B. Mann Consulting

Richard wrote about securing his email with SSHKeyChain in the context of pointing to Kees Cook's discovery of 45 clear auth POP accounts at OSCON.

I actually ran SSHKeyChain before my upgrade to Mac OS X Tiger, but never re-installed. It worked most of the time, but not all the time. To be honest, the whole process is somewhat hard. Richard (or anyone), I'm making a Request for Tutorial (RFT): please document both the requirements (what do I need in a mail server to support this?) and the steps involved in secure email.

Jeff Barr writes up his thoughts on switching to BitTorrent for Backups (or Backup with BitTorrent - BWB, as he calls it):

I have been thinking of using BitTorrent to simplify and automate the Syndic8 backup process ... if this works, I could ask a trusted friend or two to subscribe as well, giving me a scalable, distributed backup solution. Of course I would be happy to do the same for them.
Jeff Barr's Blog: BWB - Backup With BitTorrent

I remember my friend Lloyd asking if I wanted to do this with him a few years ago. At the time, ti seemed like a lot of trouble. To be honest, it probably still is, especially for the volumes of data that I'd want backed up. Well, actually, the *first* time it would take a really long time, but wouldn't I just use rsync after that? Not sure, and also not sure if there would be any speed savings unless you really did have multiple (3? 6?) people all doing this together.

An in-depth, full-bore write up of spam, email, IM, and the arms-race in dealing with it all.

And a prediction that people want...or need...to move on to some other communications medium that doesn't suffer so badly:

You can only slice the 'time pie' so thin before the wedge just crumbles and you have no choice but to move on... Which means IM services better step up and start to kick ass this year, as I am starting to believe 2005 will be the year my inboxes die.
Drunkenblog: Diary of a Dying Inbox

Other quotes, like "It's actually affecting tuition costs at some Universities", simply can't be ignored.

Get in touch with me by mentioning me in a blog post? That works. Would do attachments nicely, too.

By now, many will have read the news about BitTorrent:

According to British Web analysis firm CacheLogic, BitTorrent accounts for an astounding 35 percent of all the traffic on the Internet -- more than all other peer-to-peer programs combined -- and dwarfs mainstream traffic like Web pages.

What is BitTorrent? It's a P2P program that is optimized for sharing really big files in a bandwidth efficient manner.

This sounds like a path we've been down before. Napster was the first high-profile P2P program, used to distribute (at that time) large music files. Now broadband is more wide-spread, and the files are bigger.

If you are an ISP, or your clients are ISP's then you might need to
know what is keeping them up at night. Here is an interesting analysis of what uses up an ISP's bandwidth, produced by CacheLogic. It appears that most bandwidth is used by peer-to-peer (P2P) services - remember Napster? The rest of the web's traffic is negligible compared to P2P file-sharing, much of which is legal, so it's not just music and videos.
Jarche Consulting: Peer-to-Peer

So what if ISPs acted as super-nodes in some of these p2p systems? Much like traditional caching, this would enable them to share the load, keeping traffic on their network, and thus reduce their costs.

But would this make ISPs liable for any illegal content in their p2p cache? My non-lawyer brain immediately thinks: of course not, it's exactly like running an HTML cache that might contain illegal content.

The server version of Tiger will offer weblog hosting with Blojsom. As far as I know Apple servers are used mostly in office environments. With Safari RSS and Blojsom Apple is becoming a very interesting k-logging environment.
Paolo Valdemarin: Tiger k-logging

And an iChat server based on Jabber (well, it's a Jabber server, so it works with all Jabber-compatible clients as well). And of course, both the IM server and the blog server both tie into Open Directory for user accounts and authentication. Like Scott, I want iChat to start supporting arbitrary SIP servers as well. Somehow, the fact that there has been absolutely no word out of Apple about support for SIP makes me think they're up to something.

Check the server preview for all the other Tiger Server stuff.

Ultimately, telecom is about communications, not media. DRM inhibits communications. That’s the opposite of what you’re after. If we’d had DRM before the Internet became widely available, telcos would have sold a lot less dial-up and broadband, and the industry would have even more unlit fiber than it does today.

How many future broadband and FTTH sales will be lost because you can’t share a few moments of a good TV show with your granny over the Internet?

Telepocalypse: DRM - enemy of telecom

I wound up swapping it with the spare drive, and went and rebuilt the array again. After about an hour and a half (not bad for 74gigs) the array was in an OK state. The entire procedure with the first failed rebuild and the second rebuild took about 10 minutes. Now MX1's uptime is only 99.27% darn.

It is kind of distressing to see the drive die so quickly as it has only been in production for about 2 months. I guess using cheap desktop SATA drives has it's drawbacks. However those damn SCSCI setups are so expensive.

Phrax Blog (Benson Wong): Another victory for Hardware RAID

Ben's been churning through all sorts of good IT solutions that balance do-it-yourself against cost. The SCSI vs. SATA debate will rage on, but cheap wins over expensive if you can use techniques like hardware RAID and spare drives to maintain good reliability.

CIRA's on a witch hunt, and the first casualties are the wave of multiple suspended .ca domains dropping off the internet this weekend.
CIRA .ca Domain Suspensions

This from Dave Shea, who isn't actually Canadian either. He's "Candian" apparently. In any case, the draconian way that CIRA has handled this isn't winning them any points.

Screw the disintermediation of traditional advertising, the introduction of disruptive technologies to electronics consumers, and the enabling of networked hardware for ubiquitous seamless e-commerce.

No, I'll be satisfied with nothing less than the disintermediation of design itself, and the empowerment of stuff.

Notional Slurry: Your fridge will still be stupid and cold, but maybe my milk will tell it jokes

Another great quote was "If you can’t buy a modem equipped or Bluetooth milk-aware fridge from Hammacher-Schlemmer in the next couple of years, I’ll make you eat your hat.".