Category Archives: Network

RapidSSL 1 – GoDaddy 0

Posted on 2010-06-24 by majid

My new company’s website uses SSL. I ordered an “extended validation” certificate from GoDaddy, instead of my usual CA, RapidSSL/GeoTrust, because GoDaddy’s EV certificates were cheap. EV certificates are security theater more than anything else, I probably should not have … Continue reading →

Posted in IT, Network, Soapbox, Web | 2 Comments

Clueless SaaS providers can leave you with egg on your face

Posted on 2010-03-04 by majid

While cleaning out my spam folders, I noticed a disturbing trend: a number of the spam were sent to vendor-specific email addresses I had set up to communicate with Parallels, Joyent and Shoeboxed. As a security measure, I do not … Continue reading →

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Broken SPF records

Posted on 2009-12-21 by majid

I have SPF verification enabled on my mail server. While SPF is no panacea for the problem of spam, it is quite effective at ensuring spammers do not forge the sending address to impersonate someone else, and cause some poor … Continue reading →

Posted in Network, Soapbox | 1 Comment

Fie on parasitic US cellcos

Posted on 2009-09-24 by majid

The Economist has an excellent article on how Indian mobile phone companies cut costs. They have an ARPU of $6.50 a month yet operate with a 40% gross margin. If US cellcos were run as efficiently, they would have a … Continue reading →

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At long last real broadband in San Francisco

Posted on 2009-08-22 by majid

I upgraded my broadband connection yesterday from a puny 3-6Mbps/384-768K DSL connection to 20Mbps symmetrical Metro Ethernet service from an outfit called WebPass. My current ISP, Raw Bandwidth, has excellent service with no restrictions on hosting servers or traffic shaping … Continue reading →

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Today is a great day for the Internet in France

Posted on 2009-06-10 by majid

The content producers’ lobby is very ancient and powerful in France (it was started by the playwright Beaumarchais in the 18th century). The fact President Sarkozy’s wife is an important rights holder may have something to do with his determination … Continue reading →

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SOCKS and SSH, two great flavors that go together

Posted on 2009-04-11 by majid

I am currently in New Orleans for a friend’s wedding, and staying at the InterContinental. The hotel has wired Internet access, but like all expensive hotels, wants to charge an extortionate fee ($7/hour) for it. This is annoying as the … Continue reading →

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Whither IP-based home automation?

Posted on 2008-10-11 by majid

Home automation units based on X10/Insteon or proprietary systems like Control4 or Savant start at $100-200. At a time when you can buy a fully functional WiFi router with a 200+MHz processor, a minimum 8M of RAM, 16MB of flash … Continue reading →

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Another reason why I build software from source myself

Posted on 2008-10-01 by majid

Some yahoo at Debian found what he thought was a bug in OpenSSL, and decided to comment out some code without having any clue what purpose it served. That purpose was to seed a pseudo-random number generator with entropy from … Continue reading →

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Ethernet – accept no imitations

Posted on 2008-09-17 by majid

While reading an article about Brocade/Foundry’s product plans, I learned about Convergent Enhanced Ethernet (CEE), also known as “Data Center Ethernet”. As if Ethernet needed blessing from the price-gouging storage vendor community to enter the data center… CEE sounds like … Continue reading →

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