Preface: This little rant is somewhat for fun but contains a serious message. The large corporations like Comcast and Verizon who are now major players in providing Internet access would like to have a high level of control over the Internet. It was the openness and unfettered freedom of the Internet that has given birth to so many unique and successful ideas. Allowing large bureaucratic entities to have a high degree of control does not bode well for future innovation and economic development. Economic development that the US and other economies badly need. — Mike Shafer
As if you really didn’t know that the major service companies like Verizon really suck when it comes to having a clue about technology, at least Internet technology, let me not so gently burst your bubble. Having done IT consulting part time since 1986 and full time since 2002 I’ve developed a particularly strong dislike for the PHBs (Dilbertian Pointy-Haired Bosses – Exhibit 1 below) that make the “less than optimal” decisions that we “consumers” have to live with.
Exhibit 1: A Pointy-haired boss
For example Verizon has in the past been dubbed the master hell hole of spam bots since a high percentage of their Internet subscribers are relatively unaware users running some flavor of that security sieve called Windows with no or outdated anti virus software.
In response Verizon decides to force everyone to send out bound email on port 587 to utilize the authentication method in that service. In other words you have to logon to the Verizon mail server using a login name and password before the server will accept the out bound mail. Not a problem and in all a good thing to cut down on home machines infected with spam bots that are happily spewing out junk mail for all sorts of obnoxious topics on the standard SMTP (out bound mail) port 25.
However things turn to a posture of recto-cranial inversion (head up tush) when they simultaneously utilize an overly restrictive spam filtering service which for me has been nothing short of a complete PITA (Pain-in-the-ass for those of you not familiar with such idiomatic speech and acronyms) at times.
Exhibit two in the prosecution is the following, very time sensitive email I attempted to send to a fellow with whom I collaborate in the area of IT consulting.
NOTE: the hxxp and fake url below is intentional to keep this from appearing to be a broken link to Google’s search engine spider.
=== Begin Obviously Spammy Email:
Hey Tom,
CCL teleseminar in a few minutes. I’m probably just going to grab the
replay but thought you might want to grab it live.
hxxp://www.some-domain-name-here.com
Cheers!
Mike S.
=== End email
And this isn’t the first one. How much simpler can an email get and it was sent to one recipient. But I couldn’t get it to my associate in a timely manner because Verizon’s spam filtering decided “THIS IS SPAM.” Who in the hell are the people running these spam filters is what I want to know. Has to be the suits as no real geek could be that bad! And that’s the core point. The people who understand the technology (the Geeks) for the most part aren’t the ones making the decisions. Which is why we have to be on guard against letting *ANY* large group with it’s own agenda from having any major control over the Internet.
If you needed ANY other reason to keep the major players like Verizon and Comcast from having too much control over the Internet than this should do it. If not then please take a few minutes and visit Save the Internet. Ah hech why not visit it anyway!
{ 1 trackback }