| Wednesday, September
26, 2001
This will be a busy day.
Friday the satellite people will be here to give me some bandwidth.
This will be a temporary measure. The Phone Company says DSL in my
neighborhood by February, and Adelphia says the same thing about cable
modem. Meanwhile I do these silly things so you don't have to. I may keep
dialup for Everquest: Alex tells me that the latency will be truly bad on
the satellite. We will see. My plan is to leave the dialup system in
place, and tell the machine I play Everquest on to look to the Netwinder
for its primary gateway; all the others will get the new box. I can put up
with a 2 second delay after I ask for a web page if I then get it quickly,
as opposed to now, where it might start downloading faster but I can go
shave while the whole page comes in.
And more and more places are clearly contemptuous of the bandwidth
impaired, making pages that take FOREVER to download, and of course
sending the highly complex advertisements before they send anything I want
to see.
Which is why this place is paid for by subscriptions,
and I don't have ads, and with any luck I never will. As to subscribers, I
got a number of new subscriptions and renewals this week. Thanks. I also
sent a mailing, and many of the addresses bounced. I am checking those
addresses: if the bounced mail comes from someone not a current
subscriber, I am going to remove that name from the subscriber list. If
you did not get the Virus warning this week, and you are a current subscriber,
NOW is the time to tell me when, how, and under what name you subscribed!
Today I will be building a new ATHLON system to be the primary gateway
machine for the new satellite. It will run Windows 2000 Professional, but
I have in mind two additional measures. One, I will be looking into
various NON-Microsoft mail handlers that run under Windows. There are a
number of these, and few have the security holes Microsoft has -- in part
of course because there are fewer people looking for holes in them.
Second, Roland and Dan and other advisors are confident we can stream
the satellite bitstream through a Windows box -- the satellite people say
the optimizing software runs under Windows but not Linux -- into a Linux
box where it will get new security treatment. The first pass should
eliminate a lot of spam and most simple virus attacks through running
standard commercial software. The Linux box ought to get the rest.
This looks to be a new adventure in communications.
For the next few hours I will accepting suggestions for names for the
new Athlon box whose primary mission will be to process communications
through the new satellite system we're installing.
THANKS!! We have names
enough already...
Most of the story will go into the column, but some will be here, and
subscribers will get a report by email as the first mailing through the
mail handling software I'll be installing...
It is time to do some serious strategic analysis of the war effort,
both military operations and domestic security. We started on that
earlier; now it is time to be more systematic, and apply a strategy of
technology to the problem at hand. I'll start that effort shortly. You
should be thinking along those lines. This readership includes a large
number of the people who ought to be thinking about this, and some of
those who have inputs at appropriate levels.
We are a sort of unofficial think tank, and we can pass ideas into the
official system. How much attention is paid there isn't clear: it's not
like the Reagan days, or even when I was Mr. Gingrich's science advisor.
Still, there are channels, and I get email from rather surprising places.
Understand, I want to keep things this way: I do not want and would not
accept any official position, and I haven't had a security clearance in
years. I am in the enviable position of having no position: some ( I like
to think the more intelligent ) people listen to me, but no one has any
obligation to do anything I say. I can only try to be persuasive...
In any event we will begin a new strategic analysis shortly.
Begin with objectives:
What do we want to DO? Begin with Afghanistan:
- break heads and kill people
- feed people
- revenge
- hunt down specific persons
- change the world over there
Those are some of the possible objectives. They will control our
strategy. If we want to feed people, where? In the Hindu Kush? Kabul? All
of Pakistan? If we want to change the world there, do we want to impose
democracy on Afghanistan? On Pakistan? On all the other Stans?
And we are hardly through with this inventory. We need to look at the
Middle East, and indeed most of the world. What do we want it to look like
when we are done?
Begin with ideals: what, ideally, would we want to see? Recall that
democracies may discover they don't like us, despite our conviction that
democracies don't go to war with each other. What do we want to see in the
world?
I DO NOT KNOW IF THIS IS REAL OR A HOAX:
(LATER: it is a hoax. REPEAT: the following
is a hoax.)
>Subject: FW: WARNING - PLEASE READ Subject:
Warning - Do Not Open Blue Envelopes in your U.S. Mail ONCE YOU HAVE READ
THIS PLEASE FORWARD TO ALL YOU KNOW.
This is from Schwab corporate headquarters - so it's
no joke. Very scary. Be careful Just when you thought you were safe, now
we have the following to deal with...please read, it definitely is a
serious threat to our lives and health. This is an alert about a virus in
the original sense of the word...one that affects your body, not your hard
drive.
There have been 23 confirmed cases of people
attacked by the Klingerman Virus,
a virus that arrives in your real mailbox, not your
e-mail in box. Someone has been mailing large blue envelopes, seemingly at
random, to people inside the US. On the front of the envelope in bold
black letters is printed, "A gift for you from the Klingerman
Foundation." When the envelopes are opened, there is a small sponge
sealed in plastic. This sponge carries what has come to be known as the
Klingerman Virus, as public health officials state this is a strain of
virus they have not previously encountered. When asked for comment,
Florida police Sergeant Stetson said, "We are working with the CDC
and the USPS, but have so far been unable to track down the origins of
these letters. The return addresses have all been different, and we are
certain a remailing service is being used, making our jobs that much more
difficult." Those who have come in contact with the Klingerman Virus
have been hospitalized with severe dysentery. So far seven of the
twenty-three victims have died. There is no legitimate Klingerman
Foundation mailing unsolicited gifts. If you receive an oversized blue
envelope in the mail marked "A gift from the Klingerman
foundation". DO NOT open it.
Place it in a strong plastic bag or container and
call the police immediately. The "Gift" is one you definitely do
not want to open.
0 PLEASE PASS THIS ON TO EVERYONE YOU CARE ABOUT.
Mrs. Sandra Dee McNair-Boyd Social Work Secretary
Yale New Haven Hospital Department of Social Work 203-688-2256
Bonnie Pote WorkForce Solutions Supplier Management
Division 908-221-3467
You now know what I know. I have no more information.
http://www.snopes2.com/toxins/klinger.htm
Recommend checking this site
http://www.snopes2.com/
A good source for hoax information, unless its about
computer viruses, in which case Symantec seems to be the best site for
info.
Tom Brosz
Apparently it was a hoax. Which is not astonishing.
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