etbe

In the game show The Weakest Link competitors get voted off, usually not on whether they are weak but on whether the other contestents consider them to be a threat. It’s mildly amusing as a TV game show but not funny at all when carried out on an airline.
Recently a flight from Malaga [...]

I am constantly amazed at the apparent lack of interest in car-pooling when travelling between LUV meetings and the restaurant where we have dinner. After the last meeting I was one of the first five people to arrive at the restaurant and we had arrived in three separate cars. For the most luxurious [...]

After a recent mailing list discussion about computer security I’m going to be quoted in someone’s .sig so I think that I need to write a blog entry.
Here is an article about a 2001 case of a man who was arrested for pedophilia and spent 9 days in prison: http://www.xatrix.org/article.php?s=3549 .
This article on The [...]

There has been a lot of discussion recently about how to take laptops on planes following the supposed terror threat in the UK which has been debunked by The Register and other organizations. There is an interesting eWeek article about this that contains the interesting quote “The built-in locks don’t yet meet TSA specifications [...]

In response to my last entry about anti-spam measures and the difficulty of blocking SPAM at the SMTP protocol level I received a few responses. Brian May pointed out that the exiscan-acl feature of Exim allows such blocking, and Johannes Berg referred me to his web site http://johannes.sipsolutions.net/Projects for information on how he implemented [...]

There are two critical things that any anti-spam system must do, it must not lose email and it must not cause damage to the rest of the net.
To avoid losing email every message must be either accepted for delivery or the sender must be notified.
To avoid causing damage to the rest of the net spam [...]

An anti-spam measure that is used by a very small number of people is that of verifying the sender address by connecting to the sending mail server. For example when I send mail from russell@coker.com.au the receiving machine will connect to my mail server and see whether it accepts mail addressed to russell@coker.com.au and [...]

The recent news from the UK gives us an example of invasive security. Preventing passengers carrying on any hand luggage (even wallets) and frisking all of them is the type of treatment you expect for criminals and visitors to maximum security prisons. It’s not what you expect for people who are involved in [...]

As I mentioned in my first post the amount of effort I’m prepared to invest in posting to a small group of people is limited. I don’t think that I am the only person with this opinion.
I also believe that the number of people who refuse to post to open lists is quite small, [...]

It’s often the case with technology that serious changes occur at a particular price or performance point in development. Something has small use until it can be developed to a certain combination of low price and high performance that everyone demands.
I believe that USB flash devices are going to be used for many interesting [...]