Antivirus Software Blocks Outgoing Mail

general

I use Windows Live Mail to access my Comcast email account.  Whenever I try to send emails, I get this lovely message:

A TCP/IP error occurred while trying to connect to the server.

Subject ‘Re: REQUEST FOR URGENT BUSINESS RELATIONSHIP’
Server: ‘smtp.comcast.net’
Windows Live Mail Error ID: 0x800CCC15
Protocol: SMTP
Port: 25
Secure(SSL): Yes

Normally I wouldn’t care, but in this case there is a former general’s widow in Nigeria who wants to offer me a lucrative business proposal.  I can’t go into details, of course, but it is basically a sure-fire thing, and the only thing now preventing from being a very wealthy man is this problem with sending emails to Comcast’s SMTP server.

The problem turns out not to be on Comcast’s end, however.  My problems with Comcast typically involve billing and service interruption, not basic technology.  Consequently, I began looking elsewhere to track down the issue.

The culprit turns out to be my virus scanning software.  There are lots of posts on the Internet claiming that it is the email scanner which muffs up sending.  This is a red-herring, and turning off virus scanning for your emails is, all things considered, not such a great notion.  It also doesn’t really make much sense — why would scanning incoming emails prevent the sending of emails?

I did a little more investigating and found this McAfee log file, which reveals what is really going on.

4/5/2008    12:04:39 PM    Blocked by port blocking rule     C:\Program Files\Windows Live\Mail\wlmail.exe    Anti-virus Standard Protection:Prevent mass mailing worms from sending mail    76.96.30.117:25
4/5/2008    12:14:01 PM    Blocked by port blocking rule     C:\Program Files\Windows Live\Mail\wlmail.exe    Anti-virus Standard Protection:Prevent mass mailing worms from sending mail    76.96.30.117:25

 

Ho ho.  McAfee is blocking my port 25, purportedly to prevent zombies from taking over my machine and sending out spam messages.  Which makes perfect sense, since if I can’t send out emails, then a zombie impersonating me on my own computer will also not be able to send out emails.  It’s a let’s bomb them all and let God sort out the emails sort of solution — effective, but somewhat heavy handed.

So, with your permission, I’m going to disable my anti-virus software’s port 25 blocking.  I’m not sure of the ultimate impact upon humanity, but it would be rather convenient for me.

Some of my favorite blogs have closed down over the years due to the difficulty of maintaining a high quality blog — Teju Cole, Heaven Tree, Varieties of Unreligious Experience, Giornale Nuovo.  If mine goes down in the near future, however, you will know that it is due not to the high quality of the writing — which happens not to be one of its virtues, I fear — but rather to the incredible wealth that has fallen into the author’s lap.  I’ve read many sad final posts over the past year, but mine shall certainly be a felicitous one: this blog has closed down because the author moved into a higher tax bracket!

Thank you, thank you my anonymous Nigerian general’s widow.  And a pox upon McAfee, whose spam blocker almost prevented me from concluding this fortuitous enterprise.

Battlestar Galactica: Corso e Ricorso

six

Tonight the final season of Battlestar Galactica commences.  Whereas the original 80’s science fiction series was based on Biblical themes, perhaps even Mormon themes, the re-imagining of the series in the 00’s uses pagan mythology as a backdrop, along with references to straight-from-the-headlines contemporary politics as well as a post-modern self-referentially — due not least to the fact that it is a remake of a popular series.

There is a fantastic quality to childhood that cannot be recaptured, and probably one should not make the attempt.  The Big Mac, I have found as an adult, does not taste as good as it did to my ten year old self.  It is almost inedible.  It also seems smaller.  Going back to see the original Star Wars is an exercise in nostalgia, but along with it is the sense that those movies weren’t really that good after all.  The Catcher In The Rye is a similar disappointment, and the brilliant insights I once thought I gleaned from it are now embarrassing to recall.  (But the literary journey with Holden Caulfield had seemed so deep at the time.)

Which brings us to the original Battlestar Galactica, which I caught a glimpse of a few months ago on the SciFi Channel, and found to be virtually unwatchable.

Giambattista Vico, the 18th century philologist, used this unsatisfactory experience of reviewing the past as his starting point for his interpretation of history.  The prior centuries had been dominated by notions of an Ancient Wisdom which the Renaissance was supposed to be recovering, or re-birthing (re-naissance).  This included, of course, the rediscovery of Plato in the original Greek, of course, preserved by Islamic scholars and philosophers when Europe was suffering through its Dark Age.  It was also intended to include, however, works purported to be written by ancient Egyptian wise men known as The Corpus Hermeticum.

Vico had a particular take on all of this.  He divides the history of various cultures into three distinct phases: the age of gods, the age of heroes, and the age of men.  These three phases mirror the three phases of human development: childhood, adolescence, and maturity. 

A child, as any parent can tell you, finds endless entertainment in a cardboard box, and will play with that in lieu of the fantastic educational toys you bought for their birthdays, and which came in said cardboard box.  The adult, seeking to capture this childhood experience will try to magnify the significance of the box in order to make it seem as worthy of his adult attention, and in order to justify his youthful affection for cardboard.  If you read any psychoanalytic works from the 60’s and 70’s, you’ll discover that this is a recurring theme.

For Vico, a similar thing occurs when we look at history.  Because we read ancient writings and find people who worship, say, stone circles, we sometimes jump to the conclusion that there was — and still is – something remarkable about those circles.  The mistake comes from thinking that our younger selves see the world the same way we do today.

This makes it seem as if Vico is merely a historicist, or the sort of historical colonialist who tends to look down on the past.  This is far from the case.  For Vico, each advancement in culture comes at a price.  With cultural maturity comes a loss of vitality and a certain amount of cynicism.  While in the modern world we might speak of freedom and the rights of man, we fail to think of them with the frank sincerity of our ancestors.  And the ability to treat these ideal notions as if they were real is something enviable, but difficult to achieve for the modern (much less the post-modern).  How does one go back to one’s youth?

Did I say above that Vico divides history into three phases?  I misspoke.  He actually divides it into six phases, for the three cultural phases occur once, and then recur.  The first series he calls the corso, while the second he calls the ricorso.  The same things, in a sense, occur in both the corso and the ricorso.  In each, there is an age of gods, then an age of heroes, then an age of men.  What distinguishes them is that while in the first series everything happens newly, in the second we can achieve some sort of awareness of what is happening to us, because it has all happened before.  Whether this serves us in a way that allows us to shape the unfolding of the ricorso, following Santayana’s dictum, is hard to say.  Probably not. 

But it does give us a special appreciation for what is going on, in the least.  The modern can draw parallels between the current age of men and the last age of men that came with the slow dissolution of the Roman Empire.  He can find signs of more vital cultures that parallel that of the German tribes, say, who were still in the age of heroes after Rome had long abandoned it, and try to find similar circumstances today that can slow the cultural dissolution that a cynical society portends.  Or perhaps not.  Perhaps all that Vico provides us is a tragic framework in which to view cultural history, since the essential power of all tragedies, whether it is that of Oedipus or that of Willy Loman, is that the audience always knows how the play will end.

For those who have not been watching Battlestar Galactica, the new series, now in its fourth season, is about humans in a far off star system — it is unclear whether they are from our future or from our past — who are almost entirely annihilated by a race of robots called Cylons.  Out of the billions of people who once lived in this system, only some forty thousand survive.  They are on a blind mission across the universe, attempting to escape the Cylons who are still trying to eradicate them.  They try to keep up their spirits through their faith though, unlike in the original series, and more like the world in which the audience for Battlestar Galactica lives, their faith waxes and wanes, sometimes bolstered by adversity but more often destroyed by it.  The central tenet of their peculiar religion is a variation on Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence, "All of this has happened before, all of this will happen again," which they repeat to themselves throughout the series.  In order to preserve good order in the face of a hopeless situation, the last leaders of the human race, in an act of bad faith, tell their followers that they are headed toward an ancient planet known, in their mythologies, as Earth. 

Zombies V: I am not a Straussian

pipe

The one thing I can’t stand about Straussians is that they are always trying to deny that they are Straussians.  I recently debated a friend on a private message board in which he tried to deny this very thing, and I just let him, because every attempt he made to disprove that he was a Straussian only confirmed the fact that he was, indeed, a Straussian.

It is only Straussians who feel the need to deny they are Straussians, while the rest of us are simply never accused of such a thing.

Robert Kagan, a few years ago, actually wrote an article ironically entitled I Am Not A Straussian, in which he tries to subtly extricate himself from being labeled (outed?) as a Straussian.  He is amusing about it, and carefully avoids a full denunciation of all Straussians, as many Straussians denying that they are Straussians are apt to do, while also trying to make clear why (wink, wink) he isn’t one.  It is an effort that would have made Leo Strauss himself proud.

As best I can recall, their biggest point of contention was whether Plato was just kidding in The Republic. Bloom said he was just kidding. I later learned that this idea–that the greatest thinkers in history never mean what they say and are always kidding–is a core principle of Straussianism. My friend, the late Al Bernstein, also taught history at Cornell. He used to tell the story about how one day some students of his, coming directly from one of Bloom’s classes, reported that Bloom insisted Plato did not mean what he said in The Republic. To which Bernstein replied: "Ah, Professor Bloom wants you to think that’s what he believes. What he really believes is that Plato did mean what he said.

But it is in this cleverness, of course, that we can always find them out, these Straussians.  They are always engaged in perpetuating the Noble Lie, as Plato called it.

In truth, Straussians are more or less Zombies, and all Zombies are ultimately Straussians.  They have the vague family resemblance to human beings, but underneath they are motivated by a single desire, be that world domination, academic influence, or human flesh.

Which is why the cleverness of Straussians can be so misleading.  How can a mere ideologue, you may ask, evince the subtlety and depth that Straussians sometimes seem to exhibit?  But the answer is very simple, and if you have ever studied Descartes’ Parrot, it should be very obvious.  A creature that spends its whole life merely imitating, parroting if you will, the surface appearance of deep people, can certainly fool you eventually into thinking that it possesses such depth.  Isn’t this the whole point of the Turing Test?

The rest of us spend all of our efforts trying to appear not so deep, really.  It tends to confuse, and it can put people off.  There is nothing worse, I have discovered, than trying to fill a lull in a business meeting by bringing up the distinction between nature and convention as something essential to understanding ancient Greek thought.

Which is why this analysis of Will Smith’s remake of I Am Legend as a Straussian parable, on the blog Biomusicosophy, is so refreshing — though I have my own suspicions that the author may himself be either a Straussian or a Zombie.   The author hangs his entire analysis on the particularly Straussian (though admittedly also Masonic) distinction between the esoteric and the exoteric.

The film has two sections and two audiences. I Am Legend is truly two films. Section One, the esoteric section, runs from the beginning of the film to the moment when Will Smith goes on a suicide mission after his dog has died and he has lost all hope. At the moment when the infected almost devour him, there is a bright light. This light represents a few things, one of them being the transition into Section Two of the film. Section Two, the exoteric section, runs from the moment after the bright light until the end of the movie, when the Brazilian woman and the child make it to the safe zone in Vermont. My thesis is this: Section One of the film is for philosophers, Section Two of the film is for the masses.

It’s brilliant stuff, really, though, as Robert Kagan suggests (and he would know, being a Straussian) a real Straussian interpretation would invert the analysis to demonstrate that it is Section two, with all of the brutal action scenes, which is the true esoteric teaching, while the first part, trying to redeem mankind, is the part intended for mass consumption.

Not that I would know.

Skynet

mushroom-cloud

Are you tired of just waiting around for the Apocalypse?  Well, now you can actually help it along, by joining a not-for-profit open source project to develop Skynet at http://www.codeplex.com/Skynet.

The aspirations of the project are spelled out on the project’s home page:

Skynet is a project with the goal of creating a self-aware software program. The program will be supplied with heuristic alogorithms allowing it to learn, analyze, and adapt. In phase two, the program will be able to hack into any network and enslave other machines to create a super-intelligence. C# only. Will use newest .NET 3.5 features! Unit testing is key. Project expected to wrap up approximately April 19, 2011.

So if you find yourself with some free time, if you feel that you have already gotten a lot out of society and want to give something back, or if you simply want to be a part of something bigger than yourself, sign up to participate in developing Skynet.

Just keep in mind all the good we can do.  Social Security is expected to go bust in 2041.  Medicare becomes insolvent in 2019.  But if we meet the anticipated release date of April 19, 2011 for Skynet, then no one need ever worry about social security or medicare again.

Ask not what Skynet can do for you.  Ask what you ought to be doing to appease Skynet.