There’s a new article in the SF Chronicle that says the University of California, Office of the President (UCOP) has been monitoring emails going in and out of the UC system by using computer hardware. I wanted to give my personal opinion, as a computer programmer and somebody who has experience managing mail exchangers1. The quotes in the SF Cron article are very generous with technical details about the email surveillance system. Most of the time, articles about mass surveillance are dumbed down, but this one gives us at least a little something to chew on. Email was not originally designed to be a secure protocol. Over the three (four?) decades that email systems have been used, computer people have created several extensions to the original SMTP2 and 822 envelope protocol to provide enough modern security to make email “good enough” for modern use.… more →

Last December was the biggest month for RogerHub ever. We served over 4 million hits, which consumed over 3 terabytes of bandwidth. By request, we released the 6th calculator mode, “lowest test dropped”, to the public. But during the same month, we experienced the biggest outage that has ever happened on RogerHub, which affected over 60,000 visitors, and the number of total spam comments has nearly doubled. I keep using “we”, even though this is a one-man operation, because these seasonal surges of traffic feel a lot bigger than just me. Toward the end of the month, my hosting provider Linode was targeted by several large DDoS attacks across all their US datacenters. RogerHub is run in 2 Linode locations: Dallas, TX and Fremont, CA. However, only one location is active at any time. The purpose of the inactive location… more →