I've recently realized an attraction of planet-style blog aggregations: by design, they haveno way to go back in the feed history. You get one page of entries(however larger that is configured to be), and that's it.

This sounds like a peculiar thing to be an attraction, but it means thatcompulsive information junkies with not enough spare time have no choicebut to let things go. We cannot wind up sitting on several thousandunread feed entries that we are theoretically going to

Courtesy of Slashdot , we learn that Verizon is moving to authenticated email submission so that, to quote the Verizon spokesman:

[...] Verizon will be able to quickly identify spammers, includingthose using so-called zombie systems, and shut them down.

Sounds great, right? Not really. The problem is that this changeshouldn't be giving Verizon anything that they don't already have.

Verizon already has a perfectly good way of quickly identifying theirspamming customers, namely the spamming machine's

When we talk to people about passwords, especially about websitepasswords , generally what we teach themis some variant of 'do not write down your passwords and always usedifferent ones on each service'. Time after time, what happens is thatpeople follow half of this; they have only one common password, but theydon't write it down.

It has recently occurred to me that there is a sensible explanationfor this result (beyond the obvious one that it is the more convenientoption if you are only