Year: 2008

Because the danger remains, we need to ensure our intelligence officials have all the tools they need to stop the terrorists.

The fact that we have not been attacked over the past six and a half years is not a matter of chance.

We have enough laws in this Country, that we have secured the highest level of Freedoms ever enjoyed in written history.

I disagree. I think we peaked at some earlier time (perhaps September 10, 2001, heh) and have been sliding downhill ever since. We have fewer freedoms today, March 7 2008, than we did a year ago. Do you disagree?

In the last five years I think our government has placed unprecedented restrictions on our rights… as have the governments of many other nations. Our world is becoming more of a surveillance society, aided in large part by advances in technology (video cameras, computer storage, massive data processing) but also by a growing fearmongering that the lawmakers use to justify their new restrictions. It’s all based on the mistaken assumption that increased surveillance leads to increased security.

You may contend that I, Jeff, personally enjoy a great deal of freedom. You would be right. Since I’m not on the TSA watchlist (yet) and haven’t attempted the crime of photographing a public building, I’m lucky enough to be able to sit here working and earning an honest wage rather than languishing in Gitmo or some other rendition-happy country. But that doesn’t change the fact that overall I am subject to more laws and restrictions than I was a year ago, and thus my freedoms are diminished.

I’m straying off topic, but I would say there are three categories of laws that curtail freedom:

1) Moral laws (no murder, no rape) which a reasonable human being would agree are necessary to protect the populace. It would be difficult to argue that these laws should be eliminated.

2) Compensatory laws (no stealing, no cheating) which make it possible for us to enjoy fair commerce with those around us. If we steal, we must pay back; if we cheat, we are thrown out of class (or whatever). Many of these laws are reasonable and necessary, although I feel that many more these days have gone too far into the realm of unfair compensation (e.g., the RIAA collecting $200k from a single mom who downloaded music– yes, she was wrong; yes, she should pay for her mistake; no, it’s not right that she pay that much).

3) Convenience laws (show me your photo ID, tell me your SSN, 75-year copyrights) which have been enacted by the legislature to satisfy the needs or wishes of some agency or corporation. I believe the vast majority of these are unnecessary limitations on our freedoms and serve only those who are in power rather than society as a whole. It is these laws against which I am most firmly opposed.

I think we’ve seen a huge increase in category 3 these last few years, and an expansion (in scope and penalty, if not sheer number) of category 2. Off the cuff I’d say category 1 was established even before this country, and remains fairly static.

So, off-topic musings aside, I long for a place where I have more freedoms than I have now. Call me selfish, call me a communist, call me a libertarian nanny-head, but I long for a day where the Government steps back and lets me live my life.

Harumph.

A single PS3 performs better than the highest-end desktops available and compares to as many as 25 nodes of an IBM Blue Gene supercomputer.

I think this appropriate for the group, especially those that are email admin gurus.

All the major news sites are reporting the executive office’s loss of email. estimates as high as 1000 days.

Call me naive, but i imagine most every ISP i’ve ever sent / received email from has a record of that email.  I imagine every company i’ve ever worked for has access to my historical email.

Yet, I know that if I delete a mail from my mail spool on a unix system, it’s as good as gone.  Which leads me to believe that unless daily / weekly / monthly backups  are made of mail servers and then archived, it “might” be possible that there is no history of the emails.  

Before I criticize and label this as an obvious cover up by the executive branch, is there even any ounce of truth that there would be no foul play involved?

If there wasn’t any tampering and this actually “just” happened, anybody that has faith in the administration for the last 8 years has got be pretty disappointed knowing that the party that’s supposed to be tough on torror is completely and utterly technologically inept at even the most basic things as a nightly backup, no less in the highest levels of national office.  It’s a serious joke.  

I can’t help but think a group of 16 year old script kiddies would make our nat’l specialists look foolish.  Sad but true.

Like you, I’ve watched this story for the past few months with a mix of suspicion and humor.

I run e-mail for a hundred or so domains, totaling maybe a thousand individual users.  That’s a lot of messages coming and going on a given day.  To make matters worse, as we all know only a fraction of what comes in is legitimate– the rest is spam that’s discarded via greylisting or scanning and filtering.

A nightly backup of the mail spool on a server would be largely useless.  It would save copies of any messages that arrived but weren’t downloaded, so if the backup runs at, say, midnight then it’ll catch stuff between the end of the business day and that time.  That’s assuming the people aren’t checking their mail in the evening.  Since people are downloading messages constantly (my own client checks my mail every 60 seconds), in many cases the content of the message is only on the server for a matter of minutes or perhaps hours.

Thus, in order to truly capture and backup every message, something needs to be done at the MTA level.  I happen to use qmail, and it has a mechanism to send a copy of every message– incoming and outgoing– to a place defined by the admin.  I’m sure other MTA’s have similar functionality.  In theory, then, I could save a copy of all of it in a directory not available to the users, and backup that directory.

I don’t do that.

First, I believe strongly in the privacy of my customers.  I have no reason to store messages that may contain personal information, private conversations, proprietary business data, etc.  If I was using an ISP for my own mail, I wouldn’t want them storing it, and I think I should treat others as I’d like to be treated.

Second, if I’m storing messages beyond the usual deliver-and-download process, I incur a liability to protect and manage that data.  What if someone managed to break into the server and find the directory with tens of thousands of archived messages?  Whee!  Witness the spectacle of MediaDefender.

Third, with the volume of e-mail that flies around these days, there are storage considerations.  Assuming an average business user sends 10 messages per day, and each message is 20kB, and I have a thousand users, I’m amassing 200MB of archived mail every day.  And everyone knows 10 x 20kB messages is on the low end. 🙂  Disks are cheap, but
that adds up.

And fourth, I defy the police state mentality that seems to pervade our country.  The government (and other agencies) seem to think it’s okay to swoop into an ISP and gather all sorts of data for their various witch hunts.  If someone comes to me and demands the last 30 days of e-mail from a customer account, I can honestly say I don’t have it.  It protects the customer, and it gives me plausible deniability.

That being said, I believe there are federal laws that *require* the government to archive all e-mail messages to elected officials.  They can’t really use any of the reasons I’ve mentioned here– they *must* implement mechanisms to copy all messages and archive them to backup media.  As a result, the whole White House debacle is at best an embarrassment to the IT clowns over there, and more probably a violation of law that should be investigated.

I had to take a shower afterwards because I felt so dirty and there is a permanent stain on my soul where all the good things live.  IE sucks bald dog.