I’m without email and internet outside work hours (and heavily restricted during work hours) for the next few days, because of some problems getting ADSL in the new apartment. Anyone who is trying to contact me, please be patient – I’ll be on emergency-only duty for the next few days.
The most interesting thing for me of the responses I’ve gotten to the “I am a false positive” blog entry I wrote earlier is the defense of the blacklist system by a number of people.
It seems the theory goes “your ISP is doing bad stuff that’s hurting the internet. We’re only hurting you so that you can make them stop.” That might be “not doing good stuff to help the internet” instead of actively being bad, but you get the point.
But this is a hugely flawed logic. It’s the same logic that says that economic sanctions work because the people actually affected by the sanctions, that is, the less well off, will rise up and force their government, who aren’t affected by the sanctions, to change their ways. Blocking France doesn’t hurt spammers – they have lots of zombie PCs – it hurts me.
There are lots of ways to avoid false positives – greylisting, temporary blacklists based on who is actually sending out spam, bayesian filters like bogofilter, and so on. A case study in spam filtering without blocking real mail is here – this guy gets a million spams a day, and filters 99.999% of them automatically. Now if only everyone did this at the mail server level, I could pretend like spam didn’t exist and get on with my life.
In his Hall of Shame, he includes DNS-RBLs, and has this to say about them:
Well, I don’t know why, but in practice every single DNS-RBL eventually comes under the control of power-hungry weenies. They start listing sites unreliably, and if you complain you find yourself listed. And there’s usually no way to get off the list.
…
If the lists you use have not yet descended into corruption and chaos, consider yourself temporarily lucky.Do not use DNS-RBLs.
I feel a rant coming on.
More and more these days the email I send is bouncing back from third-party blacklist sites. Paul Graham has written about why blacklist based filters were so bad.
I am subscribed to one of the biggest ISPs in France (free.fr) at home. At work, my company is subscribed to the biggest ISP in France, Orange, formerly Wanadoo. I do not send spam from either work or home.
And yet, when I send mail to some people, it will come back with “Undelivered mail returned to sender”, with the painful message “550 receiving service provider policy blocks mail from dneary@xxxxx” in the reply.
This has happened to me so often, with so many people, that I really can’t quantify how much damage has been done. The worst part is, since email is pretty much the only way I have to communicate to these people, I can’t even let them know that they can’t receive my mail.
I have recently found out that one person I was trying to mail was behind a blacklist which was banning all email from France. That’s right, and entire country. That is antisocial behaviour of the highest order.
So, as an innocent victim in the (cue dramatic music) War on Spam, what can I do? Change ISPs? Raise my hand and say “Not I” to the blacklisters every time I get one of these? Complain to my ISPs that they aren’t doing enough to be part of the Coalition for a Spamless Web? Move out of France?
There’s an interesting article on ZDNet about comments from Larry Ellison that Oracle should be shipping “a full stack of software” to customers.
What’s most surprising about this is that it’s news.
HP already ships a choice of full stacks of software which are certified for their servers (and laptops). Nokia ships a full stack of software which is taylor-made for the 770. OLPC will be shipping a full custom-tailored stack of software on their laptops.
A common usecase for Oracle customers is to have one server doing nothing but serving a database. Doesn’t it make sense for Oracle to do the tuning work and make sure that the system is optimised for that usecase, and then ship a fully functional system to their clients?
In addition, your clients suddenly no longer have to ask themselves what distribution is best for their Oracle database server – the answLiveCDs for everything and anything and VMWare and Xen appliances?
Free software gives you the freedom to take and adapt software to your needs, and also to the needs of your clients. The only real question is what took them so long?
Wow. Just saw hub’s blog. What a way to start the weekend.
The French executive, legislature and courts have combined to produce a law that wipes out vast chunks of fair use law in the state, and which has previsions to put people who try to get around DRM in jail. For years. No exceptions.
Maybe it’s not too late to move…
I’ve seen these before, but this page is making me lose more time than I can afford to. Although I just about hit my boredom limit last night – I’ll let others lose time figuring out what the trick is.
O lazyweb, O lazyweb, I lost contact with an old friend when he went to the Falklands on a research contract, and came back to Ireland after I left for France. I don’t have an email address or anything, and I would like to get back in contact.
Can someone tell Thomas David Tierney, marine zoologist extraordinaire, graduate of UCG (that’s NUI Galway for you youngsters), known to his friends as David Tierney, and to his closest friends as Wurz, to drop me a mail, please? Alternatively, if you have his email address, please send it on to me. Last I heard he was working in the Marine Biology Institute in Ireland (marine.ie), but Google’s been no hope at all.
Thanks for your help!
Have you ever been working on a blog entry in firefox, and hit Ctrl-W instead of Ctrl-X by accident (or by habit)?
I don’t know how many times it’s happened to me, but it’s often. And always annoying.
Recently, I noticed a dialog when I tried to close on some website I can’t recall – “you have unsaved work, are you sure you want to close the window?” – I don’t know whether it was some Javascript in the page, or whether it was Firefox patched by Ubuntu, but I was very grateful.
Is this possible? Can I please stop losing unsaved work when there’s a form with text inputs on the page I’m closing by accident?
Way back at the start of 2005, nineteen Ethiopian youths were given cameras and asked to document their lives in a photo blog – the result was Ethiopia Lives.
At the end of the year, due to some technical issues, the site ceased being updated and now the photo blog is housed on Flickr.
Not only is the standard of the photography excellent, the stories and the images give you an insight into what life is like for normal Ethiopians, far from the almost dehumanised photos of famine you associate with the country in the West. It’s what Hugh MacLeod calls “reaching people on a human scale”. And it’s very effective.
Quite a few people around the GNOME community are still suspicious of companies who invest in free software – do they really get it? Is their investment fickle, or are they in it for the duration?
When I see Sun’s CEO announcing initiatives like this, it’s hard for me not to get excited about the company. I like what Sun are doing, I like the blogging CEO who answers personal emails himself, I like their investment in free software, I’m confident that Java will follow the lead of JDS and OpenSolaris. Sun are on the cluetrain, in a big way.
