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THE VIEW FROM CHAOS MANOR

VIEW 88 February 14 - 20, 2000

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This is a day book. It's not all that well edited. I try to keep this up daily, but sometimes I can't. I'll keep trying. See also the monthly COMPUTING AT CHAOS MANOR column, 4,000 - 7,000 words, depending.  (Older columns here.) For more on what this place is about, please go to the VIEW PAGE.

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If you want to PAY FOR THIS there are problems, but I keep the latest HERE. I'm trying. MY THANKS to all of you who sent money.  Some of you went to a lot of trouble to send money from overseas. Thank you! There are also some new payment methods. I am preparing a special (electronic) mailing to all those who paid: there will be a couple of these. I am also toying with the notion of a subscriber section of the page. LET ME KNOW your thoughts.
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Highlights this week:

 

 

 

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This week:

Monday
Tuesday
Wednesday
Thursday
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Monday  February 14, 2000

Valentine's Day: forget that at your peril.

It is strange how an ancient Roman holiday has become the very symbol of romantic love, but it has; and if anyone thinks that the intellectual phenomenon known as "feminism" and 'women's liberation' has changed the interest of the softer sex in matters romantic, he may anticipate an education I don't envy. Of course there are exceptions, but by and large Henry Higgens had it right in his best song in "My Fair Lady".  Women aren't men (and most men and women are glad of it).

All of which is prefatory to saying, if you forgot Valentine's Day it's not too late to do something about that, and if she protests you don't have to and "it's all right" that's even more reason to make ammends...

 

I have had to tell NASA and AAAS that I won't be in DC this week, meaning I am missing the panel discussions as well as covering the AAAS meeting and meeting old and new friends. We're on standby grandparent duty. I will also be missing the Windows 2000 Launch Party in San Francisco, and I won't be going to CeBIT. My son Alex will get to those latter two for me.

 

My special on the Web attacks is up at BYTE, along with the first installment of the February column. It turns out that some of the column was written during the web attacks when I didn't know what was going on, but looking it over, the conclusions remain. The problems I had downloading updates to utilities happened before the DoS attacks, and I did other downloads before and after the utility update failures. There's some discussion on my conclusion that we don't need OS utilities much any more over in mail, and I'm sure there will be more. I may even be persuaded to change my opinion, but so far I have not.

I am adding assets to my new systems Fergie (a fast Princess) and Mohican (with luck the last Windows 98 system I'll build; more on those in upcoming installments of the column this month) with the view that they will take over from Princess and Parsifal, my Windows 2000 Workstation and Windows 98 SE "main" systems I do most of my work on. This morning a Plexstor Plexwriter goes into Mohican.

This will be in the March column but it does no harm to say it here: if you have any problems at all making CDROM copies, clean the lasers on both the read and write drives. The one I favor is from ALLSOP, but they're all about the same: they have a little brush on a CD disk. The ALLSOP also plays a tune and shows a video as it is doing its job, and lets you know when it is done.

Now to work. It seems to have stopped raining and the sun is out, but for how long I don't know.


Some mail I got...

Here's more on the general subject of Chinese military thinking vis-a-vis

>the United States. http://www.insightmag.com/archive/200002063.shtml 

---

>http://www.nwi.net/~pchelp/obscure.htm

 

>It's a very nice writeup of obscuring techniques for IP addresses and

>ways to get around them. Lots of links to good tools.

---

http://www.unisys.com/unisys/lzw/

>

>Begin Quote:

>

>License Information on GIF and Other LZW-based Technologies

>More and more people are becoming aware that the reading and/or writing of

>GIF images requires a license to use Unisys patented Lempel Ziv Welch (LZW)

>data compression and decompression technology, including United States

>Patent No. 4,558,302, Japanese Patent Numbers 2,123,602 and 2,610,084, and

>patents in Canada, France, Germany, Italy and the United Kingdom. Since

>January of 1995, Unisys has entered into almost two thousand license

>agreements for use of GIF and other LZW-based technology.

>

>...

>

>Unisys has frequently been asked whether a Unisys license is required in

>order to use LZW software obtained by downloading from the Internet or from

>other sources. The answer is simple. In all cases, a written license

>agreement or statement signed by an authorized Unisys representative is

>required from Unisys for all use, sale or distribution of any software

>(including so-called "freeware") and/or hardware providing LZW conversion

>capability (for example, downloaded software used for creating/displaying

>GIF images). In certain cases, no license fees may be required, but this

>needs to be evidenced by a written agreement or written statement signed by

>an authorized Unisys representative.

>

>End quote

>

>My read says that they are making it sound like decompression is included in the patent. Actually, they could be purposefully obfuscating the fact that the patent only applies to compression. Note the reference to "reading and/or writing of GIF images" and "software used for creating/displaying GIF images".

>I have not looked at the patent yet.

>

>Also see:

>http://www.unisys.com/unisys/lzw/lzw-license.asp 

Some of us have been speculating that we ought to ask Unisys for a release signed by an officer for EACH gif icon we innocently used. Don't fight the system love it. But can you imagine a million requests for a paper signed license...


I need to think a lot about campaign financing. While I agree with (among others Ron Unz) that there are some real problems (and he's endorsing McCain because of this issue) there are some real problems in the other direction. Real limits on spending on campaigns is better known as "The Incumbent's Enabling Act" or "The Mass Media Empowerment Act."  Spending public money on political campaigns would have T Jefferson spinning with G Washington already orbited and J Adams sputtering. 


Amazon is not ready for prime time. They have so damned much to sell they have forgotten how to sell books. My one-click is gone (I guess they were not getting enough impulse buyng?). They know my credit card number and address but they want me to click on until I get carpal tunnel before I can buy one lousy book. What has happened to them? It used to be so convenient...

I guess they gave up on One-Click. I can't find it anyway. So I have to fill out forms and junk before I can just order a book. I used to buy a fair number of books this way, and even some of their suggested titles like Tom Bethell's latest I tried to get just now, but I would have had to do "shopping cart" and "checkout" and I am not in the mood. I believe Amazon has lost its savvy. That one-click was their best feature. Didn't they just sue to prevent someone else from using it? Now they don't. That's odd, a business to be in its dotage before it ever made a profit...

OK. three different readers have told me how to get into My Accounts and find the setting and change it. ODD: I bought one book with it off, and AT NO POINT did they suggest there was any way to turn the one-click purchasing back on. And I never turned it off. I do not understand any of this, but they need to make it easier to find that. One-click is the convenience I got used to. Go there, click, and order a book...


Does anyone know of an on-line version of the 1898 book by William Hope Harvey (sometimes known as "Coin" Harvey due to the popularity of one work)  "Coin's Financial School"? I find references to it, but nowhere the work itself, which is mostly doggerel poetry as I recall. As late as 1958 it existed in libraries since I was able to use it in a seminar paper on William Jennings Bryan back then. I am looking for the text to Coin's Financial School.


If you have a book with Carol Publishing you should read the Author's Guild announcement over in mail.


Have just installed the IDE version Plextor CD/RW 8/4/32 Plexwriter and I am in love. Wow that was easy, it's fast, and it works. See column next month. This in a Pentium 600 Windows 98 SE system (Mohican). Plextor is good stuff.  Recommended.

I said this in a conversation in another place, but it's worth putting here for the record:

Political correctness is tyranny with manners. I like that.

Let me point out a curious phenomenon. From before Marx began to publish to
the death of Hitler, more than 100 years, everyone who advocated genocide
called himself a socialist. EVERYONE. There are no known exceptions. Since
1945 we have had some tribal genocides and ethnic cleansing, but even so,
the mass murderers have all been elitist socialists. All of them.

Saving the world gives one the right to kill those who oppose. My strength
is as the strength of ten because my cause is pure.

Now contemplate political correctness.

 

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Tuesday, February 15, 2000

The papers have a spate of stuff about the DoS attacks and Who Dun It, but nothing seems definitive. Nothing seems to contradict or undermine the urgency of what I said in my article . The rain is gone and the leak in the kitchen ceiling I have been working on for months seems finally to have been fixed (and well tested). 

I won't make the Windows 2000 launch or AAAS in DC, due to grandparent standby duties. One does want to keep priorities straight.


Does anyone have the speed and multiplier settings page for the Tyan S1857 Trinity board? I have misplaced the manual and their server isn't working. Of course it is not working. No company on Earth actually provides the information you need when you want it. They buy junky old hardware and cheap software and then put the money into graphics artists to make the damned site look good. But they make sure it will take an hour to get what you want. I can drive out to Fry's and find a manual in less time. Or dig around here and find out what I did with mine...

Well, I've managed to find my own manual. Tyan hasn't in the past hour been able to download the manual from their site. It's not the web. I have larger downloads on another machine that work. It's just their servers. 

The good news is that I managed to get Mohican running at 600 MHz. He's been at 450 up to now. I hadn't really noticed that -- he's still awfully fast and I was mostly doing setups -- but I noticed on the fast display on startup before Windows 98 SE starts that it said running at 450.  Changing to 600 was a minor adventure I'll describe in the March column, because there are some instructive lessons. TYAN makes good boards, but their documents are AWFUL and their web site servers worse. Ah well.

Roland sends this reminder:

Interview with the autor of TFN

http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1005-200-1549399.html 

It is worth reading. And this from mail:

seen elsewhere:

"Beware Microsoft of Borg. You will be assimilated.

Resistance is fut...

GENERAL PROTECTION FAULT in borg32.dll"


BACK TO 450.

Mohican, Tyan motherboard, Kingston 133 memory, when run at 600 (133 motherboard) blows up. Nothing works properly. Office won't load. Registry errors. Backing off to a 100 bus speed fixes that. 

Next I'll run the multiplier up to 6 and see what that does.  

But it's stable at 450 and goes mad at 600. Now what?

Incidentally the iWill at 600 with Windows 2000 is quite stable.

 

OK at 600 with the bus speed at 100. I will next swap out the memory. 


For those wondering why Windows systems were not used in the DDoS attacks, see mail.

 

 

 

 

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Wednesday, February 16, 2000

Well, I am not on my way to Washington for the AAAS meeting, nor up in the Bay Area for the Windows 2000 launch. Nor out in the desert for the developer's conference. Just as well. I'll get reports on most of what happens. The one I will miss most is AAAS in DC where I was supposed to be on a panel on what to do about space. Ah well.

We will continue the Windows Security debate in mail.

Some words on the mess at Chaos Manor in mail. I have a dinner guest tonight and my wife tells me if I don't clean up the Great Hall I can't take him upstairs, so I have my work to do today. Photographs to the subscribers if I have any success...

Official reply from Microsoft about IE 5.5 web site.

And this just in:

Subject: DDoS &; related security must-reads

http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=00/02/16/1836215&;mode=nocomment 

http://staff.washington.edu/dittrich/misc/ddos/ 

http://sunworld.com/sunworldonline/swol-01-2000/swol-01-attacks.html 

http://staff.washington.edu/dittrich/misc/faqs/rootkits.faq 

Roland Dobbins 


http://www.lrainc.com/swtaboo/taboos/cmurraybga0799.pdf has a paper by Charles Murray that is long but worth reading for those interested in the Flynn Effect and IQ.

Thanks to everyone who suggested where I could find Tyan motherboard manuals. I had found them, it was just that their servers were so slow I couldn't download what I needed. I found the paper copy here.

I will now have to find out why the system runs just fine at 100 x 6 but blows up at 133 x 4.5.  I am sure there is a good reason. The BIOS for the board has been suggested, also that I may not have a 133 bus chip from Intel. I'll look into it. But things are very stable at 100 x 6, and Mohican is now one fast machine.

 

 

 

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This week:

Monday
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Thursday, February 17, 2000

We are headed south for grandparent duties, back this weekend. 

I was scheduled to have dinner with Ron Unz last night, and Roberta said I couldn't let him come upstairs unless I cleaned the place up. I spent the day throwing stuff out and sorting junk, and by gollies, the Great Hall looks good. I'll have pictures for subscribers once I get back. It was a horrible fight against all that clutter, but I won. Well, sort of.

Because of the rain, the dinner didn't come off, but the place looks great, and now I have to keep it clean since we have other visitors coming. 

Mohican is stable at 100 x 6 but blows up at 133 x 4.5 and I have not yet had time to see whether it's the chip (there are some Intel 600's not intended for 133, and some that are), the mother board, the memory (unlikely to be the problem) or something else. That's one of those trouble shoot situations that takes tedious time and a good log book, and I don't have time today. It will be done by column time.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Friday, February 18, 2000

I'm back, all is well, Catherine Elizabeth is beautiful, and the San Diego Freeway is unbearable at rush hours. But I am here.

Before some of you have a stroke, my Intel Pentium III 600 is an engineering department chip and doesn't have the multiplier locked in. I should have mentioned that. Since I have not been here I have done no tests on what is blowing up, which could be the Voodoo 3000 card but that seems unlikely, could be the memory but that is unlikely too, and may be -- well, we will just have to see

Clearly I didn't get a lot done last two days. I have a Big Bunch of mail much important and I'll try to get a lot of that up later tonight or tomorrow.

 

 

 

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Saturday, February 19, 2000

The big news is that The Burning City by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle is shipping from Amazon. This is our big heroic fantasy (well the characters think they are in a heroic fantasy) about a time 14,000 years ago just after Atlantis sank and the magic is going away. (Well, it's big news to me, anyway...)

Thanks to all the readers who told me. I haven't seen a copy yet, and the publishers haven't told me yet, but...

I am going to breakfast. When I get back there is a lot of excellent mail to put up.


I have just sent a short note to all subscribers. While it has a little information, particularly for newcomers, the major purpose was to check the mailing list. I am already getting returns. You can find those at the badmail page; if you thought you should get subscriber mail and did not, check there first. Then write me with the correct address. 

If you are not on the badmail page and didn't get today's message you have dropped out of my system; please send me mail telling WHEN and HOW (credit card or check in the mail) you subscribed. I seldom lose anyone but I have misplaced a few.

My thanks to all subscribers: if it were not for you I would not keep this place open.


For those who do not know, my wife has computer programs that teach children to read. You can find out more here. There's also a letter we got today that says a good bit about it.

If you know any kids having trouble learning to read, you need to look into this. The schools are NOT doing it properly.


Then, incredibly, there is this:

http://www.upside.com/David_Bunnell/38ac492d0.html 

and this:

http://www.theage.com.au/breaking/0002/19/A27800-2000Feb19.shtml 

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This week:

Monday
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Sunday, February 20, 2000

For all those keeping score: yes, I know that Freewheeling Franklin  used the "Marinius van der Lubbe International Firebombing Society" war cry. So did Fat Freddy. Please don't send me more proof of how wrong I am. I happen to have the strip with Freddy saying it. I appreciate being corrected when I am wrong, and some issues are worth a lot of correspondence, but this one isn't one of them.

There is a whole pot full of new bad addresses at badmail

If you have any interest at all in the philosophy of science, I commend

http://www.geocities.com/ResearchTriangle/Facility/4118/dcs/popper/popper.html 

which is an eye-opener, at least to me. David Stove may be wrong or right, but he is clear enough on what he is saying.

I note that The Burning City is moving about rapidly on the Amazon sales list. Someone must be buying it. Thanks

I have just got the worst spam attack ever: Hundreds of copies. More coming in all the time. You can see it at the monster page; it is a firm in the San Diego area, a real company with a real phone number and address.  This is an outfit that is as irresponsible as any I have ever seen. Hundreds of this message are coming in even now. I do not know how to stop it.

Brian Utter's problem with NoteTab seems unique; at least the NoteTab people say so, and they're actually looking at it. Something hosed the associations. It happened with me as well, and they sent me a way to fix it, which I have done. Very odd. But in general NoteTab works as advertised, and quite well too.

Does anyone know how to refer this financial services firm to the criminal authorities? He has certainly launched a Denial of Services attack on me. Hundreds and hundreds more of the message shown on the monster page have appeared in my mail. It ties up my system. I have reported it through SpamCop and uunet has responded with a "we will look into it" message, but the stuff keeps coming.

Here come hundreds more. Hundreds.

And more. uu.net has sent a message with a phone number, and I have used that and spoken with a security technician, so perhaps something can be done. SpamCop reports that it's coming through uu.net which is really all I know. I am not all that good at analyzing headers. I have of course pasted the entire "real" header into all the reports. In a way I suppose this is interesting in a morbid sort of way...

Another hundred copies in the last couple of minutes.

It's still coming. Meanwhile I have done a bunch of good mail.


It's 9:15 PM. The attack continues, hundreds of copies of this message every hour, nothing I can do. I really need a way to report this to the police; this is a criminal action, and something needs to be done.  Meanwhile

First Venture Associates, Inc., at 619-542-7883

continues to send me hundreds and hundreds of copies of the message shown on the monster page. I seem to have no way to make it stop on a Sunday. Neither does uu.net which is relaying the spam to me. No one seems able to stop this. Here come 286 more copies. I get a flood of them each time I report the Spam to uu.net or SpamCop and I am beginning to think it is not a coincidence on the timing.

I suppose I had better subscribe to one of those services that lets you blackhole an entire domain; uu.net in my case. 

Another 148 coming in now. It is 9:25

Another 204 coming in now. It is 9:40

No one seems able to do anything. I wonder can I call the police?

9:45  another 243 coming in. I wonder how many I will have by morning? Can nothing be done ever? Will this go one forever now?

9:52 another 245 coming in. uu.net suggests I put on some kind of filter to reject mail from the known spammer. Fine and dandy, but I don't know how to work that with the Netwinder in the system. I'll figure it out of course; but that outfit seems determined to overload my system entirely. There must be a way to stop it all at the source, and tell IBM.NET to stop delivering messages from that source. Somehow. But I don't know how.

I am sure I'll figure it out.

10:04  214 more coming in.

The problem is that mail to me gets in only in between these attacks. So long as the bloody IBM.Net server keeps handing me the mail nothing comes. I guess I will have to remove the ibm.net account from my mail entirely. That ought to block the garbage until I get a chance to see what to do about it.

Hah. There is a checkbox in the Outlook account properties: uncheck it and I no longer get mail from the ibm.net pop, and I won't until further action. Thus my regular mail will come in. I don't get a lot of mail on that account anyway, but I presume IBM.NET will eventually respond to my spam reports and perhaps they will send through that. Too bad. I'll get the thousands of copies of that message another time.

 


I keep hearing on Jeff Levy's program about a product called 2coolpc, so I went over to their site www.2coolpc.com for a look. It told me the wonderfulness of their product, and offered to sell it to me, but nowhere did I find a description of what the darned thing IS. A fan? Ducts? Both? Noise levels?  Not a clue, at least not one I could discern. Oh. Well.

Clark Myers reports that it's a ducted fan of sorts. I can imagine that would be useful. I don't know how noisy. I use PC Power and Cooling cases and power supplies and I have never had heat problems since they have lots of good air circulation, but some of the clones have very weak fans, and I can believe that something like the 2cool gadget would be very useful. I also have some confidence in Jeff Levy although it must be hard to take sponsors and still do reports; it's one reason I haven't any sponsors. (If Ford wants to advertise here I already bought an Explorer and I like it and...  Alas, I don't seem to be bombarded with offers from national accounts...)


Well, couldn't sleep. Turned on the ibm.net account, and lo! I have 1187 messages waiting for me. All of course the same. I'll turn it back off. No point in downloading all that.

Now to think what can be done. This looks to be a mail server gone insane, since the messages all seem identical. I will have to compare two of them and see if there is any difference at all. Stand by one....

Well they all have the identical message id

<xGBtziZETX8xz.SOqfsRuPavAMY@mail.power.net>

which may or may not be meaningful; I am learning more about the gory details of email than I ever thought I would. So this is perhaps a berserk mail server.

AM I THE ONLY ONE who is the recipient of this thing's attentions?


And on a lighter note:

COPENHAGEN, Feb 14 (AFP) - Two goldfish were cut to ribbons and 
six others were kidnapped to spare them the same fate when a Danish 
artist unveiled an installation at the weekend giving visitors the 
power of life and death over his art. 
Police, acting on a complaint by animal rights activists, asked 
the Trapholt Museum in Kolding to unplug the 10 blenders, each 
containing a goldfish, and warned of possible charges of cruelty to 
animals. 
But museum director Peter Meyer refused to budge, saying he 
would defend "the principle of freedom of expression for the 
artist." He added, however, that he expected the public to treat the 
work as they would any painting or sculpture -- to look but not 
touch. 
The work by Chilean-born artist, Marco Evaristti, "gives the 
public the option ... of pressing the button of death, or not. It 
asks the visitor: do you want to kill?" said Meyer. 
Meyer said a journalist had encouraged two visitors to push the 
"on" buttons on two blenders on opening day for the exhibition 
Friday, killing the goldfish. 
Six of the eight remaining goldfish were stolen over the 
weekend, "but the museum restored the work in its entirety for 
Monday morning," Meyer said. 

 

 

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