While a blacklist is a list of known spammer email servers that you deny email from, whitelists are servers that are known good and specifically authorized to send you email. If you haven't specifically authorized a server to send you email by including it on your whitelist, that email gets unceremoniously dropped. As opposed to blacklists, which have been traditionally maintained in centralized databases on the Internet, whitelists are maintained by each individual company. This makes them more resistant to the DDoS attacks that have recently rendered so many blacklists ineffective. The desire to pool the knowledge of known spamming email servers in centralized databases that can be referenced by anyone has been the Achilles' heel of blacklists.

There are many who believe that whitelists are the way to go, ultimately. And I guess we'll see soon enough. AT&T is asking all its business partners to provide information about their email servers in preparation for going full whitelist. If they haven't authorized your email server to send them email, your email gets dropped into the bit bucket. End of story.

• The "Archives" and "Post Categories" sections cannot be seperated or rearranged. I would prefer to have the Categories list higher up so that it does not get chased off the page by a growing archives list. But I can't figure out how to seperate the two.
• I would like to indicate what categories a particular post is a member of, perhaps in the footer of the post itself, or after the title. I don't see an obvious way to add that functionality without going into the code.
• I have to apologize to the dasBlog folks for railing on their documentation. While it is surely lacking, it is magnitudes better than what currently exists for .Text. Beyond a simple setup doc, and a couple blurbs about common problems, there is nothing that documents how the product works. Support for .Text is almost entirely through an email list (!?!), and I'm sorry but the aspadvice.com messageboards are buggy as hell, and slow when they do work. I have yet to find anything worthwhile by searching through the mailing lists there.

So I'm gonna give .Text a crack. Instead of trying to be an upgrade to an older system, like dasBlog is, .Text is new from the ground up. Yeah, it's going to take a bit of work to munge my site design into their system, but they have some features that I really like. If worst comes to worst, I still have dasBlog to fall back on, and it is still an improvement over my current software (Blogworks/XML).

But whose fault was it really?

Let's run some sims, shall we?

• Alou catches the foul ball: Let's pretend Alou catches the ball hit into the stands in the 8th. That makes it 2 outs, runner on 2nd. Let's look at what happened next: Next batter got a walk, runners on 1st and 2nd now, still 2 outs. Ivan Rodriguez hits an RBI single to bring the score to 3-2, Cubs still leading. Next batter hits a soft grounder to Gonzalez, who inexplicably drops it without recording even 1 out. Runners on 1st and 3rd now, still 2 outs. Derrek Lee hits a double into the left field corner, scoring the tying run. Still only 2 outs. This is where it gets a little sketchy, because the next few decisions the Cubs made were based on there being 1 out instead of 2. Next batter is walked to load the bases and set up a double play. The following batter hits a sac fly (again, not what would have happened with 2 outs instead of only 1), which scored the go-ahead run. The the Marlins break the game open on the next at-bat when Mike Mordecai hits a bases-clearing double, scoring 3 more runs. In this scenario, assuming the sacrifice fly didn't happen (not a good move with 2 outs), the Marlins still end up scoring either 7 or 8 runs in the inning.
• Gonzalez doesn't bork the double-play ball: The score was 3-2 when the soft ground ball was hit right at Alex Gonzalez, with a chance to turn 2. If he does what the Cubs are paying him $5M a year to do, and gets the 2 outs, the Cubs are out of the inning having given up only 2 runs, and ending the threat. The Cubs take a 3-2 lead into the 9th inning, and likely win the game.

Alex Gonzalez, the professional baseball player who is paid $5 Million a year, is completely excused for borking a routine grounder that was hit right to him and would have ended the inning, and probably won the game. Steve Bartman, lifelong Cubs FAN who coaches little league in his spare time, does exactly what every one of the 40,000 other people there would have done in his shoes by trying to catch a ball that was clearly out of the field of play, and is probably going to have to quit his job, will probably be run out of town, and still has the class to at least apologize for his part in the debacle. Alex Gonzalez, where is your apology? Why doesn't your family have to suffer death threats? Why don't you have to suffer the indignity of being run out of your hometown by an angry mob that wants to kill you? Why don't you have to live forever with the knowledge that an entire city blames you for costing the Cubs the World Series?

Yeah, let us know how that goes.

Any time a US lawmaker tries to extend law into the Internet it displays their ignorance of the entire construct. The Internet is not a US-owned and operated entity that will suddenly come into compliance now that some random US law says it must. What if some spammer from Macedonia emails a US citizen that is on the "do-not-spam" list? You think anyone will give a damn, beyond Senator Schumer? Do you think anyone in Macedonia gives a rat's ass that they are violating a US law? Besides, who is to say that the source of the spam is even the perpetrator? Spammers nowadays are partnering with hackers to send spam from the hacked mail servers of innocent victims.

The FBI can't even keep child porn off the Internet, I don't see them spending a lot of cycles trying to catch some random spammer in some backwater country, even if there was sufficient evidence to convict them.

Let me just say, right off the bat: Quentin Tarantino, you are broken. Seriously man, I don't know how you're not under glass somewhere being examined by an army of freaking psychiatrists.

Now that I have that out of the way. The movie was everything I expected. Bloody as hell. But beyond that, it's a freaking masterpeice. It's an amalgamation of various different styles, paying homage to the old-school kung-fu movies of the 70's. The soundtrack was a whole other character in the movie, mostly old 70's style stuff, and it made me laugh out loud more than once. Lucy Liu was awesome, and the anime part that introduced her was well done. Uma Thurman did a great job as well. But the music stole the show, in my mind. Tarantino showed us a little mercy by doing the big battle scene mostly in black-and-white. That gave us a nice break from the blood (body parts were still flying this way and that, but it wasn't so bad without the blood. Are you getting the idea that I am not a huge fan of blood?).

Unfortunately, BlogworksXML is now defunct, and is no longer being developed or supported. There are some key features that were coming in the next release, but unless someone picks up the development of it, those features will never materialize. Most importantly is the ability to categorize my blog entries. I really don't like forcing people to muddle through "personal" entries if all they are interested in are entries relating to the BSQUARE Alumni.

Steve and I are both looking around at the new .NET blog tools that are coming out, and he suggested dasBlog. His efforts to get dasBlog to integrate with his site have left him somewhat disenchanted, and I have to admit that the undertaking has routinely found its way to the bottom of my priority list as well. It's a pain in the arse to change blog software once you've been using one for a few months. You have all these "Permalinks" that you have to ensure still work (hint: Permalinks are supposed to be permanent!), plus the template format for the old software may not work for the new one, so you have to start from scratch on a lot of things. I think I have things a bit easier than Steve, because of the way BlogworksXML saves archived posts. But we'll see.

Anyway, I finally got the gumption to fire up dasBlog today and see what it was about. I got it running on my primary web server, just as a test, and you may have come across it for a few seconds as I swapped in the test site for the real site to see if things were working ok. Now that I am confident the product will work with the way my server is set up, I will likely install it on another 2003 box I have sitting here and work on integrating it into the existing site design.

• HR2702: HR-2702 would take several steps to address the huge holes in the L1 visa program. If you remember, there is currently no cap on the number of L1 visas that can be issued annually, like there is with the H1-B program. Also there is nothing requiring companies to pay a prevailing wage to L1 visa-holders. HR2702 would take a number of steps to reduce the burgeoning abuse of the L1 program:
  • Place an annual cap of 35,000 on new L1 visas
  • Prohibit the practice of filing blanket L1 visa petitions to hire workers
  • Deny L1 visas to any firm that has laid off an American worker within the preceding 6 months and for 6 months after the application is filed
  • Add a prevailing wage requirement to protect L1 workers, and to protect American workers from being displaced by lower-wage L1 visa holders
  • Require L1 petitioners to have been employed by the petitioning firm for 3 continuous years (currently it's 1 cumulative out of the last 3)
• HR2688: HR2688 is a bill introduced this summer by Representative Tancredo from Colorado. It calls for the immediate repeal of the H1-B visa program, charging (as I did) that the original purpose of the program has been fulfilled and its continued existence only serves to further harm American workers.

I got a question: If I were to, through the course of my research (I'm very interested in cyberterrorism, as my faithful readers know), visit one of these sites, am I guilty of a crime? If they have a banner ad on the site, and it generates revenue for the site owners (who are known terrorist organizations), haven't I just provided money to them by viewing the page? Technically, they earned revenue from my visit to the site, whether I agree with their views or not.

Specifically, Microsoft will focus on the following efforts:

• Enable ICF by default: Internet Connection Firewall, or ICF, is a surprisingly capable personal firewall package built in to Windows XP. Sadly, few people know about it, and fewer still know how to enable it (it's a checkbox, it takes 3 seconds to enable). Microsoft will be modifying future editions of Windows XP to have ICF enabled by default. There are also similar capabilities built into Windows 2003.

• Reduce Patch Frequency to Monthly: Currently, Microsoft issues patches on Wednesdays, as needed, except when a particularly nasty issue crops up that simply cannot wait until the following Wednesday. The problem is, the issuance of a patch is often accompanied by a release of Proof of Concept code, which is quickly turned into an exploit and released into the wild by black hats. Patches beget exploits in the vast majority of cases, not the other way around as you might expect. So in order to be entirely safe, admins have had to patch weekly to combat new exploits generated by the patch information.

  So, to combat this behavior, MS is going to reduce patch frequency from weekly to monthly, except in the most critical of cases where exploit code is already in the wild. Initially, I thought MS was nuts to make us wait for a month for a patch to a known problem. But then I realized that 99% of us have no idea the vulnerability exists until Microsoft tells us about it and issues a patch (hopefully at the same time). So I think this approach might work, so long as they keep their ears to the ground and come clean with the patch early if exploits are in the wild for the problem.

  This should also enable admins to schedule a monthly downtime window, and adhere to it, for the purposes of coming current with patches. Scheduling patch downtime has been problematic with weekly patches. Which brings me to the next area of MS' renewed focus:

• Reduce the number of reboot-required patches: If you rely on Windows Update to patch, every time you patch your system will require a reboot. This is a behavior we have been screaming about forever, and MS looks to finally be doing something about it. Hopefully in combination with the reduced-frequency of patch releases, this will really help with out scheduled downtime. Hopefully the admins can get into a rythym so they can schedule their monthly downtime to coincide with the patch release date.

If you thought the economy has been bad the past couple of years, you ain't seen nothing yet if you work in the high tech industry. I have to admit that nothing concerns me more today than the increasing exportation of US jobs to foreign workers who can do the same job for as little as 1/10th the cost.

I remember back in my BSQUARE days when I learned that we had outsourced a few projects out to a firm in South Africa. I was stunned. Little BSQUARE, who was around 400 employees at the time, was farming out work to South Africa, of all places. I remember feeling a little ashamed knowing that. But hey, I still had a job.

Fast forward 3 or so years later, and I'm working in a job I don't particularly like, for a company that I don't really believe in, because I work in an area of the country that has been hardest hit by the "dot-com bust" and recession. Seattle has the (mis-)fortune of being not only the home of Boeing, but also has been historically popular for the high tech industry. We don't have the cost of living of Silicon Valley (well, NOW we do), and the quality of life here is pretty darned attractive for potential job seekers. But since terrorists figured out there was little practical difference between an aircraft and a guided missile, Boeing has been laying off people in droves, and the dot-com bust has done a number on our other high tech employers. The result has been the 2nd worst overall unemployment in the country (7.5% in August), only Oregon having it worse than us here in Washington. But if you are a high-tech worker, you are facing an unemployment rate of over 10%. Everyone is telling us how the economy is turning around, yet we are still shedding jobs nationally (93,000 more jobs lost in August), even while corporate earnings are looking strong.

There are several reasons why unemployment continues to increase, even while corporate earnings are on the upswing, giving rise to the term "jobless recovery":

• H1-B and L1 Visas: In 1990, the US government introduced a new type of visa, designed to give US companies the opportunity to hire foreign workers if they were unable to find Americans with the necessary skills. The visa was dubbed H1-B, and was capped at 65,000 per year, each carrying a 3-year duration and renewable one time for an additional 3 years. In 2000, under intense pressure by Corporate America, the cap was temporarily increased (scheduled to sunset Oct 1st, 2003), to 195,000 visas annually. Since the cap was increased, 9 out of every 10 IT jobs in America have gone to foreign workers in the H1-B program(link).

  The H1-B program is heavily abused. The law requires that the company consider American workers for openings, but does not require that the job be offered to the American worker. Often, American workers are told they are "over-qualified" and the position is given to an H1-B worker who is just happy to be in the US and won't demand a high salary. There are even documented cases of laid-off American workers being forced to train their new H1-B replacements in order to receive their severance packages (link).

  Of growing popularity is the L1 visa, which is used to transfer foreign workers at an international subsidiary of an American company to a US location. There is absolutely no limit on the number of these visas that can be issued, and they are good for 7 years. In addition, the L1 visa does not put any requirements on what the foreign worker must be paid, unlike the H1-B. In many cases, L1 visas are bing used to import foreign workers to directly replace American workers for 1/3 of the cost (link). As companies realize the benefits of the L1 visa over the more restrictive H1-B, there has been a 58% increase in the number of L1 visas issued to foreign workers in the last year (link).

• American labor is expensive: Let's face it, it's expensive to live in America, and American workers are more expensive than their counterparts in other areas of the world. In some cases, like in Russia and China, software developers can be hired for roughly 10% of what an American developer would cost. The American might be better trained (and likely is in such a scenario), but even if you have to hire 2 foreign workers to get the output you would from a single American worker, you are still saving 80%. And that doesn't take into effect the extra savings realized by not having to pay Workers' Comp, Social Security, Health Care, and everything else that is required in the case of American employees. Add those things up, and you can save an additional 30%, in addition to the base salary.

  And I'm not saying foreign workers are poorly trained universally, in many cases they have excellent training. India, for example, is churning out software engineers at the rate of 200,000 per year (link). In fact, India's outsourcing industry is growing at a rate of 25% per quarter.

  It's no wonder that countries like India can find a ready source of new recruits. The average developer with 2 years of experience is earning an average of $545 per month, in a country where the average per capita income is $480 per year (link).

• Everybody's doing it: Companies look around and see that their competitors are cutting costs by using foreign workers. For companies to remain competitive, they have to follow suit. There is simply no way for a company using 100% American workers to compete with a company that relies heavily on outsourcing to foreign entitites. It's simple math.

IBM expects 3.3 million service jobs will move off-shore over the next 10 years, and has publicly stated it will accelerate plans to move a large portion of its own workforce out of the US in order to stay ahead of competitors. That means another 2% of the American workforce will be out of work as these jobs move overseas. It's a tragic race for competitive edge as US employers scramble for ways to lay off Americans and hire the best talent in foreign countries before the rates go up.

What does this mean for the US economy? Well, we are already seeing the effects. The economy is recovering nicely from the recent recession, yet unemployment rates continue to rise. There are a lot of people out of work right now. People who can't afford to buy durable goods. People with very little disposable income. The 3.3 million jobs moving overseas represents $136 Billion in wages that will not be earned (or spent) by American workers. This has to trickle up at some point and start impacting the national economy.

So what do we do:

• Suspend, at least temporarily, the H1-B and L1 visa programs: There is absolutely no reason in today's economic reality, that these programs are still needed. The H1-B program was designed to assist US companies with hiring talent in the days of a 2% unemployment rate. Now that there are hundreds of thousands of highly-skilled American workers looking for jobs, these programs are no longer necessary.
• Innovate: America has to stay ahead of the curve on technology. WE have to create the demand for skills that are not available overseas, and the only way to do that is to continue to innovate.
• Education: Similarly, IT workers have to continue to add skills to their dossier. The more skills an individual has, the more valuable they are to a corporation. After a year or two, a particular skill will be available from legions of foreign workers at a reduced rate, so the employee must continue to find ways to compete with the foreign worker, and that means adding value to their skill set.
• Tax Cuts: The vast majority of American workers who invest do so in vehicles that are already sheltered from taxible dividends (such as 401k). So cutting dividend taxes do little to help the average worker. What must be done instead, is reduce the taxes that are forced upon the companies themselves, reducing the cost gap that makes a foreign worker on average 50% cheaper than an American one. Reduce the cost of Workers' Compensation insurance, and do something about Health Insurance costs. These are all costs that American corporations generally bear on behalf of American employees, and costs that magically go away when they ship those job overseas.

If you want to see the Extended Editions on a big screen for the first time, but not all at once, these same theaters are offering The Fellowship of the Ring extended edition starting December 5th through the 11th, and The Two Towers starting December 12th through the 15th.

Truth be told, I'm motivationally-challenged at the moment. I can't seem to get motivated to write about the things that I have been meaning to write about. I meant to write about the Verisign situation, but that resolved itself while I was procrastinating. I had advance word of what is now known as the QHOSTS virus, but I sat on that too, and now it's public information. I still haven't written about the last Mariners game of the season that Jessica and I attended. Before I know it, it will be spring training time and I'll have missed the window of opportunity on that too. I had a disturbing revelation about the Yankees, and why I dislike them, and how that is probably similar to why Americans are largely disliked around the world today. Isn't that strange.

I get stuck in these ruts sometimes also, of thinking that nobody cares about the things I write about, so why bother? But the truth is, this blog is for my benefit more than anyone else's. While it's nice to know people are reading my drivel, it's not critical that they do so for me to reap the benefits of this site. I write about things just to practice writing, and to develop the thick skin that seems to be a necessary attribute of anyone who writes publicly these days (ok, that second part might go faster with increased readership, I acknowledge).