05/05/2007

Holy cow, the spam is all but gone!

For years I’ve been dealing with e-mail spam. I’ve reconfigured my mail servers, installed software and filters, and come up with increasingly clever rulesets and parsing scripts to block the deluge. In general I’ve been pretty successful, but on an average day I probably receive well over a hundred legitimate e-mail messages, and since I do so much work and commerce online, my address is on untold numbers of spam lists, so if I didn’t do anything at all I suspect I’d have several thousand spam messages a day.

After several abortive attempts, I wrote a software program to perform something called “greylisting”, and tested it for a couple of days to make sure it works. (I did this because installing it on my mail server affects a couple hundred customers and several thousand e-mail accounts I’m running.) I finally took the plunge today and installed it, and I think I received a single spam message all day. Woo hoo!

Of course it’s Saturday, and e-mail traffic seems to be a bit lower on the weekend, but I’m hopeful that next week I’ll finally be able to hop online in the morning and not delete a hundred messages before work.

05/03/2007

09 f9 11 02 9d 74 e3 5b d8 41 56 c5 63 56 88 c0

That’s the now-famous number that can be used to break AACS encryption and decrypt HD-DVDs. The MPAA has been issuing DCMA threats to web sites publishing the number, and as of this week there’s a full-scale revolt across the internet as hundreds of thousands of people post the number on their sites.

Of course it’s ludicrous that the MPAA can claim any kind of ownership or restrictions on what is essentially a very large integer. But they’re doing their best, and looking like complete fools in the process.

As Cory Doctorow said:

The companies that made AACS spent millions and years at it. The hackers who broke it did so in days, for laughs, for free. More people now know how to crack HD-DVD than own an HD-DVD player.

The number is everywhere now, including t-shirts, coffee mugs, posters, and even song lyrics. Heck, it even seems to be appearing in fortune cookies!

05/03/2007

“America believes in education: the average professor earns more money in a year than a professional athlete earns in a whole week.”

— Evan Esar