Category Archives: Technology and Society

Let Me Use The Damn Keypad!

Just a little rant.

I guess it’s some kind of technological advance when we can talk to robots on the telephone, but I don’t want to do it. It’s not just that the technology isn’t perfect, and you have to enunciate clearly and loudly. Did it ever occur to these morons that if I’m in the middle of a cube farm, I just may not want to speak my credit card number, or social security number, or zip code, or mother’s maiden name aloud? Or even speaking precise monosyllables, and sounding like an idiot to your cubemates?

I thought that the concept of using the digital keypad for sending commands to a remote system was great. Going to voice is, for me, a step backwards. There’s no reason that they can’t give a keypad option for each verbal one, yet many of them, once they transition to the new voice recognition systems, don’t. I prefer to pay my bills in silence, and I’ll prefer service providers that recognize that.

DNS Culprit Found?

Could this explain all the DNS problems that I and others have been having?

One troublesome technique finding favor with spammers involves sending mass mailings in the middle of the night from a domain that has not yet been registered. After the mailings go out, the spammer registers the domain early the next morning.

By doing this, spammers hope to avoid stiff CAN-SPAM fines through minimal exposure and visibility with a given domain. The ruse, they hope, makes them more difficult to find and prosecute.

The scheme, however, has unintended consequences of its own. During the interval between mailing and registration, the SMTP servers on the recipients’ networks attempt Domain Name System look-ups on the nonexistent domain, causing delays and timeouts on the DNS servers and backups in SMTP message queues.

If so, it’s just one more reason to make spamming a capital offense.