'm sure numerous logging corporations would be happy to assist in this "thinking" in any way they can.

So much for the guy who stood by the shore of Lake Tahoe and proclaimed himself "steward of the Earth" during the election campaign.

While campaigning, George W. Bush promised to require emission reductions by electric utilities for carbon dioxide and other pollutants. While campaigning, George W. Bush also stated very plainly, on more than one occasion, that "A promise made is a promise kept with George W. Bush." Shortly after being elected, George W. Bush told Congress that he would not seek to impose mandatory emissions reductions for carbon dioxide at electrical power plants. Nice to know just how much we can trust you, George.

I read the most intersting thing on the net this evening. I present to you here some butchered text therefrom, with a bit of hyperlinking just for fun.

Every time some untoward incident occurs, especially when it involves young people, you will hear cries about the need to "restore moral values", to "return to morality", to "rebuild the society's moral base" and so on.

A moral principle is something considered to be good in itself; the goodness of an ethical principle, on the other hand, depends on its effects. [....]

It is no use preaching to young people about moral values, when it is quite clear to them that morality has no discernible effect on how adults behave. If you want to preach, preach ethics: that a right action must be demonstrably right. Such an ethos, if taught from childhood, would encourage people to think carefully before making personal and social decisions. Who knows? It might even stop politicians making empty promises [...]

- Kevin Baldeosingh, 1998

Click here for the unabridged version. It was originally written three years ago in Trinidad, but it is entirely relevant in the United States today.

I hate to continue with on the Microsoft angle, but there's just so many fish swimming in this barrel, it's hard to resist taking an occasional shot. The fish du jour is a "nonprofit Washington advocacy group" called Citizens Against Government Waste. Among the types of "waste" they oppose: the prosecution of criminal behavior by wealthy corporations. Yes, Microsoft in particular.

They want the Antitrust Division's budget frozen to "prevent further intrusion into the free market."

Here's some news for such pinheads as these: the market isn't free. You can't sell drugs that haven't been shown to at least potentially be effective. Foreign companies can't dump their products into our "free" market at less than production cost in an effort to starve out domestic producers (though oddly enough, domestic companies are perfectly free to do this). You can't sell products that don't pass the Uniform Commerical Code's (vague) requirement of "suitability for a particular purpose." You can't leverage a monopoly to devour adjacent market segments, and you can't sell hamburgers with fecal coliform bacteria in them. The market isn't free. We The People have laws to help keep enterprises from trampling us as they stampede for their almighty dollars.

Those laws only work when you enforce them.

And yet these freakin' idiots want to send a message to all of our larger corporations that says, in effect, "if it will cost a lot to prosecute whatever laws you're interested in breaking - don't worry - we won't bother."

Makes me sick. How about you?

Here's a fragment of the Gnu General Public License (GPL), widely regarded as a cornerstone of open source software development: "You must cause any work that you distribute or publish, that in whole or in part contains or is derived from the Program or any part thereof, to be licensed as a whole at no charge to all third parties under the terms of this License." In short, if you build something with GPLed software, you are required to release whatever you create under the terms of the GPL. If you want to sell software, you'll have write it yourself - you can't just exploit the work of the many enthusiasts who volunteer their time and resources to GPLed projects.

Here's Microsoft's official position on this issue, as quoted today in eWeek: "anyone who adds or innovates under the GPL agrees to make the resulting code, in its entirety, available for all to use ... which might constrain innovating stemming from taxpayer-funded software development."

There's two ways to interpret that statement. First, it suggests that Gnu-licensed open source projects lack innovation. As if nothing much was going on under the Gnu license. Or maybe they figure you'd never see an operating system developed that way, for example. Oh wait. Second, it seems that if taxpayers fund the development of computer software (as we increasingly do in universities and national labs), Microsoft believes that private companies (presumably including Microsoft) ought to be able to license that publicly funded work for their own private profit. In other words, Microsoft isn't satisfied with their own R&D efforts, they want us taxpayers to help them out as well.

The first part would be a lot more funny if the second wasn't so gross.

"The sensation of pain takes precedence over all other sensations. This is essential to our very survival. If you are making love to your spouse in the privacy of your own bedroom and suddenly, out of nowhere, a tiger grabs you by the ass - who you gonna talk to?"

- Stephen L Bernhardt

Microsoft's keyboards include special new keys to pop up the task bar (press the 'flag' key instead of Control-Esc) and to pop up context menus (press the 'menu' key instead of Shift-F10).

But you still have to press Control-Alt-Delete the old-fashioned way.

Go figure.

Someone in Kentucky created an obviously-fake $200 bill,
with George W. Bush's face on it,
and used it to pay for a $2 order at Dairy Queen...

...and got $198 change.

I am not making this up.

On this day in 1976, Heisenberg may have died.

Not sure how fast he was going at the time, so it's hard to say for certain.

You may have heard that Microsoft's web sites went down yesterday. I noticed right away, as I was looking at documentation at msdn.microsoft.com at the time. Microsoft concocted an interesting press release, blaming the problem on the actions of a human technician.

"The website problem never involved Microsoft's Web servers, the company said. It was confined to their domain name servers, which locate a particular Microsoft website when users enter Web addresses."

Plausible enough, but it doesn't explain the 'HTTP 500: Server too busy' errors I was seeing when the problems first started. That's a web server problem, not a DNS problem.

I'd wager that any DNS and routing problems were deliberate attempts to cover up web server failures and/or to hide successful denial-of-service attacks against their web servers. The press release was an attempt to prevent the the servers from looking bad or the DoS attackers from looking bad-ass. Those of us who know the difference between HTTP errors and DNS errors are most amused.

Curiously enough, all of their DNS servers went off-line again today. I didn't catch any 500-ish errors this time but I still gotta wonder: (a) how long until the cracker kids publicly explain how they did it; (b) how many more outages until the cracker kids publicly explain how they're doing it?

Links for geeks:

1. Acme Klein Bottles
2. Britney Spears on Semiconductors

Interested in learning a few new things about our new president?
Check this out.

Interested in learning a few new things about corporate welfare?
Check this out.

Random film pick:

"Book of Life"
a Hal Hartley film
Where: Los Angeles
When: December 31, 1999
Who:

Jesus Christ Mary Magdalene Satan A compulsive gambler A woman best described as "terminally good."

Artsy, wacky cinematography (yes, this annoying at times),
Novel theological perspective,
Deep dark humor,
Time well spent.

Clintonese: "I did not have an improper relationship with that women."
English: "My intern provided oral sex in my office."

---

Clintonese: "I tried to walk a fine line between acting lawfully and testifying falsely. I now recognize that I did not fully accomplish this goal."
English: "I told lies. I see that you noticed."

---

Clintonlawyerese: "We have not admitted he lied and he did not do so today."

English: "I am very well paid. So spectacularly well paid, in fact, that I am quite willing to publicly represent myself as a complete freakin' moron, utterly unable to grasp the blindingly obvious transitive equality present in the following two facts:

1. Testifying falsely is perjury.
2. Perjury is lying under oath.

George W. Bush has suggested that Christine Todd Whitman be the new head of the Environmental Protection Agency. The following comes from Geov Parrish's "Impolitics" column in the Seattle Weekly:

"As governor of New Jersey, she cut the state's environmental protection budget by 30 percent, relaxed enforcement of pollution regulations, [...] abolished New Jersey's environmental prosecutor's office and replaced it with a business ombudsman. Pollutions fines and prosecutions have dropped dramatically under her. [...] She removed 1000 chemicals from the state's right-to-know list. She signed an executive order that rolled back all state environmental laws that were tougher than federal ones. She regularly fought with the federal EPA over [...] new standards for auto emission inspections, [...] and her efforts to relax water quality standards."

This would almost be acceptable if New Jersey were a clean and pristine place to begin with. It isn't. New Jersey has the highest number of Superfund sites in the nation.

Nice going, George.