Got a question from a friend:

"My husband, Joe, just purchased a brand new computer a few days ago from our computer guy. Joe left the computer on overnight, as he was transferring data from the old computer to this new one. This morning, the NEW computer wouldn't boot up. Apparantly, an overnight storm fried the motherboard--even though the computer was plugged into a surge protector.

Ugh! Luckily, our computer guy is handling the issue without charging us.

However, this is what I found really interesting. Our computer guy told us that EVEN if we have the computer plugged into a surge protector AND EVEN if we have the computer turned off, as long as the surge protector (or Internet connection for that matter) is plugged into the wall, there's a chance the motherboard can still get fried, rendering it useless.

To confirm this, I searched the Internet and found an entry on a Computer Technician's (Ed Martech) Blog that read..."

When you leave the house for any length of time and there is a chance that a thunderstorm will arrive near your building, you must shut down your computer and any electronic devices, if you want them to survive the storm. And, to absolutely play it safe, even if your devices are plugged into a surge protector and they are shut off, unplug the surge protector from the wall socket and the connection from the phoneline if your computer is connected to the internet.

That little act will save you from tons of costly grief! During thunderstorm season in the spring and summer, I shut off and unplug every computer that we have running at the office, as well as any other important electronic item that I don't want damaged.

Marketing (spin doctors) needs to be responsible for what gets done by government - just like Marketing needs to be responsible for what gets made.

With apologies to the original article referenced above...

30 years ago, Hosni Mubarak took power in 1981 and ruled until 2011, when the power of the masses forceably removed him. He used the power of mass media; complete control over any/all aspects of the public's perception of what was going on in Egypt under Mubarak's rule. The print, audio, video "record" showed Mubarak was benevolent and great. It must have been so - the media said so.

Today, we know that things were not as rosy as they were reported. Today, Mubarak has (as of May 24, 2011) been ordered to stand trial on charges of premeditated murder (of peaceful protesters during the "Arab Spring" uprising) and that is likely just the beginning.

Our Canadian government has been muzzling our fisheries scientists (at least) and should heed the lessons Mubarak is learning... 

Copy of the email I just sent to my MP, Randy Kamp

Dear Randy

I am troubled by this and expect you to stand up for your constituents in the face of what, in the absence of real information, can only be taken as a cover-up of government/bureaucratic malfeasance. 

Vancouver Sun Newspaper: Feds silence scientist over salmon study

As a member of the Canadian public in general and the scientific and conservation community in particular I cannot adequately express my disgust at the government interference in the discussion of public-funded information resources such as that created by Margaret Munro. This is not the first time this has happened, and I have personally spoken to some of those affected by such interference.

While the government of Canada continues to fund excursions to remove repressive regimes such as Afghanistan on the one hand, on the other hand it continues to create exactly such a regime here in Canada (the lawful access proposed legislation being another such example, but that's for another day)

The ongoing repression of our science community's ability to "tell it like it is" about what is going on with our resources and world hampers the electorate's ability to judge for itself if our government is doing what we want it to do. In the absence of good data we can only assume the worst; that government is actively screwing things up and repressing the data to hide this fact.

Please understand - the world has changed. Repression is met with subversion of the repressor. The "Arab Spring" movement should give all governments pause to think; your actions will be found out and broadcast to the world and you will be dropped from power. The only way to deal with today's open communications world is to be open and up front from the start.

WikiLeaks and other whistle-blower encouragement systems will find the truth eventually - and sooner rather than later judging by recent activities in that sphere.

Please encourage your leadership to adopt a completely open and above-board governance from top to bottom of the bureaucracy, including all government boards, offices and politicians, because failing to do that now will lead to embarrassment in the future without any doubt.

richard

Back in May of 2010 I posted an article about the fact that New York state (and potentially many others) were looking for ways to tax individuals at the state level even if they were only working remotely via the internet to computers in companies that had offices in the state.

Since my good friend and cross-border tax guru, David Ingram, passed away in February, I'll take on the task of keeping you up to date on this increasing trend. 

Last year I moved my own hosted accounts off a server in New York because of David's advice that this trend was increasing. In light of this, it is refreshing to note that Texas has just cleared up at least that part (remote businesses treated as if they had a business presence, just because their web site was hosted in a state) of the muddy waters surrounding taxation at the state level.

You see, the states (and for that matter all levels of government the world over it seems) are so short of funds that they are looking at any and all reasons that somebody should be taxed in their jurisdiction - and sending out tax assessments that, even if later found invalid, can cause all manner of extra costs to those involved.

I've been using and recommending PuTTY as an option to allow access via SSH to the command line of the various Linux systems that my customers use - mostly for access to minor system administration functions that don't require a full GUI interface, but in at least one instance it is to run some legacy text applications.

In all cases, this unique facility has been working fine, so "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" works just fine for me and them.

Now we have a new version - and I'll report on how it differs in look (so far not much) and function (web says some new features, bug fixes and compatibility for Win7 and various SSH server software)

The web site is http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/ and click on the "Download" link to get the package. I use the full package executable to do installs, and simply installed it over top of the previous version with no problems.

I've known Gary Bannerman for well in excess of 20 years. Over this time I've grown to know only a small part of this great man; a man only a couple of years older than I am, yet worlds more wise and accomplished.

Gary died today. I'll miss him - and I expect there are a great many others who will miss him too. He left his imprint here in Vancouver, his second home, in so many ways through his news reporting and digging and editorializing.

I used to listen to him long before I met him, and wondered at his ability to dig out what I perceived as truth. 

Take the fact that today our internet systems are largely "always on" and couple that with both the high speed of the net in general and the huge computing and storage ability of our computers, and contrast that with the technology in the era that the Domain Name System (DNS) grew up in; one of connect on demand, slow network and scarce/expensive local processing and storage and you come up with my premise that DNS has outlived its usefulness. Is there an alternative to the system that is a money-tree for ICANN and a lever against perceived badness by the US (at least) government (in siezing domain names) and a perceive threat to national sovereignty by most of the other countries of the world?

Maybe - in fact probably.

According to an item I read yesterday that was talking about ICANN's opening up the Top Level Domain (TLD) system to anything someone wants to pay huge amounts of money for, most people use a search engine to find a company's domain rather than trying the "obvious" domain names in hopes that they'll hit the right one. They no longer play the guessing game, they search instead. The point the article made is that all that this expansion of the TLD system does is put money into ICANN's pockets - it really does nothing to help you or me find the company, and does "tax" companies by making them protect their brands at huge expense; The CocaCola  Company would have to register for the TLD "coke" to keep the Mafia or some other criminal drug cartel from registering it and using it to market the drug (trite example but you get the picture).

The other problem of course is that the net is now so ubitquitous and has been around long enough that DNS suffers from a couple of major pollutants that affect such "intuitive" stabs-in-the-dark:

• many companies, from different parts of the world, have the same or similar names - and all have tried to get into the Dot-COM root domain for historic reasons.
• purveyors of general nastyness love to register "near miss" domain names - mis-spellings, hyphenated, etc. - and load them with spam or malware or plain misinformation

The interesting thing is that, somehow, the search engines generally get us to the point where the company or product we seek is in the first page of (and most times the top line of) options they give us, no matter what the domain name really is. They do this using several techniques that they're constantly tuning:

• geographic profiling - both of you and of the various companies that might share similar names - so you'll find the "Joe's Cleaning" from your town and I'll find the one in mine.
• popularity and feedback profiling - sites that are the "correct one" where only one such site should exist (international brands such as Ford, Coke, etc.) get in-bound links from legitimate sites that are long-lasting and from otherwise generally well accepted sites - and people who click on the sites' links don't go back and search again.

So I asked myself, "why do we need the Domain Name System in general, and ICANN, the guardian of DNS top level domains, in particular?"

Is there some other way to do this that works as well or better, and does not subject us to the US FBI seizures and excess (IMHO) fees and charges of ICANN in particular and the Domain Registrars in general?

Just remember, DNS is simply a crutch to the human mind that does not deal well with simply remembering numbers. At heart, it simply translates the human readable (and rememberable) string to a set of unique numbers that describes a host to the technology you're using; www.digital-rag.com becomes 198.162.16.6

OK - I was doing some last-minute tax preparation yesterday and the fact is, time was of the essence. So I got just a bit upset when my bank's web site made me click through the same silly notice that I "need the latest version of Adobe Reader to read this file" for every single one of the statements I wanted to print - and I sent them a snarky e-mail because of it.

The point is, I run Linux - and my system already has a PDF page viewer and print facility - in fact it has serveral (Evince, Xpdf, Google Chrome) as well as the "real" Adobe reader.

Even if I didn't run Linux, the fact is, one such notice for the whole session (or better yet, forever) would have been just fine thankyou. Popping it up every single document was not.

They're not the first to push proprietary stuff at me; probably won't be the last either - but hey, at least the PDF format itself is now openly published (by Adobe) - it's a step in the right direction, but it has been a long road to this point and doesn't look to be getting too much shorter...