[NNagain] An Amtrak trip through the real world yesterday

[NNagain] An Amtrak trip through the real world yesterday

[Dave Taht]

Normally I would blog a story like this, but knowing I have an
audience of at least 10 people that might read it, via email, you can
ignore it if you want, or cue up the song at the end and wade through
it. This story is pertinent to the nn list eventually, I think. After
some editing, it will end up blogged. If you just want the pertinent
stuff, please please, just skip to the PS at the end.

...

This past Wednesday, I decided to take the Amtrak "Coast Starlight" -
Train 14 - from SJC to Vancouver for the talks I am giving there this
weekend. I still have a lot of writing to do, and I figured that I
could finish up the slides on the trip. The cellphones worked rarely,
and the wifi not at all. I loved that! I just needed to write! but
instead I ended up swapping stories with everyone I met, and writing
those down.

I was pretty tired when I got on the train at 8PM. My seatmate wore a
mask, so I couldn't tell if she was male or female - just obviously
equally tired. I slept fitfully, only waking up once that I remember
when a set of bright white lights crossed my eyes, which I think was a
grain operation of some sort.

At the  crack of dawn, I rushed to the cafe car, with my guitar. I
cannot recommend this moment, on this train, more highly, it is
quitenssenly American and why I love this country so much. We sat
there, watching the translucent-silk like fog, over the snow, and over
Klamath Lake. Bucky Fuller had long ago called this dawn more
accurately according to modern physics - he called it "sunsight",
rather than "sunrise". A magnificent hour passed. A few chords and
words from "this land is your land" escaped my lips and guitar, along
with gasps of awe and delight from everyone in the car as magnificent
scenery passed by.

Then I went to breakfast.

...

Amtrak has a policy of community seating, 4 per table, in the dining
car. It's *needed* - there is only so much time and so much space on a
shared train, and people are there in part to relax and meet other
people.

I sat down with a builder and his wife, freshly here from Maine. She
had a humane society t-shirt on, and while we talked about many
things, only relevant here was how her husband used youtube to get
short videos on how to "fix stuff" he'd never encountered before.

A little bit later, a former, very BIG and burly marine, who now works
as a flagger, sat down in the fourth seat.

While we all talked about many things - they did like what they used
the Internet for, and they did not want to talk much about their jobs,
but the scenery and the trip and what they were going to go next. I
asked the Marine about his job for example - And he sighed. "You stand
outside all day and take abuse from drivers." They think "my job is to
make them late, not make them safe."

The builder and his wife had to get off at the next stop in a few
minutes, and he had not the time or space to finish his meal so he
offered up the rest of his breakfast to us. The marine and I returned
to talking.

"I don't get why people are in such a rush. They have the technology
to avoid construction if they just thought ahead." - he said. "*I* get
up 2 hours early to avoid the traffic, get to the job site, then I
take a walk around the area, or play some youtube, take a nap. I
rarely get a lunch break and usually have to pee somewhere off the
side of the road. " He talked about an accident or two he had seen.

Just as the train began to pull to a stop, the builder guy came
rushing back to leave a tip for the waiter.

Me and the marine talked about his town - an air force town apparently
- and we talked about interservice rivalries a bit - he said he'd put
up his service's flag on his lawn - and got more than a few unexpected
complaints about it from various neighbors that wanted him to take it
down.

He went out and got a bigger flag, grinning ferociously at the flack
he took from the "fake fliers".

...

I took my guitar down to the cafe car again after that.

Two ladies in their 70s?( 80s?) that had been to Woodstock were there.
They had many memories of that (pictures, too!), and all that had
happened since, to share. They had been in a band together up until
recently. "Joy" borrowed my guitar and played some amazing stuff, to
the admiration of us all in the car... while the magnificent landscape
continued to roll by. The conductor came down and gave us countdowns
to the next passing waterfall, and every one leaned onto those sides
of the car to admire them.

I had been working on a new filksong about surveillance capitalism. It
is based on the chords and rhyme's of Buffalo Springfields "For what
it's worth" - which I have been hearing played a lot these past few
years [cue up this song instead while reading on: 1]. I am changing
the words around a lot. My version of "For What it's Worth"  - is
clearly a satire. I do not know if the too-sensitive algorithms now
enforcing the DMCA will take it down or not. I'm going to play it
anyway, I'm going to finish writing it anyway, and pass the words
around, at least.

A kid, "Jake", (who was going on 19, I learned later) shyly sidled
over. He really wanted to play my guitar, and he noodled quietly on it
whilst I talked to other people and cussed at my notebook. He was
pretty good - better than me by a lot! As the morning wore on, he
pulled out more and more stuff, and got better and better. He was
carrying a pick! I finally took my guitar back after my fingers had
healed, hoping we could do a song we both shared together. He had
heard "Comfortably numb" at least, but did not know the words. I
called over Joy to do one I hoped we had at all least heard - Jeff
Buckley's version of Hallelujah. I had managed to misplace my capo in
my other bag, but his vocal range was good enough to be able to sing
it in Cohen's original key , which neither I or Joy could do easily -
so we harmonized. We *rocked* that car with that song.

There was a young lady listening in on us, too. From her crows feet, I
guessed she was in her early 40s, but it turned out she was 36
(oops!), with pretty blue eyes. Call her "Kay". She originally
stationed herself 6 feet away, but us sharing and passing the guitar
around, and trying out new rhymes for that song gradually drew her in.

She had left her job as a French teacher for the 3rd to 8th grades,
last Thursday, and she was going off for a new career, after spending
the last few months as a scrum master in training, for some
transportation department or another. She talked about the burnout she
had had about her now former life as a teacher, the 7 day weeks, the
hundreds of stairs she had to climb between classes, the unruly kids,
and the administrative overhead.

She was unsure if anyone would hire her given her background - but
those that hired her felt strongly that her experience in corraling 14
year olds was also going to work on engineers (and I agreed!), and
that her storytelling ability - about making a story relevant and
interesting in multiple languages, to multiple kinds a people was
going to help meld the team together.

Despite all that extensive experience in teaching kids French, she had
never heard of duolingo, which is a pretty good tool for that. It's a
big internet, I was not surprised she hadn't heard of it, but I do
hope that parents that want their kids to gain another language try
logging their kids into that, since teachers are increasingly
unavailable.

She brightened when she talked about all the former students who
wanted to talk to her that had heard she was leaving. I had a chance
to communicate how computer science actually did cross over into other
fields - I asked her how much time she spent sorting socks per week,
and she said sorting them, for her and her husband, "took about 10
minutes per week", she hated it, and she described exactly how she did
it. It was a pretty good algorithm, sorting by size and color, but
perhaps it could have been better, I thought. So I asked, what if you
had a better algorithm that only took 8 minutes? At the prospect of
saving 2 minutes every week for the rest of her life on this painful
task, her eyes lit up!

(I don't remember what that algorithm is! - it's in a book called
"Algorithms to live by" - she wrote that title down. For all I know
her method is better than Marvin Minskys! Hers is far, far better than
Minskys' college roomates' was! For all I know 98% of humanity gets
sock sorting wrong.)

Jake left (I gave him a couple of my "This machine cures Vogons"
stickers, and my tattered copy of Dylan's songbook), and Kay and I had
a heck of a good conversation about everything else under the sun.

At one point she got up to get us a set of drinks, and while she was
gone I snuck a thank you card into her bag for being so sharing and
caring about her decade+ worth of kids.

She had to get off at the stop before mine, I said the only words of
French I know - "au revior". She said "jusqu'à ce que nous nous
revoyions" - or something like that, it was noise to me at the time -
and explained that it meant "Until we meet again". I had to look up
what she actually said, on the internet, because it made no sense to
me in English, and what I just wrote is not anything what it sounded
like to me then.

We swapped email addresses and a hug. She gave me what was left of her
bread and deli meats.

When I finally left the cafe car and got back to my original seat the
girl next to me started up a conversation. She had been listening also
in the cafe car. She did not remember anything I had played but had
loved what she had heard from Joy and the kid.

She was studying library science. And we had a good talk about the
value of information to people, over time, and why libraries were
needed. Among other things she disparaged the "Dewey Decimal system" -
"good enough for the 1800s", she said "but it squeezes whole
categories into tiny slots that it shouldn't". I brought up the
"archive.org"'s fight to stay online - presently spending more money
on lawyers than books. "Oh, that place in SF? Never been there" she
said. I told her that they had a free lunch and tour on fridays.

Finally I got to Seattle, after a nap.

I had not planned out this portion of the trip well, (thinking I
actually would have connectivity) - the friends I had hoped would meet
me there didn't make it. I got on the amtrak station's wifi, and made
a reservation, caught a cab, and conked out. This morning I typed up
these notes from the trip, instead of working on my talk for
netdevconf.

And then, only then, mid morning today, I checked my email, to see
Nathan Simington's lovely note, eaten by my spam filter, discussing
stuff about the the future of the Internet I would so much like so
many more to be thinking clearly about.

I had business class this morning for the next segment to Canada.
Perhaps then I will get some work done - but frankly after too many
years now, isolated, WFH, I long for some more conversations like
that, with strangers from all professions and parts of the world. Also
it is very cold in Seattle, and I could use some gloves and a hat. I
tried to change my amtrak reservation over the website - it didn't
work - so I called, and in about 8 minutes of waiting on hold (and
typing away at this) - I got to a very nice operator that changed my
ticket from train to bus, for tomorrow afternoon. I complemented her
on that magnificant ride, and she said - "I've heard that a lot.
Making that trip is on my bucket list."

I encouraged her to put it on her bucket list multiple times. As I
would encourage you all.

...

PS A couple meta points:

I also did an informal poll of a couple issues with all these people:

Do you know what a packet is? 0
Do you know what network Neutrality is? 0 (well, the librarian thought
it meant censorship)
How many people do you know died of Covid? 0. Old age, illness,
accident, and suicide were mentioned instead.
I also explained bufferbloat to about half of them: Have you ever done
an upload and had your network become useless? All nodded yes.

So I worry about all these other possibly fictional fights we are
having in the Matrix, and about the quality of the simulation we are
coerced to live in.

Additionally:

0) I was very happy to get offline. It may well be that 90% of
everyone else wasn't - but I didn't talk to them.
1) I could get frustrated at changing my reservation online, but I
rather enjoyed talking to a human with a decent wait time.
2) I could get mad that I figure 80% of this new email list is
vanishing into spam boxes. As the administrator, I check my logs, the
email was accepted, it is not in any public spam blockers like RBL,
and I have no idea what to do or who to contact or what algorithm to
bypass to make sure the mail gets through. There is no recourse, nor
service motto, like the postal service used to make about regular
mail, about email.

What of the 10s of thousands of other emails that have come over the
years not just from lists.bufferbloat.net but from people trying
honestly to communicate?

3) It was not all that long ago that long form pieces like this were
more common on the Internet. You can still find them, if you look for
them, and put away twitter for a while.

G+ is long gone, as is everything I wrote there. If I put this just on
my blog, it will only stay up as long as I am still alive and paying
the bill. Maybe I will put a copy on glass for my granddaughter to
read. 200 of you now have copies, too.

[1] Skarlett Woods' version of "For what its worth" I like rather a
lot. But I like this original better:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ifAKkXcUjPc


-- 
Oct 30: Low Latency Life Lessons Learned
Dave Täht CSO, LibreQos

Re: [NNagain] An Amtrak trip through the real world yesterday

[Jack Haverty]

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On 10/27/23 12:37, Dave Taht via Nnagain wrote:
> I could get mad that I figure 80% of this new email list is vanishing 
> into spam boxes. As the administrator, I check my logs, the email was 
> accepted, it is not in any public spam blockers like RBL, and I have 
> no idea what to do or who to contact or what algorithm to bypass to 
> make sure the mail gets through. 

I've never understood how spam filters operate.   As an end-user, it 
does seem to me that email has been getting less reliable over the decades.

I've digitally signed this message.  Perhaps that helps get through the 
filters?  Can nnagain@lists.bufferbloat.net sign its messages? I realize 
email signing is likely imperfect for hardcore security needs.  Why 
don't more people sign their email?

Jack Haverty

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Re: [NNagain] An Amtrak trip through the real world yesterday

[rjmcmahon]

I received Nathan's email through my personal server & MTA.

I've been running my own MTA since 2000. It's a non trivial amount of 
work to keep it useful & working. Many list providers went out of 
business likely because the cost to run them exceeded revenues.

The majors read everyone's email via ML. One may need to get through may 
be to make sure the content of an email will trigger a high value 
targeted ad so the email has monetary value for the "free" email service 
provider. We get what we get when somebody else actually pays our bills. 
Every email sent is a customer match opportunity which suggests the 
incentives are less on source side pays and more on source side triggers 
ads.

Bob
> On 10/27/23 12:37, Dave Taht via Nnagain wrote:
> 
>> I could get mad that I figure 80% of this new email list is
>> vanishing into spam boxes. As the administrator, I check my logs,
>> the email was accepted, it is not in any public spam blockers like
>> RBL, and I have no idea what to do or who to contact or what
>> algorithm to bypass to make sure the mail gets through.
> 
> I've never understood how spam filters operate.   As an end-user, it
> does seem to me that email has been getting less reliable over the
> decades.
> 
> I've digitally signed this message.  Perhaps that helps get through
> the filters?  Can nnagain@lists.bufferbloat.net sign its messages?   I
> realize email signing is likely imperfect for hardcore security needs.
>  Why don't more people sign their email?
> 
> Jack Haverty
> _______________________________________________
> Nnagain mailing list
> Nnagain@lists.bufferbloat.net
> https://lists.bufferbloat.net/listinfo/nnagain

[NNagain] Spam filtering

[Hal Murray]

[Was Amtrack]


> 2) I could get mad that I figure 80% of this new email list is vanishing into
> spam boxes.


> What of the 10s of thousands of other emails that have come over the years
> not just from lists.bufferbloat.net but from people trying honestly to
> communicate? 

There is/was a good discussion of all the good things that network geeks have 
done.

How about discussing the things they haven't done?

Spam would be pretty high on my list.  It's tangled up with (in)security -- a 
lot comes from infected systems or phished accounts.

The current approach to spam is cost shifting.  If you don't pay for your 
abuse desk, the crap that you send or phishing sites you host..., means that 
the rest of the net has to spend more on defense.

Anybody remember Spamford Wallace?  He was going to setup a spam friendly ISP. 
 Nobody would connect to him.  I wonder what would happen if a few ISPs that 
host a lot of abuse had  more troubles getting connected to the net.  Would a 
few well publicized examples be enough to spread the word?



High on my list would be dis/mis-information.  The business model seems to be 
to show customers things that will keep them online so you can show them more 
ads.  Gues what does that?

Is this also cost shifting?  It's society as a whole that has to pay for the 
disruption caused by bogus information.


-- 
These are my opinions.  I hate spam.

Re: [NNagain] Spam filtering

[Nathan Simington]

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This has gone from mere cost-shifting to protocol takeover. Self-hosting is
essentially dead because you are guaranteed to get filtered by Outlook and
Gmail, which means that there is de facto embrace-and-extend -- "best
viewed in Internet Explorer at 800x600" but for a core standard.

On Fri, Oct 27, 2023 at 5:48 PM Hal Murray via Nnagain <
nnagain@lists.bufferbloat.net> wrote:

> [Was Amtrack]
>
>
> > 2) I could get mad that I figure 80% of this new email list is vanishing
> into
> > spam boxes.
>
>
> > What of the 10s of thousands of other emails that have come over the
> years
> > not just from lists.bufferbloat.net but from people trying honestly to
> > communicate?
>
> There is/was a good discussion of all the good things that network geeks
> have
> done.
>
> How about discussing the things they haven't done?
>
> Spam would be pretty high on my list.  It's tangled up with (in)security
> -- a
> lot comes from infected systems or phished accounts.
>
> The current approach to spam is cost shifting.  If you don't pay for your
> abuse desk, the crap that you send or phishing sites you host..., means
> that
> the rest of the net has to spend more on defense.
>
> Anybody remember Spamford Wallace?  He was going to setup a spam friendly
> ISP.
>  Nobody would connect to him.  I wonder what would happen if a few ISPs
> that
> host a lot of abuse had  more troubles getting connected to the net.
> Would a
> few well publicized examples be enough to spread the word?
>
>
>
> High on my list would be dis/mis-information.  The business model seems to
> be
> to show customers things that will keep them online so you can show them
> more
> ads.  Gues what does that?
>
> Is this also cost shifting?  It's society as a whole that has to pay for
> the
> disruption caused by bogus information.
>
>
> --
> These are my opinions.  I hate spam.
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Nnagain mailing list
> Nnagain@lists.bufferbloat.net
> https://lists.bufferbloat.net/listinfo/nnagain
>


-- 
Nathan Simington
cell: 305-793-6899

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Re: [NNagain] Spam filtering

[Dave Taht]

On Fri, Oct 27, 2023 at 4:23 PM Nathan Simington via Nnagain
<nnagain@lists.bufferbloat.net> wrote:
>
> This has gone from mere cost-shifting to protocol takeover. Self-hosting is essentially dead because you are guaranteed to get filtered by Outlook and Gmail, which means that there is de facto embrace-and-extend -- "best viewed in Internet Explorer at 800x600" but for a core standard.

This is one of those things that could be reversed if there was law
guaranteeing  freedom of communications. That really does not seem to
be the way the world is going, however.

See: https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/posts/chat-control/ for example.

I like email (and netnews). You had a copy, the recipients had copies,
and pretty much anyone that had the capability of snooping in-between
had copies.  Nobody ever got arround to making starttls mandatory.
Compare this to all the even more centralized, but incompatible chat
systems since, multiple ones that have vanished from the web (g+), and
others that are barely hanging on, like disquis.

Even with the flight to mastodon and other heavily encrypted home
server technologies, email remains the most common, useful and
malleable public identifier for connecting people to people. I would
like to make it better, for everyone, again.


> On Fri, Oct 27, 2023 at 5:48 PM Hal Murray via Nnagain <nnagain@lists.bufferbloat.net> wrote:
>>
>> [Was Amtrack]
>>
>>
>> > 2) I could get mad that I figure 80% of this new email list is vanishing into
>> > spam boxes.
>>
>>
>> > What of the 10s of thousands of other emails that have come over the years
>> > not just from lists.bufferbloat.net but from people trying honestly to
>> > communicate?
>>
>> There is/was a good discussion of all the good things that network geeks have
>> done.
>>
>> How about discussing the things they haven't done?
>>
>> Spam would be pretty high on my list.  It's tangled up with (in)security -- a
>> lot comes from infected systems or phished accounts.
>>
>> The current approach to spam is cost shifting.  If you don't pay for your
>> abuse desk, the crap that you send or phishing sites you host..., means that
>> the rest of the net has to spend more on defense.
>>
>> Anybody remember Spamford Wallace?  He was going to setup a spam friendly ISP.
>>  Nobody would connect to him.  I wonder what would happen if a few ISPs that
>> host a lot of abuse had  more troubles getting connected to the net.  Would a
>> few well publicized examples be enough to spread the word?
>>
>>
>>
>> High on my list would be dis/mis-information.  The business model seems to be
>> to show customers things that will keep them online so you can show them more
>> ads.  Gues what does that?
>>
>> Is this also cost shifting?  It's society as a whole that has to pay for the
>> disruption caused by bogus information.
>>
>>
>> --
>> These are my opinions.  I hate spam.
>>
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Nnagain mailing list
>> Nnagain@lists.bufferbloat.net
>> https://lists.bufferbloat.net/listinfo/nnagain
>
>
>
> --
> Nathan Simington
> cell: 305-793-6899
> _______________________________________________
> Nnagain mailing list
> Nnagain@lists.bufferbloat.net
> https://lists.bufferbloat.net/listinfo/nnagain



-- 
Oct 30: https://netdevconf.info/0x17/news/the-maestro-and-the-music-bof.html
Dave Täht CSO, LibreQos

Re: [NNagain] Spam filtering

[Frantisek Borsik]

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I just can't even. So many garbage ideas out of Brussels as of late. DSA,
DMA, DSM... GDPR in the past, or even that horrible CRA = Cyber Resilience
Act:

https://www.internetsociety.org/blog/2022/10/the-eus-proposed-cyber-resilience-act-will-damage-the-open-source-ecosystem/
https://blog.nlnetlabs.nl/open-source-software-vs-the-cyber-resilience-act/

Good intentions don't count, bad results do. Most of the evil in this world
was done by people with good intentions and this is not an exception.


All the best,

Frank

Frantisek (Frank) Borsik



https://www.linkedin.com/in/frantisekborsik

Signal, Telegram, WhatsApp: +421919416714

iMessage, mobile: +420775230885

Skype: casioa5302ca

frantisek.borsik@gmail.com


On Sat, Oct 28, 2023 at 1:45 AM Dave Taht via Nnagain <
nnagain@lists.bufferbloat.net> wrote:

> On Fri, Oct 27, 2023 at 4:23 PM Nathan Simington via Nnagain
> <nnagain@lists.bufferbloat.net> wrote:
> >
> > This has gone from mere cost-shifting to protocol takeover. Self-hosting
> is essentially dead because you are guaranteed to get filtered by Outlook
> and Gmail, which means that there is de facto embrace-and-extend -- "best
> viewed in Internet Explorer at 800x600" but for a core standard.
>
> This is one of those things that could be reversed if there was law
> guaranteeing  freedom of communications. That really does not seem to
> be the way the world is going, however.
>
> See: https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/posts/chat-control/ for example.
>
> I like email (and netnews). You had a copy, the recipients had copies,
> and pretty much anyone that had the capability of snooping in-between
> had copies.  Nobody ever got arround to making starttls mandatory.
> Compare this to all the even more centralized, but incompatible chat
> systems since, multiple ones that have vanished from the web (g+), and
> others that are barely hanging on, like disquis.
>
> Even with the flight to mastodon and other heavily encrypted home
> server technologies, email remains the most common, useful and
> malleable public identifier for connecting people to people. I would
> like to make it better, for everyone, again.
>
>
> > On Fri, Oct 27, 2023 at 5:48 PM Hal Murray via Nnagain <
> nnagain@lists.bufferbloat.net> wrote:
> >>
> >> [Was Amtrack]
> >>
> >>
> >> > 2) I could get mad that I figure 80% of this new email list is
> vanishing into
> >> > spam boxes.
> >>
> >>
> >> > What of the 10s of thousands of other emails that have come over the
> years
> >> > not just from lists.bufferbloat.net but from people trying honestly
> to
> >> > communicate?
> >>
> >> There is/was a good discussion of all the good things that network
> geeks have
> >> done.
> >>
> >> How about discussing the things they haven't done?
> >>
> >> Spam would be pretty high on my list.  It's tangled up with
> (in)security -- a
> >> lot comes from infected systems or phished accounts.
> >>
> >> The current approach to spam is cost shifting.  If you don't pay for
> your
> >> abuse desk, the crap that you send or phishing sites you host..., means
> that
> >> the rest of the net has to spend more on defense.
> >>
> >> Anybody remember Spamford Wallace?  He was going to setup a spam
> friendly ISP.
> >>  Nobody would connect to him.  I wonder what would happen if a few ISPs
> that
> >> host a lot of abuse had  more troubles getting connected to the net.
> Would a
> >> few well publicized examples be enough to spread the word?
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >> High on my list would be dis/mis-information.  The business model seems
> to be
> >> to show customers things that will keep them online so you can show
> them more
> >> ads.  Gues what does that?
> >>
> >> Is this also cost shifting?  It's society as a whole that has to pay
> for the
> >> disruption caused by bogus information.
> >>
> >>
> >> --
> >> These are my opinions.  I hate spam.
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >> _______________________________________________
> >> Nnagain mailing list
> >> Nnagain@lists.bufferbloat.net
> >> https://lists.bufferbloat.net/listinfo/nnagain
> >
> >
> >
> > --
> > Nathan Simington
> > cell: 305-793-6899
> > _______________________________________________
> > Nnagain mailing list
> > Nnagain@lists.bufferbloat.net
> > https://lists.bufferbloat.net/listinfo/nnagain
>
>
>
> --
> Oct 30:
> https://netdevconf.info/0x17/news/the-maestro-and-the-music-bof.html
> Dave Täht CSO, LibreQos
> _______________________________________________
> Nnagain mailing list
> Nnagain@lists.bufferbloat.net
> https://lists.bufferbloat.net/listinfo/nnagain
>

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Re: [NNagain] Spam filtering

[Daniel Ezell]

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Re: [NNagain] Spam filtering

[Frantisek Borsik]

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Thank you very much for this, Daniel. Safe travels, and enjoy your trip. I
hope to do it one day as well, to commemorate Dave (and I need to do a lot
of other things we were planning to do together, like to attend SpaceX
launch etc.)

Here is a reminder of Dave's Amtrak trip, if you want to refresh you memory
or missed it back then, in 2023:
https://lists.bufferbloat.net/pipermail/nnagain/2023-October/000286.html

Dave was heading to Netdev 0x17 <https://netdevconf.info/0x17/> in
Vancouver. His talks and music from the event, if anyone is interested, can
be found here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D9RGX6QFm5E and
https://youtu.be/rWnb543Sdk8?si=9LAEGpfBo2M5RX9X&t=2599

All the best,

Frank

Frantisek (Frank) Borsik


*In loving memory of Dave Täht: *1965-2025

https://libreqos.io/2025/04/01/in-loving-memory-of-dave/


https://www.linkedin.com/in/frantisekborsik

Signal, Telegram, WhatsApp: +421919416714

iMessage, mobile: +420775230885

Skype: casioa5302ca

frantisek.borsik@gmail.com


On Sun, Apr 6, 2025 at 3:21 AM Daniel Ezell <dezell@stonescry.com> wrote:

> Taking the Coast Starlight tonight. Wanted to compare notes with Dave
> about it. Sad to have missed the opportunity. So this trip is a memorial to
> a great guy I never got to meet.
> Daniel Ezell
>
> On Oct 28, 2023, at 3:51 AM, Frantisek Borsik via Nnagain <
> nnagain@lists.bufferbloat.net> wrote:
>
> 
> I just can't even. So many garbage ideas out of Brussels as of late. DSA,
> DMA, DSM... GDPR in the past, or even that horrible CRA = Cyber Resilience
> Act:
>
>
> https://www.internetsociety.org/blog/2022/10/the-eus-proposed-cyber-resilience-act-will-damage-the-open-source-ecosystem/
> https://blog.nlnetlabs.nl/open-source-software-vs-the-cyber-resilience-act/
>
> Good intentions don't count, bad results do. Most of the evil in this
> world was done by people with good intentions and this is not an exception.
>
>
> All the best,
>
> Frank
>
> Frantisek (Frank) Borsik
>
>
>
> https://www.linkedin.com/in/frantisekborsik
>
> Signal, Telegram, WhatsApp: +421919416714
>
> iMessage, mobile: +420775230885
>
> Skype: casioa5302ca
>
> frantisek.borsik@gmail.com
>
>
> On Sat, Oct 28, 2023 at 1:45 AM Dave Taht via Nnagain <
> nnagain@lists.bufferbloat.net> wrote:
>
>> On Fri, Oct 27, 2023 at 4:23 PM Nathan Simington via Nnagain
>> <nnagain@lists.bufferbloat.net> wrote:
>> >
>> > This has gone from mere cost-shifting to protocol takeover.
>> Self-hosting is essentially dead because you are guaranteed to get filtered
>> by Outlook and Gmail, which means that there is de facto embrace-and-extend
>> -- "best viewed in Internet Explorer at 800x600" but for a core standard.
>>
>> This is one of those things that could be reversed if there was law
>> guaranteeing  freedom of communications. That really does not seem to
>> be the way the world is going, however.
>>
>> See: https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/posts/chat-control/ for example.
>>
>> I like email (and netnews). You had a copy, the recipients had copies,
>> and pretty much anyone that had the capability of snooping in-between
>> had copies.  Nobody ever got arround to making starttls mandatory.
>> Compare this to all the even more centralized, but incompatible chat
>> systems since, multiple ones that have vanished from the web (g+), and
>> others that are barely hanging on, like disquis.
>>
>> Even with the flight to mastodon and other heavily encrypted home
>> server technologies, email remains the most common, useful and
>> malleable public identifier for connecting people to people. I would
>> like to make it better, for everyone, again.
>>
>>
>> > On Fri, Oct 27, 2023 at 5:48 PM Hal Murray via Nnagain <
>> nnagain@lists.bufferbloat.net> wrote:
>> >>
>> >> [Was Amtrack]
>> >>
>> >>
>> >> > 2) I could get mad that I figure 80% of this new email list is
>> vanishing into
>> >> > spam boxes.
>> >>
>> >>
>> >> > What of the 10s of thousands of other emails that have come over the
>> years
>> >> > not just from lists.bufferbloat.net but from people trying honestly
>> to
>> >> > communicate?
>> >>
>> >> There is/was a good discussion of all the good things that network
>> geeks have
>> >> done.
>> >>
>> >> How about discussing the things they haven't done?
>> >>
>> >> Spam would be pretty high on my list.  It's tangled up with
>> (in)security -- a
>> >> lot comes from infected systems or phished accounts.
>> >>
>> >> The current approach to spam is cost shifting.  If you don't pay for
>> your
>> >> abuse desk, the crap that you send or phishing sites you host...,
>> means that
>> >> the rest of the net has to spend more on defense.
>> >>
>> >> Anybody remember Spamford Wallace?  He was going to setup a spam
>> friendly ISP.
>> >>  Nobody would connect to him.  I wonder what would happen if a few
>> ISPs that
>> >> host a lot of abuse had  more troubles getting connected to the net.
>> Would a
>> >> few well publicized examples be enough to spread the word?
>> >>
>> >>
>> >>
>> >> High on my list would be dis/mis-information.  The business model
>> seems to be
>> >> to show customers things that will keep them online so you can show
>> them more
>> >> ads.  Gues what does that?
>> >>
>> >> Is this also cost shifting?  It's society as a whole that has to pay
>> for the
>> >> disruption caused by bogus information.
>> >>
>> >>
>> >> --
>> >> These are my opinions.  I hate spam.
>> >>
>> >>
>> >>
>> >> _______________________________________________
>> >> Nnagain mailing list
>> >> Nnagain@lists.bufferbloat.net
>> >> https://lists.bufferbloat.net/listinfo/nnagain
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> > --
>> > Nathan Simington
>> > cell: 305-793-6899
>> > _______________________________________________
>> > Nnagain mailing list
>> > Nnagain@lists.bufferbloat.net
>> > https://lists.bufferbloat.net/listinfo/nnagain
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> Oct 30:
>> https://netdevconf.info/0x17/news/the-maestro-and-the-music-bof.html
>> Dave Täht CSO, LibreQos
>> _______________________________________________
>> Nnagain mailing list
>> Nnagain@lists.bufferbloat.net
>> https://lists.bufferbloat.net/listinfo/nnagain
>>
> _______________________________________________
> Nnagain mailing list
> Nnagain@lists.bufferbloat.net
> https://lists.bufferbloat.net/listinfo/nnagain
>
>

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Re: [NNagain] Spam filtering

[Tanya Weiman]

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Thank you so much for these links, Frank! ❤️
 

> On 04/06/2025 6:23 AM EDT Frantisek Borsik via Nnagain <nnagain@lists.bufferbloat.net> wrote:
>  
>  
> Thank you very much for this, Daniel. Safe travels, and enjoy your trip. I hope to do it one day as well, to commemorate Dave (and I need to do a lot of other things we were planning to do together, like to attend SpaceX launch etc.)
>  
> Here is a reminder of Dave's Amtrak trip, if you want to refresh you memory or missed it back then, in 2023: https://lists.bufferbloat.net/pipermail/nnagain/2023-October/000286.html
>  
> Dave was heading to Netdev 0x17 https://netdevconf.info/0x17/ in Vancouver. His talks and music from the event, if anyone is interested, can be found here:
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D9RGX6QFm5E and https://youtu.be/rWnb543Sdk8?si=9LAEGpfBo2M5RX9X&t=2599
>  
> All the best,
>  
> 
> Frank
> 
>  
> 
> Frantisek (Frank) Borsik
> 
>  
> 
> In loving memory of Dave Täht: 1965-2025
> 
> https://libreqos.io/2025/04/01/in-loving-memory-of-dave/
> 
>  
> 
> https://www.linkedin.com/in/frantisekborsik
> 
> Signal, Telegram, WhatsApp: +421919416714 
> 
> iMessage, mobile: +420775230885
> 
> Skype: casioa5302ca
> 
> frantisek.borsik@gmail.com mailto:frantisek.borsik@gmail.com
> 
> 
> On Sun, Apr 6, 2025 at 3:21 AM Daniel Ezell <dezell@stonescry.com mailto:dezell@stonescry.com> wrote:
> 
> > Taking the Coast Starlight tonight. Wanted to compare notes with Dave about it. Sad to have missed the opportunity. So this trip is a memorial to a great guy I never got to meet. 
> > Daniel Ezell
> > 
> > 
> > > On Oct 28, 2023, at 3:51 AM, Frantisek Borsik via Nnagain <nnagain@lists.bufferbloat.net mailto:nnagain@lists.bufferbloat.net> wrote:
> > > 
> > > 
> > 
> > > I just can't even. So many garbage ideas out of Brussels as of late. DSA, DMA, DSM... GDPR in the past, or even that horrible CRA = Cyber Resilience Act:
> > > 
> > > https://www.internetsociety.org/blog/2022/10/the-eus-proposed-cyber-resilience-act-will-damage-the-open-source-ecosystem/
> > > https://blog.nlnetlabs.nl/open-source-software-vs-the-cyber-resilience-act/
> > >  
> > > Good intentions don't count, bad results do. Most of the evil in this world was done by people with good intentions and this is not an exception.
> > >  
> > > 
> > > All the best,
> > >  
> > > 
> > > Frank
> > > 
> > >  
> > > 
> > > Frantisek (Frank) Borsik
> > > 
> > >  
> > > 
> > > https://www.linkedin.com/in/frantisekborsik
> > > 
> > > Signal, Telegram, WhatsApp: +421919416714 
> > > 
> > > iMessage, mobile: +420775230885
> > > 
> > > Skype: casioa5302ca
> > > 
> > > frantisek.borsik@gmail.com mailto:frantisek.borsik@gmail.com
> > > 
> > > 
> > > On Sat, Oct 28, 2023 at 1:45 AM Dave Taht via Nnagain <nnagain@lists.bufferbloat.net mailto:nnagain@lists.bufferbloat.net> wrote:
> > > 
> > > > On Fri, Oct 27, 2023 at 4:23 PM Nathan Simington via Nnagain
> > > > <nnagain@lists.bufferbloat.net mailto:nnagain@lists.bufferbloat.net> wrote:
> > > > >
> > > > > This has gone from mere cost-shifting to protocol takeover. Self-hosting is essentially dead because you are guaranteed to get filtered by Outlook and Gmail, which means that there is de facto embrace-and-extend -- "best viewed in Internet Explorer at 800x600" but for a core standard.
> > > > 
> > > > This is one of those things that could be reversed if there was law
> > > > guaranteeing  freedom of communications. That really does not seem to
> > > > be the way the world is going, however.
> > > > 
> > > > See: https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/posts/chat-control/ for example.
> > > > 
> > > > I like email (and netnews). You had a copy, the recipients had copies,
> > > > and pretty much anyone that had the capability of snooping in-between
> > > > had copies.  Nobody ever got arround to making starttls mandatory.
> > > > Compare this to all the even more centralized, but incompatible chat
> > > > systems since, multiple ones that have vanished from the web (g+), and
> > > > others that are barely hanging on, like disquis.
> > > > 
> > > > Even with the flight to mastodon and other heavily encrypted home
> > > > server technologies, email remains the most common, useful and
> > > > malleable public identifier for connecting people to people. I would
> > > > like to make it better, for everyone, again.
> > > > 
> > > > 
> > > > > On Fri, Oct 27, 2023 at 5:48 PM Hal Murray via Nnagain <nnagain@lists.bufferbloat.net mailto:nnagain@lists.bufferbloat.net> wrote:
> > > > >>
> > > > >> [Was Amtrack]
> > > > >>
> > > > >>
> > > > >> > 2) I could get mad that I figure 80% of this new email list is vanishing into
> > > > >> > spam boxes.
> > > > >>
> > > > >>
> > > > >> > What of the 10s of thousands of other emails that have come over the years
> > > > >> > not just fromhttp://lists.bufferbloat.net but from people trying honestly to
> > > > >> > communicate?
> > > > >>
> > > > >> There is/was a good discussion of all the good things that network geeks have
> > > > >> done.
> > > > >>
> > > > >> How about discussing the things they haven't done?
> > > > >>
> > > > >> Spam would be pretty high on my list.  It's tangled up with (in)security -- a
> > > > >> lot comes from infected systems or phished accounts.
> > > > >>
> > > > >> The current approach to spam is cost shifting.  If you don't pay for your
> > > > >> abuse desk, the crap that you send or phishing sites you host..., means that
> > > > >> the rest of the net has to spend more on defense.
> > > > >>
> > > > >> Anybody remember Spamford Wallace?  He was going to setup a spam friendly ISP.
> > > > >>  Nobody would connect to him.  I wonder what would happen if a few ISPs that
> > > > >> host a lot of abuse had  more troubles getting connected to the net.  Would a
> > > > >> few well publicized examples be enough to spread the word?
> > > > >>
> > > > >>
> > > > >>
> > > > >> High on my list would be dis/mis-information.  The business model seems to be
> > > > >> to show customers things that will keep them online so you can show them more
> > > > >> ads.  Gues what does that?
> > > > >>
> > > > >> Is this also cost shifting?  It's society as a whole that has to pay for the
> > > > >> disruption caused by bogus information.
> > > > >>
> > > > >>
> > > > >> --
> > > > >> These are my opinions.  I hate spam.
> > > > >>
> > > > >>
> > > > >>
> > > > >> _______________________________________________
> > > > >> Nnagain mailing list
> > > > >> Nnagain@lists.bufferbloat.net mailto:Nnagain@lists.bufferbloat.net
> > > > >> https://lists.bufferbloat.net/listinfo/nnagain
> > > > >
> > > > >
> > > > >
> > > > > --
> > > > > Nathan Simington
> > > > > cell: 305-793-6899
> > > > > _______________________________________________
> > > > > Nnagain mailing list
> > > > > Nnagain@lists.bufferbloat.net mailto:Nnagain@lists.bufferbloat.net
> > > > > https://lists.bufferbloat.net/listinfo/nnagain
> > > > 
> > > > 
> > > > 
> > > > -- 
> > > > Oct 30: https://netdevconf.info/0x17/news/the-maestro-and-the-music-bof.html
> > > > Dave Täht CSO, LibreQos
> > > > _______________________________________________
> > > > Nnagain mailing list
> > > > Nnagain@lists.bufferbloat.net mailto:Nnagain@lists.bufferbloat.net
> > > > https://lists.bufferbloat.net/listinfo/nnagain
> > > > 
> > > _______________________________________________
> > > Nnagain mailing list
> > > Nnagain@lists.bufferbloat.net mailto:Nnagain@lists.bufferbloat.net
> > > https://lists.bufferbloat.net/listinfo/nnagain
> > > 
> > 
> _______________________________________________ Nnagain mailing list Nnagain@lists.bufferbloat.net https://lists.bufferbloat.net/listinfo/nnagain
> 

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Re: [NNagain] Spam filtering

[Frantisek Borsik]

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My great pleasure, Tanya. Btw, when I'm at it, here is a talk Dave gave at
Battlemesh v8 in Maribor, Slovenia, in 2015, and people love it a lot:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rb-UnHDw02o

Hope you guys will enjoy it as well.

All the best,

Frank

Frantisek (Frank) Borsik


*In loving memory of Dave Täht: *1965-2025

https://libreqos.io/2025/04/01/in-loving-memory-of-dave/


https://www.linkedin.com/in/frantisekborsik

Signal, Telegram, WhatsApp: +421919416714

iMessage, mobile: +420775230885

Skype: casioa5302ca

frantisek.borsik@gmail.com


On Sun, Apr 6, 2025 at 4:22 PM Tanya Weiman via Nnagain <
nnagain@lists.bufferbloat.net> wrote:

> Thank you so much for these links, Frank! ❤️
>
>
> On 04/06/2025 6:23 AM EDT Frantisek Borsik via Nnagain <
> nnagain@lists.bufferbloat.net> wrote:
>
>
> Thank you very much for this, Daniel. Safe travels, and enjoy your trip. I
> hope to do it one day as well, to commemorate Dave (and I need to do a lot
> of other things we were planning to do together, like to attend SpaceX
> launch etc.)
>
> Here is a reminder of Dave's Amtrak trip, if you want to refresh you
> memory or missed it back then, in 2023:
> https://lists.bufferbloat.net/pipermail/nnagain/2023-October/000286.html
>
> Dave was heading to Netdev 0x17 <https://netdevconf.info/0x17/> in
> Vancouver. His talks and music from the event, if anyone is interested, can
> be found here:
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D9RGX6QFm5E and
> https://youtu.be/rWnb543Sdk8?si=9LAEGpfBo2M5RX9X&t=2599
>
> All the best,
>
>
> Frank
>
>
>
> Frantisek (Frank) Borsik
>
>
>
> *In loving memory of Dave Täht: *1965-2025
>
> https://libreqos.io/2025/04/01/in-loving-memory-of-dave/
>
>
>
> https://www.linkedin.com/in/frantisekborsik
>
> Signal, Telegram, WhatsApp: +421919416714
>
> iMessage, mobile: +420775230885
>
> Skype: casioa5302ca
>
> frantisek.borsik@gmail.com
>
> On Sun, Apr 6, 2025 at 3:21 AM Daniel Ezell <dezell@stonescry.com> wrote:
>
> Taking the Coast Starlight tonight. Wanted to compare notes with Dave
> about it. Sad to have missed the opportunity. So this trip is a memorial to
> a great guy I never got to meet.
> Daniel Ezell
>
> On Oct 28, 2023, at 3:51 AM, Frantisek Borsik via Nnagain <
> nnagain@lists.bufferbloat.net> wrote:
>
> I just can't even. So many garbage ideas out of Brussels as of late. DSA,
> DMA, DSM... GDPR in the past, or even that horrible CRA = Cyber Resilience
> Act:
>
>
> https://www.internetsociety.org/blog/2022/10/the-eus-proposed-cyber-resilience-act-will-damage-the-open-source-ecosystem/
> https://blog.nlnetlabs.nl/open-source-software-vs-the-cyber-resilience-act/
>
> Good intentions don't count, bad results do. Most of the evil in this
> world was done by people with good intentions and this is not an exception.
>
>
> All the best,
>
>
> Frank
>
>
>
> Frantisek (Frank) Borsik
>
>
>
> https://www.linkedin.com/in/frantisekborsik
>
> Signal, Telegram, WhatsApp: +421919416714
>
> iMessage, mobile: +420775230885
>
> Skype: casioa5302ca
>
> frantisek.borsik@gmail.com
>
> On Sat, Oct 28, 2023 at 1:45 AM Dave Taht via Nnagain <
> nnagain@lists.bufferbloat.net> wrote:
>
> On Fri, Oct 27, 2023 at 4:23 PM Nathan Simington via Nnagain
> <nnagain@lists.bufferbloat.net> wrote:
> >
> > This has gone from mere cost-shifting to protocol takeover. Self-hosting
> is essentially dead because you are guaranteed to get filtered by Outlook
> and Gmail, which means that there is de facto embrace-and-extend -- "best
> viewed in Internet Explorer at 800x600" but for a core standard.
>
> This is one of those things that could be reversed if there was law
> guaranteeing  freedom of communications. That really does not seem to
> be the way the world is going, however.
>
> See: https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/posts/chat-control/ for example.
>
> I like email (and netnews). You had a copy, the recipients had copies,
> and pretty much anyone that had the capability of snooping in-between
> had copies.  Nobody ever got arround to making starttls mandatory.
> Compare this to all the even more centralized, but incompatible chat
> systems since, multiple ones that have vanished from the web (g+), and
> others that are barely hanging on, like disquis.
>
> Even with the flight to mastodon and other heavily encrypted home
> server technologies, email remains the most common, useful and
> malleable public identifier for connecting people to people. I would
> like to make it better, for everyone, again.
>
>
> > On Fri, Oct 27, 2023 at 5:48 PM Hal Murray via Nnagain <
> nnagain@lists.bufferbloat.net> wrote:
> >>
> >> [Was Amtrack]
> >>
> >>
> >> > 2) I could get mad that I figure 80% of this new email list is
> vanishing into
> >> > spam boxes.
> >>
> >>
> >> > What of the 10s of thousands of other emails that have come over the
> years
> >> > not just from lists.bufferbloat.net but from people trying honestly
> to
> >> > communicate?
> >>
> >> There is/was a good discussion of all the good things that network
> geeks have
> >> done.
> >>
> >> How about discussing the things they haven't done?
> >>
> >> Spam would be pretty high on my list.  It's tangled up with
> (in)security -- a
> >> lot comes from infected systems or phished accounts.
> >>
> >> The current approach to spam is cost shifting.  If you don't pay for
> your
> >> abuse desk, the crap that you send or phishing sites you host..., means
> that
> >> the rest of the net has to spend more on defense.
> >>
> >> Anybody remember Spamford Wallace?  He was going to setup a spam
> friendly ISP.
> >>  Nobody would connect to him.  I wonder what would happen if a few ISPs
> that
> >> host a lot of abuse had  more troubles getting connected to the net.
> Would a
> >> few well publicized examples be enough to spread the word?
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >> High on my list would be dis/mis-information.  The business model seems
> to be
> >> to show customers things that will keep them online so you can show
> them more
> >> ads.  Gues what does that?
> >>
> >> Is this also cost shifting?  It's society as a whole that has to pay
> for the
> >> disruption caused by bogus information.
> >>
> >>
> >> --
> >> These are my opinions.  I hate spam.
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >> _______________________________________________
> >> Nnagain mailing list
> >> Nnagain@lists.bufferbloat.net
> >> https://lists.bufferbloat.net/listinfo/nnagain
> >
> >
> >
> > --
> > Nathan Simington
> > cell: 305-793-6899
> > _______________________________________________
> > Nnagain mailing list
> > Nnagain@lists.bufferbloat.net
> > https://lists.bufferbloat.net/listinfo/nnagain
>
>
>
> --
> Oct 30:
> https://netdevconf.info/0x17/news/the-maestro-and-the-music-bof.html
> Dave Täht CSO, LibreQos
> _______________________________________________
> Nnagain mailing list
> Nnagain@lists.bufferbloat.net
> https://lists.bufferbloat.net/listinfo/nnagain
>
> _______________________________________________
> Nnagain mailing list
> Nnagain@lists.bufferbloat.net
> https://lists.bufferbloat.net/listinfo/nnagain
>
> _______________________________________________ Nnagain mailing list
> Nnagain@lists.bufferbloat.net
> https://lists.bufferbloat.net/listinfo/nnagain
>
> _______________________________________________
> Nnagain mailing list
> Nnagain@lists.bufferbloat.net
> https://lists.bufferbloat.net/listinfo/nnagain
>

[-- Attachment #2: Type: text/html, Size: 19481 bytes --]

Re: [NNagain] Spam filtering

[rjmcmahon]

My experience aligns with this even though I've been able to self host 
for ever two decades. There is always a new blocker I have to address so 
my MTA can work with the majors. My regex and header checks is updated 
basically every few days (regex pattern matching is a "use it or lose 
it" thing so this keeps me practiced up.)

One of the reasons for self hosting was to maintain privacy. 
Unfortunately, that's not possible because everybody else use free 
services that will data mine my email too, i.e. privacy has to be end to 
end otherwise there is none.

Bob
> This has gone from mere cost-shifting to protocol takeover.
> Self-hosting is essentially dead because you are guaranteed to get
> filtered by Outlook and Gmail, which means that there is de facto
> embrace-and-extend -- "best viewed in Internet Explorer at 800x600"
> but for a core standard.
> 
> On Fri, Oct 27, 2023 at 5:48 PM Hal Murray via Nnagain
> <nnagain@lists.bufferbloat.net> wrote:
> 
>> [Was Amtrack]
>> 
>>> 2) I could get mad that I figure 80% of this new email list is
>> vanishing into
>>> spam boxes.
>> 
>>> What of the 10s of thousands of other emails that have come over
>> the years
>>> not just from lists.bufferbloat.net [1] but from people trying
>> honestly to
>>> communicate?
>> 
>> There is/was a good discussion of all the good things that network
>> geeks have
>> done.
>> 
>> How about discussing the things they haven't done?
>> 
>> Spam would be pretty high on my list.  It's tangled up with
>> (in)security -- a
>> lot comes from infected systems or phished accounts.
>> 
>> The current approach to spam is cost shifting.  If you don't pay for
>> your
>> abuse desk, the crap that you send or phishing sites you host...,
>> means that
>> the rest of the net has to spend more on defense.
>> 
>> Anybody remember Spamford Wallace?  He was going to setup a spam
>> friendly ISP.
>> Nobody would connect to him.  I wonder what would happen if a few
>> ISPs that
>> host a lot of abuse had  more troubles getting connected to the net.
>> Would a
>> few well publicized examples be enough to spread the word?
>> 
>> High on my list would be dis/mis-information.  The business model
>> seems to be
>> to show customers things that will keep them online so you can show
>> them more
>> ads.  Gues what does that?
>> 
>> Is this also cost shifting?  It's society as a whole that has to pay
>> for the
>> disruption caused by bogus information.
>> 
>> --
>> These are my opinions.  I hate spam.
>> 
>> _______________________________________________
>> Nnagain mailing list
>> Nnagain@lists.bufferbloat.net
>> https://lists.bufferbloat.net/listinfo/nnagain
> 
> --
> 
> Nathan Simington
> 
> cell: 305-793-6899
> 
> Links:
> ------
> [1] http://lists.bufferbloat.net
> _______________________________________________
> Nnagain mailing list
> Nnagain@lists.bufferbloat.net
> https://lists.bufferbloat.net/listinfo/nnagain

Re: [NNagain] An Amtrak trip through the real world yesterday

[Frantisek Borsik]

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Dave, you know this already, but I really love to read your stuff. (Hope to
see it on your blog <https://blog.cerowrt.org>, soon.)

RE: traveling by train, some of you know that I was traveling a lot in
Russia, Iran, Ukraine, Balkans...and it was mostly by train. Never took
some of those lovely, scenic or looong rides
<https://www.timeout.com/usa/things-to-do/most-scenic-train-rides-in-america>
in the US and I hope to do it someday.

I had so many interactions like those you mentioned with nice and
interesting people of all walks of life on this train rides and I can't
stress enough home much I love it.

Also, your Amtrak story reminded me some passages from Atlas Shrugged,
where Ayn Rand so masterfully (for me, at least) described the ways how
railroads work and how Dagny Taggart was experiencing the railroad and
everything around.

Have fun up north and looking forward to watch your talk and workshop at
Netdevconf.

For anyone interested https://netdevconf.info/0x17/pages/virtual.html (watch
online for free) and see the schedule for the topic you may like:
https://netdevconf.info/0x17/pages/schedule.html

All the best,

Frank

Frantisek (Frank) Borsik



https://www.linkedin.com/in/frantisekborsik

Signal, Telegram, WhatsApp: +421919416714

iMessage, mobile: +420775230885

Skype: casioa5302ca

frantisek.borsik@gmail.com


On Fri, Oct 27, 2023 at 9:38 PM Dave Taht via Nnagain <
nnagain@lists.bufferbloat.net> wrote:

> Normally I would blog a story like this, but knowing I have an
> audience of at least 10 people that might read it, via email, you can
> ignore it if you want, or cue up the song at the end and wade through
> it. This story is pertinent to the nn list eventually, I think. After
> some editing, it will end up blogged. If you just want the pertinent
> stuff, please please, just skip to the PS at the end.
>
> ...
>
> This past Wednesday, I decided to take the Amtrak "Coast Starlight" -
> Train 14 - from SJC to Vancouver for the talks I am giving there this
> weekend. I still have a lot of writing to do, and I figured that I
> could finish up the slides on the trip. The cellphones worked rarely,
> and the wifi not at all. I loved that! I just needed to write! but
> instead I ended up swapping stories with everyone I met, and writing
> those down.
>
> I was pretty tired when I got on the train at 8PM. My seatmate wore a
> mask, so I couldn't tell if she was male or female - just obviously
> equally tired. I slept fitfully, only waking up once that I remember
> when a set of bright white lights crossed my eyes, which I think was a
> grain operation of some sort.
>
> At the  crack of dawn, I rushed to the cafe car, with my guitar. I
> cannot recommend this moment, on this train, more highly, it is
> quitenssenly American and why I love this country so much. We sat
> there, watching the translucent-silk like fog, over the snow, and over
> Klamath Lake. Bucky Fuller had long ago called this dawn more
> accurately according to modern physics - he called it "sunsight",
> rather than "sunrise". A magnificent hour passed. A few chords and
> words from "this land is your land" escaped my lips and guitar, along
> with gasps of awe and delight from everyone in the car as magnificent
> scenery passed by.
>
> Then I went to breakfast.
>
> ...
>
> Amtrak has a policy of community seating, 4 per table, in the dining
> car. It's *needed* - there is only so much time and so much space on a
> shared train, and people are there in part to relax and meet other
> people.
>
> I sat down with a builder and his wife, freshly here from Maine. She
> had a humane society t-shirt on, and while we talked about many
> things, only relevant here was how her husband used youtube to get
> short videos on how to "fix stuff" he'd never encountered before.
>
> A little bit later, a former, very BIG and burly marine, who now works
> as a flagger, sat down in the fourth seat.
>
> While we all talked about many things - they did like what they used
> the Internet for, and they did not want to talk much about their jobs,
> but the scenery and the trip and what they were going to go next. I
> asked the Marine about his job for example - And he sighed. "You stand
> outside all day and take abuse from drivers." They think "my job is to
> make them late, not make them safe."
>
> The builder and his wife had to get off at the next stop in a few
> minutes, and he had not the time or space to finish his meal so he
> offered up the rest of his breakfast to us. The marine and I returned
> to talking.
>
> "I don't get why people are in such a rush. They have the technology
> to avoid construction if they just thought ahead." - he said. "*I* get
> up 2 hours early to avoid the traffic, get to the job site, then I
> take a walk around the area, or play some youtube, take a nap. I
> rarely get a lunch break and usually have to pee somewhere off the
> side of the road. " He talked about an accident or two he had seen.
>
> Just as the train began to pull to a stop, the builder guy came
> rushing back to leave a tip for the waiter.
>
> Me and the marine talked about his town - an air force town apparently
> - and we talked about interservice rivalries a bit - he said he'd put
> up his service's flag on his lawn - and got more than a few unexpected
> complaints about it from various neighbors that wanted him to take it
> down.
>
> He went out and got a bigger flag, grinning ferociously at the flack
> he took from the "fake fliers".
>
> ...
>
> I took my guitar down to the cafe car again after that.
>
> Two ladies in their 70s?( 80s?) that had been to Woodstock were there.
> They had many memories of that (pictures, too!), and all that had
> happened since, to share. They had been in a band together up until
> recently. "Joy" borrowed my guitar and played some amazing stuff, to
> the admiration of us all in the car... while the magnificent landscape
> continued to roll by. The conductor came down and gave us countdowns
> to the next passing waterfall, and every one leaned onto those sides
> of the car to admire them.
>
> I had been working on a new filksong about surveillance capitalism. It
> is based on the chords and rhyme's of Buffalo Springfields "For what
> it's worth" - which I have been hearing played a lot these past few
> years [cue up this song instead while reading on: 1]. I am changing
> the words around a lot. My version of "For What it's Worth"  - is
> clearly a satire. I do not know if the too-sensitive algorithms now
> enforcing the DMCA will take it down or not. I'm going to play it
> anyway, I'm going to finish writing it anyway, and pass the words
> around, at least.
>
> A kid, "Jake", (who was going on 19, I learned later) shyly sidled
> over. He really wanted to play my guitar, and he noodled quietly on it
> whilst I talked to other people and cussed at my notebook. He was
> pretty good - better than me by a lot! As the morning wore on, he
> pulled out more and more stuff, and got better and better. He was
> carrying a pick! I finally took my guitar back after my fingers had
> healed, hoping we could do a song we both shared together. He had
> heard "Comfortably numb" at least, but did not know the words. I
> called over Joy to do one I hoped we had at all least heard - Jeff
> Buckley's version of Hallelujah. I had managed to misplace my capo in
> my other bag, but his vocal range was good enough to be able to sing
> it in Cohen's original key , which neither I or Joy could do easily -
> so we harmonized. We *rocked* that car with that song.
>
> There was a young lady listening in on us, too. From her crows feet, I
> guessed she was in her early 40s, but it turned out she was 36
> (oops!), with pretty blue eyes. Call her "Kay". She originally
> stationed herself 6 feet away, but us sharing and passing the guitar
> around, and trying out new rhymes for that song gradually drew her in.
>
> She had left her job as a French teacher for the 3rd to 8th grades,
> last Thursday, and she was going off for a new career, after spending
> the last few months as a scrum master in training, for some
> transportation department or another. She talked about the burnout she
> had had about her now former life as a teacher, the 7 day weeks, the
> hundreds of stairs she had to climb between classes, the unruly kids,
> and the administrative overhead.
>
> She was unsure if anyone would hire her given her background - but
> those that hired her felt strongly that her experience in corraling 14
> year olds was also going to work on engineers (and I agreed!), and
> that her storytelling ability - about making a story relevant and
> interesting in multiple languages, to multiple kinds a people was
> going to help meld the team together.
>
> Despite all that extensive experience in teaching kids French, she had
> never heard of duolingo, which is a pretty good tool for that. It's a
> big internet, I was not surprised she hadn't heard of it, but I do
> hope that parents that want their kids to gain another language try
> logging their kids into that, since teachers are increasingly
> unavailable.
>
> She brightened when she talked about all the former students who
> wanted to talk to her that had heard she was leaving. I had a chance
> to communicate how computer science actually did cross over into other
> fields - I asked her how much time she spent sorting socks per week,
> and she said sorting them, for her and her husband, "took about 10
> minutes per week", she hated it, and she described exactly how she did
> it. It was a pretty good algorithm, sorting by size and color, but
> perhaps it could have been better, I thought. So I asked, what if you
> had a better algorithm that only took 8 minutes? At the prospect of
> saving 2 minutes every week for the rest of her life on this painful
> task, her eyes lit up!
>
> (I don't remember what that algorithm is! - it's in a book called
> "Algorithms to live by" - she wrote that title down. For all I know
> her method is better than Marvin Minskys! Hers is far, far better than
> Minskys' college roomates' was! For all I know 98% of humanity gets
> sock sorting wrong.)
>
> Jake left (I gave him a couple of my "This machine cures Vogons"
> stickers, and my tattered copy of Dylan's songbook), and Kay and I had
> a heck of a good conversation about everything else under the sun.
>
> At one point she got up to get us a set of drinks, and while she was
> gone I snuck a thank you card into her bag for being so sharing and
> caring about her decade+ worth of kids.
>
> She had to get off at the stop before mine, I said the only words of
> French I know - "au revior". She said "jusqu'à ce que nous nous
> revoyions" - or something like that, it was noise to me at the time -
> and explained that it meant "Until we meet again". I had to look up
> what she actually said, on the internet, because it made no sense to
> me in English, and what I just wrote is not anything what it sounded
> like to me then.
>
> We swapped email addresses and a hug. She gave me what was left of her
> bread and deli meats.
>
> When I finally left the cafe car and got back to my original seat the
> girl next to me started up a conversation. She had been listening also
> in the cafe car. She did not remember anything I had played but had
> loved what she had heard from Joy and the kid.
>
> She was studying library science. And we had a good talk about the
> value of information to people, over time, and why libraries were
> needed. Among other things she disparaged the "Dewey Decimal system" -
> "good enough for the 1800s", she said "but it squeezes whole
> categories into tiny slots that it shouldn't". I brought up the
> "archive.org"'s fight to stay online - presently spending more money
> on lawyers than books. "Oh, that place in SF? Never been there" she
> said. I told her that they had a free lunch and tour on fridays.
>
> Finally I got to Seattle, after a nap.
>
> I had not planned out this portion of the trip well, (thinking I
> actually would have connectivity) - the friends I had hoped would meet
> me there didn't make it. I got on the amtrak station's wifi, and made
> a reservation, caught a cab, and conked out. This morning I typed up
> these notes from the trip, instead of working on my talk for
> netdevconf.
>
> And then, only then, mid morning today, I checked my email, to see
> Nathan Simington's lovely note, eaten by my spam filter, discussing
> stuff about the the future of the Internet I would so much like so
> many more to be thinking clearly about.
>
> I had business class this morning for the next segment to Canada.
> Perhaps then I will get some work done - but frankly after too many
> years now, isolated, WFH, I long for some more conversations like
> that, with strangers from all professions and parts of the world. Also
> it is very cold in Seattle, and I could use some gloves and a hat. I
> tried to change my amtrak reservation over the website - it didn't
> work - so I called, and in about 8 minutes of waiting on hold (and
> typing away at this) - I got to a very nice operator that changed my
> ticket from train to bus, for tomorrow afternoon. I complemented her
> on that magnificant ride, and she said - "I've heard that a lot.
> Making that trip is on my bucket list."
>
> I encouraged her to put it on her bucket list multiple times. As I
> would encourage you all.
>
> ...
>
> PS A couple meta points:
>
> I also did an informal poll of a couple issues with all these people:
>
> Do you know what a packet is? 0
> Do you know what network Neutrality is? 0 (well, the librarian thought
> it meant censorship)
> How many people do you know died of Covid? 0. Old age, illness,
> accident, and suicide were mentioned instead.
> I also explained bufferbloat to about half of them: Have you ever done
> an upload and had your network become useless? All nodded yes.
>
> So I worry about all these other possibly fictional fights we are
> having in the Matrix, and about the quality of the simulation we are
> coerced to live in.
>
> Additionally:
>
> 0) I was very happy to get offline. It may well be that 90% of
> everyone else wasn't - but I didn't talk to them.
> 1) I could get frustrated at changing my reservation online, but I
> rather enjoyed talking to a human with a decent wait time.
> 2) I could get mad that I figure 80% of this new email list is
> vanishing into spam boxes. As the administrator, I check my logs, the
> email was accepted, it is not in any public spam blockers like RBL,
> and I have no idea what to do or who to contact or what algorithm to
> bypass to make sure the mail gets through. There is no recourse, nor
> service motto, like the postal service used to make about regular
> mail, about email.
>
> What of the 10s of thousands of other emails that have come over the
> years not just from lists.bufferbloat.net but from people trying
> honestly to communicate?
>
> 3) It was not all that long ago that long form pieces like this were
> more common on the Internet. You can still find them, if you look for
> them, and put away twitter for a while.
>
> G+ is long gone, as is everything I wrote there. If I put this just on
> my blog, it will only stay up as long as I am still alive and paying
> the bill. Maybe I will put a copy on glass for my granddaughter to
> read. 200 of you now have copies, too.
>
> [1] Skarlett Woods' version of "For what its worth" I like rather a
> lot. But I like this original better:
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ifAKkXcUjPc
>
>
> --
> Oct 30: Low Latency Life Lessons Learned
> Dave Täht CSO, LibreQos
> _______________________________________________
> Nnagain mailing list
> Nnagain@lists.bufferbloat.net
> https://lists.bufferbloat.net/listinfo/nnagain
>

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