2003-05-09»
spam»
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?
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<b>% grep score ~/.spamassassin/user_prefs</b> <code> 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 |
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2003-05-03»
links o’ the past few days»
- 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.
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what is beverley hughes saying?»
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.
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2003-04-30»
links o’ the day»
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one to make matt jones proud»
The Internet Archive building now has a warchalking flag outside it.
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2003-04-29»
ipod+»
Whenever Apple releases something, there’s always a rush of people pointing out other companies that have done the same thing, only better in some way. Like it was written in Lisp, or uses righteous Ogg encoding, or just isn’t Apple. Usually you just let the waves of counterexamples crash around you until they hit their correct target, which is the Apploids thrashing in orgasm around your feet, but my… Neurosaudio has some seriously out-there features. Song recognition, built-in FM transmitter, MP3 recording. I’m not sure, but it might even be more expensive than Apple. Talking about beating someone on their home turf.
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2003-04-28»
back to work»
- Lumeta, net mapping thing started by Bill Cheswick who is talking at the Gates Science Building this Wednesday about the future of Internet Security.
- “We don’t pay you to be as confused as he is” – Spinal Tap’s (and The Simpsons and A Might Wind’s) Harry Shearer writes a ingenious piece in the NYTimes suggesting that if the music industry doesn’t want kids with more time than money to pirate their music, maybe they should stop exclusively marketing to them.
- Rand report on the troubled spread of the Net to China, Russia, Latin America, Middle East. Key assertions: China’s crackdown is working for now, Russia too weak to really kickstart IT, Latin America e-commerce suffering from lack of credit/debit cards, popular distrust of delivery procedures. Mexico most promising model. Elsewhere, establishment of Internet centers with a “human face” could “facilitate Internet use in small towns and villages”. I have no idea what they mean by that, or whether they just missed out on what a tourist revenue-spinner cybercafes are, but some nice barcharts and stats.
- Domestic use of SMS and IM, another talk, this time at PARC on Thursday. Teenage use of IM and SMS is another fork between Europe and the US, although I guess it’s more to do with the ratio of usage of the two forms. I should start automatically exporting data from my calendar for talks like these. They’re often fascinating. The PARC talks have a video archive but it seems to be lagging behind.
- Project – Aura. Designing interfaces and hardware for an environment where attention is the scarce resource. Bluesky wearable, pervasive, task-driven computing research.
- The science of pricing (via Dan Moniz). This touches on what this week’s column will be about. That is to say, the column will be ripped wholesale from Dan and my conversation about this topic.
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2003-04-26»
drink? snacks?»
I’ve been online, thinking and talking all week, in one way or another, but I don’t seem to have kept a record of any of it. I don’t have any notes, didn’t take any photographs, didn’t update any wikis, and didn’t even send out much email (I did, however, spend too much time in IRC, which is never a good sign of anything). What makes that worse is that much of my time was spent discussing how to tech-transfer knowledge out of real world conferences like Emerging Tech to a wider audience online.
To be honest, Emerging Tech suffers from this the least: much of the thinking that occurred here has already spilt out into the wider world via various blogs. Lisa Rein videod a lot of the talks, and will be uploading them to others were there.
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2003-04-21»
moon transit of iss»
This is one of those shots they should sneak into the beginning credits of Enterprise .
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2003-04-20»
don’t preach»
Madonna floods the P2P networks with an MP3 of her saying “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”. To quote the Wombles, making good use of the things that we find.
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