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Justin's Linklog Posts

New Federal Anti-Spam Law Passed

Published November 22, 2003

Federal Anti-Spam Law Passes Congress (Anne Mitchell):

This source also said that the bill in its ultimate (and by now presumably passed) version was significantly tighter and more pro-consumer than the version which passed the senate and went to the house earlier this month. That’s good. On the other hand, it still doesn’t go nearly as far as the CA law did in many ways.

Still, one must be pragmatic – it doesn’t really matter if it’s better or worse than the CA law, right now, because it is (will be) the law. If we have to have a Federal law, and if it has to pre-empt the states, then this one at least has some positive aspects to it.

XmlStarlet, and lots of stuff

Published November 21, 2003

XML: XmlStarlet: ‘a set of command line utilities (tools) which can be used to transform, query, validate, and edit XML documents and files using simple set of shell commands in similar way it is done for plain text files using UNIX grep, sed, awk, diff, patch, join, etc commands.’ Sheer genius!

Power failure — Unix v Windows war as usual

Published November 20, 2003

OSes: /.: NERC Releases Interim Report on Aug 14th Blackout. ‘part of the blame for the big fizzle of 2003 lies with a failing SCADA system, GE’s XA/21 power management system. ‘Not only did the software that controls audible and visual alarms stop working at 2:14 p.m. EDT, but about a half hour later, two servers supporting the emergency system failed, too.’ According to the product specs, it is a Unix system with X Windows.”

How to link without PageRank

Published November 18, 2003

Spam: Given the latest spammer trick, clone blogs, there’s been some discussion of how one can link to another site, without actually conferring Google PageRank to them.

Guinness IS good for you, again

Published November 13, 2003

Irish Independent: Now ads can’t say it but you always knew it — Guinness IS
good for you:

One pint of Guinness a day can reduce the risk of blood clots that cause heart attacks, according to new research presented at the annual meeting of the American Heart Association in Orlando, Florida.

… Scientists investigating the health benefits of drinking beer found that stouts like Guinness worked much better than lager. They said dark beers were packed with anti-oxidant compounds called flavonoids which help reduce damage to the lining of the arteries. … For maximum benefit a person would need to drink just over one pint of Guinness a day.

My grandfather was ‘prescribed’ a bottle of Guinness per day by his GP, to lower cholesterol and blood pressure. Mind you, that was in ’70s Ireland ;)

SCO madness continues

Published November 8, 2003

I haven’t a clue what’s going on here:

… SCO would probably provide customers with financial incentives and discounts to migrate to SCO Unix, other vendors’ Unix, and what he referred to as ‘other proprietary operating systems’ but probably Windows.

Shock Horror — Do-Not-Call’s Gaping Loophole Exploited

Published November 8, 2003

Spam: So in the past 2 weeks, I’ve been called 3 times to ‘take part in a survey’. That’s compared to prior history before the do-not-call law took effect, which was absolutely no survey calls before on this number — but plenty of telemarketing calls.

Shock Horror — Do-Not-Call’s Gaping Loophole Exploited

Published November 8, 2003

So in the past 2 weeks, I’ve been called 3 times to ‘take part in a survey’. That’s compared to prior history before the do-not-call law took effect, which was absolutely no survey calls before on this number — but plenty of telemarketing calls.

Of course, I’m sure these surveys are all companies keen to get my considered opinion, rather than phone-spam scum exploiting one of the blindingly obvious loopholes in the federal do-not-call list legislation. Sure.

BTW, that loophole seems to be there due to an oversight issue — it seems the FTC doesn’t have jurisdiction over telephone surveyors. However, this page notes that the FTC staff are prepared to prosecute callers who attempt to subvert the act:

For example, if a survey call asks a consumer if he or she would be interested in purchasing a type of service or merchandise, and that information then is used to contact the consumer to encourage such purchases, the survey call is considered telemarketing and subject to the Do Not Call restrictions.

Which is all well and good, but I’m not going to hang around for 10 minutes of ‘what long-distance company do you use?’ in order to differentiate ‘good’ surveys from ‘bad’ ones; I’ll just hang up straight away.

Sport: Ben forwards this story — the US baseball team has failed to qualify for the next Olympics. Yes, baseball. And no, I didn’t know that other countries had genuine baseball teams.

Real-time DNS blocklist accuracy figures

Published November 7, 2003

Spam: DNS blocklists are the oldest means of spam-blocking, and are still exceedingly useful; nowadays, many of these are fully automated systems, using proxy-detection algorithms and sensing patterns in mailer behaviour indicative of spam.

(DNS blocklist accuracy figures continued…)

Note, however, that it’s still incomplete:

  • some DNSBLs were not measured; these are just the default DNSBL list in SpamAssassin 2.60, excluding RCVD_IN_NJABL_DIALUP (which I had to remove because I can’t parse out accurate data).
  • it’s only 1 person’s hand-classified mail.
  • SpamAssassin tests more than just the ‘delivering’ SMTP relay; it’ll also look backwards through the headers, at earlier relays, to catch spam sent via mailing lists. This is different from what’s used with most traditional DNSBL-supporting systems.

But the results should still be quite useful.

The time period covered:

  • Thu, 21 Aug 2003 17:11:30 -0700 (PDT)
  • Sat, 25 Oct 2003 23:11:52 -0700 (PDT)

Recap of the fields:

  • SPAM% = percentage of messages hit that were spam
  • HAM% = percentage of messages hit that were spam
  • S/O = Spam/Overall = Bayesian probability of spam
  • RANK = artificial ranking figure, ignore this!
  • SCORE = default SpamAssassin 2.60 score
  • NAME = name of test. Figuring out the exactly DNSBL should be pretty obvious ;)