Oblomovka

2003-05-10»

Wow. I now get over 20,000 spams a month. Maybe that explains why I seem to get a lot more false negatives (spam that gets through) via Spamassassin. It's the same small percentage as ever, there's just a lot more of them.

Some spammers are definitely working on evading SA's filters. I see a lot of spams that pretend to come from Pine and Mozilla simultaneously - scoring them a massive minus twelve on Spamassassin's anti-spam-o-meter. I've tweaked the reward for these tests down a bit in my own user preferences. I've also nudged up the penalties for falling foul of SA's new Razor2 and Bayesian modules. Spamasssassin's still a bit hesitant to trust these much. But with the amount of spam (and normal mail) I get, my Bayesian filters get all the training they need. Don't know why it gives Razor such a low score - perhaps Spamassassin's overly cautious approach to false positives is leading it to punish for accidentally catching some major mailing lists?

        % grep score ~/.spamassassin/user_prefs
    
score USER_AGENT_PINE -0.5
score USER_AGENT_MOZILLA_UA -0.5
score BAYES_99 8.0
score BAYES_90 8.0
score BAYES_80 8.0
score BAYES_70 8.0
score BAYES_60 4.0
score RAZOR2_CHECK 3.0
score RAZOR2_CF_RANGE_91_100 3.0

2003-05-03»

• On Warranties - Glenn Otis Brown clarifies the creative commons license on indemnifying content users, as brought up by Dan Bricklin. It's a tricky topic - do you encourage people to use your works by taking on any burden of alternative copyright claims against your work. Or do you share that burden, even as you share your work?
• Vi for Squeak - it sounds perverse, but I've had a lot more fun with Squeak since I installed this. It's also one of the few changesets that I've managed to file in without getting a fistful of confusing errors.
• Lisp advocates - critique of Paul Graham and co. for being a bit too superior about the failure of Lisp.
• 23 - well-regarded movie about hackers, and in particular Karl Koch (Hagbard), the Illuminatus-obsessed German hacker who sold secrets to the KGB and ended up committing suicide. In German. Features cameo by Robert Anton Wilson!
• Fast Forward Fifty Years - sadly curtailed autobiography of Bob Forward, pragmatic hyper-futurist. Free download.

Beverley Hughes is the Minister of State for Citizenship and person in charge of investigating introducing Identity Cards into the UK. She said a very odd thing in Parliament last week:

Mr. Paul Marsden (Shrewsbury and Atcham): If he will make a statement on plans to introduce identity cards. [109766]

The Minister for Citizenship and Immigration (Beverley Hughes): We published a consultation paper on entitlement cards and identity fraud on 3 July 2002. We are at the moment making a detailed assessment of the 2,000 responses received to the consultation exercise, which ended on 31 July. Many organisations and individuals have expressed support for a card scheme, and that has been backed up by other research on the public's views, which we will publish alongside our response.

What's peculiar about this is that I know for a fact that at least 5029 consultation responses were submitted via stand.org.uk. Of course, that consultation ended on the 31st January, not July, but I assume that's just a slip of the mouth from Ms Hughes. Unless she's planning to retrospectively change the dates, and dump several thousand voter's responses (most of which were resoundingly negative) out into the Home Office dustbins?

I'm going to mail her later today and find out what's going on.