2004

May 3

PMC Board Responds to FOX News

Apparently FOX News broadcast a report with some derogatory comments regarding Billy Starr’s involvement in the Pan-Mass Challenge. Regardless of whether or not you saw or heard about the broadcast, a letter in response, by the president of the board of directors of PMC, presents some historical facts of value to anyone - donor, rider, or volunteer - with a relationship to PMC.

posted @ 06:27 PM EDT

May 6

First Day in the Mountains

Today, for the first time this year I biked in the mountains, riding through Crawford Notch from Bartlett to Bretton Woods and back. The sight of the Mount Washington Hotel gleaming in the sunshine beneath the snow-coated peaks of the Presidential Range was a delightful reward for making it to the halfway point. Even better was knowing that after the mostly gentle four mile climb back up to the notch it’s practically all downhill to the finish.

posted @ 10:53 PM EDT

May 19

DomainKeys

Yahoo! has proposed a standard, DomainKeys, similar to my own idea, for server to server validation of email senders’ addresses that provides a direct mechanism for killing spam.

DomainKeys would require email servers that verify incoming messages to maintain a list of well behaved domains. I think that the standard should include (or an additional standard should specify) a mechanism to automatically build “chains of trust,” so that for example, if A trusts B, and B trusts C, then A trusts C, where a trusted domain has adequate processes to identify its email clients and revoke the privileges of those who spam. Any single domain would then only have to maintain a very short list of directly trusted domains. An ISP whose clients have there own domains could provide a link of trust to a client as part of its service.

posted @ 01:14 PM EDT

May 25

Fixing a Hole

John Gruber has published a summary of how to close the recently publicized holes in Mac OS X, which result from the capability of mounting filesystems through web links and associating applications with URI types. Note that Apple’s recent security update only deals with one case of the general problem. The article also contains links to other recent articles by Gruber explaining the mechanisms underlying the vulnerabilities.

What’s most disturbing about this episode is not that Apple released software that has security vulnerabilities, but that the kind of explanation and recommendation for action provide by Gruber did not come from Apple when the problem became known. Especially when releasing the recent security update, Apple should have made it clear that further actions were required by users to defend against potential attacks.

Credit to TidBITS for linking to the Daring Fireball.

posted @ 12:54 PM EDT

May 29

Don't Panic

A movie of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is in production, scheduled for release in the summer of 2005. Meanwhile, there’s a blog of course.

posted @ 05:59 PM EDT