Ray and Ross are pointing to other communication technologies such as Groove and Wiki as possible solutions to the e-mail problem.  I disagree.  Vast millions are already familiar with e-mail and nothing but the e-mail will meet their needs.

Their suggestions amount to telling everyone in Asia to switch to bread because rice crops are infected with some harmful virus.  I do not believe fixing e-mail is beyond technological reach.  I also do not think the alternate technologies are problem free, particularly when they are deployed as widely as e-mail.

I think the world will choose to use minor variations of the e-mail technology instead because they just want e-mail to work better, not something else.  Ray point to the uncontrolled nature of e-mail as the fundamental weakness of e-mail.  Good point.  I believe the initially popular variations will be controlled e-mail services.

Since normal e-mail is noisy and unreliable, new businesses will spring up offering trusted e-mail service to corporate e-mail users.  They will form several co-op networks to apply the control necessary for limiting abuse.  Popularity and profitability of such businesses will force ISPs to join the co-op networks.  Eventually, the co-op networks consolidate into a single federation of trusted e-mail service providers spanning the globe.

Note that this trusted e-mail network will co-exist with current spam-choked e-mail infrastructure and none of the e-mail users will have to change their e-mail client.

I think this vision of the near-future is more reasonable than mass exodus to alternate technologies.  Still, I don't blame Ray and Ross for seeing everything as a nail, particularly since they have such nice hammers.

I just e-mailed a request to close my ServInt VPS account.  In three days of trying to set it up, the server went down several times a day.  Not a good sign.  I think the company is a good company and have heard good things about them, but I think Virtuozzo, VPS implementation software they are using, has problems.  Since I don't have time to wait for the problems to be fixed, I am going to look elsewhere.

Update #1:

I just ordered a modest dedicated server from ServerMatrix.  2 Ghz Pentium 4, 1G of hopefully fast memory, and 40G IDE with Red Hat Linux 9.0 and no cPanel (sheesh).  Bandwidth is 750GB/month in both directions.  I guess the unusual bandwidth accounting is due to ServerMatrix's dedicated game server products.  Anyway, I am expecting to wait longer than usual to get the server up and ready for my newbie Linux administrator fingers.

Update #2:

I received an e-mail from Reed J. Caldwell, CEO of ServInt, apologizing and informing me that the VPS problems were indeed caused by a Virtuozzo bug which, fortunately, affected just the server I was on.  He assured me that his teams are working around the clock to fix the problem.

He offered me several very reasonable options, but since I already ordered a ServerMatrix server I had to cancel.  Thankfully, Reed promised a full refund.  Great.  As I mentioned before, ServInt is one of the best out there so my trouble shouldn't reflect too much on their reputation.  I also still think their VPS program is a great deal once the bugs are fixed.

Update #3:

My ServerMatrix server is up and ready to go.  Heehee.

According to Reed, CEO of ServInt, VPS problems are fixed:

The problems you were experiencing on smv5 have been stabilized. We had the Chief Software Architect from Virtuozzo on the server all day yesterday. They are now working on a patch which will be replicated to all Virtuozzo customers, courtesy of the joint work between ServInt and SW-Soft.

Cool.  When I get unhappy with ServerMatrix, I'll consider ServInt again.

Oh, sh*t.  Several severe vulnerabilities were discovered in OpenSSL's ASN.1 parser code.  These bugs are really serious and widely spread.  Update Now!  Beside pathcing your own programs that use OpenSSL, don't forget about program you didn't write.  I'll have to scan my system to take stock of which programs I have to update.  Sheesh.

• OpenSSL Security Advisory
• Feds, Industry, Battle the Biggest Bug – SecurityFocus
• Brits pound OpenSSL bugs – The Register

While the hole in OpenSSL might be patched, vulnerabilities in other applications using ASN.1 are likely to still exist and may come to light in the days to come.

Pass this news on to others so they can cover their ass too.