Zorac's LiveJournal

Well, it appears that my neighbours downstairs have been doing some decorating. I vaguely notice the smell of paint/turps/whatever in the bathroom last night - presumably coming out of the fan vent. This morning I woke up rather early to discover that the delightful scent had spread to the rest of the flat and become rather more pungent. I but the bathroom fan on in the hopes of at least stemming the tide, but it did very little to get rid of what had already come in, and left in running while I trudged off through the icy air to work. This evening I got home to find the situation little different, and facing the choice of freezing or suffocating, I opted to have the windows open for an hour or so while I did shopping and chores. Now it's down to a faint background smell, hopefully enough to allow me to get some sleep tonight. Meh.

I was going to post this yesterday, when the timing would have been a little more auspicious, but hey ho. The target of today's rant is the earliness of Christmas - yes, christmas stuff has already started appearing in the shops - three months ahead of time. Doubtless, in another month or so the decorations will be going up, the holiday music will be playing and the shelves will be packed with naff gifts. Oh, joy.

It's just wrong

I may be a confirmed atheist, but that doesn't stop me from finding the over-commercialisation of Christmas tacky in the extreme. The fact that we're bombarded with it for around a quarter of the year robs the day itself of being anything much special. If I had my may, they wouldn't be allowed to go all Christmas until December - and having the decorations up beyond twelfth night would be not only unlucky, but downright illegal.

Gah! The evil scumbags who operate the .com and .net domains have decided to set up a wild-card DNS record for all non-existant domains. This means that sites like www.dygiehwlkgiuwekrf.com now exist, and take you to a nice little VeriSign plug page instead of a helpful error message telling you that the site does not exist.

Much worse is the effect this will have on email - checking for non-existent domains is a good way of blocking spam, and indeed just verifying email addresses. Also, as VeriSign are running a mail server that rejects all messages, old or incorrect MX records which previously be ignored will now cause all email to a domain to be bounced.

Update 1: Ooh! More fun! Any DNS blacklists (again popular for blocking spam) which no longer exist (eg orbs.dorkslayers.com) will now have sprung back into life listing every address on the internet - meaning more false positives in junk mail blockers.

Update 2: Here's a good article written a couple of hours after this started. There is, of course, much discussion on Slashdot, and an article on The Register (with quotes from my boss, alnitak). VeriSign's posting about it on NANOG can be found here, and there's apparently much backlash to be found there too.

Update 3: One other concern this raises is privacy/security - every mis-typed URL or email address that goes to a non-existant .com or .net domain will now hit VeriSign's servers - and their terms and conditions state that they will keep that information - what email addresses you were trying to send to and from, what websites you were trying to visit (including any form parameters, potentially including usernames and passwords). How nice.

Update 4: This doesn't just happen to un-registered domains - it also applies to domains which are paid for and owned by someone who just happens not to have st up any DNS servers for it. Leading to even further dubious legality.

WAY TO BREAK THE INTERNET!!!!!

Needless to say, large numbers of ISPs and the like will be looking to take their domain registration and SSL certificate business elsewhere.

OK, is it just hermorrine and me, or is Y!M misbehaving for other people? It seems to have developed the intensely annoying habit of randomly and silently dropping messages in the middle of conversations. It started during the Mother Of All Power-Cuts, so it might be related, but the problem hasn't yet been fixed.

mark_rigby_jones:

"Surround sound is going to be increasingly important in future offices" - yeah, right. That's going to work really well when every desk in an open-plan layout has it's own set of 5.1 speakers. Plus they're suggesting that we'll all be using emailed audio and video for intra-office communications - have they never heard of the telephone (or even Voice Over IP), heaven forbid anyone actually walk across the room and actually talk to someone. Read the full article for further examples of Microsoft Deeply Not Getting It.

This one's been rolling around for a few days, but the link on SlashDot to Richard Stallman's latest infomercial for GNU/Linux prompted me to throw together my thoughts on the subject, plus a bonus section on Free Software vs. Open Source.
( Collapse )Read the full SlashDot rant-fest here</a.