30
12
2003
What was long announced finally became true. Last week we made the first actual step for the move over under the hood of the Apache Software Foundation. Within three months we (actually mostly Justin, Daniel and Theo; thanks guys!) had collected CLAs from all the people who ever contributed to SpamAssassin (and whose contributions still were in the codease). Admittedly did we have to drop some contributions from people who did not want or were not able to sign a CLA; but those weren’t too many.
So after Justin had frozen the SourceForge CVS repository last week, our new shiny Subversion repository went online this weekend. At the same time, the developer list at SourceForge was closed and was moved to the ASF servers. More changes to come.
We’re still lingering in the Incubator though. That’s maybe not too bad because I still need some time to read the SVN Book and get used to all those new ASF terms (PMC, PPMC, Podling, Landing Something, etc.). Might the hacking start again soon.
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Categories : Imported, en
29
12
2003
Justin wrote a short note about the Web-o-Trust already more than a month ago, but I just recently found some time to work up the mail of several mailinglists I’m subscribed to.
One side effect of our well beloved spam problem is that more often than never mailserver of innocent people end on some blacklists. We don’t really have any working whitelists to compensate that. (Except maybe Bonded Sender.) It’s almost impossible for a single person or group to maintain a reliable list of “good” mail servers; they’d have to check all submissions and complaints for fakes. A daunting task for somebody who doesn’t even know the people who use the lists.
But wait… I know that my mail server isn’t used for spamming. A friend of mine knows that his mail servers are “good”, too. And I know him. I also know a few other people who administer their mail server and they know others and so on… Doesn’t this sound familiar? Yeah, the web of trust already worked pretty good for PGP. Why not apply this for mail servers?
The Web-o-Trust solution is simple: You publish a plain text file somewhere on your webspace (normally in the root directory, called web-o-trust.txt but as the format looks like YAML, I prefer the name web-o-trust.yml). That file lists a bunch of IP addresses of servers you use and pointers to other people you trust. That’s all you’ve got to do. (But one thing is very important here: Cool URIs don’t change.)
Now you’ve got to wait till your favorite anti-spam solution supports some Web-o-Trust powered whitelist. I hope that I’ll find the time to hack this into SpamAssassin for 2.70 (or maybe Justin has already done so, I’ve still got a month worth of unread commits to catch up).
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Categories : Imported, en
28
12
2003
I just visited Wikipedia to look some stuff up. The front page already loads quite slow and when it’s finally there, you’re welcome in red letters:
Please read this letter regarding the continuing Wikipedia server problems and find out how you can help.
The Wikipedia database server has crashed and might remain unavailable for several days. Contributors can use OpenFacts as a backup wiki for creating articles.
It seems like Wikimedia is in dire need of some donations/funding (20,000 $ to be exact) for new hardware.
As the recent rescue of the SelfHTML project shows, is it possible to collect even with an average donation of 20 € more than anybody expected (20,885.68 € vs. 5,000 &euro). So, go, sell some of your christmas presents, and Save Wikipedia!
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Categories : Imported, en
28
12
2003
I got almost drowned in spam the last few weeks; it became that much that I get problems sorting out the False Positives from my “Suspected Spam” folder. Wondering how much it increased over the last few months, I compiled a short statistic for 2003 from my spam archive. The resulting trend is horrifying:
| Month |
Jan |
Feb |
Mar |
Apr |
May |
Jun |
Jul |
Aug |
Sep |
Oct |
Nov |
Dec |
(All) |
| Σ |
117 |
117 |
303 |
282 |
410 |
545 |
825 |
691 |
834 |
1389 |
1748 |
2387 |
9648 |
| Δn |
n/a |
±0 |
+186 |
-21 |
+128 |
+135 |
+280 |
-134 |
+143 |
+555 |
+359 |
+639 |
+2270 |
| Δ% |
n/a |
±0 |
+159 |
-7 |
+45 |
+33 |
+51 |
-16 |
+21 |
+67 |
+26 |
+37 |
+24 |
The amount of spam hitting my mailbox increased dramatically this year, especially the last few months. (The beginning of the year was pretty quiet, in 2002 I was around 300±50 Spam per month.)
I’m neither paranoid nor arrogant enough to take this for a personal attack against myself because of my contributions to SpamAssassin. So, what happened the this year? Got more and more spam spewn out by the spamhauses? Maybe to counter the increasing number of spam solutions developed the last year(s)? Christmas time is also spam time? Or did my addresses just end on more lists? I’ve got to look closer at that mail, maybe I find some worthwile spamtraps…
A short glance exhibited that at least one thing is for sure: The spammer went too far; the quality of the spam got worse past comprehension. I have loads of spam with subjects obfuscated so much, that they’re completely illegible. Quite some mails carry unexpanded hash buster. And last week I received some spam which starts like this:
belvidere vxdwpzbdwea
bp
j dtdmsrizr ias
dr
pn yoevgnc znoqbfhs imfga q exo m lilly
|
I guess (hope?) even Outlook can’t be tolerant enough to parse obfuscated HTML…
updated Friday, January 2nd at 22:59 CET
Till New Year I received another 219 spam mails. Updated the statistics accordingly.
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Categories : Imported, en
24
12
2003
So, America got its own case of BSE now. And what’s the first thing Agriculture Secretary Ann Veneman points out?
I have been in contact with Secretary Ridge and I would emphasize that based on the information available this incident is not terrorist related nor is it related in any way to our nation’s heightened alert status. I cannot stress this point strongly enough.
Am I the only one to whom this sounds pretty paranoid? Maybe you get this as a side effect if you try to classify the world into five easy-to-understand categories.
Meanwhile the German churches ask the nation to work up the courage for changes. Yeah, right. What about changing yourself first?
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Categories : Imported, en
17
12
2003
Timo Gnabs points to XFN, the XHTML Friends Network. The proposal defines a bunch of additional XHTML link types which can be used to state the human relationship between web pages.
It has the same intention as the FOAF Project but the approach is different: With FOAF you define something like a personal profile while XFN is used to indicate your personal relationship to the persons behind the links on your site. Sounds cool, especially in combination with CSS attribute selectors.
But how do you keep your link releations up to date? FOAF conveniently collects all information in one place but with XFN you scatter meta information across your whole site.
Imagine you link regularly to somebody you’re working with but you’ve never personally met. One day you visit him and he becomes a good friend. Now you’ve got to grep through all your pages and update the links. You could keep all your links in a database but that’s not feasible for many static private pages.
I love the idea of the Semantic Web (actually am I fascinated by all kinds of networks). But while we already have to cope with linkrot today, the Semantic Web will most probably suffer under information rot.
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Categories : Imported, en
14
12
2003
The Accordion Guy sez:
Let’s take a look at Free Software guru Richard M. Stallman, who is not hiding from U.S. Forces in a hole in Tikrit, but hanging out in an office at Harvard, where I hear soap, running water, hair gel and trimmers are cheap and plentiful. [...] Really, my fellow nerds, a little break from the keyboard for a wash and a trim wouldn’t kill you, would it?
Actually, the first thing I thought when I saw that photo of Saddam the first time today
was: “Wow, Santa looks pretty run down this year.” (Found via Grant Henninger).
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Categories : Imported, en
14
12
2003
Gerold Veith yesterday announced a new version of his tool DelphiDoc. Probably nobody will care about this except the people who’re currently hacking on their pre-degree program 
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Categories : Imported, en
14
12
2003
I just put the winter tires on my car. Every tire is fastened with four bolts. That makes sixteen bolts. The first fifteen went off like a charm. But the last one of the front left tire… no chance. Why is it always the frickin last one (bolt or whatever) which makes problems? I mean, if I had started with the front left tire would I have had a problem with the rear right tire or what? In the end I gave up (it was already pretty dark) and left the car with three winter and one summer tire for now. Got to have another look tomorrow morning with better tools…
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Categories : Imported, en
14
12
2003
That film must be a coproduction between George Orwell and Ray Bradbury when both were on a bad trip.
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Categories : Imported, en
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