Some time ago I discovered that the Linux dump block size can make asignificant performance difference . Ever sincethen I had in the back of my mind to find out if the same thing was trueon other systems, with other versions of dump ,and recently I got around to doing some experimentation on Solaris.

In the spirit of sharing negative results as well as positive ones: no,it doesn't seem to. I got a modest performance increase by specifying a b value greater than the default of 64

Having just gone through a PreUpgrade experience (updatingfrom Fedora 8 to Fedora 10, yes I am behind the times), I have twosuggestions for how the whole experience could be made even nicer.

First, there should be an option to apply the current updates for thenew distro version as part of the upgrade process, or at least todownload them all in advance so that when I reboot and immediately do a yum update , I do not then have to sit around as my machine downloadsanother gigabyte.

Sometimes, faced with an apparently intractable problem in security,people say 'I know, we'll leave it up to the users to decide what todo'. What they really mean is 'we don't know what the right thing to dois, so we're going to make the users figure it out'. As the saying goes,now they have two problems.

Let's look at some big reasons that this is a terrible idea, both ingeneral and specifically for security systems

The problem with email marketing , why inpractice it turns into spam, is what I will call 'address list creep'.

The cleanest list of addresses to send your marketing email to ispeople who specifically requested that they receive them. But evenat the best of times, this is not quite the same as 'people who havespecifically subscribed themselves to a mailing list that you run',and this difference creates a strong pressure to let people in yourorganization add addresses to the mailing list.

This might work

While I think that the end effects are the same ,I think that there is a conceptual difference between what gets called'email marketing' and outright email spam, and that this differenceinfluences how the people who originate 'email marketing' think aboutit.

To put it one way, what I call 'email marketing' at least attemptsto be the logical extension of physical mail marketing; you gatherthe addresses of your customers, of business cards dropped into yourgiveaway draws at tradeshows, of people who have sent

As it happens, the os.listdir() problem is just the tip of the iceberg of Python 3's Unix problems . Here are two more ways that it helps Unixprogrammers, from the release notes :

Some system APIs like os.environ and sys.argv can also presentproblems when the bytes made available by the system is notinterpretable using the default encoding. Setting the LANG variableand rerunning the program is probably the best approach.

Since the release notes are not explicit, let me fill them in

Despite what I wrote yesterday and my general viewson authenticating SSL , I thinkthat in real life SSL still needs certificate authorities, or at leastsome sort of trust roots. The problem is that normal people are simplynot interested in assessing trust issues and probably are not capable ofdoing so. In fact I'm not sure that I'm capable of doing it.

(As I wrote once before, in practice I make no attempt to actuallyverify the SSH host keys that I get prompted to approve,

One alternative to monolithic certificate authorities is a web oftrust approach to trustissues. Here's my view of the flaws this model as an alternative toCAs, when used in practice.

First, you haven't actually removed the need to pick trust roots; everyuser has to start their web somewhere, and usually they are going tostart from some well-known root or roots. What you have really doneis made trust roots less subject to detailed scrutiny and criticism,and probably made it less obvious

Here is a thesis that I have been mulling over lately:

One of Python 3's fundamental problems is that it is trying very hardto pretend that Unix is fundamentally a Unicode operating system, sothat Python itself can be Unicode-based while still working on Unix. Theproblem with this is that it is demonstrably false, as seen in the os.listdir() problem ; Unix is fundamentally a'bytecode strings' environment, and attempts to pretend otherwise canrun into problems any time that this pretense runs