Rhonda Bracey: At Random

Day 1

Uneventful three-and-a-bit hour drive to Perth; only 11 long term parking bays available when I got there and I got one, so I didn’t have to implement plan B!

Equally uneventful direct Qantas flight to Brisbane. Slight rain delay and a slight traffic delay coming in to Brisbane, but I was in my apartment accommodation by 7:30 and at the apartment the other Perth staff were staying in by 8:00pm for an EXCELLENT BBQ steak dinner!

We were thwarted by the rain – despite being under cover, the wind blew the rain in and we headed up (with 3 other guys from the Brisbane office) to the 38th floor where their apartment was.

The guys walked me back to my accommodation (2 blocks away), which was nice.

Day 2

In the office today. Two longish meetings, and then a few bits and pieces. Back to the apartment just after 5:00pm. Will be heading out for dinner with the guys tonight – not sure where or when. Will update later…

Day 2 continued…

Went out to a pizza and lasagne dinner to Citizen Restaurant (Albert St) with two of the team – one of the guys from the Perth office and a new recruit from Johannesburg. I’ve had better pizza – and worse. The three meals, two beers and one glass of wine came to $51, so that wasn’t too bad.

Day 3

Packed up this morning (not that there was a lot to pack!), then off to the office for the 8:00am start of the half day usability workshop with users from the client’s offices. The workshop went really well – we got a lot of issues identified and enunciated – and, most importantly, prioritised. The afternoon was spent combining all the butcher’s paper ideas from the two groups into one document, and presenting that to a small group of developers. More fleshing out of that document will occur, but the hard work of going from “I don’t like it” to something concrete is done. Now, for the decisions on what can/will get done, and when… None of that is my problem, thank goodness.

I left the office before 5:00pm hoping to beat the end-of-day cab rush. Nope. There were about 7 people in front of me at the taxi rank just outside the office. And it was raining. I asked if anyone was going to the Airport – the guy next to me was and was OK to share a cab. As it happened, a guy three up from us was going to collect his car from the service depot – which happened to be on the way to the Airport – so the cab driver asked if anyone was going to the Airport and the three of us shared the cab.

I’m currently sitting in the VERY busy Qantas Club lounge waiting for my flight to Perth. I’m due in around 11:00pm, then have to collect the car and go to the hotel the company has booked for me. I’ll have a leisurely drive home tomorrow.

Later… The flight was 90 minutes late leaving, getting in to Perth around midnight. I had a VERY uncomfortable flight – the chap next to me was a pretty big guy and his knees were spread so they encroached on my space, and his backside and thighs overflowed into my space. There was no way I could avoid him – and with those economy seats, there was no way he could sit any other way. It made me very uncomfortable. The only saving grace was that I was on the aisle so after the food service, I was able to stretch out a little. The movie was Ocean’s Thirteen. Now in-flight movies aren’t the best for sound and vision, but even accounting for these limitations, this was a VERY ordinary movie, in my opinion. None of the humour and repartee from the other two. Oh, and I had a slightly upset stomach. No wonder I didn’t enjoy this flight!

Day 4

I checked in to the Melbourne Hotel in Hay St, Perth after midnight. The room was adequate but not impressive for the price. The bed and pillows were great; the shower was set up for wheelchair access and so had one of those handheld showers – which was situated so that it sprayed water all over the bathroom floor when I turned it on. You really don’t need this at 12:30pm. Sigh. I finally fell asleep around 1:30am. And then was woken around 7:00am as the room was directly opposite someone’s office, and outside on the veranda a party was going on! Well, it sounded like it. Near my room was two of the function rooms, and one of them linked to the first floor veranda. A breakfast function was going on, and some people decided to spill over on to the veranda… right outside my window.

When I checked out, I suggested to the rooms manager that they don’t put late-arriving guests that room and told her about the early morning noise. She was most apologetic and knocked off the $24 valet parking charge. Which was something. Even though the company was paying for the room, the credit charge hadn’t gone through, so I paid it (I’ll claim it on expenses). The room-only charge was $155 for the (short) night. Very expensive for what it was.

After doing some shopping (I finally tried out an Aeron chair and have ordered two!!!), and collecting our fix of Indian food (4x beef vindaloo and 4x chilli chicken dry), I hit the road around 1:00pm. It rained almost the entire way home – in some patches the rain was *that* heavy the wipers were on double speed and the traffic was reduced to a crawl.

It was nice to be home. We had a beef vindaloo, and watched the first of the footy finals (Port Adelaide beat the West Coast Eagles by 3 points; Collingwood play Sydney tomorrow night).

I’m off to Brisbane on Tuesday to spend all day Wednesday in the office, followed by a usability/user interface workshop on Thursday. I fly back on Thursday evening, getting back to Perth near midnight. Overnight in Perth then drive home Friday.

The following week, I’m back in Perth on the Tuesday for an all day meeting with one of my Brisbane bosses on Wednesday, then home sometime on Thursday.

After weeks of no travelling/commuting, there’s a few thousand kilometres to come in the next two weeks. Which is good, ‘cos I’ve got a lot of podcasts saved up to listen to!

I get the occasional hijacking of my domain name with some fake string in front of it and most of the auto responses from the spam filters come back to *my* Spam Quarantine folder. After being a bit paranoid about my system being compromised, I was told by a system administrator that it wasn’t me, it was someone/machine out there in the wild who thought my domain name would be a good one to attach ‘xcsewagtsyqhgv’ to and send off messages about body part enhancements for body parts I don’t even have. <sigh>

I’ve now learned to live with it and just delete those messages, and I no longer get paranoid.

However, others do, as evidenced by a discussion thread this past week on the Lone Writers list. Probably one of the clearest explanations of this was posted today by Lou Quillio. With his permission, here’s his response to the person whose Gmail account appeared to have been hijacked:

**********

In general there’s (almost certainly) not a problem, so you don’t need a solution. You just need information.

The phenomenon you describe is called “backscatter” or “outscatter”. It’s caused by mailer-daemons (you might say “email servers”) sending auto-responses when they identify spam. Spam is also called UBE, or unsolicited bulk email.

Here’s what happens:

A piece of spam is sent — to someone you don’t even know — with one of your email addresses as the ‘From:’ address. That *doesn’t** mean it was sent through your account or someone has stolen your login credentials. The ‘From:’ header in an email message is an arbitrary string, chosen by the sender. It isn’t authoritative in the slightest.

The piece of spam is received by the addressee’s mailer-daemon (pronounced “demon”), it’s identified as UBE, and blocked. The addressee never sees it.

Now the mailer-daemon has a decision to make. The matter can end there. Or, the mailer-daemon _could_ send an automated message to the ‘From:’ address, warning about possible UBE. That’s backscatter.

How useful are these auto-responses? Not very. Any knowledgeable sysop is aware that the ‘From:’ address is probably not the real sender.

But many send them anyway, and word them jarringly: “Considered Unsolicited Bulk Email FROM YOU”, etc. Uhh-huh. Why assume that, bub? Are you living in some innocent 1999 time warp?

Anyhow, this auto-response arrives at your GMail account and guess what? GMail marks it as spam. Because it is. Backscatter is spam. It’s unsolicited by you, the recipient, and sent in bulk.

Still with me? Spam sent + auto-response to somebody there’s no reason to assume sent it = more spam. Backscatter spam.

So there’s no _technical_ problem, just a network effect. Is there a _social_ problem? That, too, depends on how much information you and your peeps have, how well you understand what’s happening.

First concern: the spam sent under your name to Aunt Edna (or more likely to an utter stranger). What will Edna think of me?! Nothing. She didn’t even get it. Her mailserver blocked it. That’s why you got the auto-response.

Second concern: whomever (or whatever) warned you about sending spam apparently thinks you’re a bad girl. You don’t want _anybody_ thinking that. Relax. It was a machine, a rather dumb one.

Here are the take-aways:

1. Never trust a ‘From:’ address alone. You can’t. You never could. So forget that.
2. Ignore backscatter if you use GMail, Yahoo! Mail, or one of the other big services. If there’s a problem, it’s theirs. And there’s probably not a problem.
3. Ignore backscatter if you *know* your desktop email client isn’t compromised. Past experience has made Windows users paranoid. Updated Windows installs aren’t nearly as vulnerable. It remains a best practice *not* to use Internet Explorer nor Outlook Express. They were the egregious point of failure– and, however improved, are vulnerable by design and ubiquity.
4. Don’t fly into a tizzy and start spamming your peeps and your lists in shame. Windows trained this into you. You’ll have to train yourself out, and the first step to recovery is staying calm.
5. Never, ever retrieve or send email over an insecure connection. GMail won’t let you, cuz Google’s not dumb. Whenever you’re setting-up an account, connect with SSL/TLS. POP3, IMAP, SMTP … no matter. Always choose the SSL option and avoid providers who don’t offer one. Your email account’s username and password can’t be filched if they’re never sent over an insecure wire.
6. Send plain text email, and read messages as plain text regardless how they were sent. Why did the the Trojans admit the horse? Because it was fancy. You don’t need fancy. You’re a writer, not a formatter, and it’s your words that matter.

All that stuff about firewalls and virus scanners and changing passwords all the time … yeah, sure, that’s fine. But none of it’s related to your recent fear — which concerns a network effect and is cured with knowledge.

***********

Thanks Lou!

I received some mail today from Telstra, the Australian telecommunications giant. I have shares in them (which I really should get rid of… they’ve never done well). In amongst all the puffery about how good they are was a slip of paper that was a welcome relief. To quote from it:

“Recent amendments to the Corporations Act allow companies to provide their annual reports to shareholders on the Internet rather than by hard copy. … commencing from the 2007 Annual Report we will no longer mail you a hard copy unless you specifically ask us to do so.”

At last! Some sense. An opt-in clause versus an opt-out one, and a massive saving for companies in not having to get these glossy tomes printed and mailed out. An even better saving for those shareholders who receive these missives because it’s required by law but who just throw them out without doing more than skim them (if that).

I only own a few small parcels of shares in a couple of companies, but it still bothers me to get these 100+ page documents every year. They all try and outdo each other every year in the glossiness, paper stock, fancy wancy bindings etc. So I’m very pleased that the lawmakers have seen fit to enter the 21st century and allow alternative corporate reporting mechanisms.

Of course, elements of the printing industry that have survived only because of this cash cow may be squealing in pain right now. But I’d suspect many ‘Mum and Dad’ shareholders may be cheering these changes.