A good friend of mine and long-time customer, business partner, co-host and all-round great guy runs an e-mail list through my facilities. To this list (of about 10,000 addresses), he sends the results of his answers to people about their tax questions.

David Ingram (the Taxman) has two criteria for the list: you either opt in by signing up manually (and double opt-in by acknowledging the email sent to you), or, as a "cost" of him answering your question (he charges $450/hour to answer by phone or in person), you are put on the list which is where your question's answer is posted - that's the only way you'll see the answer unless he also posts it on his web site, which typically happens much later.

This means it is not really a "double opt-in" list, but it certainly is an opt-in list since every one of the pages that tell people how to send him questions says this is how the answers get back to them.

I don't have a problem with this.

What I (and he) have a problem with is people getting their answers - then rather than using the very obvious and quite effective "unsubscribe" option on each and every email, they push the "spam" button on their ISP's email system and report the list as spam.

Today my friend blacklisted AOL and all the subscribers he has on that system. This means that if you have a tax question you'd better be prepared to provide an email address that is anything but AOL. Other systems may follow - but for now AOL is the only one that has truly been a problem. His list is on their white list and I get feedback each and every time - and he manually unsubscribes the address each and every time - and some of them even "spam-button" the notice of unsubscribe!!!!

Now I've been at this for a LONG time - ever since AOL (and Compuserve and other "BBSs") first connected to the internet and allowed email transfer to/from it. Considering the number of "spam" AOL "install" CDs I've received - none of which were ever solicited - their making the reporting of spam so easy is just a bit hypocritical IMHO.

Anyway - AOL users - you get what you pay for - a "walled garden" - too bad the weeds are so high you can't see what lies outside and actually interact with it reasonably.

Consider this one of the first shots across the bow of email patrons who push the "spam-button" too quickly. I predict that soon you won't be able to get any information such as this - from anyone! Maybe I'll put together the infrastructure to allow email list services to know who has a good/bad recipient reputation. Might be interesting. 

If the pilot has the steak, the co-pilot has the chicken.

You see that way, if there is a problem with one or the other of the meals offered on the plane and one gets sick, the other will be able to fly the plane home.

Last week we saw many companies lose all of their desktop (and in some cases server) computing capacity - stores with their cash registers down (why are they connected to the internet and in need of anti-virus? Different problem) and others lost all their office systems because the company has a corporate license for one anti-virus (McAfee in this case) and that one had a problem. It's not the first time - won't be the last, but it was one of the most devastating.

It's bad enough that they all run Windows - there has to be someone who thinks that having all your eggs in one basket is a bad thing - but having something with life and death control over the running of a computer that auto-updates every day and is enabled on every desktop in a corporation is just plain silly.

Far be it from me to suggest that this is a bad idea.

It turns out that all the problems I've had with my computer system these past couple of months, other than the failed hard drive, have been because of a bad memory card.

My workstation is pretty big - in both physical and computer sense. I have 3 monitor cards, currently with 4 monitors spread in front of me. The system is a AMD quad-core processor with 8 Gigabytes of RAM and 3 Terabytes of disk configured so I see 2 Terabytes, the rest being mirrors/spares

Most of the time my machine has lots of spare RAM - my system meter shows it is using about 1.8 Gigs at the moment, and it typically is something less than 6 Gigs used for programs - the rest the system uses to help make the disk faster.

I thought I had some problems with some new software I'm running - a "latest and greatest" version of Linux with some speed-up items in it. I was dreading having to downgrade the system back to an older version.

The problems have been things like the browsers failing and closing - or difficulty with my email. Nothing that did any direct damage, at least until yesterday. Yesterday I pulled about 300 images off my camera and set my system to creating thumbnails of them - and noticed 3 images that were badly mauled in the process. This just could not be the operating system - so I booted up the system with a memory tester and low and behold - it failed!!!.

I traced the problem to one of the four modules - and had to downgrade to only 4 Gigs of RAM. I purchased a replacement set and here we are, back up and running and stable again. Whooopppppeeeeee!!!!

Social sites are "THE" thing these days - and peer review of the content of the user-generated sites is the only way they can function. The problem is, peer review can be abused and/or abusive, but you have to take the bad with the good and just keep on keeping on...

A good friend of mine posted a very innocuous post about her dog on the dog's web site the other day. The site has a twitterfeed setup and the posting was noted to both Facebook and Twitter by this automatic feed. I use this facility myself and in fact suggested to my friend that this was a good way of ensuring people know about new posts.

To her horror, the Facebook post got removed because it got flagged as "abusive" by someone. Nothing she has done can find out what made this post "abusive" and that's just the way it is - someone, on her friend list probably but could have been anyone, either really didn't think the post was OK or hit the button by mistake. That's it, game over.

My friend removed the original post to the blog and the twitter notice and sent me a worried note asking my advice. Well, since I love such questions, here's the answer I gave her:

Put on a thick skin and just post something similar again (not the same) and see if it happens again.

And that's the point - you have to develop a bit of a thick skin in this social networked atmosphere. Some people may hit the wrong button. Some people may develop a grudge for reasons only they will ever know. Some people do some things just for kicks. Some people do things like this because they can - and it may eventually lead to all manner of abuse in the real world at some point.

And that's why you can't let one incident rule your life:

Accidents happen

Malice is its own reward and ignoring it is the best defense.

Repetition will eventually get the perpetrator caught - so let them repeat, then you have some reason to get the site owners involved and they have evidence to do something about it.

In fact, looking back on my advice I'd almost say "post the same thing again and see if the problem repeats" - especially if you are pretty sure you're not contravening any of the rules of the sites involved - and in this case I'm fairly sure that's the case.

Just my $0.02 

richard

How do you guard against someone smuggling a gun onto an aircraft? You run them through a device that shows everything down to their skin.

How do you guard against a company smuggling a security breach into your company through installing it when it is manufactured? That's the problem we're faced with. We've already been affected by digital picture frames that come with viruses pre-installed so what makes us think that we can escape other and better hidden programs being installed on hardware that is supplied to our governments and big business (and small business for that matter)?

There are stories of devices offered as gifts to businessmen at trade fairs being infected with backdoor and Trojan horse software - software that reports on what is in the computer these devices are plugged into by their unsuspecting recipients.

This is just another reason why I'm an Open Source software (and hardware) person as much as I can be. When I load something onto my computer I at least have a fighting chance at it being exactly what it purports to be because, although I personally may not have looked at that particular software, others like me have - and have not found anything wrong with it; anything hidden in it.

This is not to say that it is impossible to have something hidden so well that it just is never found - it's been done before, and by someone who was in a position of trust, Ken Thompson, one of the creators of the original Unix system.

What it really means is that you can't trust anything that you, yourself, didn't have a direct hand in creating from scratch, using only tools you crafted, from scratch. That's completely impossible today as it would put us back in the stone age as far as computers are concerned, however using and supporting the open source movement is at least one step up in the right direction since it harnesses the brains of an incredible number of brilliant and dedicated people who love taking things apart and figuring out how they work - or don't work in this case.

Try to get Microsoft to prove to you that there are no backdoors or other security holes in their products - you can't because Microsoft won't open up their code for you or anyone else to look at. Same thing with the Chinese and their hardware. The chips themselves can have security compromises in them that you can't find except by monitoring their actual performance.

We live in a world where we don't know who to trust or even whether we can trust our electronic toothbrush to not be a privacy invasive device.

hello paranoia - and reality

richard

Why I'll Likely Never Buy An iPad (or another iPhone)

Steve Jobs is to be commended for creating a business model that is making Apple investors ecstatic.

On the other hand there are some people, me included, who feel that Apple's hand-held products are just more of the same thing that Microsoft tried to foist off on us with Vista. The Apple products, through a more tightly focussed application niche, complete control over the hardware, and far better engineering have not had the negative press that Microsoft got for their buggy and slow Vista, but the there are far more similarities than differences.

I receive far more email than virtually anyone else I know. I receive it for two reasons - I have a lot of different addresses including several on most of my customers' domains such as postmaster and webmaster, and I don't filter as hard for spam as many ISPs now do.

This means I get to see examples of what others try to send that might be spam in the definition of being sent out unsolicited, but which is not nearly as "spammy" as the stuff that is unsolicited and sent in the millions by rogue robot-pcs. 

I get all manner of what are probably legitimate introductions to companies and products and people - yet I open virtually none of them - how do I determine which ones to open? How can you ensure that your lead-in email to someone, whether it is for something commercial or just to ask them a favour or for some information, gets seen and opened?

I have a wall full of books - mostly science fiction but lots of marketing and computer books as well. My wife and I have a lot more books and magazines scattered throughout the house - to the point where our sons are accusing us of being hoarders (the used and broken computers, tools, pieces of this and that and a LOT of cooking utensils are involved too - it's not just books.

All the talk about a new crop of E-readers at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) this week has me almost drooling, almost but not quite.

As many of my readers know, I keep in touch with various computer security lists and try to winnow out the really nasty ones that might affect even careful people.

It's not that I distinguish careful from not-so-careful people - just that everyone should be on the lookout for nasty things in general using their common sense - don't allow your email program to open attachments on its own or bring in web pages on its own - and don't open or retrieve stuff from anyone who you have not checked with some other way is actually sending you something.

It's kind of like the difference between the US/European way of "detecting" terrorists on our airplanes vs. the way that the Israelis do it:

The US/Europeans check every piece of luggage, scan all your shoes, and now want to scan your body with full body scanners - they look for everything everywhere. This wastes a lot of manpower and as we've seen this past Xmas, it is not all that effective - but it sure uses up a lot of manpower and you spend hours in the lines.

The Israelis check you 6 times from the time you get to the airport to the time you get on the plane - but each and every time they look in your eyes, because that is where they see whether you are truly just a passenger, or are someone trying to hide something. Their airport waiting time is less than 30-40 minutes. I know - I've been through it.

Read this article for more on the difference as far as the airlines is concerned

You need to "look in the eyes" of everything on the internet that has the potential to damage you and your computer - look at what it is that it is trying to do.

Read on for details of this nasty-gram