Link roundup for 8/5/07

By Ben Gross
in

Fingerprinting the World’s Mail Servers: is a short research article by by Ken Simpson and Stas Bekman in O’Reilly Sysadmin investigating the percentage of deployed SMTP servers. The authors queried the servers of 400,000 and analyzed the results. The top three servers according to this study are: Sendmail (12.3 percent), Postfix (8.6 percent), Postini (8.5 percent). Open source mail servers comprised about 1/3 of the list. Hopefully, there will be followup research with more details results as well as explanation of methodology and limitations of the author’s approach.

Email inbox visualization: is a whimsical view into a mailbox by Carolin Horn and Florian Jenett that uses a a microbial theme to represent messages. It is based on horn’s MFA thesis at the Dynamic Media Intitute Boston. Source code and movies of the visualization as well as the full thesis are available.

Why It Will Be Hard to Close the Broadband Divide: Pew analyzes results from it’s recent study on American broadband penetration in light of the OECD rankings of per-capita broadband adoption rates. The analysis is a worthwhile read for policy makers as well as those evaluating methods to reach less connected populations.

Published August 5, 2007