| Thursday,
March 23, 2000 Freeman Dyson has won the Templeton Prize.
Fascinating.
http://www.nando.com/noframes/story/0,2107,500183615-500243844-501220107-0,00.html
Please read the above before asking me why that's interesting or what the
Templeton Prize is. Thanks to Mr. Dobbins for showing me this. I've known
Freeman Dyson for a very long time, much longer than I've known Esther;
indeed there was a time when he was much better known than his daughter...
Incidentally, the link I found that story on is not the one posted
above: I posted the link I found it on, and a reader tells me that is now
a story about an airline. I've put up the current one. Not only do some
places put in very long URL's but apparently they change them at whim. Oh.
Well.
I don't usually look at Newsgroups, and at my age I rapidly forget how
to do things I don't do and don't write instructions for. Case in point. I
got a letter telling me that if I would look at news:news.admin.net-abuse.email
I would see things of interest. Clicking on that got me a whole
series of questions I didn't seem to be able to answer. I recall that one
of them I answered mail.earthlink.net for want of a better thing to say.
Needless to say after wasting my time with this I was given a message that
said "don't bother, Bucky, this isn't working." (It
may as well have said that. It was no more use than than.)
This morning I was feeling a bit silly. After all, everyone knows how
to get to newsgroups even if I don't bother with them. So I went to
Internet Explorer HELP and asked about newsgroups. It kindly informed me
that I could change what program I used to read the damn things with if I
wanted to. Joy. Not a word on how to DO it. So off to Earthlink's
home page, drill down, be told in baby talk what newsgroups are, nothing
specific about how to do it.
Back to Internet Explorer. There has to be a way. Eventually I
pushed a button that opened the OUTLOOK News Reader. That opened a window.
NOW I punched the link for the news group. Voila! I vaguely remembered
playing about with this stuff with a program called "Free Agent"
a few years ago, so I kind of knew what to do, and downloaded 600 or so
headers, which turned out to be about 2 days' worth; clearly that's
a very active outfit. The first message was a flame to someone about
having or not having an overlord. Another big thread was about whether or
not Pair.com were villains, but it soon degenerated into a "Post the
headers of this offensive spam" -- "You don't need them" --
"Post them to humor us" -- "You're questioning my
integrity!" and on through ad tedium to ad nauseum.
I read two or three more and decided it hadn't been worth learning how to
use newsgroups. As for instance from Joey about how everyone in there is
an awesome retard; a message that if true has to be futile, and if not
true has to be irrelevant, but does manage to waste the time it takes to
delete it.
Then I made the fascinating discovery that I don't know what I did to
open the damned Outlook News Reader. It's still open, but I don't
know what I did to open it. Did I do it from Outlook or an Internet
Explorer? That at least was a great deal clearer when I used Free
Agent and for that matter with Netscape.
I'll figure it out, but I can't say I am very eager to continue. I fear
that my experiences with newsgroups has never been very good. The useful
content is so diluted that I at least can't cope with the time loss.
Fortunately I have you readers to filter the nonsense and send me links to
really interesting stuff. Thanks.
Of course sometimes even that doesn't help much as for instance
http://www.marketwatch.newsalert.com/bin/story?StoryId=ConHtubeby2XPBNrVBI1P
BMrPys1IzwDNyxi&;FQ=v%25upi&;Title=Headlines%20for%3A%20v%25upi%20
which I am sure takes one to an interesting place, but the
machinations required to get it all on one line and inserted into Explorer
defeat me; by the time I do that, that link will probably point to an
article about potatoe shortages in the Falkland Islands. There has to be
some way to make these things short enough to fit on one line...
Mr. Dobbins also recommends
http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/news/0,4586,2471995,00.html?chkpt=zdnntop
about supercomputing based on Linux. And it's time for my
breakfast. I note that the net is VERY slow, so I'll have to publish all
this one at a time through ws_ftp; FrontPage will certainly time out if I
try to use that.
Here is an interesting controversy:
http://cnn.com/2000/TECH/computing/03/21/cyberpatrol.decoder/index.html
holds an interesting story about Mattel's efforts to
ban a program designed to get around its Cyber Patrol (Net Nanny-like) net
filter.
There is an international aspect to the case that is
interesting in its own right (can US court orders be enforced overseas)
and potentially a privacy-rights issue for access of companies to the IDs
of those who downloaded the utility....
- Larry Weiss lfw@airmail.net
And it is indeed interesting. I have never been terribly fond of the
net-nanny programs, but there may be no choice if parents are to have any
control at all. On the other hand, they probably won't, and much of what
is on the Internet is pretty grim. Jacques Barzun in his autobiographical
TEACHER IN AMERICA (a wonderful book if you have not seen it) discusses
what's suitable for children. He was writing 50 years ago and what he says
seems naive now. "I recall at age 12 getting hold of a highly
naturalistic novel by Mirabeau. I thought the characters behaved rather
strangely, but I put it down to the author's inexperience rather than my
own."
Now, alas, what the kids may run across looking for channel 2000 news
can be rather sadistic treatment of both humans and animals, and pretty
disturbing. I am not sure there's much remedy on this. Of course I grew up
on a farm and where baby pigs, chickens, cows, rabbits and dogs came from
was pretty obvious, and it took no great intelligence to generalize to
humans although I think I was in 6th grade before I thought to look up
"reproduction" in the Encyclopedia Britannica. And of course
most farmhouses didn't have a Britannica.
Apparently this cphack program got out and was killed before I got a
copy. I suspect there are plenty around.
I see that The
Burning City now stands at number 7 on
the Science Fiction best-seller list, and nearly all the mail I have about
it is favorable, some very much so. Alas, only one of the people who liked
it bothered to say so on Amazon, so the silly Amazon system in which they
merely average the ratings leaves it looking as if most readers hate it.
"Most readers" turns out to be two people who disliked the book
largely because they don't like that kind of book, and one who did like
it. Averaging their results gets us a poor rating. This seems to be a
system ideal for manipulation particularly by people who have a grudge to
work off or a cause to promote.
Fortunately the Amazon rating doesn't seem to
have much effect on book store sales.
Burning City is an odd book, no question about
it. We wrote it to be entertaining, but the editor, without telling us he
intended to do that, inserted his own remark thanking us for having
something significant to say. That's always tricky: my rule is that it's
all right to introduce some ideas in a novel so long as the characters
don't become spokespeople. If you write a social satire the characters
must not know they are in one. I like to think we have managed that here;
after all, the first job is to be entertaining, not enlightening. Having
entertained it's useful to have some insights as well...
I have had other authors complain to me about the
Amazon system of leaving ratings to random readers -- actually a single
reader could write 20 bad reviews of a book and short of doing type/token
and verb/adjective ratios and other semantic analyses you couldn't prove
it was all done by one person. I listen to the complaints, but I don't
think there is much that can be done about it.
More on newsgroups. I have been urged to read at
least the thread that pertains to me and my column.
What I see is:
>> A very clue-full column.
>
> yep. miracles never cease to happen...
Well, he *did* recommend spamcop, so the bogon flux isn't entirely
gone.
--
Which I fear tells me very little. I can't tell
if this is approval or scorn, or whether the correspondent likes spamcop
(which is www.spamcop.net and I hope
they have that fixed in the original www.byte.com
column; it was my fault, and we don't do the kind of editing we used to do
when BYTE was in Peterborough and I had both a tech editor and a copy
editor as well as the editor in chief -- amusing story, Phil Lemons, now
editor in chief at a major magazine, began in computers as the tech editor
assigned to me, way way back in the early days of BYTE.)
Anyway, after I got that thread I tried to follow
it to the end, and got:
|
Message could not be displayed
Outlook Express encountered an unexpected problem
while displaying this message. Check your computer for low memory or
low disk space and try again.
|
Now it seems unlikely that this machine with
over 300 megabytes of memory and several gigabytes of free disk space
has low memory or low disk space. But whatever the problem, it doesn't
see as if I am going to get much if I persist in trying to read the rest
of that thread. If someone has better luck than me, and if there
is anything important in it, I suppose I ought to know; but for the
moment I suspect that the error may have saved me some time.
(The true explanation of that error message is
over in mail; it has of course nothing to do with what the message says.
Wonderful.)
NOW Earthlink is telling me I can't look at
newsgroups at all and some authentication is needed. I guess I don't
understand any of this. On the other hand it doesn't seem very likely I
am missing much.
HOWEVER, I have managed to fix the problem, and
I suppose I ought to have a dish of steamed crow. I forgot that for all
its difficulties, Earthlink does have a pretty good system of explaining
in baby talk. In fact that was the problem: in their verbose mode it's
easy to forget that eventually they will get a round tuit and tell you
what you need to know.
Digging in deep enough I found exact
instructions for setting up Outlook to do newsgroups, including how to
log in and passwords and access. Earthlink requires that you be logged
in as you to get to news.earthlink.net, and that is probably a good
thing since it will cut down a little on anonymous gubbage, or I presume
it will. Once I did all that I was back where I started: that is I was
able to download headers, and read messages, and not get the erroneous
error message about memory and disk space. The problem was that I hadn't
passworded my way into the newsgroup system.
Which brings me to the big question, how the
hell did it ever work at all? That is, this morning I opened a news
reader somehow, punched the name of the news group, and there I was,
able to download headers and messages. I then went to the dentist. When
I returned I was denied access to anything that hadn't been cached the
first time I looked in there.
So: now I have given the system my passwords
and account names, and I have logged through my earthlink.net address
rather than one I made up at my own domain (I had the idea that I would
use an email name and address with extra initials in it, not for
anonymity but so I could sort any mail I got as a result of being
involved with the newsgroup into a box; alas, that won't work, since I
only have one email address at Earthlink. I need to find out if my own
domain hosted at pair.com allows me to access newsgroups through that;
then I can use JerryEEp or some such at jerrypournelle.com whereupon the
mail will come to me, and be sorted into a special bin just for mail to
that address. That would give me a chance to see what I do get there.
"I do all these silly things so you won't have to..."
But at the moment I don't know whether pair
maintains a newsgroup server, or how to access it. Of course if
things go as we are now planning, I may host my own site and some others
on that big Penguin. That is one impressive machine. You could run a
bank on that machine, and if I had bandwidth for it I could set things
up here; as it is it will probably have to be located elsewhere close to
a higher speed connection than the DSL I keep hoping to get here.
Not that pair hasn't been a good place to park;
the only complaint I have is that sometimes there are problems that
aren't theirs but appear to be, and it takes a while for them to tell me
"no, we didn't do anything"... And there is the
crazy situation that I cannot publish to my site from FrontPage except
in the dead of night. But mostly the appeal to using the Penguin
is the experience of using it.
Anyway, I have now looked at some of the
newsgroup chatter about my column. I don't think I would have published
much of it here. There is one point made:
>>>}> http://www.byte.com/column/BYT20000314S0001
>>>}Not that clueful: he suggests using
an unencrypted telnet to the POP port >>>}to flush mailbombs.
>>>That's no worse than the standard POP
connection one uses to read the mail.
>>That depends upon your POP client. Some
will inflexibly download all mail.
>But they'll still send your user name and
password unencrypted, which was >(I think) spam target's complaint
about the advice...
I sit corrected. I misread "no worse" as
"no better".
He's right--the vast majority of netters are still
using unencrypted POP connections, whether they telnet:110 or use their
MSOE.
Now all I suggested was to use that telnet
trick (actually it was suggested by a reader) to get rid of a big mail
bomb too large to download. Precisely why that is such a bad idea is not
conveyed to me in the above conversations. (But it is later explained
over in mail.)
There was also a long thread on whether Joey is Joey: someone posted
a silly set of obscenities, then someone using the same name said that
was not him who had done it, after which there were over a hundred posts
arguing with him saying "oh yes that was you, you did it" and
if there was a resolution of who is Joey I fear I hadn't the patience to
continue.
So I have learned to use newsgroups, but I fear I haven't learned
much from having done so. Perhaps another time.
Hah. I inadvertantly hit 'reset list'; now I am getting thousands of
names of newsgroups. The size of this system is astonishing. Is it all
chatter about who is Joey and "bogon flux" in my columns
(whatever that is)...
My advice on OSR-1 : go see if in the list of
bug fixes it does anything to Office you want done. If you don't have
any problems you know of, get the CDROM. The download takes a long time
and requires some careful attention to the way it is installed. Read all
the instructions. It makes a difference whether you are doing a network
installation or not. Ordinary users with registered copies of Office
installed in a standard way from CDROM have had little trouble except
for the long times it may take to download.
I haven't had enough problems with Office other
than FrontPage to make it worthwhile downloading at 56K; if I had DSL
I'd do it. I have sent for the CDROM.
Those who thought they saw a previous
discussion of this subject that involved mail and other people were
imagining it.
As usual around here, almost anything can
blossom into something worth while. I rather tongue in cheek posted the
Starbridge link; it got a reply from Peter Glascowsky that's general
enough that I have put it up as a Special
Report..
And Roland Dobbins reports what he calls a wonderful but sad that it is
necessary page for checking DLL's
http://support.microsoft.com/servicedesks/fileversion/dllinfo.asp
I have had someone interpret for me what the supposedly adult network
supervisors on that newsgroup
news:news.admin.net-abuse.email
were saying. They don't like spamcop and they don't like me for writing
about it. I note that these supposedly adult people can't be bothered to
write me to tell me what is wrong with spamcop and tell me what is better;
they prefer to write in a forum in which there are over a hundred messages
on whether or not joey is joey, another hundred on total irrelevance, and
interspersed in those is a thread about what a bogus idiot I am. If
the nation is in the hands of these people we have real problems; if these
really are systems administrators, they sure have plenty of time on their
hands. More than I have.
If someone wants to tell me something better to do than use spamcop to
report spam I'll listen. The last one that wanted me to do something
different proposed a procedure that would take about 3 to 4 minutes per
spam to "do it right." And perhaps so, but I sure don't have an
hour a day, much less the four or five hours a day, that this would take.
When the signal to noise ratio goes below 10 **-2 it has gone further
than I have time.
In general, if you have a complaint about what I say, the simplest way
is to tell me. As for instance:
> Now all I suggested was to use that telnet
trick (actually it was > suggested by a reader) to get rid of a big
mail bomb too large to > download. Precisely why that is such a bad
idea is not conveyed to > me in the above conversations.
Your trick is fine. The guys on the news group are
complaining because you end up sending your username/password "in the
clear", and if there happens to be a packet sniffer somewhere between
your client and the host, it now has access to all your email.
Same goes for normal telnet between machines - the
username/password are sent in the clear. There are a number of packet
sniffers that know this and are setup to just watch the first 60 (or so)
characters of a telnet connection to try and capture passwords. A straight
telnet is much more dangerous than telnetting to a POP account, as it
gives the bad guy access to your normal user account.
Most modern protocols (such as kerberos &; SSH)
do not pass unencrypted information across an open net, even during login.
This is generally considered a good thing.
I don't know if POP has been updated to support
encrypted passwords or not, but it would seem to be a good extension.
Pete
Now at least it's clear what the problem is. It's not so clear what
should be done about it, and it certainly is not clear that a bunch of
chattering magpies like that group with a hundred messages about joey
would know. But perhaps I will find out.
It takes patience. Eventually one of the people on that newsgroup
posted a pointer to
http://www.tmisnet.com/~strads/spamhunt/index.html
which in fact looks like a very useful place. It may be that I ought to
have found it on my own. In the old days someone at BYTE would have known.
Alas, the new BYTE.COM doesn't have 30 tech editors and associates to
chase down leads and follow up on ideas. I have my own team, but we have
many things to do; I generally have to rely on experts, and it is my
conceit that among my readers there is someone who knows everything.
Alas, that may not be much use if the experts whose advice I need
choose instead to natter about joey and tell each other how bogus I am
without bothering to tell ME what's going on.
Further examination of the anti-spam techniques on that URL leaves me
in despair: the techniques may work for someone willing to hide, but I
can't. And they say people may get unhappy if they get 25-30 spams a day.
Hell I get that many an HOUR, sometimes that many copies of the same one
from different addresses, sometimes 10 copies to each of four addresses I
have. It is worse as a major show comes up, because I get a lot of press
releases about the show, and invitations to meet people at the shows, and
I need to at least look at those. Finding them among the spam is not
easy.
So the people at news:news.admin.net-abuse.email
don't like Spamcop because it doesn't always parse the headers properly
and sometimes sends spam notices to places that shouldn't get them. Alas,
these net administrators haven't told me of anything better, although some
of them act as if everyone ought to know. And I am about out of time
trying to mine that particular lode. Time to go to something else.
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