Off you go… into the purple yonder!

I came across this rather nonsensical message from one of Hotmail’s MX servers:

$ telnet mx1.hotmail.com 25
Trying 65.54.245.8…
Connected to mx1.hotmail.com.
Escape character is ‘^]’.
220 bay0-mc9-f11.bay0.hotmail.com Sending unsolicited
commercial or bulk e-mail to Microsoft’s computer network
is prohibited. Other restrictions are found at
http://privacy.msn.com/Anti-spam/. Violations will result
in use of equipment located in California and other states.
Sat, 25 Oct 2008 09:26:41 -0700

(newlines [...]

From today’s Metro, Boston edition:

I’m thinking someone at the Metro needs a crash course in elementary math.

I came across a nice PDF today. It caused an HP 4100 to just hang ‘processing job’; a Xerox 4500 printed it but overlayed the page with a lovely postscript error, and an Imagistics im2520f (a rebadged Minolta, really) just printed “Error: configurationerror”.
So I ran it through pdf2ps, after which it printed fine. Nice error [...]

I understand you like to send out subscription renewal notices. You like to keep your subscribers. Well, I like subscribing to your publication, so that’s ok.
What I don’t understand, however, is why you keep sending me subscription renewal notices to extend my subscription by another 2 years, when my current expiration date is already more [...]

Amazon has launched Amazon MP3, a DRM-free music store. From the press release:
Amazon MP3 Offers Over 2 Million Songs From More Than 180,000 Artists and Over 20,000 Labels, Including EMI Music and Universal Music Group
So that’s the second label (Universal Music Group) that is starting to get a clue. Welcome to the party guys. Two [...]

Sometimes internet routing goes seriously haywire. The routing for AS13127 (Versatel, a subsidiary of Tele-2 in Europe) seems to be completely messed up for (some) traffic that originates from outside of Europe. Here’s what that looks like from Boston (screenshot from this morning):

The traffic gets lost on teleglobe’s backbone in Amsterdam.
I got the first problem [...]

I got a most intriguing piece of spam in my mailbox today. It passed through dspam because it was so interesting that I would appreciate it. I’m very happy with dspam that way - it really knows what e-mail I like
Here’s what the body looked like:
%TO_CC_DEFAULT_HANDLER
Subject: %SUBJECT
Sender: “%FROM_NAME” < %FROM_EMAIL>
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/html
Date: %CURRENT_DATE_TIME
%MESSAGE_BODY

Yeah, [...]

Brian Krebs put up an excellent article at the Washington Post, analyzing how many days in 2006 IE was vulnerable because of critical, unpatched security problems for which documentation and/or exploit code was available online. IE’s record is abysmal: 284 days of vulnerability, or more than 9 months.
In contrast, Firefox had exactly one period of [...]

The Council of the European Union streams some of its meetings and press conferences online. Unfortunately, that streaming is done in Windows Media format. They barely support browsers other than IE, and then only on Windows and Mac OS X. If you don’t use IE on Windows, you get degraded functionality, and GNU/Linux is not [...]

So, in one week the music industry has managed to get signatures from artists that are dead in support of a (retroactive!) copyright extension in the UK, and now the RIAA is trying to lower the royalties it pays to artists for “innovative” music distribution.
Let us get this straight - on the one hand they [...]