Brookline VOL 1, NO 5
BROOKLINE’S VOICE
NOVEMBER 15-28, 2016
Photo | Joshua Resnek The movement of machines and humans at Coolidge Corner intersects many times every day.
Five frequently asked questions about e-mail (and how the Clinton political ship was sunk by e-mail) By Alexander Culafi
The Voice The moment when our world changed.
Photo | Joshua Resnek
Brookline voters bury Trump but lament the outcome By Alexander Culafi
The Voice Of the 28,922 voters who voted for a president in Brookline (about half of the population), 23,913 voted for Clinton and Kaine. Under 11% of voters, 3,137, voted for Trump and Pence. Brookline’s vote against Trump is indicative of the Massachusetts response to his candidacy, which was to reject it by the widest of margins. Six out of every ten Massachusetts voters voted against Trump. But Massachusetts isn’t the rest of the nation. Unemployment is low, the job market is strong, even though the difference
between the rich and poor is widening, the discontent felt across the nation was not felt by voters here. In the words of the movie producer and political activist Michael Moore: “Every beaten-down, nameless, forgotten working stiff, who used to be part of what was called the middle class, loves Trump. He is the human Molotov cocktail that they’ve been waiting for — the human hand grenade that they can legally throw into the system that stole their lives from them.” Boom. We had a choice between our first female president or our first president who is a
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With so much talk about Hillary Clinton’s emails during the past year and a half, I thought it would be interesting to share with you exactly how email works, and answer a few questions that have been on many of our minds. The questions about Hillary Clinton’s use of e-mails are now moot following her election loss, but the effects of e-mail drama swirling around her are likely to replicate themselves in the years to come. HOW DOES EMAIL WORK? Believe it or not, sending an email utilizes a lot of the same principles as regular mail. You write an email in your email client of choice (Gmail, Outlook, etc.), and then when you send your mail, it’s uploaded to the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) server as an outgoing piece of email. Think of it like an electronic post office computer that looks at your mail, sees where it's going and who its addressed to, and sends it on its way. After that, the SMTP server communicates with the Domain Name Server (DNS), to find out where the recipient's
address is located. If the address is found, the email is sent. If the address can’t be found, the sender will get an email that says something like “failure to send” on it. Ever type an email address slightly wrong and get that email? There you go. WHAT IS A SERVER? In the simplest possible terms, a server is a computer that stores files, keeps information, and grants things like website or, in this case, email access. Servers provide services to users on a network. The DNS and SMTP servers allow email correspondence to be sent over the web. Website servers allow sites to store various information and allow users to access website content. Now, email servers store emails. Commercial servers, like those belonging to Gmail, store and protect the email of many different people. In February, Gmail announced they had over one billion active monthly users. Federal servers, like those belonging to the United States government, securely protect the email of many powerful people. And private servers, like what Hillary Clinton was using during her time as Secretary of State, are privately operated and maintained.
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