taint.org: Justin Mason’s Weblog

Politics: Disaster. I can’t believe it.

• CNN sums it up
• some cute kittens, take your mind off it

Tags: cnn, disaster, mind, politics

Spam: CNN: First four charged under ‘can spam’ law:

Court documents in the landmark case in Detroit describe a nearly inscrutable puzzle of corporate identities, bank accounts and electronic storefronts in one alleged spam operation.

At one point, investigators said, packages were sometimes delivered to a restaurant, where a greeter accepted them and passed them along to one defendant.

Detroit Free Press: 4 Oakland men cited in 1st U.S. spam case:

The four are accused of secretly commandeering computers that forward e-mail for some of the nation’s biggest corporations — including Ford Motor Co. — to send millions of junk messages advertising herbal supplements, diet patches and sexual enhancement pills and products.

Other unwitting companies and agencies whose computers were used include Unisys Corp., Amoco Corp., the Administrative Office of the United States Courts and the U.S. Army Information Center, according to a complaint filed in U.S. District Court in Detroit on Wednesday. …..

Unraveling the trail of spam took four months. Berg said that because of the use of proxy servers, trying to trace the spam back to the original sender was difficult. …..

In Karlsruhe, Germany, an Internet security expert and activist named Anders Henke runs what he calls a “proxy pot,” a system that simulates a mail proxy but doesn’t actually forward mail. It sits on the Internet, looking vulnerable to the sophisticated scanning software used by spammers to sniff out open proxies.

Starting in early January, the complaint says, Henke’s proxy pot intercepted 5 million attempts from computer accounts linked to the Michigan men.

Tags: case, cnn, complaint, corp, court, internet, law, pot, proxy, spam

Leni Riefenstahl dead at 101 (CNN). Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will, the 1934 Nazi propaganda film, is rightly famous — it’s technically excellent — but became a millstone around her neck for the rest of her life. To my mind, this lesson illustrates that an artist (or scientist) can never divorce the work one does from that work’s implications to society.

Music: 12-year-old sued for downloading music. ‘ ‘I got really scared. My stomach is all turning,’ Brianna said last night at the city Housing Authority apartment where she lives with her mom and her 9-year-old brother.’ Way to go, RIAA.

Spam: Paul Graham: a spam filter that fights back. Basically auto-spidering URLs found in spam messages as a form of anti-spam DDoS.

Tags: cnn, film, leni, millstone, music, propaganda, riefenstahl, spam, triumph, work

Hubris: wow, SpamAssassin is on CNN.com!

The cool thing is — this photo’s syndicated by AP. Looks like SpamAssassin’s name is truly in lights now…

Tags: cnn, com, hubris, looks, name, photo, spamassassin, thing

CNN: A box of durian, sprinkled with carpet deodorizer, sparked an aviation alert in Australia on Thursday (via monkeybum):

When they finally found the source of the smell, it was a box of durian, a large, spiny tropical fruit renowned for its fetid aroma. While many people in Southeast Asia consider the durian a delicacy, it is banned from Singapore’s subway and some restaurants in the region because of its overpowering smell.

‘This wasn’t a safety issue, this was gross issue — no one wants to fly in an airplane that smells like that,’ (Virgin Blue boss Brett Godfrey) said. He compared the smell of the gourmet fruit to ’something you’d find in your outdoor dunny’ adding that ‘it just is the most pungent, disgusting smell.’

No shit — durian really stinks. I’ve tried to cultivate the taste for it, but failed miserably. Worse, for 3 hours in the passenger seat from Khao Sok to Surat Thani in Thailand, I was stuck with a selection of ‘em by my feet — no escape!

The nearest thing to their odor is really pungent, cheesy socks. ‘foetid’ is the word for it.

Tags: alert, aviation, box, carpet, cnn, deodorizer, durian, fruit, issue, smell