The Substantially Similar Weblog

Rachele and I went to Montreal for the day this past weekend. It was the longest time we’ve ever left our one year old daughter Esther—just over twelve hours with my parents. Remarkably, she survived, and didn’t even miss us.

Every time I go to Montreal I’m reminded of just how much better Canada is.

For example, Senzala, a Brazilian breakfast place in Mile End, served the most delicious gourmet poached eggs (pictured here with Rachele):

We also had a great time visiting the Botanical Garden, a vast park that dwarfs anything Boston has to offer. Here are a few examples of the flora—click on the image to see the full size version.

Along with poached eggs, beautiful gardens, and socialized healthcare, what more could one ask for?

Rachele (my wife and recent arrival to the blogosphere) made the Boston Globe “Blog Log” this Sunday — see the bit entitled Kiss Contractor Goodbye. Too bad she didn’t actually name the contractor in her blog entry!

The original entry: sexism in the building trades.

My server’s mailman (or postfix) installation is mysteriously rejecting mail from one Yahoo! mail user. I don’t get it:

 Hi. This is the qmail-send program at yahoo.com. I'm afraid I wasn't able to deliver your message to the following addresses. This is a permanent error; I've given up. Sorry it didn't work out. : 72.1.169.10 does not like recipient. Remote host said: 550 : Recipient address rejected: undeliverable address: unknown user: "[list name]" Giving up on 72.1.169.10. 

72.1.169.10 is, in fact, the IP address of my server. [list name] is (in the real version) the real live name of the list. The list seems to work for everyone else. And it’s certainly not true that I, or my server, doesn’t like this recipient (or sender).

Aside from this anomalous behavior, it’s also funny that Yahoo! provides plain old unfiltered qmail bounce messages to its users. Wouldn’t you think a fully matured webmail service like Yahoo! would, by this point, have somewhat customized their mail error reporting messages? In fact, wouldn’t you think they would want to hide the fact that the use qmail at all, if only for security purposes? Couldn’t they hire an intern to write a few replacement error messages? Maybe I’m missing something.

A propos, I discovered this nice piece from McSweeney’s, entitled YAHOO’S MAILER-DAEMON AUTOMATED REPLY FOR FAILED E-MAIL DELIVERY IS GETTING A LITTLE TOO INTIMATE.

Update 5/30/06: Figured it out. Oddly, Yahoo! was looking up the CNAME DNS record for the domain name and replacing that in the mail header. While the original email went to e.g., listname@lists.mydomain.com, the message as delivered was addressed to listname@servername.mydomain.com. Because only lists.mydomain.com processed email for lists, the message bounced. The solution was to change lists.mydomain.com from being a CNAME entry to its own A entry with the IP address specified directly. That fixed the problem. I’ve never seen any other mail service work this way — gmail certainly doesn’t.

As a result of the Verizon v710 Bluetooth Class Action Lawsuit Settlement, I just got the LG VX9800, aka “LG the V.” It’s actually not as mediocre as I thought—more on that later. In keeping with my tradition of posting solutions to problems that are not easily found on google (an omnibus entry I plan to separate out into separate entries some day), I’m posting this tip about getting on to Verizon’s high speed (“3G”) network from Linux over a Bluetooth connection.

I was able to get on with no problem with my old phone — the v710. I was surprised when wvdial kept failing with the new phone. The key, it turns out, was adding the following to /etc/ppp/options:

 -chap -mschap -mschap-v2 

(I’m not even sure all of those are necessary, since -mschap and -mschap-v2 are not documented, but they can’t hurt.)

Here’s the whole process:

1. Establish a Bluetooth connection with the phone.
   • Make the phone “discoverable” — go into Bluetooth Options and set it to be visible to all devices
   • hcitool scan to find the phone’s Bluetooth ID (henceforth ##:##:##:##:##:##)
   • hcitool cc ##:##:##:##:##:##
   • hcitool auth ##:##:##:##:##:##
2. Add a stanza to /etc/bluetooth/rfcomm.conf:
   

    rfcomm { bind yes; device ##:##:##:##:##:##; channel 8; } 

3. Add a stanza to /etc/wvdial.conf:
   

    [Dialer Defaults] Modem = /dev/rfcomm0 Carrier Check = No Baud = 115200 Init1 = ATZ Init2 = AT$QCMDR=3 Phone = #777 Username = [Your Verizon 10 Digit Phone Number]@vzw3g.com Password = vzw 

4. As dicussed above, add to /etc/ppp/options:
   

    -chap -mschap -mschap-v2 

You’ll of course have to deal with permissions issues (on /dev/rfcomm0), have the packages installed (bluetooth, wvdial, ppp), etc., but that sort of information is available elsewhere.

It should be obvious that this method costs you airtime. But in my experience Verizon imposes no other charges. I get about 16 kilobytes/second out here in Vermont, which isn’t bad compared to dial-up.

Finally, I haven’t nailed this down yet, but in some situations (maybe where you are outside EV-DO range), you may need to do the following:

• Open the phone
• Press OK – 0 – 000000
• Press 3, Network Select
• Press 1, Mode Preference
• Select 1X only.

(Remember to change it back to Digital Only Hybrid when done)

Finally, there is already an excellent page describing how to use the VX9800 (“LG the V”) on Linux. I would not want to displace its PageRank.

Check out my brother Jonah’s band, Green Mountain Moonshine. They have the least annoying Myspace page I’ve ever seen. And the music is really pretty good.

I just noticed that I’ve been donating gigabytes of free bandwidth per month to Myspace users. Apparently several of my eight megapixel uncompressed images are popular as wallpaper—also on Friendster and a similar site called “Hi5” that I’ve never heard of.

I hate to be mean, but:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} myspace.com|hi5.com|friendster.com [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !(rosi-kessel|bostoncoop|adamkessel|planet|aggregator|rawdog) [NC]
RewriteRule !sorry - [C]
RewriteRule .* sorry.png [L]


In reality, the content here is by default under a Creative Commons by-nc-nd license, but I’d like these people to realize they should at least check before copying images they find on the web. And if they are going to use images, they should copy rather than link them.

In my day, we knew about netiquette. Kids these days.

(I won’t embarrass these people by linking to them, but now there are several hundred Myspace, Friendster, and Hi5 pages that look terrible.)

Most popular backgrounds: Winter Sunset and November Foliage.

I am one of the unfortunate hundreds of thousands of Verizon customers who eagerly ran out to buy the Motorola v710 Bluetooth phone when it first came out a couple of years ago. (For a short period of time, I could really turn heads with my wireless earpiece—now you look like an antiquarian if you don’t have a Bluetooth headset). It turns out that Verizon disabled all of the most useful Bluetooth features on the phone, and a class action lawsuit ensued, which predictably settled on terms quite beneficial to counsel, but less so to the affected class. The settlement provided several options for Verizon subscribers who had purchased the v710, only one of which had a substantial monetary value—namely, a $200 credit toward a new phone (or whatever the actual price we paid for the phone, assuming we still have receipts).

The settlement period expires at the end of the month, so tonight I finally got around to cashing in on the victory.

I was quickly reminded of how much I hate shopping for cell phone technology. Verizon provides more than a dozen options for cell phones, each of them mediocre in its own different way. (I should also mention that the Verizon Wireless website is, itself, mediocre in many different ways.) Cell phones have been around for long enough that it ought to be fairly mature technology; instead, you have to figure out which annoying shortcoming bothers you the least. The most expensive of the non-Pocket PC models, the Samsung SCH-a630, despite having a 2 megapixel built-in camera, has a lower image quality than the cheaper “LG the V” (better known as the LG VX9800), as well as crippled Bluetooth like the v710.

I ended up settling on “LG the V,” despite its silly name and hefty form factor, because it seems to be the one model that Verizon decided not to cripple Bluetooth on. Apparently, it has complete OBEX support, and works quite well with Linux.

It gets worse shopping for Bluetooth headsets. None of the top headsets recommended by cnet are even offered by Verizon. So instead you’re stuck perusing endless message board postings for threads with names like Which Bluetooth Headset is best for VX9800? trying to figure out which, in fact, is the best Bluetooth Headset for the VX9800. While some aspects of a Bluetooth headset are obviously personal preferences based on, for example, the shape of your earlobe, how often you drive in a convertible with the top down while talking on your cell, and whether you like to wear your headset to bed, I would really appreciate some objective metrics and brand uniformity. There’s no way to predict, for example, whether a particular model of Motorola, Jabra, or Logitech headset will be any good—some seem to be well received, while others have glaring design flaws.

As a trademark lawyer, I’m disappointed by this state of affairs. I’d like to be able to identify a brand that I can trust and just go with it. This is especially true where it’s difficult to evaluate the quality of an item on first inspection (or over the Internet) and it’s an item you’ll keep for at least a while (two or three years for cell equipment). As things stand, there seem to be few real winners, and the search costs are inordinately high. Hopefully the invisible hand will eventually fix this situation, but I’m not going to bet on it.

My blog has apparently become a canonical source (at least by PageRank) for the Webloyalty Scam (see also this update). It’s been about 18 months since I first posted about it—since then that page has gotten over 40,000 hits and over 1,000 comments.

Perhaps the best testimony about this company comes from its own employees. At least two people purporting to be Webloyalty Call Center Representatives have posted comments to that entry; in both cases, the IP addresses resolved to a Connecticut location, so it is at least plausible that these people really work for Webloyalty. Here’s the most recent comment, posted from 69.183.205.129:

WOW!! The level of stupidity on this board is incredible. You people don’t get it, do you?? Webloyalty didn’t sign you up for anything. You signed yourselves up. The details are right there, in plain sight, in normal sized text, right in front of your faces. It details EVERYTHING, including the cost of the service and the billing cycle. The problem is that all of you idiots chose not to read it. You saw “free”, and figured “gee, something free for me? golly, I must be special”. WRONG!! YOU’RE NOT SPECIAL, YOU’RE JUST FUCKING LAZY AND STUPID!! YOU SIGNED YOURSELF UP! NOTHING HAPPENED AUTOMATICALLY!! THERE WAS NO SLIGHT OF HAND OR MISLEADING WORDING!! The bottom line is you’re all a bunch of stupid, lazy, crybabies who don’t want to take any responsability for your actions. NONE! Well, thats what you get for being stupid and lazy.

LEARN TO TAKE RESPONSABILITY FOR YOUR OWN ACTIONS. DON’T POINT THE FINGER AT OTHERS AND CALL THEM “THEIVES” AND “SCAM ARTISTS” AND BLAME THEM FOR YOUR OWN STUPIDITY. YOU ALL MAKE ME SICK!! FUCKING CRYBABIES!!!!

And here’s another for a few months ago:

comment: I’m a rep in the call center at Webloyalty. I have no pity for any of you people. You’re all suckers, plain and simple. Didn’t anybody ever teach you that nothing is free? When all of you idiots made your purchases on whatever website you did business on at the end of your transaction there was an offer asking if you wanted to save $10, or get award miles, or whatever. When you clicked on that link you were not automatically signed up. What happens is that you’re brought to the Reservations Rewards website. On that website it tells you that you are on the website for Reservations Rewards. You see, you can tell that because the banner at the top of the site says “Reservations Rewards”. Unfortunately you were too stupid to notice or remember. It then gives you instructions on how to redeem your “reward”. At that point you are instructed to enter you email address in twice and click accept. Now you have to manually type in the email twice in those boxes. No cut and paste is allowed. Then it tells you to click accept. Now, if you had any fucking brains in your head you would have noticed that right above the box where you enter your email mail address its says, in regular sized type, in plain sight, right out in the open, that entering your email twice will act as an electronic signature and that by clicking accept you are accepting that the website you just made a purchase on can share the billing information with Reservation Rewards. Also in the big box next all of this it gives the exact details of what you are signing up for, again in regular sized print, in plain sight, right out in the open. If you are too stupid to take the time to notice all of that then you deserve what you got. which was a membership in a overpriced bullshit ptogram.

Webloyalty depends on idiots like you to not notice this stuff. To be blinded by the idea that you are getting something for “free”. To not look at you credit card statement so charges go through every month. Its unbelievable the amount of dummies out there that fall for this stuff. Even if you do catch the charges eventually, and get a refund they still made money off of you by collecting interest on your money when they had possesion of it. Stay a member or cancel its win-win for webloyalty.

So, anyway I hope all you dummies learned a valuable lesson and wont fall for this again. I’m sure many of you will, though. You’d be shocked at how many people are repeat members where they canceled the service a while back but fell for the scam again a few months later.

Perhaps the funniest thing about my Reservation Rewards entry is that I get emails every day or two from people asking me how to get them to stop taking their money. There are, in fact, over 1,000 testimonials (including my own entry) explaining exactly how to get them to stop charging. Every few months, I receive an email from someone furious at me for charging them all this money. I wonder who these people are who get as far as doing a Google search to find my entry, but can’t seem to figure out that I have nothing to do with the company.

It is with some sadness and reluctance that I canceled our daily subscription to the Boston Globe today. I like the idea of a print newspaper, but in reality, it doesn’t work for me anymore.

Perhaps the biggest problem is newspapers deliver news at the least useful interval. Radio and the web give you up-to-the-minute updates, while weekly and monthly magazines give you in depth, critical treatment of the news in perspective. (Of course, the web also gives you everything, although it is not always as portable as a magazine or radio.) Newspapers end up somewhere in between: they are generally hastily (and thus poorly) written; don’t usually have space for in depth and contextual treatment (although certainly better than most TV news); but by the time you get them they are already dated if you’ve been checking Google News and listening to NPR.

Newspapers also have vast amounts of irrelevant content that just creates more work for me in taking out the recycling. I never look at the sports, real estate, “lifestyle,” or automotive sections; the hundreds of pages of advertising material in the Sunday edition likewise go right into the recycle bin. At the end of the week, I look at the pile of unread dead trees, and realize what an inefficient process it is.

Finally, it’s just not a good value. $400 a year could pay for a lot more high quality online or offline content.

I understand the newspaper business has been having a tough time, and I’m not helping things by unsubscribing. (The desperation is palpable in the “Free Boston Herald” hawkers stationed outside my office every evening.) I hope the good investigative reporters still find a way to ply their trade. Maybe they will all end up at high quality weekly and monthly publications, e.g., Seymour Hersh at the New Yorker.

In any event, I’m looking forward to less work and less guilt carrying the recycling to the curb. I suppose I’m just doing my part to kill old media.

I’m not the first person with a story about the sad state of Comcast. Since I’m certain I’m never actually going to get a True Human to read my email at Comcast, I’ll just post my brief exchange regarding Comcast’s SMTP servers here. Maybe some future archaeologist of the Internet will point to this exchange as early evidence of the End of Email:

I posted the following to Comcast’s website feedback form — apparently there is no publicly advertised email address for communicating with Comcast:

Please forward this email to an engineer responsible for Comcast’s SMTP service.

I run an ISP. Email to @comcast.net addresses often bounces with a “556 null byte in data” rejection connecting to gateway-s.comcast. I use postfix from Debian Sarge.

This is not a problem on my end. There are numerous reports of this problem in newsgroups (just google ‘556 null byte in data’ ‘comcast’). The problem is independent of mail user agent and ISP.

Note that this is *not* an issue of my users attempting to connect to the Comcast SMTP server themselves—I understand there is some issue where Comcast only accepts SMTP/SSL/TLS now for its users. This is a *delivery* problem.

I have seen some speculation that Comcast’s SMTP servers are rejecting email with this error because of either large attachments or attachments with long filenames. I have seen the problem occur where the attachments are very small (on the order of 10K), but I haven’t ruled out the latter explanation.

Please let me know if there is anything I can do to fix this problem. My users would like to be able to email Comcast customers.

Comcast’s response:

Dear Adam KESSEL,

Thank you for taking the time to write us.

Comcast is aggressive about protecting its’ subscribers from unwanted and unauthorized emails. In keeping with industry standards and best practices some recent changes to our filters have been made.If you are attempting to send emails to legitimate recipients in the Comcast.net domain, and receive an error message there are 3 likely reasons:

1. Your mail server has been identified as a source of Spam. Our mail filters have been updated to reject all mail from your server until the administrator of your mail server contacts us to request the server be removed.

2. The source of your message has a dynamic email address. Anyone attempting to email into the Comcast domain directly from a Dynamic IP address will receive the following error message:

Comcast does not support the direct connection to its mail servers from residential IPs. Your mail should be sent to comcast.net users through your ISP. Please contact your ISP or mail administrator for more information.

3. Your mail server has an invalid rDNS value. What this means is that our mail filters authenticate each message by checking the rDNS value to ensure its’ a legitimate domain and yours wasnot.

The error or “bounce” message you receive will indicate which reason the message was rejected. Youwill either be given the address to request Blacklist removal or you will be directed to our rDNS FAQpage.

If a domain administrator feels that their IP range has been blocked in error or they would like information on required steps to be removed from our black list, they can contact us at:

blacklist_comcastnet@cable.comcast.com

If you need assistance setting up email through your ISP?s mail servers please visit their support pages or contact their support group.

If you need information on the rDNS block, please visit: http://www.comcast.net/help/faq/index.jsp?faq=Email118405

Thank you for the opportunity to assist you. If you need further assistance with any of your Comcast services please reply to this email and we will be happy to assist you. Thank you again for choosing Comcast we appreciate your business. To visit our local support page including links to contact us via Live Chat, as well as many downloadable forms,and FAQ pages, please visit: http://www.comcast.com/nesupport/

Did you know that Comcast offers its customers a variety of free benefits? These include McAfee Antivirus, Firewall and Privacy software as well the Comcast tool bar that lets you take Comcast.net with you while you surf, and the Desktop Doctor to help you restore lost settings…plus much more, please visit http://www.comcast.net/downloads/ to see all of the extras that we provide.

Sincerely,
Irene

Comcast Electronic Customer Care – New England

You can email us anytime by replying to this email or by clicking the “Contact Comcast” link found on the bottom of all www.Comcast.net and www.Comcast.com webpages. Our Electronic Customer Support teams are available to assist you 24 hours a day 7 days a week.

**************************************************
The response contained in this message is intended for the addressee only and may vary from other ponses depending on geography, promotional campaigns or other factors. If you are not the intended recipient of this response, please delete this message. Any unauthorized use or dissemination of the information contained in this message is prohibited.
**************************************************

The last bit about “unauthorized use” is a nice touch.

My follow-up:

The 556 null byte SMTP error is *not* a spam or blocking related rejection.

My mail server is (1) not a source of spam (2) does not have a dynamic IP address (I assume below whenyou wrote “dynamic email address” you meant “dynamic IP address”); it is not a residential IP but rather a commercial ISP that I run; and (3) the mail server has a valid reverse DNS lookup.

To clarify: not every email is being rejected from the ISP’s IP address. In fact, the same sender can send from my ISP multiple times to a Comcast subscriber, and most messages will get through.

There appears to be a bug in your SMTP delivery server whereby certain triggering events cause a 556 null byte error. There is at least some evidence that one such triggering event is an email with an attachment with a long filename. This is not a spam filter issue. This is a Comcast SMTP configuration issue.

As you will see if you google “‘556 null byte in data’ comcast” this is awidespread problem that is entirely unrelated to Comcast’s zealous efforts to block unsolicited email.

Please forward my email to an engineer or technician.

Thanks,
Adam

Finally, Comcast’s witty retort:

Dear Adam Rosi-Kessel,

Thank you for taking the time to write us.

Commercial Email Accounts

We have to apologize, but at this time you must contact our Commercial Business support team by calling one of the following toll free numbers 888-824-8105 or 888-824-8155, 1-888-737-8361

Thank you for the opportunity to assist you. If you need further assistance with any of your Comcastservices please reply to this email and we will be happy to assist you. Thank you again for choosingComcast we appreciate your business. To visit our local support page including links to contact us via Live Chat, as well as many downloadable forms,and FAQ pages, please visit: http://www.comcast.com/nesupport/

Did you know that Comcast offers its customers a variety of free benefits? These include McAfee Antivirus, Firewall and Privacy software as well the Comcast tool bar that lets you take Comcast.net with you while you surf, and the Desktop Doctor to help you restore lost settings…plus much more, please visit http://www.comcast.net/downloads/ to see all of the extras that we provide.

Sincerely,
Ivonne

Comcast Electronic Customer Care – New England

You can email us anytime by replying to this email or by clicking the “Contact Comcast” link found onthe bottom of all www.Comcast.net and www.Comcast.com webpages. Our Electronic Customer Support teams are available to assist you 24 hours a day 7 days a week.

**************************************************
The response contained in this message is intended for the addressee only and may vary from other responses depending on geography, promotional campaigns or other factors. If you are not the intended recipient of this response, please delete this message. Any unauthorized use or dissemination of the information contained in this message is prohibited.
**************************************************

If anyone has interesting ideas about how to get past Comcast’s front lines, I would like to know.