From the page:

“This animation depicts a proposed weapon with a one megaton yield. The funding for this weapon was cut in 2005 defense appropriations. However, the United States still has a B61-11 nuclear ‘bunker buster’ in its arsenal which has a 400 kiloton yield, which could still cause hundreds of thousands of deaths and spread radiation to other countries.”

Matt Lake really puts down the grim reality into words in his chronicle.

One of the biggest problems is the outgoing spam which we as domain-owners can’t protect ourselves against: Spoofed from-addresses.

This quote says it all:

“Somebody out there, probably thousands of people, are getting messages for V-1-A=G-R-A and c1a-L:IS and embedded GIFs touting some penny stock that nobody’s heard of–all with my domain name all over the From field.”

The above can be handled on a pure technical level, as most of the error-responses can be filtered out automatically. What is worse however is the bad-will that these spoofed send-outs creates, whether these fake emails contains the spam mentioned above or viruses.

This is how it works, told through Matt Lake’s experience:

“Essentially, spoofing would mean that a spammer ran a piece of software that got hold of my domain name, possibly from its own spam lists, maybe from sniffing around in vulnerable e-mail servers from which e-mail came to me, or maybe from the central WHOIS database. The software then generated a mess of fake addresses with my domain on the end to masquerade as the sender’s addresses in the From and/or Reply To fields of their crass bulk e-mail. Then they sent out messages to unwitting strangers.”

Matt continues:

“I picked up the bounced-back messages only because I have a catchall account at my domain host. E-mail spoofing could happen to anybody with a domain (it could have happened to you), and most people never find out about it.

Unfortunately, if this spammer manages to annoy enough people, my domain may end up on a blacklist. Fortunately, because this kind of thing happens all the time, the blacklist compilers probably won’t punish me for what that spammer did, but they may. So I need to keep an eye out for any dropped messages to important clients and friends and comb the huge public list of blacklisted sites and hope for the best.

All told, my options aren’t terribly cheering.”

What is needed is an overhaul of the email-system, however there are many competing technologies and companies promoting these technologies plus that email shouldn’t lose it’s simplictic and genious usage.

A risk that is often forgotten when talking about which way is best to develop email to be less sensitive to UCE (Unsolicited Commercial Email = spam) is that less developed countries will be left behind (again) if the systems becomes too complex and / or expensive.

Another quote from Matt’s chronicle shows on another trap you as an administrator / provider can run into:

“So perhaps Verizon’s spam filter was doing exactly what it was supposed to do: removing objectionable unsolicited content from my mailbox. But of course, this does also mean that Verizon considers itself a spammer.”

Also note that there’s been a class action lawsuit against Verizon due to their spam-filtering methods. (Read about it here.)

It looks like we are stuck between a rock and a hard place…

Over the past month Rogers (ISP) in Canada has put some software on their networks that prevents activity for BitTorrents, P2P, IRC, and also along with that is a rule that if you are trying to download a large media file from more then 1 server it will be dropped. When you download a Podcast from iTunes it downloads that file from multiple servers in the background (I confirmed this by watching my cable modem logs). As soon as it tries to use more than 2 different servers for the download, it just stops. That’s the reason why Podcast downloads stop at random places – it’s the point where a 2nd server is involved in the download. The same issue causes timeouts and cut-offs in the iTunes music store.Here is the problem – when anyone calls Rogers about the problem they say it is either a router, firewall or Apple problem and they shrug you off.

Hundreds or thousands of people in Canada can no longer get Podcasts or purchase music from the iTunes Music store. This is BAD. Please, Apple, contact Rogers and sort it out. So many people have called Rogers with no luck.

The question I ask myself is why an Internet Service Provider should be capping bandwidth or limiting net-services in any way?! For security issues I do not mind certain restrictions, such as blocking port 25 for outgoing email to reduce spam coming from the network, and/ or blocking the ports135 to 139 in order to reduce common worm-threats – but there should always be some kind of user agreement where the advanced user should be able to sign a paper and taking all responsibility for unlocking these ports.

What your Internet Service Provider should do is to deliver you an unfiltered Internet-connection, if you choose to have this. With no traffic limitations or other restrictions. What you do with your Internet connection should be your business and responsibility, no-one else should be able to dictate what sites you surf to, what content you choose to download and so on. What should be applicable is the laws of the country you reside in, not the arbitrariness of your Internet Service Provider.

So, if you are a customer of Shaw or any other Internet Service Provider that is limiting your Internet-access, vote with your feet and with your wallet: switch to a provider that will provide you with un-filtered access. Sooner or later, your old provider will be forced to change their policy.

Reuters posted an article, which both speaks about the greek newsmedia running amok (as usual) and a small island of 600 whose population is around 680 people, mostly elderly, being invaded by a horde of scoop-hungry journalists and where the whole world of these 680 people getting thrown upside down, where neighbours turn on neighbours and where fingers are pointed.

Also, the mainland of Greece is being svept by panic, and all bird flu vaccines are sold out at local pharmacists. This is really bad planning from the Greek state’s side, as the limited amount of vaccine should only be given to those individuals that are needed to keep the country going – it shouldn’t be a “up for grabs” kind of system. If there is a pandemic, then the lack of planning from the Greek government’s side will bite them in their backsides, but more important: the citizens will suffer from this, in fact – the whole of Europe will suffer.

As the bird flu found in Turkey was of the deadly H5N1-strain, I am worried, to say the least. If this virus mutates further, the vaccine that we have today is totally useless, and we’ll be seeing people dying like flies, economies collapsing and general human suffering.

If there is a god, I hope he / she is fair to us in our near future.

DirectNIC, a datacenter company in New Orleans rode out hurricane Katrina. Brave employees at this Internet Service Provider is keeping power on, repairing the uplinks to the Internet etc.

If you want to follow their work, go to “The Interdictor” at LiveJournal. There you can follow their struggle (one man operation?) to keep operations running via text, a webcam live-feed and also get amazed of the fans that this relatively anonymous provider is getting.

For further information and comments, visit Slashdot, read the Wired-article, Netcraft’s coverage (Uptime graph) and browse their photo gallery.

Full press release below;

Knowledge is power. Help keep it free.

You may have noticed recent slowdowns, and periods of downtime, for Wikipedia and her sister sites. We are working to make our system more efficient, but traffic on the Wikimedia servers is doubling every four months. Wikipedia.org is already one of the top 200 most popular websites on the Internet and will likely be in the top 100 before the end of the year.

This growth has been very exciting but has been a challenge to cope with. Just to keep up we will need to spend $55,000 (USD) on new hardware this quarter alone (compared to $30,000 last quarter). But we also want to build reserve capacity and an infrastructure for deploying server clusters around the world. Hosting partners could then help us share our exponentially growing traffic load, reducing constant increases in our expenses. Other costs, however, continue to increase, such as the operation of the servers in our colocation facility, administration and maintenance work, and critical changes to our software.

Thanks to a generous grant from the Lounsbery Foundation, we can cover our budget without raising substantially more funds than in the last quarter. In all, we will need $75,000 in donations to reach our goals this quarter. You helped us raise over $50,000 in our last fund drive. Every little bit helps – most donations we receive are the equivalent of $20 or less.¹

You have the power to help keep these free resources growing. Thank you for your generosity.

– The Wikimedia Team

If you use the site, give them a buck – will ya?!