Bad floppies, spam and scram
Well the way things are panning out I'm not getting much time to write blogs - Kate and I were talking about this just this morning - so I think the solution is rather than writing full-length articles I'll just add short notes to a text file as and when I get a couple of minutes, then post a batch at a time. With that in mind...
Looks like the floppy drive on my office workstation has bad head alignment - it'll read and write floppies but they won't read properly on another machine. Val just tried one of my disks in his machine and it's shot. He showed me a little pocket-keyring-thingy that you plug into a USB port and it works like a 128Mb removable disk. He says he got it on sale for about ten bucks. I've seen them before and I thought they were just a gimmick, but now I'm converted - in the words of Confucius, "I gotta get me one of these".
Earthlink have announced that they'll be using DomainKeys as an anti-spam measure, which I think is great news. The alternatives - SPF and SenderID - are too weak and won't work if a mail gets relayed through an intermediate SMTP server, and that means that SPF and SenderID will probably have to change to fix the problems. The way I see it the more they have to tweak it to get it to work reliably, the more chances there are for the spammers to find ways round it. Call me cynical but here's a prediction: Microsoft (who are pushing SenderID) will start providing add-ons to strengten SenderID, and these will be Windoze-only so that they can then say that the Linux/open-source alternatives don't work as well. If I'm right it'll be all the more reason for the industry to go the DomainKeys direction. Also I read that a company in Atlanta checked a sample of 2 million mails and found out that (1) only 5% of senders had installed SPF records on their DNS servers (although that's likely to increase rapidly) and (2) of those 5%, only one out of four were "legitimate" mailers - the rest were spammers. So until the ISPs start building reputation databases to weed out the spamming domains, this means that if you get a mail from someone who has a legit SPF record, there's a 75% chance it's spam.
More on the spam front - I just saw a CNN headline where Bill Gates claims he's the most spammed person on Earth, at 4 million emails a day. Yeah, Bill, you just have to be better than everyone else... :)
NASA tested their Scramjet X-43A yesterday and broke the speed record - 6,600 MPH, or almost mach 10. To put it another way, Dallas to London in less than an hour. Freeow!
Looks like the floppy drive on my office workstation has bad head alignment - it'll read and write floppies but they won't read properly on another machine. Val just tried one of my disks in his machine and it's shot. He showed me a little pocket-keyring-thingy that you plug into a USB port and it works like a 128Mb removable disk. He says he got it on sale for about ten bucks. I've seen them before and I thought they were just a gimmick, but now I'm converted - in the words of Confucius, "I gotta get me one of these".
Earthlink have announced that they'll be using DomainKeys as an anti-spam measure, which I think is great news. The alternatives - SPF and SenderID - are too weak and won't work if a mail gets relayed through an intermediate SMTP server, and that means that SPF and SenderID will probably have to change to fix the problems. The way I see it the more they have to tweak it to get it to work reliably, the more chances there are for the spammers to find ways round it. Call me cynical but here's a prediction: Microsoft (who are pushing SenderID) will start providing add-ons to strengten SenderID, and these will be Windoze-only so that they can then say that the Linux/open-source alternatives don't work as well. If I'm right it'll be all the more reason for the industry to go the DomainKeys direction. Also I read that a company in Atlanta checked a sample of 2 million mails and found out that (1) only 5% of senders had installed SPF records on their DNS servers (although that's likely to increase rapidly) and (2) of those 5%, only one out of four were "legitimate" mailers - the rest were spammers. So until the ISPs start building reputation databases to weed out the spamming domains, this means that if you get a mail from someone who has a legit SPF record, there's a 75% chance it's spam.
More on the spam front - I just saw a CNN headline where Bill Gates claims he's the most spammed person on Earth, at 4 million emails a day. Yeah, Bill, you just have to be better than everyone else... :)
NASA tested their Scramjet X-43A yesterday and broke the speed record - 6,600 MPH, or almost mach 10. To put it another way, Dallas to London in less than an hour. Freeow!
Labels: Computers, Just Spouting, Science
posted by Pete Ford at
11:31 AM
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