Oblomovka

2002-08-19»

This is an amazingly clever legal hack to deal with spammers and the problems of false positives with automatic spam scanners. Anne Mitchell, ex of MAPS has copyrighted (and trademarked, and patented) a haiku. She’ll let anyone who isn’t a spammer include it in their headers. And she’ll go after spammers that do include it with the full armoury of the intellectual property legal framework. She’s taking them down for breach of her haiku, not their spamming practice! I don’t know whether it’ll work, but it’s the the cleverest use of IP law I’ve seen since the GPL.

I’ve written up the story as a news item, as per my grand writing project. If you want to forward this link around, you might want to link directly to that. (This one’s in the style of Wired News, trivia fans: a fair amount of presumed knowledge, slightly informal style, standard US news piece packaging. Wired update their site at about 3AM PST, so don’t be surprised if there’s an equivalent, but better researched piece, over there by the time you read this.)

I *knew* spam and haiku were interlinked somehow.

Oh, and by the way – I originally got this from the astounding TBTF Irregulars mailing list.

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So, I’m living through some interesting times right now. I just hit 33, my wife’s expecting our first baby, and I’ve recently discovered I owe the US federal government quite a few pork-barrels worth of tax.

Now most people who know me will realise I’m a laid back kind of guy, where “laid back” can be interpreted as “bone idle“. But there comes a time when, even though you’ve reached an income bracket that keeps you in pizza and comics, you have to think about changing out of your pyjamas, going out into the wide world, and earning some proper money. This time is known as the “completely broke” time, and I’m so there. I need a career path.

I’ve always rather avoided the term journalist. Partly because, obviously, journalists are the Two-Faced and Turncoated Enemy Who Will Be The First Against The Wall When The Blogolution Comes. Mainly though, because proper journalism involves training and grammar-checking and talking to people on the telephone and selling out to the man in weekly installments.

I’ve been a journalist in the past (straight out of college). For the last five years I’ve been doing something I guess not dissimiliar to investigative journalism at NTK. And I’ve been writing newspaper columns for three years – which is what journalists are supposed to do when they’ve been journalisting for so long they can’t stop, even when they’re too senile to fact check. I even helped start (and kill) a magazine, which even I’ll grant is a bit journalistique manque.

But: I’m not a journalist. Journalism is hard. It takes practice, regular practice, and a degree of teeth-gritting determination I’ve been avoiding for a very long time. Worse, in America it involves knowing off by heart a bunch of strange quasi-legalistic rules – a discipline taught by high-falutin’ Professors Of Inkstains here, and generally replaced in the British model with going down the pub. And you have to be fast. I’ve always been a bit slow, and nowadays I’m slooooooow.

But sooner or later, I’m going to have to be a journalist again. I need the money; there are issues that need to be covered. Also Declan, my long time inspiration in this area, appears to have gone a bit mad.

But I need practice. So, here’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to practice on you. Over the next few weeks, I’m going to file stories with you (and hopefully with STAND also). I’ll be messing around with styles a bit, to see if I can get the hang of the different tones of different news services. They’ll be like writing exercises, but the content will nonetheless stand on its own. They’ll be proper interviews, and exclusives, and all that rubbish.

Let me know how it goes, and if I’m improving. If “you” are an editor, and I get it right, you can probably run them straight, but you might like to pay me, or give me a job, or some advice. Or take me down the pub.

The first story will follow in a couple of minutes. We’ll see how it goes.

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Rhys says “at least you didn’t do a course which meant you had to pretend to understand Bayes Theorem”. More helpfully, he pointed to a Bayes explanation which made it click for him. Now the probability of me understanding something, given that Rhys understands it is about 0.4, but the probabilty of Rhys understanding given that I understand it is… no, it’s gone again.

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Which is Macintosh-flavoured Word, just bombed out on me. Again. It’s the second time in a month. Oh, Microsoft, they said you’d changed.

Back to Vim. I think it’s eaten my work once, on an alpha version, two years ago. Oh, sure, it has a steep learning curve and sucks a bit for prose work. But I learnt all the keystrokes a long time ago to impress a girlfriend, I’ve just found out that ‘gG’ tells me my word count, and it now has an interface for the Little Brother Database, so la-la-la, I don’t care..

Oh, and look – somebody’s working on a user friendly version. My UNRECOVERED FILES WILL BE AVENGED.

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Wow. So, just days after Paul Graham put up his Plan for Spam page on a possible Bayesian filter for spam, people have already started implementing it. This one is for Perl and qmail, but I’m sure I’ve seen another somewhere. And I’ll bet there’ll be many many more.

Bayesian analysis is one of those concepts that is so counter-intuitve I find impossible to understand it for more than five minutes. Must try harder.

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