Verizon collides with Firefox and lead poisoning

FahFox

Firefox flies into over drive

The same works for Mozilla. I have tried it a long time ago. However, if your secure OpenVMS/Alpha systems happens to be behind a firewall of the government that is suppose to protect your VMS system from all the nasty PC (say non-Alpha) MS-DoS (say non-OpenVMS) exploits on the web, then you may find that too many concurrent connexions will be interpreted by the smart PC quality firewall software as a DDoS attempt. As a result your tweaked web browser will get you nowhere. Now, don't ask me why some government agencies protect OpenVMS/Alpha systems from PC software problems. It's a regulation thingy.

Name supplied

Bobcat, Firefox, Bags

Mike:

Ahoy there mates you let the proverbial bobcat out of the bag ...

The dearly beloved "run the turbines at Military Power 'til they blow up" Scribner on your staff who suggests sticking their foot through the floorboards by tweaking Firefox & setting "network.http.pipelining.maxrequests" to "30" connections (This means it will make 30 requests at once.)

Said Scribner, who is obviously a gamer & overclocker freak, _FORGOT_ to read the comments section at th4e bottom of the posting http://forevergeek.com/open_source/make_firefox_faster.php#comments

"#13 Great little tips, but only one problem, and that's that you're breaking servers by doing this. 3-5 requests is fine, but trying to do 30 requests at once puts some strain on the server. If two people try to access the same page at once with this set, that's 60 connections. Most httpd's are set to cut off after there are 100 connections made. So, 4 people with this set could not access the same site. I urge you to think things through before setting something like this and killing the websites you browse."

Was the editor off having a pint when this one was lashed onto top billing?

Tell Said Scribner, okay you can grab a lot of server bandwidth and therefore cut out everybody else. But that simply proves your grandmother didn't beat you about the head and ears often enough when you stole all the chocolate biscuits/cookies from the plate. The system works when folks share - not be a freaking bandwidth hog ...

John O

FireBadgerAtTwelveO'Clock

You say that http://forevergeek.com/ showed you how to speed up firefox. This is obviously not the first people to have thought of this. There article was posted on the 26th December. It has been on Neowin since the 14th of December here. There is also a Firefox plugin for it called 'Tweak Network Settings'. Available here.

Name supplied

Is Verizon blocking foreign mail?

"When a lot of people complain" How many is a lot of people, do we think?"

Hard to tell. At the very least, I can count all the different email addresses on the newsgroups, blogs, list servers that have complained about this.But that does not take into account

(i) all the frustrated European users who have no idea about newsgroups, blog sites and are not registered on any relevant list servers.

(ii) all those who know where to complain but have not done so (like would you report to the police of stolen items from your car in London?? - most people would think it is a waste of time)

I work for a company that is one of the largest media companies in the UK & France (13,500 people worldwide) and I am reasonably certain that total newsgroup use amounts to no more than 100 people based on what I know on my floor in the building, yet everyone has a PC in front of them. But then I am a programmer. Well over 95% of people in my company have never heard of the word "newsgroup".

(Also I trust you have read not just that web page but all the Google newsgroup conversations I emailed the Inquirer (some myself)??? See below)

So I think 40,000 would be conservative minimum in the UK.

So far:

Pipex cannot email Verizon
Demon cannot email Verizon
Claranet cannot email Verizon
Easynet cannot email Verizon
Wanadoo in France can email Verizon
AOL in UK can email Verizon (probably because email is routed to AOL US server as an intermediate step)

"The Inquirer" cannot conclude it is not a problem just because it had no problems. Just read the threads below.

Thanks

Stephen Howe

December 28th Topic: "relay.verizon.net: Anyone know if they filter specific IP addresses?" Here

December 21st (SJH: This thread is quite enlightening - shows Switzerland is being blocked) Topic: "OT: Is verizon blocking european netblocks?" Here

December 20th Topic: 450 Host down (verizon.net) Here.

December 15th (SJH: Thread shows that MessageLabs UK (antivirus company) are aware of problem) Topic: "relay.verizon.net" Here.

December 15th Topic: "Verizon.net" Here.

December 14th (SJH: Microsoft Exchange user - I responded) Topic: "Can not forward to verizon.net- DCOM error" Here.

December 14th (SJH: Demon, the UK ISP know of Verizon problems) Topic: "Mail problems sending to Verizon.net" Here.

December 14th (SJH: Shows Verizon can't be emailed from UK ISPs Easynet and Claranet) Topic: "relay.verizon.net was Re: Email Problem" Here.

December 11th Topic: "No Verizon email, not bouncing back" Here.

December 8th Topic: "Verizon.net and 421 errors" Here.

reported one case of an electrician developing lead poisoning after habitually chewing the insulation on offcuts of 240VAC house cabling. Lead tastes sweet, and its ductility leads to a pleasant 'mouth feel' so you see similar cases in the medical literature every few years.

I understand that mice find cables containing lead similarly attractive.

So if the warnings should be anywhere, they should be on rolls of bulk cable. 1m or 2m of cable isn't going to cause illness unless the person has faulty teeth fillings, in which case the pain is likely to make the person desist.

Glen T.

Give the ridiculous places I've seen 'wear safety glasses' labels, I eagerly await the day when someone sues a tool manufacture on the grounds that 'everyone knows those labels are bogus, there should have been a bigger one.'

I think my favorite one was the plastic, hand crank electrical cord storage reel. The only way I can think of that you could hurt yourself with it were to shove the crank into your eye. The rubber mallet with the standard hammer label advising you not to strike hardened nails to avoid chipping the head was a close second though.

Brooks

This kind of warning is getting out of hand. California is one of the dumbest states I've seen requiring all sorts of labels just for itself. It's way too arrogant of a state. You need to see all of the warnings in restaurants that contain a similar label, saying certain compounds in the food has been known to cause cancer etc etc. I see it in all sorts of restaurants here now. It's sickening, can't wait to move out of this state.

Name supplied

Verizontal Hold

Hi Mike,

Sorry I didn't get back to you but you seem to have moved on since my mail.

We first started to experience problems sending to @verizon.net and @bellatlantic (another verizon company), at least two weeks ago. The mails were not "vaporized", they were not accepted for delivery though.

Our ISP, BIS has tried to contact Verizon (numerous times, or so they tell me), with no joy.

As you mention, they seem to have whitelisted some domains - my supplier mentioned BP and Exxon, both in the UK (apparently).

As a proud nation of immigrants, a US ISP seems an odd xenophobe...

Cheers for the news (and gossip).

Rob

Horizontal Verizontals

My email has been blocked from at least one English email address since roughly the 6th December. Emails to support@verizon.net basically bounce, and using their contact page on their website you're told to call a number during office hours, which I can't.

Great service, Verizon. Not.

BTW if you want to use any of this (can't think why, but I'm paranoid) please no name or email with it.

Vorizontal Herticals

I think there is incompetence involved in creating this situation in the first place. However, I am wondering if there is more to it with the help desk.

The first round with the help desk was with people who must have been reading from a script and didn't really seem to know much. They did not really listen to what I was telling them and just had me go through a predetermined list of things to try. When that produced no results they escalated it to another group.

These people told me the problem was caused by ALL my contacts' domains being blocked as an anti-spam measure and it was necessary. They said they could not unblock any of them until the domains were validated - and that would take at least two weeks.

I asked them questions like how the domains got on the blocked list, why ALL of them, were they blocking everything coming out of the UK, what did they have to do to validate the domains, why should it take so long to resolve the issue, why did the senders not see their e-mail returned for a week or more, why did the message say there was an SMTP connection error that timed out after repeated tries, why didn't the message say that the e-mail had been blocked?

They avoided answering all the questions by saying things like "it is a complicated process" and "that is a business decision that I cannot discuss publicly".

The whole thing doesn't ring true to me. Now I have discovered that others are having the same problem, I am less convinced that this has anything to do with spam. If it does, they are guilty of gross stupidity in the way they chose to deal with the problem. I am wondering if the real problem is that they made a major screw-up when they upgraded their system and broke something and are now trying to figure out how to fix it. The spam story could be just a smokescreen, in which case they are guilty of even more stupidity.

Mike

Chat Attack

Dear Inquirer/ Chatzilla

It's sad when individuals take it upon themselves to make a chat network unavailable by what is believed to be dos attacks on a server.

Excite chat rooms have not been available for 4 weeks now cause someone is dos attacking their server by automated bots/ programs of sorts. This is what i am being told.

Excite chat has become victim to this. Excite chat is a chat/messenger that lets you talk to others. A bit like Yahoo but less automated bots in each room. Whilst the messenger part of excite chat still runs if you go to the excite website you will see the chat rooms are empty with less than 2 chatters over the entire network chat rooms. The excite website shows how many chatters are in each room. There used to be hundreds!!

As a lover of this chat service i feel i should bring the plight of this attacked service to your attention in hope you can bring this to the press attention and hopefully something can be done.

The people attacking the network are freely boasting of their achievements. It's widely acknowledged who the people attacking the service are too. Excite has all the logs on the issue but cause of cost is giving in to online terrorists who appear to just want to benefit their own chat service.

http://boards.excite.com/jsp/taxview.jsp?did=157

Read the boards for yourself. Excite has the Ip's and logs of the attacks but remains powerless.

Its a sad state for the chat room world. MSN chat gone. Yahoo chat with each room infested with over 5-10 bots a room spewing links to porn sites and trying to make you spend money on dating sites.

The chat world is fast becoming a dangerous place to be and i for one feel sorry for the way things are going. If excite chat closes due to dos attacks what message does this send to the outside world???

It's time someone did something to stand up to these bullies.

Regards
William

Verisimilitudinous Verizontal Hold

I was following links from your article, and found this explanation. I thought it might interest you.

http://archives.neohapsis.com/archives/postfix/2004-12/1927.html

Looks like it's a brain-dead anti-spam measure, which is flawed enough to make it an excellent DoS tool and address gathering utility.

Take gun, aim at foot, pull trigger.

Shane

Intel: EM64T and AMD64 the same, practically

Hi there Mike

You debate whether Intel or AMD invented 64bit x86. Well, on "realworldtech" there where an AMD employee, who dropped by and claimed that the Prescott/Nocona 64 bit extension was a last moment "hack", based on the fact it seems to be constructed from two Northwood cores stitched together.

This should mean AMD invented 64bit x86 because Intel couldn't have worked on it for long. There's simply too many transistors and too little frequency headroom for it to be a well planned design.

Others like Paul DeMone says a modern core are 5 years in the making and the 64bit extension could not be included halfways.

He believes the "extra" transistors are for yet undisclosed purposes and the scaling problems are caused by the type of transistors used. Apparently the double clocked part of the cpu uses "low voltage swing" transistors that consume less power, but also constrains clock frequency.

Xbitlabs claims the Smithfield will contain 2.1x more transistors than Prescott.

If that is true then Prescott must surely be a hack. Time will tell... This conundrum makes it difficult for the rest of us to plan our purchases ahead. We don't know if the upcoming designs will be worth waiting for...

Regards
Tomas K

FCC accused of nicking Doraemon cartoon

Actually, as a long-time fan, there is more than a passing resemblance, especially when you compare the animated characters, and not just the stills.

My opinion: a knock-off. Whoever the commissioned artist was, should be held liable.

Disclaimer: I am neither from Japan or from the US.

Name supplied