Category: Legacy

Posted on by lhl

Been watching the Spam Conference webcast (indexes at Oliver Schmelzle’s TechBlog).

  • CRM114 – >99.9% accuracy
  • John Graham-Cumming’s (POPFile) “The Spammer’s Compendium” prsentation is great. The slice and dice technique really is dastardly (yet ingenious)

Actually, many of the talks are really good. Other standouts: Paul Graham, Arc Project, “Better Bayesian Spam Filtering”, Matt Sergeant, MessageLabs, “Spam Filtering at the Network Level”, Joshua Goodman, Microsoft Research, “Spam Filtering: From the Lab to the Real World”, Michael Salib, MIT, “Integrating Heuristics with n-grams using Bayes and LMMSE”, Jon Praed, Internet Law Group, “How Lawsuits Against Spammers Can Aid Spam-Filtering Technology: A Spam Litigator’s View From the Front Lines”, David Berlind, CNET, “Desperately Seeking: An Anti-Spam Consortium”, and Ken Schneider, Brightmail, “Fighting Spam in Real Time”

While spam filtering is good, I don’t think anyone really questions that email as it currently stands it just plain broken. Ken Schneider had some very telling numbers. The percentage of spam (of total messages) has increased from something like 10% last September to over 40% today. And that’s on average. It seems that the larger the organization (company/isp), the larger the percentage grows.

I’ve posted some of these before, but I decided to round up some possible long-term solutions:

There’s a new and what looks like a fairly complete spam analysis (Spam Control: Problems & Opportunities) online, but it looks like it’s a for-pay report. Also: spam costs

Posted on by lhl

I should probably add that for me, the most galling thing isn’t the fact that the publishers (who are scum sucking leeches and who have every reason to try by hook or crook to continue in their parasitic ways) do what they do, nor that there are so many too apathetic or jaded to stop them, but rather with those who are vain enough to believe that they have the ‘right’ to own their creations for eternity, as if their art or insights had sprung fully-formed from their genius, as life from a rock. Sometimes I wonder, how it is like to be so self-important and self-conceited. Still, it bothers me that there are so many…

Posted on by lhl

I was driving home today and NPR was talking about some copyright stuff, this time in regards to ebooks and the loss of first sale. Of courese there’s the book publishing flunkie on droning on w/ a detailed analogy about locking one’s house and physical property, which just made my fingers curl with disgust and anger. Given their obvious different natures, how can applying the same rules to physical objects and ideas/information make sense? (Corollary: given that physical property rights derive from their nature, shouldn’t intellectual property rights be the same?) [it would also be fallacious to correlate physical and intellectual property rights because they stem from completely separate philsophical and legal/constitutional bases]

Of course, the basic problem with owning ideas comes down to the fact that it’s the complete antithesis of freedom. Copyright is about the right of copy (as in printing), but in its increasingly extended form (with almost every expression being covered), it’s only a matter of time before thought becomes infringement). I don’t know about you, but that disturbs me.

Speaking of which, the NYTimes article which talks about the brief failed experiment of public domain pisses me off too. While the quality of the Times has gone downhill, you would still expect some basic fact checking. The first patent law was enacted in 1623, the Statute of Anne didn’t come into existance until 1710. Consider that before that, in all of human history, everything was public domain.

Often times, I like to think of these little thought experiments. Imagine the inventor of the wheel, or of stone cutting implements getting and enforcing a patent. Or perhaps the English language being under the modern notion of ‘copyright’. Where would we be today? We won’t have to wait long to find out I suspect. Our society seems perfectly fine with the unlimited expansion, in both breadth and length, of ‘intellectual property’.

Posted on by lhl

I did a pretty thorough search, and I really still can’t believe it, but it appears that there’s no publicly available centralized authorization module for Apache. Specifically, what I’m looking for is something that would allow storing of all authorization information, including location or directory restriction in a database structure. All the db auth modules I’ve found still require rules to be entered / manually edited for each folder. I must be missing something. What’s the point of putting the user/groups in a db if you still have to make individual .htaccess files to get it working?

PHPAuthPg uses mod_auth_pg’s query directive to pass in a folder, but you still have to insert the path manually? I don’t get it. Algorithmicly, making a centralized authorization module should be trivial, although not having written C in about 5 years and having never written a module before does put a damper on things. Still having the source of these existing modules means that most of the code is already written…