From IEM to AI and AIM

Jack Kirby now has a New York street named in his honor.

Jim Steranko at Jack Kirby Way

Advanced Idea Mechanics, AIM, was created by Jack Kirby to oppose another one of his creations, SHIELD. An organization of brilliant amoral scientists and engineers, wearing outfits lifted from Dr. No, AIM didn’t see itself as being necessarily evil or good. It was simply working for itself, as if the only goal of the Manhattan Project in developing the first atomic bomb had been to prove it could be done.

Where AIM screwed up was in creating Modok. He was supposed to serve the aims of AIM, but he quickly dominated them and took over the organization. You can see where I’m going with this, regarding Artificial Intelligence.

From Tales of Suspense #94, Jack Kirby (pencil) with Joe Sinnott (ink)

Right now I’m listening to American Top 40 on SiriusXM, with one of my ten pairs of inexpensive wired IEM earphones. I enjoy making comparisons between them.

Today’s listening selection is with the first version of the 7Hz Salnotes Zero IEM. (There’s a second version that I also have.) I came upon this website with a review of the Salnotes that I hadn’t seen before.

https://audioreview.frieve.com/products/en/7hz-salnotes-zero/

Frieve Audio calls itself, “An audio company and product meta-review site that surveys dozens of sources worldwide and publishes reviews that can be treated as final conclusions.” I’m pointing this out because Frieve is obviously a work of AI that’s dependent upon other sources, most notably Audio Science Review.

The process of AI’s recursive consumption and regurgitation of its own sh*t will eventually prove the old adage of garbage in, garbage out. If it isn’t doing that already in some areas of interest.

Scotty, We Need More Bandwidth!

Transporter Room at the Star Trek Original Series Set Tour in Ticonderoga, NY

An idle thought I had was about the transporters on Star Trek. If matter is digitized in some way and transmitted over an analog frequency through space, the data rate needed to pull that off would have to be incredible.

So, what is the current SOTA data rate from space? No surprise, it’s with the James Webb Space Telescope.

The maximum throughput is 28 Mbps, equivalent to the best ADSL Internet service. There are also a couple of side channel links running at dialup modem speed.

https://spectrum.ieee.org/james-webb-telescope-communications

However, during the Artemis 2 Moon mission, the data rate was almost ten times faster. By using lasers, communication ran at a maximum of 260 Mbps.

https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/20250010065

Which is still well below the download speed I’m seeing right now from the porch.

In November, Voyager 1 will achieve the amazing milestone of being 1 light-day away from Earth. What’s the current data rate between Voyager 1 and Earth? An extremely modest 160 bps download to Earth/16 bits up.

https://science.nasa.gov/mission/voyager/instruments/

In other space news, the Perseverance Rover is about to complete a total of 26.2 miles, a marathon distance, on Mars.

https://gizmodo.com/how-far-has-nasas-perseverance-rover-traveled-on-mars-the-answer-may-surprise-you-2000759104

By using the Mars orbiters for communication with Earth, the Perseverance data rate is up to 2 Mbps.

https://www.l3harris.com/sites/default/files/2021-02/L3Harris-IMS-EO-Sellsheet-Rover.pdf#

What Say Thee, AI?

Dear Google Search AI: Can Cloudflare interfere with IMAP?

Yes, Cloudflare can interfere with IMAP (and SMTP/POP3) login if the mail subdomain is proxied (orange-clouded) in DNS settings.

- Cloudflare's standard proxy only handles HTTP/HTTPS traffic, so proxying mail traffic blocks the connection, causing login failures in apps like Outlook or Gmail.

- In the Cloudflare DNS dashboard, ensure the A/CNAME record for ://yourdomain.com is set to "DNS Only" (grey cloud) rather than "Proxied" (orange cloud).

- Correct Mail Subdomain: Ensure your email client uses a subdomain (like mail.example.com) that points directly to your mail server's IP, not the proxied root domain.

- Verify MX Records: Ensure your MX record points to a hostname that is not proxied. If you are seeing errors, it is likely because the mail client cannot reach the server's actual IP address.

That seems to be the likely cause of the problem I had today. With this in mind, I should be able to change the server entry for my e-mail accounts in a way that will avoid interacting with Cloudflare.

But wait, there’s more! Accessing the site on Firefox has this problem:

Error Code: SSL_ERROR_NO_CYPHER_OVERLAP

Everything is still, after all of this time, still so freakin’ delicate with computers and the Internet. One little tiny thing can cripple everything. As a learning experience, I will stay away from Cloudflare, once and for all.

I’ve Changed My Mind

Bluehost has really pissed me off. If they don’t make me happy, I won’t wait until Trump is out office to shut down this site. I’ll do it before my plan renews at the beginning of next year.

What did Bluehost do to make me so mad? Here are a couple of comments I left for them on LinkedIn.

I am a 16-year customer, on a Bluehost chat right now, and I am not pleased. All of sudden, without prior notice, I need to buy a security certificate, just to log onto my email accounts with Thunderbird?! This is unacceptable!

SIXTEEN YEARS a customer, and out of nowhere you clobber my email client access without prior notification. Less marketing and more management, please! Send me a promo code for a Wildcard DV SSL to make me happy.

Follow-up: The LinkedIn complaint got a response. Cloudflare being the only change I have made in the past day, I put it on the table as a possible cause of the problem. Initially it seemed to be unrelated, because it should only affect website access, but now we aren’t so sure. Cloudflare is in the process of being deactivated. It remains to be seen if, assuming the process completes and Cloudflare is decoupled from my domain, e-mail client authentication works again. As I used to say at work, “Let’s swap all the tires until we find the flat one.”

Further Follow-up: Mail client access is working again for both sending and receiving messages. I’m waiting to hear what was broken and what fixed it.

Follow-follow-up: Bluehost doesn’t know. They’ve offered a suggestion as a workaround in case the problem returns, but that’s all it is. For the moment, it seems that Cloudflare, that should only touch WWW access, is mucking with MX access on my domain.

There is also the fact that whoever I was initially chatting with, AI or human, they guessed wrong and pointed me to a rabbit hole that would have caused me to buy an extra service that I don’t need. Major support points lost on that one.

The site is back to a “D” performance grade on Pingdom. 🙁 I will take reliability over performance every time.