Oblomovka

2003-05-17»

• tales of incompetent computer security consultants "I marched into my manager's office and told him his new gateway user name and password," fish says. "He thought I was psychic until he thought about it for a second." (via Charlie Stross , I think
• McDonald's salads have more calories than a big Mac - for added fun, check out the intra-nutritionist battles between the vegetarian Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine and some weaker pussier dieticians. It's a food pyramid - of pain!
• really bad Matrix-inspired clothing - worn by really bad Matrix-inspired people.
• most journalists have stories about colleagues who make shit up - antinews.
• big honking map of computer language history
• easynet Stellios wants to fill cinemas by introducing extreme ticket price flexibility. Some films will go for 20p. (hyped to death back in the UK, I imagine)
• gene that gives long-life via calorie restriction identified? - live to 114 without living off roots and berries.
• latest wifi cards won't get linux support - because they can programmed to work at any frequency, and "various government agencies don't like it".
• free market drone robots - "An Arizona vigilante group is testing homemade drone recon planes on the U.S-Mexican border to monitor illegal immigrants". It's the 21st century, what did you expect?

2003-05-14»

I have to write about something other than spam sometime. Anyway, Justin Mason wrote in, to say the new version of SA (v.2.54) severely punishes those Pine-'n'-Mozilla pretending creeps, and adds: "overly cautious my ass". Apparently Razor doesn't get high scores, because the genetic algorithm that they use to calculate the scores doesn't think it needs it. In other words, most of the Razor stuff gets caught by other traps. He also reckons I've got BAYES_60 and BAYES_70 a bit too high, and maybe he's right - I got one FP from LinkedIn the other day. On the other hand, I have problems separating give-all-your-friends-email-addresses-to-a-third-party services like LinkedIn from spam.

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