Silver Glimmer

Author: dennis

  • Estate of Glenn L. Mathiasen

    Dennis Mathiasen

    5909 Walker Road

    Deerfield, NY 13502

    Cell:  (315) 941-7270

    Email:  dennis@silverglimmer.com – preferred contact method

    January 23, 2025

    I am looking for advice and representation regarding the estate of my father.  He died February 5, 2021.  My sister is the executor of the estate which has been in probate since May 2021.  She had power of attorney beginning in 2015.  She managed his finances since that time as well as helping him with his many health problems.  I helped also as much as she allowed, primarily with doctors’ visits.

    Much is in question, including the size of the estate.  $120,000 is clearly in probate, but at least as much as $750,000 perhaps should be.  There is a will dated August 2018, prepared by The Estate Planning Law Center.   It names 7 step siblings, my sister and myself as beneficiaries, each to receive an equal share of his estate.

    In 2016 my fathers’ friend decided that he wanted to leave about half of his assets to my sister and I.  He lived in Long Beach CA.  He designated his various assets as transfer on death to avoid probate and other potential complications and provided me with a notarized affidavit so that I would be able to obtain the requisite death certificate.  My sister intervened and got this reorganized so that my father would also inherit.  We never discussed the amounts involved, the total or who was to get how much.  It appeared from paperwork he provided that it was about 1/3 each, but that may not have been correct. He died in November 2019 and I received about $350,000.  I have seen no further records about this.  But I believe all or most of the assets were in a Janney Montgomery Scott account in Saddle River NJ managed by a Peter Ross.

    My sister has made a claim of $88,000 against the sole estate asset.  It is based on a long term care agreement signed by my father in 2015.  It’s not notarized.  None of my step siblings nor I had any awareness of this document until it was produced to support her claim.  She first made mention of it in a letter to me shortly after the estate was opened.  She asked that I approve the claim even if it seems ridiculous because after all, the sole estate asset was “supposed to go TOD to me”.

    In that letter she mentioned that I would be receiving about $25,000 as a beneficiary of a trust she had set up.  This is my 10% share.  She is to receive the other 90%.  The trust was signed and notarized January 16, 2020.  No attorney was present nor in contact with my father at any time regarding this as far as I can tell.  It was not prepared by The Estate Planning Law Center, but by some firm in New Jersey.  My sister paid the legal fees for it personally.  He was in a nursing home and I visited him about 10 days before.  He was in bad shape.  I helped him eat.  He had difficulty understanding and our conversation was minimal.  This is the last time I saw him due to COVID.

    A check was issued for me and held by an attorney at The Estate Planning Law Center for about $25,000.  It’s to be paid to me on condition that I take no legal actions.  Since the trust places no such conditions on my receipt of it, I have refused to do so.

    I hired an attorney in May 2021.  He filed a motion to remove my sister on grounds of conflict of interest.  The motion was later withdrawn as it had no basis in law.  Discovery was done regarding her claim.  It never included any Janney statements, but did include checking and Schwab statements.  She had commingled his money and her own.  I involved my step sister Eleanor to help with analyzing the financial statements.  She has a BA in accounting.  At least $30,000 went missing.  There are several versions of the accounting.  Apparently as more information became available to others she realized her accounting would need to reflect it, including the $30K characterized as a gifts to her daughter.

    I retained another attorney and he filed a motion that her claim be disallowed.  It has not been pursued.  Eleanor decided to pursue matters herself.  Where my hope and intention had been that the trust be broken and the claim be in great part disallowed, Eleanor attacked the will and everything else in sight.  She did so with no legal counsel until recently.   Ami Longstreet, Esq. of Syracuse, New York was appointed guardian ad litem in May 2024.  Monitoring the nonsense exhausted the retainer with my attorney.  Eleanors’ actions were dismissed and she was found to have triggered the in terrorem clause in the will in December 2024.  4 others joined her in contesting the will.  She is appealing.

    My sister filed a new petition for settlement which included yet another accounting.  In this one, $554,000 has appeared as amounts “previously distributed”.  The provenance of this money is unknown.  My speculation is that she used her power of attorney, undue influence and perhaps coercion to set assets transfer on death to her.  Further that the $250,000 trust assets represent what she was unable to set TOD to herself.  I appeared January 14th to object and need to appear again with counsel on February 4th. 

  • Email Forwarding Problems

    Many people like to use forwarders so that they only have 1 email account to check.  Sometimes problems occur with this.

    Unfortunately, forwarding to gmail accounts is problematical. Forwarding to yahoo.com is even worse. The 2 things which commonly go wrong is gmail deciding forwarded mail is spam and deleting it and the other throttling sending rates.

    The cause of the problem is people complaining in their gmail account about spam which has been forwarded to them. We do fairly well at stopping spam, easily 98% and that is as good as anyone, including gmail. But when several or many people mark the remaining spam as what it is, gmail regards the likelihood of mail coming from our servers as being spam much higher. That is, they think spam just came from our server, the probability that the next incoming emails are also spam is much higher. That’s incorrect in this situation, but you can see why it might seem to make sense. When their system reaches a probability high enough, they start throttling and even discarding emails. They would discard emails when other characteristics of a particular email also suggest that it’s spam.

    I have sent emails to them several times asking what might be done about the problem. The only response I have gotten is being referred to their bulk mail guidelines. Not applicable and quite pointless. This is not an unusual problem. They ought to account for it, but they don’t.

    There are a couple of things you can do. One is to stop using gmail directly by setting up a forwarder:

    https://support.google.com/mail/answer/10957?hl=en

    You would then check the account which you set up as the forwarding target instead of gmail.

    The remaining things you can do are to use an email client instead of web mail and set it up so that it checks multiple accounts or simply check several places.

  • Hard Drive Failure Rates

    In the last 6 months we have twice had nearly simultaneous drive failures leading to service outages.  It was hard at first to grasp how something so seemingly unlikely could have happened.  When it happened a second time, it was time for some serious scrutiny.  What seemed like common sense might not be correct.

    We run servers in pairs.  A hard disk on one server has a corresponding hard disk on another server.  If one disk fails, the service can simply be powered up on the other server.  Both servers have to be down to cause an outage.

    The solution became obvious once the problem was understood.

    Google released a study of their experience with a very large population of hard disks and failures.  If you have a taste for a dry technical paper, you can find it here: Google media research  What they found was revealing.  The data set is based on consumer grade drives.  We use enterprise grade drives which have a much longer life, but the general observations will be about the same.  This summarizes failure times:

    afr_age

    As expected, hard disks show a high infant mortality followed by a period of (in our case) several years of reliable service.  Then suddenly failure rates increase.  That there is a decline in failure rates at 4 years is unexpected, but a gradually increasing rate after that is just what you might expect.  There is no data to support a rise and fall like that with enterprise drives.  It may or may not happen.

    When we think about reliability, what we want to know is the likelihood of a failure event in a given time interval.  Then we can make statements (these are made up numbers) that the odds of a drive failure in a server over a months time are 1 in 300.  Then if a drive in a second server which is being mirrored to is the same, the chance of both drives going down in the same month becomes 1 in 600.  Since replacing a failed drive and re-mirroring takes 2 days, that would make a 1 in 9,000 chance of a failure before we could recover with no down time.  That seems reasonable enough, but it turns out not to be correct.  The problem is the failure rate distribution.

    Many people are familiar with “the bell curve”, what in statistics is called the normal distribution.  The graph looks like this:

    Empirical_Rule

    If you tossed a coin 5,000 times and kept track of how many times in a row you got heads and tails and graphed it, that’s what it would look like.  The left being heads counts and the right being the tails counts.

    Hard disk manufacturers supply a statistic meant to show product life called the mean time between failure – MTBF.  If the number was 5 years, the expectation is that most drives would last about that amount of time.  What they report generally doesn’t relate to reality very well as the Google paper shows.  Still, it’s a useful statistic.  If the MTBF is 5 years and we charted a large population of disks, you would expect the chart to be a normal distribution with 5 years being the top of the curve.  Lacking data, my guess at the standard deviation of a set of 5 year MTBF drives would be something like 3 to 6 months.  Failure of a specific drive is random within a time frame so it’s reasonable to expect a failure curve to look something like a normal distribution.  We are (were) working with 2 sets of hard drives all manufactured at the same time, all in exactly the same kind of server and in service for exactly the same amount of time.  What that means is that the top of the curve is going to be much narrower and the sides much steeper.  In statistical terms, the standard deviation will be a much smaller number.

    So, the obvious solution?  Add randomness.  Add new drives, but not all new drives.  The older drives have life in them yet.  Besides being a waste of money it would lead to the same situation if we simply replaced all of them.  What we have done is replace half of them.  Each replication pair consists of an older drive and a newer one.  When an older drive fails it will be replaced by another older drive until we run out of them.  Introducing new drives will therefore be at relatively random intervals.  This will move the top of that curve all over the place in terms of single drives.  We may not see the odds against double failures as high as 1 in 9,000 but clearly it will be a huge improvement.  It would be nice to have actual data for predictions.  We don’t, so I will have to make a guess.  Based on a lot of consideration, 1 in 1,000 seems reasonable.  It’s also a number we can live with.

  • Keeping Your Site Safe

    After a site has been compromised, we often get criticized for, “Not keeping my site safe”.  It’s not a reasonable criticism.  There isn’t a magic bullet to use against attackers.

    We do scan every web server request for something like 10,000 known attacks using the web server plugin mod_security.   The rule set for scanning is updated daily to stay on top of the most recent kind of attacks, both generic and specific.

    Every request also has to pass through 2 firewalls.  The first of these examines every packet, checking whether it came from a known bad actor IP address or is malformed in any way, which is a clue that it may have a bad intent.  The second firewall watches activity, looking for patterns typical of compromise attempts.  A simple example is repeated login attempts with different user names and passwords.  This is called a brute force login attack.

    Yes, it would be possible to expand the screening to improve safety more.  The trouble is, the list grows exponentially as you expand it.  If we attempted to include anything like all possible attacks, web pages would never appear.  The servers would be too busy with screening to get around to sending them.

    So why isn’t that enough?  The usual problem is the web scripting language PHP.  Sadly, it is vulnerable to attack by default.  Unless the programmer using it is aware of possible ways to compromise it and takes steps to prevent those compromises, a script will be vulnerable.  When you install a set of scripts on your site (such as WordPress) you have placed your security in the hands of the authors of the script.  There is no getting around this.

    It is critically important to keep your site running the most up to date software available.   Even a short delay in updating can be fatal.  The more popular the software you are using, the more important this becomes.  We deal with WordPress compromises every day which should not have happened.

  • Grey Listing and Sender Verification

    I was asked today if some email is not getting through the spam filters on our mail server.  In general, only spam is filtered out, but there are some uncommon cases where wanted email is rejected.   The more email is filtered, the more opportunity exists for mistakes.  Once in a while email does get classified as spam when it is not.  This is called a false positive. There will always be some false positives because mail servers are configured by humans and email is created and sent by humans.  Humans make mistakes.  It’s only a question of when and at what level false positives are acceptable.

    An example would be if 2 people want to have an email conversation about certain kinds of pharmaceuticals.  Some of their emails might seem to disappear.  The thing to realize is that putting up with losing that kind of email also means not having to delete hundreds of spam emails daily, many thousands of emails per year.  Most people would say that the inconvenience is worth it.

    We are now doing grey listing.  When a sender has not been seen before, a deferral response is sent (a 400 series response, not an outright refusal).  It’s accompanied by a message, “Please try again in 1 minute.”  Properly configured mail servers will try again because they understand that a deferral response is not  a refusal.   Spammer mail servers seldom try again because they need to send as much email as possible before they get black listed.

    False positives can happen when the sending server is misconfigured.  Some servers fail to differentiate a deferral from a refusal.  They don’t try again.  Not to mince words, the person or people in charge of the server do not understand what they are doing.

    Grey listing also helps us spot email being sent to web harvested addresses.  When we see the same email going to an architectural firm in Dubai, to a home tutoring service in Des Moines,  a car repair shop in San Diego and a rare antiques shop in London it’s a good bet that it’s spam.

    We are blocking thousands of spam emails per day using these 2 techniques.

    We have also started doing sender verification.  This is done by testing whether a bounce message to the sending address would be accepted.  If the sender address is fake, it’s reasonable not to take mail from it.  This is controversial because it puts load on other servers which are innocent of spamming and can be employed by spammers as an attack on those servers.  However, Gmail, Yahoo, AOL, Hotmail and others do this to our servers.  Fair is fair. But again, false positives can occur due to badly configured servers. The email standards documents say that bounces must be accepted when sent to live addresses.  Some servers refuse bounces because of user complaints that they are getting email returned they didn’t send.  There are solutions to that problem, but this isn’t it.  Some mail server administrators simply do not know that it is possible to tell the difference between verification and a real bounce.

    Many people expect that email should be perfectly reliable and run their business partly based on the assumption that it is.  Unfortunately, that assumption is unrealistic.  Without filtering, email is essentially unusable because of the volume of spam.  The entire system is imperfect because it’s run by an unpredictable collection of imperfect humans.  It is flawed. To say it more plainly, it’s a mess.  Nobody in his right mind would design email to work the way it does on the Internet as it is today.

    On balance, false positives are relatively rare.  For the vast majority of users they will never be a problem.  All the same, it’s a good idea to remember that they are possible.

  • New Anti-spam Measures

    At Deerfield Hosting we work hard to reduce the spam (unsolicited email) our users receive.  About 95% of email arriving at our servers is discarded because we can identify it as spam.  None the less, the remaining spam can still be a significant annoyance.  The problem with further filtering is false positives.  We can’t be throwing away important emails.  It’s a hard problem.

    We have been noticing for some time the same from address sending to many of our users in different and unrelated domains.  Most often this is due to web site scraping, email addresses harvested from web sites.  To identify this kind of spam, we have started tracking inbound from and to addresses and generating statistics in real time.  When a particular from address exceeds more than a few unrelated domains, subsequent email from that address is blocked.

    We welcome feedback on this.  If you are noticing that you are getting less spam or if you can see no measurable difference, we want to hear from you.