Uri Even-Chen wrote: > OK, I want to clarify some things: > > 1. My mail server is configured correctly. Don't you just love axioms. > 2. After I wrote about it to a friend (from Gmail), they found out, > and stopped the censorship within a few minutes. Or the transient error got better. > 4. I had the feeling that many messages I sent were not received, or > messages sent to me were not received by me. This needs to be proved, > but I believe it is true. I believe it is true too. The question that begs answer is "why"? If you receive those same emails within the next five days (or a bounce), this was probably just a configuraiton error. Email has failsafe mechanisms, but they sometimes take time. > 5. Of course it can also be related to the allmighty United States > government. But I have a feeling that both governments will never > admit it. No need to. Next time this happens, do give me a call. There are ways you can test whether this is someone messing around or not. > 6. They don't block only messages I sent to myself, they read any > message I send and receive, and then decide whether to block it. > That's the reason why I didn't receive messages I sent to myself. Ok, here's how the "powers of the dark" work. There are two modus operandi, and neither seem to match what you are doing here: 1. Gathering intelligence. In this mode, the worst thing that can happen to them is that you know they are monitoring you. If this is were what is/was going on with you, they would never, ever, so much as delay a message in transit. It is unnecessary for reading this message, and it hints to you they are on to you. 2. Someone is dangerous enough to be silenced. Unfortunately, there is such a mechanism in Israel for doing so. It is called "administrative arrest. A person can be taken off the street, no trial, no lawyer, for periods of several weeks at least. I do believe that you would have noticed had that been the case.
I'm sorry. It's not that I don't believe that the Israeli government is morally up to what you are describing. It's just that the actual symptoms make zero sense. > Uri. In a way, paranoia is a natural state of mind. It bears directly on our fundamentally ego-centric nature. In order for you not to take this personally, allow me to share a little story with you where I reacted the same as you did now. A (long) while back I worked on a Wine feature. The feature was implementing support for a horrid hack of a library called "Unicows". It was meant to solve a deep MS dilemma: so long as Windows 9x was a valid OS to run, no sensible application developer would produce Unicode applications, as they will not be able to run on Windows 9x, even if no actual Unicode support was required. To solve this problem they introduced a horrible hack called "Unicows". You link it with your application with higher precedence than the usual libs, and it intercepts any call to any Unicode (*W) related Windows function. If you're on NT and such it just passes the call along to the real function. If you're on 9x it tries to emulate the call, as best it can, using the Ansi (*A) functions. Did I mention it was a horrible hack? Thing is, the NT vs. 9x detection wouldn't work on Wine. This was strange, as you would expect it to simply call "GetWindowsVersion". After much digging I found out that the detection was implemented completely differently. It would call some file related function with arguments that did not make any sense. Something along the line of "\\?\?.?". The function would, obviously, fail. However, on Windows 9x it would fail with "Invalid argument", while on NT it would fail with "File not found". Wine did not implement this distinction, and it would always detect it as Windows 9x. At this point my paranoia mode kicked in. I figured Microsoft did this on purpose to make wine fail! What other explanation could possibly account for the fact that they didn't just get the windows version? And the bottom line is this. It's not about you, just like it wasn't about me. As things stood, when MS did explicitly target Wine (in WGA) they actually went public with it. It's just healthy paranoia. Shachar -- Shachar Shemesh Lingnu Open Source Consulting ltd. Have you backed up today's work? http://www.lingnu.com/backup.html ================================================================= To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
