by R.I. Pienaar | Jun 24, 2004 | Uncategorized
ePHOTOzine has a nice article on the rights of photographers, it caters for the UK and gives some hints for freelancers and hobbiests.
Regarding pictures of total strangers – candid shots taken in the street, say – no one in the UK has copyright on their face, and providing you take pictures from a public place, there are no laws covering the right of privacy of the public. Therefore, if you photograph a ‘streaker’ running down the high street, there is nothing they can do about it legally. The only time problems occur is if that picture is published and the accompanying text is defamatory – suggesting the person was drunk or on drugs, for example – in which case the subject can sue you for libel damages because in fact they were just having a good time.
A Downloadable Flyer has been created for the USA.
by R.I. Pienaar | Jun 24, 2004 | Usefull Things
I have now used GMail quite a bit and must say the interface is really fantastic.
The keyboard orientated interface is for me the most appealing, combined with the searching and ease of filtering mails this is going to be my favorite means of reading mailing lists in the future.
Read the full article for some screenshots and description of some of the features I like most.
(more…)
by R.I. Pienaar | Jun 23, 2004 | Usefull Things
Thanks to Francois for sending me a GMail invite.
I have been using it for a short while today and must say this is by far the best mail client and web app I have ever come across. If they have any plans to sell this thing as a stand alone APP I would be right there buying it.
A few of my favorite things so far:
- Hotkeys, Hotkeys, Hotkeys. This is fantastic it has hotkeys for just about anything and its very Pine like which means I am comfortable with it immediately since I am a old Pine user and made my mutt also use Pine keys
- It is really fast, the web interface responds like a normal app does, this is mostly due to piles and piles of javascript but surprisingly the experience is exactly the same in IE and Mozilla.
- The labeling of emails while initially striking you as being the same thing as folders has one major advantage, you can put multiple labels on a single message. I often have mails that I am struggling to decide where to put them since they cover 2 catergories of folder.
- Searching is very good and fast – I hope it works as well when they reach hotmails user counts.
- Filtering is good while not as flexible as mail filters found in other mail clients it is adequate, you cannot forward mail in a filter to another account for example
- Something that I think is unique in the free mail world is unique email addresses, you can have username+randombit@gmail.com and the filters support checking for this and lets you classify mail based on that.
So far the Spam filters has been disappointing I think they will hopefully improve on that soon. The ads have not been intrusive at all, in fact much google use has made me not even notice them. There are of course privacy issues around all this but I think no more than with any provider of email that you do not control. The provider can read your email, authorities can demand access to your email, and gmail does give you the option to permanently delete email so I think its a small step forward from hotmail or yahoo to gmail in that sense.
There are a number of tips and tricks type sites out there, here are a few I found useful:
Gmail Gems
Gmail Tips
by R.I. Pienaar | Jun 22, 2004 | Front Page
There is an interesting piece detailing motives and method used by a spammer.
Interesting to me is the note about how the spammers pay for mail delivery and to me this is just yet another point proving that rejecting mail at SMTP time is a stupidest idea ever in the fight against spam.
There are many reasons why I believe this to be a bad idea. Most spam thesedays go directly to the secondary MX rather than the primary, this I can prove by looking at my spam checking on my own 2 machines. In the period 7 June 2004 till now my secondary machine handled 10568 emails 6913 were from dynamic blocks and blocks lists in 2 RBL lists – that is about 65% spam. On my primary server I handled 15288 messages in the same period with only 2521 being classified as spam using the same black lists but also running stuff through Spamassassin – that is 16% spam.
For anyone that hosts a secondary relay for a friend or other business this is a killer, typical mail servers reject mail at SMTP time using a 4xx class error and so the mail sits in the secondary mail queue trying over and over to deliver, each time wasting CPU and bandwidth resources. Eventually when it fails – and this happens on a 5xx class error as well – the secondary gets stuck with trying to delvier the bounce message to the source address – always faked – this attempted delivery goes on for a number of days and wastes more CPU and bandwidth resources. A much more friendly approach would be to accept the mail and bin it right away, this will actually save you and your secondaries a lot of resources – and as this quote shows it will actually end up costing the Spammers money if you accept it rather than reject it at SMTP time.
For USD 50 excluding VAT he buys his first 400,000 credits; one credit equals the sending of one spam mail. Because they have a special offer running that month, send-safe.com doubles his credits for free, which enables him to send no less than 800,000 spams for 50 dollars.
After these preparations, the spam can be sent. The program supplied will set up a connection, routing the spammer to an open proxy server and from there to the mail server where the spam is to be sent. If that mail server accepts the connection, the spam mail will be sent and a credit will be deducted from the spammer’s account. If the mail server does not accept the connection because the IP of the open proxy is blacklisted, the e-mail will not be sent and no credit wil be deducted.
In one specific case of stupid mail rejection I calculated that the repeated attempts to deliver the email over a period of 5 days used up 680 Mb of bandwidth between my secondary and the primary, off loading that kind of bandwidth waste onto your secondaries is really not a good idea.
As things stand now I am considering refusing to host a secondary domain for anyone who is rejecting mail at SMTP time, I am simply sick of having to deal with the ever growing problem of bounce messages sitting in my mail queues and never delivering.
by R.I. Pienaar | Jun 20, 2004 | Uncategorized
In a recent installment of Petteri’s Pontifications titled Boring Photographs I found a link to a PBase gallery of Hin Chua. I really like his photos and his style that is visible throughout his photos. I especially like his urban photos, will be sure to check back here often.
