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Woot?

Spammers begone! I'm quite pleased - It doesn't solve the problem of the infected computers that comprise the botnets controlled by the folks hosted at McColo (so they could just start up again at another ISP), but at least it quiets the spam wars down for a few weeks. I'll take good news wherever I can get it :) Now, all of you motherfuckers with unpatched virus laden computers listen up: You're just as bad... no, you're WORSE than the McColo's of the world -- Clean your shit up so they can't keep using your machines for cannon fodder. Anyone with half a brain knows that this is just a blip and they'll be moving their machines to a new home (probably offshore with more unscrupulous upstream providers - the kind that don't care enough to cut off spammers and child pornographers but are too big for our Tier 1s to just kick off the internet), so take this reprieve for what it is and patch the holes in your roof! KTHXBAI.

ICANN't believe it...

ICANN has officially lost their limited minds. Open Top-Level Domain registration. It's usenet all over again. Someone please stop teh intertubes, I wanna get off.... This has been a public service crying by a crusty old fart who remember when 14.4kbps modems were blazingly fast, CompuServe didn't suck (sucked less than AOSchnell!), and you had to manually start up PPP on your shell account if you wanted that fancy crap, otherwise you could use Lynx and Pine and be DAMN FUCKING GREATFUL FOR THE OPPORTUNITY! These kids today with their high speed multimeg pipes to the home... when I was your age we shared one T1 line for an entire class C of dial-up users! What? What do you mean "What's a 'class C'?" DAMNIT! DIE! (:-P)

Dropping ACID(3)

So... uhh...yeah... w00t and such. The WebKit engine (the thing that powers Safari) has passed ACID 1, ACID 2 and ACID 3 tests* - They are the first team to release a publicly available engine that does so. Now of course the real question -- When will Apple release a new Safari based on the new WebKit? I want to see Safari 3.5 (or 4.0) within the next 3-4 months with a full ACID 3 (rendering) pass (and possibly a mobile version on the iPhone? That doesn't do very well currently). There is a lot of prestige and clout to be claimed by having the first officially released browser to pass all 3 ACID tests - It may even help make Safari the "Gold Standard" for web development, something that may help further drive Mac platform adoption. (Author's Note -- I'm still pissed about Safari 3.1, which broke ACID 2 compliance. I refuse to install that browser as it represents a significant regression from previous Safari releases - Safari holding the title of first browser to pass ACID 2. Get it together Apple QA!) Continue reading "Dropping ACID(3)"

Lions, Tigers and The Big Bad Internets

Read: http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/02/22/1615212 Discuss below the jump, but first some background" -- My friends and I grew up way back in the early pre-paranoia days. For me, I had a string of "computers" (Atari, Commodore and their ilk with acoustic-coupler modems and BBS services), got my first real PC at around 7 or 8 (idunno, it was for-fucking-ever ago - I still have the motherboard though - a 286 with a blazing 12MHz clock and a modem that actually plugged into the wall! OH HAPPY DAY!), I was running Unix in 4th or 5th grade and writing reports in TeX markup. In Jr. High I traded in my BBS accounts for ISDN and a shell account on a box that would let me run PPP, and the bandwidth has been growing ever since. For my friends - well, were all ahead of the curve. I used to chat with propeller-headed nerds, including two guys who founded a local ISP (Lightning Internet - www.lightning.net - Hurricane Electric bought them), some of the first botnet masters from back when compromised hosts would join an IRC channel for orders, and their ilk. My former business partner Joe Po and I started up a shell account provider back when shell accounts were something people paid good money for, and he and Ross were among the first (if not THE first) people in our area on the Optimum Online cablemodem network back when the modems were fugly blue things with heat sinks on 'em and "optonline.net" was still "nassau.cv.net". We've lived through large-scale internet renumberings, we remember the coming of CIDR ('least I do), and we've witnessed or participated in our fair share of history. All this is by way of saying that my parents (& probably theirs) wouldn't be able to figure out what the hell was going on on my computers if they had a map and a seeing eye dog. And even if they knew what to look for they probably couldn't bypass the system security with anything short of a hammer and a magnet. I have a younger brother (10 years younger than me). He has grown up his whole life around computers. He has never known a world without CIDR (he's technically disinclined, so to him CIDR is something that has an E in it and gets made from apples), he has always had antivirus software on his PC (which has always had a GUI made by Microsoft), and perhaps most importantly he "just doesn't get it" (i.e. "You mean the sexy female elf on WoW is a GUY??? EWW!!!") Background over! Continue reading "Lions, Tigers and The Big Bad Internets"