All email disclaimers are utterly useless – except, possibly, one that a lawyer sends you that, on that particular message, reminds you that you are not in a privileged relationship.

Here’s the proof:

This message (including any attachment(s) hereto) is confidential and may also be privileged. It is intended solely for the addressee. If you are not the intended recipient you are hereby notified that any disclosure, copying, distribution or taking any action in reliance on the contents of this information is strictly prohibited and may be unlawful. If you have received this message in error you are requested …

One problem: we have built an immense network of supercomputers that is essentially a Commons. An abuse of this Commons that would be ridiculously unprofitable if it had to be carried out by humans – say, an expected return of one one-hundredth cent per attempt – is highly attractive to unscrupulous actors who can automate a billion attempts for an expenditure of a few days or weeks worth of setup and expect a hundred thousand dollars of return.

Another problem: there has been little incentive for software developers to guarantee the security (integrity, privacy, trustworthiness) of their products, because they face so …

Gas ranges have the UNIX nature: they are powerful, can be controlled precisely, and if you only half-know what you are doing, it’s possible to blow up your house. If you do know what you’re doing, nearly any problem can be solved by taking it apart and cleaning things or replacing components.

Electric ranges are like Windows: they might eventually do the thing they’re supposed to do, but it’s hard to control them, there is a propensity to wildly oversteer, and you really don’t get the same power. If it breaks in a way that …

The Amazon Kindle Fire HD10 (2017) is the high-end tablet of their line. The hardware is mediocre and the software is quite bad. I do not recommend you purchase this or any other Fire tablet… unless you have some very specific requirements.

Let’s consider the negatives, first.

Bootloader is locked

Having a locked bootloader means that you can’t replace the OS with a sane one. If you could do that, then all other software problems could be overcome by a slightly technical person. (If you can follow directions well enough, there are good guides for most systems to …

By all means, replace procmail with maildrop.

If you haven’t read a procmailrc in a few months, it’s so much line noise and you need to consult the man pages again.

If you haven’t read a maildrop recipe file, well – here’s a nearly maximum-complexity snippet:

   xfilter "/usr/bin/spamc -U /var/lib/spamassassin/socket"
      if (/^X-Spam-Status: Yes/)
      {   
        to Maildir/spam/
      }

   `reformail -D 16000 duplicate.cache`
   if ( $RETURNCODE == 0 )
       exit

   if (/^X-Facebook.*/:h)
       to Maildir/facebook/

   if (/^Subject: \[Slack\] Notifications.*/:h)
       to Maildir/slack/

You now know how to do 90% of everything you’ll ever want …

Someone on the debian-user list just discovered that gpt partitioning allows you to put 128 partitions on a disk. They got really excited at the granularity that would allow. They weren’t thinking about the exciting maintenance procedures that would inevitably follow – not enough space here, too much space there, backups all over the place.

This is the sort of thing that ZFS excels at.

For example, let’s say you have five 1 TB disks, and you have less than 1TB that you really really want to have safe.

You could set up the following:

mainpool: a zpool composed …

If you have a domain name registered, you need to renew your registration every few years. You can generally ask for a 1-3 year cycle.

If you like your DNS registrar, there is no need to switch.

Today I received paper mail from a company called iDNS. I’m not a customer. The mail looked an awful lot like a bill.

“You must renew your domain name to retain exclusive rights to it on the Web, and now is the time to transfer and renew your name from your current Registrar to Internet Domain Name Services. Failure to renew your …

The price for using a math library developed by Foobar Corporation is $10,000 plus 1% of the sale price of your product, or whatever you negotiate with them.

The price for using a GPL’d math library is that you must license your source code under the GPL as well.

The price for using an LGPL’d math library is distributing the source for the library along with your product. If you modify the library itself, then that falls back to the GPL.

In no case are you getting something for nothing. It’s just that the cost of …

Your company probably needs a librarian. Maybe more than one.

A modern librarian selects, installs, configures and administrates knowledge management software. They are experts in organizational methods and search techniques.

A librarian may take in paper documents and convert them to electronic formats. Everything gets stored, indexed, and made searchable and retrievable. Wikis are re-organized, old information marked for review and status updated: is it still correct? reliable? useful?

You have email that concerns a whole team, contracts with history, agreements with revisions. Librarians control the automation that keeps track of that for you. You have customer contact databases — a …

It’s not enough that Net Neutrality be enforced. That’s just a basic requirement to keep corporations from completely exploiting their customers.

What would a good long-term solution look like?

We can look at history. In 1982, the eight-year antitrust suit against AT&T was ended by the breakup of AT&T into multiple entities, seven of which had a regional infrastructure and one of which held on to long-distance, research, and computer hardware and services. In addition, the de facto monopoly was broken by requiring transport service to be available at a wholesale rate to any qualified party …

If you have a Mac and DNS resolution seems really, really slow — like, five seconds or more per lookup — check to see if you have an IPv6 address. You probably do.

Then check to see if you have an IPv6 DNS server listed. I bet you don’t, or it’s wrong.

Solution: add an IPv6 DNS server to your list.

• Google DNS IPv6: 2001:4860:4860::8888 and 8844

• OpenDNS IPv6: 2620:0:ccc::2 and ccd::2

For any given technology, there will exist at least one point in time in which people are simultaneously not trusting it for being too new and unproven, and other people are depending on it in production.

( – me )

Every decision involves a cost/benefit analysis. Sometimes they are formal; often they are drastically informally. Either way, people inevitable leave out costs and benefits that they are not aware of, have forgotten, or are otherwise invisible.

The resiliency of a system is proven by its behavior in an emergency.

The design of a system is proven by its daily usability.