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Spam Wars

by | Nov 24, 2003 | Front Page

We all know how frustrating Spam is, currently i am subjected to spam on the following mediums:

  • E-Mail – In the order of 4500 per month
  • Pop-ups, Pop-unders, Spyware and other malware. Thanks to the Mozilla Adblocker and its pop-up blocking this is not a big problem anymore either.
  • Blog comments, luckily not by my own blog yet but soon it will no doubt since I recently enabled comment posting ability, about 3 a week currently on other blogs I host
  • Referer log spams, 10 a week
  • SMS Spam used to be a problem for me, but now thanks to TPS that is not a problem now anymore, but TPS is voluntary and if the UK didn’t have strong laws protecting people this would still be a problem.
  • Snail mail spam, less of a problem now than before since my new living arrangements has a old lady who goes through my post and only gives stuff to me that is addressed to me, but in previous places I used to get about 15 to 20 snail mail spam articles a week.
  • Telemarketing calls on my mobile used to be a problem but also solved by TPS and I do not answer my land line so I won’t know about that one.
  • Instant Messaging spam on IRC and other IM systems, not a huge problem for me but others are feeling it badly.
  • Direct abuse of Microsoft’s pathetic Messenger service, this pretty much happens the moment you put a machine outside a firewall, thankfully you can disable this “service” and thankfully in XP SP2 it will be disabled by default.
  • Physical annoyance by sales people, charity beggars and other such types, I have my “get the fuck out of my way” look down pretty well so they run circles around me now.

As far as e-mail spam goes I keep track of time spent checking email for spam using iScan. This year I checked 311 611 emails for spam and spent 13 700 seconds of system time to do so. Of the 311 611 emails I checked 41 470 of them were tagged as spam. Of the 12 Gb of email I processed this year 300 Mb was spam tagged. Those are large figures and I am running a pretty small system for only a handfull of people, I would hate to imagine the impact that spam has on large ISPs.
So given all of this it does not surprise me at all to read stories such as the one about a ongoing war between a blog hosting company in the Netherlands and a spamming outfit in the states, people threatening anthrax attacks on spammers and the various name-and-shame tactics that anti-spammers are deploying to make the lives of spammers hell. I can sympathize with them and understand their rage.
Our only hope will be legislation and strong legal prosecution, there is no clear way to protect us from a technological point of view from attacks on all these fronts, the protocols we use such as SMTP and HTTP are all too weak and easy to abuse from a meta data point of view. The current spam laws leaves much to be desired, the people who are heading up government initiatives are clueless on a level I never thought possible so the future is looking pretty bleak. It seems that anyone with a desire to remain freely contactable will have to suffer as a result.

gmane.org NNTP 2 RSS converter

by | Nov 22, 2003 | Code

Ever since I started using Sharpreader I have been missing out on some feeds I used to read. Newzcrawler has the ability to read NNTP and show it in the same style interface as RSS feeds which is really nice for reading mailing lists via gmane.org‘s SMTP to NNTP service.
At the moment I read FreeBSD Stable, FreeBSD Security Announce, NT Bugtraq and Bugtraq through this gmane.org so you can understand that it was rather traumatic to loose this ability.

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Bill Joy on Linux, Mac OS X and Open source

by | Nov 20, 2003 | Front Page

Wired has a interview with Bill Joy – co-founder of what used to be called Stanford University Network aka Sun Microsystems, Grandfather of lots of sexy hardware and also Java – where he makes quite a few interesting remarks.

Re-implementing what I designed in 1979 is not interesting to me personally. For kids who are 20 years younger than me, Linux is a great way to cut your teeth. It’s a cultural phenomenon and a business phenomenon. Mac OS X is a rock-solid system that’s beautifully designed. I much prefer it to Linux.

Later on he has this to say:

I’m figuring out a meditation wall for my apartment in New York. Eight feet high by 12 feet wide, with an array of overlapping rear projectors, each with a tiny Linux box and connected by gigabit Ethernet.

Even more sexy would have been Apple G4 Cube machines ๐Ÿ™‚
On Open source he says the following:

Open source is fine, but it doesn’t take a worldwide community to create a great operating system. Look at Ken Thompson creating Unix, Stephen Wolfram writing Mathematica in a summer, James Gosling in his office making Java. Now, there’s nothing wrong with letting other people help, but open source doesn’t assist the initial creative act. What we need now are great things. I don’t need to see the source code. I just want a system that works

As always I think he has his head on in 100% the right way.

More blog spam

by | Nov 18, 2003 | Front Page

Another annoying vector for spamming bloggers is comments. The bots now do google searches for typical signs of Movabletype comment forms and then go spam them. They do this to up their google pageranking.
A few weeks ago Jay Allen wrote a system called MT-Blacklist that blocks based on blacklists. While blacklists isn’t the best way to blog spammers they are so far the best option that bloggers have due to the lack of unspoofable meta data in the HTTP protocol.
I installed the plugin into my Movabletype and have stopped quite a few comment spam attempts using it so I am quite happy with it and would recommend it to any MT user.