Posts by Rob Munn

free OS, peeps

Isn't this just more evidence that everyone needs to use an open source OS so they can upgrade at their leisure without getting hammered by license fees?

Land of the free, baby

A friend of mine from northern Michigan once quipped that they had a very low crime rate where he was from because everyone was armed to the teeth and everyone else knew it. You find the vast majority of violent crime committed in cities where guns are illegal, and mostly among gang bangers.

Curl = also-ran

It's big in Japan? Come on, you all can do better than that. Flex is the best RIA platform available.

wow we've never seen this before

Oh yeah, right, this is the same centralized computing outage problem we had back in the mainframe days, only extended worldwide.

The cloud is great - for cloud/service vendors and for very small companies that can't afford their own IT staff. For everyone else it is a boondoggle waiting to happen.

hosted email

I will be very surprised if public companies in the U.S. embrace Gmail for corporate email needs. The SOX requirements alone create a HUGE risk premium for anyone who decides to outsource the corporate email solution. Imagine the look on some CEO's face when his CIO tells him that the emails the FBI requested could not be retrieved because they have disappeared into the Googleplex. Will we see a CEO go to jail because of this kind of a situation?

No, I think it is far more likely that corporations will copy the Google cheap infrastructure model, hiring away Google engineers in the process, rather than allow Google to manage (read "control") their data. Why pay Google when you can take their talent and do it yourself?

blackhole servers

I think the poster who fingered the blackhole servers might be right on the money. I can't believe no one has covered this story yet. APEWS (www.apews.org) is one of those blacklists. Until very recently, APEWS was a private list that only invited email admins could use for their spam filters.

Within the last month, APEWS opened its list to any and all email admins. I believe this change has caused a huge problem for Internet email traffic. Specifically, APEWS have blacklisted entire segments of the Internet. The Class B address block for my home Internet connection (TimeWarner) is on the APEWS blacklist, as (apparently) are other large address blocks.

What is really interesting about the story is why APEWS is blacklisting entire address blocks. APEWS has a political agenda, and they are using the blacklist to further that political agenda. Specifically, they are trying to force users like me to switch ISPs or complain to their ISPs to put pressure on those ISPs to do a better job blocking spam that emanates from their networks. A laudable goal, to be sure, but their tactics strike me as unethical and potentially illegal- and they certainly represent a breach of trust of the blacklist system.

I would like to see a journalist find out who the original nine members of the APEWS organization are, what companies they work for, and whether the executives at those companies have any knowledge of the actions of their employees.

The APEWS domain was registered in Brazil, has its DNS servers in Germany, and is hosted in Canada. All public information, and maybe somewhere to start the investigation.

Cheers!