At a Loss for Words - fascinating. Microsoft just removes support for old file formats from Office 2003 - with a service pack. Great idea. Have fun those who have archived their documents in Word or Excel format ... there are hardly better reasons to switch to open programs like OpenOffice, or?
Archive 7. January 2008
Backscatterer.org, another antisocial and technically stupid blocklist - idiots at work. Once again, an antisocial and stupid wannabe expert tries to redefine the Internet according to his opinion. This time it's against sender callouts - a technique that helps quite well against spam because addresses can be checked for validity with it. And all with minimal effort for the mail servers - a small sequence of HELO, MAIL FROM and RCPT TO (which would come later in any case with every bounce) and then directly a QUIT - so no mail in the queue, but only a check based on SMTP. The argument that he has to deal with the verifiers in addition to the bounces is nonsense - because if the verify does not come, the bounces come from these failed mails, because not only the senders are in a much larger part garbage, also the recipients (of the mail traffic that we push, only the smallest part is actually valid in terms of emails). Turning off the verification only leads to a greater occurrence of bounces - and they are expensive, because they go into the mail queue, while the verifies do not go there. The argument about loops is also stupid - correct callbacks happen with an empty envelope-from, so the other server knows immediately that it does not need to perform verification (in principle, a bounce delivery is simulated, and loops are also prevented by the empty envelope-from). The purpose of the verification is to answer the question of whether you could send a bounce to the technical sender in case of doubt. If you can't do that, you can't accept a mail if you can't directly guarantee to check all the factors up front. This is a completely legitimate procedure and absolutely conformant with the RFCs. The operators of this list are only surpassed in stupidity by the mail administrators who enter such a list into their server as a blocklist. How stupid do you have to be for that? I know how stupid, because since today I know the first server that does this ...
base2 - a library that smooths out JavaScript differences between browsers.
Dean Edwards: IE7.js version 2.0 (beta) - new version of the brilliant JavaScript library that turns IE into a somewhat compliant browser.
Child pornography: Companies to evaluate hard drives - "In their investigations against child pornography in connection with the nationwide operation 'Heaven,' the Berlin police want to use internet specialists from external companies." - as if it were such a good idea to hand over private data (and every hard drive contains such data) to companies instead of having it examined by officials. What nonsense is this? Of course, the volume of data may overwhelm the officials - but one could have realized that beforehand. Now, however, to ultimately devalue all potential evidence by handing it over to entities outside the investigating authorities is quite a strange action.
Mars collision becomes more likely - just make sure it doesn't fall on top of Spirit or Opportunity!