I’m feeling a little cranky this morning. I woke up to over sixty emails since 10 pm last night, of which six were good, and four were automated notices I expect to get every night. The other fifty-some were either spam, bounces from spams that had forged my address in their reply-to, or notices about spam having overflowed a mailbox for one of my clients (for whom I forward mail), because her webmail-box on one of those free servers has filled up with spam, so I’ve got nowhere to forward the mail to anymore. I’ve had to shut that forwarding off for now.
It makes me wonder if we’ve become too civilized or too complacent. I was talking with another friend over the weekend, and we were trying to figure out why it is that Alan Ralsky is still able to send spam. I don’t condone murder or capital punishment, but there are people out there who are a bit unbalanced. Hell, some guy killed a rock star to get attention and another whack-job tried to kill Reagan to impress a movie star. I find it hard to believe that there’s not some nut who’s so pissed off about spam he wouldn’t make a trip to Michigan. If Ralsky lived in my neighborhood, I’d think awfully hard about at least cutting his phone line.
I’ll keep trying technological solutions though. I keep tweaking SpamAssassin, and am looking into other answers (more on that below). I’m also thinking of switching email clients to one that supports IMAP so I can flag spam on my client machine, and get that information (easily) propagated back to my server so it can do better filtering in the future. But it’s going to take a while to get any solution in place, and meanwhile I have to deal with over ¾ of my mail being spam. Ugh.
- Here’s a handy how-to on Installing the Greylisting Milter “RelayDelay” on OpenBSD 3.4. Sounds useful, but I’m still looking at doing the filtering with spamd, too. [openbsd]
- Did you know E-mail and snail mail are united in India? They’re taken the system of mail-runners (formally started in 1854, but around long before that) and use email to send messages over longer distances. I’m betting they don’t hump a lot of messages touting v14gr4 over the mountains. [slashdot]
- On Monday, Brewster Kahle, who runs the Internet Archive and the Internet Bookmobile filed Kahle v. Ashcroft claiming that:
via [slashdot]the Berne Convention Implementation Act (BCIA) — is unconstitutional under the Free Speech Clause of the First Amendment, and that the BCIA and Copyright Term Extension Act (CTEA) together create an “effectively perpetual” term with respect to works first published after January 1, 1964 and before January 1, 1978, in violation of the Constitution’s Progress Clause. The complaint asks the court for a declaratory judgement ruling, stating that copyright restrictions on orphaned works — works whose copyright has not expired but which are no longer available — violates the constitution.
- Dudley Hiibel’s case has gone to the Supreme Court, and the Wired News: Supremes Weigh In on ID Debate. The outcome of the case will decide whether or not you can be required to show ID just because the cops ask you, whether or not you’ve done anything illegal. [wired]
- The Daily says the Met Council is wasting time with negotiations if they’re not going to actually, well, negotiate. [daily]
- The Commuter Connection has a Transit Strike Emergency Kit which knocked me out of number 1 on google. It’s a handy set of links.
- Soucheray says Cable dispute could have Twins fans heading for the bars. Victory Sports, the new
network
started by Carl Pohlad to show Twins games, hasn’t been picked up by any of the local cable systems, and wants $2.20 per month for it. I don’t watch all that many Twins games myself, since I’m often over in St. Paul watching the Saints, but I can see where many folks are going to get twitchy if this isn’t resolved soon. I also wonder what will happen to attendance if folks can’t watch a game on the TV once in a while. I expect it’ll hurt, and then we’ll hear a sob-story about how the evil cable companies are combining with the people who are against buying Pohlad a new stadium to force the Twins to move out of town. Did I mention that I’m feeling cranky this morning? [press-patch]