As much as the software industry overdog and the its representatives are disfavored, I do find Bill Gates very respectable. The scholarship program for law students that was formed in honor of his father is a great gift. I, as a juror, have seen young public defenders and prosecutors at work. I am fairly certain that these people do not receive the same amount of monetary pay that private firms offer, and it is great for Bill Gates to create a scholarship that can bring fresh, enthusiastic lawyers into public service.
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There is no reason for ISPs to block certain ports, but according to this blog entry, it seems that some still do. SBC Yahoo! DSL blocks outgoing connections on port 25 (SMTP) by default, however, they allow their clients to request the port to be opened. Whether or not SBC Yahoo! DSL unblocks outgoing connections to port 25 for only a particular destination is uncertain. Blocking ports is essentially restricting access to the whole Internet, and I would have sought another ISP if my provider was very strict about accessing third-party SMTP servers or operating servers from my home.
ISPs know which client’s credentials are used to connect to their service. They also have the means of determining which account is abusing their service. ISPs do throttle their clients’ bandwidth already, and they can further diminish the connection quality of abusing, jabbering, or compromised clients. They do not need to block these ports by default. Blocking popular ports, such as HTTP, evidences their lack of enthusiasm to take advantage of the networking tools they have as Internet service providers. It is an indication that the ISP is not strongly motivated to provide unobstructed Internet service to its clients.
I have been running an old computer with OpenBSD as a NAT router since the first day with my ISP. SBC Yahoo! DSL does not support it, but they also do not prevent it. I have also operated a webserver after the first week. Although they have been targetted by lawsuits demanding more protection mechanisms from the Internet, they have been a great ISP. I have been experiencing a lot of dropped connections lately, but I am happy overall for their unobtrusiveness while providing a generally reliable connection to the Internet. I have been an SBC Yahoo! DSL customer for approximately three years.
If an ISP is uncooperative about port unblock requests from hobbyists that are interested in gaining experience in IT administration, then three good solutions are very feasible: sign up for a dedicated hosting plan, experiment with network configuration in a private network, or simply look for another ISP and inform the restrictive ISP on the reason for abandoning them. It is very important that dissatisfied customers discontinue financially supporting restrictive ISPs. There are many ISPs available, and some of them are operated by professional computing hobbyists that simply love what they do and will not prevent their customers from experiencing the pride and joy of running legitimate servers at home.
Wired magazine’s Robert Andrews claims that Digg Just Might Bury Slashdot. Digg’s interface is more sleek than that of Slashdot. For example, links to the items under discussion are easily found as the title of each Digg. More items are presented on Digg’s homepage along with concise descriptions. Stories that are presented on Digg’s homepage are also determined by the Digg community. Digg is definitely a welcomed source of additional reading material.
An IT article is publicizing a remote hole in Microsoft Internet Explorer that can be allegedly used to execute arbitrary code. The latest virus definition update for McAfee VirusScan prevents the proof of concept page at computerterrorism.com from executing the payload right after Internet Explorer crashes, but systems without third-party security products may be vulnerable. I applaud Pearson of computerterrorism.com for recognizing the memory location of code that Internet Exporer fails to execute and its potential for exploitation.
My interest in contributing to open source projects has been growing lately. I use several open source operating systems, and I rely on many open source applications. There are many applications that I am very interested in developing for myself, and the open source community can provide a lot of off-the-shelf components that I can use, thereby reducing the time required for implementation. I am particularly interested in programming frameworks that support AJAX. Although I have a couple of disjoint open source projects that will help in the implementation of Web applications that use asynchronous Javascript and XML, I am unable to find a unified framework that uses one programming language to generate both client-side Javascript and server-side data processing logic. The open source projects that I found are mature and very exciting, and I look forward to becoming a key developer for one or more of these projects.