VZ Port 587: Good Try

Back in February, Verizon announced it would start requiring outbound mail go through port 587 instead of port 25 during the next few months. It seemed like a good idea to squelch spam. Most other major ISPs did it. People applauded Verizon for doing it.

Unfortunately, it seems that if it had any effect it was short-lived. Looking at anti-spam blocklists on a daily basis, a couple of Verizon Autonomous Systems (ASes), AS-19262 and AS-701, do show dips in blocklist listings on the blocklist PSBL in March. But they don’t last.

Spammers are very adaptable, partly because the botnets they use are adaptable. Good try, Verizon.

This information is from an NSF-funded academic research project at the University of Texas at Austin business school. Thanks to PSBL for the blocklist data.

-jsq

Tomato monoculture

P7238909 You Say Tomato, I Say Agricultural Disaster,, By DAN BARBER, New York Times, Published: August 8, 2009:
For years, this kind of breeding has fallen by the wayside — the result of a food movement wary of science and an industrialized food chain that eschews differentiation in favor of uniformity. (Why develop and sell 20 different tomato varieties for 20 different microclimates when you can simply sell one?)
Does it seem that agricultural monocultures are almost always produced by economic greed?

-jsq

Design in Security; Don’t Wait to Defend

56+Northern+States+Barn+doors.JPG Gunnar recommends building in security instead of waiting to catch the horses after they’re out of the barn:
The way out of this is for security to get involved in building better systems, getting involved in the system development, Identity management, and coding. Come to the table with useful tools such as Threat Models and Misuse Cases, and make sure you are there early enough to have an impact. Three places to focus are application development, databases, and identity. Time for security to live in code and config not in Visio drawings.
As Gandhi supposedly said about western civilization: “That would be a good idea!”

Iranian Internet Disturbances

iran20090615.gif Here’s an example of some Internet routing in Iran, in this case on the way to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs on Monday 15 June 2009. Normally, routing and latency don’t change much. Starting Saturday 13 June, the day after the election, routing and latency have become increasingly disturbed. More here.

Twitter Reschedules

whereistheirvote.jpg Twitter recognizes that a network upgrade is important, but the role twitter is playing in Iran is more important, and reschedules for 1:30 AM Iranian time. Now that’s risk management!

Would that U.S. states had all rescheduled Diebold and the like to the junk heap after the 2000 U.S. election.

Also notice who twitter’s hosting service is: NTT America. I’ve been predicting for years that the U.S. duopoly’s intransigence would lead to NTT and other competent international ISPs eating their lunch, and I see it’s beginning to happen.

-jsq

Windows Considered Not Ready for the Desktop

R. McDougall takes the high ground for open software:
0. Premise: free and open software will stay indefinitely. Full stop. You may argue eternally, but free software is the ultimate disruptive technology, moving up from the low ground, replacing complicated and ill-fitting proprietary alternatives at every turn, such as web-browsers, e-mail clients, video players, office software, etc., which at one point cost money, but now most people find that they can no longer justify spending money to buy an upgrade for more “Clippy the Happy Assistant”. Proprietary software will only be able to stay relevant by searching out ever more niche applications, or by massive expenditure on research in high-end applications for which it will take time for the ideas and algorithms to filter down to the greater community, and thus a brief window of profitability will remain. Software patents are nothing but a destructive force to retard innovation, and with more and more of the technology and legal communities realizing this basic fact, software patents are about to go away forever.
I think he’s being a bit optimistic about software patents, but no more so than Windows advocates claiming that open software is a flash in the pan. Then he gets into the undeniable stuff, chief of which is:
1.1 History’s greatest playground for malicious software. With unpatched machines on the internet taking only minutes to become infested with viruses, or become a slave bot for massive illegal spamming operations, Windows is a blight on the Internet’s infrastructure.
And it keeps getting better. He says he wrote it just as a game, but it pretty much spells out why I don’t use Windows, plus why Windows is a menace to the Internet.

Pirate Party Legitimized by Winning EU Parliament Seat

Support for Prohibition began to diminish as enforcement became increasingly expensive and it was becoming apparent that the ban was doing little to curb crime and drunkenness. There’s lots of academic and commercial effort put into stopping software and other intellectual property piracy, especially for videos. A form of risk management, I suppose, but one that ignores the much bigger risk to traditional intellectual property of causing political blowback such as what just happened in Sweden:
“Together, we have today changed the landscape of European politics. No matter how this night ends, we have changed it,” Falkvinge said. “This feels wonderful. The citizens have understood it’s time to make a difference. The older politicians have taken apart young peoples’ lifestyle, bit by bit. We do not accept that the authorities’ mass-surveillance,” he added.
Funny thing about what happens when the majority of the population participates in an illegal activity: eventually it’s not illegal anymore.
At least partially, The Pirate Party puts its increased popularity down to harsh copyright laws and the recent conviction of the people behind The Pirate Bay. After the Pirate Bay verdict, Pirate Party membership more than tripled and they now have over 48,000 registered members, more than the total number of votes they received in 2006.

With their presence in Brussels, the Pirate Party hopes to reduce the abuses of power and copyright at the hands of the entertainment industries, and make those activities illegal instead. On the other hand they hope to legalize file-sharing for personal use.

Many of those abuses of power probably already are illegal; the appropriate laws just aren’t being enforced. We saw this during alcohol prohibition in the U.S., and we see it now with marijuana prohibition in the U.S. The first prohibition ended, the second probably will, and meanwhile, online “piracy” is on its way to being redefined.

-jsq

Van Meter on Barabasi and Doyle on Internet topology and risks

rdv-hakama-0609.jpg Rodney Van Meter, co-teaching a class by Jun Murai, posts notes on why Albert-László Barabási (ALB) is both right and wrong about the Internet (it is more or less a scale-free network when considered as a network of Autonomous Systems (AS), but contrary to ALB's assumption John Doyle and others have pointed out that the bigger nodes are not central, an AS as a node would be somewhat difficult to take out all at once, there are both higher and lower layer topologies that make the Internet more robust, and the Internet's biggest problem isn't topology at all:

The most serious risks to the Internet are not to individual "nodes" (ASes), but rather stem from the near-monocropping of Internet infrastructure and end nodes, and the vulnerability of the system to human error (and political/economic considerations):

Monoculture, who would have thought it?

For that matter, the Internet's ability to reroute has been very useful to ameliorate topological link breaks at the physical layer, for example undersea cables in the Mediterranean Sea twice last year.

Cultural Risk

Arkush.jpg Or risk as culture. Malcolm Gladwell writes in his book, Outliers:
The historian David Arkush once compared Russian and Chinese peasant proverbs, and the differences are striking. “If God does not bring it, the earth will not give it” is a typical Russian proverb. That’s the kind of fatalism and pessimism typical of a repressive feudal system, where peasants have no reason to believe in the efficacy of their own work. On the other hand, Arkush writes, Chinese proverbs are striking in their belief that “hard work, shrewd planning and self-reliance or cooperation with a small group will in time bring recompense.”

Here are some of the things that penniless peasants would say to one another as they worked three thousand hours a year in the baking heat and humidity of the Chinese rice paddies (which, by the way, are filled with leeches):

“No food without blood and sweat.”

“Farmers are busy; farmers are busy; if farmers weren’t busy, where would grain to get through the winter come from?”

“In winter, the lazy man freezes to death.”

“Don’t depend on heaven for food, but on your own two hands for carrying the load.”

“Useless to ask about the crops, it all depends on hard work and fertlizer.”

“If a man works hard, the land will not be lazy.”

And, most telling of all, “No one who can rise before dawn three hundred sixty days a year fails to make his family rich.”
As Gladwell points out, this is a bit of a different attitude to those of the nut-gathering !Kung or the medieval French peasant. Or, for that matter to the 40-hour-week office dweller. Any of them would consider working 360 days a year, which at even 8 hours a day is 2880 hours a year, to be hazardous to their health. But if you’re hand cultivating rice paddies, with your family, it’s a bigger risk not to work that hard.