Spam: my slides from the presentation I gave at Toorcon 2004, ‘Spam Forensics: Reverse-Engineering Spammer Tactics’, are now up. Hope they prove enlightening ;)
Tags: engineering, forensics, hope, presentation, reverse, spam, spammer, tactics, toorcon
Travel: Toorcon was great fun! Lots of interesting conversations.
Unfortunately they had a cruddy internet connection, so I’m majorly backlogged, and can’t write about any of it just yet ;)
Spam: SpamAssassin 3.0.0 is now released! w00t! Only 4 months late this time ;) Announcement, techie details, Slashdot. New logo too:
(Note: if you’re running SpamAssassin 2.x and plan to upgrade, this is a new major release cycle — so we’ve taken the chance to break some backwards compatibility. Be sure to read the UPGRADE doc!)
Tags: announcement, chance, cycle, logo, plan, release, slashdot, spam, spamassassin, techie, time
Politics: So I was listening to that this morning. Did I hear correctly? Did Bush really say that one of the good side-effects of Iraq’s invasion, was that there were now hopefully less attacks inside other countries? sure looks like it:
‘Coalition forces now serving in Iraq are confronting the terrorists and foreign fighters so peaceful nations around the world will never have to face them within our own borders.’
I’m sure the Iraqi civilians will love that. ‘Hey guys, sorry about all the missing limbs, but you’re doing a really good job of being flypaper so we don’t get hurt. Cheers! Have a 15% corporate tax rate!‘
Tags: bush, cheers, coalition, flypaper, hey, invasion, job, morning, politics, tax, world
Conferences: Hey — I’m talking at ToorCon 2004 down in San Diego this weekend! Come along and check it out, if you can.
I’d better hurry up and file my presentation slides pronto ;) The topic is:
Spam Forensics: Reverse-Engineering Spammer Tactics
In this talk, I’ll discuss how the SpamAssassin project has identified reliable signatures indicating that a message is spam, by reverse-engineering spammer tactics from the spam mails themselves. I’ll also discuss several specific features that we have identified, how we found them, and why the spammers add them.
Tags: conferences, forensics, hey, presentation, pronto, reverse, spam, spammer, toorcon, topic, weekend
Green: Wow — UC Berkeley’s Lab Notes newsletter this month includes an article noting the benefits to the environment of reading your news on a PDA instead of getting a delivered newspaper. Check this out:
In a new study, UC Berkeley researchers report that receiving your news wirelessly on a PDA instead of delivered to your door requires up to 140 times less carbon dioxide, several orders of magnitude less greenhouse gases, and the consumption of 26 to 67 times less water.
…
To tease out the truth, Horvath and graduate student Michael Toffel dissected nearly all of the environmentally-relevant processes involved in both wireless news delivery and teleconferencing. In the case of newspapers, the researchers focused on the environmental effects of reading the New York Times in Berkeley, California, from the manufacture of newsprint and ink to the delivery from a nearby printing press to disposal of the newspaper. This data was then compared to such factors as the energy used to manufacture a PDA, including its microprocessor and battery, and the electricity required by wireless and Internet service providers to deliver news content to the device.
Sitescooper is therefore a WorldChanging tool!
Tags: article, delivery, environment, green, lab, month, news, newsletter, newspaper, pda, study
Mail: Ask’s mods to ezmlm got me thinking about mailing list managers. Hence, here’s my wishlist for what MLMs should be capable of…
Patents: Now that the summer break is over, software patents are back on the EU’s agenda. The FFII (via EDRI-gram) reports
On 24 September 2004, the European Council will probably meet to rubber-stamp the ‘political agreement’ achieved on 18 May 2004 on the highly controversial software patents directive (2002/0047 COM-COD).
According to the FFII the text was designed to mislead ministers about its real effects. ‘It consists of many sentences of the form or ’software is … unpatentable, unless … [condition, which, upon closer scrutiny, turns to be always true]‘.’ And, states FFII, ‘It can be said with certainty that only a minority of governments really agrees with what was negotiated, but several governments were misrepresented by their negotiators, who broke intra-ministerial agreements or even violated instructions from their superiors.’
More info:
Tags: agenda, break, call, council, edri-gram, european, ffii, patents, september, software, summer
Web: Flickr’s latest trend — using just an eye (or similar minimalist face part) as your avatar pic:
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Life: Luke writes:
Lean and I were joined by Lara at 6.10pm on Saturday 28th September. Lara is a little (8lb 7oz, so not _that_ little) girl. And she is gorgeous. Of course.
Congrats! I’ll be dropping in on the three of them next week, looking forward to it…
Tags: congrats, course, girl, life, saturday, september, week
Funny: The Daily Show’s GWB reelection film: ‘George W. Bush — Because He Says So’ (Quicktime MOV, 6MB). This is the funniest thing I’ve seen in ages.
Remember — don’t listen to the facts — listen to the words!
(thanks to anaxamander for the file. This URL is cached through CoralCDN, so pass it on!)
Tags: anaxamander, daily, film, funniest, funny, gwb, mov, quicktime, reelection, show, thing
Web: My Nearly-Live Planetary Desktop Backgrounds site is now using NYU’s Coral Content Distribution Network instead of FreeCache.org. (FreeCache wasn’t caching the files, because they were too small. drat.)
Coral is a ‘decentralized, self-organizing, peer-to-peer web-content distribution network’, using a distributed sloppy hash table and peer-to-peer DNS redirection infrastructure.
At least, apparently. ;) I haven’t read the papers yet, but what I do know is that so far, it seems to be working perfectly — each file is requested exactly once by the CDN servers:
193.10.133.129 - - [31/Aug/2004:16:50:31 +0100] "GET /xplanet/tmp/200408311455.399750/day_clouds_800x600.png HTTP/1.1" 200 706936 "-" "CoralWebPrx/0.1 (See http://www.scs.cs.nyu.edu/coral/)"
and never requested again. That’s a big saving… nifty!
Tags: backgrounds, desktop, distribution, freecache, live, nearly, network, nyu, planetary, site, web
The weblog of Justin Mason; incoherent ramblings about Apache SpamAssassin, anti-spam, perl, software development, and the web, from an Irish software developer.
The opinions expressed on this web site are my personal opinions, and do not in any way represent those of my employer.
