Posts by Number6 2293 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Jun 2009
It wouldn't be so bad if the DoNotReply at least had a bounce filter on it so it would flag rejected mail as such, either for automatic removal or flagging for a human to check after enough bounces. I also wish spammers were smart enough to take out the email addresses that bounced rather than accepted and quietly dropped.
So what happens when someone with a long-established email address keyed to their country wants to move to a different country? Do they have to give up the old one and get a new one?
I admit to getting a .org over 20 years ago, and have moved country since getting it, so I guess that paid off. I figured out even back then that a demon.co.uk address wasn't readily portable and might not last.
Early on in all the fun and games I had occasion to call Comcast tech support. While we were waiting for the set top box to reboot for the nth time, idle conversation revealed that all their tech support people were working from home as much as possible, presumably if they all had Comcast lines themselves then the company was presumably able to plumb in the corporate phone system out to individuals and let them sit at computers at home and talk to customers. So tech support, especially at this point, should be relatively easy for most companies if only they made an effort.
I wonder what happens if they pick the wrong person? I know other people with the same name as me, so if one of them defaults on a debt, am I going to get bugged by debt collectors because it's easy for them to do on social media?At least if they're required to keep it private it saves them from defamation lawsuits from those they've wrongly accused.
It's sort of sad that it's gone. I wasn't one of the originals but based on my IP address I was somewhere around customer 700-800. Stayed with them a long time and finally jumped ship because I wanted to play IPv6 and they didn't support it. I did see the possibility of losing the email domain well before that though, my personal domain dates back twenty years.
I see that the MX record now points to disabled.demon.co.uk, which doesn't resolve, so presumably mail eventually gets returned to sender as undeliverable.
I think the "relay not permitted" usually comes as a response to "RCPT TO:" because it figures out that it can't cope with that recipient. However, there's nothing to stop someone accepting the whole message and then issuing that response. My local spam filtering will accept the entire message and scan it before issuing a bounce (albeit not with that message, but it would be trivial for me to make it so) if it doesn't like the content. And yes, I do keep copies, helps with the occasional false positive.
Last time I had to fill in US entry paperwork (many years ago now), I recollect them specifying DD/MM/YYYY for the dates. I assume they did it that way because so many people visitng write it like that without reading the form more closely and it made their life easier when processing.
Why am I not in the least surprised by this? Still not got one of those spy devices in the house. I bought a dumb TV (which is getting surprisingly hard to do now if you want a large screen size), although the cable box probably manages some of that on its own. The voice remote sits unused and unpowered on the shelf in favour of the old button-press one that came with the old cable box and works just as well with the new box.
Not yet paranoid enough to remove the microphone from the smartphone, although I did tick some option to tell it not to allow Google Play to access the microphone (about which it complains regularly, threatening loss of functionality even though I've not noticed anything I want failing to work).
I manage with a cup every couple of hours, but then my tea mug holds a pint. I drink it black, and relatively weak, the trick being to get the good flavour before the bitter tannins make an appearance. When it's hot I usually drink water, so my options are cold water or hot, slightly-flavoured water.
I have been known to drink coffee but I save that for emergencies and I think it smells way better than it tastes.
I was a Demon customer for many years, not in the first batch but signed up in the first year. My local exchange back then didn't even support DTMF so dialling in was slow. My old 158.152 address still resolves but to a different hostname now.
As for email, I saw the light on that one back in 2000 when I registered the domain I still use today, which is based on my Demon hostname. I eventually jumped to AAISP because Demon weren't rolling out IPv6 and I wanted to go play with it.
I still ping gate.demon.co.uk as a connectivity test even now, I guess I'll have to stop that.
I think "easily" in this context is like carrying an ice cream in a cone intact through the Sahara Desert - if you've been allocated a /24 and are using 150 of them, not necessarily consecutively, then it becomes problematic to reallocate things to free up some of them, and it's going to fragment route tables unless the excess is given to someone else at the same ISP . Even behind a NAT, I find it convenient to allocate users from one end and servers from the other.
I use TB because it is cross-platform so I can run the same thing regardless of OS. I mostly run Linux machines so any MS-only solution is out. I did try Evolution on Linux for a while, and have played with KMail too, but ended up back with Thunderbird. Mind you, I also run my own IMAP server for home email, so I do have control over both ends of the service.
What we need is a proxy server type of thing that doesn't block things as such, it'll go fetch them, with a bit of randomisation in the cookie data it sends back, does all the processing required and serves a sanitised script-less page to the user. So the ads get requested but the user is never bothered by them. No doubt some helpful person will come along and point me at a project that's been doing this for some years.
As I've said before, anyone who wants to run ads brokered from one of the big (or not so big) sites is out of luck. They're not going to indemnify me if, due to malware on the big site (which does happen), my PC is compromised, so I choose to go elsewhere rather than access their site if they want me to allow that code to run. Now if they ran the ads in-house, even if they hauled the static images from a broker, with all the stuff done server-side instead of using javascript on my machine, it would be easy to produce something that would get those images past an ad blocker unless the user chose to disable all images. Of course, it would require a lot more CPU cycles on their servers, but rather there than on my machine slowing down my browser.
I have two basic precautions, one is to be very careful where internet-facing cameras are positioned (all mine are outdoors covering entrances) in case there's a breach and the other is to firewall the cameras from the outside world anyway, because they're set up on the internal network and something else has the responsibility of storing and preserving the generated images and videos. They do email me images when tripped, but that comes via another internal machine.
When it comes to Y2K, I remember being asked if my Rugby MSF clock code was Y2K compliant. Given that MSF slow code doesn't transmit century digits, I said yes, but if it happened to be running in 2100 and wasn't receiving MSF at the time, it would wrongly tick over to 29th Feb and that they could call me nearer the date if it was a problem to them.
Fortunately, it appears that a lot of places that want a paper bill seem to accept one I've downloaded and printed myself. Even when someone wanted a notarised copy of a bill, I just took two copies to the notary, got him to agree they were the same and stamp one appropriately, then sent that off and it was accepted.
Most on-line billing systems seem to let you download PDF copies of the bill.
Usually it's a case of "we might trust the current government but how can we be sure of future governments?" We appear to have skipped the first step this time around, which is worrying.
There are really good reasons why governments with any sense will refuse to even consider certain actions.
Surely the quick fix for this is for WhatsApp, Telegram et al to include in their Ts and Cs that use of the software is not allowed in Germany but make no effort to do any sort of GeoIP checking. If they're going to offer 'proper' software for use in the free world and an emasculated version for places that want a backdoor, then anyone with any savvy is going to install the proper one regardless. No one reads the Ts and Cs anyway,so things will continue as normal until the state jumps on someone and there's a big court case, at which point the people either say STOP! or bend over.
I mix and match between Chrome and Firefox already, and I can see dropping Chrome completely if the adblocker stops working. I occasionally get to see pages bristling with ads and it reminds me why I don't want that to be my regular browsing experience. Plus there's the security issue too, with the occasionally dodgy scripts that plant malware. I've said it before, the ad industry needs to come up with a server-side model so that all that gets served is hosted on a single server rather than finding that a page is loading scripts from a couple of dozen different sites. If they did it that way, most ad blockers would be defeated but user security would be maintained.
The trouble is that .gb excludes Northern Ireland. Given the huge efforts currently being made not to exclude it in other ways, this is an important point. The full title is the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, so using .uk is reasonable. One could argue that ISO got it wrong, but it as probably discussed at great length and the UK probably agreed to it.
Larger drones in testing cannot cause an uncontained engine failure.
I think they'd prefer to avoid engine failures even if contained. Jet engines aren't cheap.
I suspect a toy drone wouldn't even be noticed as it got disintegrated by the engine though. They're designed to withstand hailstones, some of which may well be bigger and tougher than a flimsy bit of plastic and fibreglass.
Given that I'm not the one paying for it, the product isn't bad, better than Teams because it's truly cross-platform. As for the logo, I'll refer people to Dogbert's Brown Ring of Quality. https://dilbert.com/strip/1996-06-11
Wow, over 22 years ago.
I would add "any sort of ad that requires a script to run on my machine" as bad because it's a security hazard. On the other hand, it does make it easy to clobber ads by blocking scripts from known ad sites.
If they want to run a script-based system then they can do it server-side. There's also the point that such ads would be way harder to block if done carefully.
Yes, a remote reboot assumes that there's nothing wrong with the hardware that might prevent a reboot. For a simple router box that was reasonable, the only hardware concerned was required to be working to be able to talk to it in the first place. I guess if the system disk was well and truly fscked then it might decide it couldn't find critical files after reboot though, having trampled through the inodes with the CPU equivalent of hobnail boots.
Fortunately I learned the lesson of not messing with remote routers and firewalls by screwing up my home one from the outside. That was at least fixable by a phone call to my wife to tell her to power it off and on again. I hit the enter key, everything stopped and I immediately saw what I'd done. Oops.
Now I know to (1) never do that and (2) if it really must be done, schedule a reboot for five minutes' time before entering the command, on the basis that if I can still talk to the router I can cancel the reboot, and if I can't talk to it, hopefully it'll be back in five minutes.
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