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US defence forces no match for the unstoppable fiend known as Reply-All
- bell-cot 4y agoE-mail, designed in the mid-80's by and for computer geeks, in a tiny, trusting little pre-web internet, is a seriously crappy fit for the modern world. But good luck replacing it. Random idea: Add a few commands to ESMTP, which allow the mail server to tentatively accept an e-mail for delivery, then examine the message, then either handle it normally...or, optionally, do some basic back-and-forth with the sender. "Do you really want to sent this to 17,000 recipients?" "Your 50MB attachment is too large for reliable delivery." "Your system has the Zandu-j84 virus; an alert was sent to the IT Dept." Etc.
- sam_lowry_ 4y agoThis is a great business idea. No kidding.
- aliqot 4y agono, stop sending email that can be 'examined'. thats the first turd in the shitshow we call email.
- dr-detroit 4y agoThese are all features of the managed email service at my job
- TheNorthman 4y agoHey man, just a heads up: You're currently shadow-banned on HN so your comments are automatically hidden. I don't think there's anything you can do about it but I'd want to know. I feel comfortable telling you because most of your content isn't inflammatory, so I fear you might have been wrongly filtered out.
- aliqot 4y agocareful, dang will threaten you for doing this. I used to do this, and he eventually showed up and said to stop. i encourage others to question this behavior and vouch gratuitously, otherwise we'll hivemind ourselves. when vc stops being en vogue, hn loses about 50% of its luster, and whats left will rely on the quality and diversity of discussion here. the day will come where yc shits the bed and there is someone new, don't leave yourself without a nerd community if/when that happens by encouraging samethink. edit: now the user's <5 minute old grey posts are un-vouchable. this is fucking pathetic
- throwawaaarrgh 4y agoNever question authority publicly; they'll be on to you and can stop you.
- aliqot 4y agoill do what i feel is just, they can try and stop me, but there will be more like me.
- ElevenLathe 4y agoTruly a posting martyr. Thank you for your service.
- zahrc 4y agoMimecast and some M365 defender plans offer those features.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y agoThere's a whole lot of current computing that is just hacked together on top of unscalable bad-in-retrospect ideas from the 70s and 80s. If I had a couple billion dollars I'd be interested in hiring a small group of very bright people to see what building a computing platform and infrastructure from scratch with no concern for compatibility with the current paradigm would look like.
- TheBigSalad 4y agoHonestly it would probably be just as bad, but in different ways.
- dexterdog 4y agoOne way would be that it would not even exist in a usable state for at least 15 years. Then it would have the mastodon problem.
- chasd00 4y agoIsn’t that Plan9?
- eru 4y agoI'm not sure the situation is all that dire. Remember eg the battle of RISC vs CISC? These days we accept that a reduced instruction set is a better idea, but those bloated instruction sets barely take up any any space on the chip anymore compared to all the caching we do.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y agoA couple examples of the kind of thing I'm talking about: Why is vsync still a thing? Originally it came from how broadcast TV worked with CRTs, but the fundamental technologies are different today. Yet, we still update the entire screen, all at once, on a fixed rate timer with blanking intervals[0]. I'm certainly not an expert in how LCDs work, but my understanding is that there is no fundamental reason we cannot update different parts of the screen at completely different rates or on-demand. We just don't do that, because the convention is a stream of pixel data from top left to bottom right. Or take process memory isolation and remapping. There's a lot of overhead there, and the whole thing looks like a solution to make a program think it has all the memory to itself and no other processes exist, and then we have to work around that specially to let them share it, and still have to add extra complication to deal with malicious jumps, and now timing attacks. What if there were a better way, so long as your programs didn't essentially act like they were running on a Commodore 64? What could something like Unicode look like if it had never had to deal with any kind of legacy nonsense, han unification, or the UCS2/UTF-16 debacle? Oh and if it didn't have such an obsession with emoji. Those are just off the top of my head. Undoubtedly my lack of expertise in these domains means I'm probably missing or misunderstanding some things, but I think there is practical value in occasionally re-examining all of our assumptions and starting from scratch. [0] Free/Gsync exists now, but we still update the entire screen.
- mywacaday 4y agoMy personal favorite are the emails with a image at the bottom reminding me not to print to save the trees/environment with out realizing that in most cases the image has at least doubled the size of the mail and everything that goes with it from a a transfer storage and display perspective even if miniscule.
- unsupp0rted 4y agoI wonder if those messages have ever successfully prevented somebody from printing an email they otherwise would have printed
- LinuxBender 4y agoNot exactly what you are asking for but many MTA's do have options to limit recipients and ways to make exceptions so there are ways to protect against this and limit who can send to many people. Many enterprise mail servers have something similar to this as well. I have no idea what the military are using these days. They mention Outlook in the article so I assume they are using O365 or whatever it was renamed to. O365 has the ability to write rules based on AD group membership to limit who can mass email. Perhaps the military can temporarily take away those permissions until people have had training.
- aliqot 4y agoarticle titles are dying a slow death these days.
- hipsterstal1n 4y agoMy father-in-law works for a defense contractor around DC and works with and travels to allied countries on classified + items. He has several stories of him and his colleagues at his office being on the receiving end of un-intended reply-alls with the end result in most cases of a military team coming to the office and physically taking away all the computers that had been on the receiving end of the reply-alls.
- boomboomsubban 4y ago>For starters, the incident coincided with a Chinese spy balloon's journey across US airspace. Something of nearly zero importance to the army. What were they going to do, send paratroopers at it? >Second, it was quite clearly far from a wise use of military resources. While true, I doubt this caused a significant waste of resources. The third issue is fair. The original source opinion piece seems better than this writeup.
- FartyMcFarter 4y ago> What were they going to do, send paratroopers at it? I think the balloon was flying at 60,000 feet. I'm not qualified to know if paratroopers can operate at that altitude, but it sounds tough. They'd need oxygen at the very least. It would certainly make for a cool scene in a movie, although it seems pointless?
- kube-system 4y agoThe sentence you quote is sarcasm. Jumping at 30k is risky. Not to mention, what would they do, run into it?
- heavenlyblue 4y agoWhy is it risky?
- HPsquared 4y agoThere is not much oxygen up there and it's very cold.
- shagie 4y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-altitude_military_parachuting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-altitude_military_parachu... In military operations, HALO is also used for delivering equipment, supplies, or personnel, while HAHO is generally used exclusively for personnel. In typical HALO/HAHO insertions the troops jump from altitudes between 15,000 and 35,000 feet (4,600 and 10,700 m). Military parachutists will often reach a terminal velocity of 126 mph (203 km/h), allowing for a jump time under two minutes. ... All types of parachuting techniques are dangerous, but HALO/HAHO carry special risks. At high altitudes (greater than 22,000 feet or 6,700 metres), the partial pressure of oxygen in the Earth's atmosphere is low. Oxygen is required for human respiration and lack of pressure can lead to hypoxia. Also, rapid ascent in the jump aircraft without all nitrogen flushed from the bloodstream can lead to decompression sickness, also known as caisson disease or "the bends". --- You'll note that the numbers there are much less than 60,000 feet. The altitude here is closer to the ceiling for the U2 spy plane (famously known for being high altitude) at 70,000 or so feet. For further context with the U2, here's the pilot suit required to operate at those altitudes - https://www.afcent.af.mil/Units/380th-Air-Expeditionary-Wing/News/Display/Article/445170/u2-pilots-rely-on-special-flight-suit/ https://www.afcent.af.mil/Units/380th-Air-Expeditionary-Wing...
- TheBigSalad 4y agoWow there was an email chain in the Army. Crazy stuff.
- ravroid 4y agoDoes anyone have a link that isn't behind a paywall?
- Bender 4y agoElReg should not have any paywalls. I am curious what you are seeing. Here is an archive link [1] [1] - https://archive.ph/6TBGB https://archive.ph/6TBGB
- MarkusWandel 4y agoIsn't that what bcc: was invented for? Who sends out a mass email with 13,000 listed recipients in the first place?
- hef19898 4y agoEasy: Unintentionally subscribe an e-mail list to another e-mail list at Amazon. And unintetionally press reply all to unsubscribe...
- LinuxBender 4y agoIsn't that what bcc: was invented for? Yes. I recently had to explain that to my bank. Now I have the names and email addresses of all my fellow customers of the bank.
- m000 4y agoGiven the existence of bcc, this is as much a sysadmin failure as it is a tech illiteracy failure. This mail should have been bounced by the outgoing SMTP server.
- throw0101c 4y ago> Isn't that what bcc: was invented for? Meta question: How many folks, or at what age cut-off, know what the "CC" stands for? And how many know where the 'carbon copy' term comes from? For those that don't know: > A sheet of carbon paper is placed between two or more sheets of paper. The pressure applied by the writing implement (pen, pencil, typewriter or impact printer) to the top sheet causes pigment from the carbon paper to reproduce the similar mark on the copy sheet(s). More than one copy can be made by stacking several sheets with carbon paper between each pair. Four or five copies is a practical limit. The top sheet is the original and each of the additional sheets is called a carbon copy. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_copy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_copy
- WirelessGigabit 4y agoNo, not for internal traffic. If I receive an email because it's part of a mailing list it should be in 'To' or in 'Cc'. Otherwise I have no way of filtering out the email based on its origin.
- invalidusernam3 4y agoI'm surprised email clients/sites don't warn you if you're replying-all to more than x addresses with an "Are you sure?" pop-up
- xocdan 4y agoThe client is almost always unaware of the true size represented by an alias for a group it does not manage. These are the source of the big storms in my org.
- micromacrofoot 4y agoIMO the client shouldn't even be allowed to send to more than XX addresses
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]