Diana the Valkyrie's Newsletter - May 2003

A hard man is good to beat

April

I love this time of year. Oh to be in England, now that April's here. The trees put on their petticoats, the daffodils begin to trumpet, the bluebells emerge from their winter sleep and the pigeons do their mating dance across the garden.

New and updated Galleries

Galleries added this month.

The Library

Stories added this month.

Listen with Diana the Valkyrie

The Movie Theatre

Movies added this month.

Shopping Mall

A roll in the hay - a new Kasie Cavanaugh video is now available.

The Server Farm

On the 7th April, the connectivity problem was fixed. Energis rerouted my packets via Telehouse instead of Telecity, and the problem was gone. Whew! A week or so later, Level 3 found the problem, and replaced a piece of hardware. But I doubt if I'll ever find out exactly what went wrong there.

All the drives that I sent back under warranty, have now been replaced with good drives. As a result, I'm rolling in drives!

My Windows workstation stopped working. Not Windows fault, it was a hard disk failure. And, wouldn't you know it, the disk was dated 1999, which means it's out of guarantee.

Not a big problem, I don't keep any date on those things, it's all on the servers, and I switched over to using a different workstation without missing a beat. Then I had a thought, and I opened up the machine. I took out the drive, and put it in a different machine, and it was blindingly obvious that it wasn't spinning. Stone dead.

But it was a 37gb IBM drive, and there was a time I was buying quite a few of those. I have a few dead ones in my "bits and pieces" box, so I took out one of the old dead ones. It only took four little screws to get the drive electronics off, and I swapped that to the drive that just died. Imagine my delight when the drive started to work again! So, I put it back in the computer, and I'm a happy bunny.

I usually report only problems in this section, so it's nice to be able to report that my mass replacement at the start of this year turned out well. All the Pentium 4 machines that I built, are still running without problems. Back in December, I was expecting a failure each night. Now, I don't expect failures at all on the servers in Watford (those are the main member-facing servers). And I'm gradually eliminating failures on the machines here (which are less critical because they're mostly for support and suchlike).

Cameras

Nothing new.

The Newsgroups

The volume of Newsthumbs these days is so great that I have 750 gb accumulated in just two months. I'm guessing that I'll have to make the current server into Older Server Number 8 in a few weeks. Maybe I can hold out till the end of May.

Spams of the Month

I don't make these up. These are actual spams sent to me, which just strike me as funny. I don't include their contact details - go find your own spammers!

Complimentary Macaroni and Cheese for you!

One of the best offers I've had all month.

Claim Your Complimentary Pasta Pot

One of the best offers I've had all month.

You and your COLON

Actually, I don't use colons much; I'm more a semicolon sort of person.

Squeaky Clean Colon

Audible punctuation, just want I always wanted.

Important COLON info

I am enormously encouraged by the sudden surge of interest in punctuation.

Valkyrie, Seek of spam ?

Yes, actually I do seek spams, especially amusing ones that don't know the difference between "seek" and "sick" like yours.

do you believe this?

Nope.

Understanding the internet - who are you?

One of the significant issues on the internet, is that of identity. Who are you communicating with? How do you know they are who they say they are?

As a general rule, you don't. You don't know who they are, even if they tell you. And people can have more than one internet identity. And people can try to pretend that they're someone else; impostoring (also called identity theft).

Some examples.

So, how can this be resolved?

The main way that people confirm identity, is via face-to-face meetings. That way, you get to know the person behind the email address. But that isn't always practical. Is there another way?

Yes, there is, and it involves something called dual-key cryptography. Using it, you can be sure that something came from the person you think it came from (some people call this a "digital signature"). But again, this isn't practical, because it isn't in widespread use, and there's not many people who understand it sufficiently to have faith that it actually works. It's mostly used by people who already work in computer security. But one spin-off from this, is that when you go to a Secure Server (such as the one I use to collect membership information), you not only get the data encrypted before it's sent across the internet, you also get a guarantee that the server you're accessing is actually mine, and not someone pretending to be me. This guarantee can be accesses by looking at the "properties" of the secure page. I had to show company documentation to Thawte, the guarantor, in order to get that guarantee.

So, in the absence of a practical solution, what can be done? The answer lies in something that I say quite frequently. All the rumours are untrue. In other words, don't believe anything unless you have confirmation from a source that you can trust.

Does this matter?

In many situations, no it doesn't matter. This web site, for example, is an entertainment web site. Is Clepsydra a real person, or is she a clock like she says? Does Sandra really index the whole web site every day? Does it matter? All that matters, is whether you're having fun. Just don't believe anything that you're told, unless you get confirmation from a source that you trust.

In the situations where it does matter, I'd suggest that you look into GPG (Gnu Privacy Guard), which is free, and runs on Windows, Mac and Unix. That will do excellent cryptography, and also digital signatures.

Sponsorships

We currently have several running; Nicole Bass, Andrulla Blanchette, Sheila Burgess, Christine Envall, Marilyn Perret, Peggy Schoolcraft, Larisa Hakobyan, Steph Parks.

We're also sponsoring individual events, and funding athletes to go to events with grant dollars.

We're also doing free hosting and free bandwidth for many of our sponsored women. Bandwidth can mount up to a large bill when you're running a popular web site.

And we've sponsored Heather Foster, Kara Bohigian, Priscilla Ribic, KerryAnn Allen, Linda Cusmano and Jodi Miller.

The Clubhouse

In the Chatroom

Chatter of the month

TKO is ahead this month, and then alphacentaurian.

On the Message Boards

This month, we had 4591 posts to the boards.

Back Page

I checked the site statistics that Sandra counts up each night.

At the end of March 2003, there were about 616,000 pictures (34 gigabytes), 92 gigabytes of video, 7000 text files (mostly stories) and a total of about 127 gigabytes.

To the Magic Carpet