The Substantially Similar Weblog

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.

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.

Ed Felten is writing an excellent series of series of blog entries on network discrimination (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3), focusing on the nuts and bolts of how Internet Service Providers can (and do) discriminate between network traffic they like for various reasons (commercial, legal, etc.), and network traffic they do not like. Today’s entry focuses on encryption. Felten points out something that had never occurred to me: even if the user encrypts network traffic so that the ISP can’t see what he’s doing (or even tell the traffic in question apart from the standard website traffic), the ISP can still implement methods that selectively prefer certain types of traffic over others:

But the ISP may have a different and more effective strategy. If the ISP wants to hamper a particular application, and there is a way to manipulate the user’s traffic that affects that application much more than it does other applications, then the ISP has a way to punish the targeted application. Recall my previous discussion of how VoIP is especially sensitive to jitter (unpredictable changes in delay), but most other applications can tolerate jitter without much trouble. If the ISP imposes jitter on all of the user.s packets, the result will be a big problem for VoIP apps, but not much impact on other apps.

So it turns out that even using a VPN, and encrypting everything in sight, isn’t necessarily enough to shield a user from network discrimination. Discrimination can work in subtle ways.

I’ve never been able to get my DVD burner on my Thinkpad X40 to work properly. I usually have to ruin five or six DVD-R’s before I get a successful burn, and even then the result doesn’t necessarily work.

I’ve always gotten 5 or 10 cent DVD-Rs from the cheapest source I can find on pricewatch or froogle. Today, I decided to go to Staples and buy some “name brand” (well, Staples brand) DVD-Rs.

I’ve burned three so far and they each work perfectly. They cost about 50 cents each, but since I had to throw away 80% of the cheaper DVD-Rs, I actually end up ahead. Way ahead if you count the value of my time.

The web is really good at finding the cheapest anything, but I’m noticing more and more often that buying the cheapest of a particular item on the web, even for a “commodity” product like DVD-Rs, often turns out to be not all that cheap. What I would really like is a more automated system to find the cheapest anything that doesn’t suck.

I just received my first Tribe.net “internal” Nigerian-type scam email:

There’s a new message in your Tribe.net inbox from jenny
Message details: hello Adam
Dear Adam, Please i decided to write you because i have no other alternative. Since after the death of my father in the hands of the rebels i have been in a very big difficulty of how to safeguard the money that my father left for me before his death because,the money is too much that i am afraid i dont know how and where to start to go about it. Please if you can help me try to reply me urgently and i will tell you how much and explain more to you and we can discuss fully and God will always bless you for your help whch i know you shall never regret as i am going to take you as my father. I am Waiting eagerly to hear from you.you can write me through jen_221n@yahoo.com Sincerely Jennifer.

I suppose it was only a matter of time. I wonder if Friendster and other similar FOAF services are prepared to deal with the infiltration of their networks by scammers and spammers.

I just checked out the new Windows Live Local—Microsoft’s answer to Google Maps. The interface is a little clunky, but the flyby image quality is amazing.

Here’s my house on Windows Live (by the number 1):

The same location, at the maximum magnification from Google Maps:

Google is going to need to invest in some better images. I think what this proves is that even Google needs some competition.

Interestingly, neither of these images shows the 9-unit condominium complex that replaced the duplex across the street from us. The duplex was demolished more than a year ago.

I was wrong. It turns out that privoxy is now removing the search box area from the Google. Presumably this is a change in Google’s code, since privoxy hasn’t been updated recently. But I suppose this qualifies as a bug.

Is it just me, or did Google just change the layout of its search results in the last couple of hours? History in the making?

I was just experimenting with Google Print and discovered that a book I contributed to has been translated into Italian! Here’s the first page and last page of my essay. That’s kind of a funny way to find out you’ve been translated. I wonder if it the translation is accurate.

In any case, I can safely say that I am a member of that overwhelming majority of authors who can only benefit from Google Print. Not that I receive any royalties for that piece, but it’s still nice to think someone might discover that book who would otherwise never have heard of it.

(Incidentally — do Google Print links persist over time? I guess we’ll find out).