Class-action this time. I got a copy of this today, which I thought was rather funny. If they win a lawsuit in a judicial hellhole but can't enforce it because the company is outside federal jurisdiction, I guess they may as well bring a class action against them too. Unfortunately it looks like they want to try for those using spamhaus lists. Hopefully they won't get a ridiculous ruling stating mail server operators are not allowed to filter or anything like that. It's unfortunate what they put in that message - I hope people don't believe it without researching a bit.
So I was looking at filter stats, and noticed an interesting trend on the spam time of day average graph. There's a base level of junk from knows sources, the level of which doesn't change much. But then there's an additional amount which has an interesting slope over the day. It's like the spammers wake up with a new set of accounts, machines and connections, and then it gets cut off as ISPs find it and take action. It seemed interesting.
So I decided to glance across the spam quarantine boxes today, and saw some rather shocking statistics. Note this isn't anywhere close to the average (most people have under 100 over the same 3 weeks), and yes, these are for individual addresses. Even public contact ones we publish on major web pages don't get this much junk. Which makes me really wonder what these people are doing with their addresses. 8485 in 20 days is 424 per day.
So Monday night I decided that I was sick of the 600 some spam messages I had received over the weekend and decided to do something about it. Unfortunately the frontend mail host for qux is a RH7.3 box that I can't rebuild, so it's an old sendmail and no updated sendmail packages were available. I decided to just go for it, shut down and uninstalled sendmail, and started compiling. After solving some dependencies and after a bit of waiting, I now have a decently modern sendmail with milter support and milter-greylist installed. I think I've had 3 spam messages make it through since, and all were detected and filtered as spam. I'm amazed at how well it works. It's funny since I didn't notice much at work when it was implented there due as my addresses don't get much (mostly to some aliases like the old ssl cert ones). The ones that do get through still come, meaning most of the junk there comes from compliant mail servers. Apparently my personal spam comes from zombies though. Oh, if stuff bounces wait until later that day and send again. I'm too lazy to say more, other than point you here and say it's pretty much the same other than I'm not gonna whitelist people with broken mail servers (manually resend the first time and/or bug your mail provider). Ah, it feels like I'm back in '99 with the lack of junk...
Friday I was working on projects, as well as a lot of planning stuff. It was a long day, especially since I worked on some stuff rather late. Hopefully that'll be done soon though and people will like it. Raadt made a cool theme for IncidentBase too - you'll have to ask about it sometime.
Saturday was a relaxing day. I slept in until sometime in the afternoon, and then did some cleaning up. I made a couple dongles to go from S-Video and dual RCA to STP RJ-45s. Basically to run video and audio over STP CAT5 to upstairs. Much easier than running a bunch of coax and audio patches up. After that was set I watched a couple movies. First was Napoleon Dynamite, which I thought was pretty boring. The soundtrack had some interesting parts, but it's not something I'd go out and buy. The movie itself was boring, with a lot of dumb humor. I guess to each their own, as some people seem to think it's the best movie ever. Second movie was I, Robot. That movie also got split reviews, but I liked it a lot. I liked a lot of the ideas that Asimov brought up, but never really got into his writing style. Something about how they were written just never hooked me in. This movie seems to have done a good job of adapting many of his ideas into a single coherent story. It sorta has a traditional sentient robot plot line, but that hasn't really been done well with any modern movie. For some reason the good stories just seem to be books. Maybe this movie explains why, given there are 3 rendering companies, 2 pre-vis companies, 1 motion capture studio, and 3x the number of stunt people as actors. That can't be cheap, and robots don't exactly draw a mainstream audience (although the two main characters may have helped the draw on this one). Good mix of just good action and a strong plot, and they didn't go and throw in an unnecessary love story. I'd recommend this one. I also find the shape of the USR building in the movie rather funny. Think cable modem...
Sunday was getting up earlier than normal for church. After that was off to the parents' place for lunch, as my dad's birthday was last week. Their Mac Mini arrived as well, so I went with my sister to pick out a keyboard and mouse she'd like (my dad was supposed to order them online 2 weeks ago, but never did so we ended up spending way too much at Best Buy). Plugged it in and it was good to go. Those things are tiny. Seriously, the box my Axim came in was bigger than the one it came in. After that was home to clean up a bit and get ready for people coming over. Last year people showed up at 1, this year it was more like 5:20, although I'm not gonna complain. It was a decent crowd, and I think everyone had fun. Lots of junk food, and Nick showed up but disappointed everyone by not bringing the promised chili. There were two people doing homework, and 4 people on laptops during the thing. Surprisingly schdav left his at home, which is pretty rare for events at my house. :) The funniest part was the Lincoln Fry auction, which sat at a high number (I think it was $99 trillion) after a quick rise. Basically once it passed $1 mil it started getting out of hand. I have the numbers, maybe I should graph it. It was interesting to see companies using the bidder list/high bid name to advertise. Yea, mostly the type you'd expect to see getting links on web sites in that way... There was one very funny one with the picture of the combined Janet Jackson and Paul McCartney... The Internet is a great thing. Everything I looked for online I was able to grab quickly, including videos from the pregame stuff. I'm not sure that the TV people would be that happy about it, but if they don't release it, what do they really expect? The big exception being laughing at godaddy for their site dying for a couple minutes after their commercial. Everyone else I looked into seemed to be using stuff like akadns and akamai, and even yahoo auctions was having noticable performance problems. It's cool that they got it back up quickly though, and seemed to keep it in house at least somewhat. The longer version of their commercial (shot down by Fox) is a lot better than the one that ended up getting aired. It better conveys the message which was basically some of the crazy inconsistencies about what's getting aired and what isn't lately. Also the company CEO has a blog on which he has some interesting arguments and reasoning. Halftime was good, even though we had to educate some people who had never heard of Hey Jude (and shortly after when some commercial had a U2's Sunday Bloody Sunday which they couldn't identify either). There is that whole thing about him being the clean guy after last year and noticing the selection of people on stage. Austin had a great comment on that, and while I don't remember his exact wording some other people expressed the same ideas pretty much perfectly. It is something to think about. As Dave said, he's an old man now so it's OK. Menards takes the cake for the cheapest looking, least interesting, and most annoying commercial. Yea, it's just like their other ones, except it played during the superbowl. It looks like some guy with a camcorder made it.
I stumbled on this interesting article. The PDF is linked, but the text is more readable on their page. I especially like point #3. The part about "what constitutes spam is in the eye of the beholder" is very true, and I hear about it weekly and sometimes daily. It's amazing how many people fail to realize that and just make people want to completely ignore everything from them. Gone are the days where you can hit people with commercials that the vast majority of people see - the whole system is moving towards targeted and "grassroots" or "community-driven" (yea, I know, lack of better terms) marketing. Those who get people pissed at them early on will have an interesting time in the future. The other points in the article are definitely valid as well. A good summary could be to let the consumer make an intelligent choice rather than try to force feed them stuff. A good product or service will sell itself. Consumers are becoming more intelligent and picky, especially with the availability of information on the Internet. The days of being able to sell crap with marketing spin are going away.
Don't think about all those things you fear
Just be glad to be here.
That's FC/Kahuna's Hayling, which is actually sung by Hafdis Huld. There's an interesting music video at the end of Confidence with her, along with one from Zero 7 (Destiny). Zero 7's site sorta reminds me of the Ogo documentation... Anyways, there's also another (just as weird) video of Hayling done by Lynn Fox up on her site. I sorta like the musical style though - I may have to look into more of FC/Kahuna's stuff. Apparently they're supposed to be like Zero 7. They also were the people that started the Big Kahuna Burger club (yes, they got the name from there) in 1995, which inspired Fat Boy Slim. Their whole bio is actually pretty interesting.
Saturday I upgraded SA on my personal server to the latest version. That combined with a few custom rules has dropped the amount of spam I see to almost nothing, which makes me happy. It'd be nice if spammers just went away, but unfortunately I don't see that happening until idiots stop buying stuff from them. Sunday started off with church. Amazingly even though I got lots of sleep and actually wasn't that tired when I got up, sitting down and not moving for an hour really made me tired. The rest of the day sat around catching up on /. and newsgroups some more. Then watched Confidence. Good movie I thought, fits in with the others like it. As you probably noticed already, the soundtrack was more interesting though. BTW, if anyone knows what the 1 minute long clip on the end credits is (after Clocks), I'm wondering. It's not any of the credited songs as far as I can tell. My guess is something for the movie by Beck, but apparently it's not in the official soundtrack, so...
Year after year this always amazes me. How can people completely forget how to drive in the winter over the summer? One day of snowing and it turning wet, another day of it sorta sticking but basically just wet on roadways, and we get that. If the car rolls when you hit the ice, it means you were going too fast on the road. I can't see how people think some country highway is safe to go normal speeds on during or shortly after snowfall... That and the fact most people don't seem to know what to do when they hit ice...
Well, unfortunately I have to work in about 8 hours. So much for the nice long weekend. I guess all good things have to come to an end. I just hope that we don't get roped into too much computer fixing that we shouldn't be doing tomorrow.
Pretty usual week, thus the lack of posts. Friday night ended up rebuilding my powerbook since the partitioning tools from Apple suck. There's no good reason to not allow changing partitions on a system drive (I could see the system partition maybe, but not others). It seems to be running better for the most part. This time I actually went through custom and chose not to install the stuff I never used anyways (and discovered used way too much space). That includes iCal, iPhoto, iDVD, iMovie, GarageBand and the like. Unfortunately they still include too much crap. Like Address Book, Chess, iChat, Internet Connect, Mail, and Stickies. They already have a custom install, why make us still have to delete a bunch of crap afterwords? At least it still sorta resembles it's unix roots and I was able to drop in my home directory and have it work. Why it can't be on it's own partition you never have to touch when reinstalling without worrying about the partitioning issue if you want to move space around though...
Saturday was a busy day. Woke up in the morning to some pages from idiots who decided our blocking them from the mail servers meant they should try again in the middle of the night from a different machine (this one doesn't look quite as cracked). It was rather nice of them to include paging the sysadmins as part of the spam run though... Then there was a Soccer game followed by Football. It was cold and the lens didn't like the cold much. I had to help it focusing occationally, and still ended up with an unfortunate number of not-quite-focused shots. After the football game ended up taking some pics up at seminary since I was there and there was a good view with the colors and the lake. Took a look at the inter-building cable runs too since I hadn't been up there since they went in - interesting. After that was off to my parents' place for dinner since it was my mom's birthday. Pizza, followed by Radio. Good movie, good story.
Sunday was Salem and listening to Politics in church. That was interesting. Then some sitting around the house. Finished off the day by watching 3 movies. Started with Red Dragon. It's definitely an interesting story, seemed stronger and doesn't seem as held back as the other two. Second was The Shining. Seems like a failure compared to Kubrick's other films. I heard bad things about it, but tried to think it couldn't be so bad. So the movie starts off with the shadow of the helicopter they're shooting from visible in the shot - and doesn't get any better. Oh well, I guess they can't all be perfect. I ended up realigning my projector a bit during this one. Finished off the night with Conspiracy Theory. I liked that movie. It's one of those ones where there's action and they reverse the plot a ton of times. Some people like those, some don't. And now I need to get up early again tomorrow, so that's it.
Saturday was decent. I didn't feel much better, but it was Meghan's going away party so I was outside a decent part of the day, which might have helped. After the party I fixed my dad's computer a bit, and that was it. Sunday was church at Salem, and I took a nap. I don't remember much else.
Monday was the first day of the fun known as training and welcome week. Basically since then I've been busy with work stuff constantly. Tuesday I started off the day with making some progress on the list server. I finished off the day doing a mass migration of email lists to the new server and rushing to get temp LDAP entries in place so we could go live since another system was broken. A bit over 4000 email lists in a day, that works. We'll find bugs in production I guess - so far all the new server restrictions seem to be working as planned though. Then Wednesday I finished up a script to add, modify, and delete LDAP aliases automatically, which should save hastle. That was also new student pizza and movie night which was fun with Ice Age. Although a bunch of us sat on our computers during it. And Mike Vedders leaves too many programs up and running while playing movies on the projector... That was followed by setting up my sister's computer (Macs have some cool features to help fix PCs), and meeting all her roommates and getting attacked by Austin in the process. 4 people at the movie ended up in her room, it was sorta weird.
Then I got this email forwarded to me. It was spam. No big deal, it's happened before, someone gets a list of Bethel people, the email servers don't like them anymore. The pattern in this one looks really odd though. Start poking a bit more, and see a distinct thing meaning the list came from one of two places. Look on one and someone obviously trying to get around the filters to harvest addresses. A marketing company, different from the spamming company. The emails are coming in at a rate slow enough that it's obvious they're trying to avoid detection. What a pain. Harvest from web (over 2 days, also likely to lessen chance of detection), demunge, and sell. At least the emails admitted they're an advertisement. How low can you go though - even targeted to the organization name...
Copyright ©2000-2008 Jeremy Mooney (jeremy-at-qux-dot-net)
