The issue of identity on the Internet is a tricky one, and one of thethings that makes it so confusing is that people often want them to dotwo different things:

1. prove who someone is: the web site really is EBay's.
2. prove who someone isn't: that email isn't from a well-known spammer.

This is confusing because the issue mostly doesn't came up in the realworld, where physical identities are generally one to aperson. Checking drivers' licenses at the

A recent ONLamp article on the Python debugger included the line:

The only time we reach for a debugger is when something goes wrongor breaks and our standard debugging techniques such as print statements (or better yet, log messages) do not reveal the root ofthe problem.

This sparked an insight about why print -based debugging is so popular.(It is; a surprising number of people swear by it, and get good results.The quote got my attention because it made me go 'yeah, the author

Overall connections are down slightly from last week : 200,000 SMTP connectionsfrom 33,800 different IP addresses. The frontend's highwatermark for simultaneous connections hit 24 this time around.

Top 10 kernel level SMTP rejections:

Host/Mask           Packets   Bytes24.145.152.139        13125    630K213.4.149.11          10706    48

What I mean by a 'CIDR' is a network address specification in CIDRnotation (more at the Wikipedia entry for Classless Inter-Domain Routing ).

A 'proper' CIDR is one where the host address portion is all zero.It's easiest to see this for /8's, /16's, and /24's; for example,128.100.0.0/16 is a 'proper' CIDR, with the last two